Damned

passive-aggressive.

Other kids went to Sunday school. I went to Ecology Camp. In Fiji. Other girls learned to recite the Ten Commandments. I learned to reduce my carbon footprint. In our Aboriginal Skills workshop, in Fiji, we used certified organically grown, sustainably harvested fair-trade palm fronds to weave these crappy wallets that everybody threw away. Ecology Camp cost about a million dollars, but we still all had to share the same filthy bamboo toilet stick to wipe our butts. Instead of Christmas, we had Earth Day. If there was a Hell, my mom said you'd go there for wearing fur coats or buying a cream rinse tested on baby rabbits by escaped Nazi scientists in France. My dad said that if there was a devil it was Ann Coulter. If there's a mortal sin, my mom says it's Styrofoam. Most times they'd spout this environmental dogma while walking around naked with the curtains open so that I wouldn't grow up to become a little Miss Whorey Vanderwhore.

Sometimes the devil was Big Tobacco. Sometimes, Japanese drift nets.

Even worse, it's not as if we traveled to Ecology Camp aboard sampans, gently pushed along by the Pacific currents. No, every single kid got there on a separate private jet, burning through about a gazillion fossil-fuel gallons of dinosaur juice the likes of which this planet will never see again. Each child was borne aloft; provisioned with his or her body weight in organic fig bars and free-trade yogurt snacks sealed within single-use Mylar packaging designed not to biodegrade before the future date of NEVER, all of this burden of homesick children and between- meal calories and video gaming systems would rocket toward Fiji at faster than the speed of SOUND.

What a fat load of good that did... now look at me: dead from a marijuana overdose and damned to Hell, scratching my cheeks raw in an attempt to convince my next-door-cell neighbor I suffer from communicable psoriasis. Surrounded by a million-million stale popcorn balls. On the plus side, in Hell you're no longer slave to a corporeal self, and this can be a blessing to the truly fastidious. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you've no more of the tedious, endless stoking and scrubbing and evacuation of the various holes required to keep a physical body functional. Should you find yourself in Hell your cell will feature no toilet nor water nor bed, nor will you miss them. No one sleeps in Hell except as a possible defensive posture in retaliation during yet another punitive presentation of The English Patient.

No doubt my mom and dad meant well, but it's really hard to argue with the fact that I'm trapped within a corroded iron cage boasting a scenic view of a raging excrement waterfall—actual poop, I mean, not just The English Patient—NOT that I'm complaining. Trust me, the last thing Hell seems to need, in a coals-to-Newcastle way, is one more complainer.

Yes, I know the word excrement. I'm trapped and bored, not brain damaged.

And it was my parents who told me to act out, a little, and experiment with recreational drugs.

No, it's not fair, but I guess the worst thing they taught me was to hope. If you just planted trees and collected litter, they said, then life would turn out okay. All you had to do was compost your wet garbage and cover your house roof with solar cells and you'd have nothing to worry about. Renewable wind energy. Biodiesel. Whales. That's what my parents considered our spiritual salvation. We'd see approximately a quatrillion Catholics throwing incense at some plaster statue, or a billion-zillion Muslims all lined up on their knees and facing New York City, and my dad would say, 'Those poor ignorant bastards...'

It's one thing for my parents to behave all secular humanist and gamble with their own eternal souls; however, it's altogether not all right that they also gambled with mine: They placed their bets with such self-righteous bravado, but I'm the one who lost.

We'd see Baptist people on television waving baby dolls impaled on wooden sticks and dripping with fake ketchup blood in front of some doctor's clinic, and I really could believe that all religions were way-bat-shit loony. In contrast, my dad always preached that if I ate enough dietary fiber and recycled any plastic bottles that had a neck, I'd be fine. If I asked about Heaven or Hell, my mom gave me a Xanax.

Now—go figure—I'm waiting to get my tongue yanked out and fried in bacon grease and garlic. Probably demons plan to stub out their cigars in my armpits.

Don't get me wrong. Hell isn't so dreadful, not compared to Ecology Camp, and especially not compared to junior high school. Call me jaded, but not much compares to having your legs waxed or getting your navel piercing done at a mall kiosk. Or bulimia. Not that I'm a totally eating-disordered Miss Slutty von Slutski.

My biggest gripe is still hope. In hell, hope is a really, really bad habit, like smoking cigarettes or fingernail biting.

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It's an addiction to break.

Yes, I know the word tenacious. I'm thirteen and disillusioned and a little lonely, but I'm not simpleminded.

No matter how hard I try to resist the impulse, I keep hoping I'll still have my first menstruation. I keep hoping I'll grow really big boobs, like Babette in the adjacent cell. Or reach a hand into my skort pocket and find a Xanax. I cross my fingers that if a demon dunks me in a vat of boiling lava I'll get thrown together naked with River Phoenix, and that he'll say I'm cute and try to kiss me.

The problem is, in Hell there is no hope.

Who Do I Think I Am? In a thousand words... I don't have a clue, but I'll start by abandoning hope. Please help me, Satan. That would make me so happy. Help me give up my addiction to hope. Thank you.

IV.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I thought I saw you, today, and waved madly like some fevered groupie to get your attention. Hell continues to unfold as an interesting, exciting place, and I've begun to learn some rudimentary demonology so I won't feel like an idiot forever. Really, there's almost no time to feel homesick.

Today I even made friends with a boy who has dreamy brown eyes.

To be completely technical about the matter, time in Hell doesn't consist of days and nights, only a constant low-light condition accented by the flickering orange glow of flames, billowing white clouds of steam, and black clouds of smoke. These elements combine to create a perpetual rustic apres-ski atmosphere.

Recognizing that, thank God I wore a self-winding calendar wristwatch. Sorry, Satan, my mistake, I said the G-word.

To all of you alive people walking around, taking your multivitamins and busy being Lutheran or getting colonoscopies, you need to invest in a good-quality, long-lasting wristwatch with day and date functions. Don't count on getting any cell phone reception in Hell, and don't think for a second you'll have the forethought to die with your charger cord in hand or even find yourself locked inside a rusted jail cell with a compatible electrical outlet. That doesn't mean go buy a Swatch. Swatches equal plastic, and plastic melts in Hell. Do yourself a big favor and invest in a high-quality leather wristband or the springy expandable metal kind.

In the event you neglect to equip yourself with an adequate wristwatch, do NOT scope out some bright, proactive thirteen-year-old chubby girl wearing low-heeled Bass Weejuns and horn-rimmed eyeglasses and then keep asking her, 'What day is it?' and 'What time is it?' The aforementioned intelligent-albeit-beefy girl will simply feign looking at her watch, then tell you, 'It's five thousand years since the LAST time you asked me that....'

Yes, I know the word feign. I may be a tad annoyed and defensive, but—no matter how nicely you ask with that wheedling tone in your voice—I am NOT your little timekeeping servant bitch slave.

And before you make the effort to give up smoking, take note that smoking cigarettes and cigars is excellent practice for being in Hell.

AND before you make some snide remark, based on my general temperament, that I must be 'riding the cotton pony' or suffering from a 'red-letter day,' need I remind you that I am dead, deceased, and rendered eternally pre- pubescent and therefore immune to the mindless reproductive biological imperatives that, no doubt, shape every living, breathing moment of your crummy living, breathing life.

Even now I can hear my mom saying, 'Madison, you're dead, so just calm down.'

Increasingly, I'm not sure to which I was more addicted: hope or Xanax.