Richard Kadrey: Dead Set

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s me.” Zoe limped over and dropped onto the edge of her broken bed. Her mother came and knelt beside her, moving her hands over Zoe’s face, her arms and legs, checking to see that she was still intact. Zoe winced when her mother touched her shoulder. Her mother drew her hand back.

“We should get you to a doctor,” she said.

“And pay for it with what?” Zoe asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” said her mother. “I’ve got a job now.”

“Listen, Mom,” Zoe said, feeling down beside the bed. Every part of her hurt, but there was something left to do. “Everyone in the building probably just heard that window break and someone’s already called the cops.”

“Good,” her mother said. “Let the cops do something useful for a change.”

“When they get here, I’m going to tell them it was a crackhead who followed me home from school the other day. But that’s a lie, okay?” She looked into her mother’s eyes and saw growing fear and suspicion. “The other night when I told you about seeing Dad and Valentine in Iphigene, and Queen Hecate and Emmett, you said you believed me, but you didn’t really, did you?”

Her mother rubbed Zoe’s back in small circles. It was a comforting feeling, something she’d done when Zoe was a little girl and sick. “I do believe you. Mostly. I want to believe it.”

Zoe nodded. “It’s okay. I know how crazy it all sounds,” she said. “But it wasn’t a crackhead who broke in here tonight.” She handed her mother the Polaroid photo she’d picked up off the floor. “It was Emmett,” she said.

When the police arrived, Zoe told them the story about the crackhead. By the time he’d escaped to the roof, the crackhead must have panicked and disappeared. She told the police that he’d made all kinds of disgusting sexual remarks and threats the day before. She told them everything she knew they wanted to hear. The cops nodded and took notes without seeming particularly interested in any of it. Before they left, they gave Zoe’s mother a little card with a case number on it. The one thing the cops did that made Zoe grateful was shoo away the other tenants who’d clustered outside the apartment door, gawking and trying to get a look at the crack girl.

When everyone was gone and she’d locked the apartment door, Zoe’s mother took the photo of Ammut from the pocket of her robe and stared at it as if trying to force a rational answer out of the flat, overly lighted image. Finally, she dropped it onto the living room table and shook her head. “I believe,” she said. Then she turned to Zoe and asked, “Did you throw all my cigarettes away?”

“Yep.”

Later, when Zoe fell asleep on the couch, there was nothing but peaceful blackness. She didn’t dream at all, or if she did, none of it was important enough to remember.

That Monday, while Zoe was getting ready to go back to school, the insurance company called. They’d located her father’s paperwork and were finally processing the claim. Considering how important that had been to her at one point, it felt sort of weird and anticlimactic.

They didn’t bother with the story about a sick relative. Zoe was still bruised and scraped enough when she went back to school that her mother gave her a note about a car accident during a family road trip.

“I hope everyone is all right,” said the woman in the school office who took her note. She was a nice older woman who wore a gray sweater over a white blouse covered in small yellow flowers. Pinned to the blouse was a silver rhinestone pin in the shape of a fluffy cat. Two greenish-yellow rhinestones set into the cat’s face served as its eyes.

“That’s a nice pin,” said Zoe.

“Thank you, dear. It reminds me of my poor deceased kitty, Fuller.”

“I once saw a snake with green eyes like that.”

The woman gave a shudder. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t like snakes.”

“Neither do I,” said Zoe.

The school day passed in the same vague way that they’d all passed before she’d left. The classes weren’t bad. They just hadn’t become any more interesting while she was gone. Besides, she knew she could pass most of them by reading the textbook the night before any big tests, so she didn’t worry about it. The teachers were all coolly polite when she handed each the permission slip allowing her back into each class. Some clearly didn’t remember that she’d even been in their class, which, she had to admit, made sense considering how much school she’d cut in the weeks before she’d followed Emmett into the sewer. The good news was that since she’d allegedly been in a car accident, she was exempt from making up all the homework she’d missed. Each teacher gave her an outline of what the class had covered during her absence. None of it looked very hard. Zoe had no doubt that she could get caught up with most of her classes by the weekend.

Mr. Danvers’s class was in the afternoon and she was nervous about going back. Did he know that she’d stolen from him? She hoped he wouldn’t make a scene in front of the whole class.

He’d just finished taking the roll when she entered the class and handed him the permission slip. Zoe kept her gaze on his desk until he spoke.

“Our wanderer’s returned. How are you doing?” he asked. When Zoe looked up, he was smiling down at her.

She relaxed a little. There wasn’t going to be a scene after all. “Pretty good, thanks,” she said.

“You look like you were doing stunts for the next Mad Max movie.”

“I feel like it, too.”

He signed her form and handed it back to her. “I’m glad you’re okay, Zoe. It’s good to have you back.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll get you the information on what you missed after class. Stick around for a couple of minutes, okay?”

“Sure,” she said, and headed for her seat in the back of the room. She didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone else in class, so she looked at the anatomy charts on the back wall. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Absynthe and turned to give her a rueful little smile. Absynthe had added purple extensions to her hair while Zoe had been gone. They looked really nice over her blue hair. Absynthe pointed to her face and lifted her hands to mime What happened? Zoe mouthed, “Later,” and sat at her usual seat in the back.

After class, Zoe hung around while Mr. Danvers copied some notes from his lesson plans for her. When he handed them to her, he said, “Don’t go getting in any more accidents for a while, okay? You don’t talk much in class, but it’s nice to know that at least someone smart is out there listening.”

She tried to suppress the smile that wanted to break out on her face. Instead she blushed and said, “Thanks. I’m not going anywhere for a long time.”

After stashing her books in her locker, she went outside and around the corner of the building to Absynthe’s secret hangout. The other girl was there already, smoking a pink Sherman Fantasia.

When she saw Zoe, she jumped down from the steps and hugged her, then took her hand and looked her over appraisingly at arm’s length. “Let me get an eyeful of you,” she said. After checking Zoe out for a minute, she said, “Scars on children are wolves in their skin; the scars of young lovers are the moon shining in; old scars are the damage and the medals we win.”

“Who said that?” asked Zoe.

“Nick Valéry, an old poet who wanted to fuck Patti Smith. It didn’t work.”

“What does it mean?”

Absynthe drew her over to the steps and they both sat down. “It means you’ve got a story to tell me,” she said. “What the hell happened to you? I was starting to think you were dead or kidnapped by a satanic cult or something.”