sat in a folding chair in an office with sterile white walls and ugly orange carpet. Four boys my age, about ten or eleven years old, sat in chairs on either side of me arranged in a semi-circle. I was the only girl. We were dressed in white jumpsuits, barefoot. The carpet was rough to my toes and the balls of my feet. The room smelled like someone had stuffed an old tuna sandwich into a vent for several hundred years. It punched the pit of my stomach and brought bile to the back of my throat.

A demon paced in front of us. She was short for an adult, shorter than the tallest boy in the room who sat two chairs away on my right. Graceful black horns curled out of the blacker ringlets of her hair. Her humanoid face was round and taut, and her skin glistened red and silver like she was made of liquid iron. A long black robe draped from one shoulder, wrapped about her stout body, and fell just below her backward-hinged knees. The demon’s legs were sturdy and goat-like, covered in coarse hair with a fiery sheen. In some ways, she resembled the old, handsome Spanish caricatures of El Diablo from Abuela Carmen’s vintage book of folk stories.

Her golden eyes bore catlike pupils and a stern pinch at the corners as she perused what appeared to be a stone tablet illuminated with strange characters. The characters scrolled and changed like text on a digital screen. We sat in silence, save for the subtle clopping of her hooves against the floor as she paced back and forth. One boy on the end of the row to my left couldn’t contain himself any longer and began to sob.

“Are we dead?”

All heads turned to look at the skinny boy just right of me with a coffee-brown complexion. His eyes gleamed with equal parts wonder and dread. We each felt the same, I knew.

The goat lady did not look up from her tablet. Her words bore a thick Spanish accent. “Did I say you could speak?”

“No.”

“Don’t waste our time with absurd questions, then. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

The tall boy in the next seat asked, “Where are we?”

A third boy with light skin and mousy brown hair sitting to my left asked simultaneously, “Who are you?”

The goat lady looked up from her tablet and cast an indifferent glance around the circle at us. She drew in a stiff breath, flared her nostrils, and pronounced, “I am Betlize, juvenile handler and underling to Xandern, fellow Yazata of the great Ahura Mazda. You are dead. We are in Hell. Congratulations on failing to survive to adulthood.”

“Why are we in Hell?” A slight quiver in the skinny boy’s voice betrayed the diminishing wall of self-assurance holding back his emotions.

“I want my mother!” The boy on the far left bawled so hard he slid out of his chair and hugged his knees to his chest. The boy with light skin squeezed his shoulder and urged him to get a grip.

“There are no mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers in Hell,” said Betlize. “All the family ties from your former lives have been dissolved.”

“But my brother…” I began.

“What does dissolved mean?” asked the skinny boy.

Betlize snapped her fingers. The sobbing boy went silent. He swiped at his mouth and throat with wide eyes as though his ability to produce sound had magically vanished.

“The next child who interrupts me will have their tongue bound for the remainder of this orientation. Is that clear?”

I shut my mouth and nodded with the rest.

“Unfortunately for all of you, when you did have parents, they didn’t teach you to follow the ways of Lord Mazda.”

“Who…?” The skinny boy froze, mouth drawn in an “o,” trying to look as though he meant only to blow out a breath.

The goat lady eyed him for a long moment, then continued, “Ahura Mazda is Lord and God of all creation. Until you know His ways, you cannot be permitted into His glory. Not even as children.”

“How…?” I bit my lip and glanced away, feeling the goat lady’s eyes on me like wood-burning lasers.

“It isn’t our fault our parents didn’t teach us,” said the tall boy in a soft tone of defiance. “They probably didn’t even know the truth. This isn’t—”

Betlize snapped her fingers. The boy swallowed. His fingers twitched and tears filled his eyes, but he resisted probing his muted throat.

“Not fair, is it? Well…” She glanced at her tablet and grunted as though disappointed. “Yes, Humberto Verde, I suppose you’re right. You were disciplined three times for bullying at school due to assumptions based on your size and not your actual behavior. Died during surgery to fix a leg shattered in an accident with a careless motorist. It appears you had a severe allergy to the anesthetic. I would say you have quite a lot of experience with unfairness. Patience will serve you well here.”

She scrolled up to the top of the glowing text and swiped right. She sighed as though bored or impatient. “I am obligated to inform you that your time in Hell will not last forever. Eventually, when your ignorance of Lord Mazda has been corrected and you have learned your lessons, you will each find your way into Paradise. Yea.”

The skinny boy raised his hand.

Betlize rolled her eyes at him. “What?”

“So, we’re not here because we’re bad?”

The demon raised an eyebrow and swiped her fingers across the tablet. “Breaking into an abandoned copper mine on a dare didn’t turn out to be such a good idea when the tunnel collapsed, did it, Roberto DeJolla?”

He fidgeted and cast his gaze at the carpet as though it were suddenly far more interesting than anything the goat lady had to say.

“You were rather mischievous it seems, but not cruel. I’ve dealt with children who have done far worse in their abnormally short lifespans than you.”

I didn’t appreciate the way Betlize spoke to us, like we were stupid because we had all died as kids. None of us wanted to be here. At least, I assumed not. And the only crime of which most of us seemed guilty was spiritual ignorance. Her strange beauty seemed sinister now that her authority over us had grown uncomfortable.

So many questions burned in my mind. Did unknowing infants have to work their way out of Hell somehow? Did bad children have to stay longer than good children? Would our family ties be restored when we got out of Hell? I kept these thoughts to myself. Betlize said she would explain everything, and I didn’t want to lose my voice.

The room remained silent as the goat lady resumed her pacing. Her eyes scanned the stone block in her hand once more, then she paused. “Justina Harper?” She glanced directly at me with her bright catlike eyes and no-nonsense expression.

I cringed back in my seat and forced myself to meet her gaze.

She looked at the tablet once more. “Had one sibling: a brother, age eight.”

Her mentioning my brother made me squirm with anticipation.

“Likes horses and plain chocolate ice cream,” she continued. “Prefers playing with action figures and collecting insects to Barbie dolls, and despises the color pink.” The demon looked at me and gestured to the boys. “Notice that you are the only young lady in this room today? Girls usually live longer than boys, so there are not as many of them in the younger groups.” She looked at the tablet once more, then dropped it to her goat-like thigh and put her left hand on her hip. She glanced at the other children as though revealing an absurd fact. “Ms. Harper attacked a bear, and it tore out her throat.”

Nervous snickers spilled out from the two boys who could still speak. It was as if I’d done something incredibly stupid and now paid the price. I cast glances at the half-terrified, half-laughing faces of the other children. They had all been crying. All except me. Something about that really bothered me. Boys didn’t cry as often as girls, and it made me wonder what the demon, or Ahura Mazda’s true motives were in “correcting” us before we could enter Paradise. I swallowed to steel my feelings and decided I wasn’t going to let the demon make me cry too. I raised my hand to explain myself.

The goat lady rolled her eyes a second time. “You have a question, Ms. Harper?”

I wanted to blurt how I wasn’t about to let my brother get eaten by a rabid animal raging through my family’s campsite, but hesitated. If I said something that irritated the demon, I wouldn’t be able to ask any questions. “Is my brother still alive?” My voice trembled, and I worried my resolve to keep this creature from taking advantage of my emotions would break down.

Betlize pressed her lips into a hard line. She leaned forward until we were almost nose to nose. The acrid, fishy smell in the room came from her . “Would you really like to know?”

The smell was so strong I covered my mouth and nose in disgust. My eyes watered from the horrid stench. I took a breath through my mouth to stay tears and nearly failed when I swallowed the noxious tang. I wanted to barf. I coughed and nodded. “Yes.”

The goat lady’s lips curled and split in an unpleasant smile, revealing an array of pointy yellow teeth. “You’re quite a tenacious child, aren’t you?”

I wanted to ask what tenacious meant, unable to decide if the goat lady had paid me a compliment or expressed irritation. I decided instead to save my voice for more important questions.

“You liked school, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Ms. Betlize.”

“Well, Justina, there is a special place in Hell for little girls like you.”

“Wait!”

She snapped her fingers. The chair fell out from under me. All sensations of my post-mortal body blurred into cold and darkness so expansive I thought I would dissolve into the very ether of oblivion. Just as my identity seemed about to disintegrate out of existence, my body slammed into a solid stone floor. Breath fled my lungs. I gasped until my diaphragm managed to pull in air. Fatigued beyond sense, disoriented, shocked by the uncaring vastness of the universe, I sank out of consciousness.

Pain bit my left cheek where my head rested against the floor. My neck and ribs pinched as I rolled over. Artificial daylight flooded my world from small, semi-spherical fixtures in a marbled blue, stone-hewn ceiling. I couldn’t tell if bulbs or something more ethereal produced the light.

