Questions and Answers

David Templeton

“Good morning, people! You lucky, lucky people!”

Startled from silence, seven sullen recruits, each mutely hunkered around a large wooden table, all pop upright in their seats like slices of bread in a slightly rusty toaster. Turning, they watch as Doug, slender and bright-eyed, darts into the room, a stack of ancient textbooks clutched in his long, thin arms. With a hefty thump, he dumps the books on a small desk at the front of the room. Beside them is a neatly stacked pile of thick, rectangular boards.

He turns to face the class.

“All right, then!” says the young man, bouncing softly on his heels, his face brimming with enthusiasm. “Who’s ready to learn something?”

Instantly, each member of the class reaches the same conclusion.

For a dead man, this guy is way too fucking lively.

“What can I say? I love being dead!” he says, smile widening, his voice as crackling with energy as an aluminum lunchbox crammed with electric eels. “And I love my post-death career! Let’s hope the same will be true of all of you!

“Anyway…first things first!” he continues. “I’m Doug, assistant instructor. I’ve been dead…let’s see, almost five years now. Wow! Time flies! Hey! Want to know how I died? It was crazy! A refrigerator fell on me. My bad…total accident…shit happens. Anyway, I signed up for classes here as soon as I could after that. After I, you know, crossed over.”

Doug stops, abruptly.

He’s trying too hard.

He knows it.

“Okay…anyway…” he breathes out, forcing himself to slow down. “On behalf of the faculty here at Otherside University, I’d like to welcome you to day one of Elementary Occupational Spirit Board Training. This is room B-1. If you’re looking for Second-Level Residence Haunting, which met in this room last semester, it’s now down the hall, in B-6. Everybody cool?”

“Oh. Yeah. Definitely.”

From the far left of the table, a youngish, redheaded, recently deceased mortician’s assistant sits nodding…wondering to herself how anyone could be accidentally crushed under a refrigerator.

This guy must have been a real loser.

Unlike herself, who’d died of cancer .

Like a normal person.

“Spirit Board Training,” she repeats. “Ouija boards. Yep. I’m in the right place.”

“Awesome,” Doug says. “Glad to hear it. Anyway, in this course, you will all learn the age-old mysteries of the spirit board, commonly called the Ouija board. Technically, of course, that’s more of a brand name. Spirit boards actually pre-dated the Ouija by decades.

“Anyway, in this class you’ll learn how to turn a board on, how to turn it off, and how to operate it from this side of the Veil…the Great Divide between life and death. Some of you might remember that… the Great Divide…that place you were floating in on your way to Otherside.”

He pauses, all too conspicuously suppressing a deep shudder of emotion.

Apparently, Doug’s memories of the Great Divide are far less than positive.

“Um, regardless of what most people assume over on Lifeside, the board is not as spooky as it seems,” he says. “But actually, operating a board can be kind of dull and technical and tedious.”

Doug notices that the faces of his class have turned from skepticism to concern.

“Not that it isn’t still fascinating!” he adds, quickly. “I love how someone Lifeside can work out a question on the board, one letter at a time, and then, when we get the question over here, we get it all at once . There’s even a spell-check function . On our side. So when we type out our answer and hit ‘SEND,’ they get it…properly spelled… one letter at a time .

“Yes, they have to wait for it, but it makes it mean more.”

Doug smiles.

“Of course, there are rules. And there are consequences for disobeying those rules.”

“Oh, stop it! You’re scaring us,” says Cancer Girl.

She turns to her classmates, smiling and rolling her eyes.

They do not smile back.

In fact, one of them, a middle-aged bartender killed by a drunk for serving a lemon twist instead of an olive, is clearly concerned, furrowing his brow into a knot of disconcerted worry. Another student—a former police officer run over by her own squad car when it slipped out of park while she was writing a speeding ticket—is nodding vigorously, ever the fan of following rules.

