Passing Strange

  Ahh, life!

  “Gee, being a zombie doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either, Margi. But I’m going with it.”

  She laughed, maybe for Phoebe’s benefit, then sipped. Cute as a button.

  “Aren’t you afraid the police might still be after you?” Phoebe asked.

  “Nah. They’re looking for Tak and the Sons of Romero.”

  I wasn’t really sure about that last point. But three cheers for optimism, right?

  “Hey,” I said. “What about our fair-haired boy? How’s Tommy?”

  Phoebe told me that his travels had gone well and that he was in Washington, D.C., at the moment trying to rally support for a sort of undead bill of rights. Being undead had not yet been criminalized at the nation’s capital, and zombies were arriving there “in droves.”

  “You mean ‘hordes,’ don’t you? Isn’t a group of zombies a horde? Like a flock of sheep or a murder of crows?”

  “A gaggle…of geese,” Adam said from the front. I think he was trying to help me lighten the mood. “A google…of giraffes.”

  “You made that one up,” I said.

  “Tommy’s taking a huge risk,” Phoebe said, ignoring our banter. “But he thinks it’s worth the risk. Or will be, if he succeeds.”

  Maybe she was trying to tell me she understood what I had to do, even if she didn’t agree with it. Or maybe she was trying to convince herself; I wasn’t sure.

  That fire was in her eyes again, that grim, steely resolve. I don’t know why it still surprised me. One of the first times I ever saw Phoebe, she was wrestling with one of those football players while they attacked Tommy in the woods.

  But I think I could understand how she felt. In their own individual ways, all of her dead friends were risking their lives.

  We all got together again a week or so before Christmas, keeping an appointment we’d made with the Hunters to check in on Sylvia. When we’d last seen Sylvia, she was going through some horrific “augmentation” process that was supposed to leave her restored, but instead seemed to have her—literally—in pieces, like an unassembled doll. We went to the Hunter Foundation expecting the worst, but were pleasantly surprised when Sylvia herself met us at the door, looking better than ever. Looking, in fact, almost human.

  “Happy…birthday.” She greeted us under the watchful yet angelic gazes of Angela and Alish. “Sorry. I’ve been…OD’ing…on Christmas…specials…all week.”

  I think we were actually stunned into silence by her happy return, watching her move, walk and talk far better than she ever had as a pre-augmentation zombie. We were so used to negative outcomes that I don’t think any of us—myself, Margi, Phoebe, or Adam—had even dreamed that she would be better off after the procedure. Margi offered her a bed at her house, as she once had with Colette, but Sylvia said that she was going to stay on at the Foundation and help the Hunters with their studies.

  “This is…my chance…to make a difference,” she said. “Like…Tommy.”

  Like Tommy. Like Colette, like DeCayce. Even like Tak, in his own way. Leaving her I was all the more determined that I, too, would make a difference by proving that my friends weren’t murderers.

  I had Margi drop me off at the edge of the Oxoboxo woods, against the protests of my friends. It was late, it was dangerous, etc. I told them not to worry and that I was probably safer in the woods than I was at my family’s home, even, because who knew how long it would be before breathers started banging down doors and dragging zombies out into the street?

  This really didn’t help my case any, but Margi pulled over and let me out.

  “Kisses, kisses,” I said, stepping out onto the shoulder. Snow-covered leaves crackled beneath my feet.

  “Be careful, Karen,” Phoebe said.

  “Don’t you worry,” I told her. “Because I’m not. Worried, I mean.”

  Hugs, hugs. I turned to watch Margi waving as she swung the car around, and also Adam and Phoebe in the back seat, Adam bending his head low to kiss Phoebe. It was just a quick kiss, a stolen peck taken when you thought the eyes of the world were on something else. But what I saw was the kiss that brought us—me and the one I loved—together. Something about the way he kissed her so brought back that moment.

  The beautiful couple, boy and girl, in a close embrace, about to kiss.

  One kiss to grant life, one kiss to take it away.

