First things first
I died in a cold morning, but don’t fell sorry for me, this is not a sad story. Who would think that I would be much better in the afterlife? There are no days or nights, no hunger, no thirst, nothing to make me feel uncomfortable! I love not having a body anymore, can you imagine? However, there are the memories and they simply do not go away; trust me, I tried. So, as I have a pen, why not write about them? Why not try to understand my actions from another perspective? But don’t get me wrong, this is not a story of regrets whatsoever. To be honest, I am bored; that’s the only reason I write.
First things first, you need to know me and what had dragged me to the day I died.
Physically, I was not really pretty. I had quite regular facial features, nothing that stood up. If I could pick something on my body that was definitely my favorite, it would be my hair. You got to understand, even when you live in a big city for almost your whole life, like I did, you never get used to some types of hair. I could have had rainbow hair, short hair, channel cut, but I opted for keeping it natural. Trust me, a long and hydrated hair sometimes is more eye-catching than a bald girl. Enough about it.
Before I died, I had two distinct lives. In New York City you’d know me as Katie, always hanging out with my friends, shopping, drinking coffee in Times Square or getting in a cab heading wherever we wanted. Skipping classes was so easy and so fun that my uniform was more like an opportunity to be creative to change it in many ways, than anything else. I’m sorry, I wanted to be a fashionista. My friends and I would love to go to Central Park to watch a really sketchy and alternative band play for free, not because they were that good, but because they were that good, if you know what I mean. They were older, cooler, and sometimes so handsome, that we couldn’t stop ourselves. Tyson was in this band and he is the reason I had a second life.
My family was not the wealthiest of New York, but still we had a lot of money. Since I was born my parents provided everything I needed, paying for my education and hoping for a bright future. I was an only child living in Lincoln Square, so imagine when they discovered I was dating a guitarist of an unknown band that lived in Bronx, whose apartment he probably struggled to pay for. That was so cliché, but so true… when they found out I said I would never break up with him, even though I knew he was a cheater and a drug dealer. Can you blame me? I was trying to find my spirit in that concrete jungle, and all that silly stuff you get to see in the movies, finally believing that I belonged somewhere. In the end you will see I really belonged in the kingdom of the dead and nowhere else. I couldn’t maintain that passive aggressive war against my parents, Tyson was arrested a few weeks after we started going out. I was with him so I was also taken to the police station.
Being arrested in the age of 16 kind of changed the way my parents saw me.
“Ok, Katie, this is enough for me”, my dad said when he personally went to pick me up in the police station. I never saw Tyson again, or heard about him. He didn’t have parents to pick him up, though.
“What’s wrong with you?”, my mon asked, almost crying. I bet she could have made a list to answer her own question, but instead she convinced my dad to do something much worse.
They could not allow me to turn into that sort of problematic teenager, no. That’s why they sent me to Vermont to study in the Menkins Academy for Successful Students, the M.A.S.S, or, as the students like to call it, “my ass”. You will find out soon enough that by “successful students” they meant “kids with rich parents”. It was far enough from Tyson, and any other problem maker. M.A.S.S. was a boarding school with the promise that everyone there would do nothing but study and succeed in life. Or in death, in my case. My second life began when I got there.
In M.A.S.S I was known as Kathleen Degarmo or simple Mss. Degarmo, the lonely bullied girl with no especial ability that would get in trouble at least once a week. My life in Vermont was not that bad, as I contemplate it here in the afterlife, it could’ve been worse. But let’s be honest: I only died because I went to that school. My parents couldn’t have known, of course, but being arrested with my delinquent boyfriend was not compared to what happened to me there. Yes, Tyson could have killed me or addicted me to dangerous drugs, but he didn’t. He was not the case of my death. You’ll be surprise when I tell you… if I tell you. Until then, nice to meet you.
