To Be Transparent

To Be Transparent

When I died there was no pain. No bright lights. No one there to hold my hand and take me away. I remember seeing a Jeep Cherokee out of my window in the backseat. The next thing I knew I was waking up and stepping outside of the car. When I looked back I saw my own body. I still looked like I was wearing that same skin when I looked in the mirror. Only it's fainter, more see through, but who i am now is completely detached from the girl in the backseat that day.

My parents died that day too, but they’re in their forties so it’s not as uncommon as it is for an 18 year old. They recently joined an online website for couples who died together to meet and made friends with a married couple who died in a hiking accident. They've now been able to climb some of the tallest mountains in the world. Our neighbor, Mr. Bronley, died 3 years ago after falling off the roof while hanging Christmas lights. Now, he hangs himself with Christmas lights on Halloween to scare the neighborhood children. Being dead sounds fun doesn't it? Maybe for the older generation, but not for me.

 Young adults can be cruel.

I had to return to high school to finish my Senior year that Monday. Just because you're dead doesn't mean you get to just give up on everything. The first person to comment on my clear lifelessness was my best friend, Cheyenne. 

‘Whoa, what happened to you? Was it something cool? Bear attack?” She said when she met me at my locker that day. 

"Car accident" I told her. She sighed.

In gym class, we had to run the mile and I asked if I could take the written final considering I had just died and hadn't quite gotten the hang of 'not having a body' yet. She rejected my request. Probably because she didn't want to grade it. You wouldn’t believe how fast ghosts can move. I floated through the mile in record time. A time that no living being with a lung capacity could ever have a chance of beating. At first it felt good. I was usually one of the last to finish and this time I was done before the fastest kid had gotten halfway through. I thought my classmates would cheer for me, but they were angry. Especially the cross country and track runners who were always striving to beat the record time. Those whose dreams were crushed because I was dead.

During lunch I went to the cafeteria with everybody, but ghosts don't have to eat, so I simply sat with Cheyenne while she told me all about her crush on some new guy who moved here from Michigan. It was impossible to get a word in, as usual. She never asked about how i'm feeling about ya know, being dead. She did, however, comment that she thinks we should lie about how I died because people think it's lame. Then she told me she had to go meet her tutor in the art room and she was off.

I decided to spend the rest of lunch in the bathroom to avoid the awkward stares, but I was stopped by a girl on the way out of the lunchroom. She said her name was Lexa. I could tell she was not quite visible, like me. "How'd it happen?" She asked me. "Car accident." I said, prepared for the disappointed look in her eyes. "Wow, that's crazy." She said. "Tell me about it." I smiled. We sat down at the lunch table and talked for the rest of the time we had. She told me about how she died white water rafting in Colorado. She was on a family vacation. She said that after she graduates she's planning to move around a lot. "All we have to do is get through these last few months and then we can literally do whatever we want and at a much faster rate than anyone else here. We're gonna see and do things way before they even get the chance to. Things they couldn't do. Don't sweat them."

She walked me to class.