I was alone in some sort of classroom with six neat rows of eight desks each. The walls and floor were all made of the same blue, white, and gray swirled stone as the ceiling. Low wooden bookshelves lined the walls. Instead of books, a collection of black stone tablets resembling the one the demon held were aligned, like the desks, in six rows of eight per shelf. I was pleased with myself for noticing this pattern right away, but puzzled to know what it meant or if it meant anything at all.

A massive whiteboard took up the whole wall at the front of the room. Scrawled in flowing blue ink from ceiling to floor was the message:

Welcome to Hell, little children! This Hell is based loosely on the Bolivian folktale known as “The Armadillo’s Song.” In order to leave, you must translate the ballad of your earthly life story into Avestan. When you are ready, simply stand in front of a whiteboard and sing your ballad from memory, word for word, and perfectly in tune without faltering or forgetting. When the song is complete, if it is accepted, you will be admitted into a glorious Paradise where all your questions, great and small, will be answered.

While you are here, we ask that you follow six simple rules:

1. Don’t cry for the people and things you miss. You no longer have families, and any meaningful ties you once had to other mortals in life no longer exist. Standard fleece blankets are, however, available in every dormitory should you feel the need to hide or shelter yourself for any reason.

2. Stand in line and wait your turn to request food in the cafeterias. A limited selection of healthy sandwiches and bean burritos are free. Anything else, including condiments and junk food, can be obtained for a price.

3. Work hard and try not to kill each other. There are no grown-ups here whatsoever to mediate on your behalf or tell you what to do. The more you work together to live in peace and harmony, the easier it will be to achieve your goals and leave Hell. If someone does die though, don’t worry. Everyone will be restored to life at the start of each new day.

4. Don’t try to sing familiar, happy songs to comfort yourself. You will only be disappointed.

5. Be kind to girls when you see them. There aren’t a lot of them in your Hell.

6. Don’t erase the whiteboards.

7. Focus on your own task, not on anyone else’s. No one is going to get you out of here but you.

8. Don’t get discouraged. Remember that nothing lasts forever!

You can access your life ballad by picking up any stone tablet in any classroom. Your ballad will automatically appear in English. You may use other phantom applications to learn Avestan, learn about reading music, study Zoroastrian scripture, read children’s stories, or play games.

Good luck!

Of all the bizarre things about the message before me, the fact that eight rules appeared when the instructions requested we follow six caused the hairs to bristle on the back of my neck. I read the instructions again and stared at the list in utter bewilderment. Had the all-mighty Lord of Car Dealers (which is what I thought every time the word “Mazda” came into my head) actually made an error? How was I supposed to obey instructions that didn’t add up?

There wasn’t any chance of my breaking rule number one, as I had already made up my mind that the goat lady and this Hell would not make me cry. Rules two and three were so far beyond my present comprehension of life in Hell they didn’t faze me.

The mystery of rule five bothered me more than any other. I assumed it was there to tell boys not to be mean to girls. Did it mean girls should be extra nice to other girls too? Or was it saying girls didn’t have to worry about being nice to anyone? It seemed unfair not to include instruction on how to treat the boys, as flattered as I was to feel somewhat rare and special. Or else extra stupid and careless about dying young and going to Hell early.

What about singing happy songs? We did have to sing our life’s ballad to get out of this place, didn’t we? Unless that meant our life’s ballad would be sad. Maybe it was supposed to be unbearably off-key. No, that couldn’t be it—the whiteboard said we had to sing the song in tune.

When I was mortal, singing had always made me happy inside in ways that nothing else did. I tested my vocal chords with a soft hum. “Heeeello,” I sang to the whiteboard. Then I realized I had made no attempted to speak since the goat lady snapped her fingers and transported me here. So, Betlize didn’t bind my tongue for eternity.

My voice was clear and surprisingly controllable in ways that had never clicked for me before. But when I tried to hum something familiar—Disney classics, church songs, Mama’s lullabies from when I was really little and she used to rock me to sleep for an afternoon nap—my throat pinched and chills swept through my body.

The harder I pushed, the more frozen and sickly I felt inside, like I brushed some forbidden barrier and was about to walk off a cliff, or steal. The paralysis, which came from my mind and not some obvious physical restriction, startled me so much that I clamped my mouth shut and turned away from the whiteboard, crossing my arms. Maybe the demon had put some kind of a curse on my tongue after all.

The sixth instruction listed no consequences or reasons to obey it. I turned slowly to the whiteboard and studied it once more. What would happen if I erased the message? In experiment, I drew close and smudged off the tiniest piece of an a-letter’s tail. Nothing happened. The strong smell of the dry-erase ink conjured a sense of impermanence and changeability to its message.

Could I write on the board, too? No consequences were listed for doing that either. I spun around and searched the room for a marker. I found sharpened Number 2 pencils and stacks of white loose-leaf paper in baskets on top of the tablet cases. But there were no markers, and few crannies to hide them.

Panic and loneliness crawled up inside my chest like a frightened creature lived there. Memories of my short life on Earth flashed before my eyes in detail vivid and painful on a variety of levels. Moments of guilt, embarrassment, and mortification chased deep sorrows that bonding time full of laughter and fun with my family was over forever. I wanted to scream. I rubbed my eyes, wondering suddenly where the other children might be. There were other children here, weren’t there? Or was that just one more of the Great Whiteboard’s riddles?

As though in response to my anxious thoughts, another child whizzed past the room, wailing and slapping their feet. The classroom had no door, I realized, only an empty frame that opened onto a hallway. A weird mixture of relief and giddiness washed through me. I wasn’t alone.

I rushed out of the room and saw a boy my age speeding down a wide, blue-marbled corridor that appeared to have no end. Other children emerged from classrooms all around me. We took shy stock of each other. A tense chatter broke out.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I spun round. Another girl. She was tall and a little bit stocky, with dark hair that hung past her shoulders, deep brown skin like mine, and dewy black eyes.

“Hi,” she said in a quiet tone. She smiled like the gesture was effortless. “My name is Lina. I mean, my name is Carolina, but I go by… I mean I went by… you can call me Lina for short.” She extended her hand for me to shake.

I didn’t like girls who were a lot bigger than me, and she intimidated me just a little despite her warm greetings. I shook her hand anyway. “I’m Justina,” I said. I needed to make friends if I didn’t want to go crazy in this place, and she probably felt the same way.

“Did you wake up in one of the classrooms?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Me too.” She looked down at her bare feet, which I noticed were at least two sizes bigger than my own. Talking must not have been as easy for her as it looked.

“Was there a big whiteboard in your room?”

“You mean one with eight dry-erase commandments on it that only tells us to follow six?”

She looked up and frowned at me. “Is that what they’re called? The Dry-Erase Commandments?”

I shrugged. “That’s what I call them because I think they’re stupid rules that don’t make sense. Which six of the eight rules are we supposed to follow? Or are we supposed to follow all eight? Are we supposed to be nice to the boys too? It doesn’t tell us that either. See? The instructions have holes in them.”

“Did yours talk about working together to get out of… you know… where we are, and talk in another place about focusing on ourselves and no one else? I don’t really understand what that means.”

I thought for a moment. The whiteboard’s message appeared in my mind word-for-word in perfect clarity. “You mean the rule where it talks about ‘working together in harmony,’ and the other rule telling us to stay focused on our own tasks and not to worry about everyone else? You’re right. It sounds like another hole in the rules. I think the mighty Lord of Car Dealers is crazy and put holes in on purpose to freak us out.”

Lina furrowed a pair of bushy brows that suited her round face. Her mouth opened as though to ask a question, then she closed it again and glared at me. Her cheeks turned red. I assume this meant she figured out my reference to “Mazda,” and decided it was a bad joke she didn’t want to laugh at. Her embarrassment irritated me. At the same time, I was pleased. At least she was smart enough to get my reference without having to ask me what I’d meant.

Two more girls waved as they ran down the hallway toward us. One girl with ebony skin like the boy who sat next to me in the demon’s office pushed into me with instant affection as she slowed. I couldn’t help but smile as I fell into a silly little embrace with the newcomer. We unwound, and she leaned her arm on my shoulder to catch her breath.

“Hey… chicas !” she panted. “We girls should stick together.” She was tall and rail thin. Not as tall as Lina, though. “I’m Ester,” she said. She gestured to the other girl. “And this is Marissa. We just met.”

The other girl was shorter than me with an olive complexion and long, feathery eyelashes. “I can say my own name,” she said in a nasal, high-pitched voice. She jabbed a thumb at her chest. “I’m Marissa.”

