B.C. Johnson - Deadgirl

“That’s not good,” she said, softly.

“It’s over,” I insisted. “Over.”

We walked on, and near the gate to the parking lot, I saw Wanda and Daphne and Sara, waving to me. Morgan held a hand up, and I did the same. They glanced at each other, as if debating something. Then they waved again and walked off. They hadn’t exactly been avoiding us…I hoped they were just giving us a little space.

“How’s your mom?”

Morgan shrugged. “I thought she would freak worse…I went to a party while I was grounded.”

“Yeah, well, mortal peril does wonders on the mother-daughter relationship. I highly recommend it.”

She laughed a little at that. That little laugh gave me some hope. For us. For her.

“How’s Zack?”

I rubbed my face. “I don’t know. He’s been…distant. Really weird. Like—”

“Stop.”

“What?”

Morgan looked behind me, hard. My eyes popped open, and I rotated on my heel. Zack. Jogging toward us. Morgan tapped me on the shoulder, waved to Zack, and walked off toward my mom’s car. I waited for Zack to approach me, trying not to burst into a terrified run in the opposite direction.

“Hey, Luce,” he said, and slowed down.

“Hi,” I said.

“Would it be possible to meet you somewhere? Tonight, I mean?”

I glanced toward my mom’s car.

“I really doubt it. Not the way they’ve been.”

“Nowhere? Not for coffee or…anything?”

I clutched my hands together.

“I don’t—”

“It’s…important.”

“How important?” I said, trying to be playful. I failed miserably.

“Very. The most.”

I looked toward my mom’s car again. The Goblin mobile.

“I’ll try,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

Zack nodded, turned, and walked off again. Not a word. Not a goodbye. He looked nervous…not half as nervous as I felt. My body was buzzing with electricity. The walk to my car took forever, or no time at all.

We went home. Mom followed me from the living room, up to my room—she helped me find clothes to change into. Luckily she didn’t follow me into the bathroom—I washed my face—but she was right there, sitting on my bed pretending to rifle through a copy of Bust magazine. She escorted me downstairs, then into the kitchen, where she made me sit down while she fixed me an after school snack.

I didn’t think much. I couldn’t. Because my thoughts were for Zack, and they were jumbled, nerve-wracking, and poison-tipped. I knew they would take me down if I let them. If I tried to guess or speculate or wonder. Or think. Thinking was the worst.

Mom handed me a paper plate with a peanut butter and honey sandwich on it. She sat down next to me with an identical sandwich. She asked me about my day, and I told her enough boring things to make her stop asking. I wasn’t hungry, which was no surprise nowadays, but I devoured the sandwich quickly. The trick I’d learned from Puck seemed to be helping—the more I forced myself to eat, the more I showered, the more I went to the bathroom when I didn’t have to, the slower I burned away. Mundane anchors, props for pretending.

Other than stealing a little sorrow from Mom and Dad, something I hoped was a blessing, I’d lived mostly off the residual heat from Zack. Maybe I can do this , I thought. Maybe I can nip and peck. Maybe I can make it.

I went into the living room to find something on TV—with Mom—and plopped into the cushions with wild abandon. Halfway through an old episode of 30 Rock my cellphone beeped. I glanced at my Mom—she looked at me with terror disguised as good-natured curiosity. I took my cellphone out and wasn’t surprised to see Zack’s name. I punched ignore. I put the phone back in my pocket.

“Well?” Mom asked.

“Well,” I said, and took a deep breath.

“What?”

“I kind of need to know the limits of our arrangement here.”

“We have an arrangement?” Mom asked her eyes wide with fake-innocence.

“I need to know what it would take to meet Zack for coffee somewhere.”

Mom’s lips twisted.

About forty-five minutes later, I walked up the handicap ramp toward the front of the Starbucks just down the street. It wasn’t hard to find Zack—I spotted him through the window. Hell, I didn’t even need to use my eyes to find him anymore. Part of him still lived in me, just a gentle banked coal now, but still there. I went inside, took a brief stop at the counter to order a drink that was more dessert than coffee, and then sat down across from Zack at a little square table. The Starbucks was blissfully empty. Probably a first.

Zack gave a little, strained smile, and glanced out the window. He looked back at me and shook his head.

“That’s your arrangement?”

I followed his gaze out the window. My dad’s car was parked just outside of the coffee shop—I could barely make out the faces of Mom and Dad, staring at us through the windshield. I turned to Zack, my lips turned in a playful smirk.

“What?”

He shook his head and snorted. “Nothing. Makes perfect sense, actually.”

We talked a little, about nothing. Well, maybe not nothing—comparing the lies we’d told the cops, which had been pretty damn close without even having to coach each other. And what had happened with our parents. Zack’s father had berated him for the better part of a day about handling situations like old crazy guys in cars, but after that had become almost as smotheringly defensive as my parents.

We didn’t talk about Abraham. We didn’t talk about the Grey Meadows. We didn’t talk about Puck—who I had seen only briefly since, standing outside of the hospital as my parents were taking me home. He was fine, just a long silhouette in the shadows of a tree, one tweed-clad arm raised in a half-wave. That vivid red scarf at his neck, whipping in the gentle breeze, the outline of his crazy static-shocked hair glowing with the dim yellow arc-sodium light. A smile on his face, both happy and sad. Reserved.

We didn’t talk about what happened in the train, while I was recruiting Ophelia. I’d spoken with Morgan already about that, and she’d told me a horrible story about their train, surrounded and under siege by those twisted, jerking corpses. They pounded and moaned and whispered things…Morgan barely got through the story. She’d told me that something in Abraham’s light, when he’d tried to erase me, had revivified Zack. And her, too, when we moved to her room. At least, that had been Puck’s explanation.

Our small talk expended, Zack stared at me across the table, I couldn’t help but shift uncomfortably under the gaze.

I couldn’t bear the wait. He wasn’t speaking, and his eyes drifted between mine and the table in front of him. Finally I reached across the table, my staked-out parents be damned, and squeezed his hand.

He flinched. I let go.

“What’s going on?” I asked him. I felt a hitch in my throat.

He looked down at the table.

“I had to see you,” he said. “In person.”

I felt the color run out of my face, and I felt a cold trickle drip into my stomach. His face, so handsome, yet pale and drawn. He looked like a man about to vomit, or maybe one who just had.

“I—”

“What is this?” I asked him. He was beginning to blur. The entire Starbucks was beginning to blur.

“I don’t know,” he said. “When I woke up in the hospital room—”

“That’s over,” I said. I tightened my jaw. I tried to swallow, but it was like downing a fistful of dry crackers, “Stop. That’s over now. All of that is over—”

“It’s not that…it’s not what happened. It’s not Abraham or post-traumatic stress or fear or anything like that—”