“Okay, before we go further,” Doug continues, “I’m supposed to ask who you are—and what it is that interests you in becoming a spirit board operator. I mean, why not learn how to work Tarot cards? Why not tea leaves? Why not the Magic 8-Ball? And why take up the board now, at this particular stage of your afterlife?

“Also, if you care to share it,” he goes on, “we’d like to hear how you died. That’s optional, of course. Death is private stuff. But sometimes it can have a significant impact on how you function, or don’t, as a spirit board operator.”

For a long stretched-out moment, no one speaks.

“Can we actually take a class in the Magic 8-Ball?” Cancer Girl finally asks. “Can I switch to that?”

“Um, no,” replies Doug. “The Magic 8-Ball isn’t really a thing. It’s just a toy.”

“Well, isn’t the Ouija board just a toy?” asks a short, muscular gentleman who was an insurance salesman, until he was toasted alive in a car accident. “I happen to know the Ouija board was originally patented, as a toy, in the late 1800s. Yeah, it’s true, by a salesman named Elijah Bond. The patent was filed on the tenth of February, 1891. For years after that, the Ouija was thought of as a harmless parlor game, until World War I, when the American spiritualist movement rebranded it as a way to speak with the dead. Elijah Bond, by the way, had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He’s currently buried in a graveyard in the Green Mount Cemetery in Dorsey, Maryland. His gravestone is shaped like a very large Ouija board.”

He shrugs.

“What can I say?” asks Toasted. “I was a two-time semi-finalist on Jeopardy.”

“Ah. Congratulations. So, where are we?” asks Doug.

“We’re about to share how we all died, and why we’re here,” says Cancer Girl. “We already know how you died.”

“Yep. Refrigerator,” says Doug.

“Nice.” She smiles. “Me? I’m in this class because I’m more comfortable with the dead than with the living, and I figured, now that I’m officially deceased, maybe talking to the living would give me the same satisfaction that hanging out with the dead gave me when I was alive. Creepy but true. Oh, and…how’d I die? Garden variety Leukemia.”

“Nice,” says Doug. “Well, not nice, but…good! Good that you’ve started us off. Anyone else?”

“All right, I suppose I’ll go,” murmurs a small elderly woman seated beside Cancer Girl. “I drowned in my bathtub while having a mild heart attack. And I’m here because my P.D.A.…my Post-Death Advocate…said a part-time job would be good for me. She says it might help me get over my P.D.D. You know, my Post-Death Depression. I’ve been pretty low. I miss having a purpose. My P.D.A. suggested Spirit Board Duty. Because I was a kindergarten teacher, and I’m used to working with people who read and write just one letter at a time.”

“That’s funny,” chuckles Toasted. “You’re very funny.”

“Thank you. And one more thing,” Bathtub Lady adds, clearly more than confortable with the topic of alphabets and writing. “I find it very odd that the Ouija board, presumably designed for people to ask questions on, does not include any actual question marks. Just letters, and some numbers, and the words ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Goodbye.’”

“I know, right?” shouts Doug, excitedly. “The thing is, the living don’t need a question mark, because when you get the message on your end of the board…the question mark is there anyway. Chalk that up to management efficiency!”

The ice now broken, everyone takes a turn.

Twist-not-an-Olive has enrolled because he’s good at drunken late-night banter.

Officer Squad Car thinks spirit board operation sounds more interesting than working behind a desk at Central Spirit Processing, while Toasted signed up because he was bored with his last Otherside assignment working in the Reference Library of Lifeside Facts and Figures. The last two to share are another salesman, of sorts, who died when a competitor threw him from a high-rise, and a businesswoman-turned-actress, a devoted community theater fanatic, who’d fallen through a faulty trap door while rehearsing a death scene in an Agatha Christie mystery.

“I’ve always been clumsy,” she blushes. “But I am extremely enthusiastic.”

“What a promising group,” Doug silently thinks. “They’re all wounded, somewhat likable, and reasonably insecure. That’s good. That’s refreshing.” A surprising number of spirit board applicants are freshly dead Internet trolls…angry people, overtly thrilled at the thought of using the Ouija board to fuck with people.

