Deadgirl

by B. C. Johnson

  “I’ll see you around, Sykes.”

  “I hope not,” Sykes said.

  I laughed and scooted out into the reception area. Right as I crossed the threshold I noticed plump little Ms. Crane sitting on one of the chairs just outside the conference room. My shoulders slumped.

  “We start today, don’t we?” I breathed.

  Ms. Crane smiled and stood up. I followed her to her office with all the Sykes-inspired goodwill leaking out of me. By the time I sat down in her oddly colorless office, it had hemorrhaged completely. She shuffled through a stack of papers on her desk before standing up, shutting her office door, and dropping back into her cushy-looking leather chair.

  She gave me a tight little smile.

  “Tell me about yourself, Lucy.”

  I slumped in my chair and started in.

  I’d been all crossed-arms and pinched face when she started, like I was waiting for a wave to crash me into. For the hammer to fall. Crane kept it light, though. Asked about my parents, what they did, how often I saw them. Was she trying to pin it on them? Runaway, product of a broken home? She was too damn pleasant and mild and unassuming to be mad at, though. It was like being interviewed by Mundane-Crap Magazine.

  The session passed faster than I thought it would. The intro with the principal and the time with Sykes had taken a chunk already, and I just began describing my home situation when the bell rang. She shook my hand and wished me a good day. I left the office in a slightly better mood—I hadn’t expected everyone to be so nice. Going to the principal’s office rarely foreshadowed a good day. I mean, so I’d read in books.

  I didn’t think of myself as a goody two-shoes—I’d managed plenty of mischief in my day. I guess the only difference between me and the problem kids was that I knew how to avoid getting caught.

  Art passed by in a blur—both Wanda and I were way too behind in our fruit bowl projects to be distracted by any talk. I was grateful, honestly—I wanted, more than anything, for everything to go back to normal. I was tired of being congratulated or pitied or fawned over or hugged.

  Wanda and I headed toward our lunch spot after class, chatting about our art projects and the weather. I spotted Zack sitting on a stone table at the edge of the quad, surrounded by his usual friends. His hair wasn’t done, I realized—his deep chestnut hair, normally bed-head mussed, lay rounded and out-of-the-shower frizzy across his skull. He wore a brown t-shirt and a pair of washed out jeans. He wasn’t participating in whatever group conversation was making Benny rave.

  His eyes were locked on the table in front of him—he fiddled with a bag of Cheetos without opening them.

  I touched Wanda’s elbow and nodded toward Zack. She gave me a knowing look and veered off toward our usual group. I sucked in a deep breath. Why was I so nervous about seeing him again after our amazing-turned-catastrophic-turned-manhunt date?

  As soon as I was in earshot, Zack’s entire table dropped into unrelenting silence. Another deep breath. Calm down, Lucy.

  Zack looked up at me last. When he did, I gestured toward the ring of grass just outside the quad. He gave me his Zack poker face and stepped over the low stone wall.

  I slid over the tiny wall after him, making sure to put my back to his friends—I didn’t need the worry of having to read his friends’ expressions, too. Zack looked down at me with those intense blue eyes.

  “Zack,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Zack stuck his hands into his pockets, “You didn’t answer my calls.”

  My heart leaped into my throat. He was angry. The set of his shoulders, his tensed arms. He stood evenly between both feet, motionless. A statue.

  I recoiled. Of everything, I hadn’t expected anger.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I didn’t really talk to anyone.”

  “Mmmhmm,” Zack said.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t talk to Morgan? Wanda?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I just… I didn’t.” I shrugged. “I didn’t know what to say. I texted you.”

  Zack blew out a stream of air. “You sent everyone that text.”

  I bounced a tight fist in my other hand. I followed every movement, every tremor, and turn of Zack’s body. He kept turning away from me, I noticed, offering me only one side of him.

  “What is it?”

  “I…we looked everywhere for you.”

  “I know,” I said. My cheeks burned. “I’m sorry. I mean, thank you. I don’t know. This is new for me.”

  “Me too,” Zack said. He crossed his arms over his chest, “I just… Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I didn’t call any—”

  “Forget it,” Zack said, trying to offer a wan smile. It was fake, grotesque even.

