Passing Strange

  “Sure. You’d fit right in. Then your sister could come back and squish Grinches or goth Frostys.”

  “Is there really such thing as a goth Frosty?”

  “If there is, we’ll carry it. Come on, it’ll be fun. Besides,” she said, her voice dropping to the whisper of conspiracy, “I get a twenty-five dollar gift certificate for every employee I recruit as long as they stay through Black Friday.”

  I laughed. “A whole twenty-five dollars? You could buy Jason a bottle of Z for Christmas.”

  Tamara pointed a sharp-nailed finger at me, her silver-knuckled thumb upraised.

  “Now yer thinkin’,” she said. “Come on, let’s go fill out the application.”

  * * *

  Katy was asleep before we were halfway home. My father’s gaze drifted to the rearview when he heard the soft squawk of a snore from the backseat.

  “Thanks for letting me come tonight, Dad,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said, looking at me with what seemed like real affection. His face was almost the same shade as mine in the greenish light from the dashboard. “Katy loves being with you.”

  “I know. I love being with her, too.”

  “We should do this more often,” he said. “You coming out with us, I mean. Out places.”

  “I’d like that,” I told him. I wasn’t trying to be all cool or anything, just careful—because if I flipped out with Margiesque enthusiasm, he might get all weird, and that would be the end of his wanting to be seen in public with me.

  “We could go out more, to most places,” he looked back at the road, and sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  He turned the car stereo on. He had one of his Santana discs in the CD player and he let it play, turning it low so it wouldn’t disturb Katy.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “I was offered a job at the mall tonight. At Wild Thingz!”

  “Really?” he said. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  He shook his head, laughing. “You always were full of surprises, Karen,” he told me.

  And I waited for it; I could almost hear it at the pause at the end of his words, a memory lingering just out of reach. What I waited for was for him to call me “honey,” or “sweetie,” as in “You were always full of surprises, Karen honey,” which is the way he used to talk to me. Back when I was alive. I waited, but the words never came.

  I’m a firm believer in epiphanies. I wasn’t always, certainly not when I was depressed. A life of depression is a life without epiphanies. When most people think of the term “epiphany,” they think of a moment of great personal insight, but the word often has spiritual significance. I’d like to think that my father had an epiphany in the car that night.

  He didn’t say it, but when he turned away from the road for a moment to look at me, I could see that the affection was still there in his eyes, and that it might actually be blossoming into more. Four years was a long time to some, but I hadn’t aged a day, and for the love of my parents I could wait an eternity.

  “I’d really like…to take the job,” I told him.

  “Absolutely,” my Dad said. “I think it’s about time you go to work.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I wanted to hug him, to lean over the seat and kiss his cheek just like a real girl would do. Of course I didn’t. I still had part of the story to tell.

  “But, Dad?”

  “Yes, Karen?”

  “I don’t think they realize I’m dead.”

  He didn’t answer right away, and I assumed he was considering how to phrase his reversed position in a way that would be the least psychologically damaging to me. I was already placing a lot of faith in the tiny gleam of affection I’d seen in his eyes, wasn’t I? The next light turned green as we approached, as did the next, and finally he spoke.

  “Well,” he said, “I won’t tell them if you don’t.”

  And then he did a beautiful thing, my Dad did. He winked at me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THINGS AT HOME IMPROVED, strangely, in the days that followed the Guttridge “murders.” The new state rules regarding zombies—the curfew, the banning from schools, the requirement to be staying with a legal guardian—created a feeling of solidarity at home. Even with Mom, who was much kinder to me, although Dad must have told her about all the various ways I was breaking the law.

  I think she was reaching out to me in her own way. Christmas at the DeSonne household almost felt like a real Christmas for me, even though I wasn’t invited to attend church with my parents. Maybe if they weren’t such sporadic attendees—they were lapsed to the point where they only set foot in the church for Christmas, Easter, funerals, and weddings—they would have risked bringing me along, but in truth I wasn’t so disappointed that I couldn’t go. Since my suicide I’ve been scared of setting foot in a church.

  Katy threw a minor tantrum, saying that she wanted to stay with me, when in reality we all knew that she wanted to stay with her new toys. New dolls and a house for them to live in, stuffed animals, DVDs, an electronic keyboard, games, sneakers—she’d gotten a pretty good haul. My parents included me this year and supplemented my usual mall gift certificates with a present I could actually unwrap: a book.

  “We’ll play when you get back home, Katy,” I told her, once she’d settled down a bit.

  “Those are my dolls,” she said, sniffling. If I wasn’t a zombie I would have been struggling to hold my laughter inside.

  “Oh, I know they are,” I said, nodding gravely. “I’ll wait for you to get home.”

  She stuck out a pouty lip. “You can play wif them if you want,” she said. “Just one.”

  “We’ll be back in a couple hours,” my father said, his tone apologetic as my mother waved from the car. “If you could just keep an eye on the turkey, I’d appreciate it.” He was leaning in close to me because he knew that Mom didn’t like me around their food.

  “Okay, Dad.” I said. I stood in the doorway and watched them drive away. The sun was shining and I had to squint my eyes against the reflection of the light on the snow.

