FUSE

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Why is He so Dumb?

A few moments after Michael leaves, the angels float off the stage in a perfect V formation and silently glide toward the back door. Once the door closes behind them, the altar, the throne, and the pretty butterflies disappear in a flash followed by a tiny puff of smoke.

I whip my head around. "All this is your fault," I scream and actually stomp my foot. The minute I do it, I want to smack myself in the head. Sure, big baby, stomp your foot. What's next? Are you going to call your mommy? "Why did you kill me? I didn't even do anything to you! I was just sitting at my table eating a muffin."

"I didn't mean to kill you, Annalise," he replies, dropping his head and voice.

"Well, you meant to kill someone."

Finally, Richard looks at me. If we were still on Earth, I would say he has a raging case of pink eye. The red veins popping out against the white of his eyeballs look like a road map. "I don't think  I wanted to kill you. It's all hard to remember, but I do recall wanting the money in the cash register for something," he says, while rubbing his temples. "My memory is awful. When I'm here, I can't remember Earth very well, and when I'm living on Earth, I forget all about this place." Tears form in the corner of his eyes, and he drops his head low. "When I'm human, I can't even remember that Big Guy exists. You're lucky to be a Base. Base's have better memories."

"Give up the act, Richard. Tears are not going to make me feel sorry for you." I yank the mandate out of my back pocket and crinkle it into a ball small enough to hide in my palm. I swing out my fist until it meets the bones of his ribcage. "Here, take this, and read it, or should I say reread it for the bazillionth time?"

He unscrunches the paper and irons it out on his knee while sucking snot back up into his nose. "Blow your nose," I say, digging a used tissue out of my other back pocket. You're gross enough without making that disgusting sound and stop wiping it on the back of your hand!"

"Please, don't yell at me. I don't know why I keep killing you."

Shoot, now I feel tears forming in my eyes. How did such a loser like him split from a soul like me? I throw my head back, stare at the spotless white ceiling and quietly plead. Please let Big Guy decide to send us to Earth or to another training class. Another hundred years of lessons with the angels would be fun. It would be a nice break from being human. You may not realize this but living on Earth as a human being is hard work. Dragging around a body that requires water, food, and air—exhausting.

Did I explain that once we die and return to the UHQ, we don't really have bodies? Before this whole vacation business started, the UPC souls looked very similar to the angels, but due to the nature of our jobs, Big Guy made our wings much larger.

Once we started living inside human bodies, we acquired something the angels have dubbed the "lingering effect." Each soul brings the sensation of living inside a human body to the after-life. Inside UHQ, we appear exactly as we did on Earth. For example, at this moment, when the angels, or Michael, or even Big Guy look at me, they see a really cute little blond eight grader. When they look at Richard, they see a big jerk. Complicated, but just remember that when I say I feel tears in the corner of my eyes, I actually feel the wetness. When Richard sucks up snot, the awful sound makes me want to barf, even though he doesn't really have a nose, and I can't barf because I don't have a stomach any more.

Big Guy designed it to work this way for very practical reasons. First of all, we can't get our true form back until we completely fuse with all of our splits. In the beginning, we died human deaths and arrived as invisible energy lumps. The Front Desk Supervisor complained her staff couldn't count the number of souls standing in the newly-dead line, nor could they complete the intake questionnaire with invisible energy lumps. So, she requested that Big Guy allow the human bodies of all souls to remain visible until that soul departed for the next go-round on Earth. They insisted the implementation of this one simple change would cut the intake processing time in half, and dramatically improve accuracy. He agreed when they threatened to go on strike.