Divine and Dateless (13 page)

“I’m sorry, Mr. Loveass,” I said through a barely restrained growl, “but I’ve been waiting here for three hours.”

His face twisted up as if it was caving in on itself, his hollow cheeks turned bright red, and I’m fairly certain I saw steam shooting out of his ears.

“Lovelace,” he said through clenched teeth. “The name is Lovelace.” He motioned to a faded gold plate in front of his desk, and sure enough, the word “Lovelace” was etched across the top.

Well, didn’t I feel like a moron?

I felt the heat creep into my chest and fan my face as I sank low in my chair. So much for me giving the guy a piece of my mind. That was hard to do with my foot lodged in my mouth.

When I got hold of Grim, I was so going to throttle him.

“I’m sorry. Grim told me it was Loveass. Your name was smeared.” I dug through my purse and held up the card. It was coated with Hammerhead’s old, crusty blood.

One thin brow shot up. “You don’t remember me?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Am I supposed to?”

“We went to the same high school.”

He gave me another long look, but I was still coming up blank.

He grabbed a pencil off the desk, clutching it so tightly, I feared it would snap in two. “We had third period chemistry together. You sat catty-corner to me. We were lab partners.” He leaned forward and shot me this expectant, almost demanding glare, his dark eyes magnified beneath the lenses making him look angrier.

“We were?” Surely I would have remembered a guy as dorky as Lovelace.

“For three assignments.” He held up three bony fingers for emphasis.

I struggled to jog my memory. Asshole or not, it was starting to dawn on me I probably needed to be on this guy’s good side if I wanted to get into Heaven faster.

“Sorry.” I shrugged. “My high school years are sort of blurry.”

At least senior year was. That was the year my volleyball teammate's brother turned twenty-one, and he thought he could get into the team’s pants if he bought us beer. It worked on a few players, but not me. Believe it or not, I had standards back then. I never said no to the beer, though, until the night after playoffs. I’d drunk myself into a stupor and woken up in a pile of my own vomit.

Two weeks of uncontrollable diarrhea and barfing later, doctors diagnosed me with Celiac Disease, and then no more beer for me. I spent the rest of my senior year in a gluten-withdrawal coma. The last thing on my mind would have been a skinny bug-eyed nerd when I was mourning the loss of Budweiser, Captain Crunch, and Oreos. My GPA took a nosedive, too. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a few sympathetic teachers and hired tutors, I would have failed.

An image flashed through my mind: a kid with big head gear and high-water jeans whose zipper was always halfway down. He’d tutored me after school with Periodic Table of the Elements flash cards he'd made himself. He used to yell at me in this nasal voice that sounded more squeak than scream every time I interrupted his rehearsed lecture to ask a question.

I remembered choosing him as my lab partner because he did all the work, even though he belittled me at every opportunity. But then something happened to him. Something tragic, like he’d committed suicide. I’d fallen off the gluten-free wagon and gone on a Pizza Hut deep-dish pizza and Olive Garden breadsticks binge the weekend it happened, so I’d been too sick to attend the funeral.

I briefly remembered lying in bed and reading about his death. I think I may have even cried, because though he was always calling me a moron, I’d felt sorry for the kid. He’d climbed to the top of the water tower and spray-painted the words “I love ass” before jumping to his death.

It dawned on me why Grim called him Loveass. Oh, the jerk was so going to pay for making me look insensitive.

“I remember who you are now.” I jutted a finger at him. “You’re the guy who loved butt and then committed suicide.”

“Loved butt?” He jerked back as if I’d just spit all over his face, which I hadn’t.

Because even though my words project, I keep my saliva within the confines of my mouth, thank you very much.

I looked over my shoulder to make sure Miss Marshmallow had shut the door behind me, and then I dropped my voice to a nearly audible whisper. “You wrote ‘I love ass’ on the water tower and jumped to your death.”

His face colored, first red, then a bright shade of fuchsia. “I fell. I didn’t jump,” he snapped. “And I didn’t mean to write ‘ass.’ My hand slipped when I fell.”

“Oh?” I asked. “What were you trying to write?”

“Never mind.” He snapped the pencil in his grip and dropped the splintered pieces on his desk before disappearing behind the bulky computer monitor.

I guess I’d breached some Purgatory code of ethics by asking about his death. I had no idea why he’d gotten so upset. It’s not like I hadn’t already had to fend off humiliating blow-dryer questions.

He cleared his throat loudly while he tapped on his keyboard. “So, about the mix-up yesterday.”

Really? That’s what he’s calling the crushing of my dreams? A mix-up?

“Yeah, what happened? One minute I’m floating and eating cheesecake, and the next minute I’m stuck in Purgatory,” I blurted, and then winced at the severity of my tone. But on second thought, maybe I hadn’t been severe enough.

I didn’t understand this whole credit system, but if it wasn’t for his sucky math skills I’d be, well, I’d be stuck on level two, but still, he could have ignored his mistake and left me in Heaven.

He stood up, looking like a bent beanstalk as he leaned over his computer and pointed a finger at me. “You got a pass to the thirteenth floor, from what I understand, even though you didn’t earn it,” he snarled like a hungry bear, a really skinny hungry bear.

I shrank back a little. “That’s not the point.” My confidence burst like a balloon under the razor-sharp intensity of his bug-eyed glare.

He swept a hand at the blackened window behind him. “Would you rather be stuck in the dark and breathing sewage?”

