by Jordan Dane
“What?”
I turned to see Tanner Lange roll up in his wheelchair. I considered him my best friend, poor guy. In truth, he was my only real friend, even if he got a little rude at grazing time.
“I had prime real estate staked out in the cafeteria. I had to give it up to come looking for you. What happened?”
Looking back over my shoulder, I stared at Nate as I mumbled something about Akk the Yak keeping me after class, but Tanner didn’t buy my excuse.
“You’ve been stalking him again, haven’t you?” He shook his head, but I saw him losing his battle with a smile. Tanner had cute dimples that gave him away every time. The whole bashful-boy routine came easy for him and he wore it well.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to turn my back on the one thing (besides Tanner) that made school even remotely tolerable, Nate Holden. After I slung my bag on Tanner’s wheelchair, I climbed on back to scoot us down the hall.
“Coming through, people,” I yelled, making engine and horn noises. “Make a hole.”
It took us over thirty minutes to get through the line and get to a table, only we had to share our spot with the Scrapbook Club, the glue and stickers brigade. Talk about useless!
“You gonna eat your tomato?” Tanner didn’t wait for my answer.
He reached across the table to score the tomato slices on my chopped lettuce. I thought about stabbing him with my fork, but that’s not how you treat a guy in a wheelchair—at least not while anyone was looking.
“Chandler, you should consider dialing it back a notch with Holden.” Tanner leaned in and whispered. “You’re a little obvious, don’t you think? I’m disturbed by your drooling. It’s nearly put me off of my taco experience.”
“You’re disturbed, all right. Anyone can see that.” I rolled my eyes.
Although I knew he had a point, I couldn’t help it. I was a junkie and Nate fed my addiction. The boy was seriously worthy. He was smart, got good grades, and he risked his sweet neck doing volunteer work for a mountain rescue team. If he had any flaws, no one could expect me to point them out, because I was blind. Seriously blind.
“It’s a good thing I’m secure in my manhood or else I’d be a little uncomfortable with your courtship ritual.” Tanner stuffed a taco into his mouth.
“Yeah, good thing, Chuck Norris. I can see how messed up you are about it. How’re the tacos?”
“Are you gonna eat…?”
“Don’t even think about it.” I glared at him. I wasn’t so wrapped up with crushing on Nate that I’d let Tanner scarf a taco off my tray, not on my watch. “Damn, dude. You’re like a human garbage disposal. Seriously. You’ve got a tapeworm or something.”
“I’m blessed with a healthy metabolism. It runs in my family.”
“Yeah, well…I wish you’d share it with me. The only reason I hang with you is, I’m hoping lean and mean is contagious.”
I had totally justified body image issues, but never cared enough to go cold-turkey off the junk food, and forget about breaking a sweat. Exercise was for mice in a cage with a wheel and nothing better to do.
“Now I know you’re lying. I know the real reason you’ve lowered your standards to hang with me.” Tanner leaned across the table again. Only this time, he didn’t whisper. “’Cause when I start driving, I’ll have all the choice parking spots.”
“You’ve nailed it, Lange. I’m after your handi-crap parking. You’ve got me figured out. But, dude, I’m tellin’ ya, some days that’s not good enough.” I looked at him sideways and smirked. “So why do you tolerate me?”
“Two reasons. You’re my only friend with boobs.”
I rolled my eyes and scrunched my face. “What’s the second reason?”
“You do the math, Chandler. You’ve got two of ’em, duh.”
When Tanner shrugged and kept eating, it gave me a chance to partake in the Nate Holden experience when he finally walked into the cafeteria and the Red Sea parted. If Palmer High had royalty, Nate would be crown prince and I’d be the cursed troll who lived under the bridge. Nate stood close enough to our table for me to overhear him talk to Josh about their trip up Denali. A climb like that would be epic, but it worried me. People did it. Some never come back. I had met one of the unlucky ones once. His body was still up there, frozen in ice.
I had plenty of motivation to talk Nate out of the climb of his life—a trip he’d been talking about forever—but he’d never listen to someone like me. I wasn’t even on his radar. We occupied the same planet and breathed the same air, but that’s where anything we had in common came to a dead stop.
“You comin’ over tonight?” Tanner had turned his attention to his chocolate pudding cup. “I got a recording of a new Japanese reality TV show that’s pretty sick. You could check out my new radio. Dad says it should pick up the frequency Nate will be using for us to track his climb.”
Expedition teams on Denali carried portable radio transceivers used to get weather alerts and for emergencies. Our plan had been to eavesdrop on Nate’s climb.
“Yeah, sure. That’d be great.”
Tanner was an army brat whose father did the daily commute to Fort Rich so his mom could live in Palmer to be near her family. His dad doted on his only son, especially after Tanner was paralyzed from a four-wheeler accident at thirteen years old. Racing too fast with his buddies on a mountain trail, not far from Palmer, Tanner slid around a corner and his back wheel caught a boulder that sent him careening into a ravine. He got pinned under the vehicle. Once they freed him, he had to be evacuated by helicopter, but the damage to his spinal cord had been too severe. A lapse in judgment had cost Tanner his legs and since his father had bought him the four-wheeler, against his mother’s wishes, the terrible incident nearly shattered his family.
Tanner had been strong and athletic once. He had friends, too. But after things got rough, his buddies went on with their lives, leaving Tanner to deal with his. I’d been one of the few people who stuck around. Birds of a feather, I guess.
