Generation Dead

  Yu p.

  We should play Frisbee sometime . Then he signed off.

  That, she thought, was really weird. The only time they tossed the disk now was when one of them needed someone to talk to. There were things Phoebe couldn't talk to Margi about, and there were things Adam was reluctant to share with any of his friends on the football team. They were an odd pair--but odd pairs were what kept life interesting.

  That sentiment instantly brought Tommy to mind. When she switched off the light she imagined his faintly glowing eyes in the darkness of her room, and this time she had no fear at all.

  Adam arrived at her house at seven sharp, the STD's pickup coughing in the driveway while he walked into the kitchen and helped himself to a banana. Phoebe, the last one out, wrote a note for her mother telling her not to hold dinner and then locked the door behind her. "Thanks, Adam. How'd you get the truck?"

  "The STD's got Mom's car today," he said. "He brought her into work so he could change the oil. We've got time to get a coffee, if you want."

  "I'm okay, but you can get one."

  He shrugged. "I like the streaks of red. You do it yourself?"

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  Phoebe reflexively touched the spiked tips of her hair and thought of falling leaves. "Of course. Thanks."

  "Yer welcome."

  He backed the truck out of her driveway and took a left, which meant he was going the long way, around the lake. "Soooo ..." she said, "what's up?"

  She now realized how quiet he'd been since Friday. A fair question that night would have been, "Hey, Phoebe, what the heck were you doing in the woods?" But he'd never asked it. He hadn't noticed, and Adam noticed most things around him. She realized she'd been so preoccupied that she hadn't even realized how preoccupied he'd been.

  He shrugged again. "Later. I just want to drive around a little."

  "Sure, Adam. Driving's good. Smell that clean lake air."

  He laughed, and she knew him well enough not to pry it out of him. He would talk to her when he was ready.

  The Oxoboxo woods looked different by daylight, and from the outside. She always thought the trees there were set more closely than in other forests, as if they were huddling together to keep secrets from the world outside their sylvan borders. She and her friends had spent a great deal of their young lives in the woods and the lake. The Oxoboxo was a place where one never felt a hundred percent safe, and that was what made being there so exciting.

  Exciting, at least, until Colette died there.

  "So you never told me how practice was," Phoebe said, turning to look out the windshield. "How was it playing with the corpsicle?"

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  She'd intended it to be a diversion, but she saw by his shocked look that her words struck close to whatever it was that was eating at him.

  "Oh," she said.

  "I thought that wasn't PC. Isn't that what you and Daffy were telling me the other day at lunch?"

  "I'm kidding !" He was fronting and it was obvious, but if he wanted some time before he told her what was bothering him, that was fine.

  His shoulders twitched again like they did whenever he was nervous. "You know, the dead kid wasn't so bad." "Really?" she said, secretly thrilled.

  "Really. He's strong as hell. I mean speedwise, he's slow. But he picks stuff up fast. By the end of practice he'd figured out a way to counter me throwing him. It was pretty cool, really."

  "Wow, who would have thought?"

  "Not me." And that was all he said about Tommy.

  He rolled the car into the student parking lot moments later, and then they were out of the truck and making the long trek to school.

  "Hey, I've got practice again tonight," he said. "You need to go to the library or anything?"

  She smiled at him. "You want to do some midnight Frisbee?"

  "Yeah," he said. "I might just need to do that."

  Everything was normal on Monday. The living went quickly from class to class, chatting about weekend dates or the

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  hundred subtle liaisons that occurred in the time that elapsed between the morning bell and lunchtime, while the dead moved in straight lines and shared their thoughts with no one, not even each other. Phoebe roamed and looked for Tommy Williams, catching glimpses of him from a calculated distance. He might have the advantage in the Oxoboxo woods with his stealth and his moonlight eyes, but among the living, she held the upper hand. Here in the fluorescent halls she could watch him at all times without him being aware of it.