  All our kisses were stolen moments like theirs. All our kisses were secrets: they were secrets that I couldn’t reveal to the waking world. I was too afraid to make those secrets public, and the one I love waited for me and waited for me, but my fear overcame me and we said good-bye. I tried to move on, but the blue fog washed over me, and all I had to cling to were my secrets.

  My secrets weren’t enough to protect me, though, and the blue fog filled me.

  And I took my own life.

  I watched my friends kissing. They weren’t supposed to be together, either, I thought. Living girl and dead boy. They aren’t supposed to be together, but they’re facing the world, hand in hand. Looking at them filled me with shame.

  And then I turned away.

  I told Phoebe that I wasn’t worried, which wasn’t truthful, but I’ve had a lot of practice at pretending something other than what I really am.

  I pretended I wasn’t depressed. I pretended I wasn’t in love—look where that got me. I pretended lots of other things, too, and now I’m pretending I’m alive.

  Why do I pretend to be all these things I’m not? I guess at base level it’s because I’m a coward. I was afraid of my sadness, and I was afraid to profess my love. I didn’t want to be different, I just wanted to be like everyone else. Even the Karen that everyone knows in Oakvale, the provocative Karen, the risk taker in a short skirt, is really just another mask, a false front. And now I’m trapped—what if Phoebe found about who I really am? I can’t risk losing her. I can’t risk losing any of them.

  It was flattering for people to think that I was a normal, healthy girl, back when I wasn’t really healthy or what passes for normal. But that feeling was nothing compared to the feeling I get when living people think I’m alive.

  I’d had some moments at school where I seemed to be crossing a line, the life-death line, but my real chance at passing came when my father decided that he needed a new cell phone (how mundane), and announced that he was going to the spectacular and thrilling Winford Mall to get one. And then he did a very strange thing. Instead of putting on his coat, picking up my sister Katy, and wishing me good night as he proceeded with jangling keys to the front door, he spoke words that were like a magic spell to me.

  “Come on, girls.”

  “Girls,” as in, plural. The shock must have shown in my face, because when my father looked at me, he reddened a bit, but I wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed at the obvious effect his invitation had on me, or that he had, for one sweet moment, forgotten that I’d killed myself.

  You see, my parents didn’t go anywhere with me—not to the homes of relatives or friends, not to the beach, not to the grocery store. They didn’t restrict my comings and goings from their house, and they didn’t shun me at home, but they didn’t want to be seen out in public with me, either. Sort of like normal people who don’t want others knowing them as the owners of a dog that misbehaves in public.

  I’m not blaming them—I killed myself, after all. I’m fortunate that they took me in. Not all of us deadheads are so lucky.

  For the most part my parents saw me as a child who they felt responsible for, but didn’t particularly love or care for anymore. I expect that theirs is a pretty common reaction among parents whose child has done something so horrible, so unforgivable, so offensive to their sense of self and their world that they’ve effectively cut that child from their hearts with precise incisions.

  My Dad, though, I don’t think he’d ever been able to cut me out of his heart completely. Or maybe I grew back, like a tumor. There were moments, like the moment of shock that hung between u
s after his invitation, where I thought he wanted to hug me. And I wanted him to hug me, I really did. But he didn’t, not then.

  Katy’s reaction was far less ambivalent and was a welcome break from the awkwardness between us.

  “Yaaaaaaaay, Caring coming!” she said, the little sweetie. Scary how well little kids can pick up on things.

  I saw the slight smile on my father’s face, and I was happy. No hugs, but I was happy.

  Katy was born about nine months after my death; it didn’t take a math whiz to figure that one out, but I don’t have a shred of resentment for my little replacement. She’s an improvement over me in every way.

  “I’ll be right up,” I said, running for my basement abode. “Or down, then…up. Whatever.” Two minutes later I was upstairs and looking presentable in a fashionably wrinkled black denim jacket and low-heeled black boots. I even put in my contacts.

