Free My Way to Hell by dakota cassidy Page B

Marcella frowned.
    “You wanna play army with me?”
    Like her ass wanted cellulite. “Maybe another time.”
    “I’ll let you have the general.”
    Superfly. “I think I’ll have to pass.”
    “But the general’s the best guy in the army.”
    “I thought colonels were the big guys.”
    Carlos giggled again, strangely sweet and almost infectious to her ears. “That’s stupid. The general’s the biggest guy in the army. Mine has five stars,” he gloated.
    So? I can walk through walls. “I’ll try to remember that. But no, thank you. Don’t you have some friends you can play army with?”
    For the first time, he looked away, casting his eyes back down at the green figures while his slight shoulders shrugged. “No.”
    It wasn’t as much the word “no” as it was the flat tone of his response that made her heart jerk. “You don’t have any friends?” Didn’t eight-year-olds hang out together in grimy, snot-nosed packs, playing video games and soccer?
    “Not really.”
    “I know how that feels.”
    “You don’t have any friends either?” His face brightened—like they’d just bonded over their social ineptitude.
    “Nope.” Not any that could see her, anyway.
    “It sucks sometimes.”
    The impulse to reach out and soothe him by ruffling his hair grew intense with a rush of lonely sympathy. Marcella fisted her hands at her sides instead. “Sometimes.”
    The skitter of fingers against Carlos’s bedroom door made her jump. “Carlos? Dinner. I make you tamales. Hurry so dey don’t get cold.” Footsteps, light and brisk, made their way down what Marcella supposed was a hallway.
    Carlos slid off the edge of the bed, his legs clearly reluctant. “I gotta go eat. Will you be here when I come back?” His gaze, dark and longing, was so hopeful, Marcella almost couldn’t breathe from it.
    She bit the inside of her mouth. At the rate she was going, who knew where she’d be by the time he had tamales splattered down his crisply clean shirt? Yet she didn’t have the heart to tell him no. The thought actually hurt. Hurt. “I’ll try, but I can’t promise. I sort of just show up, you know?”
    He placed a small fist around the doorknob. “Yeah. I know. ’Bye, Marcella,” he said, the flat tone of his words returning. Carlos let the door close with a soft hush against the red carpet covering his floor.
    “’Bye, Carlos,” she whispered. Watching his bright-orange-clad back disappear from view gave her an inexplicable pull, a sad throb of her heart, making more tears well up in her eyes.
    Jesus. What was it with all the crying? Was this some kind of afterlife payback because she’d skipped through menopause with nary a night sweat to her credit?
    Swiping at her eyes with her thumbs, Marcella gave one last glance around Carlos’s bedroom. The bright primary colors that graced the walls, the mobile of army planes that hung from the fan on the ceiling all beckoned her to sit at the edge of his bed, making her want to take the knitted blanket on the bedpost and hold it to her nose so she could deeply inhale this child’s scent.
    Since when was she into snarfing up the sweaty, toe-jammed odor of some kid she didn’t even know?
    Fuck-all if she didn’t need to get back to Plane Dismal and head straight for some of those classes she’d been too busy moping in the first time around to garner any helpful information.
    Surely, in one of them, there was an answer to this pathetic melancholy she was experiencing—this rush of hormonally imbalanced fucked-uppedness.
    Maybe they had afterlife estrogen patches.
    I’ll take a full body one, please .
     
     
     
    “Joe, I don’t get it. I want to help. I really do, but I’m lost. You show up here, throwing around random words and euphemisms, and look at me like I should know how they translate to what it is you need. This is the second day in a row you’ve done it. So, care to explain in complete sentences how exactly I can help you?” Kellen dragged