Love is Hell Read online

  Because all I can think about is Travis.

  I take a deep breath and then exhale for five full seconds, trying to thwack myself out of it, but when I turn around, he’s sitting there on the corner of my bed.

  “Hello, Brenda,” Travis says. “You’ve been waiting for me, haven’t you?”

  I nod. My face flashes hot.

  “Good, because I’ve been waiting for you, too.” He stands and extends his hand to me. I take it and we both just sort of stand there, staring at each other. “I want to help you,” I say, noting the warmth of his palm.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod again and glance up at his forehead where the gash used to be.

  “It’s still there,” he says, rubbing the spot. “But it isn’t exactly pretty, so I’ve sort of hidden it away—one of the perks of being a ghost.” He smiles, trying to make light of it.

  “Does it still hurt?”

  He nods, sandwiching my hands between his palms and turning my insides to absolute mush. “It won’t heal until I do.”

  “Hold that thought,” I say, eager to show him the necklace. I move over to the closet and swing the door wide.

  My roller skates are in full view.

  I take a step back, my hands trembling. My mouth turns dry. Normally, I keep the skates in a brown paper bag, tucked behind a suitcase in the very back.

  “How did these get here?” I whisper.

  “Brenda?” Travis asks. “Are you okay?”

  I shake my head, wondering how this could possibly happen. Did my mother rearrange my closet when I wasn’t home? Was my dad snooping around in here? Travis comes and wraps his arms around my shoulders from behind. “They’re just skates,” he says.

  “No,” I say, feeling my eyes well up. “You don’t understand.”

  “I do,” he whispers. “I understand a whole lot more than you think. And they’re just skates. They’re not her.

  They shouldn’t represent her.”

  “Did you do this?” I ask, turning toward him.

  “Don’t be upset.” He wipes my tears with the corner of his sleeve. “I just want you to be happy. Your sister would want that, too. And you can’t be happy when you’re trying to hide the past in a paper bag. Think about the good times you had with your sister when you want to remember her. Don’t think about these skates.”

  “How do you know what my sister wants?”

  “I think I speak from experience,” he says.

  I want to be mad at him, but I can’t. And as messed up as it sounds, it feels really good to cry. After Emma died, I wasn’t allowed to show even a speck of emotion, and now it seems too big to hold back.

  Travis holds me for way longer than anyone else ever has, until all my Emma tears have dried up.

  “Thanks,” I say, wiping my eyes, trying to regain composure.

  “Sure.” He smiles and reaches for my hand, gives it a squeeze, then moves past me to go into the closet. He pulls the necklace from my old tennis shoe. “I watched you hide it in here,” he says. “I gave this to my mom on Mother’s Day. I still remember that morning. I had tried to make French toast, but it turned out to be more like soggy bagel bites. We ended up eating cornflakes.”

  He laughs and runs his thumb over the heart-shaped pendant. “Anyway, I gave this to her, along with a bouquet of wildflowers. The day I was killed, that bastard ripped it off her neck and chucked it across the bathroom.

  It landed in the radiator, but she was never able to find it.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened to you.”

  He shrugs. “That’s life, I guess. There are no guarantees.

  Like with my dad . . . as far as everyone knew, he was in perfect health. But, then, one day, he just never came home.”

  I nod, thinking how it was like that with Emma, too.

  “Did you enjoy your life at least?”

  “It had its moments.” He smiles again and his eyes lock on mine. “I only have one regret.”

  “Which is?”

  “Not living long enough to tell my mother that what happened wasn’t her fault. I stepped in to help her—to distract that asshole from beating her—because I wanted to. It was my choice.”

  “But you were only seventeen.”

  “I know.”

  “And you aren’t angry at all?”

  He shrugs again. “What good would that do? My mother did the best she could, but she wasn’t a strong woman. I knew that. Her boyfriend knew it, too. That’s why he beat her down so bad. Plus, you could totally turn things around and say it was my fault. If my mother was too weak to do the right thing, maybe I should have reported him long before anything like that ever happened.”

  “I guess,” I say, wondering how he can be so forgiving.

  “Besides,” he continues, “life’s too short to live with all that guilt. That’s what my mother’s doing now, even twenty years later. And that’s what you’re doing, too, isn’t it . .

  . with Emma?”

  I shrug and look away. “How do you know so much about me?”

  “I’m inside your dreams, remember? I know all about you.”

  I nod, slightly disappointed that this is a dream, that I eventually have to wake up.

  “So, will you help me?” he asks, dropping the necklace into my palm. “Will you bring this to her? Will you tell her that I don’t blame her for my death?”

  “And what’ll happen then?” I ask.

  Travis bites his lip and touches my face. His fingers feel like velvet against my skin. “I’ll be able to pass on.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I say, hearing the disappointment in my voice.

  “But I want to spend more time with you first.” He runs his fingers along my jaw. “I want to see you as often as I can before that time comes.”

  “And when will it come?”

  He whisks a lock of tear-soaked hair off my face and leans in a little closer, his lips just inches from mine.