  “Stop it,” I said. “I’m sorry, okay. This is new for me. Being on Unsolved Mysteries isn’t my idea of a great weekend.”

  Zack offered a genuine smile this time, even if it just barely escaped his lips.

  “Can we start over?”

  My heart sank when he said it. What did that mean? All over? My eyes burned, and I growled silently in the dark reaches of my mind—I couldn’t cry. Stop it. Just stop it, you stupid girl. My fists balled into little white fists, but my voice stumbled over the hitch in my breath. Please stop. Just don’t cry.

  “O-okay,” I said, and nodded. When I dipped my head down on the nod, I made sure my curly mane of black hair curtained around my face. Hiding it as best as I could, hunkering back into it like a hood, “Just. Okay. All right.”

  I knew I shouldn’t have let Zack back into my thoughts. Shouldn’t have hoped that the smartest, cutest, most perfect guy would want someone like me. I was the weird girl who disappears during a date and shows up on a milk carton. I was Lucy Day, Damsel-in-Distress. Victim. Loser.

  My shoulders bowed, and I nodded at a question unasked. I turned to go.

  “W-wait!” He said, and grabbed my shoulder. I snapped back toward him.

  “Zack…”

  “I meant another date. Start over another date.”

  My ears went deaf. The hollow rush of blood wooshed through my head. My lips felt numb. It sounded like I said “What?” but I couldn’t be sure behind the mile of cotton jammed so suddenly into my head.

  “Another date?” he asked. “One preferably without a rescue team.”

  Somehow, my lips remembered how to smile. I’d gone drunk at the wheel, but someone on board still had a hand on the rudder.

  “U-unless that’s what you’re into,” Zack said. “Because I have a cousin who’s a lifeguard. We can go to the beach, pick fights with sharks, slap around the whales. It might be fun.”

  I laughed, and the grin he flashed made my brain melt. I found myself dangerously close to a swoon again—I couldn’t believe it. Two swoons within the same week. One more and I had to pack it in and become a full-time romance novel cliché.

  “Well?”

  “Yes!” I said. “I mean. Well, uh. Sure. That’s cool.”

  I went to stick my hands nonchalantly in my pockets before I realized I was wearing a skirt. I went for the cardigan, but it was too high up, and I ended up look like an old man trying to pull up his incredibly high pants. Zack laughed.

  “Did I mention how good you look today?”

  I beamed. I couldn’t help it.

  “Nope,” I said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “I’ll tell you in Spanish, then,” Zack said.

  “Cool,” I said, and backed away slowly. “Start working on a date idea.”

  He frowned, “What about the shark thing?”

  “Shark date is the third date,” I said. “I’m waiting.”

  Zack nodded and his mouth turned into his crooked grin. I turned and fled back to my group with as little speed as I could manage. I didn’t quite get the lazy stroll I was gunning for, but I accomplished something slightly under power-walk.

  When I get back to the g
roup, the girls were filled with dynamite. All of them bounced on their seats, pained faces screaming for details. I told them what happened, and they erupted in an atom bomb of girlish glee. Frankly, I found the whole thing disgusting. Or, I would have, if I hadn’t been jumping up and down like an idiot along with them.

  After pocketing the cash my mom loaned me for lunch, only marginally aware that not eating for three days was a strange thing, I headed to Spanish. I was packed with tightened springs—I was made of light. I thought of Zack, who liked me. No maybes, no faint hopes. No dreaded freshman Weirdness. He liked me. He didn’t want to be with Morgan, he didn’t want to go on a date with a cheerleader, or even Becca Darling, the brainy-but-sexy phenomenon in all of Zack’s honors classes.

  Me. My heart felt like a hot coal in my chest.

  Not everywhere else though, I noted as I made my way to Spanish. I hadn’t noticed it until then, but I was freezing. My legs felt like they had been dunked in ice. I blamed it on the skirt—I’d worn it as a universal go-to-hell to my own fear, but it was thin and the air was turning chilly. This wasn’t even California cold, the wussy cold that gripped me often. I felt like I’d eaten a bucket of ice cream and been dumped into a meat locker with the Abominable Snowman.