Such behavior is forbidden, of course.

In fact, this class was designed to identify and eliminate such applicants.

For decades…long before the Internet…the spirit board had been thought of all across Otherside as a sacred craft, one that had always been taught slowly by a spirit board master, one apprentice at a time. Bad apples would still slip through, obviously. There were countless stories of rogue board operators who abused the system, thinking it hilarious to make contact with the living and then falsely identify themselves as angry dead relatives, or demons, or seriously demented inter-dimensional entities.

They scared the shit out of people.

To prevent such abuses from happening, the spirit board course was designed. Strict rules were developed, severely limiting the choices that operators could make while operating the board. Around that time, the textbook was created.

“Hey! Refrigerator Guy! Now what?”

Cancer Girl, having silently moved over to where Doug is standing, touches him on the arm, gently attempting to break whatever reverie he’s fallen into.

“Wow. Oops. Sorry!” he says. “Just…organizing my thoughts!”

Turning away, Doug makes a mental note that Cancer Girl is the first person who’s physically touched him since he died…presuming, of course, that the word “physical” even applies in the afterlife.

“So…what’s next?” Cancer Girl asks.

“What’s next is…everyone gets a board, and a book!”

Quickly, Doug scoops up the stack of spirit boards on the desk.

“Hey! Um…I’m sorry…what’s your name?”

“Rebecca,” says Cancer Girl.

“Rebecca,” nods Doug. “…Um, would you mind grabbing those textbooks?”

Following Doug’s lead, Rebecca collects the stack of textbooks and, stepping a few paces behind him, sets one book directly on top of every spirit board Doug places before the waiting students.

“Excellent.” Doug nods. “Have a seat…Rebecca.”

“You’re welcome…Refrigerator Guy,” she replies, returning to her chair.

“Okay, do me a favor,” Doug says, addressing the entire class now. “Don’t open your books. We’ll do that in a minute, I promise. First, it’s the policy of the Boss…the primary instructor of this course…I’m just the assistant, right? It’s the policy of the Boss that every new student be told the history of the Spirit Board Textbook before they open it. The Boss wants everyone to know exactly what happens… what goes wrong …when some new Board operator decides to improvise…to do their own thing…for, you know, selfish reasons.”

Officer Squad Car raises her hand.

“Is this the part where we find out what happens if we break the rules?”

“Exactly,” Doug smiles. “This is that …the part where I tell you a story…a true story…a cautionary tale about breaking the rules.”

“I always hated cautionary tales,” murmurs Tossed-Off-a-Building.

“Me too,” whispers Twist-not-an-Olive.

Doug takes a breath.

“So…has anyone here ever heard of Alice Cooper?”

Whatever it was the group has been expecting Doug to say next, this wasn’t it.

“Alice Cooper…the rock star from the seventies?” he continues. “‘No More Mister Nice Guy?’ ‘Welcome to My Nightmare?’ That guy?”

“We know who Alice Cooper is,” says Trap Door Accident, a slightly freaked-out expression scrawling itself across her face like a rude word on a chalkboard.

“Well, I’ve never heard of her,” says Bathtub-Heart-Attack Lady.

“His real name was Vincent…Vincent Furnier,” explains Doug. “There’s an interesting urban legend about him. Supposedly, he chose his stage name…Alice Cooper…after consulting the Ouija board one night. The details vary, but supposedly he was in a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona, and one of his band mates had a Ouija board. They were still called The Spiders then, but wanted a new name, and everything they thought of was either not right or already taken. So, after different band members took a turn asking stupid questions, eventually, Vincent took a turn on the board, and asked, ‘Hey Dead People! What should we name our awesome band?’

“After a short pause, the Ouija board began spelling out A-L-I-C-E and C-O-O-P-E-R. For years, he told that story, made a big deal of it. But in his sixties, after he’d become famous and started golfing with Pat Boone, Vincent switched course, telling people that the Ouija story was totally made up, that some fan invented it.”

