As Dead as It Gets (6 page)

“One,” I said.

“Okay. It’s only twelve thirty.”

“Good,” I said, sleepily turning toward him.

“I’m so glad you came here tonight.” His hand absently stroked my hair. “I’ve been…I don’t think ‘hoping’ is the right word. But I’ve been…waiting.”

“Really?” I said, even though I knew it.

“You don’t have to be sad or scared anymore.” He pulled me closer. “You’re safe with me.”

I could have said,
That’s nice
or
You’re sweet
or some other generic thing.

But then he leaned down and started a line of light kisses across the back of my neck, and I didn’t have to say anything at all.

The next morning, I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling.

I’d slept in Jared’s T-shirt. It was warm and soft against my skin.

Yeah, so he wasn’t Carter. But he was decent and kind, and there was something else about him—some secret undercurrent of intensity that I couldn’t imagine Carter ever having.

Jared had walked me to my car the night before. “You’re not going to wake up in the morning and regret this, are you?” he’d asked, leaning down and resting his elbows on the window ledge.

“No,” I said. “Are you?”

His eyes crinkled. “Are you
kidding
me?” Then he’d kissed me in a way that made me believe him. Thinking about it, nestled under my comforter, I felt myself starting to smile.

A few minutes later I got up and went to the bathroom, where I carefully covered the bruise on my chin and combed my hair over the cut on my forehead. Then I went out to the kitchen, where Mom was making pancakes.

“Happy new year,” she said, giving me a hug. “Let’s make it a good one, okay?”

“Sure,” I said, pouring a glass of orange juice.

“Do you have any resolutions?”

I took a swig of juice and thought of what I’d promised myself I would do that day. “Just one.”

I
DROVE SLOWLY THROUGH
the west part of Surrey, my stomach doing unhappy backflips. At first I wasn’t sure I’d remember where to turn off the main road. But when I passed a mini-mall with a burned-out, boarded-up beauty salon in the middle, the odd twinge in my abdomen turned into a spasm.

Who was I trying to fool? Like I’d ever forget this route as long as I lived.

A few more turns led me to Lydia’s house. What had been a mild air of homeownerly neglect back in October had matured to a very real sense of impending collapse by January. The garage door was dented like someone had driven right into it. One of the porch steps was missing altogether, and flies swarmed over the mountain of trash bags just outside the front door.

I remembered that the doorbell didn’t work, and knocked gently. I counted to fifty-Mississippi, but just as I was about to leave, the door opened a few inches to reveal a haggard face defined by sharp gray shadows.

“Mrs. Small?” I asked.

She stared dead-eyed at me, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

“I’m…I was a friend of Lydia’s,” I said.

The door opened, and Mrs. Small backed away to let me inside. She wore a long nightgown, tattered at the hem, with a knee-length robe over it. The ties of the robe fell limply down to the floor.

The house was dark—all of the shades were pulled down. And the smell of cigarettes, beer, and rotting food hung heavily in the air.

I took a shaky breath and forced myself to speak. “I’m really sorry about Lydia.”

That got her attention—kind of. But her eyes couldn’t seem to focus on me.

“I was wondering if…” Even though I’d made up this story and rehearsed it a dozen times, I could hardly spit out the words. “She borrowed something from me and I wanted to get it back…to remember her by.”

It sounded weird and false to me, but Lydia’s mother just pointed at the stairs.

“Thank you,” I said, leaving her behind.

There were three doors at the top of the stairs, all closed. I went through the one with the Dead Kennedys poster on it.

Lydia’s bedroom was much cleaner than the rest of the house. Her closet door was open, revealing a perfect line of shoes and rows of neat skirts, shirts, and dresses. No sign of the ripped jeans or baggy black Goth clothes she wore during the brief period when we’d been friends freshman year. Naturally, she would have thrown them all away. They were useless to a Sunshine Club girl.

Her jewelry was laid out in a grid on the dresser, and a hook on the wall held three purses—black, brown, and red.

Two hangers were tossed sloppily on the bed, and I realized that they must have been the hangers from which her mother pulled the clothes Lydia was buried in—a gray silk skirt and black angora turtleneck.

I closed my eyes for a moment.

No matter how awful Lydia had been at the end (
very,
by the way—let’s be clear on that), I couldn’t forget what Carter said at the funeral:
She was just sad.

Thing is, she wasn’t “just sad” anymore—or she wouldn’t be trying to kill people.

I began to inspect the room, though I was having a hard time figuring out what might be her power center. I had absolutely no idea where to start. What would I do, destroy every last thing in the room?

I was on the verge of utter hopelessness when the door opened behind me and Mrs. Small came in, looking around in bewilderment. It was like someone had dropped her off outside and she’d wandered in to ask for directions.

