Where the Staircase Ends (2 page)

Tires screeched. A horn blared. Everything happened at once. I threw my arms in front of my face (like that would actually help) and waited for the inevitable burst of pain that had to follow.

None came.

I lowered my arms, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the afternoon sun, which somehow seemed brighter than it had a moment ago. Sweat prickled at the back of my neck as the scene before me clicked into place.

The woman and her Beemer were gone. Everything was gone—the intersection, the hot spring day, the neighborhood I’d lived in my entire life—all of it vanished, like someone abracadabra-ed it away.

In its place stood a giant stone staircase, clawing upward so the sky split
into
an endless stack of right angles. I couldn’t see where it ended. It just went on and on, up and up, until my neck couldn’t bend any farther and I lost sight of its climb.

I blinked, then blinked again. My brain didn’t want to accept what my eyes saw, so I crouched into a ball and pressed my fists against my eyes until black-and-red spirals spun into my vision.

This couldn’t be right. This couldn’t be right at all.

When I pulled my hands away, the world pinwheeled back into view.

Bright afternoon.

Blue sky.

Enormous staircase.

I’ve heard people compare rapidly beating hearts to rabbits, or something equally weak and frantic. My heart was not the heart of a terrified bunny—it was the heart of a million terrified bunnies looking straight into the drooling mouth of a grizzly bear.

There was no sound. No chirping birds or buzzing lawnmowers. No rumbling of cars or thrumming iPod music. In fact, my iPod had vanished from my hand, and my headphones were no longer in my ears. The only sounds came from me—my toe tracing the edge of the step in front of me as I contemplated my next move, and my slow, calculated breath as I fought the panic welling inside of me. I pinched my arm until I cried out. Then for good measure I gave myself a sharp slap across the cheek, but the staircase didn’t disappear. Neither did I.

Instead, the stairs stretched on and on in front of me like some kind of nightmare step class from hell. It made me wonder if Led Zeppelin had intel when they wrote “Stairway to Heaven,” because they totally nailed it. Unless we’ve had it wrong all along, and hell is up and heaven is down and everything’s all backward.

Deep breaths. I had to take deep breaths.

What had just happened?

I thought back to a few moments before. The car was coming straight for me, and then … and then what? I could only recall the few seconds right before the Beemer must have pancaked me. It was as if someone snapped their fingers and
poofed
me there, only I couldn’t remember them, the snapping, or the poofing.

I ran my hands along my body, checking for bumps and bruises. Nothing hurt. I didn’t even look like I’d been hit by a car. My yellow sundress was as crisp and clean as it had been when I put it on that morning. There was no car grease, smears of blood, or bits of brain splattered across the pleated cotton fabric. Even my ponytail was neat and tidy, each hair smoothed into place the way I intended. I was the same me I’d been when I left my house, only I wasn’t me. How could I be me after a head-on collision?

Was I dead?

No. No, that couldn’t be right. I was breathing. I was thinking. I was moving. Those were not the kinds of things dead people were supposed to do.

“Hello?” I finally shouted at the blue and gray nothingness of the stairs and the empty sky. A hundred voices bellowed the greeting back in an echo. It was an empty and terrifying sound.

I tried to spin around, ready to launch myself through the door that must have led me there. That’s when I realized the most disturbing thing of all: I couldn’t turn around. I could look left and right, but I physically couldn’t face anything except the blasted staircase. It was like someone held me from behind, only there was no one there. And man, did I want to turn around. Anyone would after seeing the size of that
thing. I got winded after one lap in gym class. How was I ever going to make it to the top of a monstrous set of stairs? Assuming there was a top.
God, if you’re up there, please let there be a top
.

I tried to keep my panic from bubbling into anger, but I could feel the f-bombs forming on my tongue. I mean, what the hell? WTF happened to heaven? If I was dead and this was the afterlife, shouldn’t I at least have gotten a guardian angel greeting, or some kind of clue about where the hell I was and what I was supposed to do? Maybe a hello from Mamaw and Gramps? Something?

But there was nothing except the stairs and a quiet so deep I was pretty sure I could’ve heard the grass growing if I were able to turn around to see if there was any grass behind me. I just hoped Led Zeppelin was right, and the stairs led to the good place rather than the bad one. Otherwise I was screwed with a capital S-C-R-E-W-E-D.

The steps slid easily beneath my feet as I started to climb, and I let out a sigh of relief. A small part of me had expected the sky to rain frogs, or a swarm of locusts to rise up and gobble me whole. But instead of fire and brimstone, my ascent began with my flip-flops applauding against my heels.
Congratulations, Taylor. You’re dead. Clap, clap, clap.

I THOUGHT
I
WAS THE GHOST

Cracks spider-webbed their way along the stone steps, splitting the surface into tiny crags that ran up and down the length of the staircase. It looked old and busted up, like whoever built it decided it wasn’t worth the upkeep. My dad would’ve had a field day. My mom bought him a caulking gun two Father’s Days ago, and he’d been a hole-filling, crack-fixing machine ever since. He seemed to think that most things in life could be caulked back together. Crack in the sidewalk? Caulk it. Wobbly table leg? Caulk it. Heel break off your shoe? Caulk it. Once he even gave me a dried-up wad of caulk to use as an earring back.

My hand jerked up instinctively, checking to make sure the diamond studs he’d given me for my birthday still sparkled from my earlobes. Then just as quickly I dropped my hands and fidgeted with the hem on my dress. I didn’t want to think about my dad. I didn’t want to think about my parents, or what the staircase meant, or whether or not I’d ever get to see Dad rounding the corner with his caulking gun in hand, waiting to fix life’s ailments with the squeeze of a trigger. I didn’t want to
think
at all.

