last heaven || wally clark

prologue : the pull

RHONDA WAS WATCHING THE HOMECOMING GAME THE NIGHT WALLY CLARK DIED FIVE YARDS FROM THE END ZONE.

Under normal circumstances, Rhonda would never have been caught anywhere near the football field of Split River High School, and her being dead hadn't changed that. She spent most of her time stalking the hallways and eavesdropping on the teachers, screaming at them (to no avail) for someone, anyone truthfully, to say anything against Mr. Manfredo, the guidance counselor she had died at the hands of.

But the Homecoming game of 1983 was anything but "normal".

Rhonda had only felt the pull once before. She couldn't describe it even if she tried, but it had been a day in mid-May only about a decade or so prior when she had felt inexplicably drawn to a supply room near the AV lab. She had watched two girls enter the lab, both laughing and blissfully making jokes about some girl they both knew, picking whoever it was apart; her red hair, her slightly-too-large clothes, her perpetually dazed voice, anything they could.

Their laughter and comments, barbs and insults traded back and forth at an unknown subject, are so loud and so quick, so mercilessly cruel, that neither girl hears the door of the nearby supply closet softly close. Neither is aware of the blinds in the closet window that open slightly, and neither of them sees a girl with red hair and large brown eyes peer out of them.

But Rhonda isn't focused on the girl, on how her eyes are filling with tears and how her chest is rising and falling at a rate that simply couldn't be considered normal. No, Rhonda's eyes were fixated on a spot slightly behind the girl; a coffee cup teetering precariously on a wheeled cart mere inches behind the girl, almost as if it was placed there with the explicit intention of being knocked over.

It was at that moment that Rhonda, sitting on a nearby table, feet dangling and surrounded by cameras and electrical equipment, knew what was about to happen. She knew then what the pull was about.

She knew that she was about to watch someone die.

She watched, feeling much like how a passing car spectates a wreck happening, as the two girls finally looked towards the still slightly widened blinds. She watched as the red-haired girl, still in the supply closet, stepped back, allowing the blinds to close, finally obscuring her from view, but the death wasn't long now as she heard the sound of the cup falling, liquid no doubt spilling all over the room, and the unmistakable sound of short-circuited electrical wires begin. She watched the overhead light of the closet start to sputter and fail, casting flickering shadows through the blinds.

And finally, she watched the girl in the closet reach for the light. She looks away just moments before the girl's fingers close around the light to attempt to unscrew it, but she hears the girl's loud gasp as the electricity goes haywire and courses through her body.

Rhonda leaves after hearing the girl's body hit the floor, moving through the two still-living girl's bodies as they rush to the closet and wrench the door open. Rhonda hears their screams as they discover what had happened, hears the cries of horror as they barrel through her corporeal form, looking for a teacher, but she doesn't pay them any mind. Her only goal was to leave the room before the new girl woke up and realized her new purgatory.

Nobody had been there when Rhonda woke up after dying back in the guidance counselor's office, and she didn't want this new girl to find out Rhonda had watched the entire incident as it happened.

Rhonda had been alone. And so will this new girl.

It was after the incident with Dawn (Rhonda had learned her name months after her death) that Rhonda began to fear the pull, the inexplicable feeling of knowing someone was about to join them in the afterlife and being drawn to their exact death location. She had tried talking to a fellow ghost, Janet Hamilton, about the pull, but talking to Janet never seemed to go well. Rhonda hadn't seen Janet at Dawn's death and wondered how she'd managed to ignore the pull, or simply never felt it at all, but Janet had long since checked out of what was going on in the world around them, preferring to spend her time with Mr. Martin, the self-proclaimed group therapy leader to those trapped in the Split River afterlife. So far, out of the four people who were dead, only Mr. Martin, Janet, and Rhonda attended the therapy. Dawn had found herself a spot on the top of the lockers, and she was far too checked out to be convinced to come to therapy.