“So…that story’s not true?” asks Twist-not-an-Olive. “Dammit! I must have told a million people that story. It was a total lie?”

“Well…let’s call it a half -lie.” Doug grins. “Truth is, Vincent really did get that name from the Ouija board. Only under slightly different circumstances than the ones he described.”

With his well-practiced preface now complete, Doug takes a seat on the edge of the desk, and begins his story.

***

It was the summer of 1968, a few hours after midnight, Arizona time.

That was an especially busy morning out in the Otherside Spirit Board control room, where a brilliant, impulsive, slightly frightening woman, known to her fellow board operators as “Scary,” had just returned from her lunch break.

It was near the end of her third full month on the job.

She wasn’t happy.

Scary took a seat in her cubicle, plugged in her board, flipped the switches that connected it to the Great Divide, and tuned the board’s frequency to North America, her designated “beat.” After a moment or two, the spirit board began glowing blue. It gave out a soft, pleasant “BING!,” the signal that someone on Lifeside had just been randomly directed to Scary’s board.

It was from San Francisco.

A group of heavily tripping flower children wanted to know if there was really a god…and if so, was he or she interested in a four-way with them.

Scary wrinkled her nose, wryly. A number of colorful responses occurred to her, but instead of following those impulses, she obediently followed the textbook.

The textbook was very clear in regards to “spiritual questions.”

Spirit board operators were forbidden to answer them.

So, Scary declined to answer the hippies from San Francisco.

Too bad, too.

She’d thought of a hilarious answer.

After a while, the blue faded, and Scary sat waiting for her next call.

She hated not being allowed to respond to an honest question. But there were a vast number of questions to which board operators were not allowed to give an answer.

The Big Three, as they were known around the Control Room, were the most common.

1. “IS THERE A GOD?”

2. “WHERE WILL I GO WHEN I DIE?”

3. “HEY! WHO IS THIS?”

The rules were very clear, though.

Never answer spiritual questions.

Never give any details whatsoever about Otherside.

Never identify yourself.

To Scary, it seemed cold and unfriendly, giving people the silent treatment like that.

Still, she recognized that silence wasn’t necessarily a bad policy. Sometimes…actually, most of the time… no answer was better than a bad answer. In fact, in some cases, when no spirit board answer arrived from the great beyond, the Lifeside caller’s own best instincts would kick in. Unconsciously, they would actually solve their own problem, gradually working out a fairly decent answer all on their own.

One letter at a time.

For instance, there was the time a young man named Bill, at the end of his rope following years of self-destructive addictions, consulted the Ouija, asking what steps he might take to gain a little control over his lifelong thirst for whiskey.

“NO MORE THAN TWELVE,” Bill suggested.

Across the Veil, in the Command Center, as Bill’s spirit board operator that night desperately flipped through the textbook, Bill grew impatient. Without knowing he was doing it, he reached down into his own better self, and soon, one letter at a time, had spelled out his twelve steps.

That worked out fairly well, all things considered, even if Bill did always believe those steps had come from some “higher power,” instead of from the inherent human wisdom he unwittingly carried within himself.

Then again, on occasion, a caller’s own original answers could be dreadful.

Once, in the early 1900s, a woman named Emily Grant Hutchins used a Ouija board to ask Mark Twain to dictate a novel, using her as his secretary. The operator on-shift that night also remained silent, for the simple reason that he was, in fact, Mark Twain. But Emily Grant Hutchins began writing anyway, and eventually produced a novel she proudly claimed had been dictated by the ghost of Mark Twain. It was terrible. So much so that Twain’s estate promptly sued Emily Grant Hutchins for defamation of character.

Having heard many such stories over the course of her training, Scary knew there were serious dangers to almost any response a spirit board operator might give. The pressure of that knowledge could sometimes be crippling. To relieve that stress, the textbook contained pages and pages of common spirit board questions…with a large number of “management sanctioned” answers, each one spelled out clearly.

