Inspired by real-life events, The Unexpected Afterlife of Salon Rose is equal parts thrilling murder mystery and bittersweet coming of age story.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Unexpected Afterlife of Salon Rose by Amy B. Scher, which is out now.
College hopeful Salon Rose arrives to the Nowhere in Between, a way-station between life and death, only to learn she’s been murdered. Returning to the life she had before is not an option, but before Salon can move on, she is determined to discover who was responsible for her death.
With the help of her new friends–all recently deceased–and maybe even a fresh crush, Salon must learn to let go if she has any hope of getting out of there. Even if it means confronting some hard to swallow truths.
EXCERPT
1
the first dead body i ever see is my own.
no.
no.
noooo.
you have got to be kidding me.
this cannot be what i think it is.
my body is arranged in a perfectly straight line on a shiny silver metal table. the tag on my toe says “office of the coroner, plainsville nj.” the fluorescent lights clinging to the water- stained ceiling are the only signs of life. there’s a mess of lunch-bag-brown files stacked up on the counter next to me, a jenga tower of folders. and next to that, an abandoned sweaty diet coke sits precariously on the edge.
my kryptonite.
i would kill for a sip right now.
the lights beam down on my translucent skin, which is
honestly not far from my natural coloring. i resent fluorescent lights. such an injustice to a girl’s complexion. they also remind me of school, which is exactly where i should be right now. i’d usually say that school’s the last place i’d ever want to be, but algebra 2 actually sounds delightful.
my long, blond hair is stringy and twirled out into a disheveled pile. it looks like a colony of worms trying to slide away. i should have washed it last night. my normally full, red cheeks that pop when i crack up (according to mom) are sunken and wilted. my mascara is smeared across my left eye, all the way to the bridge of my freckle-ridden nose. to add to the visual, i am as naked as the day i was born. but considering the current situation, i think we can agree i have much bigger problems to deal with.
because i am d-e-a-d.
dead as my beloved goldfish, swim shady, who perished last month in the infamous tank-tipping tragedy. she was on her way to the guinness world records for goldfish longevity at the ripe age of seventeen. eighteen is the record neither one of us will ever see now.
watching my body here like this is freaking me the hell out.
i am not supposed to be dead. i’m not even in the middle of my life yet. i have so much unfinished business (today alone, forget my fifteen-year life plan), it’s not even funny.
in this weird, floaty place—wherever i am—it’s light, but i feel totally in the dark. my body is on the table, but another part of me is still alive in this white space built of fog; except, it’s bright and translucent. it’s as if i’m on one side of a steamed-up window and my former life is on the other.
i don’t know how i’m seeing what i’m seeing.
i need to try and get out of here. but that seems way beyond my current skill level.
wait, i don’t even know… am i still attached to my body?
i mean, how do i get around?
more importantly, why am i here?
most importantly, what happened to me?
like, what the actual fuck is going on??
i once heard that our brains may continue to work for ten minutes after we die. which means in some way, we might actually be aware of our death.
i start to panic.
is that what this is right now? what if there’s been some glitch, and my brain has outlasted me? and now i’m stuck in some weird in-between world forever? where are all the angels and escorts and spirit guides that mom insists are always around when you need them most?
for starters, it would be nice if they could help me get to my phone. i think i hear it buzzing from somewhere in the distance. i probably have hundreds of texts piling up, a thought that honestly makes me feel like dying all over again. alive or dead, i refuse to be one of those people with 40,000 unread notifications.
also, where is my mom? to say i really need her is an understatement. i have to find her.
when my mom’s big brother, my uncle artie, died a couple years ago, mom started saying things like “he would have wanted me to use his camera,” and “he would love the dinner i’m planning.” one day, the week after he died, i caught her kneeling in the garden, wearing his oversized harley-davidson t-shirt and her floppy straw-brimmed hat, planting radishes for artie, honoring him in her daily rituals. did artie even eat radishes? i wanted her to sell the camera, eat all the radishes herself (which would be disgusting), and let us have mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner every night because uncle artie would never know. i love my mom so much that all i wanted was for her to stop elongating our pain and admit artie was gone. it made me sad that she believed so fully that artie was anywhere at all. the world stayed the same without him, and i needed her to stay the same, too. why would uncle artie care what was going on, anyway? although, he certainly would have wanted to know if we were smoking weed.
i thought when you died, you were just dead. fertilizer for the ground around you, or whatever. but here’s the thing about dead people that i didn’t understand until now: they do know what’s going on after they die. or, at least i know.
