As Dead as It Gets (14 page)

“What other areas?”

“Our relationship, for starters,” he said. “Lately there have been days when I really wanted to see you, and I can’t even get you on the phone anymore.”

I glanced down at my food. Nothing had ever looked less appetizing. “I’m sorry.”

“You know what? Forget it. I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he said. “I’d like to enjoy my dinner.”

I sat back, silent.

Jared didn’t eat, either. He just stared down at his bowl, holding his fork in a death grip. After a few seconds, he leaned back a little and sighed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think that’s what they call an overreaction. Can you forgive me?”

“Sure,” I said. My nerves were starting to feel like a frayed rope. I reached for my wineglass and gulped down a mouthful before I had time to dislike the taste.

Jared had softened. “Maybe you should tell me about yearbook. Since you seem to enjoy it so much.”

So I did. I talked about Elliot, Marley, Chad, Mr. Janicke…all the shoots I’d done. Well, all the shoots except the ones with Carter. I thought that by putting names and anecdotes along with it, I could make Jared understand why it was so important to me.

By the time dinner was over, I’d finished the entire glass of wine, and my head was feeling fuzzy. I was still shy, underneath my alcohol-loosened tongue, and I suddenly wondered just how long I’d been going on about how cool Elliot was. It could have been five minutes or it could have been an hour.

“I should go home.” I stood up, but the room swayed around me.

“Yeah, I don’t think so, lightweight,” Jared said. “You’re going to have to hang out a while.”

I called Mom and told her Jared and I were going to watch a movie, but I’d be home by ten. The words slipped around my mouth like a wet fish, but Mom didn’t seem to pick up on it.

“You should probably drink some water,” said Jared.

I shook my head, which was starting to ache. “I just want to sit down.”

He helped me to the couch and turned on the TV.

I put my hand on his thigh. “Sorry,” I slurred. “I guess I’m a featherweight.”

He half laughed. “A fezzerweight?”

“Is that what I said?” The words were too thick to come out correctly.

“No.” He softly swept the hair from in front of my eyes. “It’s not. I shouldn’t tease you.”

I yawned in his face. “I’m so tired.”

“But you
are
a featherweight.” He leaned toward me. “A very cute one.”

By the time the kiss was over, I was passed out.

“Alexis?”

My temples ached like I had a too-tight bandanna tied around my head. I opened my eyes to see Jared standing above me.

“Ow,” I said.

“Hello to you, too.” He took my hand and pulled me to a sitting position.

“I think my brain is full of ball bearings,” I groaned.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “Are you okay to drive?”

“What time is it?”

“Nine forty-five.”

That opened my eyes. I’d been asleep for two hours?

“I can take you home. I’ll just drive your car and take a taxi back.”

“I’m sure I’m fine,” I said. “It was just one glass.”

He looked sheepish. “Well, it was a generous pour.”

“But
you’re
fine?”

He smoothed my hair. His cool fingers felt heavenly on my skin, and I pressed my face against his hand. “I like wine,” he said. “Dad’s let me have a glass with dinner since I was thirteen.”

“No, I’m okay,” I said, standing. Then the room whooshed around me, and I sat back down, defeated. “But you have to let me pay for the cab.”

“We’ll figure that out later,” Jared said. “I’ll get my jacket. Where are your keys?”

By the time I got home I was ready to pass out again. I totally forgot about paying for the cab. It was all I could do to brush my teeth, change into my pajamas, and collapse into bed.

Sometimes you wake up because you’re hot, or cold, or thirsty, or have to pee, or hear a noise. And sometimes you wake up because you just
do
.

I yawned and stretched and moved my arm out from under my pillow, shaking it lightly to get the blood flowing back into my fingers. My head still swam from the wine, so I snuggled back down on my pillow and closed my eyes again, trying to make the spinning dizziness go away.

Then I felt the slightest movement across my cheek.

My fingers touched something soft and wet, and I gasped, slapping at my skin furiously, as if there had been a spider crawling across my face in the darkness. I jumped out of bed and switched on the light.

On my pillowcase lay a single yellow rose petal.

I looked around. My head felt stuffy and I could hear the blood in my ears. It made the room seem silent—until I focused a little harder.

Vzzzzzzzzzz

“Hello?” I whispered.

But there was no answer.