I winced and hoped she pinched her own voice that way out of habit, rather than some weird physical trait that had followed her into Hell. She would have to sing her ballad in tune somehow. Then again, maybe that was yet another hole in the instructions—not everyone in Hell could actually learn to sing new songs in tune. Maybe no one could. I shuddered. But as soon as I tried to believe it was possible we might never leave, a strange certainty solidified in my chest, like a stone, that we all would leave eventually, every single one of us.

I introduced myself, and Ester let go of me to pull Lina into a hug when she extended her hand and offered her name. We discovered that all four of us came from Latin-American homes, and we all knew little to no Spanish. I noticed the two new girls had found something to tie back their hair. Ester’s was frizzy and poofed out behind her head. Marissa’s larger curls hung down and brushed the back of her neck like my hair did.

“Nice hairbands,” I said. “Where did you—?”

“Have you looked at the tablets yet?” Marissa interrupted with all the zeal of someone who had just received a fancy new electronic device for her birthday and had to show it off or the world would die. Literally. She held out the one in her arms. “When I hold it, this thing shows the file for my song. See, look.” She held out the tablet for us to see. A handful of application icons floated on the smooth surface of the iPad-sized stone in gold and white hues.

There were more than just a couple reading apps about music and Zoro-whatever… Zoroastrianism. Strange… I knew the name of the One True Religion by heart now, like I knew daylight and stag beetles, even though I didn’t want to remember it. There was a whole library of children’s stories, fables, even history. I spotted the game library app and was curious what games it held. Would the gaming graphics all be that weird gold-tone of the other phantom apps?

Marissa showed us an app named “Marissa Gonzales’s Ballad.”

“When Ester holds it, it shows the file for her ballad.” Marissa pushed the tablet into Ester’s arms. The stone went blank. New folders appeared. Where Marissa Gonzales’s Ballad once graced the screen, the application file now read “Ester Noble’s Ballad.”

I reached for the tablet, and Ester jerked it out of my reach. “Wait, don’t grab it.”

“I just wanted to see,” I said. “I wasn’t going to take it from you.”

“If two people touch it at the same time, it turns off,” said Marissa.

“One person has to hold the tablet at a time in order for it to turn on,” Ester confirmed.

“Oh.” I folded my arms and slid back just a step.

“There are some cool games on here too,” said Marissa.

“Have you figured out where the one application is that we’re supposed to use to translate our songs?” asked Lina.

“The one on Avestan? Yeah, it’s on the first screen.” Ester exited out of the library collection to show us.

“Yeah, it’s probably a good idea to figure out how to use all the applications we need to get our ‘tasks’ done before playing any games,” I agreed. “The sooner we get out of here, the better. I want to know what happened to my brother.”

Marissa whined, “Your brother? But I thought we didn’t have families anymore.”

Anger flared inside me. I clenched my fists. “I have a brother named Mark. A bear attacked us while we were camping with our mom and dad during summer vacation, and I have to find out if he’s still alive or if he’s stuck here in Hell somewhere.”

A quiet swept over not only our group, but beyond into the hallway packed with boys. I guess no one else was ready to talk about how they died.

A new voice asked, “Do you think other people we know who died might be in here somewhere?”

I turned to see the tall boy from the goat lady’s office. She had bound his tongue for saying he didn’t think it was fair we had to come to Hell when we didn’t know the truth. His presence here startled me. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I had ever met outside of this… school, or whatever it was.

Hope welled inside me for a moment, thinking I might find my brother here if he was dead. But the whiteboard said this Hell was based on a folktale. There were no grown-ups here, living or dead. They had to be somewhere else then. It struck me like the undeniable stone of reality in my heart about escaping Hell someday that there were many, many more Hells than just this one.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” I snapped. “We’re not going to find anyone we know in here, and you know it. We’re not going to find out what happened to anyone until we get out.”

“But we know each other.”

Gasps and murmurs rippled out around us.

“I didn’t know you before I died,” I sneered.

“But you were in the demon’s—”

“It’s just another hole in the stupid rules to freak us out!”

“We have to follow the rules to get out,” said Lina.

I spun on her. “I thought you agreed with me that the rules didn’t make any sense.”

“No,” said Lina. “All I said was that I didn’t understand them. I wanted to know if you’d figured out anything.”

“I think I’m hungry,” said Ester, changing the subject. “What about you guys?”

Marissa whined, “I’m starving. Let’s find a cafeteria.”

My stomach growled at the mention of food. Why did we still have to eat? We were dead! That was stupid too. Everything about this place was stupid. “Fine,” I growled just to be louder than my stomach. “Let’s get food.”

I read The Armadillo’s Song on the tablet Marissa had brought while we waited in a long cafeteria line to get our food. The story was about an armadillo that wanted to sing but couldn’t. All the other animals made fun of him, until one day an old man told him he knew a way to make the armadillo sing—and be famous among all the animals—if he really wanted it. The armadillo really wanted it, so the old man killed him and made a flute from his shell. All the animals loved the music the old man played on the armadillo-shell flute, and the moral of the story was that devoted artists often sacrifice their lives for their art. I had no idea how our Hell was supposed to be based on this story. We weren’t armadillos in Hell, and as far as I knew, no one had been turned into one. As for the story itself, I thought it a cautionary tale about being careful what you sacrificed for something else.

After Lina read the story, she said she thought it was about sacrificing all our passions and desires to be one with God’s will. “The old man is Lord Mazda,” she said. “We are the armadillos who wish to sing our life’s ballad so we can get out of Hell.”

“If Lord Mazda is the old man, he’s a total jerk,” I said.

Ester rounded on me. Her hands clenched into fists. “The only person who’s a jerk around here is you.”

I furrowed my brow in confusion. “How am I being a jerk?”

“Can’t you say anything nice?” Marissa added in her awful nasal whine, clutching the tablet to her chest once more. Apparently, I was the only one who thought complaining about Hell, and the Lord of Car Dealerships, and whatever else was universally acceptable. “Every time Lina tries to say something positive, you have to comment on how stupid you think everything is.”

“That’s because everything is stupid here,” I said.

“That’s all right,” said Lina. “With an attitude like that, she’ll probably be the last person to get out of here.”

Some of the boys in line around us ooed . The unwelcome contribution from others outside our little group conversation irritated me.

Ester folded her arms and added, “Yeah, I guess she doesn’t really want to know what happened to her brother that badly. Maybe she’ll never find out.”

“Shut up!”

“You shut up,” said Ester.

“You know it’s true,” said Marissa. “If you don’t do what the whiteboards say, you’ll be stuck here forever and you’ll never know what happened to your brother.”

“I never said I didn’t want to follow the rules. All I said is the rules don’t make sense.”

“You don’t seem to care about following the rules much, considering how stupid you think they are,” said Ester.

“I’ll bet that’s how she died in the first place,” Marissa taunted. “She probably broke the rules or ignored a hazard sign or something.”

“I saved my brother from a rabid bear, you buttheads!”

“If you saved him, how come you think he’s here in Hell?” said Ester.

“You must not care much about your brother either, since you’ve decided you’ll never see him again,” said Lina.

I shoved her. Ester and Marissa shoved back, and I landed hard on my butt on the marble floor.

“You can go to the back of the line after all the stinky bad boys who died in gang fights,” said Ester. “And find someone else to sit with who doesn’t care about anyone but themselves and how stupid everyone else is—just like you.”

I got up and dusted off the seat of my pearly white jumpsuit. “Fine,” I growled. “Have fun being played by God, you stupid armadillos.” The crowd ooed again. The other girls didn’t laugh, though, as I stomped away to find the back of the line.

The stupid tall boy who recognized me from the demon’s office tried to wave me into line in front of him. I glared at him briefly and stormed past. When I reached the end of the line and turned around, I jolted. The boy had followed me. He laughed nervously at my reaction.

“Go away,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re stupid and I’m mean.”

The boy’s ridiculous grin withered and he cleared his throat. “Were you mean before you got here?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think so.”

“Why are you mean now?”

“Because everyone here thinks I’m mean.”

“I don’t think you’re mean.”

I ground my teeth as my eyes flickered away from his. “You’re still stupid.”

He shrugged.

I turned away from him and he got in line behind me. He said nothing, did nothing but stand there in silence as the endless line marched slowly onward. It irritated me. Everything irritated me. “I don’t think it’s even possible to make an armadillo’s shell into a flute,” I said.

“Why would you want to make an armadillo shell into a flute?” the boy asked.

“I don’t want to. It’s from The Armadillo’s Song, part of the story our Hell is based on. Haven’t you read it yet?”

“No.”

“They’re on the tablets.”

