DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi, nor am I affiliated with Epitome. I'm just bored and decided to write about a sunken ship.
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Adam stood by the door. There was nowhere left to go.
He took the elevator, just like the man said. He went up to the 17th floor, like he was told to do. There was not much to do in Heaven, but to do as he was told.
With one last ding, Adam turned around to see the elevator doors closing and slowly vanishing from the wall. It was gone in a blink. But with the way it left, it almost looked like it actually disappeared right in front of his eyes.
There was nothing around him other than a door across from where the elevator used to be. It was the only thing in sight. There weren't any other doors around, not even some windows to be seen, or people walking by. There was just a door and a boy on an empty floor in Heaven. Adam hesitantly opened it, not sure what to expect—he had nothing to lose, after all.
"Hey guys, Look! We actually got a newbie again," The voice was a whisper, but loud enough for Adam to hear.
He scanned the room and counted eight pairs of eyes ogling him. Girls and boys scattered in a fairly big room. Some were playing cards on a table, some sat by themselves on armchairs reading books the size of an encyclopaedia, and one girl sat on a stool in the corner trying not to care about the new boy.
They all looked so young. They weren't exactly children, but they weren't adults either.
Adam stayed by the doorway as the group scrutinized him from head to toe. This made him question whether he was even allowed entry or. He tried to take a step back, but remembered that there was nowhere else for him to go. It was the only door on the floor and there weren't any other exit routes for him to take. He felt as if he was intruding some sort of gang meeting. As if he was Jack climbing up the beanstalk and witnessing a community of giants. But, in this case, Adam was put on an elevator with only one option to choose: To enter a roomful of teenagers—unwelcoming teenagers.
One guy at the table smirked at Adam, but the girl next to him punched his arm and shook her head. Another girl lying on a couch took one look at Adam, only to quickly fix her eyes back on the book she was holding.
Adam, feeling unwanted, closed the door hoping that when he opened it again, another room with nicer people would pop up instead of the previous one. Much to his dismay, the same room with the same kids were found behind the door. He tried doing it again, still hoping for a new room, but never got his wish. What kind of place is Heaven, if I'm going to be stuck with teenagers for eternity, He thought.
"He looks like he's struggling pretty hard over there…" The boy who smirked whispered to the girl who punched his arm.
She rolled her eyes and said, "Someone just go over there and help him before he breaks the damn door."
Adam stopped his commotion. It was only after hearing their comments that he realized how silly he must have looked playing with the door. He sighed and closed his eyes. Maybe it's all a dream, he thought, maybe I'm not really dead. This could all be a dream.
When he opened his eyes, he wasn't waking up in his room as he had wished. Instead, he opened his eyes to find the girl by the window standing just two steps away from him.
"I don't think you fully comprehend the position you're in right now," she said.
The girl took control of the door and motioned for Adam to come in. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, she was tall and lean, and she reminded him of Becky. This girl's resemblance to his girlfriend made his heart drop. He suddenly remembered how he would never get to see Becky again.
"I'm Jackie," Her voice wasn't as sweet and perky as Becky's, instead it was deeper and laced with evident pain, "That asshole who was laughing at you is Brandon, next to him is his girlfriend Elise."
Adam looked at the couple by the table, the boy still had a smirk on his face. He stood up and walked to the newcomer and held his hand out for Adam.
"Don't listen to Gloomy-Jack-Jack. She's not the best at introducing people." He shook Adam's hand, "I'm Brandon, and I'm not an asshole. I mean, back on Earth people said I was a douche, but Elise can vouch for me when I say that I was never an asshole. Scout's honor."
"I'm Adam," He whispered. It seemed odd, he thought. To have to introduce himself to a new set of people, who like him, are presumably as dead as he was. Would their names even matter in the land of the dead? Aren't they all just dead in the end, especially in Heaven? Just simply: Dead. What was the point of introducing oneself in a place where the beginning was literally their end?
Adam shrugged the thoughts in his head as he watched Brandon attempt to avoid a pillow that Elise threw his way. The rest of the people in the room seemed to have gotten used to their banter and unquestionably ignored them.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Jackie grab a chair for him to sit next to her by the window. She waved for him to go to her, and he obeyed by sitting and quietly thanking her for her kindness.
"So, Adam. Tell us your story," Elise said, clapping her hands like an excited child waiting for a bedtime tale.
Jackie leaned on the wall, Brandon quieted down, and everybody else in the room, even the ones engrossed in their books, also seemed to want to listen to him tell his story.
Adam, who realized that all the attention was focused on him, felt as if he was back on a stage with WhisperHug on their way to start a set in front of an eager crowd. The difference this time, was that he was solo and without his bass guitar to save him from embarrassment.
"My story? Like…" He gulped, "You mean… The story of my life? Isn't that a bit too boring?"
Brandon, unsurprisingly, was the one to laugh first. Some chuckled and some giggled softly. Adam felt his heart beat faster, thinking he had said something wrong.