  “Whatever you do,” he whispers, ignoring the question, “don’t wake up now.”

  A moment later, I feel his kiss. It presses against my mouth and makes my skin sizzle.

  “We don’t have much time,” he says, once the kiss breaks. “You’re going to wake up soon. I can sense it.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now I hold you while I still can.”

  We lay in my bed, Travis cradling me in his embrace. I try to stay asleep, to relish the moment for as long as I can.

  But the sound of birds chirping outside wakes me up.

  I roll over in bed to look for him. His mother’s necklace rests on the pillow beside me. But Travis is nowhere in sight.

  .

  I spend the next several days sleeping whenever I can—drinking lots of warm milk, switching to decaf, and reducing my intake of sugar, carbs, and anything else that might keep me awake. Raina tells me she can see the difference, but attributes it to her stellar makeup tips and not to the fact that I’ve been going to bed early each night, taking catnaps during the day.

  And seeing Travis.

  In my dreams, Travis and I talk about everything— about his favorite ’80s flicks (Back to the Future and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), how I’d like to start swimming again, and how he misses the taste of fudge ripple ice cream.

  We talk about music we love and places we’ve visited.

  And places he never got to see.

  We even talk about Emma.

  While my parents won’t even allow me to say her name, Travis listens as I talk about the day of Emma’s accident, the six months that followed while she was in a coma, and the day that she died—when her ghost appeared to me.

  “I think about her all the time,” I tell him on our last night together. “I wonder what she’d be like now, if we’d be close and if I’d teach her stuff—like how to make butterscotch candy—my culinary specialty—or how to trap and dribble in field hockey. I just hope she’s happy . . . wherever she is.”

  “She is
,” he says, pulling me close. “There’s no need to feel bad about anything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He breaks our embrace to look at me. He cups my face and stares into my eyes. “More than sure.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” I say, fighting the urge to well up.

  “There’s still right now,” he says. “So, don’t wake up.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  We end up taking a walk by the lake, where he and his dad used to go fishing. Travis picks a spot close to the water and lays out a thick blanket. We sit down facing one another, holding hands, and entangling legs.

  “I wish you could stay,” I whisper.

  Travis threads his fingers through mine, sending warm and spicy tingles straight down my back. “I’ll always be with you,” he says.

  “But not like now. I won’t be able to see you.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair of me to stay. You have your own life to live.”

  “Well, maybe I want to live it with you.”

  He smiles and brushes his forehead against mine.

  And then he kisses me and it tastes like hot apple cider inside my mouth. “I’ll always be with you,” he repeats, murmuring into my ear. “Just don’t ever say goodbye.”

  I rest my head against his chest as tears drip down the sides of my face. We continue to hold and kiss each other, until the sun rises up and paints a strip of gold across the water . . . and I wake up.

  .

  The sun beams through my bedroom window. I squint against it and roll over in bed, wondering why my alarm clock didn’t go off, especially since today is the day I’ve planned to see Travis’s mother.

  Around ten, Craig comes to pick me up. He volunteered to take me to Mrs. Slather’s condo. Just a few days ago, I told him and Raina the full story—about the necklace, about my sister, Emma, and how my relationship with Travis has gone from zero to sixty in less than a week.

  “Are you nervous?” Craig asks, pulling up in front of her place. We’re in one of those condo parks, the kind where all the units, including the shrubbery that surrounds them, are cookie-cutter perfect. Mrs. Slather’s is the one on the end. There’s a rust-stained car parked out front and a few rolled-up newspapers on her welcome mat.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Craig asks.

  I shake my head and climb out of the car, the necklace pressed in my palm. There are ten stairs up to her door. I climb them slowly, trying to calm myself down—to slow the pounding of my heart.

  At the eighth stair, I pause and look back at Craig’s car. He gives me a thumbs-up and I do the same back, grateful that he’s here. And that I’ve come this far. My fingers shaking slightly, I take a deep breath and continue to the door. Finally, I ring the bell. I can hear someone moving inside. The door opens a couple seconds later.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asks.

  She’s older than I imagined, maybe in her late sixties, with silvery hair and a crooked mouth.

  “Are you Jocelyn Slather?” I ask, hearing the quiver in my voice.

  “Who are you?” Her tiny blue eyes narrow on me. The deep lines that surround them branch out like tree limbs.

  “I think I have something of yours,” I say, ignoring the question. Her mouth tenses into a frown. “And I think you’ve got the wrong person.”

  She goes to shut the door, but I’m able to stop it by jamming my foot into the doorway. I dangle the necklace in front of her eyes.

  “Where did you get that?” She looks past me, toward the street, to see if I’m alone.

  “Travis wanted you to have this.”

  “Who are you?” she repeats.

  “I’m a friend of your son’s.”

  “Well, my son is dead.” She goes to shut the door again, but my foot is still jammed in the way.

  “Please,” I say. “I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. I have dreams about him.”

  She shakes her head and leaves me at the door, tells me she’s going to go call the police.

  “Just wait,” I insist, flinging the door wide.

