The Reaping of Norah Bentley (13 page)

With that thought hanging over me, I fumbled with the door some more until I managed to get it open and collapse into the driver’s seat. My cell was in the cup holder beside me, lighting up and vibrating with a new text as I leaned back and propped my knees against the steering wheel. I needed some sort of distraction just then, so I reached over and grabbed the phone, held it up under the shadow of the visor so I could read it in the glaring sunlight.

It was from Rachel, reminding me about the plans we’d made for tonight, wanting to know if I still wanted to hang out. I didn’t actually remember making those plans— but then, most of this past week had been a little hazy. At the moment though, any plan that involved anything but graveyards and death and grim reapers sounded fine by me; so I texted back, as fast as my fingers could fly across the cracked screen, and told her sure, name the time and place and I’d be there.

Maybe I could still live a normal life. Maybe if I just acted like everything was normal, if I just went and hung out with Rachel and laughed and joked with her like always, maybe then I could ignore Eli, all the things he said. Maybe I could even ignore him now. Leave him and never look back. The key was already in the ignition, and I’d managed to turn it, and my car’s engine had managed to stutter to life. It would be so easy to drive away from all this.

My hand hovered over the gear shift for a minute. Then I drew it back, reached to crank up the heat instead. Then to adjust the vents, and then my seat. The mirrors. The sun-visor. I shuffled my feet, slid the mat underneath it back into place, contemplated different ways I could keep it from bunching up around the clutch like that in the future.

Then I looked in the rearview and thought,
who the hell am I kidding?
I wasn’t going anywhere without him. I leaned forward, laid on the horn for a few seconds and then rested my forehead against the steering wheel while I waited. And soon Eli opened the car door, climbed inside almost soundlessly; I felt the cold air from outside rush in with him, and that was the only reason I looked up at all.

Neither of us said anything. He stared straight ahead. I watched him settling into his seat; so quiet, so unassuming, so human. He even pulled his seatbelt on, like a car crash would have made any difference to him. And I pulled mine on, too—although I guess it wouldn’t really have made any difference to me, either. As far as the universe was concerned, I was already dead anyway. But as long as Eli was beside me, my heart would keep pounding. I would keep drawing breath. As long as he was beside me. Elijah James Emerson.

The boy who held my life in his hands.

Luke was there too. And if I didn’t love Rachel so much, I would have killed her.

In her defense, I guess she didn’t know about the fight we’d had last night, didn’t know about what was going on between me and Luke and Eli. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her, and even if I had, how exactly was
that
conversation supposed to go?

So there’s this guy, Rach, and he’s sort of invisible to most people. But Luke can see him, which is kind of unfortunate, because I sort of feel like Luke might want to kill him—of course, that’s what’s really funny, since Eli is technically already dead. Oh, and so am I. Also, my life recently became an episode of The Twilight Zone. I just thought you should know.

Yeah, that would probably go over real well with the girl who freaked out when she had to take the dog out after dark.

Stepping into the Molongoski’s basement was like stepping back in time, back to the unfortunate décor trends of the sixties. Rachel’s mom was always talking about how she was going to renovate this place; she had an entire box of do-it-yourself magazines, most of them with half their pictures and articles cut out and paperclipped together—a stack for wall colors, one for different carpeting options, one with pictures of furniture she liked. That was as close as she’d ever come to getting this place together, though.

And tonight, I was kind of glad she hadn’t. Don’t get me wrong—the bright blue sofa and loveseat, with its orange and salmon pink circles, was pretty terrible. Even worse, the same fabric they’d used to upholster the furniture had been wrapped around the bottom half of the wood-paneled walls, and the room’s shag carpet was the same salmon pink as the fabric’s circles. It all matched in an awful, make-you-want-to-vomit sort of way.

But it was familiar. That couch, for all its gag-worthiness, was surprisingly comfortable, and I’d probably slept on it at least as much as I’d slept on my own bed. The built-in bar in the corner was familiar too, and the bar stools that Rachel had dared me to hop across when we were ten, which led to a 3 a.m. trip to the emergency room and neon green cast on my arm for the next six weeks. And just behind the couch was the pool table, exactly where it had been for as long as I could remember.

Luke had taught me how to play at that table, and that was where he was now, where he always gravitated the second he came down the stairs. Parker Maples—Rachel’s on-again, off-again boy toy— was with him, had just gotten done breaking. He was stripes. Luke was solids.

Other than a stiff hello and a quick smile, Luke and I hadn’t said much of anything. He seemed all too happy to be distracted by Parker’s presence, and I wasn’t going out of my way to get his attention. I sat at the bar, sipping a coke, my eyes drifting over to them every now and then but mostly keeping to the safety of Rachel, who was digging through the dvd cabinet and trying to pick something out.

“Anybody have any preference?” she asked. “Comedy? Romance?”

“Don’t care,” Luke and Parker both said, almost in unison.

“Neither of those,” I said. I didn’t really feel like laughing or watching people fall in love.

“Ooh, how about a horror movie?”

“Why did you even bother asking our opinion?” Luke asked. He laughed and crouched down beside the pool table, used his cue stick to line up a shot. “Any time you’re over there picking, we always end up watching one of those dumb slasher movies.”

“They’re not dumb,” Rachel said. “They’re classics.”

“Classically dumb movies.”

I smiled a little from behind my coke can. Luke and I had never shared Rachel’s weird affinity for those gory movies; it was something she got from her dad, and it was his collection of old vhs tapes that she was pawing through now—emphasis on old, because they both agreed that after the eighties, the slasher genre really started to go downhill. Apparently, all of Hollywood’s new technology couldn’t compete with the pure terror of classics like
Alone in the Dark
and the original
Halloween movie.

