Angel Numbers 2

When I was a kid, my favorite games were Pokemon. I played every iteration that the franchise released, getting new consoles just to make sure I would never miss a release. On the playground, my friends and I would run in circles brandishing rocks in our hands, calling out to our imaginary partners to swipe, jump and defend in intense battles, sweat drenching our hair and clothes in the Georgia humidity. Reasonably speaking, I always knew that Pokemon didn’t exist. But as a kid, one with a fierce imagination that often held my brain in its power, I still dreamed of finding a partner like that or being reborn in a world where that deep level of connection was possible.

If someone had told my younger self about Amara, I like to think that I would have died happy.

The number two had been following me all day. I was 15 years old, past the point of inventing games on the playground but still deep in my love for the Pokemon video games. I was mid-way through my sophomore year of high school, doing what my mother called “coasting.” I kept my head down, my sentences short, and my bangs long enough to obscure any eye contact that my peers attempted to make with me. While I had been a relatively social kid, moving cities several times throughout middle school had made the idea of cultivating any new friendships exhausting. I had one decent connection left, a penpal from elementary school who now lived 16 hours away from me, and outside of her I had grown accustomed to relying on my own thoughts and the occasional intrusive conversation from family members to deplete my social battery.

Quiet was peaceful and trustworthy and simple. I thought it was enough for me.

The day I died, I remember boarding the bus home to a cacophony of shouts and whines. Kids were yelling back and forth, all trying to talk over each other after hearing the bus driver say that the route was going to take an extra half hour due to traffic being super congested around the town square. I put in earbuds to mellow out the noises, and stared at my feet as I padded to an empty row closer to the back of the bus. Pain flared in my left arm and I jumped, realizing I had grazed against someone’s spiky keychain, leaving two thin lines of white that had just broken the top layer of skin. For a second, those two swipes seemed to pulse, much brighter and clearer than they should have been for a wound that didn’t even draw blood. They faded in seconds to a light pink, barely off from the color of my skin. I stared at them, perfectly parallel, and almost brought my other hand up to trace across them when someone shoved into me from behind, pushing me forward and into the next available seat.

Unfortunately, it was not the lovely, empty row I had been gunning for but one where Michael, sophomore class clown, had spread out his belongings across 5/6ths of the seat cushion. With students streaming past and filling the isle, I perched on the edge of the row and decided that this was just where the universe wanted me to be for the ride home. At least I was one of the first stops; I wouldn’t have to deal with the uncomfortable predicament long. I could hear him beside me, standing and leaning over the seat in front of us to chat with some of his buddies. It looked like today’s mischievous plan of choice involved paper airplanes, and he had a whole fleet that he was giving away to anyone who would accept one.

He tried to give one to me. I declined. He insisted. I grabbed one without looking at his plethora of design options and set it in my lap so he would focus his attention elsewhere.

The lines on my arm had faded when I looked back at them. Something about them stuck in my brain though, like I had been marked by two talons, claimed by some unnatural force in the world. I glanced down at my watch, ready to be home and cozied up in my room. It read 3:22 PM, eight minutes until we were scheduled to depart. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and tried to disassociate from the chaos around me. I felt someone poke my arm, twice in quick succession.

“Hey. You. Are you going to join the barrage?”

I opened one eye and looked across the aisle to a girl named Morgan, who should definitely have known my name by this point. We had almost every class together. I couldn’t fault her for it though, as all that really meant was that I was very successful in remaining under the radar. She pointed at the airplane in my lap, and I saw almost the whole bus looking straight ahead, hiding their planes behind the tops of the seats in front of them, ready to let them fly at a moment’s notice.

“The plan is to release them right before we turn onto the main road. It is going to make for an awesome picture in the class pranks page of the yearbook!”

I had been to some unique schools over the past five years of my life, but the fact that Evergreen Public School had a “secret” pranks page on the online yearbook definitely placed it towards the top of the list. It was what gave kids like Michael so much power; everyone wanted to be featured, even the faculty. Last week I walked into a classroom where plastic cups of water had been balanced on every inch of flat surface: desks, floor, even inside of the cabinets. Now there was this.

I looked at Morgan and raised an eyebrow. “Does it matter? One less plane flying isn’t going to make or break the photo.”

“Yes but yours is going to look really cool up there! If you aren’t going to fly it, I want to trade.” For the first time, I looked at the paper plane sitting in my lap. It was a unique design. It was as if the plane had been made by gluing two different papers end to end. Where the first plane stopped, another one connected to the back end of it. Thankfully it must have been made with miniature papers, otherwise the invention would have been too big and unwieldy to throw.

Two planes. Two scratches. 3:22 PM. Michael had even had to ask me twice to take one, and Morgan had poked me twice to ask about it. The correlations manifested in my brain, and I had to shake it away from the forefront of my thoughts before I forgot to respond to this girl. “Here, we can trade. I’m fine with whatever one.”

