Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_02 by Homecoming

together.”
    “I didn’t want to bother you.”
    “You’re never a bother, Char,” Maddy said endearingly. “Something on your mind?”
    “Oh, nothing.”
    “You can tell me,” Maddy urged.
    Charlotte paused for a second and then decided she felt secure enough in their friendship to really open up.
    “I miss … everything,” Charlotte confided. “I feel different all of a sudden. I thought I was over it, over all of them, and totally changed in really profound ways, but now I think that was all just one big rationalization.”
    “How so?” Maddy asked, more like a therapist than a friend.
    “I did what I was asked to do,” Charlotte went on. “I made the hard choices Brain wanted me to.”
    “Brain?” Maddy asked.
    “My Dead Ed teacher,” Charlotte babbled, totally on a roll now. “I made every sacrifice for my friends,” she blurted, “to get us all here.”
    “And for what? What did all that do-gooding get you?”
    “I just thought, hoped, that, well, that things would really be different for me here,” Charlotte said quietly. “But it isn’t. It’s like this world is a Mac and I’m a PC.”
    “Heaven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Is that what you are trying to say?”
    Charlotte hadn’t really thought about it, but Maddy had a good point, once again. Charlotte had never really entertained the notion that this was it. Heaven couldn’t be a phone bank, could it?
    Charlotte spent another day staring at the phone on her desk and trying to tune out the chatter from the other interns’ calls. She couldn’t even sneak away with the damn video camera constantly trained on her and Mr. Markov constantly walking by in the same pattern every few minutes like some kind of supernatural jail warden. Kim’s calls were the most annoying and the most difficult to ignore.
    Charlotte loved talking on the phone too: that wasn’t the issue. It’s just that Kim was so … sure of herself. So sure about what was right and what was wrong. Charlotte had felt that at the Fall Ball, right before they all crossed over. But she wasn’t so sure what was right anymore. How can you be expected help anyone else if your own gray matter was one big gray muddle?
    Charlotte struggled with these big ideas and covered her ears. This whole experience, she thought, was like being a mouse caught in a maze, except there was no cheese at the end to guide her through. She’d lost her life, her friends, her future, and now maybe even her mind. She was trapped in a state of perpetual puberty and in the same outfit forever, and her payback for all this sacrifice? She got to help other people, or might get to, if her phone would ever, just once, ring!
    She looked up at the lens of the camera and mouthed slowly:
    “HELP ME.”
    Damen’s legs were bouncing nervously as he sat silently in the still hospital room, positioned equidistant from Petula and Scarlet. For perhaps the first time in his life, he felt out of control, not just of the circumstances but of himself as well. He prided himself on being an athlete, after all, disciplined, determined, and optimistic. He was a winner in sports and in life and had the resume to prove it. He never considered losing, even when it was inevitable, such was his faith in himself and in the power of positive thinking. The dreary thoughts and increasing hopelessness of this situation, however, were new territory for him, mentally and emotionally. Mostly emotionally.
    He could stand in the pocket and face down a core of blitzing linebackers without a second thought, but he couldn’t face his own feelings. That’s what made Petula so easy for him to date. No depth required. He could tote her around like one of his sports trophies, more a prize for others to envy than for him to value. But being with Scarlet had changed him, or at least it had begun to.
    He began thinking about all the things he should have told Scarlet but didn’t have the courage to say. Not so much about stopping her