As Dead as It Gets

by Katie Alender

  He leaned back. “I’m glad you called, actually. I’ve had sort of a sucky day, too.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  There was a hint of sadness on his face. “We had a meeting about graduation.”

  “Wow,” I said. “In February?”

  “Well, it’s kind of a production at Sacred Heart,” he said. “Lots of alumni, ceremonies, rituals—”

  “Animal sacrifice?” I asked.

  That won me a smile. “More like a bunch of old people carrying banners, students dancing around Maypoles…Attendance is required for the whole school. It’s just a really big deal for us.”

  “So you’re bummed about having to spend a whole day dancing around a Maypole?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he said. “That’s just the girls. It’s more like…something is ending. Endings are always sad.”

  “Kind of,” I said, though I’d begun to itch for not only the end of my junior year but for my graduation the next year, too, and the promise of leaving Surrey and all its ghosts behind me for good. I knew there would be other ghosts out there, but surely the air couldn’t be this thick with them everywhere. Maybe I could move to Montana or something. A house in the country, a hundred miles from other people. Although, with my luck, I’d end up living in the middle of some old battlefield. “Or you could think of it as the beginning of something. Moving on. A fresh start.”

  He shrugged, his smile gone. “I don’t need to move on. I don’t really want a fresh start.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching over and taking his hand.

  He stared intently at my face for so long that I got shy. “You’re sweet.”

  “I get called a lot of things,” I said, “but sweet isn’t usually one of them.”

  “Well, I see right through you, Alexis.” He raised my hand to his mouth and kissed it.

  I tried to ignore the thrill that coursed through my body—but I couldn’t.

  His eyes crinkled around the edges and he gave a gentle tug on my hand. I got out of the chair and went to sit on the sofa with him. His arms wrapped around my shoulders, but he didn’t kiss me.

  “Hey there,” Mr. Elkins said, coming out of the hallway. He was in his mid-fifties—Jared called himself a “whoops baby”—and he always seemed surprised to see me. He was tall, with dark hair like Jared’s, and a short beard.

  I bolted upright, out of Jared’s arms. “Hi, Mr. Elkins.”

  “Pete,” he said. “Call me Pete.”

  Jared’s father gave us an awkward smile and disappeared into the kitchen.

  I looked at Jared and shook my head. He pulled me back close to his chest. “He doesn’t mind,” Jared said, and I didn’t know if he meant his father didn’t mind that we were snuggled up together on the couch, or being called by his first name.

  I un-snuggled. Whether he minded or not, it felt too weird to be so cuddly in front of somebody’s dad.

  Mr. Elkins didn’t seem any more comfortable with it than I did. “Well, good to see you,” he said, coming back through with a cup of coffee in his hand and eyes averted.

  “You too,” I said.

  “Jared?” he said, and Jared looked up at him. “Um…things good? You happy?”

  “Dad.” Jared said the word as a kind of laugh. “Go back to your office.”

  Mr. Elkins flushed a little. “All right. I’ll do that. I—good to see you again—”

  “Dad.”

  After all tongue-tied parents were safely stowed, I finished my hot chocolate and nestled back into Jared’s arms, nearly dozing off. I lingered in that twilighty pre-sleep state, forgetting Carter and Zoe, forgetting Ashleen, forgetting the bright white light.

  “I was just wondering.…” Jared’s voice woke me up by sending delicious shivers down my spine. “Why’s your camera in your car?”

  The question stunned me for a millisecond, and I knew from the way I found myself scrambling for an answer that nothing I could say would be good enough.

  Our cameras had been what brought us together; creating photos was Jared’s greatest love, and when I said I wanted to cut back, he’d basically given it up to spend time with me, doing anything but photography. Now I’d been going behind his back and taking pictures—for almost a month. True, they were only for the yearbook, but I knew that didn’t matter. It was the principle of the thing.

  “I’m just…doing this stupid thing for school,” I said. I could hear how inadequate it sounded.

  “What stupid thing?” His voice was light, as if it weren’t a big deal. But if that had been the case, he would have let it go.

  “Taking some pictures for the yearbook. Nothing big.”

  He tensed. “What kind of pictures?”

  “Um…posed portraits. Of the language clubs, sports teams…” I sat up and shook my head, trying to remember. “Student Council…”

  Jared narrowed his eyes. “Huh. So by Student Council, you mean Carter?”

  I know honesty is the best policy and all, but I was severely regretting that particular bit of honesty.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, he was there. But it’s not a big deal.”

  Jared choked out a laugh. “No, of course not. Why would it be a big deal? I mean, you were only together for five months. Why shouldn’t you spend the afternoon with him?”

  “It’s not like that.” My heart started to flutter. “I’m spending the afternoon with you. I spent maybe five minutes with Carter.”

  He was silent for a moment. I started to hope he would let the subject drop, but no such luck.

  “Can I see the pictures?”

  “No,” I said, sitting back, away from him. “Why? What difference does it make?”

  “You said yourself it’s not a big deal.”