  I wasn’t sad. Not really. I sat on the sofa with my new book on my lap and looked at the colored lights around the tree blinking on and off. I’d bought my mother a jacket, my father a retro punk T-shirt, and my sister a trio of stuffed bears. I could smell the pine. I could smell the turkey cooking in the next room. I opened my new book and I could feel the pages beneath my fingertips.

  When they came home, Mom rushed into the kitchen to check on the food, Katy rushed to the tree to check her toys, and Dad just rushed.

  “How was church?” I asked.

  “Long,” was his reply.

  I watched Katy play. Eventually she asked me if I wanted to help her bring her dolls to her room so we could play with them there.

  “Why don’t we stay here and play?” I said to my sister, knowing that Mom didn’t like me in her room. “It’s so pretty by the tree.” It was a reflexive suggestion on my part; I didn’t know that my mother was watching us from the doorway, wiping her hands dry with a dish towel.

  Mom smiled at me. I know this doesn’t seem like much, but it meant the world to me. I was so used to the tight expression she wore when she saw me with Kaitlyn, so used to her manufacturing some silly errand for me to do just to keep us apart. But this time she smiled and sat on the couch in the living room while Kaitlyn and I played dolls, looking at the newspaper, then a magazine, and then her library book. She was supervising but not policing, I guess.

  Kaitlyn had four dolls, two blond Barbies, a brunette, and another that had a few strands of crinkly blond hair attached to the taupe plastic dome of her head. This one was Señorita, and it was Katy’s favorite, even after the haircut. As usual, Katy asked me to be a Barbie named Anne, one of the blondes.

  “This dolly is a zombie dolly,” Kaitlyn said, handing me bikini-clad Anne.

/>   “She’s very pretty,” I told her.

  “She’s the dead one,” Katy said, “so she’s the prettiest.”

  “You think so, Katy? The other girls are pretty, too.” I tried not to look up at my Mom.

  “Anne is the prettiest one. But nobody likes her.”

  “Because she’s the prettiest?”

  “No,” Katy said, using a microscopic plastic brush on Señorita’s remaining strands. “Because she’s dead.”

  I glanced at my mother then, but she was pretending not to hear our conversation. She turned a page after wetting her index finger.

  “Anne is sad,” Katy continued, “but she’s still very, very pretty. And she likes to dance.”

  “Well,” I said, standing Anne up on the toes of her impossibly arched feet. “Maybe the other girls will try to like her if she’s really nice and friendly.”

  I twirled Anne slowly on the carpet, and then pushed one of her legs in the air and back down again, humming a slow but happy tune. Katy had Señorita and the other blonde join in the dance by hopping them up and down six inches off the floor, as though the carpet was a dolly trampoline.

  “They’re friends now,” Katy announced. “We need to decorate their house for them.”

  See how easy it could be for zombies and trads to get along? I looked at my mother. She turned another page. Quick reader.

  “When I grow up, I want to be a zombie, too,” Kaitlyn said.

  My mother either didn’t hear or was pretending that she hadn’t heard.

  “No, Kaitlyn,” I said. “You don’t want to be a zombie. It’s much more fun to be alive.”

  Isn’t it funny, the look a child can give you to let you know just how insane they think you are? Kaitlyn gave me one of those looks just then.

  “Someday you’ll be alive again, too, Caring,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. She started brushing zombie Barbie’s hair with the pixie-sized brush, and that was her final word on the subject.

  An hour or so later dinner was ready.

  “Would you like to sit at the table?” my mother asked me. Behind her I saw my father nearly drop his glass of wine.

  “I’d love to,” I said, and I sat with them, watching them eat.

  Katy started yawning around seven thirty, and my father picked her up to take her to bed, but not before she wriggled out of his arms to plant a kiss on my cheek. She Godzilla-stomped her way to my mother and kissed her, too. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see my mother turn away from Katy’s kisses, as though the zombie virus could be passed by kissing, but she didn’t. Katy gave her a big wet one on her cheek, and Mom responded with a flurry of little pecks and a smooch on the lips that made Katy giggle.

  “She loves you,” Mom said when Dad had disappeared down the hall with his warm bundle. She’d looked almost proud when she’d kissed Kaitlyn, as if she were proving something not only to me and Dad, but to herself.

  “I love her,” I said. “She’s…” I paused. I was about to say, “She’s the only good thing that came out of my dying,” but I checked myself, not knowing how Mom would react. I made the pause seem like a typical zombie pause rather than one of self-censorship.

  “A great kid.”

  Mom nodded and went back to her book. When Dad came out of Katy’s room twenty minutes later, I wished them both good night and went downstairs into my cave, a big smile on my face.

  But it wasn’t all healing, psychic and otherwise, that was taking place at the DeSonne household. I’d Tivo’d the Guttridge footage and must have watched it a thousand times over the course of the holiday season. I was searching for clues, of course, and clues began to appear.

  Not only were “the zombies’” walks all wrong, but the carpets they were carrying didn’t look like they had bodies in them. They didn’t bulge enough and there didn’t seem to be enough weight on the “zombies” shoulders. And then another weird thing I noticed: In one brief clip, two “zombies” were facing each other at either end of the carpet they were carrying across the Guttridge’s back lawn. Other clips of the house showed the front steps and a sliding door that led to a high deck, which meant that there were multiple cameras and the footage had been edited together.

