Another Life Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Robert Haller

  E-book published in 2019 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Alenka Vdovič Linaschke

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-9825-2605-4

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-9825-2604-7

  Fiction / Literary

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  For the parents. For the kids.

  My beloved spake, and said unto me,

  Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

  For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

  The flowers appear on the earth;

  The time of the singing of birds is come,

  And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

  The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,

  and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

  Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

  —Song of Songs

  Everybody’s got a hungry heart.

  —Bruce Springsteen

  LAURA

  I wasn’t a bad girl. None of it had been my idea. Under the gazebo in the park, it was Bethany who started up about the bath salts and how snorting them was supposedly like taking acid. But she didn’t know for sure, it was just what she’d heard some of the senior girls saying in the locker room last week. And, of course, Ian wanted proof. So we piled into his car and headed to Walmart, the only store that sold bath salts in our town, the only store still open at this time of night. It was Friday, the first night of summer vacation, and I was fifteen.

  In the back seat, pressed up against the door handle and Bethany’s left side, I looked up “snorting bath salts” on my phone and scrolled through the results. I didn’t love the idea of running around town naked, out of my mind, ripping people’s faces off with my teeth. It just didn’t seem the best way to start the summer. But at fifteen, you can’t always afford to be a conscientious objector, or even a conscientious observer. You are a willing participant or you are alone.

  “Ian, why are we taking these side streets?” Nola asked, sitting on the other side of Bethany. “It’s faster just to go down Main.”

  “I just want to see something real quick,” said Ian.

  I watched the town roll slowly by—blue television light streaming out from the windows of some houses while others sat dark, toys lying dormant on front lawns, Little Tikes cars and inflatable swimming pools, a lone cat prowling the sidewalk. I could feel Bethany breathing beside me, her rib cage rising and falling in steady rhythm. I didn’t look at her. As Nola argued with Ian and Joey up front, demanding they change the music, I resisted the urge to grab Bethany by the arm, open the car door, and leap out, taking my best friend with me. We would hit the pavement and roll onto the curb, bruised but safe. She’d yell at me first, call me crazy, but much later—years from now, even—she would see that I’d been right.

  On Linwood Street, Ian slowed the car to a crawl. Nola began to laugh. “Really, Ian? This is what you wanted to see?”

  Ian didn’t answer, just looked across the street at the house we had stopped in front of. We all looked.

  There was nothing especially strange about the plain white house. The windows were dark, and the grass in front was maybe a little longer than it should have been, but not by much.

  “I’ve heard he hasn’t been out since he came back,” Nola said after a moment. “Just sits in there doing nothing.”

  “How do you know, though?” said Ian, staring at the house. “He could be doing anything in there: writing songs, recording. It’s only his mom with him, so we don’t know.”

  Suddenly, I understood. They were talking about Paul Frazier.

  Four years ago, Paul had fronted a high school band called the Seizures. The story goes that on the band’s first gig at Mullen’s, a restaurant downtown, people half a dozen blocks away had called the cops about the noise. Although the band had been together only a year, kids still talked about their shows. If you were one of the few lucky enough to have seen them play, you held a certain authority. At school this past year, I had overheard many arguments between juniors and seniors claiming to have gone to one of their shows, and the doubters and detractors who hadn’t. Sometimes, walking through town I would see rip seizures spray-painted in the alleyways between vacant buildings.

  I hadn’t heard of the Seizures until this year, my first year of high school. By the time I’d been “enlightened to the noise,” the band was long defunct. Paul Frazier had left for college in New York City, and all that was left of the band were the stories and the memories and a six-song EP, still available for download on their Myspace page. But earlier in May, the word was that Paul had returned. He’d moved back into his mother’s house and had hardly been seen or heard from since. He stayed in his room, holed away from the rest of the town, like a monk or a sleeping vampire.

  “I think it’s over, man.” Nola ran her hands through her short dark hair. “He’s never going to play again.”

  Ian shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  I’d learned quickly that this was the group’s favorite topic of debate: Paul Frazier. Nola and Joey were skeptics, but Ian still clung to a slim but dogged hope. Out of all of us, Ian was his biggest fan. Although he was in our grade, Ian was a year older and the only one of us who could drive. He was also the only one of us who had seen Paul’s band, sneaking out with his older brother to one of the Seizures’ shows when he was only twelve—or so he claimed. During these arguments, Bethany and I stayed silent. We were the newcomers. I couldn’t speak for Bethany, but in this group’s presence I evaluated every word before I said it, mentally proofing future sentences in my head.

  I was in this car because of Bethany, my best friend since first grade. Wherever she went, I went, too. I hardly knew these other kids. But if clever, pretty Bethany wanted to hang out with them, then I was coming along, like a dog dragged on a leash. Just a dumb, anxious dog, with nothing clear to contribute. Just Laura: sort of cute but not pretty, with a cluster of freckles splattered across my nose, and thick, unruly red hair. I was good at making myself invisible.

