Chapter Three
It would be near impossible to find that girl again in a city of such size and population of the one that I happened to be in. And after walking aimlessly for a while, hoping for a sight of some fortune-telling shop, I realized that I was in San Diego, seeing it on a sign. For a moment I stared at it, and then, as I gradually realized that my eyes weren’t watering, as they should have for keeping them open for so long, I blinked.
San Diego. The revelation hit me like a blow. I lived nowhere near San Diego! I didn’t even live in California! I furiously trudged up a hill, thinking. At the top, I spotted the ocean glittering in the distance. Its beauty did not touch me. I lived in Minnesota! How could this have happened? Did they divine powers screw my location up? Or… had it all been accidental? Was it not on purpose that I’d fallen out of that tunnel?
California. It was laughable, in a sick and twisted way. Was it a joke? Did the greater powers think I would enjoy the sunny state in my afterlife? It was as I glared at the ocean that a memory tugged at the back of my mind. No matter how hard I thought, I couldn’t reach it. Frustrated, lost, lonely, and dead, I gave up almost as soon as I began.
I was not tired, and I was not hungry or thirsty, but I sat on a bench to rest anyway. People continued on their way, oblivious in their lives. It was one of the few times in my rather short life that I had been envious of someone else. The last time was when Kelly Johnson got an iPod for Christmas, and I didn’t. Yet this jealousy was far more vast and different than that time. I was jealous in a sad way. In a way that the dead look on the living with no hope and only despondence.
My reason returned to me as I sat. What was the point of finding a medium? My family was across the entire country! I had no one to communicate to.
But, being the goal-oriented person I was, I needed a purpose. I needed something to distract me, to do, to focus on, so I wouldn’t sink in self-pity. Being thirteen did not hinder my intellect. I knew that if I were to sit down and truly cry, as a huge part of me wished to, I would never stop. Perhaps I did have “unfinished business”. Perhaps that was the reason why I had been released from my certain fate.
Or maybe, despite it being a completely absurd idea, this was my fate. But didn’t everyone go to Heaven, or Hell, or reincarnate, or whatever happened to a person when they died? Why was I left behind, abandoned?
Then I remembered—though I couldn’t believe I’d actually forgotten—the girl who’d seen me. Something new occurred to me. Was she dead, too? Then an even more inspiring thought: Were there others like me?
What had she meant, by the word newbies? Her tone had been disdainful, and she had treated me with irritation and cruelty, but I would have given anything to see her again and ask. Yet I knew it was an impossibility. If I did the math, my chances of finding that girl were, to say it simply, slim to none. I couldn’t find her, and ask her my questions. Clearly, I was on my own.
Maybe she wasn’t dead, though. Perhaps she was a medium. How ironic, if she were. To find what I’d been seeking without knowing it.
A man, talking quickly into his cell phone, suddenly sat on my spot on the bench. Startled, I moved away, and watched him.
“I want ten percent, Vincent,” he was saying sternly, “and if I don’t get what I want, I’m walking.”
His words caused an emotion I’d never felt before in my soul—literally. Homesickness. I’d never been away from my hometown. I’d never had a desire to. And I knew I didn’t want to stay in the strange city that I did not know, that the tunnel had dropped me into. If I was to “live” the rest of eternity, without touch or words from anyone ever, then there was only one place I wanted to go. One place I wanted to see, and stand in.
Home.
I would go home. That would be my new purpose, my goal. I would see my parents again. I would walk through the walls of the house I grew up in. I would pick one more apple from the tree—if it was possible. But if I could touch surfaces, and even sit on a bench, why not objects?
Leaving the busy man’s side, I stood and experimentally touched the wall of a nearby telephone booth. My hand went through. I had expected this, so I was not as frustrated as before.
Straightening my shoulders and lifting my chin, my feet turned and put my back to the ocean. I faced the long road ahead, full of honking cars and living people that no longer had anything to do with me. I had a goal, and a confounding mixture of relief, worry, and determination filled me.
I was going home.
What I would find there, I didn’t know. What I would do when I’d had my fill of it, I also had no idea of. But I wouldn’t, couldn’t stray from the lifeline of a path that I’d discovered.
And with one last glance at the man who was now shouting into his mouthpiece, I set off.