Instead, I trudged ahead, looking up and down the staircase for some clue about where the stairs led.

Each step was wide enough to hold about ten people walking shoulder to shoulder, but my fear of heights kept me firmly rooted to the center. Without being able to turn around it was impossible to tell if I was close to the ground or floating somewhere up in the sky, and there was nothing to keep me from falling over the side—no railing to hold on to or wall to protect me.

But if I’m dead can I die again? It didn’t seem likely. At least that was what I told myself when my curiosity finally got the best of me and my feet started inching closer to the ledge.

I expected to see green treetops or the brown and emerald patchwork of the earth below, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just the same empty sky stretching down and up and all around me. My head swam with the sameness of it all.

I leaned out farther, trying to catch a glimpse of anything other than the gray-blue mix of stone and sky, but my head stopped just short of the edge. It was like a wall ran along the side of the stairs, only there wasn’t anything there.

Weird.

I tried again, this time pushing and shoving with all my strength, trying to kick a leg, a hand, or even a toe over the edge, but nothing could break past the farthest perimeter. Not even my middle finger, which was exactly the digit I wanted to show whoever might be watching from below. As far as I could figure, it wasn’t a physical thing trapping me. I just
couldn’t
move anything beyond the edge, similar to the way I physically couldn’t turn my body around no matter how hard I tried.

I gave up, resigned to the fact that climbing was my only option.

That’s when I saw Sunny standing three steps in front of me, watching with a wicked smile.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

It looked exactly like her, only it wasn’t really her. It couldn’t be, because I could make out the zig-zagging stone through her image, as though she was a reflection in a pane of glass rather than an actual person.

I narrowed my eyes at the gauzy hallucination. Her skirt billowed around her, the hem rising and falling as if it was blowing in the breeze even though the air around me stood perfectly still. I remembered the white eyelet dress well from the previous summer. She wore it to the mall almost every Saturday because it made her boobs look bigger than they really were. It used to annoy the crap out of me, because my boobs were actually bigger than hers, but somehow that dress made her look like the chesty one.

The wind lifted her hair from her shoulders, twirling and twisting it until she finally reached up and pulled it back from her face.

If I’m dead, shouldn’t I be the one doing the haunting?
That, at least, had some upsides. I would have haunted the shit out of Sunny and gone all Jacob Marley on her ass with the chains and moaning and all. Why did she get to be the ghost?

I remembered reading that people went into shock after traumatic events. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe I imagined the whole thing, and Sunny was a figment of my car-thwacked brain. Which led to only one question: could you punch a figment of your imagination?

“Go away,” I said through clenched teeth. She blinked back at me as if I hadn’t uttered a word, and smiled her bitchy smile until I couldn’t take it anymore. I tipped my head back and screamed at the empty sky, letting out a lupine snarl that surprised even me.

When I looked back at Sunny’s ghost, it began to fade into the steps, her eyes holding mine until they completely evaporated from my view. Maybe I was dead
and
crazy. Or maybe crazy came with the territory.

Just move
.
Keep climbing. Don’t think.

I marched ahead, my eyes stretching upward in the hopes of seeing the top. Instead, I saw another ghost.

“Justin,” I said, a smile bending the sides of my mouth even though I knew he couldn’t be real. Out of habit, I smoothed my dress down against my thighs and checked my ponytail for flyaways.

His long, lean body stood off in the distance, and his infamous half-grin played at the corners of his lips like he didn’t have a care in the world, like he somehow missed the fact that we were stranded on a gigantic staircase. Then I realized I was stranded on a gigantic staircase with Justin Cobb. Hallucination or not, maybe the being dead/crazy thing wasn’t so bad after all.

I took the steps three at a time to catch up with him as familiar butterflies danced a jig inside my stomach.

When I got close enough to touch him, I stretched my fingers out in his direction, wanting more than anything to prove that he was real. Before my fingers made contact with his hand, his image swam away from me and reappeared several steps ahead.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, looking for sanity behind my eyelids. When I opened them he was still there, backed by the flat expanse of endless blue sky.

He wagged his finger at me as if to say,
no touching please
, then tipped his head to the side like he wanted me to follow him. I took a hesitant step forward. Which was crazier—seeing ghosts or following them? But I would go anywhere as long as I could be with Justin.

He grinned once more before turning on his heel. I followed, quickening my steps in an effort to catch him, but he managed to stay two steps ahead of me, just out of my reach. The ghost-Justin wasn’t much different than the real Justin.

I broke into a run and threw my hand out toward his back. If he were real, I would’ve felt the soft cotton of his T-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders, but my hand passed right through him, and I was hit with a wave of nausea. A shudder ran the length of my body, and I had to place my hands on my knees to keep myself from falling forward. Everything around me turned gray, as if the stairs had somehow swallowed the sky. It felt like they were trying to swallow me, too.

“Justin, what’s happening? Where are you?” I couldn’t see anything except gray, gray, gray.

The ground shifted beneath me. The stairs flattened out, and I thought I caught a glimpse of the hideous brown-and-black speckled carpet that covered my high school’s corridors. And then suddenly I
was
in my high school, standing just outside the door to a classroom. But how …

“Watch where you’re going!”

Someone rammed into me from behind, knocking my backpack askew.

Wait, what backpack?

I looked down and my sundress was gone. Instead, I was wearing jeans and my favorite blouse, the one my mom hated because, well, she pretty much hated anything that I liked. My lips were sticky from gloss. My hair was down. But wasn’t I …