  In the Walmart parking lot, Ian pulled into a space as far away from the entrance as possible, although there were hundreds of free spaces closer. We climbed out of his old Saturn. It was one of the first warm nights of the year, and it felt strange to be out this late with bare arms, not chilled by the breeze. While everyone else headed for the entrance, I grabbed Bethany’s arm and held her back. She raised her eyebrows, impatient. I tried not to show that this look hurt. “Hey,” I said, “do you know what bath salts are supposed to do to you? I just looked it up.”

  Bethany looked at my phone in disdain, as if phones were now beneath her. “You know, just because it’s online doesn’t make it true, Laura.”

  “It doesn’t make it false, either,” I said.

  She glanced at Ian and Nola and Joey, who had stopped a few yards ahead and were looking back at us, waiting.

  “Apparently, they make you do weird stuff,” I said. “Really weird stuff.”

  For a second, I could see her almost caving to me; then she s
hook her head. “Don’t be so lame, Laura. I want to actually do things this summer.” She turned and headed toward the store, and I had no choice but to follow.

  Inside Walmart, we drifted down the aisles, past mad, grinning animal faces on the fronts of cereal boxes, past women’s underwear and kiddie T-shirts graced with the latest Disney starlet, everything lit in a cold fluorescent glow. This was where I went with my mom and little brother for laundry detergent or school supplies, but tonight, it didn’t feel familiar. Tonight, we were on the verge of something strange and dangerous.

  It turned people into zombies, one article on my phone had said, blood-hungry zombies. Ian led us to the health and beauty section and, after a minute of scanning the aisle, pointed to a small tub with the words “Soothing Bath Salts” on the front. The second he picked it up, my dumb heart began to pound. None of us spoke on the way to the checkout line.

  Only one register was open, and the large, scowling cashier raised her eyebrows when she saw us. “Before I ring you up,” she said, “can you tell me what five kids are doing buying bath salts at eleven o’clock at night?”

  Ian replied without hesitation. “It’s a gift for my mom. Her birthday’s tomorrow.”

  Eyebrows still raised, the woman made no move to ring up our purchase. “These ain’t gonna get you high, you know,” she said.

  I clenched my fist and glanced at Ian. “Excuse me?” he managed.

  “The salts that get you high, you can’t get at a Walmart—or anywhere in Grover Falls. Trust me, you aren’t the first bunch of kids I’ve seen try to do this.” A bemused, almost evil grin spread across her face. “Just thought I’d save you some time.”

  We all looked at Ian. It was a full ten seconds before he mumbled, “It’s a gift for my mom,” and pushed the salts closer to the register. The cashier rang it up. “Twenty-two fifty, please,” she said.

  The bath salts lay between my feet on the floor of the car, and as we pulled out of the Walmart parking lot and onto the road, I wondered what Ian would do with them now. Maybe he would give them to his mother after all.

  “I have some of that weed left in my bag,” said Nola, now in the front passenger seat, as Ian began to drive back the way we’d come. “The stuff we had last weekend.”

  Ian nodded. From my spot in the back seat, I could see his profile, lit intermittently by passing traffic. He looked sad and disappointed.

  “Are we really going back to your basement to smoke?” Joey asked, sitting next to me. It was the first time I’d heard him speak without being spoken to first.

  Nola looked at him the rearview mirror. “You have any better suggestions?”

  Joey sighed but didn’t say anything. I felt my body begin to tense. I had never smoked weed before, and the idea of doing it for the first time around kids I was trying to impress sent my heart into overdrive. We had just tried to buy bath salts to use as narcotics, but at least then we’d all been equally clueless. Nola talked about weed the way Bethany and I might talk about going to the mall—it was something they did all the time. She had it in her bag, and we were going to her house to smoke it. No Walmart cashier was going to stop us.

  “It’s just so cold in your basement,” Joey burst out again, “and we go there all the time.”

  “Well, we could go to your house, except that your parents are fucking Nazis,” Nola snapped, turning around in her seat to look at Joey. “Or, Ian, what about your house?”

  Ian shook his head. “Not happening.”

  “Guess that leaves my basement.” Nola gave Joey a triumphant jerk of her head.

  “I have the keys to the church,” Bethany said in a rush.

  For a moment, everyone was silent. Bethany’s father was a pastor. Our town was small enough that they all surely knew this already, but during the past few weeks, whenever Bethany was around her new friends during lunch or study hall, she had gone out of her way to avoid the topic. I couldn’t understand why she suddenly wanted to remind them.

  Nola looked at Bethany. “So?”

  “So we could smoke the weed there … if you wanted,” Bethany said timidly.

  Nola was looking at her with raised eyebrows, and I could almost physically feel the skepticism in the car. Then Ian broke it. “Hey, your dad’s church is the one that used to be a school, right?”