“Oh.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw the golden light of phantom characters scroll as he brushed his fingers across the stony tablet in his big hand. “You brought a tablet with you?”

He eyed me timidly and nodded.

“Can I see it?”

He extended the little black slate to me without hesitation. The phantom lights blinked off and on again, showing the home screen, or whatever the Mazda demons wanted to call it. I was tempted to just turn my back on the boy and play games until it my turn came to get food, but decided that really would be mean. He didn’t seem like the type of kid who would fight to get his stuff back if you took something away from him. I decided to explain what he didn’t already know about how the tablet worked, and showed him all the phantom apps I knew about. I even read him the armadillo story.

“That’s really sad,” he commented.

“Sad and creepy,” I said. “The other girls up there think it’s a metaphor for obeying the will of our great Lord of Car Dealers.”

The boy snickered. “Car Dealers. I didn’t think of that one.”

I raised an eyebrow, pleasantly surprised by his reaction. I smiled too. “What’s your name again?”

“Call me Beto,” he said. “And you’re Justina?”

“Yep.”

“Have you looked at your song yet?”

I shook my head.

“Mine is a thousand pages long.”

My jaw dropped. “A thousand pages?”

“Yep. How long is yours?”

The app for my ballad was on the home screen. I hesitated before tapping it, wondering if I really wanted to know my life story according to creepy Lord Mazda. I opened the song. Words appeared above musical notes like I’d seen for piano in treble clef with a simple C major key and a hard-looking 6/8 time. I knew a little piano, but the melody looked hard. At least on the first page. Beto helped me skip to its ending. One thousand, thirty-two tablet pages. “We’re supposed to translate this and memorize it?” I said it, not in disgust like I had meant to, but with a quiver in my voice that made bare a growing sense of horror and despair that threatened to sink into a bottomless pit in my gut.

“You think it’s impossible?” he asked.

Something inside me knew better than to say yes. I knew without a doubt that it wasn’t impossible , and I knew Beto knew it too. Everyone knew it. “No. But it’s horrible. It would take a whole day without stopping just to sing the song, maybe longer. It’ll take a whole lot longer just to translate every single word, then figure out how to pronounce it in whatever language it was… Avestan. Then memorize…” A sob caught in my throat. It surprised me. I threw the tablet down, away from me, and it shattered on the floor. “I won’t do it! I won’t sing the song, or memorize it, or do any of that other stupid stuff! I’ll either stay in Hell forever, or Mazda can let me out some other way. But I won’t play this stupid game!”

My will never to touch Hell’s cafeteria food only lasted two hours before I gave into hunger. Beto had managed to make space for us to sit at the end of a long table so we didn’t have to sit on the floor or out in the hall. The place was a mess. Several food fights and massive shoving matches had broken out and died down in the time it took Beto to convince me to stop crying.

Crying. I wasn’t going to let the demon or Hell make me cry. Everyone here was going to cry, though. That was the point of this place, and I knew that now. Emotions were too strong and despair was too deep to keep it all from welling up and spilling over. Already I had seen hundreds of boys crying, some angry, some afraid. All alone. I was no better, no stronger or wiser. Well, Lord Mazda could make us cry if he wanted to, but he couldn’t make me sing.

I poked at a burrito with my fork as I chewed the beans and tortilla into a meaningless paste and forced myself to swallow it in little globs. The food was utterly bland. It literally had no flavor: no sweetness, no salt, no tang, and no spice. I liked my food plain. I didn’t typically grab packets of mayonnaise or ketchup or pickle relish back when I was alive and I bought lunches at school. But this burrito and the bite I had of Beto’s sandwich were all texture and no character. The food certainly wasn’t rotten or stale, but it was incredibly boring. I devoured half the burrito without thought, but struggled now to force it down.

Turmoil roiled all around us. Orderly lines, which had somehow formed in the first twenty minutes of everyone’s first day in Hell, had since dissolved into a constant brawl. A knot of shoving and kicking kids writhed all around the metal bar where standard food magically appeared on pastel-colored plastic trays that slid out of a dark slit in the wall. The only reason I had food at all was because Beto pushed his way through and got food for both of us. I was grateful we’d been able to secure something to eat before the intense hunger everyone seemed to share turned us equally animalistic.

I eyed the Kiosk of Sacrifice, so labeled in big metal letters above a stand in the middle of the finite space packed with hunger-angry boys. The kiosk’s mystery beckoned to my unsatisfied appetite for food—food that wasn’t empty and boring. Like other kids had done, I wanted to hurl my try of nasty food at the floor and wade into the fray once more to fight for something worth eating.

Beto sat next to me on my left side. Those who squeezed in beside us eyed each other and said little until someone finished eating. Whenever a seat vacated, everyone shifted and a new kid somehow peeled out of the chaos to join our company.

Beto stared at the kiosk too. Disgust pinched his own face as he chewed the food in his mouth like a machine. “If you could get anything, what would you get?”

I sniffed and rubbed my eyes. They were still puffy and damp from my defeating tears. I shrugged. “Chocolate ice cream.”

“Mmm, that sounds good.”

I smiled just a little.

Beto said, “If I could get anything, I think I’d get pancakes with Nutella, and bananas, and whipped cream. And a pulled pork sandwich with barbecue sauce.”

My mouth watered. “That sounds really good too,” I said. “I want my mother’s homemade tres leches cake. And her papitas rellenas with sour cream on top. And fried bananas with chocolate sauce, and beef skewers glazed with sweet sauce, and chocolate milk.”

“That’s a lot of chocolate.”

I nodded, and my grin grew wider. “You know what though? I never want to eat vegetables ever again.”

“Me neither.”

We both giggled.

My smile fell, and I went back to picking at my tasteless burrito with my fork. “Why are you being nice to me?”

Beto shrugged. “The whiteboards said to be nice to girls.”

“The whiteboards are stupid.”

“I know you think so.”

I sighed. “It’s stupid because it doesn’t say to be nice to boys, too.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have to.”

I glanced around at the sea of chaos whose currents had somehow left the tables as strange, untouched little oases of order and balance. “Really?”

Beto shrugged again and took another forced bite of his sandwich.

“I wasn’t very nice to you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.” He wiped his fingers on his shirt and extended his hand to me. “Friends?”

“Okay. Friends.”

I shook his hand. It was hot and clammy, and still a little gritty from breadcrumbs. His ears turned red. He glanced at his tray and tried very hard to look like he wasn’t smiling. I don’t know why.

“I don’t like not having grown-ups around,” I said. “It’s scary.”

“Yeah,” said Beto. He frowned. “Justina, are you really not going to sing your song?”

I shook my head.

“What if it’s not as hard as it looks?”

“That’s not why I don’t want to sing.”

“Why then?”

I didn’t know how to explain the unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I was a monkey hovering over a boiling pool of tar. I didn’t know what the feeling meant exactly. “I want to be in control of what happens to me,” I said. “I don’t want someone or something else to make me into something I don’t want to be.”

“What about your brother? You want to find out what happened to him, right?”

I ground the tasteless blob of food between my teeth, trying to stay another wave of emotion and tears. “The whiteboards said to forget about our families.”

“I thought the whiteboards were stupid,” said Beto.

“Yeah…”

I noticed at this moment the main indentation in one corner of both mine and Beto’s plastic food trays were marked and numbered six inches on the short sides and eight inches on the long sides. Six inches and eight inches. Six rows with eight desks per row. Six tablets and eight tablets… Eight rules, and six to follow. Maybe the instructions were that way on purpose after all. But why?

“Mazda’s pretty smart though, isn’t he?” I said. “I hate him.”

When the lights of the strange school dimmed, every child in Hell’s perfect internal clock knew it was time to find a place to sleep. Why, I didn’t know. A part of me wanted to stay up all night, but I didn’t really know what night and day meant here either. I just knew I couldn’t stay awake forever.

Weariness, irritability, and the raw shock of knowing I was dead and that my reality had been permanently warped seeped through me from head to toe. This fueled a strange sense of envy as I watched little groups of boys sort themselves out and trickle into the dormitory across from me. There were no beds, cots, or bunks inside.

I’d already looked into two other identical dormitories to find floors padded with thick foam and three carts: one full of pillows, a second full of blankets, and a third full of clean jumpsuits and boys’ underwear. Maybe with some digging I could find panties in the clothes bins, but the prospect of spending hours hunting made me feel even more fatigued and self-conscious.

Would I find bras somewhere, too? I hadn’t arrived in Hell wearing a bra, even though my mother had started making me wear one every day since the end of the school year. They were annoying sometimes, but I knew I was going to have to get used to them. At least, that was the case when I was alive.

