Beautiful Dead

by Eden Maguire

  Copyright © 2010 Eden Maguire

  Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover illustration by Julia Starr of http://night-fate.deviantart.com

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900 Fax: (630) 961-2168

  teenfire.sourcebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hodder Children’s Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Excerpt of Beautiful Dead: Summer

  About the Author

  For my two beautiful daughters

  Phoenix Rohr changed me. He exploded into my life like a bright shooting star out of a big, dark sky and lit up my world. Before I met Phoenix I was a half person—unfinished and scared. Afterward, for a few short weeks, I was whole.

  He held me together against the rough world, my hand in his, his arm around my shoulder.

  The truth is, people in my world have a habit of losing their lives—four kids from our school in one year. It makes for intensity—every day you grasp what you’ve got and live it. Love, and sex, and sharing each moment. I held on to Phoenix like he was my savior.

  And then it shattered. I lost him—three small words. He was in a fight and he died.

  I looked for him everywhere. I drove my car out of town through the shaking aspens and tall redwoods to where the jagged hills joined the sky. “Phoenix.” I whispered it a thousand times. His name was all I had.

  Phoenix—the fourth on a roll call of students who would never return. One—two—three—four hits to the heart and the last one was the worst by a million miles. “Phoenix.”

  I clung to memories. His kisses, his touch—midsummer days when we swam in Deer Creek, evenings when he would turn up the sound system in my car and drive us out to Hartmann Lake, with me resting my head on his shoulder and trying to count the stars. For a time I was scared that I’d forget.

  Then the wings of angels, ghosts, spirits in limbo—whatever you want to call them—began to beat. And Phoenix came back.

  I don’t want to talk with anyone. I need to be alone.

  OK, so everything worked out for Jonas—and that was partly down to me. But I still hold the fate of three Beautiful Dead in my hands. It’s true—I do. Arizona, Summer, and Phoenix. Arizona, Summer, Phoenix. In that order—the names run in my head like a mantra.

  “Darina, I wish you would stay home more. We could do stuff—have a pedicure, go shopping.” This is Laura, my mom.

  “Darina, you have to quit driving the convertible. It eats gas.” My stepdad Jim.

  You get the picture.

  “Meet us at the mall. Lucas and Christian will be there.” Jordan and Hannah. Chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheep chickadees.

  And Logan Lavelle. “Darina, why don’t you hang at my place like we used to? I have a cool new DVD we can watch.”

  Back off, all of you. Leave me alone. My body language ought to have done it, but these guys are too thick-skulled to read it. Or maybe they care about me.

  I drive the car anyway, way out through Centennial, always in the same direction toward Foxton. Into the mountains, rising sheer on each side of the freeway, blocking out the blue sky.

  I blast music into the quiet air. I put my foot on the gas.

  Speed is the key to lifting the weight from my shoulders, leaving everyone behind. Drive, baby, drive! I’m in among the burnout area. Miles of forest fire have left black, twisted stumps, fallen trunks, gray earth. In ten years maybe green stuff will start to grow.

  I’m out of the tree carnage, pushing higher into the mountains and the redwoods are green again against the pink rock, and I’m shedding my heavy secret. It’s sliding from my shoulders because out here nobody can pressure me. I’m safe.

  The beat of the music pounds my eardrums. Guitars whine. I yell the lyrics as I grip the steering wheel and lean forward in my seat. Lip gloss–red bodywork and creamy beige leather with silver trim. Brandon Rohr showed expensive taste when he found me this car.

  I pass Turkey Shoot Ridge, ten minutes from Foxton. Thirty minutes from the Beautiful Dead.

  I guess I’m fixated. I know I am. Every moment, every breath I take, I long for Phoenix, his eyes reading what’s in my head and heart, his arms around me. Why can’t I be with him twenty-four/seven? I want to know.

  Here’s Foxton—a straggle of wooden houses, a general store with boarded windows, an intersection without a traffic sign. I take the side road, past the fishermen’s cabins overlooking the racing water where Bob Jonson finally took revenge for Jonas’s death—he forced Matt Fortune off the road and they both smashed against the rocks and drowned. They took Matt’s Harley back to Charlie Fortune and he fixed it up for himself to ride. I shudder when I think about that.

  Don’t think about it, Darina. Drive on.

  I’m clear of the houses and the road has turned to dirt. There’s nothing beyond this point, so I need to get out of the car and go by foot along the path the mule deer made when they headed for the stand of aspens on the ridge. This is the fifth (maybe sixth) time I’ve driven up here since Jonas left, and I always meet silence and emptiness. The wind blows through the aspens but there are no wings beating, no force field telling far-siders like me to back off.

  Phoenix, it’s me. Where are you? I need to see you.

  When he holds me in his arms my heart steadies. It’s the only time I feel I’m home.

  If I carry your secret much longer, I’ll fall apart. Tell Hunter, tell the others, I can’t do this alone.