  Bethany nodded. “Yeah.”

  “We could smoke on the roof and watch the stars.”

  “How romantic,” Nola muttered.

  New Life Center was in a brick school building that had been closed since the eighties, after a new, larger school was built on the other side of town. It sat in a field on the outskirts of Grover Falls, with a long drive that spilled into a giant parking lot. New Life had bought the property about ten years ago, after our old church building burned down in a fire. In the years between the school’s closing and our church’s buying it, the town had turned the giant surrounding field into a twelve-hole golf course. Our church had decided not to anger the town by shutting down the popular golf course, so instead, we ran it ourselves. Some people in the congregation didn’t think it was right for the course to stay open on Sunday mornings, but since that was when it got most of its business, it didn’t make sense to close it. Sometimes, during Bethany’s father’s sermons, you could hear a golfer yelling “Fore!” out on the green.

  It had been easy enough to find a way out onto the roof. Bethany led us through the door, and we sneaked through the dark hallway and up the stairs. I’d been in the building countless times, but never this late at night. The empty darkness had a menacing feel that our whispers and giggles didn’t seem to relieve. One of the third-floor classrooms had a closet with a steel ladder that led up to an unlocked trapdoor, bringing us out onto the roof. By the time we were on top, I had pretty much forgotten about the weed. It seemed thrilling enough to have broken and entered, to be out here, the night breeze wafting across my face and through my hair, the lights of Grover Falls visible in the distance.

  But Nola wasted no time. She knelt down, dug the weed out of her backpack, and quickly rolled a joint. After it went around the circle that ended with me, I had no choice. When the smoke hit my lungs and I started to cough, I panicked.

  “Come here, son.” Nola placed a hand on my shoulder and gently took the joint from me. “Let me show you how it’s done.” I watched her pale face pull in and grow thin as she inhaled, and then the bloom of her dark lips as she breathed out the smoke, talking in a pinched voice as she did. “You have to invite it into your lungs. This weed is a friend; make it feel welcome.” She brushed a strand of hair from her face and handed me back the joint.

  One minute I wanted to kiss someone, the next I was dying to talk about extraterrestrial life. I settled for spreading myself out on the cold roof deck and staring up at the stars. If I squinted, I could make them all come together and form a giant ball of light, like how I imagined things had been at the beginning of the universe, before God decided that his own divine presence wasn’t enough.

  As the others laughed and fooled around with some irons and golf balls Ian had taken from the supply shed, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and held it above my face. A new message was waiting for me on my MatchUp app: Martin. Though I wanted to, I resisted opening the app and reading the message. Someone might see. Also, my phone battery was almost dead. Instead, I looked back up at the sky and wondered, not for the first time, what Martin would say if he could see me now.

  Our online conversations had grown longer and more intimate in the past few weeks. Only the night before, we’d landed on the subject of death. Michael Jackson had just died, and Martin was upset. On chat, I did my best to appear upset, too, but in truth, the King of Pop’s death hadn’t fazed me much. I didn’t listen to his music, so for me he was just a sad old R&B star. To cover myself, I tried to steer the conversation away from Jackson by talking about death in general. I mentioned how
death scared me because it was the one thing in life everybody had to confront, but the one thing we knew absolutely nothing about. I talked about how I’d been raised to believe in an afterlife, though usually the idea of not being seemed more convincing to me, but also more terrifying. I’d begun writing all this to Martin as a way of deflection, but as I typed, I realized it was all true: I was afraid of death. If I thought about it at night, it was hard to fall asleep. I was scared I would never again wake up.

  I had worried that my fears would sound dumb and immature to Martin, that he would think me childish. But, as usual, he understood. He told me he used to feel the same way, but he had come to the conclusion that the idea of not being, of nothingness, was comforting. Death was no different from before we were born, when not being had meant no pain or fear. I’d never thought about it that way before, and Martin was right, the idea was comforting.

  Bethany’s face filled up my vision. She lay down beside me on the roof. “How ya doing?”

  “Just stargazing.” I let my anger at her go. I could always get it back if I wanted to.

  I turned to look at her, and it hit me. “You like Ian, don’t you?” I said. I had already been suspicious but hadn’t known how deep it went. If she was willing to snort bath salts for this boy, if she was willing to break into church and risk getting caught by her dad, then it must be serious.

  We both looked over to where Ian stood, hitting golf balls off the side of the roof. Nola was beside him, drawling in a voice I recognized but couldn’t place—“Ah say, ah say, boy, ya gotta put more energy into yer drive there, son. Really put yer back into it!”—while Joey looked on and laughed.

  Bethany looked back up at the sky. “No, Laura, I don’t like Ian.”

  It was standard practice, of course, to deny any allegation of a crush the first time it was made—even one made by your best friend. Still, her lie hurt a little. “Bullshit,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.