“Hi,” I said. “My name is Susie.”
Later she would tell me she picked her name from a movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But that day it rolled right off her tongue.
“I’m Holly,” she said. Because she wanted no trace of an accent in her heaven, she had none.
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines. “How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Three days.”
“Me too.”
I sat down on the swing next to her and twisted my body around and around to tie up the chains. Then I let go and spun until I stopped.
“Do you like it here?” she asked.
“No.”
“Me either.”
So it began.
We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams. There were no teachers in the school. We never had to go inside except for art class for me and jazz band for Holly. The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue.
And our heavens expanded as our relationship grew. We wanted many of the same things.
Franny, my intake counselor, became our guide. Franny was old enough to be our mother – mid-forties – and it took Holly and me a while to figure out that this had been something we wanted: our mothers.
In Franny’s heaven, she served and was rewarded by results and gratitude. On Earth she had been a social worker for the homeless and destitute. She worked out of a church named Saint Mary’s that served meals to women and children only, and she did everything there from manning the phones to swatting the roaches – karate-chop style. She was shot in the face by a man looking for his wife.
Franny walked over to Holly and me on the fifth day. She handed us two Dixie Cups of lime Kool-Aid and we drank. “I’m here to help,” she said.
I looked into her small blue eyes surrounded by laugh lines and told her the truth. “We’re bored.”
Holly was busy trying to reach her tongue out far enough to see if it had turned green.
“What do you want?” Franny asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why – really know – it will come.”
It seemed so simple and it was. That’s how Holly and I got our duplex.
I hated our split-level on Earth. I hated my parents’ furniture, and how our house looked out onto another house and another house and another – an echo of sameness riding up over the hill. Our duplex looked out onto a park, and in the distance, just close enough to know we weren’t alone, but not too close, we could see the lights of other houses.