Occasionally, the answer was simply another question.

LIFESIDE: “SHOULD I ACCEPT THIS JOB PROMOTION?”

OTHERSIDE: “WHAT DOES YOUR HEART TELL YOU.”

LIFESIDE: “WHERE IS MY LOST DIAMOND EARRING?”

OTHERSIDE: “WHEN DID YOU SEE IT LAST.”

LIFESIDE: “WHAT IS MY NAME, AND HOW MANY FINGERS AM I HOLDING UP RIGHT NOW?”

OTHERSIDE: “DON’T YOU HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO.”

Actual answers weren’t always much better.

LIFESIDE: “WHEN WILL I WIN THE LOTTERY?”

OTHERSIDE: “WHEN IT IS YOUR MOMENT.”

LIFESIDE: “AM I EVER GOING TO BE HAPPY?”

OTHERSIDE: “IF IT IS MEANT TO BE.”

LIFESIDE: “SHOULD I JUST KILL MYSELF?”

OTHERSIDE: “UNCERTAIN AT THIS TIME.”

“Uncertain at this time.”

Scary hated that one especially.

It was, according the textbook, the answer to dozens of questions, including the suicide question. It was why Scary hated suicide calls. That one single stupid phrase was all she was allowed to say. Nothing helpful. Nothing true .

Only, “Uncertain at this time.”

That, or complete silence.

“BING!”

Scary’s second call was from a young man in Portland, Oregon.

“IS MY MOM THERE?”

Fuck.

Scary hated that one too. And she got it a lot.

“IS MY MOM THERE?”

Or “CAN I TALK TO MY HUSBAND?”

Or, “I JUST WANT TO HEAR FROM MY LITTLE BABY DAUGHTER.”

But the dead are never allowed to talk to their own loved ones.

That, everyone knew, could lead to a conflict of interest.

In the rare cases a spirit board operator received a call from someone they had known when they were alive, especially a person they’d loved, they were to step away from their cubicle immediately and summon the floor manager, who would call in a substitute.

So, that night, when Missing-Mom-in-Portland called up to speak to his mother, Scary followed the rules, and declined to reply.

Sitting there alone in her cubicle, thinking of that poor guy sitting in the dark, waiting, Scary’s heart began to ache, knowing that she’d let the poor guy down…that she’d missed a chance to do some actual good in the world. Gradually, she started becoming angry. All this obfuscation and misdirection was not what she’d signed up for. She was told she’d be doing something positive with her death, making up for all the opportunities to help that she’d passed over when she was alive.

“BING!”

Yanked from her thoughts, her board glowing blue again, Scary saw that the next call was coming from a hotel room in Tuscon, Arizona.

She flicked the switch.

“HEY! DEAD PEOPLE! WHAT SHOULD WE NAME OUR AWESOME BAND?”

Impulsively, she wrote out an answer and sent it.

“WHO GIVES A SHIT,” she said, adding, “AND STOP WASTING MY TIME…ASSHOLE.”

Scary knew she was engaging in a serious break in protocol.

She stood up. Time to take another break.

But before she could escape her cubicle, a second question popped up on the board.

“NO. SERIOUSLY. WE NEED A NAME. PLEASE?”

Scary stared at the screen. She was just reaching over to unplug the board, when a third question appeared.

“BY THE WAY…WHO IS THIS?”

“Oh, fuck it!” Scary sighed, aloud, sitting abruptly back in her chair. “ Let them fire me.”

Pulling the board closer, she typed out an answer and hit the button.

“ALICE COOPER,” she said.

That was, in fact, Scary’s real name.

Alice Cooper.

It was the truth. And right at that moment, Scary desperately needed to tell someone the truth.

Meanwhile, over on Lifeside, Vincent Furnier and his band were laughing their asses off.

“Alice Cooper.”