  One day my father came into the living room while I was watching the footage.

  “Something bothers me about those clips,” he said.

  I tried to be nonchalant, even though I’d just paused the screen on the most distinct image of Fake Tak, who was much wider across the shoulders and chest than real Tak, who is tall and lanky. Fake Tak looked like a football player. Fake Tak looked like Pete Martinsburg.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah. I’ve watched it a few times now. The whole time I was thinking, those look like movie zombies, really low-budget movie zombies. And they’re built like men, not kids. Except for maybe that guy you’ve frozen on.”

  Sometimes I really wanted to hug my Dad. I probably should have hugged him then; I don’t even think he would have minded. But you never know. “Yeah, you’re right,” I said.

  “There’s a story out now that Guttridge was under investigation by the IRS.”

  “Oh?” Like I said, my Dad was a Reagan-era punk. It makes him more attuned to the idea of governmental conspiracy and cover-up. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “And then there’s the evidence having gone missing. Very strange, in light of there being a newly formed unit of the FBI to deal specifically with crimes involving zombies.”

  “The Undead Crimes Unit,” I said, and then I told him about having met agents Alholowicz and Gray in Undead Studies class. It was just like every cop show you’ve ever seen, with Iceman Gray acting all bad-coppy while his overweight partner, Alholowicz, shirttails flapping out of his suit-from-Sears pants, did his best to be all buddy-buddy. They came in to grill us about stuff that happened at the Winford cemetery, and they already thought Takayuki was responsible for that crime and probably a dozen others. I went all dumb blonde and asked them if Takayuki was the chicken you could get on sticks at Sakura in the mall food court.

  They were less than pleased with me.

  Dad slipped a couple gears when I told him about the grilling. At first he was a little miffed that I hadn’t told him about it before, but we haven’t really had the sort of relationship where I come home and blather on about my school day. He never asked, and I never offered. I never told him about the Undead Studies class, even. I just went. I think for us dead kids, parental permission was sort of optional anyhow; there was a space for a signature on the information slip, but I went ahead and filled in his name—the fact that I forged his signature probably would have ticked him off, but me taking the class would have had no impact on him whatsoever. I just didn’t want to discuss it at the time.

  “You spoke to federal agents without us even getting a phone call?” he said, really spun up.

  “Dad,” I said, “they aren’t required to tell you anything. We’re dead. We’re not citizens. In the eyes of our country, we’re non-persons.”

  I could see it really getting to him, so I laid it on thick. “We can’t get insurance. We can’t vote, we can’t get married. There isn’t much we can do.”

  Now Dad was getting agitated. He’d somehow compartmentalized the things that the undead dealt with on a daily basis—the inability to get licenses of any sort, the inability to leave the country legally, the inability to even be seen in certain public arenas—but the idea that the feds could detain his little dead girl without even a courtesy call was somehow too much for him to bear.

  I was worried that Dad was going to start making a battery of calls to congressmen, state reps, et al., which wouldn’t work with my plans to be an undercover agent, so I started talking to him about the Undead Studies class. I guess I wanted him to know that not every institution out there was bent on subjugating the undead. I mean, there was the fact that Oakvale High School, under the leadership of Principal Kim, opened their doors to zombies—that alone was pretty rare, right
? Yes, recent events banned zombie children from attending school, but at least we’d been allowed to go for a little while.

  It’s as if he and my mother assumed that the world no longer had any consequences for me. Who cares if I got an A on my math test (or, more likely, a C)? It wasn’t as if I was going to college. Who cares if I dated? It wasn’t as if I was going to get married. I was just marking time, and the time I was marking had already expired in their eyes.

  But the idea of trads and zombies discussing the social impact of the Undead in America was interesting to him, and I have to admit, the more I talked about it, the more wistful I became about the class. I didn’t join because I thought we were going to solve the world’s problems, like Tommy and some of the others did. I joined because I thought it would be a hoot and because some of the other people who were joining looked interesting. And I guess it was expected of me.

  But if I hadn’t joined that class I wouldn’t have any living friends. No Margi, no then-living Adam, no super-cute Thornton J. Harrowwood III, either. No Phoebe. That alone would be a reason to do it all again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I DIDN’T KILL MYSELF BECAUSE of unrequited love. I killed myself because I was depressed. People can argue the chicken-or-egg aspects of depression all they want; is depression triggered by life’s trials and tribulations, or do life’s trials and tribulations lead to depression? In my mind there’s no argument, no discussion. The blue fog existed before I did; it could come without warning, and when it did it annihilated everything. Maybe life could trigger it, but it was going to be there one way or the other.

  But I didn’t kill myself because the one I loved didn’t love me. I don’t have any blame to assign. I killed myself because I’m sick.

  Because the one I loved did love me. But I couldn’t let anyone find out.

  * * *

  He called me while I was walking around the mall, on a break. Christmas had come and gone and we were into a new year. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered anyway. What can I say? I’m a lonely girl.

  “Hello?”