Even though I probably outweighed this guy by thirty pounds, how did he manage to make me feel smaller than a speck of dirt?

I shook my head.

“Then don’t complain.” He slammed back into his chair so hard, the desk rattled. “I live on the fifth floor, which isn’t a whole lot better than this hellhole, but at least I earned my way there.” He tapped something on his keyboard and an ancient printer started making all kinds of noise as it slowly spat out a printout from a ream of paper. I waited for a stretch of time that seemed too long, even by eternity standards, before the printer was finished. He ripped the pages from the spool and handed them to me. “Here is your work assignment. Report there at 8:00 a.m. sharp on Monday.”

My hand shook as I scanned the printout of my history on Earth, from my C-minus in high school geometry to my defaulted law school student loan, and finally, my five-year employment, which had felt more like a life sentence, at Schwartz, Parker and Boone. The ream of paper stretched toward my feet, and as I hastily reached the bottom, there was a job title I didn’t remember on my resume: entry level prayer call center clerk.

I gaped at him. “My work assignment?”

He swore as he stumbled into his chair before walking around the desk. “You want to earn your way back into the Penthouse, don’t you?” he said as he sneered down at me.

I had to stifle a laugh when I looked at him. He had to be wearing the jeans he’d died in. They were at least two inches too short, and again, his zipper was halfway down. One tail of his button-down striped shirt was hanging out of his pants, and his ugly yellow tie was stained with either ketchup or barbeque sauce.

“Yeah, but don’t I get to pick my job?” I asked as I shielded a smirk behind my palm.

He folded his arms across his hollow chest, flashing a condescending smile. “And what exactly would you pick?”

“I don’t know.” I set down the paper and gave him a smug look of my own. “What jobs are there?”

“None that you qualify for.” He laughed. “You were a clerk on Earth, and now you’re a clerk in Purgatory.”

“A legal secretary,” I corrected.

He rolled his eyes. “I read your file. You dropped out of law school and went to work for a lawyer. And how many lawyers do you think made it to Purgatory, much less the thirteenth floor?”

I paused at that. Surely there had to be lawyers in Purgatory. How else were laws upheld without lawyers? “I don’t know.”

“We don’t have lawsuits here because everyone is nice to each other.” His eyes narrowed as he planted both hands on my arm rests and leaned over my chair. “Whether they’ve got head injuries or not.”

I gasped, and not just because his breath smelled like leftover fish tacos. “I didn’t mean to….”

He held up a silencing hand as he stepped back and jerked open the door.

“Go on now.” He pointed to the hallway which led to the waiting room. “I’d like to hit the elevators before rush hour.” He handed me a fresh business card with a handwritten appointment time. “I’ll see you in a week. Have a nice day.”

You haven’t died until you’ve shit your pants in Purgatory.

Note to self: eating gluten in Heaven good. Eating gluten in Purgatory bad. Very, very bad.

Inés wasn't downstairs when I'd come out of my appointment. I guessed she’d gotten tired of waiting, too, so I had to find my way up to level thirteen by myself.

Navigating to the second floor elevators wasn't the problem. It was a straight line down a rat-and sewage-infested street, past a few cordially irate cabbies, and into the station. Rumor had it Stan was still riding that elevator with no line, but rather than take my chances, I fell into the crush of people and waited over an hour for my turn. After we all packed into the square cubicle like sweaty sardines, my stomach started to rumble, and not in a good way. This rumble was followed by a sharp stabbing pain. As we slowly worked up to the seventh floor, the stabbing worsened, and it felt as if those brownie gremlins were playing jump rope with my insides. By the time we reached the thirteenth floor, the heat had worked its way down, and I was forced to play the butthole-clenching tango all the way out of the station, and not a bathroom in sight.

Finding my apartment was a bit of a challenge. Stupid me had been too disoriented on the trip down to pay close attention to where we were going. Though the landscape of the city reminded me very much of Seattle, some streets were different, and I found myself waddling up and down the same block before a familiar storefront jogged my memory.

But by this point, my butthole tango had turned into a rapid cha-cha-cha, and I'd already missed a few steps in-between. I sure hoped Inés didn't want her underwear back.

After that glorious night in Heaven, I never thought I'd be so relieved to see my rundown apartment complex again, but I was practically jumping for joy when I saw that old grey building. Although jumping was out of the question, as any sudden movements meant I'd run the risk of overflowing underwear, which were already filled to capacity.

I waddled like a duck all the way to the elevator, cringing with each step. By the time I reached my door, fumbling frantically with the key, those gremlins had turned into demons, and they were in complete possession of my colon. I was no more than three steps away from the bathroom when those demons unleashed a poltergeist down my legs and onto the shag carpet.

Maybe it was a good thing the carpet was shit-color brown. I spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening with my ass glued to the porcelain throne. Needless to say, my first day in Purgatory sucked on so many levels.

“What do you want?” I glared at Grim through a crack in the door. After spending all evening shitting my brains out, the last thing I was in the mood for was a confrontation with the sexiest jerk in Purgatory.

“I heard you were sick. I brought you some soup.” He held up a steaming brown paper bag.

My senses were assailed by garlic and onion, and possibly rich chicken broth. My traitorous stomach rumbled, and I had to remind myself that whatever smelled so heavenly was probably poison. Chicken soup usually had noodles, and noodles usually were made from wheat, my stomach’s enemy number one.