  I pulled my cardigan around me, which did next to nothing against the chill.

  The incredible fluffy lightness caused by thoughts of Zack made Spanish zip by. He sat behind me, as usual, but today we didn’t sit and pretend like the other didn’t exist. We’d taken Spanish One together freshman year, and had spent most of those days flirting, passing notes, and engaged in the standard Weirdness sports. This year had been awful. Awful until today, anyway.

  We spoke quietly to each other during lulls in the class. Mr. Halloway—Seńor Halloway, as he insisted we call him—even yelled at me at one point to quiet down. Both of us disappeared back into our verb conjugation worksheet, and I didn’t look up until a tiny square of ripped-off notebook paper floated onto my desk. I turned it over to see the small neat blue handwriting I knew to be Zack’s.

  You look really great today.

  Where is your cauldron and broom?

  I spun around, trying to decide between playful annoyance and joy. He locked me with a wily half-smirk and bent back to his worksheet. I flipped the paper over and scrawled a message on it. I watched him read it with a faux-shocked expression. He wrote beneath my message and slipped it back to me.

  I was late this morning and didn’t have time to do my hair.

  Well, either that or I’m victim to some kind of witch’s curse.

  Weird, huh?

  I smirked at him, but when I turned back to write my own note back I gave a quick up-and-down of my outfit. It was a little proto-Goth I supposed, but the glaring pink top had to count for something, right? Stupid boys. I scrawled something equally inflammatory back to him on the already-crowded slip of paper. He handed it back to me, and my breath caught.

  Benny is having a party at his place Friday.

  You should come with me.

  A party? I loved parties. And going with Zack would make it one of the better ones in recent memory. I wasn’t sure about the specifics, and I certainly couldn’t guarantee that as soon as my parents got over the we were so worried period and entered the how could you zone they wouldn’t ground me until next Christmas. It didn’t matter. I’d figure out the groveling later. I wrote an all-caps YES on the paper and settled into my worksheet with renewed, non-academically-inspired glee.

  The glee disappeared with Geometry class. I sat, trying to endure the combination of soul-sucking boredom and bone-shattering cold. I flirted with the guy who sat next to me until he let me borrow the huge life vest-like parka he was wearing. It helped a little, and I even managed to ignore the fact that I looked like a bright red marshmallow in the comically sized jacket. Well, that, and the knowledge that I had just set the women’s rights movement back a good three months with a few well-timed fake laughs and arm-touches. I was ashamed, but I was warmer, so I clung to that.

  When school ended the guy whose jacket I conned from him followed me half-way to my car before giving up. He started asking about my Winter Formal plans when I shoved the jacket into his hands, thanked him as sweetly as I could, and bolted to Mom’s car. I felt awful. Girls are evil. I admit it readily.

  I slid into my mom’s car and jammed on the heater before I even looked around. Morgan was already in the car—Jacket-Guy had kept me later than I had guessed. I explained the situation to Morgan and Mom, who laughed and scolded me, respectively. I kicked the heater up to max, unsatisfied with its agonizing slowness.

  “Hang on, Lulu,” Mom said, spouting a child nickname I didn’t particularly enjoy. “Relax! It’s not that cold.”

  “Pssh,” I said. My teeth were rattling.

  “I told you to wear something else.”

  “Mom!”

  We drove in relative, comfortable silence while Mom sang along to Elton John songs. We dropped off Morgan in front of her apartment/parental dungeon with a sad, reluctant wave. Mom parked, and as we climbed out of the car and scooted towards the front door of my house, trying to put as little distance between two heater-equipped areas as I could, the raw naked fear from the super-market hit me again.

  I choked off a pained breath, grabbed Mom by the shoulders, and threw her down behind the hood of our car. She was fumbling with her keys when I grabbed her, and she fell to her knees with a pained yelp and flung them into the rose bushes.

  Through the tiny space beneath my mom’s Green Goblin mobile, I saw the black tires of a white Lincoln turn onto our street. It rolled past my house without seeming to slow and swung left onto the street perpendicular to mine. When it was gone I jumped to my feet and ripped Mom back up to her feet.

