“So she’s shy,” I offer, but the words feel limp on my lips.
Dane’s tongue is out, a sure sign he’s working something over in his brain. His fingers fly on the phone’s keyboard once more.
I sigh, then practically shriek.
The key! In the front door.
“He’s back!” I say, as if Dane hasn’t heard it himself.
“Sit,” he orders.
Like a dog, I obey. But I wasn’t even standing! I scoot back in my chair, and so does he on the couch.
“The phone,” I gurgle as I hear the key in the third lock and the quick puff of air that happens whenever the door slides open.
Dane grunts, looks at me, then at the doorway, and quickly tosses me the phone. I’ve never been good at catching things, not even a cold, but here comes this sleek phone and—yes!—somehow I clutch it from the air and slide it onto the same end table we plucked it from only minutes ago. It doesn’t glide all the way to the end and hang there like it did for Stamp but stops square in the middle. I doubt he’ll notice, but with Stamp you never know.
Stamp still looks surly, maybe even more so, with his hands buried in the pockets of his crisp new slacks and his chin tucked deep in his stiff shirt collar. For the first time, I notice how cheap the black shirt with red stripes looks. Not inexpensive but brassy and flashy. And I wish, for just a moment, he would have asked me to help him pick one out instead of trying to do everything for himself all the time.
“Forget something?” Dane says a little too loudly.
Stamp hardly notices. “My phone,” he says, reaching for it in the middle of the end table without further comment.
“Gonna try Val again?” I say, if only to fill the awkward silence.
He looks at me sharply, then softens. “Not really,” he says quietly, turning for the door again. “I just feel naked without it, you know?”
Before I can answer, he’s disappeared again, shoes scraping the pitted concrete beyond our welcome mat, shutting and triple-locking the door behind him.
I slump in the chair. “Phew, that was close. Who were you texting, anyway?”
“Not texting,” Dane says, standing and dragging me into his room with those thin arms I always forget are so strong. “I was sending those pictures to myself so we could study them a little more closely and on a bigger screen.”
“Oh,” I say, a little disappointed.
I mean, I thought he was dragging me into his bedroom because Stamp was finally gone …
4
Monsters on Parade
Growl. Dane chases me across the stage of The Great Movie Monster Makeover Show.
Stamp growls even louder, pursues even more aggressively.
I nearly duck his wide, swinging arms. “Hey,” I whisper as I hide behind him, the audience laughing as if this is part of the performance. “Take it easy on the overaggression there, big guy.” I shove him, just a little too hard, to let him know I’ll only play the victim so long.
He goes flying, tumbling toward the end of the stage.
Just in time, Dane grabs the back of his jacket and keeps him from careening into the third row.
More laughter, spontaneous applause.
Dane looks at me from behind the Frankenstein mask. “Cut it out,” he says, using the nervous laughter of the audience as cover.
Stamp stumbles back, waving his arms, making a big production out of it. I think he’s smiling, even though I can only see his eyes behind the goofy mask. He chases me around the stage, still growling, and now I can’t tell if he’s happy or sad or scared or faking it or for real mad at me. I only know there should be two Frankies chasing me and there’s only one.
“Hey,” I blurt when we pass Dane, who’s standing awkwardly at the end of the stage, peering past the house lights at the audience. “What gives?”
He springs to life, grunting and waving and chasing me offstage.
The curtain falls.
I punch Stamp in the arm. “The hell?”
But he’s already onstage again, ruffling the curtains and poking out through the middle as he yanks off his mask.
Dane and I join him for our final bows.
It’s cheesy, sure, but with these tourists, you wouldn’t believe who passes for a celebrity these days. They’d rather get the autograph of some two-bit ham in a rubber Frankenstein mask than go home empty-handed.
Stamp does his thing, bounding down into the audience, still wearing his mask and then finally revealing his cute face.
The girls swoon and rush him with their little copies of the black-and-white photo they got up front. Don’t worry. It’s not even of us, so no danger of the Sentinels using it to track us down.