Would we grow up in Hell? The prospect of growing up without my mother and father to help me become an adult terrified me. Every child here was an orphan of sorts now, and we had to look after ourselves for everything.

I was so tired. It would be comforting to be surrounded by other kids, to cuddle up together and feel safe from our impending nightmares in numbers. At home, I wasn’t allowed to sleep next to boys when my brother had slumber parties or when we were on vacation with our cousins. I kind of knew why.

I wished I hadn’t been so negative so that Lina, Ester, and Marissa hadn’t pushed me out of their group. I hadn’t found any other girls. Life as a ten-year-old girl in a Hell packed with ten-year-old boys was going to be very lonely and uncomfortable. Maybe Beto was right to think there was a reason the whiteboards specified being nice to girls in particular.

The whiteboards. The rules. Singing. Not singing. I slid down the wall. The floor was hard. The floor was cold. The floor was mean. Mazda was mean.

“Justina?” Beto loomed tall beside me, arms folded.

“There isn’t going to be any room for me in there,” I said.

“I can make room.”

“I don’t want to sleep in there.”

“Why?”

“Just because.”

“Where are you going to sleep then?”

I growled, “I don’t know!”

Beto sighed. “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the dormitory.

I curled up on my side and waited. When the lights everywhere went out, my thoughts went black. Sleeping was not a choice in Hell.

My turn came to approach the Kiosk of Sacrifice on my second day in Hell. Lines had miraculously taken shape again, and held. While the calmer proceedings of kids snaking their way through the cafeteria was much nicer than the constant brawling of yesterday, there was something weird about the fact no one made us stand in line. At least, no adult or self-appointed leader made us. I couldn’t put my finger on why this was happening, or why it bothered me.

The kiosk’s metal sign stuck up on two stilts over a rectangular stand rooted into the blue marble of the floor. It was a small and unremarkable structure up close, a freestanding version of the bar where the general meals appeared. A sign below the bar read that here we could request whatever we wanted as long as we were willing to pay the price: Any who are brave enough to bloody their knees in submission to the will of Lord Mazda will receive whatever they desire to eat. Read the fable of the Lazy Student on any tablet for more details, and ponder it for greater understanding.

Beto and I read the fable on a tablet we shared while we waited in line. It was about a boy in a faraway country who did poorly in school. He was given several chances to improve his test scores or suffer the consequences. Each time he failed to improve, his punishments became more severe until other students got punished too. First, he was sent home with a warning, and his father spanked him for being lazy. When he chose not to worry and his scores didn’t improve enough to please his school, his friends who spent time with him lost their playtime and were told by their mothers not to be friends with the lazy boy anymore. Then his class lost their funds for a pizza party, and his school lost grants and awards.

At last, the lazy boy’s frustrated teachers dragged him out in front of the whole school and made him kneel on salt. He cried and cried while all the other children laughed and cheered, and his parents and teachers scolded him. Then, according to the story, the lazy boy learned his lesson that if he wanted to accomplish anything, he would have to sacrifice his own blood, sweat, and tears every day of his life.

I hated the story. It didn’t say why everyone thought the boy was lazy. Did he really not care, or did he work very hard and just sucked at taking tests? Why did none of the grown-ups try helping him love hard work instead of scorning him all the time? Did the boy really go away a better person after being humbled, or did he feel like he had to punish himself, hurt himself, every day for the rest of his life because he would always be “lazy” to everyone no matter how hard he tried?

Below the kiosk’s sign was an alcove brimming with opalescent chunks of salt rock. Next to the alcove was a smaller slot with a little sticker above it that read Submit Sacrifice Here.

I’d seen boys ahead of me do this: take a chunk of rock, roll up the legs of their jumpsuits, and grind their knees against the salt until they broke skin. They then submitted their bloody salt chunks into the slot and requested a “blood treat,” as everyone in line called the desired food that came in exchange. The trick was, you could only order one tasty blood treat per day. Others had tried to submit more than one “sacrifice” and left angry or disappointed.

I told Beto how I felt about the fable. He didn’t give an opinion of his own, just listened. He persuaded me to stay in line for the kiosk even though I felt uneasy about what the whole sacrifice ritual was supposed to mean.

“Don’t think about it,” he said. “Lots of people have already gotten their blood treats, and nothing worse has happened to them than anyone else who ate the regular food yesterday.”

I wasn’t sure this was true. We’d only been in Hell two days. Bad things you ate could take a long time to affect you.

“Let’s just try it once to see what it’s all about,” he said. “If bad things happen, we don’t have to come to the kiosk ever again.”

So, here I was. I took a chunk of salt and frowned at it. My stomach growled, angry at the prospect of eating more of Hell’s tasteless food for a whole day. What was I going to get for my sacrifice? I craved ice cream, but that sort of reward would only last five minutes. Maybe I should order an entire carton of ice cream. But that would melt in a few hours. I thought about getting a large sandwich that I could save for more than one meal.

“Hurry up!” someone called behind me.

“Take your time,” Beto countered. He let me go ahead of him, saying he wanted to be a gentleman.

I rolled up my pant legs, knelt, and positioned the salt rock under my right knee. I bit my lip and twisted my weight back and forth until my knee stung.

With the bloody rock in hand, I stood up and let the leg of my jumpsuit fall back to my ankle. A kid my size rushed up and plucked the bloody salt chunk from my hand.

“Hey!” I shoved and grabbed for my sacrifice, but he quickly slapped it into the slot and hollered for twelve powdered doughnuts in a box. The box appeared instantly.

I screamed and grabbed the box of doughnuts.

The boy grabbed the other end and snarled, “Let go, butthead!”

“They’re mine!” I snarled back. “You stole my rock!” I pounded on his hands and threw punches at his chest with my fist.

He kicked me in the stomach and I fell back against the kiosk, hitting my shoulder hard on the metal bar before my butt smacked the floor. I screamed again in rage and pain.

Before the kid could run away with the doughnuts, Beto caught him by the collar of his jumpsuit. He hoisted the other boy off his feet and threw the kid flat on his back on the ground. The winded boy waited for his breath to return. The box skidded away.

“Leave her alone,” Beto growled. He retrieved the box of doughnuts and held them out to me. “What did you want, Justina?”

I sniffed and shrugged, rubbing my sore shoulder and failing not to cry again. “I don’t know,” I muttered.

As I reached for the doughnuts, two more boys tackled Beto to the ground, punching and clawing at him. He squeezed the flimsy cardboard box of doughnuts against his chest like a ball he kept out of the clutches of an opposing team. The number of boys fighting to get the box away from him grew to six. They got him on his back and raked at his arms.

“Stop it!” I tried to pull one of the boys off him and got elbowed squarely in the diaphragm. It hurt so badly I collapsed on my stomach and couldn’t move. For a long and terrifying moment, I couldn’t breathe.

Two of the boys peeled away and managed to rip one of the poles off the kiosk. A stocky boy with a wild mixture of fury and glee in his eyes slammed the pole down on Beto over and over and over. At last, they tore the crushed box free, howling in triumph as they ran past the long, orderly lines and out of the cafeteria.

I coughed. “Beto?” I shook his shoulder, then gasped and slid back. His jaw lay open. His left eye socket was smashed in. Blood pooled and seeped into the cracks where the kiosk’s metal stabbed into the stone floor.

“He’s dead!” I shrieked. “They killed him!”

“He’ll come back to life tomorrow, stupid,” another boy hissed in my ear. “You troublemakers deserved it anyway.” He stepped over Beto and took a chunk of salt.

I bolted out of the cafeteria, collapsing in the middle of the hallway across from the closest bathroom. I vomited and curled up in a ball, shaking with shock.

More boys jeered at me as they passed by. “Look, it’s that troublemaker who doesn’t want to leave Hell.”

“Troublemaker! Troublemaker!”

“Where’s your bodyguard, Troublemaker?”

“I guess she doesn’t like the food. Too bad she’s going to stay here forever.”

“Why don’t you sing a song your mommy taught you to make yourself feel better, stupid?”

“The whiteboards say to be nice to girls, but you’re not a girl. You’re a troublemaker.”

They laughed. Every once in a while, someone would kick me in the leg or the side for no good reason. How did every kid in Hell seem to know who I was? Why had they dubbed me “Troublemaker?” Did no one care that Beto lay in a gory heap like a barbaric Mayan sacrifice in front of the kiosk?

I couldn’t speak. Mercifully, I lost my appetite for the rest of the day as well. When the lights dimmed, I snuck into the closest dormitory, retrieving a pillow and a blanket. The boys jeered at me some more and told me to get out, that they didn’t want troublemakers in their midst. I found an empty classroom and curled up on the marble floor until the lights went out and I fell into that forced, dreamless sleep cycle of all children in Hell.