  I climb to the ridge, and I’m out of breath as I stand in the shade of the rusting water tower. You can look through the trees down into the next valley and never see the old barn. The aspen leaves shake and rustle—like wings? It’s beautiful, really beautiful—the aspens and the sloping hillside, yellow spikes of Indian tobacco plant standing out among the silvery meadow grass. And the big, big sky.

  But, no, I’m still not hearing the sound of beating wings—only the thump of my own heartbeat and the rasp of my breath, and I get no sense of Phoenix and the Beautiful Dead. I look for him as I stride down the slope, look so hard that maybe I miss the obvious and fail to spot his tall, still figure by the barn door, turned to me and waiting. He will be there, if wishing and longing can make it happen.

  My legs swish through the grass. I crouch and crawl under the razor-wire fence. And I can see straight into the barn because the door is swinging open like always. “Phoenix?” I say out loud as I step into the darkness. There’s the dust smell in my nostrils and the stall partitions rotting and leaning at crazy angles. Ancient horse tack is hanging from hooks. Cobwebs trail from rafter to rafter.

  “Please!”

 
Let’s get this straight. This is where the Beautiful Dead hang out. They don’t let you see them unless they want to. In fact, they need to be secret, to keep out people from the far side—that’s you and me—or else they’re…I was about to say “dead,” but that would be weird. I mean, Phoenix, Hunter, Arizona, Summer, and the rest are history already. They’re revenants, come back from the dead.

  The barn was empty—I checked every inch, even the hayloft, where narrow shafts of sunlight fell across the rotting floor. This was where I’d first glimpsed Phoenix, in the center of a chanting circle—the Beautiful Dead and their overlord welcoming him back from limbo. Bam!—my mind exploded. By the time I gathered the pieces, my dead boyfriend was part of Hunter’s gang and he had his death mark to prove it. An angel-wing tattoo between his shoulder blades, where the knife went through.

  Phoenix, come back! I pleaded.

  I left the barn and walked across the yard, hope draining from me. “Hunter!” I yelled. “This is you doing this. I hate you!”

  The zombie overlord kept them invisible. He wasn’t ready for me to see the Beautiful Dead again. He would take his time, let them gather their strength after the Jonas thing. And you should also know that they have no free will and Hunter rules every single thing they do. Even though he stayed invisible, he heard me saying I hated him, right there and then. That’s another seriously useful superpower he has.

  I decided to appeal to his softer side, though I knew he didn’t have one.

  “Hunter, please. I miss Phoenix. It hurts like hell.”

  No answer as I stood by the flatbed of the rusty truck. Still no answer as I stepped onto the house porch and peered through the grimy window. I made out the rocking chair by the kitchen range, the table covered in a hundred years of dust. I turned the handle and shoved with my shoulder against the locked door. “Hunter, I hate you,” I murmured.

  A month earlier I would have walked away and told myself that the whole zombie thing was crazy. It was what grief was doing to my fevered brain—making me see things that weren’t there. I mean, how else do you cope when the person you love most in your life gets stabbed in a fight and dies? Loss doesn’t cover that feeling. You need to cry and hit out at the same time. You fall down the deepest, darkest hole and the sides are smooth and there’s nothing to cling on to. According to Kim Reiss, the therapist Laura sent me to see, this is when the brain is most likely to play cruel tricks.

  But that was four weeks back. Since then, I’d time traveled and come up with the answer to the mystery of Jonas Jonson’s death, and I was a true believer. So I knew Hunter the zombie overlord was definitely holding out on me and stopping me from seeing Phoenix. He was choosing to stay away.

  “If you keep on like this, I won’t come back,” I threatened. I sounded like a wuss, even to myself. “You need me. I’m your link with the far side.”

  Silence and space—nothing else.

  “Arizona needs me,” I insisted. It was close to a year since she’d drowned in Hartmann Lake. “Her time is starting to run out.”

  The wind blew along the porch, lifting a loose board in the roof. I’d tried every trick I knew to make the Beautiful Dead come back, and all for nothing. Still I stayed for the whole morning, sitting in the cab of the ancient truck, staring up at Angel Rock.

  Finally I climbed down. “OK, you win,” I muttered, setting off up the hill. “Anyhow, I have a funeral to go to.”

  It wasn’t Bob Jonson’s actual funeral. After four in one year, I don’t go anymore. So I went along afterward to the wake.

  All the old bikers were there in their fringed leathers, with their goatee beards and their wild gray hair. The Harleys were parked in a half circle outside Bob’s favorite bar. I was underage, so I hung out in the parking lot with Jordan, Lucas, and Logan.

  “This is too sad,” Jordan said. There were tears in her eyes. A lock of wavy dark hair fell over her face. I was waiting for shy-boy Lucas to put an arm around her shoulder and comfort her.

  He didn’t make a move so I stepped in and handed Jordan a Kleenex.

  “You were there, Darina,” she said. “You saw him ride over the cliff.”

  I nodded. “It wasn’t an accident. Bob forced Matt to skid over the edge, then he revved his engine and rode after him. He definitely wanted it to end.”

  “It’s still too tragic,” Jordan insisted. “The guy had his revenge. He didn’t have to die.”