I’m next to Stamp, feeling lonely and out of place because nobody ever asks the non-Frankenstein girl for her autograph, not even out of pity. So I’m not as distracted as Stamp is when Dane bounds by in his sweats and a flannel shirt, looking around the audience before slinking through the chairs to the exit.
“Dane?” I follow him. I don’t know. There’s just something about the urgency in his step, the tension of his shoulders, that screams three-alarm fire.
I look back at Stamp, still playing the ham, growling and mugging for the cameras with the tourists. He doesn’t even notice me. I race past the last row. Outside, I get slight waves from folks.
“Hey, hey, lookee there,” says some red-faced bloke with an English accent, tipping his madras driver’s cap. “It’s the lass from the monster show!”
I bow and smile and see Dane’s bristly head weaving and bobbing through the crowd beyond. I walk as briskly as possible, legs a little rigid for this kind of cat-and-mouse chase. Folks smile at me as I pass, figuring the stiff-legged walk is all part of the act, and suddenly I remember. I’m still in costume!
It’s a pretty big no-no. If my manager, Mr. Frears, were to spot me offstage like this, I’d be fired. But he’s not working today, so I’m not too worried about it. I look down at the scrappy dress, the fugly shoes, and the blood splatters on my stockings. I must look a fright, but sometimes it’s easier to hide as a monster than it is to pass as a Normal.
“Dane!” I finally catch up, yanking him around more roughly than I wanted to.
He turns around and clutches my hand to drag me along. “Hurry,” he says, weaving through the tourists, intent on getting to something or someone in the distance.
“Hurry where?”
He points with his free hand as we narrowly avoid toppling a tour group of Brazilians in matching green-and-yellow sports jerseys. “It’s her, Maddy. The girl from Stamp’s cell phone.”
“Val? How? Where?”
He stops short, pulling me behind a giant green soda machine. “I saw her in the audience at the last show.” He peeks around the corner of the machine and quickly looks back. “When you almost pushed Stamp offstage.”
I picture her from Stamp’s phone, glimpses of spiky blonde hair, pale little face, black fingernails, mesh-covered thigh. “How could you tell?”
“I can’t. I just … don’t ask me to explain. I think, I mean, I know it’s her.”
“So what are we doing behind this soda machine?”
“She stopped at the caramel corn booth.”
I risk a glimpse past his shoulder, although he grimaces like I’m about to get us caught. The midafternoon crowd is thick, but I know the popcorn stand he’s talking about. There, in a line of about five people, is a waif with spiky blonde hair. And then she’s gone, abandoning her place in line and making for the caricature booth.
“Let’s go, Columbo.” I snort. “She’s on the move. Although, it doesn’t look like her.”
Then again, as I catch flashes of her in the crowd, it could be. A peek here, past a burly man in a tank top, looks like her. Then, as she coasts through a sea of sticky-fingered field trip kids, she looks nothing like her. Too tall, too short, too broad, too thin.
“Why is she avoiding us, then?” Dane says.
“Have y
ou seen yourself lately?”
“Funny.” Then he stops, turning his back to her as I peek under his arm and notice a spiky blonde-headed someone sniffing our way, then turning quickly to disappear into the crowd.
“That little minx!” I’m sure it’s her. Kinda, sorta, maybe. I’m dragging Dane along, weaving in and out of tour groups and sweaty, sunburned families until we turn the corner near the cheesy pretzel stand, and—poof! No more Val. Or maybe-Val. Or could-be-Val. Or probably-was-Val.
I start again.
Dane holds me back. “We could do this all day,” he says, stretching one arm over my shoulder. “And we’ve got another show to do in an hour.”
It feels good, his arm like that.
People smile at us, two kids obviously on break from some show, not hiding their affection.
“Why would she be here?”
“If it even was her.” Dane cocks one beautiful eyebrow.