I didn’t move from that classroom for two days. I didn’t eat, I didn’t drink. Peed in my jumpsuit a couple of times. Tablets I broke, shifted, or placed somewhere else in the room were always restored back to their orderly six rows of eight. Any desks I moved were always back in their perfect six rows of eight too. The only things not restored in the classrooms each day were the instructions on the whiteboards. As other children raced from room to room in giddy, destructive fits, everything they erased in this room was gone. I assumed it was the same everywhere else.

I wondered… if I could erase every whiteboard, maybe I would forget the instructions to get out of Hell? Then I’d be stuck forever like I wanted. Then I worried about making everyone else stuck in Hell, and the stupid “Lazy Student” fable swirled around in my head. This proved to be wishful thinking, anyway, because after I erased this whiteboard, my memory of the instructions didn’t go away. I realized quickly they were always going to be as clear and sharp in my mind as I had seen them my first day.

Eight rules, six to follow. The one with no consequences listed had consequences after all. Sort of… No, not really. At least, not consequences that made much sense. Why did the instructions tell us not to erase the whiteboards if we could wipe them clean forever, but we would remember everything they said anyway? It was stupid. Everything was stupid! Then again, maybe that was one of the two rules that didn’t matter… Did any of them matter, though? What was the point of this whole thing?

Don’t think about it, I heard Beto’s voice say in my mind. So I stopped thinking about it. I also realized that I did want to leave Hell very badly. I wanted to know how my parents were doing, what had happened to my brother. I just didn’t want to be… an armadillo, an empty shell turned into a flute instead of a life. A flute… It doesn’t make sense. Why doesn’t anything make sense? Does that mean something? I didn’t cry this time. I just sank into myself.

My hunger didn’t go away or reset each day like everything else did, and the festering horror inside me didn’t magically disappear. The image of Beto’s smashed head wasn’t going to fade away either. I was going to go crazier and crazier until… what? Was craziness endless? Bottomless? What would happen to me?

Maybe Beto had gone to a better place now, gotten into Paradise. Or maybe he’d ended up back in front of that demon, shuffled into another Hell. Could I die my way out of Hell? I lay curled up in front of the whiteboard with my eyes closed, determined to waste away and die there, when I heard someone come in the room. Other kids usually didn’t stay very long, and they didn’t bother me much if I stayed quiet and still in my little corner. Someone shook my shoulder and, with a whimper, I tensed.

“Justina.”

I jolted and looked up at Beto. He smiled, and there was no sign his head had ever been less than perfectly formed.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I thought you’d gone and left Hell without me already.”

I sat up and threw my arms around his neck, startling him. I cried and cried, and kissed his cheeks three times. He didn’t pull away or act embarrassed. He just hugged me back.

When I finished crying, I blew my nose on my sleeve. He patted my back and held up a pair of great big, juicy, sweet-smelling barbecue sandwiches in separate paper trays. His ears and face were bright red. “Are you hungry? I don’t know if you like pork.”

I nodded, and even smiled a little. He gave me the sandwich, and we sat side-by-side, tearing ravenously at our food. The barbecue sauce was sweet. The meat was salty, juicy, porky like only real pork can taste. The bun tasted like real bread. Good bread.

He said, “Did you know you can only ask the kiosk for one thing every day, but you can ask for as much as you want? I asked for two sandwiches yesterday, two the day before, and two today. I figured I’d eat one for breakfast, and if I didn’t find you I’d eat the second one before lights out. That’s what I did yesterday and two days ago.”

“Thank you,” I managed quietly. After we finished eating and wiped off the excess barbecue sauce from our fingers and faces on our clothes, we sat in silence for a while. “Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“You know. Why did you get two sandwiches every day even though I ran away and you couldn’t find me?”

He shrugged. I thought he would say something again about how the whiteboard said to be nice to girls, or maybe how he hadn’t made any other friends in Hell yet. “Well, it’s because… because…” He swallowed and scratched one of his ears, which had turned bright red. “I like you.”

I looked at him, and he slapped his hand over his eyes. “You mean you like like me?”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath but didn’t take his hand away from his eyes. “Do you… do you like me too?”

I thought about it, and my face burned. I got why his face was red now. “Yeah, a little.”

He looked at me with one eye through his hand and giggled, turning even redder. I think we were having a blushing contest now. “Can I…?”

“What?” I asked.

“Can I kiss you?”

I screwed up my nose in disgust. “Kiss me?”

“I mean… not kiss you kiss you. Just on the cheek. You know, like you kissed me?”

“Oh.” My face grew warmer still. I hadn’t meant to kiss him because I liked him liked him. I think. He was my friend, and the last time I saw him his head was… I didn’t want to think about that right now. “Yeah. Okay.”

He leaned over and, shaking, quickly kissed my cheek. He leapt up and ran away to the other side of the room. I’d never seen a boy as big and tall as he was for his age giggle so much.

“Hey, wait for me!”

I chased him around the room, giggling as we tried to tickle each other and kiss-tag each other’s hands and cheeks. Beto was strong, and he pushed me hard enough to make me fall over a couple of times when he tried to get away. The third time, he pushed me too hard and I tripped over a desk and fell on my back. I laughed, but he looked unhappy and pulled me to my feet.

“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t hurt me.” I held his hand, which made him giggle again.

He cleared his throat. “So, I was thinking, if we’re going to stay in Hell forever, we should make a plan so we don’t get bored.”

I frowned. “Wait, you want to stay in Hell forever too?”

“Well, I don’t want my new girl… best friend to be alone forever.”

“What about your family? Don’t you want to see them again?”

He shrugged. “I think you want to see your family again too, even though you don’t want to do things the Car Dealer King’s way.” I smiled at that, and he continued. “But I don’t know if we’re really ever going to see them again. If we do see them, we might not know them as family anymore, you know? And the demon lady put us together in the same place. Maybe we’re supposed to be friends, or maybe it was an accident. But it’s nice to have someone around to be your friend or your family for… you know… a long time.”

That thought was deep and a little bit frightening. I thought about letting go of Beto’s hand, but I didn’t. “What if we don’t like each other forever?”

He shrugged. “Maybe that’s when we’ll leave.”

We both frowned this time. “Hell is stupid,” I said. I led him over to the shelves and handed him a tablet. “I hear there are some really fun games on these things. Should we try them out?”

Ten years into our denial, Beto and I exhausted every game the tablets had to offer until we hit a certain irrevocable boredom with them. I knew I was never going to play the tablet games ever again out of sheer disgust that there was nothing new to discover or do. No new games had appeared in that time.

Because our memories never faded in Hell, there was no chance of giving the games a break and coming back later with fresh enthusiasm or rediscovery. Once learned, everything to know about every game became stored permanently in our brains in perfect detail. Games no longer had the power to drown out that itch in my mind that someday I would actually leave Hell despite my resolution never to sing.

I always have a choice, I told myself. I don’t have to sing ever again if I don’t want to. But I didn’t have a choice. Not really. Like time and space, morality worked differently in Hell. You could hurt anyone you wanted to and it didn’t matter because everything broken would be restored when the lights turned back on and you woke up. Choice was literally a delusion. I knew I couldn’t stay in Hell forever, like I knew my name, and knew every moment of my mortal life in all its bittersweet detail. Someday, something would compel me to learn that ballad, and I would to sing it.

Fortunately, remembering was not the same as understanding or being constructive. Once, out of curiosity, I looked over the first ten pages of my ballad on the tablets. I could still recall the images of words and notes on each page perfectly, but keeping all those images in their correct order in my mind took effort. A lot of my song had parts that were worded exactly the same way as other parts, and there were places in the music that told me to go back to other sections and sing them again before moving ahead.

Retaining the words and the images of the notes in my mind was only a small part of the equation. I would have to train myself on which parts to repeat, and I still had to figure out by ear what sounds went with which notes. Learning this song would be more complicated than it had first appeared, as impossible as it had seemed anyway, but I wished I knew nothing about music at all.

“What are we going to do now?” asked Beto. He lay on his back beside me on the padded floor of the fully lit dormitory we now occupied. He set his tablet aside like I had done and folded his hands behind his head. We were still boyfriend and girlfriend, even though we knew each other so well now we acted more like siblings than normal friends. There was a lot more teasing and bluntness; even meanness sometimes that didn’t faze either of us anymore.

“Maybe we could get Daniel and Jacob to go exploring with us,” I said.

“There’s nothing to explore, though. Every classroom and every cafeteria and every dormitory down every length of hallway is exactly the same.”

