Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

Ouch. My chest area hurt, just from seeing what I knew was a time loop.

“McGlinn’s uncle Kevin,” Randy said softly in a moment of soberness. “He was jus’ a kid when he died here with his parents sittin’ by the bed. They took him out of the hospital to be with the family ‘cause they knew he was goin’. Cancer.” He slid me a glance. “Does this also show you why McGlinn won’t leave?”

I nodded slowly, not trusting myself to speak.

Randy spent one more second by the bed before he led me out of the room. Then, outside the door, he hesitated.

“Every so often, we’ll try to get Kevin outta the loop. Can’t ever manage it, though.”

Some upbeat Southern rock music had started downstairs, where the party was going on, oblivious of the tragedy up here. But they knew, didn’t they? They had probably been celebrating downstairs from Kevin for years, accepting that this was how it was in Boo World and there was no changing things.

We all had ways of coping, whether it was McGlinn and his dope or ghosts and their music. Death was always a heartbeat away somewhere, so why should I be concerned about it?

Randy was already in a better mood, like he’d had a lot of practice leaving dark times behind. “I’ve been lookin’ forward to showin’ ya this .”

I hoped it would be happier.

We were standing in front of an open door leading to a master bedroom with a bed covered by a dull brown spread, decorated with only a worn-down dresser. Inside, I heard someone moving around in the attached bathroom.

Randy plunged inside like the drunken imp he was.

I met him in that bathroom, where he was already hover-sitting on top of the toilet tank by the shower. But forget Randy. My attention was fixed on the chick standing in front of the mirror, fussing with her hair.

And what hair it was, one side of it all black and straight, streaming over her shoulder, the other side teased and colored with what I thought might be rainbow hues, even though I couldn’t tell with her grayish tone. Part of her scalp was shaved down to stubble, too.

She was wearing a dark corset, petticoats, fishnet stockings, and ankle boots, plus the pièce de résistance.

Madonna bracelets.

Randy was holding back a laugh as the girl caught sight of me in the mirror, then whipped around, her face megapale, her eyes ringed with lots of liner. She looked like half Cyndi Lauper and half Robert Smith from the Cure.

“Goddamn it, Randy,” she said, turning around again and throwing a punch at him. She only swiped through his arm with a bzzt of energy. Randy still flinched, though.

She huffed. “I’m not, like, fit to meet anyone.”

“Ya never are.” Randy presented me. “This here’s Jensen, from the ’eighties.”

When the superfreak just looked me over with a sneer on her lips, I began to question Randy’s friend-matching skills.

“Jensen,” he said, “meet Twyla from the ’eighties.”

Instead of saying hi, she chuffed, “Grody.”

Yeah, yeah, my clothes. I wasn’t thrilled about the eternal statement they made, either.

“Hi to you, too,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, turning back to the mirror, stabbing a hand at her hair. “Like, really, Randy? You sincerely think I look decent or something?”

Like, whatever. I wanted to be with the fun ghosts downstairs again.

Randy was enjoying her sass. “Twyla’s jus’ in a bad mood. She died on a Friday night before goin’ to the clubs. Got a charge out of a malfuck… malfunken…”

“Malfunctioning?” both Twyla and I said.

We ignored our stereo correction as Randy said, “Yeah. That. Her hair dryer cord thing dropped in a full sink and gave her a sizzle while she was experimentin’ with her look, comparin’ one side to the other. She got so…”

“Extra-crispy,” she said, rolling her eyes again.

“Yeah, she got so extra-crispy from the dryer that she ended up only dyeing one side of her hair black ’fore she became a Kentucky Fried Corpse.”

Again, Randy looked proud of his ability to drop modern pop names.

Twyla cared only about the hair. “Like he said, I was comparing how I looked with Lauper in the mirror and then with the Goth. I died right before I decided to stay with the colors and right after I filled the sink with water to wash my hair. So sue me.”

Randy busted out with “Jensen got murdered.”

Twyla’s hands stilled. “Bag your face! Seriously?”

“Seriously,” I said.

Suddenly, I was queen of cool while Randy told her every detail he could, obviously relishing my story.

“Oh my Ga -od.” Twyla looked half Goth, but she sang out the phrase like a true Val. “You’re, like, interesting.”

“Totally,” I said, not sure if I was mocking her or just falling into the bad habit of aping her speech. That sometimes happened to SoCal girls—even the resistant non–Pod People who hung out at the beach or sheltered ourselves with normal friends. Val talk had been a plague that you could catch without knowing it.

“Jen’s jus’ learnin’ the ghost ropes,” Randy slurred. “She jus’ joined her first human dream yesterday.”

“Ah, dreams.” Twyla went back to the hair, testing out ways to hide the shaved part of her head with her longer hanks. “I’ll go into one of their dreams just so I can feel what it’s like to be touched again, you know?”

Randy couldn’t help himself. “Jen likes humans even more ’an that. She’s on a mission for one of ’em.”

And he spilled everything about my former alliance with Amanda Lee and her crusade.

When he was done, Twyla gave me a perplexed look in the mirror. “Like, why would you go through the trouble?”

“I asked her that, too,” Randy said. “Why worry ’bout anything but your own state?”

Twyla shrugged. “Come to think of it, caring about humans’ problems is sooooo cute. It really is.”

I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or genuine. Either way, I didn’t dig her attitude.

“It keeps me from being bored,” I said, not wasting my time on any more complex explanations. She wouldn’t get it.

Randy floated off the toilet tank. “Jen’s also managed to find a strange buddy in the otherworld.”

Awesome. It was now time for fake Dean stories.

“He or it seems like a wrangler,” Randy said, “but I ain’t sure. Ya ever meet up with a thing that took ya to a starry place?”

The Goth Val seemed highly intrigued. “No. What happened?”

I started to suspect that Randy got more of a kick out of telling my stories than I did.

“It snatched her off this plane, and it looked like her ex-boyfriend.”

“Awww,” Twyla said. “And… ew.”

I casually shrugged at both as Randy continued.

“The thing tried to get Jensen into a light—and I don’t think it was our light. Then, when she wouldn’t go in, it dumped her.”

“What a dick!” Twyla said. “Have you seen him after?”

“No.” And it tripped me out that it hadn’t been so long since my sick rendezvous with fake Dean. A day? Two? Ghost time sure blurred a lot.

“I’m guessin’,” Randy said, “you’ve never come across something like that, Twy.”

“No day, no way. But it is a pretty gnarly tale.” She hopped up to hover-sit on the counter very ghost-gracefully. “But if you do run into your boy toy again, Jensen, you should make the most of it. Ask him who murdered you, you know?”

Again, she might’ve been playing around with me. I’d had a so-called friend like that in middle school who took great pleasure in tormenting everyone with mind games. Twyla might be one of those.

But I had to admit, her comment was a grain of an idea. Was fake Dean a higher being or just a really talented kind of ghost? He’d created a star place, after all. Would he know more than any other regular ghost?