Everyone was looking towards Michael for the cue, which meant that they were indirectly looking at me as well. I tried to ignore the pricking sensation on the back of my neck, and stared straight ahead with my gaze purposefully unfocused. I would know when everyone released their planes - almost every kid on the bus had one at the ready. We lurched forward, rolling slowly away from the sidewalk and onto the asphalt path that would take us away from the front doors of the school and onto the highway towards town. Everyone was holding their breath.

Something felt wrong.

Just as we approached the stop sign at the turn onto the main street, just as we felt the brakes engage, Michael shouted “Fire!” and a hundred paper airplanes were released in a cloud. I heard the shutter of people’s un-silenced phone cameras clicking, and my vision was obscured in a white cloud of paper.

The driver’s vision was obscured too. Instead of stopping at the sign, nobody realized the bus had inched out halfway onto the highway. Not until moments later when we heard the bellow of a horn and the metallic singing of a brutal collision between us and an 18-wheeler. Suddenly, everything went black.

When I realized that my brain was still functioning, the only thing I registered was silence. My eyes were closed, and I was hesitant to open them after the chaos that lingered at the edge of my memory. Maybe it was all of my practice disassociating, but I could almost sense the existence of that memory in the back of my brain like a little bubble. I could pop it, and look back into the experience, or I could push it to the side. I had a bad feeling it, so I pushed the memory to the side for now. I opened my eyes instead, and found my world a sea of blue. I was looking at an open, cloudless sky. I wiggled my toes and fingers experimentally and determined that I was not in any pain and had retained all of my extremities. I sat up.

Something slid from atop my chest down into my lap. I looked down in surprise, seeing both that I was alone in a field of swaying, bright green grass and that the thing atop me was, of all things, a lizard.

“Chameleon.”

The voice spoke inside of my head. If I hadn’t been so disoriented I would have jumped to my feet, but instead I just blinked, existing in shock. The animal in my lap was indeed a chameleon. Its small feet, complete with two toes on each, were splayed across me as if it had decided to camouflage itself as a starfish.

“Not some random lizard. I am much more than that.”

I blinked, and hesitantly lifted a hand to touch the rough-skinned creature. “Sorry.” I said slowly, the movement of my hand paused in midair as I debated if the creature would be mad at me for touching it and confirming its physical presence. “Am I hearing things? Are you speaking to me?”

“Of course, you dolt. Do you see anyone else around?”

I scanned the area. The field of green extended in every direction, as far as I could see. “No.” I replied.

“And why are you speaking out loud? Human voices are so abrasive. It is like I can hear the echo of you thinking the words and saying them each time. Stop that.”

I almost laughed in my confusion. I was completely overwhelmed. Without saying a word, I thought “So you can still hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Am I in heaven?”

“No.”

“Am I in hell?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have never heard of either of those places, and I like to know where I am.”

I decided that this would be the time to open up my personal Pandora's box - the memory of that moment on the bus that was trapped in my mind bubble. As I pulled it into the forefront of my mind, the voice spoke again.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Humans don’t do well re-living their death.”

“So I am dead?”

“Yes.”

“You’re really helpful, you know that?”

“And you shouldn’t start a new life off with sarcasm. Your choices in the next few days are going to instill most of your new personality into you, and it is a pain to change those characteristics afterwards. My last bond was to an alcoholic, and let me tell you trying to break that cycle took years.”

The creature must have seen the confusion in my eyes, because it paused and backtracked without me having to say a word. “My name is Amara. You are in the Afterglow. Think of it as an alternative to purgatory for anyone whose brain didn’t finish developing before they died. This is your chance to experience adulthood and determine your final resting place, and I am your guide and partner for it. Your soul was unsure of where it belonged in the moments before your death, so it was assigned a partner to help get you where you belong. I am that partner.”

Words escaped me as I looked into the eyes of this creature, my newfound partner. “All of the twos, all of those signs, that was the world generating you here? It was an angel connecting me with a second soul?”

“No, it was me linking myself with you. The beings in the Afterglow know when we are needed. We sense it too, in the minutes before a death on Earth. It was me reaching out and securing us so I could drag you here once you died. Otherwise you would have been left meandering around that school for the next fifty years, and none of the ghost stories I have ever heard are happy ones.”

I shuddered. “Thank you?”

“You’re welcome. Don’t revisit that memory for a while, and have some human support around when you do. I’m no mountain lion - I can’t just drag you to safety if you pass out on me.”

“Will do. Locked nice and tight.”

“What I can do is keep you invisible while you get to know this new world. That will be important when we get to town. Poachers love to grab newbies off the street before they have settled in.”

Last week, if you had asked me about my dream superpower, invisibility would have topped the list. It made sense, looking back at the last years of my life. I couldn’t help but smile at the thought. “Amara, I think we are going to get along just fine.” I picked up my newfound partner gently, and settled her onto my shoulder. Her toes gripped my shirt lightly, with one hand reaching up and securing itself in a small tangle of my hair. “Will you show me where to go from here?”

“I cannot. That is completely up to you. But I will be along for the ride.”

I thought back to my childhood and those safe, happy memories of video games and playing pretend out of the playground. And I smiled, feeling better in death than I ever could have imagined.