AllFreeNovel
Share Us
There was something else, too. The strongest feeling of them all.
I felt absolutely nothing.
Nothing.
* * *
The sky spat down at us as they lowered his body into the ground. The hallelujahs from a song the cantor performed during the mass echoed through my brain.
I squeezed my arms around my body as the inevitable chill of the damp air worked its way through my inner core. The priest spoke a prayer into the air, though his blessings didn’t reach me. Instead, my internal radio—hallelujah, hallelujah—played on and on, covering up all external noise. The melody increased until it sounded as if someone had a music player going, a record spinning and spinning and spinning.
“Goodbye, Jamie,” I whispered under my breath.
A raindrop hit me smack on the top of my forehead.
Through the repetitive hallelujahs, I swore I heard:
“I’m still here, Jemma.”
A rush of something warm passed through my body.
It was gone as quickly as it had entered. That dark, hollow feeling I was accustomed with swiftly returned. Emptiness engulfed me and wrapped me up like a toxic relationship that refused to ever leave.
Jamie wasn’t here.
Jamie was long gone, and there was never going to be a way to bring him back.
Chapter Seven
Seventeen Years Before
“We still haven’t settled this!” The words flew off my tongue as I pointed a finger in Jamie’s direction. I stood at attention, my mouth wide, energy buzzing all around me as I prepared my next argument. The logs from the fireplace in the common room crackled, adding a dramatic flair to my sentiment.
Jamie paced in front of the mantle back and forth, then planted his feet as his eyes bore into mine.
“What’s there to settle?” he asked as emphatically as my previous statement had been, waving his hand back and forth, multiple times, across his body. “Death isn’t a subjective topic. When you’re dead… you’re done. The computer shuts off. Donezo. They’ve conducted scientific studies that proveallof this.”
In the three weeks since Jamie and I had begun our strange friendship, we’d proceeded to argue over pretty much every philosophical and topical issue in existence. Everything from abortion, to affirmative action, to whether the death penalty should be a legal thing. To goddamn George Dubya. It wasn’t so much that we disagreed, I’d discovered, but that each of us wanted to pick an opposite side. As if we both enjoyed the fight. Even if we didn’t truly stand behind our newly adopted doctrines.
It was like we just wanted to be assholes who argued.
Truth be told, I really wasn’t sure what Jamie actually believed. But then, I didn’t fully know what I believed, either. At least, not on most of the things we debated. I simply knew I had to win.
“What proof? Cite me your sources,” I said. “Or… is this another situation where you’re going to have me call PETA? Because we could so call them and get their opinion ondeath.”
I rummaged through my purse on the side table, ready to pull out my RAZR phone. Jamie rested a hand gently against my arm which dug into the bag, and I stopped. My face reddened from the touch, a spark of electricity tingling all over my body.
“When you put out a flame, it simply stops,” he said. Though his voice rang out softly, his tone was nevertheless triumphant. “We aren’t a bunch of spirit blobs, existing in space, who float around aimlessly. Science has proven that there is a dependent connection between what we perceive as our reality… and the electro-chemical events going on in the brain. Epi-fucking-phenomenalism.”
Then, like he wanted to add emphasis, he fell onto the sofa in front of the fire, swung his foot across his body, placed it over his opposite knee, and stuck two thumbs up in the air.
“Boom!” he cried.
“Hold on a second.” I mirrored his actions and sunk down into the seat next to him. My knee grazed his. Maybe it was the adrenaline pumping through my body, but a warmth caressed the area where we touched. However, the analysis inside my mind of what that might mean was finished before I even started to fully take the emotion into consideration. I had an argument to win.
“What about Near Death Experiences?” I asked.
“What about them?”