  But that did not mean the dead were incapable of surprises, as Margi proved by dropping the biggest one of all in the hallway after final bell. She was packed and ready to go to the bus before Phoebe even made it to her locker---that's how big it was.

  "Sorry, Margi," Phoebe said, "no bus today. I'm hitting the library again."

  "You're kidding," Margi said. "I have got to talk to you." "What's up?"

  "What's up with you ?" was her reply, with more than a hint of accusation in her voice.

  "Is this twenty questions, Margi? I don't know what I'm supposed to say now, and I don't want to make you miss your bus."

  Margi looked at Phoebe, a mixture of impatience and sympathy on her smooth, round-cheeked face.

  "Pheebes," she said, "you're my best friend and I love you. You know that. But something is up."

  "Right, we've established that. So what, pray tell, is up?"

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  "Let me ask you: have you ever seen a living impaired kid draw on his notebook?"

  Phoebe sighed. Leave it to Margi to bring the melodrama. "I don't think so, no."

  "Do they ever contribute to the Oakvale Review ?"

  "No."

  "Or take art or music classes?" "No."

  "Pick up digital photography or gardening on a kooky whim? Or basically do anything creative at all?"

  "No, not to my vast knowledge."

  "Not even decorate their lockers?"

  "Margi! Get to the point!"

  She did, and drove it home. "Tommy Williams has a poem hanging up in his locker," she said, "and it sure looks like it was written in your handwriting."

  The precise moment that Phoebe's mouth opened in response to Margi's statement, the trunk to Pete Martinsburg's car popped up with a click from his key. The car was barely a month old, a birthday gift from dear old long-distance dad.

  Pete wasn't stupid enough to think his dad's gift was anything other than an expression of spite for Pete's mom. It was all about getting vengeance on the ex-wife.

  But hey, free car.

  He led Adam and TC over to the car. It took some convincing to get Lame Man out of the locker room, and even now the big stiff was making a show of how boring this all was to him.

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  Pete knew how this was going to go, but he felt the need to give Adam one final test of faith before changing his strategy.

  He went to the trunk and withdrew his football gear. Beneath the long black duffel bag was a trio of scuffed and scratched baseball bats. Pete took the aluminum one out of the trunk and, gripping it tightly with one hand, snapped it around with his wrist a couple times. His smile was cold and wide.

  "Smacked fourteen homers with this baby my last year in the PAL league. I hit .313 that year."

  Stavis nodded with appreciation, but Pete could tell that Adam was a hairsbreadth away from making some wiseass comment, and his grip on the bat tightened until his knuckles were white.

  "We're going to teach zombie boy another sport after practice," he said, sneering. He dropped the bat back into the trunk, where it landed with a hollow thud, a sound not unlike the one that particular bat would make against a human skull, Adam thought.

  Then the trunk slammed down with such force that the thought disappeared.

  "Pete," Adam said. He didn't look so smug any longer, which strengthened Pete's resolve to carry the plan through.

  "Yes, Lame Man?" he replied. "You have something you would like to contribute?"

  "You are
n't really suggesting that we go after this kid, are you?"

  Pete laughed. "Why not? There's no law against it."

  "C'mon, Pete. That's just stupid."

  "Stupid? I'll tell you something that's stupid. Your little girl

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  Morticia Scarypants having the hots for a corpsicle, that's stupid."

  "Leave her out of this. I'm talking--"

  "You're flapping your jaw, but you aren't talking. Your chick, the one you've had a thing for, for what, your whole life? She's writing poetry to dead guys. She's coming to practice to watch a dead guy. A dead guy , Adam. How sick is that?"

  "Shut up, Pete." Adam turned a bright crimson shade, and Pete smiled.

  "And you're just going to let it happen. You aren't even going to try and get her playing on the right team, are you?"

  Stavis, who was still smart enough to catch the signs, moved to Adam's left.

  "What happened, Adam?" Pete said, dropping his voice to a low whisper. "What about you is so repulsive that the girl you've been pining after for years turns to a zombie for her lovin'?"

