This is the second version of this. Please review. Feel free to leave crits.

Summary: Laurel Bastian is shot and killed during a robbery gone wrong. After she dies, she is sent to purgatory where she lives out her time there as a shoulder angel. She is assigned to a young boy who is arrested for a drug-related murder he had no part of. She has to guard the boy throug this trial while trying to influence him to be good and ward off his neurotic shoulder demon bend on making the boy a hell-bound criminal.

Rating: Teen (PG-13) For language and scenes of breif violence.

I always pictured Purgatory as a pale white waiting room where you sat and did nothing but wait. In truth, it is anything but that. As the cliché goes, it cannot be described in a matter of words, but maybe my story can help clear up some of the fog.

“There we go, all done” I smiled, patting the seven year old girl laying in the bed before me. She looked at me through teary eyes, her lip red from biting it. “You did good,” I added, gathering the wrappers that needed to be disposed of. I had just placed an IV into the girl, as part of her pre-operative care. Despite having given her a medicated cream to numb her hand she was still terrified. Luckily for me, she had calmed down once the needle punctured her skin and she realized that it didn’t hurt. For that, I gave the kid some credit. She let me put an IV into her better than most adults I had taken care of before deciding to focus on pediatrics. “The anesthesiologist and your doctors will be in shortly to speak with you,” I paused, pulling a sticker I kept in a perpetual collection in my pocket with my free hand and handed it to her, “For being such a trooper. But you can’t put it on until you wake up, okay Nicole?” The girl nodded, giggling as she took the sticker.

“Spongebob!” She cried happily. Her reaction made me smile again I placed my hand on her shoulder,

“Good luck now.” I bid her before smiling at her nervous mother and left the room, disposing of the wrappers and my gloves.

“Laurel!” I turned my head sharply, startled at how loud my name was used.

“God Jim stop doing that!”

“Laurel you’ve been here since six this morning, go home.” The doctor was used to my habit of pulling constant double-shifts, and he often tried to send me home if I was staying too long. Most of these efforts were done through an attempt to ask me out on a date.

“Oh you know me, I live here.” I replied with a silly grin.

“You’re going to burn out. I’ll have Wendy cover you. You’re going home if I have to carry you out of this hospital myself.” I sighed, accepting defeat.

“Fine. See you bright and shiny in the morning.” I smirked again and he reached out to touch me,

“One day you’ll let me kiss that grin of yours.”

“Sure Jim.” I waved him off, leaving as demanded.

“So is that a yes?” I rolled my eyes a bit, looking bad at him.

“Goodnight. Jim.” It took only a moment to gather my things and find myself outside. I got out my cell phone, not much up for going strait home and dialed Rachael. She was my closest friend, an outgoing hyper woman whom I’ve known my whole life. I often teased her that she was the “whitest black person” I knew, even her family would tease her about the fact. But she knew it was only lighthearted. Originally from Pennsylvania she took her revenge on my by picking on my Boston accent. Though it was not very thick, it was easily noticeable to someone who wasn’t from the area.

“Hello?” Her accent wasn’t as thick as it used to be when we were kids, but I would have thought that spending most of her life in Boston would have gotten her to start dropping her R’s and dropping her Gs if they appear at the end of a word.

“Hey Ray, its Laurel”

“Hey Laurel! Someone actually got you out of that hospital for a while?”

“Very funny. Wanna’ meet me at the usual place?”

“Wow not only did you leave that hospital you’re being social! Did you hit your head?”

“Oh you know how I am, I probably wanged my head a few dozen times today on something and just don’t remember.” I heard her laugh a bit, and after a moment we said goodbye and I headed for the subways. I descended the stairs, greeted by the scent of urine but I no longer really noticed it after years of taking the T. The route to my destination was so habitual that I didn’t think about it, dropping a token into the slot and heading to my station to wait for my train which was not as crowded as I had expected. Several stops later I reached Park Street and walked the few blocks to meet with Rachael who was already sitting at the bar. The place was a dive, and not among the more popular bars so the place only had several people there making my friend rather easy to find. “Hey Ray.”

“Laurel! Walking among the living sporting a stylish set of scrubs.” I rolled my eyes, hopping up onto the barstool next to her.

“Oh you know, they’re all the rage now. Well how was your day?”

“Not bad, the kids were actually behaving today. Though Tommy got into a fight with Eric today, so I had two kids with bloody noses to take care of.” Rachael was working at a daycare center while she attended a local college to get her degree in elementary education.

“Again?

“I don’t know what to do with them! But Tommy’s mother is into that ‘free spirit’ thing. She thinks that she should just let him be who he wants to be, no matter what he does. So she doesn’t discipline him for anything that he does. The kid is only four and he’s a total tyrant! And we can’t do much about it, she’s already threatened to sue us several times for punishing him for misbehaving. It’s not like we do anything extreme! A time-out is healthy for a kid once in a while so they learn a little restraint.” Our conversation was interrupted by the barman asking what we wanted.

“Just a Guinness.”

“Bud for me.” Rachael chimed in her usual cheerful tone before turning back to me as the man went to get our drinks. “But little Sarah is so cute! She drew a picture of me with all the kids around me. She doesn’t like Cathy so she drew someone in the corner with scribbles and she told me ‘Miss Darrel is a poopie head!’ I couldn’t help but find it hilarious. Cathy is a bit of a bitch.”