Of course, they all took this unexpected suggestion as the answer to their original question. Vincent thought it was hilarious. In fact, he thought it was perfect . Fully appreciating the notion of a badass rocker, devoted to songs about nightmares, devils and black widows, with a stage name as sweet and harmless as Alice Cooper, he decided, right then and there, to change his name to Alice Cooper.

***

“The rest, of course, is history,” announces Doug, finishing his tale with a wide smile.

“Oh, bull,” says Rebecca. “You’re shitting us.”

“No. No I am not,” replies Doug. “That really is how Alice Cooper got his name.”

“And that’s our cautionary tale?” asks Trap Door Accident.

“That’s it.” Doug nods.

“But…” states Tossed-Off-a-Building, “it’s not cautionary. It doesn’t have a scary ending.”

“Well, Scary…Alice… did lose her job,” replies Doug. “After the incident, she refused to back down, insisting to the end that telling the truth…using your instincts…is better than following rules you know are wrong. So they fired her. Basically—”

“Wait,” interrupts Officer Squad Car. “So, the whole point of the story is…if we break the rules, we’ll get fired? Why didn’t you just say that?”

“Well…” Doug says. “There actually is one more tiny part. See, Alice did get thrown out, but by then she’d become kind of famous around here. Everyone knew she’d only done what a lot of spirit board operators had been too afraid to do. She’d told the truth.

“Then, one night, this one board operator, a former cabdriver, who’d fallen asleep at the wheel…and who’d known and liked Scary…he got a question from some stupid, heartbroken teenage guy. A girl he’d liked broke up with him on his nineteenth birthday. The kid was devastated. So he decided to go the Grand Canyon and walk off a cliff. Heartbreak Kid even bought a plane ticket to Phoenix.

“The night before his flight, he suddenly pulled out a Ouija board, a present from one of his stoner friends on his birthday. On a whim, he set it up, and sent a question out into the beyond.

‘SHOULD I, OR SHOULDN’T I…KILL MYSELF?’

“So, of course, that’s the question that Sleepy Cabdriver got that night. He knew the rules, though. He knew what the management sanctioned answer was to that question.”

“Uncertain at this time?” asks Rebecca.

“Right!” says Doug.

“But he couldn’t do it, could he, the sleepy cabdriver?” asks Officer Squad Car.

“No. He couldn’t,” Doug confirms. “He thought of Alice Cooper…the woman, not the rock star…and instead of sending ‘Uncertain at this time,’ he sent the words, ‘YOU SHOULDN’T.’ Then, inspired by Alice’s enduring example, he added, ‘YOU STUPID FUCKING IDIOT.’

“The kid was stunned, to say the least,” Doug says.

“WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?’ he wrote back.

“FUCK WHAT I CALLED YOU. DON’T YOU DARE KILL YOURSELF!’ Cabdriver wrote back. STAY ALIVE! LIVE AS LONG AS YOU CAN. BELIEVE ME! BROKEN-HEARTED AND ALIVE IS A LOT BETTER THAN BROKEN-HEARTED AND DEAD! TRY GETTING OUT OF YOUR OWN HEAD FOR A WHILE. MAYBE TRY VOLUNTEERING FOR SOME CHARITY THAT HELPS POOR PEOPLE. THAT MIGHT HELP YOU REALIZE HOW GOOD YOU ACTUALLY HAVE IT. BUT…NO! DON’T KILL YOURSELF. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. YOU STUPID DICKHEAD.’

“My goodness!” says Bathtub-Lady, softly. “That must have been quite a difficult message for Sleepy Cabdriver to send, without punctuation and all.”

“Well,” Doug says, “punctuation or no punctuation, I’m happy to say Heartbreak Kid never went through with it. In that moment, something clicked in him. He sat there, feeling everything deeply, for a long, long time, then he sent one more message on the spirit board.

“ ‘THANKS,’ he said. ‘…I’LL TRY.”