  “What the…Lucy!”

  My eyes were locked in wide-eyed hysteria on the corner the Lincoln turned away on. I was frozen, and yet I couldn’t stop picturing the white Lincoln rolling backwards through the intersection. The street was empty, but my heart still raced like the devil.

  “LUCY!”

  I turned toward the screaming voice. The simple gesture broke the spell, and my lungs began to suck air again. Mom was the color of a freshly boiled lobster, and she cradled her badly scraped hand close to her stomach.

  “Mom?”

  “What the hell was that, Lucy? You almost broke my hand.”

  She shoved her hand in front of my eyes. It didn’t look anywhere near broken, not even bruised, but it did have a nasty scrape creeping from knuckle to wrist.

  “I’m…I’m sorry Mom. I just—”

  I stopped. What had just happened? I didn’t exactly have a ready explanation.

  “Sorry? Lucy, you just…you attacked me.”

  “No, I was trying to hide you,” I said, and my voice sounded calmer than it should. I sounded crazy, even I knew that.

  She puffed her cheeks and slammed her hands to her hips. “Hide me from what?”

  “I thought—I thought I saw the car those guys had. The guys at the Set.”

  Lying. Liar. I had no idea if the guys who attacked me even had a car. But it just popped into my head—it was the only thing I had that might not make me look like a total raving psycho. But what if it was them? What if my…condition allowed me to sense my killers? Were they after me? Did they know?

  “What? They had a car?”

  “Uh—when they started to chase me. One ran to a car…but I think he changed his mind.”

  “Lucy, are you okay?”

  “Can we go inside?”

  Mom frowned, clearly trying to fight between concern, anger, and worry that her daughter was a complete nutter-butter. Something won out, because she grabbed me by the elbow and rushed me into the house. It might have been none of those things, to be fair—it might have been the fear of a scene. Either way, when she shut the front door she spun the deadbolt closed without hesitation.

  “Sit down, honey,” she said. “I’m gonna get you
some water.”

  I snatched the blanket from the couch and wrapped it around me tighter than a burial shroud.

  “Mom,” I shouted. “Can you turn up the heater?”

  “Sure, baby,” she said, though her voice sounded funny. Preoccupied.

  In a couple minutes she brought me a glass of water, a cup of hot chocolate, and one diagonal of a turkey sandwich. She sat next to me on the couch with the other half of the sandwich on her plate and set it on the coffee table. I didn’t feel thirsty, but I quaffed the water to appease Mom. I clung to the burning mug of hot chocolate like the last train out of Hell. Though Hell was warm…

  Hmm. Something to ponder.

  Mom didn’t say anything for most of the night. She treated the scrape on her hand, ate her sandwich, and stared at me out of the corner of her eye. I wanted to be mad at her, but my brain was shutting down. I could feel it. The cold was pouring into every molecule of my body, and I couldn’t think beyond cold…cold…cold.

  I skipped dinner, told my Mom I felt sick, and ran up to my room sometime before 7:30. A hot shower helped, but the chill of the water afterward shook my entire body with wracking muscle spasms. I put on two sets of long underwear, one of which I’d gotten last year from my uncle for a ski-trip to Big Bear. They were supposed to be rated for high-altitude mountain climbers. I threw my hugest pair of jeans over the long-johns, tugged on the big stupid furry boots that had been in fashion a year ago—but that I now despised—and pulled on a t-shirt, a flannel, a sweatshirt, and my giant purple parka. I even tightened the hood around my face when I jumped into bed. Sheet. Blanket. Comforter. Grandma’s quilt.

  It took me half-an-hour to realize that I wasn’t warming up. I kept trying to deny it, trying to push away the ridiculous information. I knew that when you start cold and wrap yourself up it takes some time to get warm again, and so I tried to be patient and let it happen. It wasn’t happening. I waited another hour, curling my toes, rubbing my arms. I wasn’t too proud to get up, dig through my hope chest, and tug on a giant pair of mittens I’d had since I was nine-years-old.