by Kali Wallace
“I know you heard me when I said it hurts.”
“Sorry.” Jake didn’t sound sorry; he sounded interested. “It’s weird. It’s healing unevenly.”
“I’m sure they cover that in the Undead Medical Emergency Handbook, but I lost my copy. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Sure.”
“Lots of practice with first aid?”
“Yes, actually,” he said. “My brother is a dumbass.”
He didn’t say it meanly. He said it fondly, and for a moment I missed my sisters so much my chest hurt.
Jake pressed the scalpel in, more surely this time. Blood seeped out and I stopped watching.
“How did you meet Rain?” Jake asked calmly, like he wasn’t starting a bloody excavation into my side.
“We got locked up together. I didn’t get to pick my roommate.”
“You didn’t know her before that?”
“No. Why?”
“No reason,” Jake said, in that voice people use when they have a lot of reasons but would prefer not to share. “What did she say to Zeke? To get him to help her,” he added, when I glanced at him.
“I don’t know.” I thought back to the one side of the phone conversation I had heard. “She said he owed her for something.”
“Did she threaten him?” He looked up at me, and from that close, I could see that the pupils of his eyes weren’t quite round. It was subtle, no more than a slight oval distortion, but it was there.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know what she was talking about. He didn’t tell you?”
“He told me what you guys found in that house,” Jake said. “This is going to hurt.”
It did hurt, but more than that, if felt unbelievably weird when he pried the scalpel into the cut and pressed his fingers in to draw something out. Sodden scraps of cloth: pieces of Violet’s dress driven into the wounds by Lyle’s claws.
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
Jake dropped the soggy mess into the sink and grabbed a towel, dampened it and began cleaning the wound. When he was done, he pressed the towel to my side and told me to hold it in place.
“I guess you don’t need stitches,” he said.
“No, it’ll close on its own,” I said, a little breathless. “Thanks.”
I dropped from the counter and sat at the table while Jake washed his hands.
“I’m not sure it would even work,” I said.
He glanced over his shoulder. “What?”
“Chopping me up into little pieces in revenge for threatening your little brother, or whatever it is you were thinking.”
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
“Well. Good. But it probably wouldn’t work anyway.”
“Because none of the other things you tried worked?” Jake dried his hands on his jeans—apparently they only had one towel, and I was bleeding into it—and sat down beside me. He nodded at my NASA notebook lying open on the table. “The sleeping pills were a really stupid idea.”
“I know.” I tilted my head back and stared at the ceiling. It was better than looking at my own blood, better than looking at the list. “Dumbest idea ever. But let’s not talk about what does or doesn’t happen in my digestive system anymore.”
“I’m surprised the electrocution didn’t have any effect. Electricity kills a lot of things, even things that almost nothing else can hurt.”
“Not me,” I said. “I mean, yeah, it hurt, but it only stunned me for a couple of minutes.”
“Gunshot?”
I had a puckered scar the size of a nickel on my chest. I hadn’t been brave enough to aim it at my head. “I figured by then it wasn’t going to work.”
“But you kept doing it anyway?”
“They say that’s one definition of insanity.”
I lifted the towel away from the wound. It was already knitting together. I didn’t want to talk about my many failed attempts at making my death permanent. At some point it had become more habit than earnest experimentation. I was already growing tired of my new collection of scars.
“It’s been that way since you . . .”
“Woke up? Came back? Un-died? Yeah.”
“Do you remember how it happened?” he asked.
No. I remember nothing. That’s what I had told Ingrid and Rain. Nothing nothing nothing.
It was so easy to lie, but for the first time, I didn’t want to. I hadn’t realized, during all the days I spent wandering through Chicago, hitchhiking across the country, how lonely it was to put so much effort into lying about who I was. The patchwork girl made up of my friends and their friends, embellished by people’s careless assumptions and expectations, she was unraveling, and I didn’t want to piece her back together.
“I remember going to a party,” I said. “I am a dead teenage cliché. I remember the stupid music and the beer and my best friend. . . .” I touched my cheek as though I could still feel the warm sting of Melanie’s hand. “She slapped me. That’s almost the last thing I remember. That doesn’t seem fair, does it? My last memory of my entire life is my best friend since kindergarten slapping me.”
“Did you have a fight?” Jake asked.
“No.” I took a breath. There was an uncomfortable knot in my stomach. “I kissed her. I, uh. It seemed like a good idea at the time. She didn’t think so.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction I was expecting, but Jake didn’t look alarmed or disgusted. He was smiling. It was a sad smile. “I got a black eye and a bloody nose when I tried that.”
“Yeah? What happened?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. He apologized and went to get some ice. We told our parents I fell out of a tree.”
“Did he ever forgive you?”
“I don’t know. What does your family think happened to you?”
I accepted the change of topic. “I’m missing. They had fliers and volunteers and a neighborhood search and everything. Yard signs. You’ve never seen anybody do yard signs like the concerned citizens of Evanston do yard signs. I would probably be on a milk carton if they still did that. Do they still do that?” I gestured at the laptop; the screen had gone dark. “There’s a web page. My friends made it. It was the one year anniversary a few weeks ago. They posted all these things about . . . nothing important. Stupid stuff.”