My cheek burned, so I turned to the mirror to see if I’d scratched myself. My body felt weighted down, my mind thick. I was still out of it from being drunk—it was like I couldn’t even force myself to stay alert.

The sound seemed to be coming from behind me. But I could clearly see in the mirror that the room was empty.

Without thinking, I reached down for my camera, aiming it at the mirror and shooting pictures of the reflection.

Looking down at the image, the first thing I noticed was that the exposure was way off. There wasn’t nearly enough light in the bedroom, and I’d been too woozy to change the lens settings, which were adjusted for an outside shoot in the sun. Everything in the picture was darker than it should have been, which meant the image
should
have been a black, underexposed rectangle.

But it wasn’t.

There was something there.

The air left my lungs completely, and my hands clenched the sides of the camera in a death grip.

What I had thought up to that moment was a bright splotch of light—in the woods with Ashleen, on the TV screen, and in front of the small house on the far side of town—was a ghost. The ghost of a girl.

But she wasn’t like any ghost I’d ever seen before.

She was
moving
.

In a photograph.

Her whole body flickered slightly, like a neon sign about to burn out. The flickering gave the impression of a glow around her, and her form was slightly blurred, like she was making a million tiny movements. And even in my photo…she was
quaking
.

She floated directly over my bed, her body crooked and broken, arms askew and neck bent to a horrific angle.

The pose looked like she’d fallen—but she was hovering in midair. Her hair swung raggedly in front of her face, almost reaching my pillow. Her left arm hung down, and her left hand held a bouquet of yellow roses.

And she was wearing the purple dress.

The same one I saw myself in. The same one Ashleen’s ghost wore.

Almost in a panic, I crashed into my dresser and then threw open my bedroom door, trying to get as far away from the ghost as possible. I ended up in the kitchen, with my back against the sliding door that led to our tiny patch of backyard.

“Lydia!” I whispered.

But Lydia didn’t pop out of thin air. How long did it usually take her to come, I wondered?

Holding my breath, I looked back at the picture, at the trembling figure.

And then—she turned her head. The ghost in the picture
turned her head
. And looked at me.

Except she didn’t have eyes. Where they should have been were just dark sunken patches of smooth skin, like two round shadows on her face.

But she saw me—I know she did.

Through a
photograph
.

I stood in shock, my breath coming in tiny puffs. I glanced at the hall, expecting to see a trembling cloud of white light float out of my bedroom.

Then I heard the sound again—
vzzzzzzzz
—coming from behind me.

Before I had the sense not to do it, I turned around and took another picture, looking out the glass doors toward the yard. She was there. And she was closer—she filled almost the whole frame.

I stared at her waves of golden hair—which, up close, were covered in dirt. Where her hair and skin met, the skin was beginning to shrivel, raisinlike, and was laced with a thin layer of black. The layers of her purple dress were outlined in gray-green mildew, and her bony, desiccated left hand held a bouquet of rotting roses—only
held
was the wrong word. The stems seemed grafted to her palm, growing out of the skin like some grotesque, malignant tumor.

But the worst of it was the space where her eyes should have been.

It would have almost been better if there were disgusting empty eye sockets, because at least that would have been real—but this hollow smoothness was like something from a nightmare. It was impossible and horrible and yet it was right there in front of me—staring me down.

I thought,
I don’t know if I can do this.

“What—” I choked. “Who are you?”

I raised the camera and took another photograph. In this image she’d begun to lean forward through the sliding glass door, and her head and face and dress and flowers were actually coming right through it, as if the glass were nothing but a sheet of falling water.

I stepped back and snapped another picture.

Now she was in the kitchen with me.

“Wait—” I took one last photo and looked down at it.

She was smiling, revealing a mouth of blackened teeth, sharpened to points. Her gums were gray and decaying.

The
vzzzzz
seemed to waver and change, until it was a new sound:

Hisssssssssssssss

And suddenly I understood something, down to the core of my being—

This was not a good ghost.

I swallowed hard, letting the camera fall to the end of its strap. My voice trembled like a flag in a windstorm.
“Go…away.”

Then she laughed—the horrible, musical, maniacal laugh.

That’s when it clicked for me. Every time I’d heard that laugh—every time I’d seen the light—this
thing
had been there. This horrible, disgusting thing…this thing that had been in my bedroom—hanging over me—
watching
me.