  Travis’s mother picks up the phone and clicks it on.

  And so I just spill it, blurting out every detail that Travis told me—about Mother’s Day and the soggy French toast, how he gave her wildflowers, and how the necklace was ripped from her neck. “It was thrown across the bathroom,” I tell her. “You looked for it everywhere, but couldn’t find it. It was in the radiator.”

  Mrs. Slather stops dialing and drops the phone. Her hand trembles over her mouth.

  “He wants you to know that he doesn’t blame you for his death,” I continue.

  “How do you know all this?” she asks, coming toward me again.

  “I dream about him,” I repeat, holding the necklace out to her. She takes it and tries to say something. Her mouth moves to form words, but nothing comes out.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” I say, “but maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe the only thing that matters right now is that you stop living a life of guilt.”

  And maybe I’ll do the same.

  .

  It’s saturday afternoon, a full three weeks since my visit to Mrs. Slather. And a full three weeks since I’ve seen Travis.

  I’m sitting in Stanley’s Coffee Shop with Craig and Raina, a large cup of regular positioned on the table in front of me, since, oddly enough, Stanley’s bland-o blend is actually starting to grow on me.

  “So, how are you holding up?” Craig asks.

  I shrug, trying my best to stay optimistic. The truth is, aside from Travis’s absence from my dreams, my life here has gotten more palatable—not unlike Stanley’s java. It’s weird, but moving halfway across the country— far from all-things-Emma—has brought her closer. Just yesterday, when I was whipping up a batch of butterscotch pudding in the kitchen, I accidentally said Emma’s name in front of my parents—since Emma and I used to barter over who would lick the spoon, the bowl, and the stray droplets of spilled batter—and neither of them snapped at me. They just sort of exchanged a look and, though I wouldn’t stake my life on it, I’m pretty sure I saw a tiny smile wiggle across my mother’s lips.

  For her—and them—that’s huge.

  Then, about two and half weeks ago, I opened my closet to look at the skates, to really see them for the first time in five years—white with red stripes running down the sides, glittery pink laces, and a giant scratch on the front from when I wiped out doing a spin. I took them out and left them by my desk, so I’d be forced to look at them all the time. After a couple days, the anxiety wore off and they became just skates. Nothing more. And so I ended up donating them to Goodwill, opting to remember my sister by thinking about all our butterscotch concoctions and the times we made blanket forts under the dining room table.

  “You’re looking a whole lot better,” Raina says, repositioning one of the many barrettes that adorn her hair.

  “I mean, I was seriously considering staging a Clinique intervention for you.”

  “Well, thanks,” I say, glancing at my reflection in the wall mirror behind her. Having finally gotten caught up on sleep, I’m no longer a walking zombie. Gone are the veins of redness that ran through my otherwise bright green eyes. So long, tired and pasty complexion; my skin seems, dare I say, glowing compared to just a month ago. And so does my hair—no longer the drab auburn tresses that hung down the sides of my face. It now looks downright tousled.

  “So, is it safe to assume your house is a ghost-free zone now?” Craig smiles, exposing the oh-so-adorable gap between his two front teeth.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I say, looking down at my wrist, where the bruise has finally healed. “I mean, sometimes, when I least expect it, I get a hint of him—a vibe, a feeling, a whiff of his spicy scent.”

  Like the other day when I was waking up, I could have sworn I felt someone clasp my hand. A few days before that, when I was getting dressed, I thought I spotted a hockey stick propped up against the wal
l, but, when I looked back, it was gone.

  “So, he’s still around,” Craig says, trying to be clear.

  “In some way, I guess, he always will be.”

  “That’s totally hot.” Raina grabs a sugar packet and attempts to fan herself down with it.

  “Any chance he has an available dead friend?”

  I let out a laugh, wondering if Travis is watching over me right now, if he’s happy where he is.

  And if his heart aches, too.

  “You should totally go on one of those ghost-hunter shows,” she says. “You know . . . the kind where the psychics help solve crimes and stuff.”

  “I’m hardly psychic.”

  “Well, what else do you call it? Last I heard, it wasn’t exactly mainstream to communicate with the dead— much less make out with them. How was that, by the way?”

  I smile wide, just thinking about it. About him. Our last kiss in front of the lake, our fingers entwined, and our lips melted together.

  “That good, huh?” Raina asks, winking at me. “I need to get me some ghost—fast.”

  “Right,” Craig says, “because nobody with a pulse would possibly date you.”

  While they continue to bicker, I lean back in my seat, noticing the sudden warmth in my palm.

  And the smell of spiced apples all around me.

  .

  .

  .

  .

  Stupid Perfect World

  scott westerfeld

  .

  Like most days, i was barely on time for Scarcity class.

  It wasn’t a real course with grades and everything, so only the most pathetic meekers worked hard at it. The rest of us just showed up and tried not to fall asleep. Nobody wanted to fail, of course, because that meant repeating: another long semester of watching all those olden-day people starving and being diseased. At least regular History has battles; Scarcity was just depressing.