I had read through the entire page, every post and comment, all the way back to when it first started. There was a picture at the top of the page: me and Melanie together at a diner we used to visit on Friday afternoons. I remembered that day; Maria had taken the picture. She had been sitting across the table from us, complaining about how soggy her fries were and trying to get the waiter’s attention. Melanie had whispered to me that Maria didn’t care about her fries, she just wanted to flirt with the waiter, and I had sat up on my knees to look over the side of the booth to get a look at him. He wasn’t anything special, a thin-faced college boy wearing the stupid restaurant uniform and a fake smile, everything about his demeanor saying that he knew the high school kids making a mess in his section would skimp on the tips. He barely even glanced at Maria when she finally got him to come over. She huffed and rolled her eyes, then immediately switched her attention to taking pictures of everybody around her. She told me and Melanie to smile, and Melanie had hooked her arm around my neck and we both put on big, stupid grins for the camera. It wasn’t Maria’s waiter who brought her fresh fries to our table but somebody we knew from school. He appeared beside our table and said, “Hi, Breezy,” not even glancing at Maria when he set the basket of fries in front of her. I said, “Hi, Ricky,” polite reflex, and he had hovered awkwardly until Melanie cracked up with her familiar, snorting laugh and said, “We don’t need anything else, not unless you want to recite some poetry for us.” He flushed red and slunk away.
If I thought about it, closed my eyes, and remembered, I could still feel the heat of Melanie’s arm around my neck, across the back of my shoulders, and count the seconds she let it linger.
> The online comments in the beginning had all been suggestions, speculation, worries. Predictions that other girls would go missing soon. Thoughts about how to organize. There had been search parties. They put up posters. They spread rumors. The cops brought out the canine units. The dogs never had a chance. I wasn’t decaying, so there was no corpse smell for them to follow. But I wasn’t myself anymore either. I was too degraded.
All that effort, all that searching, and nobody once looked in the backyard of that foreclosed house just a few blocks from my home. I was only buried beneath eighteen inches of soil. A whole year, and nobody had noticed. People must have come through that house, potential buyers standing at the glass door, looking across the cracked cement porch and brown grass, talking about how much space there was for entertaining, for kids to play, it just needed a little bit of work, a little bit of landscaping. They must have looked right over me, right over the disturbed ground where somebody had dug a grave, but not a very deep one.
The more recent comments on the page had been memories, pictures, insults, rumors. Ran away with an older boyfriend, maybe she promised to love him long time, get it, it’s just a joke, don’t be so easily offended. Not saying she was a slut but, come on, you know how she was. She should have been more careful. Shouldn’t have been drinking and wearing those clothes. Like anybody was surprised. Didn’t her parents feel stupid for not knowing what she was like?
Reading through those comments felt like invading the edges of somebody else’s life, another version of me who had done things I never had, suffered the hatred of people I had never even met, an imaginary girl overshadowing the real one.
“I don’t think they’re looking for me anymore,” I said.
“Why didn’t you go home?” Jake asked.
“I did,” I said. “Right after I woke up. Nobody was home. So I left. What was I supposed to tell them anyway?”
He didn’t try to answer. He only said, “I’m sorry.”
I looked away, and Jake stood and walked out of the room. A minute later he came back with a folded-up blanket and a pillow. He set them on one end of the sofa, then stepped over to the front window and looked through the curtains again.
“Why do you keep doing that?” I said.
“Habit. I’ve got work in the morning, so I’m going to—”
There was a quiet scratching behind the basement door.
“I have a confession to make,” I said. “Zeke told me not to go down into the basement.”
“But you did anyway?” Jake walked over to the door, pounded on it a few times. The scratching stopped, and the stairs creaked. “So you met Steve?”
“It has a name?” I said, incredulous. “Its name is Steve? What is it?”
“I don’t know if it really has a name,” Jake said. “It’s a brownie. They don’t talk. But Zeke felt sorry for it because our landlady just kept calling it ‘that horrible thing,’ so he gave it a name.”
“Your landlady knows about it? Is it like a pet?”
“It’s not a wild animal. It came with the house,” Jake explained. “We don’t know for sure, but we think our landlady’s mother brought it with her when she moved here. After she died, it refused to leave. But it didn’t want anybody else moving in either. It doesn’t like humans.”
“What did it do?”
“Scared them away,” Jake said. “Little things, mostly, but after it pushed one man down the stairs, word got around.”
“He was badly hurt?”
“He broke his neck. He died.” Jake looked at me, waiting for my reaction.
The big-eyed creature might have been alarming to look at, but it was hard to imagine it trying to kill people between its bedtime stories. It was so little and quiet and scared.
“It didn’t try to hurt me,” I said. “It didn’t do anything.”
“You’re not human.”
“Yes, I—” I stopped.
I wanted to argue with him, but I couldn’t. The protest was dust on my tongue.
Jake pretended not to notice. “So now our landlady doesn’t rent to humans anymore. It’ll leave you alone as long as you don’t go downstairs.”
