Michelle Falkoff - Playlist for the Dead

SamGoldsmith:Well, I know who it isn’t.

ArchmageGed:Are you sure?

Sure I was sure.

SamGoldsmith:Look, I don’t know who you are or why you’re doing this, but cut it out. Things are crappy enough as it is.

ArchmageGed:Not messing with you. I’m here to help.

SamGoldsmith:What’s that supposed to mean?

ArchmageGed:Just what I said.

SamGoldsmith:I don’t see how you can help when you won’t tell me who you are. This was just too weird. Signing off now.

ArchmageGed:Wait, don’t.

And for some reason, with that, I had the sense that I really was talking to Hayden. I mean, I knew it was impossible, and yet it sounded so much like him, teasing me for a while but quick to get serious, especially if he could tell I was getting annoyed at him. My heart started racing.

SamGoldsmith:Are you ready to be straight with me now? Who are you?

ArchmageGed:I’m ArchmageGed.

Interesting. He hadn’t said he was Hayden.

SamGoldsmith:Prove it.

The cursor blinked. The air in the room seemed to grow colder, and the goose bumps rose on my arms again. I looked at the clock on my computer screen. Somehow it was two in the morning. I’d been sitting here for hours and hadn’t even realized it. Hell, I was probably hallucinating; I’d barely slept in days, and it didn’t look like I’d be making up any ground tonight.

And then, all of a sudden, a song began playing, the music streaming through my computer speakers.

It was that Skylar Grey song I’d never heard before from the playlist. But the playlist had stopped playing hours ago. The room had been quiet since I turned off the game. The song felt almost like an assault on the silence.

ArchmageGed:See?

SamGoldsmith:That doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t even know that song.

It was some chick I’d never heard before, and I had no idea why Hayden would be listening to her.

ArchmageGed:That’s the whole point. There’s a lot you don’t know. But I want you to.

SamGoldsmith:So tell me!

But the cursor just kept blinking.

SamGoldsmith:Are these songs supposed to mean something? Seems pretty obvious to play me some dumb chick music about invisibility when I can’t even see you.

ArchmageGed:Lots of people want to be invisible. Maybe they even think they can pretend to be. But someone always sees.

Now the hairs on my neck were standing up. I must have looked like a plucked chicken. A scared, probably hallucinating chicken. But the thing was, whoever this ArchmageGed was sounded an awful lot like Hayden. Especially because I had no idea what he was talking about.

ArchmageGed:You’ll figure it out.

As if he’d read my mind.

ARCHMAGEGED HAD ME SO FREAKED OUTthat I got almost no sleep the rest of the weekend, and I was terrified to turn on my computer—I wasn’t sure whether I wanted the Gchat window to pop up again. In the light of day it seemed clear to me that there was no way it could have been Hayden. Better to focus on things that were real, like the fact that I had to go to school.

For my first day back I put on my favorite jeans, a zip-up hoodie, and my Metallica T-shirt—one of their songs had come on the playlist as I was getting ready, and it made me think of Hayden. They were one of the bands we fought about; Hayden was strongly in favor of their stance against music piracy. “What if you spent your whole life working for something and people thought they were entitled to it for free?” he said. He didn’t have to add that he thought I’d understand, as someone who didn’t have a lot of money, but I knew he was thinking it. He always tried to be sensitive about the fact that his family was loaded and mine wasn’t, but sometimes there was no getting around it.

“If I was already a billionaire then maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal,” I said. “And it’s not like most of the money is going to the artists anyway. It’s all about making record companies rich. It costs nothing to distribute music electronically—this stuff should be dirt cheap by now.”

As usual, though, I was pretty sure Hayden was right. God, I missed fighting with him.

I walked downstairs to grab some coffee before school. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table in her scrubs, both hands wrapped around an enormous mug of what smelled like tea as I walked down the stairs. Tea meant she’d just gotten home from work and was about to go to bed. It was so weird to be on such different schedules. She gave me an up-and-down look as I headed toward the coffeepot, which she always put on for me and Rachel even though she never had any. She could be pretty cool like that. “Is that what you’re wearing?” she asked.

“Something wrong with it?”

She opened her mouth, paused, closed it, opened it again. “No,” she said finally. “I’ll see you at dinner tonight, and you can tell me all about your first day back, all right? And make sure to be on time—apparently Rachel is bringing a friend home.”

“A friend?”

“A gentleman caller,” Mom said, with one eyebrow arched.

“This should be good.” Rachel had horrible taste in boyfriends, and there had been a lot of them. Most of them never made it past the driveway, though, so she must be really into this one.

“Indeed. Now get to school—you don’t want to be late.”

That was debatable, but I left just in time to catch the bus, where I sat alone in one of the front seats, listening to my iPod. That was normal—I always sat alone. It wasn’t that I wanted to, necessarily, but for some reason it seemed terrifying to just sit down next to a random person. Was I supposed to talk to them? What would I say? As long as I could remember I’d been shy around strangers—not as bad as Hayden, but bad enough. I was fine once I knew someone, but I hadn’t really gotten to know anyone except Hayden, at least since I moved to Libertyville. I’d counted myself lucky to have made such a good friend, someone who made me stop feeling so lonely, and for years that was enough. Until it wasn’t anymore.

I’d imagined that everything would be different once Hayden and I got to high school. I felt like we’d both made progress in getting over our shyness; now we’d have a chance to expand our insular little world. In high school, I was sure, there would be a bunch of guys more like us—into gaming and music, maybe a little geeky but not total dorks—and they’d be our friends. Maybe there would even be some girls. Girls like Astrid.

And some of that had been true. Libertyville High was huge—it had kids not just from Libertyville itself but from a bunch of neighboring farm towns, and there were tons of kids who neither of us had ever met, some of whom looked like us and ran clubs that included stuff we were into. Gaming, comics, all that. But I’d counted on Hayden being on the same page as me, and as soon as school started, I could tell I’d been wrong. I couldn’t get Hayden to come with me to anything, and I was too nervous to go alone.

I figured out pretty quickly why Hayden was so inclined to hide out. Ryan and his friends were in my sister’s grade, so they were all juniors by the time we got to school. But Rachel was content to pretend she was an only child, ignoring me when we ran into each other in the halls. Not Ryan. We’d made it through the first few days of school without incident, happy in the knowledge that even though we didn’t have any classes together—I was in the Honors track, but Hayden was dyslexic and stuck in all the lower-level classes—we shared a lunch period most days. And on Fridays, we shared it with Ryan and his friends.