I slap him playfully on the chest, right between two smears of fake blood on his T-shirt. “You’re the one who convinced me it was, remember?”
He sighs, shaking his head. “Maybe I’ve just been on the run too long.”
And I know he means forever, not just now: his whole Afterlife, ever since he was reanimated. This school, that school, before Chloe, after Chloe, and now with Stamp and me. I lean into him, to show him I understand, that I care, and he nuzzles his chin on the top of my head, you know, the way guys do.
It feels good, and I don’t want to think it was Val scoping us out. I want to be anonymous, boring. I can’t believe undercover Sentinel skanks are watching our every move, like Dane believes they are.
“It probably wasn’t her,” I say. “We’re just being paranoid.”
“Yeah, probably.”
We’re almost back to the front entrance of the theater, all fake spooky with cobwebs in the windows and plastic ivy on the brick facade. A little girl in a Victorian apron and bonnet hands out pictures to our fans.
She nods at us warily, as if she’s going to tell our manager about our little between-show excursion.
“Let her,” Dane says, reading my mind as we enter the darkness of the theater. “If it was Val, I don’t see us being under the radar for too much longer anyway.”
“And if it wasn’t?” I open the door to backstage.
He pauses on the bottom step below me, shrugs. “Then we tell Mr. Frears we were just hunting down some audience member who forgot her camera.”
He smiles as if this is actually what happened.
I smack him again on the shoulder and turn, finding Stamp standing there, still in his stage makeup, tapping one shoe on the floor.
“Where the hell did you guys go?”
“Didn’t you hear me? That little girl from the third row dropped her camera,” I say, taking Dane’s cue.
“So you had to go halfway around the park to catch her?” He’s clearly not buying it.
“What can I say?” Dane slides into his cast chair and grabs a makeup remover pad. “She was a lot faster than a couple of zombies.”
5
Cursed Again
That’s definitely zombie flesh,” Dane murmurs Rainman-like a few mornings later. “Definitely. Zombie. Flesh.”
Yes, we’re back in his stupid room.
Yes, we’re studying stupid pictures of stupid Val on his stupid computer.
And no, we’re not doing anything else. Not one little thing.
Dude. Is. Obsessed.
“You don’t know that,” I remind him for the 673rd time.
“Look!” he says, as if he’s suddenly remembered I’m in the room with him, as if I haven’t already given it 1,000 looks, as if my neck isn’t going to snap in half from looking so much. “Look at the way the concealer is smudged on her wrist in this one picture. See, I’ve blown the image up. Now, I ask you, who else but a zombie would have gray skin underneath?”
We’re looking at another random club picture of Stamp with the Val chick hiding playfully behind him. Her small, pale hand is clutching the sleeve of his black-and-white-striped hoodie, and Dane has blown it up as far as he can without all the little pixel thingies showing up.
“Maybe the concealer is gray and her flesh is pale,” I counter, mad because if we don’t put this Is-Val-a-Sentinel controversy to rest soon, I’m going to start looking into ways to unzombiefy myself—permanently.
“Yeah, that sounds reasonable.” He scoffs in that I’ve-been-a-zombie-longer-than-you way that always irks me for some reason. “What human in her right mind wants her skin to look like ours?”
“Speak for yourself,” I huff, standing from the twin bed next to his computer, since he’s been hogging the desk chair all week. “While you’ve been obsessing over Val and her potential zombieness, I’ve been hitting the tanning booths without you, so I think I look pretty normal.”
In fact, though I would never admit this to Dane, I kind of look better than normal. (Zombie normal, that is.) My new zombie skin doesn’t hold the tan as long as my human skin once upon a Before Life, but if I go for an hour every other day or so, I at least look less gray and almost, vaguely human.
Enough to take my hoodie down on the way to work the last few days and not tug on my long sleeves till they cover my wrists and fingers all the time. And after one more teeth-whitening session, I might even be able to smile again. You know, not all the time, but at least more than I do now. Lots more.