  Adam took a step forward, his own hands balled into fists, but that was as far as it went. Pete wished he had taken a swing, because then they could throw a few punches, bloody each other up, and at the end of it they'd be friends again. They'd be the Pain Crew.

  "You can walk away, Adam," he said to Adam's back, "but I'm not done. I'm not going to let that charming pale young flower lie down with a corpse. Not while I live and breathe."

  Adam continued his walk back toward the school.

  Pete said he wasn't done, and he meant it. The rumor making a loop around the school like a brush fire was so absurd that Pete

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  couldn't even get his mind around it. A living, breathing, blossoming sixteen-year-old girl having a thing for a dead kid? It was just plain unnatural. Why not go just go and lie down with a farm animal? At least an animal is alive. He decided that he'd better take matters into his own hands.

  Pete saw her in the library. He was already late for practice, but what the hell. What was coach going to do, fire him? And lose two interceptions a game? No way.

  Besides, getting into this girl's skirt would be well worth the extra wind sprints.

  "Hey," he said, sitting across from her.

  She looked up and removed a shell-like headphone from one ear. Someone was screaming in pain through the speaker, the volume audible halfway across the library. He liked the way her dark eyeliner made her eyes look even more like a cat's. Slinky. And the best part was that this girl had no idea how slinky she was. She didn't have any friends in Pete's normal datepool, the cheerleaders and other gum-snapping types, the Toris and the Hollys and the Cammys who would have hooked up with him even if he were the ugliest guy on the football team.

  He gave her a smile calculated for her to feel it in her toes. Hanging out with the college girls this summer had opened up some new worlds to him, femalewise. This girl was dark, she was serious, and she was bookish. He figured that less experienced guys wouldn't look at her twice, but to Pete, all of those factors were just part of the sweet secret that girls like this held, a sweet secret just waiting to be told to the whole world.

  "Hey," he repeated.

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  "Hey," she said, a hint of question in her voice. He liked that. And she was shy; her pale white skin was turning pink at her throat. He made a point of watching the color spread.

  "I saw you at practice yesterday," he said. If there was one thing that girls liked, it was to be noticed.

  "You did?"

  "Yeah, I did. I'd look up and there you were, watching us."

  "I was waiting," she said, "for Adam."

  Pete smiled inwardly to himself. Morticia was so far out of her league.

  "Layman? He's not your boyfriend, is he?"

  She laughed and shook her head, the pink glow hitting her cheeks. Her skin was the skin of angels, he thought, soft and white. He almost reached out to stroke her cheek, but he figured she'd spook. Soon.

  "That's good," he said, "because Adam's a good friend of mine, and I'd hate to have him mad at me."

  She stopped laughing. "Why would he be mad at you?"

  Now it was his turn to laugh, which he did as he leaned back in the creaky library chair, spreading his arms so she could catch the definition of his arms.

  "For asking you out."

  She looked back down at her history book. Pete leaned forward. Willowy girls liked big guys, and he was a big guy; he made the shadow of his shoulders fall across her like a blanket.

  "Because even if he was your boyfriend, I still would have asked you."

  She looked like she was having trouble catching her breath.

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  It made him think of other ways he could make her breathless.

  "I need to study," she said, her voice just above a whisper.

  You do, he thought. "So is that a yes?" he said, his hand drifting to her arm. She was wearing a light sweater, and he rubbed the black fabric bunched at her elbow with his thumb and forefinger. "I can drive you home if you like. I'll tell Layman we've made some plans. You've probably seen my car around."

  "No." Her voice was so soft he almost didn't hear it.

  "No, you haven't seen my car? It's the ..."

  "No," she said. "No, I don't want to go out with you."

  "What?"

  "No," she said again. "Please stop. People are looking at us." "I don't understand." He really didn't. "I don't want to go out with you, Pete. Thank you, but no." "Why not?" he said.

  "I just don't want to. Please let go of my sweater."

