“Tiffenie, I’m not going to give you up to the parliament.” He sounded exasperated. “I just want to see you.”
“FaceTime is good enough, but thanks for the offer.”
He didn’t say anything for a beat, swallowing his disappointment. “So how’s the drive? Is your progeny behaving herself?”
“About that…” I glanced at the coffin.
Vlad sighed. “She didn’t wake up, did she?”
“Not yet. Does it take extra long sometimes?”
“Did you follow my directions?”
“Mostly.” Recipes are just suggestions.
“What did you do?”
“Well, I didn’t bury her. I just sort of…covered her up.” And I wasn’t about to tell him that I opened the coffin once or twice a day to unlock her phone with her Face ID so I could keep posting TikToks.
Vlad groaned. “Tiffenie, you have to follow instructions.”
“The point is to just cover them up, keep it dark. Right?”
“It’s about the soil,” he said. “You need the sacred soil of her homeland.”
“I don’t know, Vlad. Have you been to LA recently?” It didn’t feel very sacred or homeland-y, not to mention Instagram was more like Heaven’s homeland than the earth. “We’re not an agrarian society anymore. Maybe soil is less important.”
“You might be fine.” Vlad didn’t sound optimistic. “It’s a waiting game at this point.”
My stomach clenched. Please let him be wrong. Please. I didn’t want to arrive in Valentine with a dead friend. Not to mention, if she was dead I would definitely be arrested for murder. You can’t kill someone and then spend the next four days posting on their social media accounts. Even I knew that much.
Cat meowed loudly, complaining from the floor of the passenger side. After a week in a car with Cat, I understood why people took dogs on road trips.
Something moved inside the coffin. I strained to hear more, anything to confirm it wasn’t my imagination.
“Vlad, quiet. I heard something.” More rustling and then a knock. “She’s awake!” If I could have, I would have yelled “Hallelujah!”
“Well, that’s good. How much longer till you arrive?”
I glanced at the map app. “Six hours.” We’d be there well before sunrise.
“Don’t let her out till you get there.”
“Six hours—you think she’ll be okay?” I didn’t want her to start hernew life acting out a buried-alive nightmare.
“Just put on a podcast and keep going. You don’t have a choice. It should take her a while to gain full consciousness.”
Except for the podcast rec, he was right. I put my foot on the gas and turned up Beyoncé again. Upstate New York was only a hop and a skip from Vermont.
My excitement climbed with each mile we crept closer to Valentine. Heaven was waking up and we were almost home. Would I find a job? What would the townspeople be like? Where did Bernie Sanders live?
But I didn’t drive fast enough. We weren’t quite there when Heaven knocked from the inside of her coffin. “Let me out!”
“We’re almost there!” I called with forced cheerfulness, echoing parents of time immemorial.
“Help!”
“You know how you mentioned going with me to Vermont?” I called into the back seat.
