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“The passenger train approaching Platform 3 is not for the living. I repeat, the passenger train approaching Platform 3 is not for the living. Please do not attempt to board this train if you identify as a living person. Thank you.”
What a weird fucking message.
Darby Harper wondered if anybody else had heard it. She looked around, but everyone seemed to be going about their business, paying no mind to the creepy announcements about trains that carry the dead.
She shrugged off the heavy backpack and dropped it on the ground between her Chucks, accidently pulling off her jacket in the process. She and Capri bent down to pick it up at the same time.
“No, I got it. Here.” Capri Donahue looked anything but nervous.
On the other hand, Darby was shaking like a leaf. She’d helped hundreds - no, thousands - of Deados cross over into an afterlife that she couldn’t even fathom. But none of them had ever taken a fucking train.
Darby cleared her throat awkwardly. “Thanks.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out what she needed. The four small items that Capri had instructed her in collecting over the past month. Darby had no idea what they meant or how they were all connected, but Capri insisted that they were needed as fare for the train. Whatever that means. “They’re sort of heavy all together, so be careful-”
Capri Donahue picked them up with ease, waving her perfectly manicured fingers in the air and pulling the objects from Darby’s grasp. They hovered ceremoniously in the space between them, as lifeless and magical as Capri Donahue.
Darby counted them all again, just to be sure. The feather (‘Clean, Darbs, I need a clean feather - gross!’ ), the old quarter (‘what part of 1996 confuses you? I thought you were supposed to be good at math, Jesus Christ’), the nail file (no explanation for this one ), and the old, original print, really hard to find, seriously made Darby want to tear her hair out, hardback copy of a book called Lost Dreams From Alliance Boulevard (‘this looks boring as hell but I can’t board the train without it Darbs - yes, it HAS to be hardback’ ). It took Darby two months to find that book. There was only one printing of it forty or so years ago and it wasn’t very well received. She’d visited estate sales and old libraries until she happened across a listing on eBay just last week. It arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon. That was the heaviest item.
Capri was right - it did look boring. 807 pages of absolute misery.
Darby’s mind wandered back to when Capri had appeared in Darby’s bedroom a few months ago, talking faster than humanly possible about, "a train that can carry Deados to the afterlife and then back to the realm of the living," and the part that worried Darby the most, about the fact that "there are apparently SCHOOLS there - SCHOOLS, DARBY - not that I want to spend eternity in school or whatever, but they could like, teach me how to be an even better ghost. I could maybe even learn more about what my purpose was while I was living and get strong enough to do what you do, Darbs. I could learn to also help people cross over."
Darby didn’t realize just how much she was going to miss Capri until she was faced with the possibility of not having her around. She had tried to convince her that it was a terrible idea; she had never heard of this train before and didn’t know where it would take Capri’s ghost, much less if she’d ever be able to return.
All of her convincing, and it hadn’t worked.
Darby shook her head to clear her thoughts.
“Are you ever going to tell me what all this is actually for?” Darby asked. She could feel the ground vibrate under her feet as the train approached.
“If I make it back, I promise I’ll tell you everything.”
Darby felt like reaching out and shaking her by the shoulders, but she knew there was a good chance that her hands would pass right through the ghostly image of Capri. “When, Capri. When you make it back. Not if. ”
“Yeah, yeah, when.”
“And you’re not scared? Not even a little bit?”
The train pulled up to the station then, and Darby looked around. Most people didn’t notice it at all, but there were a few who did. They made their way toward the platform that Capri and Darby stood on. Darby realized they must be Deados.
The doors to the train slid open.
Capri took a deep breath and smiled. “Do you see that, Darby? Can you feel it?”
“Feel what?” It looked like a normal train to her, waiting at a normal train station.
“That breeze. The lights. Definitely different, clearer, brighter. Even the air smells different coming from inside that train.”
Darby felt her heart begin to race a thousand miles a minute. She felt like she was going to throw up. “You don’t have to if you don’t-”
“I want to. I want to do this. It’s going to be fine, Darbs. I promise.” She smiled one of those million-dollar smiles that could get Darby to do just about anything. Even let the person she loved the most board a train to literally nowhere. God, she wished she could reach out and touch her just one last time.
“Just promise me you’ll come back, okay?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die. Again.”
She smiled and walked toward the train doors, stepping in with ease. The items she’d taken with her, those mysterious magic tokens that she wouldn’t explain the need for, vanished the second they crossed the threshold into the train.
Darby scanned the windows until she saw Capri take a seat near a window, on the side facing the platform where they once stood together. Capri’s eyes found Darby immediately. She wiggled her fingers in a lighthearted wave, her gaze never breaking away from Darby’s even as the train pulled out of the station.
When she was too far away to hear, and all but impossible to see, Capri smiled once again, and Darby could just make out the shape of her lips, mouthing the words, “Bye, bitch.”