“I won’t. For real this time.” But it wasn’t the thing in the basement that interested me. It was the fact that a human might know enough about monsters to rent only to people the homicidal house elf in the basement wouldn’t hurt. I had so many questions. “Is that the kind of thing a landlord can put on craigslist? Is it in the lease? Is your landlady human?”
“She is, yeah,” Jake said. “There are some humans who know just enough about us to know they don’t want to know more. Look, I have to work in the morning, so I’m going to sleep.”
I didn’t want him to go; I wanted him to stay up and answer all my questions about monster-human relations in property management. But he did look pretty tired, so I only said, “Good night. Thanks for letting me stay here.”
Jake disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door.
I didn’t feel right using his computer and poking around his house while he was in the other room, so I went out into the backyard. I kicked off my shoes and stepped onto the lawn. The grass was scratchy and dry. I lay down, hooked my hands behind my head, looked at the sky.
Every time I thought I was getting a grasp on the rules of this new world I had awoken into, they shifted again. Violet and Mr. Willow insisted there was an obvious boundary between the worlds, a line with good humans on one side and evil creatures on the other. But even if I didn’t trust Rain’s motives or Ingrid’s explanations, they certainly didn’t rank above Willow and Brian Kerr on the potential evil scale. And assuming they weren’t secretly planning to make a meal of me in the middle of the night, Zeke and Jake had been nothing but kind. I didn’t know who to believe. They all wanted me to be afraid of something—monsters, humans, magic—but all I wanted was for things to start making sense again.
Maybe there was something wrong with the fear center of my brain. Maybe it had been damaged when I died. Maybe a worm got in there during all that time I was in the ground and chewed up one important knot of neurons, the knot responsible for warning the rest of me not to get into cars with murderers or accept help from psychotic cult preachers or go home with monsters who eat human corpses.
In quiet moments, when I held my breath and listened, I imagined I could hear the worms still digging around, breaking connections any normal person’s brain should be able to make.
I had never known this world existed. I hadn’t asked for any part of it. I didn’t want it.
But you can’t go back to not knowing something once you’ve been thrown into the middle of it.
The air was cool, crisp, and the night was peaceful. I watched the stars, and I thought about monsters and magic and murderers, and it wasn’t like sleeping, but it was as close as I could get.
TWENTY-EIGHT
BEFORE I DISCOVERED what I had become, before I learned how much time had passed while I floated in the stars, before I made a list of all the ways I had tried and failed to kill myself, before I had a body count and an endless supply of murderers’ memories chasing around my head, I woke up in an unmarked grave, and I killed a man.
And I went home.
Barefoot and chilly on the empty streets, spitting mud from my mouth and scrubbing dirt from my eyes, I went home.
There’s a story about Yuri Gagarin, the first human to travel into space, and what he said when he came back to Earth. April 12, 1961. The Vostok 1 capsule and its pilot were only gone for 108 minutes, but those 108 minutes took them into space for one complete orbit, the farthest from Earth anybody had ever ventured.
When Gagarin landed, so the story goes, a farmer and her daughter saw him parachute to the ground in his orange flight suit and his helmet, and the woman asked him, “Have you come from outer space?”
He wasn’t wearing a space suit, although that would make the story better. The Soviets didn’t put their cosmonauts into space suits until after 1971, w
hen Soyuz 11 suffered catastrophic decompression before reentry and its three crewmen became the first and only humans in history—so far—to die in true space rather than on the launch pad or in the upper atmosphere.
But before that, a man fell from the sky, and when the farmer asked if he came from outer space, he replied, “As a matter of fact, I have!” He told her he must find a telephone to call Moscow and let them know he was home. That’s how the story goes. It’s a foolish story, a silly story, but it’s the kind of story we want to believe of humankind’s first space explorer, that young man with the big bright smile who might have been the boy next door if only he hadn’t been the one to leave the earth instead.
I was thinking about Yuri Gagarin as I walked home and blood flowed through my brain again.
“Hi, Mom and Dad. Sorry I’m late. Have I been gone long?” That’s what I would say. I had no idea how long I had been lying in that grave. It felt like eternity. It felt like no time at all.
They would ask me where I had been. They would say, “We thought you were dead.”
And I would reply, “As a matter of fact, I have been!”
Dogs snarled as I passed and threw themselves hysterically against their fences. Dead birds littered the ground in small sad lumps. Twice I caught myself wiping invisible blood from my fingers and cringing at piercing screams I couldn’t hear.
I was confused and disoriented, but the neighborhood was familiar. I wasn’t very far from home. Close enough that if I had asked to borrow the car, Dad would have told me to walk instead.
Our house looked much the same, but there was a flower bed in the yard that hadn’t been there before, and one of the sick old trees was gone. Dad had been talking about having somebody chop it down forever, but I never thought he would do it. There was a hole where the stump would have been.
There were no lights on. I had lost my keys and my phone. I crossed the lawn, avoiding the scattered dead birds, and punched in the code to let myself in through the garage. Mom’s car was there, but Dad’s was gone.
This is what I told myself when I went inside: