“Can’t I just…really slap you?”
I gave her a sideways glance, “We’ll see how bad it gets.”
“Okay,” Wanda said, and her tone made me wonder whether she was joking or not.
As we left the class, Wanda turned toward me, her face blank.
“The sweater I borrowed from you last week got stained with spaghetti sauce.”
I sucked in a tight, high breath. Wanda grabbed my arm and led me out of the door.
The lunch crowd was assembled in the quad in their usual spots.
We lunched on a low wall in the shade of blocky juniper bushes, next to the central statue of Johnny Rebel, our anachronistic, out of place, but much beloved mascot. The "we" never changed—Daphne, Sara, Morgan, Jamie, and Will. They were in their usual configuration. I thought again about the odd mechanical sameness of high school.
Wanda broke off from me and skirted toward our group. Her speed and strange backward glance made me halt. It was the same look the guy in the toll booth gave Sonny Corleone before hitting the deck.
“Wow,” a voice said behind me, making me jump. “I didn’t suddenly turn into the Hulk did I?”
I turned around. Zack stood just behind me, his hands in his pockets. I gave him a wide, if admittedly brainless, smile. He returned it with his patented half-smirk.
“Why? Why do you ask?”
“Wanda ran away like I was going to grind her bones to make bread.”
“Are you?”
Zack shrugged, “I prefer tortillas. Mind if I take a seat?”
“With,” I said, but choked it off. My voice was abnormally high, and so I dropped it back down again, “With the guys?”
I waved over my shoulder toward the girls.
“Sure,” Zack said.
I hated him for a second right then—Zack never seemed nervous. If he didn’t like me, then he didn’t mind putting me in an awkward situation. If he
did
like me, then he had the poker face of a world champ.
Ugh.
I led Zack over to the group, trying not to look freaked out and thus broadcasting my freak-out on all channels. Morgan and Wanda picked up on it—they flashed me tiny sympathetic smiles. Daphne had her hands over her head and her voice raised in anger, talking to Jamie and Will. She wouldn’t have noticed a cow bell around my neck. Sara seemed as enthralled with her fervent speech as the boys were.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “Zack has a proposal.”
I gestured to him like Vanna White and stepped aside. He gave me an unreadable look and took a step forward. Daphne stopped mid speech and turned. Sara and the boys followed suit.
“Well,” Zack said. “I heard the plight of fair Morgan.”
He pointed an open hand at her, and I felt blood pulse behind my eyes.
“And I have a fairly unorthodox but unquestionably exciting plan. Who’s in?”
Daphne’s hand shot up toward the sky. Sara gave Zack an incredulous look, and Morgan raised her hand with marked reluctance. Neither Jamie nor Will looked excited by another male stalking up to their pack.
“I need at least three,” Zack said, turning to me. “For a consensus.”
I raised my hand at the wrist—my arm didn’t leave my side.
“All right,” Zack said. “Daphne, how well can you climb a trellis?”
Daphne flashed a wide smile and sat up.
“I already love this plan,” she said. “I’m for it. I’m
totally
for it.”
I shook my head, and we all crowded around Zack to hear his scheme. Zack tucked in close to me as he talked, his right side pressed up against me. My fears for the plan vanished. Then again, I didn’t hear most of it either, and my excitement probably wasn’t related to Zack’s strategic mastery, but I didn’t care. I listened to his voice, stared at the ground, and focused as hard as I could on the closeness of his body.
I knew right then, that tonight would be the happiest night of my life. The irony is that it was.
Chapter Three
Waking Up Is Hard to Do
The preparations for the night went in a blur. Hair, makeup. The skirt Benny talked about, the boots. I didn’t care about the source of the fashion advice anymore. I didn’t care about anything. I was the center of the universe—I was a flaring star in the night, burning brighter as I neared the explosive finale I had no comprehension of.
Morgan and Wanda were at my house after school. We all dressed and glammed up together, giggling, and laughing in fits of nervous energy. Daphne showed up before long, her route slightly
alternative
—she climbed through my second-story window with aplomb. Give it to Daphne for commitment. Black combat boots, black fatigue pants, a tight black tank top, and a long black coat with the hood tugged up around her pixie face. A small black backpack completed the outfit.
“You’re so
dead
, Lucy,” Daphne said.
“What?” I said to her.
“In trouble, silly.”
“What?”
“Oh forget it.”
I only gave her a few seconds of stare, to her credit. It wasn’t the strangest Daphne-occurrence, not by a mile. I shook it off and thought about the plan.
The plan enlisted Daphne as the phone-ninja—Zack’s phrase—and it was her job to connect a three-way-call from my house. Daphne would sacrifice her night and stay hidden in my bedroom, so my parents wouldn’t catch wise. She would then call Morgan on my house phone and then make a three-way call with Morgan’s mom. In theory, the plan was solid.
“And if there are any complications, I’ll text you on my new…phone, oooooh!”
Daphne produced the thing, a shiny silver touch-screen phone. I rolled my eyes at her.
Benny, on account of his junior-ness, picked us up in his mom’s minivan. Not the coolest ride, but spacious and certainly more effective than the Shoelace Express. Morgan had her permit, but that wasn’t terribly helpful in any situation that didn’t involve driving her mom to the grocery store.
The front seat was empty—it looked like our fates were predetermined. Zack sat alone on the bench behind Benny, and their friend Marco sat alone behind Zack. When the sliding door rolled open, Benny’s voice ratcheted up to its usual explosive volume.
“Morgan! How do you feel about shotgun?”
I glanced at Morgan, and she hid her surprise well. Benny and Morgan had been friends for years, and he’d never shown any signs of interest. Well, any
abnormal
signs of interest. Where Morgan and her Aphrodite looks were concerned, the distinction was necessary.
“Sure,” she said, and slid into the front seat.
I hopped in next to Zack. It was an impulse—most of me wanted to stand there until he invited me up, but something in me, the part that yearned for caution, had broken. I clicked the seat belt in place and gave him a sideways glance.
His brow was crinkled and his tan skin sported a light sheen. Everything else about him was normal, but the look on his face was only shocking because of its uniqueness—Zack was nervous. Part of me thrilled at the thought of seeing behind his calm façade—part of me quailed in terror. To know that maybe it wasn’t all in my head. The thought was crazy, but I’d wanted Zack for so long that I think I was afraid of what would happen if I actually got him.
Wanda slid timidly into the seat next to Marco. Neither of them looked ready to be on a triple date, and shared identical looks of tension.
“Get the door, Luce?”
I reached out and trundled the big sliding door closed. Right as it
whumped
shut, I felt Zack’s fingers slide over mine against the seat cushion. My breath caught with a jagged gurgle.
Wait
.
The feeling of his hand on mine—
Wait.
When I turned to look at him, I felt the hot explosion in my stomach, a would-be-rapist’s bullet slinging through my body—
Wait
.
Zack smiled at me. I touched my stomach, where hot blood oozed through the ragged hole in my shirt and welled up through my fingers. Zack’s smile didn’t falter as I raised my red fingers to the sickly yellow light streaming down from the streetlight overhead.
No.
I shook my head. I was in a van, not an alley. On my way to the movies.
The light streaming through the windows gave the blood a maroon tint. It all seemed so unreal—
It is unreal, Lucy.
—that I felt a strange urge to smell it, or taste it. The pain in my chest quadrupled, and Zack’s face began to sag. Finally he noticed the blood, and he cocked his head to the side.
“Luce?”
“I’m…fine.”
“I think you’ve been shot, Luce,” Zack said to me, his eyes glancing toward the ground. “I think you’re dead, Luce.”
“No,” I said. I tried to wipe the blood on the front of my skirt, “No.”
“It didn’t happen like this, did it?” Zack asked me, the sad puppy-dog tone breaking my heart.
“No,” I said, and I felt my traitor’s voice breaking. “You held my hand last time. We watched some dumb action movie. You kissed me inside the theater in front of everyone. You told everyone we should date.”
I laughed, despite the catch in my throat, “You polled the audience.”
“What did they say?”
“Most people said we looked cute together,” I said. “One guy called you gay.”
“What did you say?”
“You know what I said,” I said. “I kissed you back.”
Zack smiled. “Yeah. I thought so. That’s much better. Better than this.”
I nodded and felt tears spill over and slide down my cheek.
Benny turned around, and Morgan too, but both of them faded into encroaching darkness. Morgan’s mouth was open—she tried to talk before the shadows stole her away. I heard Wanda make a little squeak behind me, and when I turned around, she was gone, too.
“Why are they leaving?”
Zack smiled again. A melancholy smile. An angel’s smile, I realized—beautiful, wise, but infinitely sad. Like he knew the course of the universe and wept at its passing.
“We’re all leaving,” Zack said, and leaned forward.
When his lips touched my forehead, I knew. They weren’t warm, they weren’t solid. It felt like wind brushing the hair out of my eyes. It felt nothing like the kiss in the movie theater. It felt nothing like the heady rush, the warmth of his lips, the taste of his sweat.
“I’m dying?”
The rest of the van faded away into darkness, until Zack and I sat on a disembodied bench seat in the abyss. My feet dangled over nothing. Maybe everything. I took a deep, rattling breath, waiting for his answer.
“Yes.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and kissed my forehead again. Nothing this time. Not even the gentle breeze. “Stand up, Luce.”
I did. My feet touched asphalt this time. The abyss was gone—we floated in a pool of yellow light, in an alley behind a dead office building. He held me to him, like dancing, and then he dipped me. We stayed there for a long time, him holding me just above the ground, looking down at me.
Then it wasn’t Zack anymore. Just a black shadow in the shape of Zack. The shape I loved so much. He let me down the last foot to the asphalt, slowly, gently, cradling my broken body draining rapidly of strength. When he set me down and stood up straight, I could barely even feel the jagged rock beneath me. I felt nothing, in fact.
“Buh…”
I couldn’t even form the word before the shadow winked out of existence.
I had no more tears to cry, I realized. Nothing but the slow pulse of my blood leaking out onto a dirty parking space. Then I went cold. Then I died.
Light. Welling. Heat.
Fire.
Hell?
No
.
Warm.
Content?
Drained away.
Drained away like a gas tank, like a pile of firewood.
A hungry flame took everything in its greedy mouth and swallowed it whole.
My eyes fluttered open again.
“What?” I whispered.
Overhead, the baleful yellow light glared down at me. I felt my fingers curl against the asphalt, raking my fingertips with jagged lines of pain. My butt felt flattened and sore—my spine felt like it had been stretched over a pile of broken glass. The back of my head, resting against the ground, felt raw and sensitive, and every tiny motion of my body sent an ache through my skull.
Blue above me. Daytime blue
. The golden light wasn’t the streetlight—it was too warm now, amber instead of perverse yellow. A cloud floated in the bright blue sky just above me, in the shape of a rabbit, or maybe one of those fat little pug dogs. I blinked. I raised my hands to rub my eyes against the glaring light.
I sucked in a breath and touched my stomach. I sat up, ignoring a racking stiff pain in my back, and looked down.
My shirt was still torn and stained with blood. I grabbed the edges of the hole and tore. The fabric ripped easily, revealing my bare stomach. Brown, dried blood flaked off of my stomach with the movement, but most of it clung tightly to my skin. I shuddered and probed at my abdomen with trembling fingers. I felt no sudden stab of pain, no aching sickness.
I touched where the hole that took my life should be. Smooth skin, beneath the blood. No scar, no puckered skin, no gaping maw. Just nothing. Just me.
Alive?
My eyes began to adjust to the day, and I turned my head to either side of me. Just parking lot, the office building with its empty, dark windows. In the distance, over the hedges that lined the parking lot, I could see chunks of the Set’s landscape against the sky.
I sat up, slowly at first, expecting some rush of agony or wave of dizziness, but I felt nothing. Nothing beyond the norm, anyway. I touched my stomach again, ran my fingers harder across the skin. Trying to find the pain. Some part of me wanted it to be there. Some sign, other than the blood, that it all wasn’t some dream.
But I felt nothing, other than my fingers and the crusted blood and a nagging terror that I was about to wake up.
I checked my pockets—I had my phone, my wallet, my keys. If I’d been robbed, someone had done a pretty crappy job. I turned my phone over and pressed the menu button. The screen didn’t light up. Dead. I made a sound in the back of my throat that I only just recognized as a stifled laugh.