my mom would consider the irony of my postmortem realization completely hilarious. she’d comb her strawberry- blond waves out with her fingertips and tease me: “for all those podcasts and shows you listen to, salon, you really didn’t learn anything useful at all, did you?” after uncle artie died, she insisted that i’d developed an “unhealthy preoccupation with death” (her words, not mine). but it wasn’t that at all. i just think everyone’s grief has its own language. for example, mom spent hours watching online tutorials to learn the jasmine stitch—widely considered the most difficult crochet stitch to master. but for me, it was true crime podcasts, because getting lost in someone else’s story can give you a weird kind of break from your own. so, with mom and i, our distractions were obviously different, but the reasons we needed them were the same. we were both just trying to stay busier than the grief.
i study my body again in the morgue.
it hasn’t moved, which i guess is a relief. i feel like i’ve already started to look paler, sadder, and deader. god, i wish i had gone with my friend juliet to those laser sessions. i wish i was anywhere with my best friends right now. i wish i was anywhere but here.
rigor mortis lasts 24 hours. i don’t seem to be quite there yet, but it’s inevitable. in no time at all, i’ll be completely stiff. what if i get frozen in time and space? can you imagine? Will my entire existence fade away without resolution? would everything i’ve worked for be just one giant moot point forever?
my head hurts like there’s a rubber band tied around it a hundred times over—and there’s a whirling in my chest where my breath is supposed to be.
but i force myself to try to get it together. if i lose the plot now, there’s no coming back.
plus, i can still see some version of myself, so i must be … sort of semi-okay, right?
i remember how mom was always worried something would happen to me (slow down! be careful who you trust! you think you’re invincible!) and my boyfriend liam was the same. but i swear to god, those two worried about everything. let me assure you that prior to this, i was doing just fine. it was going to be a perfect summer—my last summer before college, where i would major in criminal justice and become a modern-day catherine willows, called to every major CSI investigation in my state. except, it turned out to also be my last summer, period. not perfect at all.
just last night, my biggest worry was which outfit to wear to the halloween in june party i was going to, even though my boyfriend liam had to cancel last minute with food poisoning. of course, i felt bad he was sick, but i mean, who orders the surf and turf at a diner right off the highway on half-price night?
my brain carries me back to when i first met liam almost two years ago—in french class, when the leaves were the colors of condiments. he won me over with his emerald-green eyes (only bestowed upon two percent of the population); messy, golden-blond hair; and the deepest dimples you’ve ever seen. it didn’t hurt that his french was impeccable, and he had straight As in the looks department. liam is the kind of guy who’s smart without trying and has good teeth without any intervention. he can convince anyone of anything with his mouth alone. he can almost form a smile without turning up the corner of his lips at all.
things started casually enough between us, when i’d stayed up too late again and fell asleep in class one monday morning. halfway through the period, i woke up to see that liam had moved seats to the one directly in front of me, protecting me from being found out by mrs. walker. when the bell rang at the end of class, liam passed me a page of notes from his notebook, filling me in on everything i had missed during my snooze. i thanked him profusely, but he only said a cool “aucun problème, mon ami,” like it was no big deal. he usually sat behind me, constantly tasked with picking up items i’d accidentally dropped—pens, gum, even a tampon once—returning each item with equal patience. before i knew it, i’d fallen hard for him—harder than when amy mcmillian, our school’s head cheerleader, tumbled off the human pyramid and broke both legs while eyeing liam for herself. no need to feel bad about amy, though, because when her legs healed, she fell in love with joey, the quarterback. it was tout est bien qui finit bien (french for “all’s well that ends well!”)
i was bummed liam couldn’t go to the halloween in june party last night, but i’m not gonna lie, a tiny (tiny) part of me was excited to spend the whole night with just my best friends. soon, i’d be without them for pretty much the first time ever, all the way on the other side of the country for school. so, the night was going to be all about us. then, i guess i died. and here we are.
how, though? did i fall into the pool at sarah’s party and drown? tumble off her terrace? choke on a twix on the car ride home? i always eat them too fast. why am i always so quick and careless? case in point: i’ve been in three very minor fender benders since i got my license (although only two were my fault).
still, this is extra, even for me.
yesterday, i was a normal teenager worrying about normal things.
today, what fresh hell is this?
a spark in the universe and everything changes.
wait, someone’s coming!
the door opens and a small, kind-looking woman in a white coat comes toward my body and stands by my side. she crosses her wrists behind her back and tilts her head, letting out a quick sigh.
“another young girl, dead before her time,” she whispers, shaking her head. “tragic.”
perfectly said.
from here, within this strange and new world, i know almost nothing at all. but here’s what i have so far: whether it was a ridiculous mistake or something else that killed me, it doesn’t matter. it will be over my dead body that i accept it without a fight.
oh, and hi. i’m salon rose, i’m seventeen years old, and this is the story of an unsolved mystery—but hopefully not for long.