Until last year, she’d owned one of those hair salons where they valet park your car and give you champagne while they do your hair, but it had gone out of business when people stopped paying two hundred dollars for a haircut. Now she was a faded version of her former self. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in about a week, and the gray roots crept over the top of her head like a river overflowing its banks.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“It’s, um, a shirt,” I said. “But I don’t see it, so I’ll—”

“She got rid of a lot of things before she died.” Mrs. Small’s voice sounded strained. “She might have let someone else have it, or…I don’t mean to say she would throw something of yours away—”

“No, I understand,” I said. “Now that I think about it, I probably told her it was okay to lend it to someone else. It’s all right. I should get going.”

It felt like my lungs were compressed, and no breath I could take was deep enough to fill them.

No matter how determined I was to get rid of Lydia’s ghost, bursting into this place, which was filled with sadness that was a direct consequence of my own actions, was too much for me. This whole thing had been a serious strategic misfire. I was treading behind enemy lines without a single weapon. It was time to retreat.

But Mrs. Small sat on the edge of the mattress and looked up at me. “Are you one of the girls from her little club?”

I didn’t know whether to confirm or deny. I gave up and nodded.

“I was glad she found so many nice friends.” Mrs. Small’s fingers toyed with the hem of her robe. “I’d been worried about her. But she started hanging out with all those girls—all you girls—and she got so…pretty. She looked happy. So I stayed out of her way. But now I wonder if I should have…I don’t know.”

I started to feel like I was suffocating. I almost excused myself, but now that Mrs. Small had begun talking, the words poured out of her mouth.

“The doctors said there was no way we could have known. You can’t predict an aneurysm. But don’t you think a mother should be able to tell there’s something wrong with her baby?” She reached out, grabbed one of the hangers, and brought it down hard against her leg. “I wasn’t paying attention. I can’t even remember the last time I told her I loved her. If I could just go back and have one more minute—”

So she didn’t blame me.…

She blamed herself.

Tears bit at the edges of my eyes. “I should really get going.”

“They remember her, don’t they?” she asked. “The other girls? They think about her?”

“I do.” At last I could speak the truth. “I think about her all the time.”

To be honest, I didn’t know if the Sunshine Club girls thought about Lydia or not. You certainly never heard her name mentioned in casual conversation. Maybe I
was
the only person who ever thought about her. How depressing would
that
be?

“I just like to think people aren’t forgetting.” Mrs. Small refused to stop staring up at me, her tired eyes wide and pleading.

“I’m sure they’re planning some kind of memorial,” I said. “In the yearbook or something.”

There was the tiniest glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Yes, they might be…that would mean so much to her.”

“Yes,” I choked. As if Lydia cared in the least about the yearbook. “I’m sure.”

“Could you—” She looked afraid to speak, but steeled herself and kept talking. “Could you ask and see if they are? Could you tell them how much it would mean?”

What? As in, actually go to the yearbook office and make an official request to memorialize the girl who was actively trying to destroy my life?

No freaking way.

But then I saw how Mrs. Small looked like an actual living human being for the first time since I’d come into the house, and I couldn’t help myself. “Yeah, okay.”

“I’d offer to pay for something, but money’s a little scarce.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s free.”

“Thank you,” she said, getting up and going to the dresser. “I’m so grateful that she had such nice friends…at the end.”

She turned to me, her fingers lightly petting some tiny object. When she saw me looking at it, she held out her hand and dropped something small and cool into my palm: a delicate gold chain with a little glass bird charm, black with a red head.

“It was her favorite piece,” her mother said. “A gift from my mother for Lydia’s ninth birthday. It’s a woodpecker. It means you have a guardian.”

Her favorite piece.

Her power center. The key to getting rid of her once and for all.

Mrs. Small’s fingers hovered in the air near mine, like she was eager to grab the necklace back.

“You know…” I said, “I could take a photo of this and…put it in the yearbook.”

I pictured myself taking it into the garage and smashing it to bits with a hammer.

Her hand trembled.

“It would be really nice, I think,” I said. “I think Lydia would have liked it.”

Welcome aboard, Alexis. This train goes straight to hell.

Mrs. Small’s mouth was open, and she looked at the bird one last time before reaching over and closing my fingers around it. “All right. Just…please…be careful with it. Promise me.”

I felt the cool glass on my skin, and I thought of what Lydia had done to Kendra. And to me.

“I promise,” I lied.

I really
did
intend to take pictures of it before I destroyed it.

But I didn’t get the chance.

When I got home and retreated to my room, after sneaking the hammer from the toolbox in the garage and setting a protective layer of cardboard on my desk, I dug down into my bag for the charm. But it wasn’t there.

Instead, there was a hole in the corner of the bag where a seam had come apart.