  My friends tell me my eyes look like diamonds, but they just look kind of colorless and glassy to me. They disturbed my Dad, though, so he’d bought me nice blue nonprescription contact lenses. They were pretty close to the color my eyes had been before I died. I felt sort of silly wearing them, but secret-agentish cool, too. Even so, I hoped none of my dead friends saw me wearing them.

  “Okay,” Dad said. He blinked when he saw my eyes. Anthony DeSonne always seemed to be on the verge of saying something when he looked at me, but whatever it was remained a mystery. Did he disapprove of my clothing? Did he think I looked nice? Did seeing me with blue eyes allow him to believe, if only for a few seconds, that I’d never taken my own life?

  Sometimes it’s better to let the mystery remain.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  During the short trip to the Winford mall, Katy managed to convince our father to let me take her to the toy store while he ran his errands. I listened to Katy’s argument—which bordered on but never crossed into whining—without comment. To offer to take Katy myself would be to cross that unspoken line that demarcated my place within the home. For that reason I was thrilled when Dad, after the slightest hesitation, said that it was fine by him.

  “That is,” he said, as though he were bound by the same unspoken line of decorum that restrained me, “if Karen wants to.”

  “I’d love to,” I said, too quickly, no doubt.

  So we split up at the wide neon maw of the mall entrance, my father off in search of the newest cellular technology, Katy with her tiny soft hand in my own.

  “I can feel how warm your hand is,” I told her, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “I really can.” Katy beamed up at me with her eyes. Her naturally blue eyes.

  “I think blue eyes go better with this coat, don’t you, Katy?” I said as soon as our Dad was around the corner in the half deserted mall.

  Katy shrugged.

  “I like your real eyes,” she said. “Nobody else has eyes like you do, Caring.”

  I looked at my sister and saw how smooth and supple her skin was, how subtly pink, how rosy her cheeks. I felt like a ghost beside her, she was so filled with life.

  We walked around the birch tree that rose up from the first level of the mall, looking for the unseen birds that we could hear chirping away. I was still staring at the eye-level branches when Katy gave my arm a sudden tug.

  “Caring! Caring!” she said. “I want to go there!”

  She was pointing at the Wild Thingz! store, which had a window display of Halloween items left unsold after the holiday: masks, haunted houses, spiders as big and hairy as house cats, a rubbery painted leg that looked gnawed at the knee—all marked down fifty percent. “Prices slashed” the sign proclaimed, in a blood-spattered font.

  “You like all that scary stuff?” I said, surprised. A month before, Katy had burst into tears at the thought of wearing a fuzzy costume that would make her look like her favorite television puppet, and now she wanted to go rushing into a store filled with ghoul masks, dark cloaks, and spiderwebs.

  Katy gave a solemn nod.

  “You aren’t afraid?”

  “No such thing as momers,” Katy said, with true conviction. “Momers” was Katy-speak for monsters.

  “Well,” I said, “if you say so.”

  We walked into the store, where Katy began playing with the hacked leg. I had a brief moment of panic, wondering just how I could translate the story to our father on the way home if Katy blurted out that she’d been playing with body parts. Scanning the wall of concert T-shirts, I was thankful that Katy couldn’t read.

  “Squish, squish,” Katy was saying as she used the heel of the severed leg to stomp on the fat plush spiders that had spilled to the floor from a bin on the lower shelf.

  “Awww, poor spider,” I said. I noticed a rack of Skip Slydell’s “Zombie Power!” T-shirts beside a display of zombie hygiene products, the top shelf of which was a large black bottle of Z, the body spray “for the active undead male.” There was a separate line of Lady Z products, which differed mainly from their male counterparts in that they were in smaller, curvier bottles.

  Kaitlyn’s next words made me laugh out loud in a way that I didn’t even have to think about, like I do most of the time when I’m trying to laugh.

  “He’s a bad spider, Caring. I have to squish him.”

  Still laughing, I left Katy to her squishing and drifted over to look at the other products on the display. There was a perfume called Endless, in a slender purple-lacquered bottle. I chanced a spritz on my wrist from the sample bottle. The scent had a hint of incense beneath a floral base.