  “Yes, he did.” Logan spoke, not looking at Jordan, but right at me. “There was nothing else for Bob, not after Jonas was killed. Life was hollow. He was always at my place, drinking with my dad. I personally watched Bob fall apart. Right, Darina?”

  I nodded again. “Did Jonas’s mom make the trip from Chicago?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. She flew down with her sister. They’re inside with the guys.”

  “How did she look?” Jordan asked.

  You can lose your son, then split with your husband because he’s crazy with grief, but you can still care. And the proof is—she came to the wake. “How do you guess she would look?” I asked.

  Other kids from Ellerton High were showing up. Someone turned up the CD player in his car and began blasting out Bob Dylan from way back. A track called “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

  “Bob Jonson would be cool with this,” Logan said.

  The song’s bleak words made me want to cry but I’d handed Jordan my last Kleenex. Instead, I stared at the shiny metal tubes and tanks of the motorcycles and tried to remember how totally happy Jonas and Zoey had been.

  “Why are you smiling?” Jordan asked impatiently. “You’re weird, Darina.” She walked away, with Lucas trailing behind.

  “No, you’re not,” Logan assured me, trying to stick a Band-Aid on what he supposed would be my shredded ego. “I know where you’re coming from.”

  I stared at him. “You think you do, Logan, but you don’t!”

  There’s backstory here between me and Logan, which means I push him away whenever he tries to get close. To be fair on myself though, he definitely trades on me knowing him since kindergarten, living on the next street, and him buying me a white orchid corsage and taking me to our first prom—like we’re always going to be that close, Disney bluebirds in the trees and wedding bells in the distance. Not!

  I caught the hurt look in his eyes, the hand running uncertainly through his curly brown hair. Then he went into damage control. “Well, no one knows exactly how another person is feeling—obviously. But no way are you weird.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, spotting Zoey’s mom dropping Zoey off in the parking lot. Zoey was still in a wheelchair, but her hair was styled and colored and she was looking good. I went right across to talk with her.

  “Hey,” she said softly.

  I tried to pinpoint the way she smiled at me and scraped up the word wan. I must have read it somewhere. “Hey, Zoey,” I replied. She looked small and fragile in the wheelchair beside the monster Dynas and Softails. “I guess this is hard for you?”

  She nodded. “I came because of Jonas.”

  “Have you still got his Harley buckle?” I asked. With Zoey, there was no ice to break. We just jumped right into the stuff that mattered.

  Raising her sweatshirt, she showed me that she was wearing it on her belt.

  “What do you think, Darina—that Jonas and his dad are together now?”

  “Big question!” I shrugged. “It depends what you believe.”

  There was a long silence. A couple of long-haired, badgewearing, Bud-toting guys came out of the bar and sat astride their bikes. Two women wearing tailored black jackets and black trousers stood just inside the door. I recognized the fair, petite one as Jonas’s mom.

  “What do you believe?” Zoey wanted to know.

  What did I do now? Did I shrug the question off, or did I give her what she wanted to hear? “I guess they are,” I mumbled.

  “Together,” she repeated with a sigh. “You’re not just saying that?”

&nbs
p; I was sidestepping here. I knew for certain that Jonas had split from the group of Beautiful Dead the day his dad died—next stop freedom and peace for them both. That was the way Phoenix had explained it. But I couldn’t breathe a word to Zoey. “I believe it,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Have you ever had a secret so big that it screamed to get out every time you opened your mouth? I pictured myself jumping up onto the saddle of one of the Harleys, stretching my arms wide, and yelling, “Listen to this, all of you! Jonas and his dad are cool. They’re free. They got the peace they wanted. Be happy for them!”

  “Darina—are you OK?” Zoey asked.

  “I’m good,” I lied.

  Luckily she moved on. “There’s Mrs. Jonson. Should I talk to her? What do you think, Darina?”

  “I say yes. Do you want me to tell her hello, get her to come over here?”

  Zoey shook her head. After multiple surgeries to fuse her spine in the places where it was broken in the Jonas crash, it was still an effort for her to raise herself out of her wheelchair and take slow, unsteady steps toward the door of the bar.

  The kids in the parking lot did the decent thing and tried not to stare. One of the gray-haired bikers straddling his Dyna put down his beer, went up to her, and said, “Hey, let me help.” Together they went up the single step into the doorway.

  Haley Jonson flinched when she saw Zoey, then set her face in a smile. “Zoey, look at you!”

  Zoey spread her hands like she’d performed a magic trick. “Ta-da!”

  “Hey, that’s great,” Haley said, her voice choked, her eyes filling up. She stared at Zoey for a long time, maybe thinking, If someone had to survive the crash, why couldn’t it have been my Jonas? A dozen emotions fluttered across her pale face, then she took Zoey’s hand. “It’s good to see you,” she whispered at last.

  “Did you hear?” Zoey murmured. “Darina finally helped me remember exactly what happened.”

  “Honey, stop!”

  Zoey dropped her gaze.

  It was as if everyone in the bar and the parking lot were holding their breath, waiting for a break in the unbearable tension between Jonas’s mother and his girlfriend.