I retraced my steps to my car, and then I drove all the way back to Lydia’s house and retraced my steps there. I looked at every square inch of space within ten feet of where I’d walked, not even caring if Mrs. Small looked outside and saw me.

But the bird was gone.

S
CHOOL STARTED UP AGAIN
on a Wednesday. I took a deep breath as I got out of my car. New year, hopeful new outlook. (Or at least slightly less terrible outlook.)

The 700 wing was the newest building in the school. It had wide, spacious hallways with skylights and classrooms with air-conditioning that actually functioned. The only reason to stray this far from the center of campus before school was to be part of an advanced science lab or some sort of extracurricular organization, so all the kids I passed moved with purpose, like they had somewhere to be.

Halfway down the hall was a door marked
PUBLICATIONS
. A printed sign hung beneath that with the name of the yearbook:
THE WINGSPAN
.

I pushed the door open and walked into a large room that was painted nonregulation dark blue, with a row of computers along the far wall and bookshelves along the near one. About a third of the floor space was taken up with matching file cabinets, and next to those were a conference table and a small, untidy cluster of desks. Five or six kids sat on the desks, staring up at a giant whiteboard on the side wall. The whiteboard was covered in printed pages that seemed to represent an early draft of a yearbook.

A girl was talking. She had short curly hair, thin wire-frame glasses, and dark olive skin. Her baggy sweatshirt read harvard.

“It doesn’t make sense to try to divide clubs up by grade level. There are only six that determine their membership that way.” She pointed to a sheet with a list of club names on it. “We’re going to list them either alphabetically or grouped according to the type of activity. Actually…both. Alphabetically by activity.”

One of the boys opened his mouth to reply.

“Forget it, Chad,” she said. “That’s my final answer.”

They all scattered, with no one taking any particular notice of me. I hung back, not knowing whom to approach.

Finally, the curly-haired girl glanced over at me. “You look lost.”

“I’m looking for…” I consulted the note the office secretary had written for me. “Elliot Quilimaco? Is he here?”

“Hmm…someone’s looking for Elliot.…Is
he
here?” She put her hands on her hips and looked around the room, speaking in a loud voice. “You know, the
boy
in charge of the yearbook, because of course no mere
female
could ever be a yearbook editor. Has anyone seen Elliot, the exalted
male
?”

Nobody looked up. But the boy she’d called Chad, a burly guy with spiky dirty-blond hair, said, “Did you skip your meds today?”

She ignored him and turned back to me. “
I
am Elliot Quilimaco.”

“Sorry.” Couldn’t she have just said so? I mean, it
is
a boy’s name.

“Bless my stars!” she said, eyes widening in horror. “A girl named Elliot! Stop the presses!”

“Wait, really?” asked a boy a few feet away. He was hovering over a humming machine.

Elliot rolled her eyes. “That’s not a
press
, Kevin. It’s a laser printer.”

If I hadn’t already been saturated with regret about my promise to Mrs. Small, this would definitely have tipped me over the edge.

“What brings you to our humble corner of the school, Alexis?” she asked. “I thought you spent your time in the courtyard with the important people.”

She knew who I was?

She tapped her foot, waiting for my answer.

“Um,” I said. “I have a favor to ask.”

“I’m listening.”

I lowered my voice, not that anyone in the room seemed to be paying attention to us. “I was wondering if it would be possible to have some sort of memorial in the yearbook for Lydia Small—I mean, if you weren’t already planning something.”

Elliot’s alert, questioning expression didn’t change at all. “No, sorry, I don’t think so. Have a nice day.”

She started to turn away.

“Wait!” I said. “Are you kidding? You know she died, right?”

Elliot shrugged. “Even if I didn’t, which I did, the request for a memorial would have been a pretty good clue.”

“And…” I decided to change tactics. “It would really mean a lot to…people.”

“Oh, I
see
.” She blew air out of her nostrils. “Well, that doesn’t actually change anything.”

“Come on, seriously?”

Elliot put her hands back on her hips and leaned ever so slightly forward. “All right. Let’s move this along. Here’s the part where you say, ‘What did she ever do to you?’”

“Um, no,” I said. “That’s probably not a good question to ask about Lydia.”

“You’re right,” she said, moving closer. “Because I’ll tell you what your little friend did to me. Last year—I don’t know if you know this, but I doubt it, because obviously you’ve never deigned to notice me before—my older sister was a senior. And she was diagnosed with cancer, so she had to miss the last two months of school.”

My hands were suddenly slick with sweat. I didn’t see what this had to do with Lydia. Had Elliot’s sister died and not gotten a yearbook memorial? Why did everything end with death and misery?

“She’s in remission now, thank God,” Elliot said a little more gently, probably after seeing my face. “But anyway, her greatest wish was to have her senior yearbook signed by all of her friends and teachers. So I brought it to school, carried it around for a week, made sure everyone wrote in it. And the stuff people wrote?
Epic
, Alexis. Poems, song lyrics, quotes—so much amazing material.”