In a burst of terror, I turned and ran, desperately trying to get away from the laughter and the teeth and the non-eyes. But the laughter came with me, like it was playing through headphones that were glued onto my ears.

I skidded around the corner and down the hall toward my room, gasping in shock as I saw another figure standing in my path.

At first I thought it was Lydia.

But this figure was solid, and I ran into it, and both of us went flying, and the next thing I knew, my sister was sputtering beneath me like an angry cat.

“What are you doing?!” she demanded, pushing me off her and getting to her feet.

I didn’t answer because I was too busy looking behind me. The laughter was gone, but that didn’t mean that she—it—whatever it was—wasn’t still following me, hovering, grinning, hissing.…

“What’s going on?” Kasey asked. “You look like you just saw a…”

I turned to her. I don’t know what my face looked like, but her expression changed as though someone had flipped a switch. She went from irritated to dead serious.

“Lexi,” she whispered, shaking her head. “What
exactly
are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

She looked in the direction of the living room.

“No,”
I said.

She whipped her head toward me.

“Kasey,” I said. “Don’t. Just go back to bed.
Please.
”

She glanced past me toward the end of the hallway. Her eyes came back to meet mine, and we stared at each other for a long, terrible minute.

Then, so fast her nightgown swished around her legs, she turned and stormed into her bedroom.

I got into my bed, but I didn’t sleep. I just sat there with the light on.

I was so tired that I began to see swirls of color in my vision, but I didn’t lie down, didn’t rest my head.

Didn’t even close my eyes longer than it took to blink.

For the whole night.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I got to school early and went to the yearbook office, where I found Chad hunched over a layout, as usual.

When I sat down at one of the open computers, I found that the internet was blocked.

“What’s up?” Chad asked. “There’s a lot of disgruntled sighing coming from your side of the room.”

My sleepless night left me feeling like the world’s grouchiest zombie. “I’m trying to look something up,” I said. “But I can’t.”

He wheeled his chair over and looked over my shoulder before I thought to minimize the screen.

“‘Supernatural yellow roses,’” he read. He sat back and looked at me.

“It’s…a band,” I said. “My cousin’s punk band.”

He thought about it, then nodded. “Catchy name. Do they have any songs out?”

“Probably nothing you’ve heard of.”

He shrugged and reached for the mouse, going through a series of menus and typing in a bunch of long codes. Then he sat back. “Chad rules, firewall drools. Cyberstalk crappy bands to your heart’s content.”

“Thanks,” I said. But none of my searches pulled up any relevant results. Nothing was written about a ghost that could move, or about ghosts wearing clothes other than the ones they died in.

I was fairly certain that the ghost who’d been in my room—though really she was more than just a ghost, kind of a
superghost
—was somehow the key to everything that was happening. If she was the source of the buzzing noise, the yellow roses, and the purple dress, then it was fair to speculate that she was the one who’d lured Kendra and Ashleen from their houses in the middle of the night to wander in the woods.

So if she was at the center of it all, the next logical step would be to find out her identity and her story.

It might help to take a closer look at my pictures. “Do you have the card reader?”

Chad wheeled back over to me, card reader in hand, and looked at my screen again. “‘Dead girl in purple dress’?”

“It’s…one of their songs.”

“I never really figured you for the emo death rock type,” he said. “But I guess it makes sense.”

“Thanks,” I said, grabbing the card reader and pushing his chair back toward his own computer. Then I hooked the reader up and inserted the memory card from my camera. The pictures loaded, and I leaned closer to study them.

Nothing stood out to me in the daylight that I hadn’t noticed at night.

But…the white spots…

“Hey, Chad?”

“Yes, Death Rock?” He wheeled over. “Should I just sit here with you for a few hours?”

“Help?” I’d opened Photoshop and loaded one of the pictures of Ashleen and the white spot.

Chad squinted. “This is your best work?” To him, it just looked like a poorly composed picture of a tree.

“No.” I looked closer at the screen. “How do I make it darker?”

“You mean lighter.”

“No, I mean darker.”

“You
do
know this picture was taken at night, right?”

“Darker, please,” I repeated.

“Image menu…adjust…exposure. Or levels. Play around until you have the extreme, black, ruined photograph of your dreams. Are we done here?”

“Like this?” I used the mouse to move the exposure slider down, keeping my eyes on the white spot.

It worked.