“The people aren’t, though. And we haven’t found the end of the hallway yet.”

“Maybe the hallway never ends.”

“Or maybe it’s round like the Earth, and it only seems like it goes on forever.”

“Nobody wants to go really far away from our group in case we get lost and never find the spot where we live again.”

“Well, we need something to do to keep from getting bored and wanting to leave. Those two don’t want to leave either.”

“I don’t want to leave our group or split everyone up. It took us a long time to find good friends in here.”

“What are you going to do when all our good friends leave Hell?”

“That won’t happen for a long time.”

I sighed.

We’d traveled a long ways down the hallway from where we first arrived to get away from all the people who knew us and called us troublemakers. Now we shared a dormitory with a large group of kids, both boys and a few more girls, who didn’t care that Beto and I wanted to stay in Hell forever. A handful of them even felt the same way. For the majority who wanted to get out, we simply all agreed not to interfere with each other’s efforts either way. Meals turned into a community routine where we voted on what we wanted to eat that day and each ordered our limited one item in bulk from the kiosk so everyone got something both tasty and well-rounded to eat.

I liked the girls in our little community a lot. They were smart—smarter than me. A lot of the boys were too. We figured out amongst us that those who experienced a more traumatic death had a harder time coping with life in Hell. Trauma didn’t make you dumb. It just made it harder to think, harder to learn. Harder to… well, no one grew up here, so that didn’t matter.

The other girls in our little community hadn’t been through traumatic deaths quite like having a bear rip out their throats, like I did. Abby from Austin, Texas passed away from a freak illness in her sleep, surrounded by family. Susana from Orlando, Florida, died instantly after her bedroom collapsed into a sinkhole. And so forth.

“We could get married,” said Beto, pulling me out of my thoughts.

I looked at him, and he looked at me. “There’s no marriage in Hell,” I said.

“We could make marriage in Hell. The whiteboards didn’t say anything about it.” Most of the whiteboards we knew about had been wiped blank by now. Hence we referred to the instructions they once bore in past tense.

“I don’t want to get married.”

“Why not?”

I looked back up at the blue marbled ceiling. It amazed me how a pattern that once seemed endlessly pretty could feel so dull when it was the only thing you ever saw in the walls, floor, and ceiling anywhere. “I want to wait until I’m grown up.”

“We are grown-ups.”

“No, we’re not.”

He huffed in frustration. “We’re never growing up, Justina. There’s nothing to wait for.”

“Maybe we’ll grow up when we leave…” I caught myself too late.

He retorted, “Ready to give up and leave now that we’ve played every game on the tablets a thousand times?”

“Shut up.”

He glared at me. “I was just trying to think of something that would keep us from getting bored.”

My ears burned. “Well, not that.”

“What?”

I glared back at him. We broke gaze. We said nothing for a while, then a twinge of panic plucked at me. “Beto, are you going to stop being my boyfriend if I don’t marry you?”

“Maybe if you don’t marry me ever.”

“Oh.” The panic swelled. I braced myself. Maybe this would be the moment Beto had predicted ten years ago, when we would finally get bored of each other and stop being friends.

He didn’t seem happy with his answer either, though, because out of the corner of my eye I saw him frowning.

“I’m not trying to be mean,” I said.

“I know. It’s just not fair being stuck like this forever, never growing up, is it?”

I hated our absurd state of mind, too, having more than adult consciousness about everything we experienced, but confined to our never-changing ten-year-old abilities to reason against it. “When I was alive, there were times when I used to think I never wanted to grow up. There were other times too when I really wished I was grown up, and my parents would tell me to enjoy being a child while it lasted.”

“Yeah, my parents said that to me, too. I’ll bet our parents never guessed our childhood would last forever. Never growing up is not as nice as it seems when it’s real.” He took my hand. “It’s okay, Justina. I’ll still be your boyfriend. I don’t really know what grown-ups feel when they talk about marriage and romantic things anyway. I think you’ve got the right idea. I’ll wait too.”

I sighed in relief.

Daniel rushed into the dormitory, his deep brown complexion rosy with exertion. “Bear! Sloth!”

“Hawkman!” Beto greeted.

Those of us determined to stay in Hell came up with animal nicknames for each other many years ago in defiance of the armadillo fable. Call us anything but blind armadillos. We weren’t going to sacrifice who we were to become to some empty shell of a musical instrument for the Lord of Car Dealers’ amusement.

We gave Beto the nickname of “Bear,” because he was the biggest boy in our group and he was everybody’s protector. He thought I wouldn’t like that name because a real bear killed me. I didn’t actually hate bears, though, and I liked the healing irony that a “good bear” was my best friend now. Because I was the slowest at games our group invented to play together, taking my time to be thorough and precise enough to exploit the rules in creative ways, I was given the affectionate nickname of “Sloth.”

“Hawkman” Daniel continued, “You guys! Abbey finished her ballad last night before lights out. Paulo said the whiteboard swirled into this portal thing, and a bright light sucked her through. She’s gone armadillo!”

Beto and I both sat up. “No way,” I said. “How did she get around the problem of Hell forcing us to sleep ten hours a day?”

“Did she sing through the night?” asked Beto.

Daniel shook his head. “Paulo says she sang her ballad in thirteen hours. She sang super fast, and hit every note perfectly.”

Beto and I looked at each other. I wanted to laugh and say I was relieved we weren’t working toward something so ridiculously difficult. Really, how did Lord Mazda expect to compel all of us to sing a thousand-page song in thirteen hours straight? That wasn’t my personality, though. In life, I loved achievement. I loved school, and stretching my mind to learn new things. I felt jealous. Someone had done it. Someone had met the great Car Dealer’s challenge and gotten out of Hell in ten years. It could be done after all, and I had spent ten years doing nothing about it. Beto and I were living a lie, pretending we would never leave just because it seemed impossible.

No, that wasn’t the real reason we were determined to stay forever, I reminded myself. We sensed something we didn’t like, something that seemed very wrong about our existence here, and we didn’t want to give ourselves over to that system—that conversion—willingly.

While it was true that our minds and bodies were neither growing nor maturing, and we knew they never would in Hell, we were changing. Our independent wills were slowly leaching out of our souls. Someday there would be nothing but the great Car Dealer’s will to fill our desires and compel our movements. It would just happen. At that day, we would no longer be our own creatures but His to control. We would be perfect, absolute… what we didn’t know. This much terrified us. We were desperate not to lose our free will, and to exercise that will for as long as we still possessed it. Keeping boredom at bay was essential.

Every child dreams of living to be one hundred. I didn’t live that long, obviously, which means one hundred years after my arrival in Hell, I still looked, moved, and used my brain like a ten-year-old girl. I never thought I’d envy someone who experienced aging. What would it be like to look in a bathroom mirror at a face full of wrinkles from years of smiling, a little too much sunshine, and deep, grown-up thoughts?

It was on this day where my perfect memory marked the passing of exactly one hundred years that I realized my little brother had probably died by now. Years of agonizing about his fate was over, because it didn’t matter anymore whether the bear got him or he lived long enough to have children and grandchildren. Unless he had miraculously converted to Zoroastrianism within his lifetime, which I highly doubted, he had most certainly landed in Hell.

The horror of this thought hit me as I contemplated how much more it would hurt to live a full life, to get married, have kids, go to college, and fly rocket ships into space if he’d done that after all, only to have all those relationships and accomplishments turn out to mean nothing. At the same time, I still envied the thought of living a full lifetime, of growing up.

Most of the friends in our group who wanted to leave Hell were gone now. Those that were determined to stay had scattered, and the general population of our never-ending hallway had dwindled significantly. Hell was no longer the noisy, bustling, brawling stew of the first years. Sometimes, for long stretches, it was dead silent. Empty.

“I love you, Justina,” Beto said. He still held my hand as we walked the seemingly endless hallway. We’d been walking for almost a year now, and still hadn’t found the end of Hell’s school for ten-year-olds.

What would it have been like to grow up together? To get married and grow old together? I imagined people changed a lot as they grew out of childhood in particular, but some people still married their childhood friends. We never pretended to get married in Hell. We were still waiting to grow up, even though we knew we never would. We’d grown so close, but we could never be more than friends as children.

“What shall we do today?”

“We’ve read every book in the tablet libraries,” I replied sullenly. Every story in the tablets was a strange parable about sacrifice with twisted double meanings that made me hate them all and pity any child here who might glean false wisdom from them.

Beto said, “We’ve read everything except… you know, our forbidden ones on Avestan, reading music, and our ballads.”