New or old, I thought they were all sort of dumb, and I thought it was even dumber that Rachel insisted on watching them, even though every time she did she ended up having to sleep with the lights on for a week afterwards. But I had a feeling I knew why she was suggesting a slasher for tonight.

Parker Maples was a senior, co-captain of the basketball team and the kind of guy who got away with acting like a jerk half the time because of his golden blonde hair and washboard abs, and the fact that he had connections and could always bring the beer to the party. The kind of guy that most girls would have wanted to watch a horror movie with, just to have an excuse to scream and bury their face in that broad chest of his. The kind of guy I never would have acknowledged, and definitely wouldn’t have hung out with if it wasn’t my sworn duty as Rachel’s best friend to stick around and make sure she didn’t do anything too incredibly stupid.

“You said you didn’t care what we watched anyway,” Rachel said.

“I don’t,” Luke said.

“Alright then. Dumb slasher flick it is, then.”

“Excellent,” Parker said over the crack of billiard balls. “I need a little more gore in my life.”

I could arrange a gory end for you, Parker Maples...
I thought smugly. I did have connections after all, even if I didn’t actually know where Eli was right now.

Being away from Eli like this still made me uneasy, but I felt like I needed it, this breath of normal life. My old life. And Eli had things he needed to take care of, he said; things I couldn’t be around for. Job stuff. Reaper stuff, I guess. For once I hadn’t pressed him for any details. I’d just made him promise to be back as soon as he could and made him take my cell phone with him, so I could use Rachel’s to call him if I needed to. Although, now that I thought about it, the Afterworlds probably didn’t get very good reception. Oh well.

The noise in my head was there, but I was learning to ignore it, to focus more intently on the world around me and fill my thoughts with those things instead. With the sound of Rachel’s voice, and the clattering and scraping of the tapes she was digging through. With Luke’s laugh, his smile, the way his mouth opened just slightly right before he went to take a shot. Suddenly the world was full of things I felt like I should’ve been paying attention to, and the distant screams in my head weren’t as hard to deal with.

“Oh wow,” Rachel said suddenly. The cabinet door creaked as she closed it. “Look what I just found.” She held it up: an old yearbook with a glossy maroon and black cover and a year printed in silver across the bottom— 2004. “Talk about classics,” she said.

“You should probably just put that away,” I said.

“What?” Luke said. “No way! I want to see this.” He propped his pool stick up against the wall and crossed the room, took the book from Rachel’s hands and spread it open across the top of the cabinet. Parker followed a second later, and then I did too, drawn by a mixture of nostalgia and that need to stay constantly distracted.

“What grade was that?” I thought out loud. “Sixth, right?”

“Yep,” Luke said. “And there we are—Mr. Bailey’s homeroom.”

I stepped up to the cabinet and Luke took a step back, so there was no chance of us even accidently touching. I looked down at the creased page, scanned the rows of mostly familiar faces.

“I forgot you were in that class too, Parker,” I said. “Nice braces.”

“What?” he said. “You think people are born with smiles like this?” He demonstrated his smile for us; Rachel giggled, and I rolled my eyes and made sure Parker saw it.

“Look at your hair, Norah,” Rachel said, leaning over my shoulder. “It was super short back then.”

“I know,” I said. “It sort of makes me cringe just looking at it.”

“It wasn’t
tha
t bad,” she said.

“I thought it looked good,” Luke said.

“I think it made you look like a lesbian,” Parker said.

Rachel smacked him in the chest. “Your mom looks like a lesbian,” she said.

“But I know for a fact she’s not,” Luke said, “Because I was with her last night.”

“Oh come on, man!” Parker said. But he was laughing; we were all laughing, even as Parker jerked the book out of my hands and slammed it shut. “Weren’t we going to watch a movie?” he asked.

Rachel grabbed two tapes she’d balanced on the armrest of the loveseat and held them up to us. “Take your pick,” she said. “We’ve got
Nightmare on Elm Street
or, my personal favorite,
Evil Dead Trap.”

“I vote
Nightmare on Elm Street,”
Luke said. “Just because
Evil Dead Trap
might be the lamest name for a movie ever.”

“Seconded,” Parker said,

“Thirded,” I said.

“It’s not lame,” Rachel said, putting the losing movie back up. “It’s Japanese.”

“Why would you want to watch a movie in Japanese?” Parker asked.

“It’s not
in
Japanese, stupid. It’s just…” She smiled hopelessly at him; not that he saw it, since he was already on the other side of the room, hidden from view behind the open refrigerator door. There was some shuffling, the sound of clinking bottles, and then Parker reemerged holding several bottles of beer by the neck. He walked over and offered everybody one; Luke and I both turned him down, but Rachel took one and carried it with her over to the TV. I guess just because she didn’t want Parker to have to drink alone—because I knew for a fact that she didn’t even like the taste of beer.

Parker claimed the couch for him and Rachel before I could get to it, in a flying leap that skidded the whole thing across the carpet when he landed on it, sloshing some of his beer over the armrest.

“Mine,” he said, grinning up at me.

“It’s all yours,” I said. “You can see the TV better from the loveseat, anyway.” Which was true; the only problem with the loveseat was how tiny it was. And also the fact that Luke was already sitting in it. There was another chair, but it was on the other side of the room and not really an option—since if I didn’t sit with Luke, Rachel was going to start asking questions.

So I sat down beside him, as far away as I could without risking it looking weird. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, leaned casually against the armrest, crossed my legs back. Drummed my fingers against my knee.

This sucked. However convincingly normal I tried to make it look, it still felt weird to have any sort of space between us. It was just a few inches of retro-fabric cushions, but it felt more like we were on opposite ends of the house.