  He did, and leaned back, the chair groaning against his weight. First Layman cops a big attitude, and now this. Pete had been hiding his rage ever since his father packed him off to the airport without even dropping a dime to wish him a good flight, and now it threatened to erupt from his whole being.

  "T don't want to' isn't much of a reason, is it?" he said, his face close to hers.

  "It's the best reason," she said, and he was surprised at how poorly he'd misjudged her. "Can this conversation be over, please?"

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  Pete forced his hands to relax and pushed himself slowly back from the table.

  "Hey, I'm sorry," he said. "I thought I was picking up on something that I guess maybe I wasn't. I know I'm a little headstrong, probably because most of the girls I go out with like that. I'm sorry if I offended you."

  She softened, but only a little. "It's okay," she told him. "I'm sorry I didn't give you a more graceful answer. Really, I'm flattered."

  He gave a nod that he hoped made him appear wounded and crestfallen--as though he really cared what Scarypants thought of him. "Well, I didn't give you much of a chance, did I? Headstrong, that's me."

  She smiled. He held out his hand.

  "Friends?" he said.

  She looked at his hand, and then up at his face, and smiled. "Friends," she said, and held out her hand for him to take.

  He was planning on walking away. But something about the feel of her cool, slim hand in his changed everything. She had long, slender fingers, and he blinked and thought for a moment, just one moment, that he was holding Julie's hand. He hadn't had a relationship with anyone like that since Julie died. Julie who died and would not, could not, come back. The rage welled in his mind.

  Still gripping her hand, he leaned in close and whispered into her ear. "Layman is tagging you, isn't he?"

  She looked up at him then, her eyes more like a cat's than ever. The color returned to her face and she tried

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  to pull her hand back, but he was too strong.

  "Least, I hope the Lame Man is tagging you. Because if I find out that you are passing me over for some dead meat, I might get pretty upset. I might get pretty damn upset that the girl I had pegged for a closet nympho is really a closet necrophiliac, you know what I'm saying? And people, dead or otherwise, could get hurt."

  She didn
't look away even though he was squeezing her hand hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. After a time he blew her a kiss and stood up, giving her hand a gentle stroke as he let go.

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  ***

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  T HE HITS KEEP ON COMING, Adam thought, watching Stavis rock Williams with a blindside

  chop block. It would have knocked the wind out of a living kid. Williams was pushed off his feet, and Stavis used his momentum to drill him into the ground.

  Williams made no sound. But then, Williams never made a sound.

  The play, a halfback draw, was over before Stavis's hit. And it was nowhere near Williams.

  Adam was experiencing a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with his physical conditioning, but with the mental conditioning he'd worked on over the summer with Master Griffin.

  He closed his eyes and could see Master Griffin as he met him on the first day of class; his shaved head smooth and glossy in the bright light of the dojo, the merest hint

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  of a smile beneath his thick black mustache.

  "We are all gifted with power," he'd said to his students. Adam watched the lithe, catlike way that Master Griffin walked around the practice mat, almost like he was gliding along on the balls of his feet.

  "All of us," he'd said, looking at each of them in turn. "It is what we do with that power that is important."

  Then he told Adam to try to tackle him. Master Griffin was shorter and more compact than Adam, and much lighter. Adam came at him with a wary confidence. Tackling people was what he did. He moved in low, going for the legs.

  Suddenly he was airborne, but it was a short flight. Griffin brought him onto the mat and somehow cushioned his fall. Then instead of letting him go, Griffin maintained a tight grip on Adam's arm with one hand, while his free hand was cocked back and ready for a flat-palm strike. Adam looked at the rigid line of that palm and knew with certainty that Griffin could break his nose or smash his face in with one quick thrust. But he just tapped Adam twice on the chest before hauling Adam to his feet.

  "Adam has power," Master Griffin had said to the class. "I have power. Each of you do. What will we do with that power?"

  That had been the only physical contact of the first session, Master Griffin tossing his biggest, most athletic student like he'd toss his dirty socks into the laundry hamper. He'd spent the rest of the session teaching them forms and talking about personal responsibility.