Neal Shusterman - Everlost

The boy pushed through the revolving door and hurried off.

Allie came up beside Nick. “I joined their card game a few days ago. It threw them off, but the next day, they were back to the same old routine.”

“But it doesn’t make sense…”

“Yes it does,” said Allie. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. You know when you’re listening to music, and the CD starts to skip? Well it’s like our lives are CDs that started to skip on the very last note. We never got to the end, we’re just sort of stuck. And if we’re not careful, we start to fall into ruts, doing the same things over and over and over.”

“…Because there’s comfort in the routine,…” said Nick, echoing Mary’s words.

“Is that what’s going to happen to us?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“We are not like the living,” Mary writes in her book The First Hundred Years .

“We are beyond life. We are better than life. We don’t need to complicate our existence with a thousand meaningless activities, when one will do fine. Just as the world’s great artists learn the value of simplicity, so do we Afterlights learn to simplify. As time goes on, we fall into our perfect routine; our Niche in space and time, as consistent as the rising and falling of the sun.

This is normal and natural. Routine gives us comfort. It gives us purpose. It connects us to the rhythm of all things. One must feel a certain pity for Afterlights who never do find their niche.”

Nickspent the next few days following other Afterlights in Mary’s domain, and it confirmed what Allie had shown him. For these kids, each day had become a repetition of the same day—and although he wanted to ask Mary about it, he didn’t, because he knew she would find some way of giving it a wonderful, positive spin. He wanted to sit with it for a while and think about it himself without Mary’s input.

That didn’t stop him from spending as much time as he could with her, though.

Mary was not routine. Each day was different for her—the kids she spent time with, the things she did. It eased Nick’s mind to know that endless repetition was not an irresistible force. A person had choice in the matter, if they were strong enough.

It was a constant irritation to Nick that he and Mary could never have time alone. Wherever Mary ‘was, Vari was there, too, like her own personal valet. Or like a lap dog. Clinging to Mary kept the boy’s life from becoming repetitive, like the others—although Nick wished Vari would just lock himself in a room, and play endless Beethoven to the walls for a few hundred years.

“Do you always have to hang around her?” Nick asked him. “Don’t you ever want to do anything else?”

Vari shrugged. “I like what I do.” Then he studied Nick with a certain coldness in his eyes. “You’ve been spending lots of time with Mary,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for you to do something else.”

Nick couldn’t quite read Vari’s emotions, only that they were unpleasant ones.

“It’s a free spirit world – I can do what I want,” Nick said.

“She’ll grow tired of you,” said Vari. “She likes you because you’re new, but you won’t be new forever. Soon you’ll be just another Afterlight, and she won’t even remember your name. But I’ll still be here.”

Nick huffed at the suggestion. “She won’t forget my name.”

“Yes she will. Even you will.”

“What are you talking about? “

“Your clothes, and your chocolate-face might cross over with you, but your name doesn’t. Not really. It fades just like any other memory. Soon everyone’ll just call you Chocolate. Or Hershey .” Vari grinned, but it wasn’t a pleasant grin.

“Yeah, that’s it. You’ll be Hershey .”

“No I won’t. And I won’t forget my name.”

“Really,” said Vari. “Then what is your name?”

He was about to answer, when suddenly he drew a blank. It only lasted for a second, but a second was way too long to not remember your own name. It was a profoundly frightening moment. “Uh…Uh…Nick. My name is Nick.”

“Okay,” said Vari. And then he asked: “What’s your last name?”

Nick opened his mouth, but then closed it again and said nothing. Because he couldn’t remember.

When Mary arrived, she noticed the distressed look on Nick’s face immediately.

“Vari, have you been teasing our new friend?”

“We were just talking. If he thinks that’s teasing, that’s his problem.”

Mary just shook her head, and gave Vari a kiss on his curly blond hair. Vari threw Nick a gloating grin when she did.

“Will you escort me to the lobby? There’s a Finder waiting for me, and I suspect he has some interesting things to sell.”

Vari stepped forward.

“No, not you, Vari. You’ve seen Finders before, but I thought Nick might like to learn how to barter with them.”

Now it was Nick’s turn to gloat.

Once the elevator door closed, and Vari was out of sight, Nick put him out of mind, dismissing what he had said—not just about his name, but his certainty that Mary would tire of Nick. Vari, after all, was only nine years old. He was a little kid, feeling little-kid jealousy. Nothing more.

What Nick didn’t realize was that Vari had been nine for 146 years. Little-kid emotions do not sit well after a century and a half. If Nick had realized that, things might have gone differently.

Lief stood in the arcade, staring at the video-game screen, and didn’t dare blink. Move the stick right. Up. Left. Eat the big white ball. The little hairy things turn blue. Eat the hairy things until they start to blink. Then run away from them.

Lief had become a Pac-Man junkie.

There was no telling what caused the old Pac-Man game to cross over all those years ago. Mary had bought it from a Finder who specialized in tracking down electronics that had crossed. Electronics did not cross very often. True, over the years people loved their gramophones, or Victrolas, or 8-track players, or iPods, but in the end, no one “loved” those things with the kind of soulful devotion that would cause the device to cross into Everlost. No love was ever lost on a CD player that broke. It was simply replaced and the old one forgotten. For that reason, Everlost electronics were mostly the result of sunspot activity.

Mary prided herself on keeping current on technology, so that arriving Greensouls would feel somewhat at home. It had taken patience, and work, but over the years, Mary had gotten herself quite a collection of video games, and had turned the sixty-fourth floor into an arcade. There were also countless black vinyl record albums that had crossed, because people did truly love their music, but she had yet to track down a record player on which to play them.

Up. Left. Eat the big white ball. The hairy things turn blue. Eat the hairy things until they start to blink. Run away.

Over and over. The repetition wasn’t so much soothing to Lief as it was compulsive. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. Ever.

In the forest he had surely been a creature of habit. He had swung from the trees, playing his games alone—the same games day after day—but that was somehow different. There was no urgency to it. But the endless stimulation from this new-fangled machine demanded his focus in a way the forest never did. Other kids told him it was an old machine—but he didn’t care. The games were all new to him.

Up. Down. Left. Right. Eat. Run.

“Lief, what are you doing? How long have you been here?”

He was barely aware of Allie s voice. He didn’t even turn to look at her. “A while,” he told her. Up. Left. Down .