The Next Thing I Knew (Heavenly) Read Free

of us.  I think she frightened him because got out of there really fast for a chubby guy.
    Ms. Tate wasn't the only religious person scared out of her mind.  A lot of people were worried to death, mainly those who'd expected to find St. Peter at the heavenly gates waiting for them or a chorus of angels singing as they stepped up to be judged by the Lord himself.  Someone claimed they had seen angels watching us and another person claimed to have seen Jesus.  The closest thing I'd seen to Jesus was Freddy Parson, the skater dude who never shaved his face or cut his hair and was seriously bummed by the lack of skateboards in the afterlife.
    Ms. Tate told anyone who'd listen that Jesus was on his way to judge us and that this was just a waiting period for the dead.  She quoted some other Bible verses to me.  I nodded to make her feel better when she got all up in my face.  Inside I was secretly glad that people like her had ended up in the same place I did.  My family never went to church.  My mom was Hindu and my dad had been raised Methodist.  Sometime before I was born they'd left religion behind and never looked back.
    I thought of all the nasty things people like Ms. Tate had said about my mom's religious background and all the cruel things their kids would say to me about being secular or agnostic or whatever you want to call it when you don't believe in some magic man in the sky.  Now we were the magic people in the sky but we still had our old notions, fears, and self-limiting beliefs.  Kids like Robby overcame the limits faster than any of us once we told them they didn't have to listen to the adults anymore.  They were one big happy multi-colored, multi-racial mob.
    Day and night cycles didn't happen on the grassy plain.  White light from the strange sun bathed it constantly.  For variety's sake, Kyle and I ventured to Earth just to keep track of time.  We tried to figure out where exactly the plain was located in relation to Earth but didn't have any luck.  When we wanted to go there, it was like stepping through a portal in thin air and being back.  Kyle figured it might be another dimension in the same place as Earth.  I'd never been into science fiction but it seemed as good an explanation as any.
    On the third day of life after death I saw my first animal on the grassy plain, a brown field mouse.  One of the kids chased it down and scooped it off the ground.  It bit him, but he shook his hand and laughed.  A few hours after arriving in the afterlife, the mouse vanished.  More animals flitted in and out of our strange purgatory.  Some stayed longer than others, dogs especially.  Wild animals didn't stay for longer than a few hours.
    A chocolate Labrador that had belonged to the McElroys from down the street appeared one day.  Poor pooch probably starved to death, locked up in the house with nobody to feed him.  I never saw a dog grin so much as he did, romping up and down the plain, tongue lolling, as he chased flying kids.  Robby later told me that a few days after arriving, the dog sat down, barked a couple of times at the kids, and vanished.  Maybe he was saying goodbye.  Maybe he wanted to fly too.  Our grassy plain might have just been a way station to doggie heaven.
    It made me wonder if we all had an expiration date when we'd vanish.
    Ms. Tate organized religious gatherings.  The number of people that showed up to hear her ramble on about a book she could never again pick up in her ghostly hands creeped me out.  More than anything, though, people wanted to ask questions and figure out how everything related to the big picture, the biblical end of days.  I wanted them to go find something productive to do, like stamp the words "Epic Fail" on their foreheads and crawl back into their holes.
    Kyle noticed some familiar faces at the edge of the knot of worshippers one day and whooped.  My parents and his stood outside the group, scanning faces.  Mom heard Kyle's exclamation and