“Every time I think that, something new and terrible happens. I get fired. I get run over. I die. Someone I live with dies. I die again. I become a queen. I get tricked into running Hell. I’m forced to wear humiliating name tags. I—”
“I miss the blowout sale for summer sandals. I get shriller and shriller rather than learning from my mistakes. I go all dictator-ey and banish blackberries from smoothies.”
“That doesn’t affect you one bit, Cathie! (A) You hated smoothies in life—”
“How has the smoothie industry tricked you into thinking pulverized fruit and yogurt and old ice cubes from the back of the freezer is a terrific plan?”
“And (2) you’re always in Hell.”
“Truer words,” my “friend” Cathie replied. She was already building another conference room out of Lego bricks. (The one she built yesterday had too good a view of the amusement park, or, as we called it, the Vomitorium. If you hated amusement parks or were prone to severe motion sickness, and subconsciously decided you needed punishment after you died, guess where you ended up? With a permanent season ticket?)
“Almost done,” she added, like I had an enduring interest in her temporary architecture. She could whip rooms up in no time. It helped that each Lego (or would that be LEGO®?) block was the size of a stereo speaker. One of the ancient ones, two feet high and a foot wide. Not one of the new ones you can’t actually see. “You’ll be bitching about the things you constantly bitch about in no time.”
“Drop dead,” I replied, which was redundant at best, lame at worst. Her evil snicker proved it was on the lame end of the meter. Cathie had faced down the serial killer who’d killed her; as a ghost, she wasn’t scared by bitchy vampires even a little.
I’d never known her in life, but in death she was pretty great. When she first appeared (manifested? intruded? trespassed? stalked?) she was mega-pissed over being murdered. So employing the “unlikely partners” trope, we’d teamed up. The end result: a dead serial killer, a vengeful ghost’s revenge, and the Antichrist’s temper tantrum, which resulted in a dead serial killer and a vengeful ghost’s revenge.
(I’ll go into the whole estranged-from-the-Antichrist thing in a bit. Really can’t stand even thinking about her right now. Long story short: she’s as dead to me as my dead father, who isn’t dead.)
Unlike a lot of new spirits, Cathie had no problem looking different from how she looked on the day she died. As she explained, “I got foully snuffed on laundry day; I am not plodding through eternity in granny panties and a sweatshirt. Besides, my clothes aren’t real. Probably I’m not real. So why not embrace it?” Excellent advice, and today she was in boyfriend jeans, a blue T-shirt with If you don’t sin, Jesus died for nothing in white letters, hair in an elaborate French braid (“Finally! The trick to mastering French braids is not having a body, or hair that grows on the body!”), and battered blue loafers, sans socks. Why she refused to manifest nice shoes would be an eternal mystery.
“Gang’s all here?” she asked, still messing with Lego pieces. She’d made the room, I slunk inside, and she was now working on the table.
“Mostly.” I sighed. “We’ll have enough to get through the meeting.”
“Which you’re seeing as a disaster for some reason.”
“Kind of.”
“Suck it up, buttercup.”
“Y’know, you could pretend to be intimidated by me. Or even acknowledge that I’m your boss and am chock-full of sinister powers.”
“Nope.”
Well, good, I guess. Throughout history, most dictators became douches because they were surrounded by yes-men or, in my case, yes-roommates/ghosts/vampires/zombies. Having people around who aren’t afraid of you is crucial if you want them to tell you what they really think, instead of what they think you want to hear. Though on days like this (nights? what time was it? Hell was like Vegas: no clocks), a little nervous deference wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world . . .
I’d known running Hell wouldn’t be easy, but hadn’t planned on it being boring. It had everything I hated about my old office job (meetings, organization, meetings) and none of the stuff I liked about my old office job (paid vacation, holidays, all the Post-it notes I could steal).
But meetings, like the IRS and the DMV, were a necessary evil. It was a whole new ball game since I’d killed the devil, banished the Antichrist, yelled at my father for faking his death (badly), banished my not-dead father and the Antichrist, and taken over the care and feeding of Hell.