“You’re great with the kids though. You’ll make a great teacher!” I nudged her and she gave me a light punch on the arm,

“Just a year of school left! You’re lucky you only had two years.”

“Yeah. But I’m thinking of going back to get my Bachelor’s.”

“Then go for it.” I shrugged a bit, deciding to change topics.

“So, how did your date go with that boy, Cory?”

“Corbin. And it was nice! We went to the north end to eat, then we went to Lowe’s to see a movie. Kind of a romance novel cliché date, but it was great. I’m seeing him again on Friday.” Something in the tone of her voice told me that she had already taken quite a liking to him.

“Excited?”

“Yeah! He’s wicked nice, and so hot!” She laughed, especially at the look I gave her.

“Well I’m happy for ya. Hopefully things work out well.” We continued to talk for an hour before I began to feel the effects of having worked a fourteen hour shift and I was surprised I had even managed to go to the bar. “Well I’m exhausted, I’m gonna head home,” my words muffled by a yawn.

“If you didn’t live in that hospital you’d have a little more energy. Saturday you and me are having a girls night out, no excuses. Okay?”

“Okay okay, Saturday we go out. Have a good night!” We hugged before I left and headed back to the Park Street station, heading to the red line. I had used my last token when I got off at Park Street so I headed towards the kiosk to buy more tokens. Being later at night there usually were very few people there and I saw only one person outside the kiosk. I usually was rather unaware of my surroundings, the pattern of how to get home was so routine to me I didn’t need to think about it. As a result, I didn’t realize that the man was fighting with the vendor.

“Just hand over the fuckin’ cash man, and no one’ll get hurt!” My attention was grabbed by that, and I froze where I was. I couldn’t make out the voice of the vendor, the sound masked by the kiosk he was in. “No fuckin’ excuses! I swear I’ll blow your fuckin’ face off!” That unmistakable sound of a gun cocking followed. That split-second click that had to be the most intimidating sound known to mankind. The sound was different in reality than in all those movies. The sound alone brought my heart rate higher than it already was, the hard pounding in my chest so fast it was hard to distinguish if it was beating at all. My breath hitched, and the gun was suddenly pointed in my direction.

That gun was all I could stare at, that black horrifying machine. Everything around me was blurry except for that gun, my mind couldn’t even wrap around the fact that it was pointed at my face. I wanted to put my hands up and fall to my knees, anything to show him I was harmless. But I couldn’t move, I was frozen as I was. I couldn’t even find my voice to scream.

“You! Who the fuck are you!” I took several breaths, fighting to find my voice. I noticed the gun tremble, watching it twitch as if it were having a seizure. “I ain’t havin’ a skinny broad go runnin’ to the police after this. I ain’t goin to fuckin’ prison!” My throat tightened, and a squeak managed to form before my trembling voice returned to me and the sensation of talking made me feel like I was going to vomit,

“Please don’t kill me. I won’t talk to anyone!” I was able to tear my eyes away from the gun, looking up at the man and observed his face. He was scruffy, his face unshaved and his black hair a greasy tussled mess. I heard a loud bang, followed quickly by a second. My eyes squeezed shut and I fell back, hard. My head split with an instantaneous groan of pain so brief it was hard to register. I opened my eyes, trying to think of what happened. Everything was blurry and fell slowly into focus and I made no attempt to sit up. I thought for a moment that the vendor surely had a gun and had shot the gunman, and the pain I felt was a bullet grazing by my head. I pulled my hand away from my hand expecting to find it coated in blood. But once my eyes adjusted, I was met with a different sight entirely.

I saw what looked like myself, a crimson hole through the forehead with a pool of blood forming on the ground. The eyes were open in a blank expression and the arms were sprawled awkwardly. The gunman was gone, nowhere to be scene and there was no sign of the token vendor. From my angle I couldn’t see what happened to him.

“What… what happened?” I said aloud, narrowing my eyes.

“You’re dead.” I turned around sharply and found a tall figure standing there. They were wearing a pair of black pants, a black shirt, and a long black cloak with the hood pulled over their head, and in their hand was a long scythe. It was like staring at a more detailed picturesque of the grim reaper. The only fault was the strongly feminine voice that seemed to come from beneath the cloak.

“What?”

“You see that there? That’s you. You were shot in the head, and well… you didn’t exactly make it.” The figure clucked their tongue, “Such a mess.”

“What the hell was in that Guinness.” I crinkled my nose and placed my hand to my forehead.

“Last time I checked beer didn’t make you hallucinate. You got shot in the head, that’s part of your brain on the wall, your blood on the floor, and that’s your body so stylishly decorating the subway floor.” I started at the figure, lifting an eyebrow.

“I thought the grim reaper was, y’know, silent.”

“Isn’t folklore fun?” At that point the figure pulled back their hood revealing the face of a young blonde woman who couldn’t have been much older than myself. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and her blue eyes finished the out-of-place appearance of the supposed grim reaper. “Okay… speech time…” She cleared her throat, her voice sounding rather unenthusiastic. “Your tie to the mortal world has been severed. You must follow me… blah blah blah crap that doesn’t matter. Stay here for a minute. That poor little man in the thing over there, shot in the chest.” She tugged the hood back on and vanished into the kiosk.

I was left with only my thoughts again, and the first thing I thought,

“Huh… so the grim reaper is a blonde girl.”