“Yeah, like that,” Chad said. “Now you can’t see anything. Mission accomplished. So, tell me why you’re doing this?”

But I was too busy looking at the picture to answer. The white spot in the picture of Ashleen, faded down, was the exact same ghost I’d seen in my room.

“Live via satellite,” Chad was saying. “It’s Alexis Warren…”

She was still shaking. And she looked at me again.

Then—she moved closer.

I jerked away from the desk and pushed off of Chad’s back, slamming him forward into the desk and shooting my own chair across the room.

“Turn it off!” I said. “Turn the computer off!”

“What—why would you—my
stomach
!”

I ran back and hit the power button on the underside of the monitor.

“I hope you didn’t break my ribs,” Chad said. “I mean, I’d kind of heard you were supposed to be mental, but I didn’t know you were violent.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, breathing heavily and not taking my eyes off the darkened monitor. “I thought I saw a spider.”

“Um, okay,” he said, wheeling his chair away. Under his breath he whispered,
“Crazy.”

After a minute, I went back and disconnected the card reader. Then I reached down and held the computer’s power button in until the machine shut off with a sudden sigh.

“Um, excuse me. You’ve used computers before, right?” Chad asked, looking up from his screen. “You know how to go to the menu to turn the power off? And how to eject a memory card? Are you
trying
to corrupt the hard drive?”

I couldn’t answer. My fingers fumbled getting the card out of the reader and sticking it back in my camera. I went to the menu and selected erase all.

There was probably important information in those photos. Clues that could help me figure out what that thing was, and how it was connected to Ashleen and Kendra, and—most important—why it was sleeping in
my
house.

But I couldn’t bear to let it live in my memory chip.

I looked at Chad, stuffing the camera back in my bag. “Did I hurt you?”

The way he looked at me, I knew he knew something was wrong.

“Nah,” he said, his voice a shade gentler than usual. “You’re just lucky my rock-solid six-pack broke the impact.”

* * *

I completely ignored whatever my first period teacher was talking about, and spent the whole class sketching what I could remember of the purple dress. When the bell rang, I went over to the 200 wing, where my sister and her friends had lockers.

Keeping an eye out for Kasey, I went up behind Mimi Laird, whose bouncing red mane of curls made her visible from a hundred feet away. I tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around, obviously surprised to see me.

“Can we talk for a minute?” I asked.

Mimi glanced around. If I had to put a word to it, I’d say she looked nervous. (Which further confirmed my suspicions that the whole ex–Sunshine Club thought I was a murderer.)

“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Not here.…In the bathroom, maybe?” I didn’t want Kasey seeing us.

She put on a brave little smile and followed me. When I unfolded my drawing, she visibly relaxed.

“That’s…nice,” she said. “Are you into fashion now?” She cast a doubtful look at my non-fashionista outfit—jeans, T-shirt, and a hoodie.

“No,” I said. “I saw this dress somewhere and I’m trying to figure out where it came from.”

Mimi knew more about fashion than anyone I’d ever met. She read every magazine and had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the designers and trends.

She made a skeptical face. “Where it came from?”

“Like, any particular store or whatever?”

Mimi quirked her mouth up. “Um…I don’t know. Like, literally thousands of dresses come out every season. And a lot of designers did stuff that looked like that.”

“
Did?
What do you mean?”

“Nobody’s done tulip sleeves for two years,” she said. “You…weren’t going to try to wear this to prom, were you? Because I’m sure Kasey and Adrienne could help you find—”

“No,” I said. “I just liked it.”

Mimi nodded slowly, with the kind of caution you’d use around an unstable person. “Well, I’d say that style’s two years old, at least.”

“At least?” I said. “So it could be, like, ten years old?”

She bit her lip and looked down at the dress. “No. Two to three years, max. If that helps.”

“It does, actually,” I said. It gave me a window to look into. “Thanks. And…could you not mention this to Kasey?”

“Um…sure,” she said. “Anytime.”

I stopped at home after school to drop off my backpack and have a snack before Brighter Path. As I was sitting on the couch, with the TV droning on as background noise, the front door opened and slammed shut.

I sat up to see Kasey in the entryway. She left her backpack in the foyer and came over to the couch. Then she just stared at me.

“Um, hi,” I said.

“What is it, Lexi?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Why would you go to Mimi for help instead of asking me?”

I tried to hide my annoyance, but I guess it didn’t work.