  “Isn’t that just the best?” a way perky voice called out, nearly making me drop the bottle.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” the perky girl said.

  Scare me, I thought. Funny.

  It was a revelation that I could be startled, actually. We—the dead, I mean—aren’t exactly famous for our reaction time; most of my reflexes are no longer reflexive. You could tap my knee with a hammer all day and not get a movement, unless I wanted you to.

  I saw a girl who looked like a taller, slighter version of Margi, except her hair spikes were purple over brown, and she’d shaved one side of her hair down to her skull. She had a wide silver ring through her nose, and an ascending column of silver studs curving along her ear. She was wearing a black T-shirt from the Zombie Power! line, which had the words “Open Graves, Open Minds…” across the chest in a Day-Glo green script. I had one just like it in my dresser at home.

  “No worries,” I said, turning away, but not before I saw a Celtic braid tattooed on the inside of her arm. I set the bottle back on the shelf and rubbed my own arm through my denim jacket.

  “What do you think?” the girl said. “Different, huh? I think it’s the new patchouli, I really do. I wear it all the time. I bought the Z for my boyfriend, Jason.”

  Katy was still squishing spiders. The clerk didn’t seem to mind.

  “You date a zombie?” I asked.

  “Naw,” the clerk said, smiling in a way I thought conveyed a trace of disappointment. “We don’t have any zombies at Winford High; they all go to Oakvale. Mostly it’s trad kids that buy the colognes, anyway. We don’t sell much of the skin stuff. But a zombie once came in here to buy some Z, and he was with a trad girl. It was great!”

  “Great?” I said, now looking at the girl. I didn’t see a name badge.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, that was really brave of him, you know? And her, too. I so love your hair. How do you get that blond-y, silvery color?”

  “It’s…natural,” I said. I was hitching in my speech a bit, something I only do when I’m emotional. Most zombies have trouble speaking at a normal pace, but big-mouth me usually speaks without pauses.

  I guess I was a little emotional. My hair is even blonder than when I was alive, but the blond is all natural. Or all unnatural, if you prefer, since it happened when I died.

  She reached out toward me, toward my hair, hesitating a moment for a sign from me that it was okay. I told her it
was with a flicker of my eyes. My bright blue eyes.

  She let the long threads run through her fingers. “It’s so soft,” she said, “God, I’d die to have hair like this. It’s just the best.”

  Irony! She doesn’t know, I thought. She really doesn’t know I’m dead.

  “Thanks. I like the purple, too. And how you made it look wet. Very cool…What did you say your name was?”

  “Tamara,” the girl said. “But not Tammy. I hate Tammy.”

  “I’m Karen. That’s my sister, Katy, destroying all your spiders.”

  Tamara turned back, laughing. “She can’t hurt anything; they’re stuffed,” she said. She held out her hand at an angle, and each finger had a ring of some sort, some at the knuckle. “Nice to meet you, Karen.”

  I hesitated a moment before taking her hand, hoping that if I could concentrate on fur and sandy beaches and oven-fresh apple pie, Tamara wouldn’t notice how cold my skin was.

  “Nice to meet you too, Tamara not Tammy,” I said. Really corny.

  Tamara’s grip was vigorous; there was a strength in her wiry, gangling frame, hidden like the spark of unlife is hidden somewhere within me. If she thought I was clammy or cold, she didn’t say so.

  My sudden self-consciousness made her look around. There were few people in the store, and a pair of teenage boys by the CD rack were looking at us and whispering to each other. The blond one with the bomber jacket smiled and nodded in our direction.

  At me. He was smiling at me.

  My God, I thought. I’m actually passing.

  Tamara also saw the boys. She turned back to me with a wry, knowing smile on her face.

  “Hey,” Tamara said, finally releasing me, “I just thought of a great idea.”

  “I like…great ideas,” I said, hitching again. It felt so good to be mistaken for alive!

  “How about you apply for a job here? We just started looking for Christmas help.”

  “A job?” I said. Nothing could have been further from my mind.