"No… Not your life," Jackie informed him, "Seeing as no one knows his or her own life clock around here, we're not sure if anyone has time to listen to your life story."
"What Jackie meant to say," Elise, Adam noticed, was a soft talker, "Is that your life story is probably very interesting. I know mine was," She winked at Brandon, who nodded in approval, "It's just that… One of us could be sent to go For Rest any time soon, or one of us could wake up down there. We're not given any time frame in this room, so we don't have hours to spare to listen to what happened in your lifetime."
Adam tried to understand just what Elise meant about going to rest and something about waking up. Did that have anything to do with the path that most of the people of the cobblestoned path took to the left of the forked road?
"What do you mean by wake up down there? Aren't we all dead in here? Isn't this Heaven?" Adam asked.
He looked around at the people in the room as they all sat quietly. The people on the couches looked at Jackie and waited for her to explain, but she looked to Elise, who instead looked at her boyfriend.
Brandon, Adam saw, seemed to have lost all traces of douchebagery and said, "Jackie's right. You really don't get the position you're in, do you?"
Adam shrugged, "I mean. One moment I'm crashing a van, right? Then next thing I know, I'm in a weird forest with people walking in one direction, so naturally, I assume I'm dead. And then, there's the sign pointing to places to go for rest and another to go for thoughts. What the hell was I going to choose?" Adam got up from his chair and faced the crowd, "I'm not that tired so I chose the thoughts. Why not right? Then there's this weird building with Orphan Black dudes in the lobby and the Tower of Terror elevator that disappears. This has got to be Heaven, right?" He shook his head and caught his breath, "It's not really the Heaven I imagined when I was little. Everything's weird here, but no one's ever been in Heaven and lived to tell about it, so who knows what it's supposed to be like. I'm in a room with people I don't know and you guys keep talking about Earth like it's another planet. Either I'm having the worst dream ever, or we're all dead. We've got to be dead. I died in that crash. I felt it. We're dead."
It was quiet for a bit as everyone gaped at Adam with shocked faces. No one seemed to know how to respond to his monologue, and no one looked to want to be the one to explain everything.
"Holy shit! He really doesn't know," It was Jackie.
"Dude," Brandon got up and placed both of his hands on Adam's quivering shoulders, "You gotta sit back down and relax. Because what I'm about to tell you is gonna be a game changer."
Adam looked at the boy in confusion. He couldn't think of anything that could possibly change the outcome of his fate in Heaven. As far as he knew, Heaven was the last place anyone could be, once they lived and died. Heaven was the pit stop, that's what he was taught to think in Sunday school.
He looked at the others and was taken aback by the quick change in their facial expressions. What were once shocked faces were now replaced by sympathetic sentiments. They could tell Adam still needed to understand things, and realized that they needed to be gentler with someone who clearly oblivious of his own condition. Brandon on the other hand, looked excited. He beckoned Adam to sit and took a big breath.
"You're not dead… yet. We're all not dead… yet."
Adam stared at the boy. What did he mean by yet? He furrowed his eyebrows and surveyed every face in the room for any sign of a prank. They all looked very serious. A glint of hope twinkled in each of their eyes, as if they all waited for their turn to go back home. Adam didn't want to believe them. What if it was true and he was never able to get back to his family? What was the point of knowing? False hope had always been dangerous.
"How can I not be dead, I crashed a van with a car, I felt my lungs give up and I literally felt my heart slow down. I know I'm dead. You're all crazy."
Brandon looked solemn as he glanced at Elise, who seemed to understand what he wanted to share with Adam. She nodded and let him say it. "I get what you mean, Adam. When Elise and I were stuck in a house fire, I felt every inch of my body burn. I knew for sure we were dead. When we got here, we thought we got lucky enough to be sent to the same Heaven."
"My family's raised me Agnostic. Heaven was never in our family dictionary," Elise explained.
"And I'm Jewish. When we died I thought I'd never see her again," Brandon smiled at his girlfriend and took a moment before continuing, "But then we ended up here together. We figured it must mean something. The cloned dudes downstairs made us go to the Glimpse room, and that's when we realized we weren't dead yet."
"He's right, man" A boy who hadn't spoken since Adam's arrival said, "I wasn't with them at the Glimpse, but I had to do the same shit. Mine was: gunshot, forest, clones, glimpse, and then some bro downstairs sent me up in this room. We're not dead, man. We're just in a coma."
Adam looked in Jackie's direction. She also said something along the same lines of initially thinking she was dead until she had the Glimpse. But she also said, "You probably know what we're talking about though. Unless your Glimpse was blurry."
He didn't know what to say. They all seemed to tell the truth and shared the similar experiences in Heaven. But the problem was that Adam couldn't relate. The truth was that he had no idea what a "Glimpse Room" was supposed to be. They all did something that he didn't get to do. He didn't think it was possible to feel left out in Heaven.