Wow, imagine that. Smiling versus biting my lip.
I never thought I’d do that again.
“You looked fine before,” he grunts, finally turning around in his chair and giving me some attention as I linger at his doorway. “I mean, you look fine now, but there was nothing wrong with you before.”
“That’s kind of nice of you to say.” I grin but not all the way. “I think.”
“We are what we are,” he says somberly, ruining it. “Tanning beds and teeth whitening and facials and all that stuff—I’ve been there, tried that, and it’s a lot of work. To keep up with, I mean. And expensive. You’ll see. Besides, I kind of like the real you.”
“Wait,” I say, ignoring the kind-of comment. “You mean, the old real me or the new real me?”
“Which do you think?”
“I think you dance around the answer too much.”
“The new old you, before you started trying to impress Val for Sunday dinner or whoever you’re trying to impress now.”
I shake my head and slip from the room, leaving him in rueful silence. This is all getting too funky. With Dane and Stamp under the same roof, I mean. It’s too much. I know he wants to keep us all safe, but I need to move out. Seriously.
It’s too much like marriage up in here. Family. Nine to five. Like my mom and dad used to be once upon a time, and look how that turned out. Mom taking off with the yoga instructor. Dad working 70 hours a week to get over it. Me rubbing graves after school.
But this is even worse because we’re kids, really. And we’re still figuring it all out. Between us, I mean. The moody silences and giddy rushes and slamming doors and dancing in the middle of the night—when we’re not exercising, that is. And Stamp coming in at all hours, and Dane resenting it, and me hating it. Ugghh. Just … I can do soap opera on my own.
I drift into the living room, which still looks like a living room in case Val ever makes it for dinner, which Stamp keeps promising she will even though Dane and I both know that, no, she won’t.
Which is kind of okay with me because, frankly, I don’t know if the million-dollar spaghetti I froze from the other night will taste as fresh. Not that I care. I won’t be eating any of it. Still, if he cares about her that much—and, of course, if she’s not a Sentinel trying to trick us—I’d like her to at least enjoy the food.
Stamp has already come and gone for the morning, despite the hour. He likes to stay away from the apartment as much as possible, coming home late and leaving early to drift through the local mall or go from coffee shop to coffee shop, t
esting how far and how fast he can blend with the Normals.
I have to admit, even with my latest efforts at playing it human, Stamp has me beat. Dane, too. Maybe it’s because Stamp’s newer. He’s certainly been a zombie for a much shorter time than Dane has. Whatever the reasons, he’s just more Normal-looking.
Dane says that happens sometimes. Just like there are tall zombies and short zombies, boy zombies and girl zombies, there are some real zombie-ass-looking zombies and then there are zombies who look more like, you know, the human people they once were.
Yeah, but I don’t know. Maybe I’m just imagining it all or remembering his prezombie self too strongly to ever see him as anything other than alive. But it certainly doesn’t hurt him with the ladies. Of all those pictures on his phone, every one was full of adoring human lady flesh.
I walk through the empty living room to grab the morning paper from the front porch, wondering what it would be like to stroll through the world so confidently that you don’t just pass as a Normal but you’re actually physically attractive to Normals as well.
The locks—all three of them—sound stiff, and I quickly open the door to the chilly dawn. I bend to grab the paper from the cheesy, scratchy welcome mat we bought at the dollar store when we first moved in. It’s faded fast and the O and M are pretty much missing, but we’re too cheap or lazy to replace it. I shake the dew off the paper’s plastic wrap and carry the news inside, triple-locking the door behind me as I go.
The stationary bike is in my room—has been since the night Val didn’t show—and I open the paper and unfold it onto the flimsy black reading tray Dane drilled in place between the handlebars weeks ago.
If you’re thinking it’s some big romantic gesture he did for me, don’t. He just wanted to be able to set his game player on it after the hunk of junk ran out of juice.
A Living Dead Love Story Series Page 25