  “It’s not.” My throat tightened. Don’t you dare cry right now, Alexis. “But I’m not going to be scolded like a kid who stole a candy bar from a drugstore.”

  He gave a quick, disapproving shake of his head. “Is that supposed to be a metaphor for my feelings? I guess I’m…the drugstore? A nameless corporate entity? Is that how you see me?”

  Without a word, I got up off the couch and hurried to the bathroom, where I splashed cold water on my face. The girl staring back at me in the mirror was flushed, her eyes vivid blue against the angry red of her cheeks.

  She looked wretched and flustered.

  She looked scared.

  She looked…weak.

  I leaned against the wall for a minute, squeezing my eyes shut. Why did every single tiny thing in my life have to be difficult?

  Finally, I opened my eyes and stared at my reflection. I was past the danger of crying, but I couldn’t stop my heart from beating like a snare drum.

  There was a knock at the door. “Alexis?”

  “Just a second,” I said.

  “Open the door,” Jared said. “Please. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  The longer I watched, the worse things would get. I flung the door open, like pulling a Band-Aid off all at once.

  Jared stood across the hall, his hands in his pockets. “I trust you completely. If I gave you the impression that I don’t, then I owe you an apology.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you,” I said. “But it’s only for school. I swear.”

  “Of course it is.” His voice was as soft as velvet. He beckoned me toward him. “Come here.”

  Like there was a magnetic connection between us, I let myself be dragged across the hall into his embrace.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” he whispered into my hair. “We shouldn’t upset each other.”

  “I know,” I replied, letting my cheek rest against his shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said.

  By the time I’d raised my eyes to look at him, his lips were on mine.

  I WOKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, covered with my thick comforter and a coating of sweat, like someone had turned the heat up and left it blasting. As I went to push the covers off, I realized there was somet
hing in my left hand.

  I turned the light on and sat up, pulling whatever it was out from under the covers. Something stung my thumb, and I flung the thing to the floor. Sticking my stung thumb in my mouth, I stared at the object on my carpet—

  A single yellow rose.

  Then I became aware that something else was wrong—something far worse than the rose.

  It was a sleeve. A sleeve of pale purple chiffon, fluttering weightlessly around my arm.

  And it was attached to a dress. The dress. The one Ashleen had worn.

  The dress I was wearing now.

  I climbed out of my bed and stood in the center of my room, grabbing at the gauzy layers and trying to figure out how someone could have changed my clothes entirely without waking me up.

  I reached over my shoulder to see if there was a zipper in the back of the dress. There wasn’t. A little more patting down revealed one under my right arm. I unzipped it, then went to slip the dress off—but I couldn’t.

  When I checked the zipper, it was zipped again.

  I unzipped it once more, working hard to steady my breath, trying not to let the situation get to me. But again, when I went to raise it over my head, it wouldn’t budge.

  I decided to go with brute force. I lifted the skirt and yanked as hard as I could, determined to rip it to pieces if that was what it took. But as soon as the skirt was blocking my view of the room, I heard soft laughter.

  And a voice.

  “It doesn’t come off.”

  The words were the quietest whisper, the merest hint of a voice in my ear. But through the layers of fabric I saw a shadow standing between me and the lamp.

  A human-shaped shadow.

  I was half naked, my arms in the air, but I didn’t move. I didn’t drop the dress.

  I just stood like a lump, staring. My voice froze solid, like ice in my throat.

  Finally, I whispered, “Lydia?”

  Then the shadow moved, whipping around me faster than I could react, and in my struggle to catch up, to keep it where I could see it, I dropped the skirt of the dress and found myself face-to-face with my empty bedroom.

  It—she?—was gone.

  And something had changed.

  There was another rose. It was closer to the door, which was now open a crack.

  As I forced myself to calm down and not freak out—yet—I heard, coming faintly from somewhere in the room:

  Vzzzzzzzzzz

  I backed slowly out to the hall.

  There I found a third rose, and a fourth one a few feet farther, and a fifth, sixth, and seventh, leading to the foyer.

  The urge to see where they led was irresistible.

  I held my breath and followed the trail. When I came to the front door, I silently turned the dead bolt and pulled the door open.

  There were more roses outside.

  It was the middle of the night, and the temperature was in the low thirties. All I wore was the gauzy purple dress, not shoes or even socks. But I followed the line of roses laid out in front of me.

  It was almost like I had to.

  When I reached the intersection of our front walk and the sidewalk, I hesitated.

  I could follow these roses forever, by the looks of things. And at the end, I would find…

  What would I find?

  As I started to step on the sidewalk, a freezing rush consumed my body.

  The roses blinked out of existence just as someone grabbed my arm.

  “Lexi?” Kasey stood beside me, bundled in her bathrobe and a pair of woolly slippers. “What are you doing out here? Why didn’t you stop when I called your name?”

  I started to open my mouth to ask what she was doing—the best defense is a good offense, after all—but she rolled her eyes and cut me off.

  “Following you,” she said. “Now, answer me.”

  “I was…” I glanced down at the bare sidewalk.

  Then I looked down at my body. All I saw were my plaid Christmas pajama pants and a long-sleeved tee. No purple dress.