“So, did he get fired?” asks Toasted. “Cabdriver? He definitely got fired, right?”

“Actually, no…” says a strong, loud voice from behind the group. “Sleepy Cabdriver did not get fired.”

Startled, the entire class turns to watch a tall, middle-aged woman in a smart black business suit, carrying a copy of the textbook, stride into the room and walk up to the desk, where Doug stands beaming.

“Thank you, Assistant Instructor Doug,” says the imposing woman. “Well done. I’ll take over from here.”

“Of course, Professor,” says Doug, turning back to the class. “Uh, everybody? Allow me to introduce the Boss, the primary instructor of this course. Please say hello to Professor Cooper.”

“Call me Alice,” she says.

“No fucking way,” smiles Rebecca. “Doug, you set us up.”

“Settle down now,” says Professor Cooper, gently but firmly. “It’s time to get to work. Everyone please open your books to pages 484 through 598…the chapter titled, ‘Questions and Answers.’”

Still a bit stunned, everyone opens their books to the designated pages.

After several seconds, Trap Door raises her hand.

“Excuse me, Professor. There doesn’t seem…there aren’t any of those pages. They’ve been torn out.”

“Torn out of my book, too,” says Twist-not-an-Olive.

“Mine too,” says Tossed-Off-a-Building.

“Ah, that’s right,” Cooper says with a nod. “Doug? Care to explain?”

“See,” he tells the class, “after it became known that Cabdriver had pulled a Scary, that he’d defied the rules, and saved a kid’s life, it was, like, total anarchy in the Control Room. Spirit board operators everywhere started doing their own thing, totally improvising. Not in a troll-ish way, but, you know…they just wanted to do some good, tell the truth. Operators started tearing the ‘Questions and Answers’ pages out of their textbooks right and left. It was madness.”

“Eventually,” Professor Cooper takes up the tale, “I was brought back…as a consultant, to bring a bit of stability to the chaos I’d started. Not long after, I was asked to join the faculty of the university, where I soon took over the training of new recruits.”

“And now, Alice Cooper runs the fucking place,” Doug says, grinning.

“And one of my first decisions,” she says, “was to leave ‘Questions and Answers’ out of the book. You’ll have to rely on your training, some creativity and common sense, and your basic human decency. Just, tell the truth… do what your heart tells you …and you’ll do fine.”

No one speaks, as Professor Cooper studies the faces of each student.

“Make no mistake, this isn’t going to be easy, for any of you,” she finally says. “There are still rules. If you are not in this to help others…to help the living…you will be dropped as quickly as possible. That said, I have a very good feeling about this class.

“Any questions?”

“Yeah, I have one,” says Rebecca, raising her hand. “About that kid…Heartbreak Kid. Did he ever, you know, walk off a cliff? Or did he get over that girl and end up changing his life?”

“Oh, he changed his life, and then some,” says Cooper, smiling. “He stayed alive, devoted his time to helping others, had his heart broken another time or two, and kept on going, kept on helping. And, when he finally did die…about five years ago, I believe…he was killed the way he’d lived. Right in the middle of helping an elderly couple move into the new high-rise, low-income apartment, a complex he himself had helped to build.”

“Let me guess,” Rebecca asks. “A refrigerator fell on him?”

Everyone turns to look at Doug.

“Yep. That was me.” He shrugs, smiling happily. “My bad. Total accident. Shit happens.”

“So then,” Alice Cooper says, opening her textbook. “Who’s ready to learn something?”

“One more question, Professor,” Rebecca says.

“Yes?” Cooper asks.

“I’m just curious. Is Heartbreak Kid…is Doug going to be here every day?”

“Yes. He is. Unless he’s needed as back-up in the Command Center,” Cooper replies. “Why? Is that a problem?”

“Uncertain at this time,” Cancer Girl answers, shooting a dangerously playful smile in the direction of Doug, who rolls his eyes, makes a mental note to follow his heart, but to be very, very careful…and with that thought, he smiles right back.