Let me tell you a story/ about a boy and a girl/ a different one than you’ve ever heard.
-The Dilemma, You Me at Six
One of the few similarities I’d ever had with Bella Swan is that I’d never given much thought to how I would die. I’d had a crushing fear of it; something I’d lay awake at night thinking about, but I’d always assumed that it would be in old age. ‘Assumed’ is probably not the right word. More like ‘hoped’. I’d hoped I would live a long and fulfilling life before like everything else, I came to an end. I think the thing I was most afraid of was oblivion. I was practically petrified by the thought of well, not thinking. Not existing. Going, leaving, which ever words you can associate with it. Yet I never thought or even contemplated the idea that I wouldn’t live to be eighteen. And if that wasn’t strange enough, being an Atheist, I assumed that death would indeed entail oblivion. Turns out that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
As if it wasn’t already apparent, I died. I died when I was half way through being seventeen, probably the most annoying age for any adolescent. Everything is legal but not quite. You can smoke on the streets, but you can’t buy cigarettes. You can drink alcohol, but you can’t buy it or drink in a pub. I guess the only thing that was completely legal was sex when I died, which I hadn’t experienced. Yes, I, Wendy Smith, died a virgin. Not that I would have particularly minded if I’d actually achieved oblivion once I’d died, yet the universe couldn’t have even granted me that. If you’d wondered how it happened, it wasn’t very glamorous or romantic. I think I was just happy it was quick. I got hit by a car. I’m now on the list of people included in the one million that die from car accidents each year. It wasn’t anything stupid either; I was simply crossing the road and some idiot ran me over. And I’m not even bitter because I died. I’m bitter because it was a red light and the idiot still whizzed over me.
I knew it when it hit me. It was quick and it was very painful. But it was only painful for a couple of hours, when my lungs wouldn’t work and my twenty six broken bones ached. Plus the fact that I had millions of cuts, bruises and a dented head. I can only assume I looked hideous. My last moments couldn’t have even been graceful. There is no way to romanticise a car crash. But if I’d actually attained oblivion when I’d died, I wouldn’t have cared. But like I mentioned, I was dead, but not ‘dead’. Not in the way that I’d have guessed by any science that I’d at all learnt in my thirteen years of schooling. Life is selfish, holding on to anyone and anything she can. Death takes what he can get, even if it is the bare minimum of the person that is cursed to remain on earth. Though what I didn’t understand was the complete lack of ghosts in the world around me. I was alone, and I didn’t know why I was. If I’d turned into a ghost, shouldn’t everyone else have as well? Shouldn’t the earth be populated by billions of dead? There are fifteen dead people for every living one, and yet I was completely alone in the grave yard of which I’d been buried. But that was before I’d met Peter Grace, the boy who I’d come to deem important in my not-so-life.
The first time I saw him was when I’d been coming to terms with what being dead was. I sat on the mound that was my grave, leaning against my headstone in a way that completed any stereotypes of ghosts or zombies or any undead being. Though I doubt an undead rabbit, for instance, would fit this stereotype. On the contrary, if it did what I had been doing, it would have broken any stereotypes about rabbits, or undead ones at that. I shook my head. I’d had far too much time to think. Anyway, I was sitting on my grassy bed when I saw him. He sat a little way from me, leaning against a gravestone and holding of all things, a book. This baffled me slightly. If this boy is indeed holding a book, and he is indeed a ghost, is the book a ghostly reincarnation of said book, or was he buried with it, making it a part of his ghostly form? I think that was the moment when I came to the conclusion that taking GCSE philosophy had been a very bad idea as it looked as if I was going to spend eternity contemplating my existence. The next thought I had was that there was a boy, sitting a little way from me, holding a book. There was another! There was another, for want of a better word, me! By this point, he’d noticed my staring eyes and raised an eyebrow.