A vague sense of dread began to churn in my stomach.

“So on the last day of school, Lydia Small—who I kind of knew in junior high—comes up to me and asks if she can write something for Dale—yes, my sister also has a boy’s name.”

Lord, here it comes.

“She signed it, I said thanks, took it home and gave it to my sister. It was a huge surprise—Dale was so happy, we were crying…and she opened it up and started to read, and it was, like, better than I
ever
imagined.”

She was telling the story with such relish that I couldn’t bear to interrupt her, even though I knew I didn’t want to hear how it ended.

“And then she gets to some random page…and stops smiling.” Elliot’s face turned from rapturous to deadly serious. “And the next page after that, she’s frowning. And so on, until she’s in tears, and she gets up and
throws the yearbook in the trash
. Because Lydia Small took a bright red Sharpie and wrote on, I don’t know, I never actually counted—fifteen pages? Stuff like, ‘Sorry you had to miss school because of the chlamydia,’ ‘Hope those crabs clear up before bathing suit season!’”

Now Elliot’s eyes were bright and cold and diamond-hard, and everyone in the room was staring at us.

“So, yeah,” she said. “Forgive me if I don’t want to devote a two-page spread to your little friend who didn’t give a flying—”

“Language, Quilimaco,” said a voice from the corner. A teacher was sitting with his feet up on a desk, reading a magazine.

“A flying
foot
,” Elliot said primly, “about what could have ended up being my sister’s dying wish.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “She’s not my friend. I couldn’t stand her, for the record.”

Elliot shifted her weight and looked at me with blank curiosity. “Then why are you here?”

“I promised her mother I’d ask. But whatever.” I turned to go.

Elliot heaved a mighty put-upon sigh. “Okay, fine.”

“Wait, really?” To be honest, if I’d been in her shoes, I don’t think anything could have changed my mind.

“Yes,” Elliot said. “Mostly because you didn’t try to go over my head and ask Mr. Janicke about it.”

I glanced at the teacher, whose shirt was covered in doughnut crumbs. He gave me a wave. “I have no authority here,” he said. “Carry on.”

“Thank you
so much
,” I said.

She turned and looked at the board. “We’ll probably put it after the junior class photos. Just try to have it finished by Valentine’s Day, because, no offense, it’s probably going to need some tweaking.”

“Wait—have it finished? Me?”

“Yes, you. Who else? We’re understaffed. Here, let me give you the specs.” She reached for a pad of paper. “We’ll need a PSD with all the layers, and include the files of any exotic fonts you use. Eight by ten and a half, three hundred DPI, and obviously nothing with a copyright, please.”

I stared at her, not even sure where to start. “Um…what’s a PSD?”

“It’s”—she blinked, momentarily stunned by my ignorance—“a Photoshop document. This isn’t going to work, is it?”

“Please,” I said. “Isn’t there any way someone who knows about that stuff can do it?”

Elliot scanned the room. “Of course there’s a way. Chad, want to do this memorial page? Make it glorious.”

Chad turned to us and shrugged, then went back to his work.

“He looks like a hoodlum, but he’s brilliant with graphics,” Elliot said.

“Thank you. Again.” I still couldn’t believe she’d changed her mind.

Her eyes were lit up, like she was enjoying this. “So. Chad does your layout, you do something for us.”

“But…I don’t know how to do any of this.”

“You know how to take pictures.”

True.

“Here’s the deal.
We
devote two pages to making Lydia Small look like a dearly missed pillar of the school community, and
you
take on some photography work. Chad’s pictures suck, anyway.”

Without taking his eyes off the monitor, Chad held up his middle finger in our direction.

I was about to say no…and then I remembered Mrs. Small.

“Fine,” I said.

“Great,” Elliot said, looking pleased. “Perfect, in fact.”

“What am I going to be shooting?”

“Nothing too exciting,” she said, turning to walk back to her desk. “Clubs, teams, Student Council stuff.”

I followed her. “Um, I can’t do that.”

“Okay.” She sat and stuck the end of a pen in her mouth. “Then I can’t do your special project.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“I’ll bet I do,” she said, not even looking up. “You used to go out with Carter Blume. And now he’s dating Zoe Perry. And they’re both on Student Council. But somehow, you’re going to rise above all that and take really good pictures of them.”

I glanced at the teacher, hoping he would speak up.

“No authority,” he said.

I turned back to Elliot.

“Deal?” she asked. “Or no deal?”

I looked at the ceiling, thinking of the bird necklace Lydia’s mother was never going to get back
.

“Deal,” I said, turning and walking toward the door with as much dignity as I could muster.

“Our weekly meetings are Thursdays at two thirty-five!” she called. “Don’t be late!”