  Could it really just have been a dream?

  If Kasey had seen the dress, she would have said something.

  “I was just…sleepwalking, I guess. Weird. Thanks for waking me up.”

  “Well, not like I’m going to let you run off in the middle of the night—” She stopped, suddenly realizing that girls running off in the middle of the night was nothing to joke about. “Lexi…was it—would you have kept going? Like Kendra or…”

  She didn’t want to say Ashleen’s name. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t want to hear it.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  As my daze wore off, the cold took hold of me. It seeped through the skin of my feet and up through my legs.

  Kasey watched me go all the way to my room before retreating toward her own bedroom. She looked like she’d rather plant herself down in the hall and guard my door than go back to bed.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

  After I closed the door, I looked around my room.

  No roses, no purple dress. The covers of my bed were rumpled, and as I climbed back underneath them, I tried to convince myself that it had just been a nightmare. How could I not have nightmares, after what I’d been through over the past week? Of course it wasn’t real.

  That was what I told myself. And I repeated it in my head, an endless mantra, until I fell asleep.

  But I didn’t believe it. Not that night, and not in the morning, when I woke up to find a tiny spot of blood on the pillow and a scab on my left thumb, as though I’d been pricked by a thorn.

  No, I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew it hadn’t been a nightmare—

  Something had come for me.

  I WAS SITTING IN ENGLISH CLASS the next day, trying to write an essay about The Grapes of Wrath without actually having read it. The room around me was silent.

  “Sleepwalking? Ha. Not quite. I had to try three times to wake you up.”

  It took a couple of seconds for me to realize it was Lydia.

  She sat on the teacher’s desk. The teacher was leaning back, reading. Which is a good thing, because if he’d leaned forward he would have been staring directly through her butt.

  “So what exactly was that little midnight stroll about?” she asked. “Or were you planning to blame it on me again, like everything else that goes wrong in your life?”

  I pursed my lips to keep myself from accidentally answering. Kids at my school already thought I’d killed Lydia. I didn’t need them to know that I had regular conversations with her.

  “I must admit, it was a pretty impressive little show.”

  I gave her a questioning look and beckoned her over. The kid next to me saw me moving my hand, so I pretended to be stretching my fingers.

  Lydia came over to my desk. I flipped to a page farther back in my notebook and wrote: What did you see?

  “You woke up, flipped out, spun around in a circle, and then walked straight out of your house, staring at the ground.”

  I raised my hand. “Hall pass?”

  The teacher nodded.

  “Don’t bother,” Lydia said. “I’m leaving.”

  And she vanished.

  I spent the rest of the day doing something I never in a million years thought I’d do:

  Wishing Lydia would show up to bug me again.

  After school that day, Marley and I met in the yearbook office to scroll through the Student Council portraits. We narrowed it down to one or two of each person but couldn’t agree on which pictures were the best, so we decided to leave it up to Elliot.

  I carried the printouts over to her desk. She studied each photo for a second and made her choices without hesitation.

  “How do you do that?” I asked.

  She tilted her head. “Do what?”

  “Decide things so fast.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Ninety percent of the time, I go with my gut.”

  “And your gut is usually right?”
>
  She gave me an amused smile. “My gut is flawless. It’s the other ten percent of the time I get myself in trouble.”

  I tried to remember the last time I’d trusted myself to make an important decision without agonizing over it. “I don’t know about my gut.”

  “I think your gut is smart.” Elliot set down her highlighter and poked a finger into her stomach under the yale logo on her sweatshirt. “My gut tells me that.”

  I sighed.

  She leaned forward, studying me intently. I nearly took a step back, but managed to stand my ground.

  “You know what your problem is?” she asked. “You need to learn to trust—”

  Here we go again.

  “—yourself,” she finished.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I just sort of thought my problem was trusting other people.”

  She waved her hand like the statement was a pesky fly. “Other people need to earn your trust. That’s beside the point.”

  To earn my trust.

  Huh.

  “Tell me something, Alexis,” Elliot said. “Why do you eat lunch alone?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s easier.”

  Elliot didn’t ask, Easier than what? She just stared at me for a long moment, the same way she would stare at a layout that wasn’t quite gelling. “We have room at our table, you know. You should eat with us.”

  “Wow,” I said. Somewhere inside me was a happy little shudder—here was someone who knew me exclusively as a crazy, messed-up person, and she still liked me. But…even if Elliot felt that way, did the others? Or did they silently judge me? Would they judge Elliot for inviting me? “I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  Elliot didn’t even fidget like a normal person. She had to take a pen entirely apart and rebuild it. “You were there when she died, right? Lydia Small?”

  I stopped short, my bones fusing together, locking me in place. I couldn’t look at her. I stared at the surface of the desk until its faux wood grain swam in my head.

  She slipped the spring back into the plastic barrel and screwed the pen back together. “What I’m getting at is, it’s not like it was your fault. Even if you were there. You should stop punishing yourself. Or—should I say—punish yourself in a new and different way by eating at our table and watching Chad talk with his mouth full of food.”