Remember Me by Christopher Pike Page A

splinter of fear had grown long and sharp in the last half-hour. Now it was like an icy blade that was threatening to cut my sanity in half and leave me floundering in darkness for eternity. Yes, eternity—that was the element that hit me then. Something terrible had happened, I realized, and whatever it was, it was forever.

    The deduction wasn't that clever.

    "Morgue," I whispered aloud to myself, to no one.

    Dr. Leeds reappeared approximately five minutes later and led my family through the double green doors. Apparently everyone had gone home for the night; there were only the five of us in the morgue. And maybe, I thought with growing understanding, there were fewer.

    Off to the right was an open square room stacked with rows of lockers. Only they weren't lockers. I'd seen enough police shows. They were the cubicles in which they stashed the stiffs.

    Off to the left was a white-tiled wall. In the middle were three tables. The center one was occupied. There was a person there, a short dead person, lying under a thin white sheet. Dr.
    Leeds stepped to the head of the table. The rest of us followed. We had asked for it, and now we had to take it.

    Dr. Leeds slowly pulled down the sheet. He appeared to be starting at the head.

    The first thing we saw, however, was not a head; it was a green towel, and it was stained dark and wet. The doctor had obviously just wrapped the towel around the girl's hair. I could tell it was a girl. The conversation on the other side of the green doors had made that clear enough, and a lock of her dark blond hair had peeped out from beneath the towel. There was no blood on the hair, on those particular strands, but it didn't require a great deal of imagination to see that the rest of her hair must be a disaster.

    It was, of course, silly of me to wonder what kind of shampoo it would take to clean that hair when it was clear that the entire top of the girl's skull had been crushed to a pulp Even before Dr. Leeds folded down the sheet farther and revealed the girl's face—washed clean of blood;—I knew what we would see. I knew that hair. I had fought with it all my life, and now it would rest in peace forever, along with that face.

    A moment later Dr. Leeds folded down the sheet, tucking it under her chin as if it were a blanket that could keep her warm. He stepped back. Her eyes were closed, thankfully, and although a ghastly black and blue patch had colored her forehead and sent bruised streaks down the sides of her cheeks almost to her mouth, death had not stolen her beauty.

    You see, that's how I felt then, in the presence of a person who could have lit many lives with her beauty had she just been given the chance.

    My father didn't move. My mother couldn't move. But Jimmy reached out and touched the girl's lips with the tip of his finger. It was fortunate his fingers strayed no higher. I remembered the long fall toward the sidewalk then, the fat red stars, the wave of hot wax covering the sky, my blood flowing over my open eyes. Maybe it had been Dr. Leeds who had closed them. It was good. Better she remain a sleeping beauty, I thought. I knew if Jimmy were to open them, they would no longer be the sparkling green she had told him they were, nor even the warm brown he had thought they must be. They wouldn't be beautiful. They would only be flat and colorless.

    It was me lying there. Just me.

    CHAPTER

    VI

    A. HAVE READ articles describing how hard it is to accept the death of a loved one.

    How people often go through phases where they actually deny the person is really gone. I can imagine how difficult it must be. Yet I must say it is harder to accept one's own death.

    As long as I stood in the morgue with my body, I could intellectually understand that the fall off Beth's balcony had killed me. But when my family left the room a few minutes later and I followed them out the green doors and back down the hall, I began to have doubts. I began to get upset, angry. I couldn't be