Adam recounted his steps since his appearance in Heaven. There was the door, followed by the forest, where the path led to the fork. He ended up in Suspension where there were cloned men, and brought into an elevator and lastly into the room. There was not a moment in his time here when someone told him to go to a room called "Glimpse".
"I have no idea what the Glimpse is," He admitted.
The boy who said he was shot exclaimed in disbelief, "Man, don't fuck wit' us! Everyone goes to the Glimpse before the room. That's what everyone did. If you didn't like yours, don't mess wit' us. It's the only thing we know that's for sure and reminds us of what's for real." He shook his head and faced Brandon, "Bran, this bitch acts all innocent like he don't know shit and then messes with us," He turned back to Adam and looked at him suspiciously, "How'd you even get up here? He asked accusingly, "Are you one of the guards? Are you taking one of us to Rest? Who the hell are you, man?"
Adam sat wide-eyed and shocked at the boy's allegations. It sounded as if he made Adam to be some sort of Heaven Spy who was supposed to take one of them to die. Whatever this boy thought he was made Adam question his own identity. If he wasn't dead yet, then what in the world was he supposed to be?
The uncertainty of his life, on whether he was alive or not yet dead, was confusing him.
"I really don't know what it is!" Adam said, desperately trying to defend himself.
"I'm on to you, man," The boy said, "Something about you's shady."
"Cut him some slack, Lionel," Elise spoke up. The boy, whose name Adam now knew, clamped his mouth. She hadn't let her eyes wander away from Adam ever since he admitted to not knowing about the Glimpse. "I sorta believe that you really have no clue about the Glimpse, but Lionel's is right. How did you get up here if you didn't go there first?"
All eyes looked to Adam waiting for him to say something. Adam felt himself begin to panic. If the people in the room weren't quiet enough, they definitely were now.
"I was told to take an elevator to the 17th floor," He started, "No one told me to go to a Glimpse, whatever the heck that is."
Adam wasn't sure what to think anymore. He was so sure he'd died in that crash. But it seemed as though what these people said of being in a coma was real. Even if it was hard to imagine. They weren't dead… yet. Even if it was laced with a tiny bit of suspicion, he understood what Brandon meant.
"So you're not a guard?" The girl on the couch asked.
"No! I swear I'm not," Adam said, "I didn't even know there were guards up here. What do they even look like? Do they like, snatch you away, or something?"
Elise shook her head, "They come up here. Call a name. If it's yours, you follow them. No questions asked."
"We have no idea where they take them. They up and leave, and we never see them again," Jackie, who had been mute for quite some time finally spoke up, "I've been here long enough to see people come and go. I never know if they get sent to Rest or if they ever woke up."
Adam studied the girl. Sure, she may have looked much like Becky, but this girl looked a heck of a lot sadder.
"So are we… Are we like, prisoners then?" He asked.
Brandon laughed uncomfortably and the rest just shook their heads, "When my babe and I got here, we thought the exact same thing. Like we were getting punished or something," He walked to Elise and put an arm around her, "But there's something about this place that makes it feel like a second chance, y'know? We fucked up one time, and here we are, waiting to see if we can get past this and get back down."
Adam watched everyone and pondered on what he was being told. "Are we in Heaven?"
He expected them to laugh again, or shake their heads like he was the court jester. In truth, he needed to ask these questions to make sense of the reality he was in. To his surprise, they all answered at the same time and said a simple "No."
"They call it Suspension," Elise said, "It's the place where you're not alive but you're not dead either. Your life is up in the air. It might keep going up, or it might come back down. Either way you're not sure and it stays in the air, suspended."
"Wow that was very… well thought out."
"If you went to the Glimpse, you would've heard the same spiel, bro" Brandon sighed, "M'babe here's just got real good memory."
Adam got up and walked around his chair and ignored the eyes that followed him. He stood next to Jackie's chair and looked out the window. He expected seeing nothing but a painted horizon, but was astonished to see something that looked very real. It was beautiful, but it was far. There was so much brightness far off into the distance in contrast to the dingy atmosphere of the building they were cooped up in.
No wonder Jackie kept her eyes glued there. The outside looked like something they'd seen before, like something straight out of Earth. It was beautiful, and enticing, but most of all, it reminded Adam of home.
"If we're not in Heaven, does that mean that place over there-" Adam pointed to the cloudless fields, "Is that supposed to be Heaven?"
The kids behind them all stood and took a peek. Some of them gasped, and some sighed. Nobody spoke. No one seemed to know the answer.
Adam stared some more until he remembered one thing. He meant to keep it to himself, but it came out as a whisper, instead.
"How can I get my own Glimpse?"
~ . ~ . ~
A/N: Thank you for reading! Please leave a review and tell me if you liked it. If you hated it, you can leave a review to tell me to. If you just simply don't like it, you can leave a review too.
[Confession: I'm starting to lose ideas on how I could finish this story, and my guess is that no one actually reads this story, so if it gets shittier, I'm sorry, because that might be me quitting a little bit]