I paused. Sweat broke out all over me, and my body went cold at the mention of these things. They sounded so interesting, so intriguing. Reading the references wasn’t the same as putting them all together to sing our ballads, but our minds could do that in Hell. We memorized everything we read, everything we saw. With time, we pieced some things together without meaning to. When I read part of the book on Avestan, I regretted it right away because my mind automatically translated half the words I’d already seen of my ballad. Boredom made my brain hungry like a withered sponge in a sea of sand and fire. If Hell’s juices weren’t soul-poison, I’d only be too cheerful to suck up what was left.

“I wish it didn’t all look exactly the same everywhere,” I said. “We’re going to get bored of everything, aren’t we?”

“I think you’re right,” Beto whispered.

“Do you think the whole universe is like this? Pointless? Meaningless? Moving toward that end? Do you think these little mortalities and Hells Mazda creates are really just what he’s ultimately experiencing, too? Are these spaces his madness, his postponement of the inevitable nothingness after existence that’s going to come for all of us, even himself?”

“Those are deep, grown-up thoughts today, Sloth.” He took both my hands and frowned in deep thoughts of his own. “How could anything exist if nothing has a point?”

“Maybe, every once in a while, there’s some blip in the great expanse of Nonexistence where the stuff of existence—time, matter, space, relationships, morality, what have you—happens briefly before it winks out again. A great ‘Never Mind.’ You know? Maybe Mazda was born in the great Never Mind, too, and even he will be swallowed up by nonexistence in the end.”

Beto nodded slowly. “So evil and destruction triumph over good and creation in the end, with little more than a stalemate of nonexistence to show for their efforts.”

I shivered.

He shivered too. “Are you thinking that when we get bored of everything and there are no consequences for anything we do…?”

“We’ll have no choices left,” I said. “We’ll go armadillo. We’ll leave Hell.”

“Because we’ll have no will left to resist it? Our wills will just cease to exist?”

I nodded. “Everything is finite here. It’s not a matter of if we’ll leave Hell. It never was an option for us. You know it too. I just… I’m sorry I dragged you along with me for so much time. Our choices, our desires… they’re all in vain.”

He shrugged. “Nothing is right in this place, either way. What’s our plan now?”

My mind kept drawing to the ballad, even though I didn’t want it to. Hot tears pooled in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. I had cried many, many times more than I wanted to in Hell. “I think the saddest part of the day I’ll be forced to sing my ballad is the fact that I’ve spent more time with you than anyone in mortality, and your name won’t be in my life story anywhere. It’s like…”

“It never mattered,” Beto said quietly. His own tears enflamed his eyes streaked his cheeks. “I think that’s stupid.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Beto let go of my hand forever the day he sang his ballad. Two hundred and fifty-three years after our arrival in Hell, when we were all but alone, his expression turned hollow as the doom of ultimate boredom settled over him. There was nothing left to say to each other, nothing left to see or do that would hold meaning for us. Like every other relationship we had ever known in life or in death, ours was quickly dissolving into nothingness. If we all learned one thing in Hell, it was that nothing lasted forever. Not our ties. Not our choices. Not our suffering. Not even our souls.

After the bright light of the whiteboard’s vortex swallowed him up, I sank in the far corner of that room, wondering what it would feel like to dissolve out of existence. I had felt something close to that sort of thing once, between the moment I left the demon’s office and the moment I arrived here. Was I ready for my will and being as I knew them to dissolve away into a billion unorganized particles, to become a new invention perfectly mastered by the great Ahura Mazda? Was I ready to embrace nothingness?

No. I wanted so badly to be, to exist and resist the pull of that unseen black hole at the center of all creation. To believe I would grow up, see Beto again, reunite with my brother and my parents. I hated death for robbing me of progress, and nothingness for robbing Ahura Mazda’s spheres of meaning. All that was would cease to be very soon, and much of it already had, I was sure.

It didn’t take long after Beto disappeared for my will to give way. One other soul ventured into the nearest cafeteria. I didn’t know his name or who his friends had been in Hell. I didn’t know if he was still in Hell because he wanted to be, or because he’d suffered a traumatic death and had a hard time learning his ballad. I killed him one day and used his blood to secure two blood treats for myself from the Kiosk: a barbecue pork sandwich and a bowl of chocolate ice cream. After that, I kept the hapless boy hostage, killing him every day for three weeks. At the start of one new day, he killed me first and got away.

I resisted learning my ballad for several months by stabbing myself in the head at the start of each day. Killing myself soon grew monotonous, and the inertness of temporary death tasted too much of nothingness. I switched to cutting off my fingers, which were restored each morning. The pain and horror of removing my own fingers over and over induced shock and kept me from thinking about my ballad for several months more. To this, I grew numb, too. Bored. I was so, so bored. Nothing fazed me anymore. I didn’t care about dying or suffering, losing anyone or anything. Nothing changed in Hell. Nothing mattered here. Ever.

Even that pattern of sixes and eights cropping up everywhere lost its intrigue over time. The whiteboards said Paradise held the answers we sought, so it was clear some things could never be fully explained in Hell, and perhaps were never meant to be. A mystery that remained forever mysterious, like a road that leads forever nowhere, peters out in the forests of oblivion.

Beto was gone. Beto was no more. I would never see Beto again. Ever again. Someday soon, I wouldn’t even know him. I wouldn’t have a conscious, meaningful thought about him, or anyone, or anything, ever again. And Beto? He’d already forgotten everyone and everything. He’d already forgotten me. I was alone. No, alone was woefully inadequate to describe that feeling. I was cut off. I was nothing. My existence was utterly meaningless in all its audacity to take up shape and make shadow—a great Never Mind. That’s what finally broke me.

I read my ballad over and over until I was bored. I read the reference on Avestan over and over until I was bored. Absolutely nothing remained in Hell that interested me, I read about music, playing with translation and singing. My heart grew numb as my resistance to the universe’s will abated. I felt cold inside, empty, as I stood before the whiteboard and began to sing. The notes flowed out of my soul in prickling, needle-like swells, eroding all that remained of my defiance like a river of ice carving u-shaped channels through mountain bedrock.

Stripped of my desires to learn and grow, overcome with apathy about the fate of all those I had ever loved on Earth and in Hell, the solid white mass of the whiteboard warped into a tunnel of light. This light was no light at all, but darkness in the similitude of light, cold and unforgiving as sunshine in the dead of winter.

As my skin, bone, and being disintegrated into the Great Destroyer’s maw, never to be one Justina Harper ever again, my lips offered one final pleading prayer on behalf of Beto, my brother, myself, and all mortal souls that had ever existed, that I was mistaken about everything.

A milky white fog enveloped the miniaturized scene of unsupervised ten-year-olds pacing an endless hallway set into the little glass test tube. Timothy frowned at the window in his palm.

He met his best friend, Patrick, when he was ten. They both joined the army right out of high school. Timothy never had a girlfriend, but Pat did. Pat said he was going to marry that girl when he got home. But he never went home.

Was Pat in Hell? Had his soul been obliterated out of existence, like the innocent children Timothy had just seen dissolving away into nothing one by one?

Timothy squeezed the tube in his fist until the glass shattered. A puff of ghostly white mist hissed out. It smelled like morning dew on wet grass in summer, like hamburgers grilling on a backyard barbecue. Like the warm scent of a beloved pet rat nestled into a fresh bed of straw, the one Patrick took off Timothy’s hands and cared for when his mother refused to let him keep the animal in his own house. The smells were raw and deep, deeper than the evocations of rocket fuel and Pat’s flesh burning beside him in a ditch, pinned under a massive piece of debris that had fallen out of the sky.

He let the blood slither down between his fingers, let it drip and pool in the darkness at his feet. Timothy hadn’t cared much about dying. He hadn’t cared much about being in Hell. Now he was angry.

He was tired of watching people hurt each other, watching people suffer unspeakable things before they crumbled away like dust. After the war, he’d been unable to touch anybody or do anything that would ever make a difference. Nothing mattered. Nothing ever would. Now that he had decent lungs, he couldn’t even help the damned souls in Hell. He could only watch them suffer and disintegrate out of existence. Billions and billions of souls that had no idea what life in Hell was really about. Did he really know either? No, of course not.

Timothy threw his arm across the strange lone shelf on the basaltic wall of his own endless hallway, knocking the bottles and vials full of little Hell visions to the stony black floor with a crash. He clawed at the closest full-sized windows, screaming to be let out, or let in. But no one heard Timothy’s shrill song of madness. Even Timothy didn’t know what he screamed. Warnings to the souls inside that total destruction might be eminent? Profanities to the deity? Cries for mercy?

He slid to the floor, rocking his knees against the rough stone while chanting, “Six bottles, floor eight… Six bottles… That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”