“Don’t be mad at her,” Kasey said. “She didn’t tell me anything specific. She just said I should check on you.”

“Great,” I said. “Now Mimi’s gossiping about me.”

“It’s not like that,” Kasey said. “Mimi wouldn’t gossip about you. She’s just worried.”

“Why would she worry about me?” I asked. “I didn’t ask her to.”

Kasey rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to ask your friends to worry about you. That’s just what they do. It’s why they’re your friends.”

Did Mimi really consider herself my friend?

I’d certainly given up thinking of her that way. I’d lumped her in with the rest of the Sunshine Club girls—the ones who avoided me.

“If you need help with something, I’ll help you,” Kasey said. “I’m your sister.”

She sat forward in her chair, her hair hanging in two loose braids over her shoulders, her jaw set, and a fierce look in her eyes.

“I’m fine, Kase,” I said. “I’m sorry Mimi got you all worked up.”

She sighed and sat back. Then her phone started ringing. She glanced down at it and stood up. “Just remember,” she said as she walked away, “people want to help you.”

Then I heard her say, “Keat? Hey,” and shut the door to her bedroom.

I stared at the TV, not processing the images but letting them wash over me.

Maybe my sister was right.

Maybe it was time to ask for help.

I just couldn’t bring myself to ask
her
.

When I pulled into the Sacred Heart parking lot, Megan was waiting for me.

Seeing her used to give me a glowy moment of happiness mixed with relief—the security you feel around your best friend. But as the weeks went by, the glow had gotten dimmer and faded out faster. I didn’t know what we were to each other, but it didn’t seem quite like BFFs anymore.

She hugged me, beaming her Brighter Path smile. She looked flawless, as usual, her hair in a perfect frizzless ponytail, her makeup understated but pretty. But lately she was…different.

Like a robot. In fact, she reminded me a lot of herself as a Sunshine Club girl.

“Welcome!” she said, in a chirpy voice that made me wince.

Megan had bought, mixed, and drunk the Brighter Path Kool-Aid—then gone back for seconds. She was basically the group’s poster child; she was Brother Ben’s second-in-command, and she loved nothing more than to sing the praises of him and his stupid club until I wanted to tear my hair out.

We started walking along the tree-lined cobblestone path that wound through the campus. I tried to think of a way to bring up the superghost—but Megan did it for me.

“It’s so weird about that girl Ashleen,” she said, shaking her head and smoothing her skirt. “Do they know anything about what happened?”

“No, nothing yet.”

“It’s sort of…off, you know? Sneaking out in the middle of the night. Dying mysteriously.”

Could I really be hearing correctly? Megan was thinking about it. She was curious. Maybe she would be excited to hear what I had to say. And then we could work on this together—and fix it.

She clucked sadly. “I just can’t help but assume they were in trouble somehow.”

It wasn’t what I’d been expecting to hear. “In trouble?”

She had the grace to seem a little uncomfortable. “I mean…they were messing with things they shouldn’t have been messing with.”

I could tell my stare made her nervous, but that didn’t make me back down. “Are you trying to say that Ashleen
deserved
to die?”

“God, no! That’s horrible.” She swiftly spun away, but I knew Megan too well—her sharp denial was basically an admission. “Just that they probably weren’t being careful. So it’s not like it’s a
surprise
, that’s all.”

“Like girls who dress a certain way and get attacked and—”

“No!” She snapped the word at me, and I could see I’d broken through her smooth, composed exterior. She blushed hotly and sped up, walking a few steps ahead of me.

I caught up. “Let’s talk about something else, okay?”

She made an annoyed sound. “It’s not like you to deliberately misunderstand me, Lex. I meant more like…like Lydia. You play with fire, you’re going to get burned.”

Shockingly, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “Lydia didn’t know any better. She didn’t deserve to die, either. Her death was a horrible tragedy.”

Megan shot me a glance that I couldn’t decipher. “Of
course
it was.”

“I need to show you something.” I knew it was a long shot. I even knew it was a terrible idea and even more terrible timing. But that didn’t stop me from pulling out the drawing of the dress and handing it to her. “Have you ever heard of a ghost that, like…flickers?”

She’d been studying the picture, but when she heard the word “ghost,” she shoved it back into my hands. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Just…no reason. Or…a ghost that can hold something? Like, in its hands?”