My best friend had his own reasons for listening to Nate’s Denali expedition on his radio. It gave him a chance to imagine going with him. Tanner never had to tell me that. I figured it out on my own.
An hour later
This time of year I always felt an edge of impatience for summer to get here. Spring breakup in the Mat-Su Valley was the ugly butt end of an Alaskan winter. Breakup was nature’s equivalent of being forced to eat brussels sprouts before you could dig into a hot-fudge sundae. With the sun nudging aside the night sky, each day gained five to ten minutes of light. Summer solstice would be right around the corner in June, when the days got seriously longer.
Despite the fact that slushy mud was the terra not- so-firma today, I could live with the sloppy mess because summertime in Alaska had always been worth waiting for. School would be over soon. One more day and I’d be done. Adiós, M.F. Since nothing much happened on the last day, except cleaning out our lockers so nothing fungal grew in them over the summer, I was totally ready for a vay-kay from school.
I hadn’t come straight home. Tanner’s mom let me stop at Taco Bell, in case I hated what Dad made for supper. I scored like a hundred things of free salsa to eat with the bag of Doritos I kept in my sock drawer. On the drive home, I sucked on an open packet of honey that I’d gotten from the drive-thru window. The honey was supposed to be drizzled on sopapillas, but I liked it straight up. When I got home, I waited until Tanner and his mom drove away before I crept around the back of my house. I climbed the stairs to the main floor, careful to avoid the creaky parts of the steps.
Dad hated when I sneaked in the back way, avoiding the entrance to his business. I mean, there was a time that the way we lived didn’t bother me, but after the other kids dropped the pity routine and abused me for real, that’s when I became painfully
aware that where and how I lived was different. Sneaking in the back had become my way of keeping a low profile.
When I got inside, I tossed my coat and boots on the floor, saying, “I’m home,” barely loud enough for me to hear. I hoped my dad wouldn’t notice, but my luck wasn’t that good. Dad’s voice came from the basement.
“Can you come down here, honey? I could use some help.”
I rolled my eyes, even when there was no one around to see it. In my opinion, eye rolls were never wasted. I trudged to the basement where Dad had his business, feeling the weight of my body with every step.
When I got downstairs, I plopped into a chair in Dad’s workroom and said, “What?” While he worked on Mrs. Capshaw and fixed her gray hair with a brush, I stared out our frosty basement window. The glass glowed bright orange. The ice crystals were lit from behind by the sun going down. I grabbed my cell phone and took a picture of it, trying to ignore my dad.
“Work your magic with the curling iron, will ya, Abbey? You always do a great job.”
Dad didn’t see the irony. He thought I did a good job with hair when I barely touched mine.
“She looks pretty, doesn’t she?” Not waiting for an answer, he pointed a finger and said, “Do something up here? She needs some lift.”
Mrs. Capshaw had her eyes closed and a faint smile on her face. I knew Dad had something to do with that. When I got to work with my curling iron, Mrs. Capshaw’s silver curls caught the faint orange glow coming from the basement window. The sunset made her hair look real pretty and under fluorescent lighting, the wrinkles on her face didn’t cut into her skin as deep.
I had no concept of turning seventy-five years old. At fifteen, that seemed like an eternity to me. I wondered what I’d do as my face changed. Would I freak at the first wrinkle? When would I stop obsessing over my fat thighs and my nonexistent boobs? And at what point would I quit hoarding Kit Kat bars or lose interest in Nate Holden, the love of my pathetic life?
Did I have to wait until I died like Mrs. Capshaw?
“Is that good enough?” I asked.
Dad focused on the dead woman lying in the coffin. “Yeah, that works. She looks ten years younger, don’t you think?”
I swear, I don’t know why people say that. When someone is seventy-five, does ten years really make a difference?
“Yeah, she looks…better.” I lied.
How could someone look better dead than alive?
Most kids my age have never seen a dead body, but not me. After Mom died, I knew death wasn’t a joke, but every kid in town made me the poster child for sick humor. I’d been around corpses my whole life. When it came time to bury my mom, I knew what would be behind the curtain of Oz and hated everything about the funeral business. My dad, Graham Chandler, ran the only mortuary and crematorium in a small town of 4,000 people, a business that had been in his family for generations.
I lived in a house with a mortuary in my basement where the big-screen TV should have been. With the ground frozen for a big chunk of the year in Alaska, Dad stored bodies in our house, waiting to plant them with the spring thaw. Our first floor had a funeral parlor with visitation rooms and enough Kleenex boxes to soak up the Matanuska River.
So being an outsider came with the territory—with good reason. I made the weird kids in my school feel good about themselves. I knew what it felt like to have no one show up for a sleepover. I see dead people, literally. My father makes his living off them. He likes to call it job security. According to Dad, it’s a great way to meet people without really trying. Eventually everyone comes to you.
But from my darkened corner of the world, my dad and his “business” only reinforced my D.O.A. social life. Living with Dad made “normal” impossible. It wasn’t easy being a teenager—period—but to do it when your father tells people embalming fluid runs in his veins?
I used to think that was funny.
“I got good news.” While Dad fussed with Mrs. Capshaw’s dress collar, he smiled and avoided looking at me. That wasn’t a good sign. Ever. “I got that time off and I’ve made all the arrangements.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Our trip. Don’t you remember me telling you about it last week?”
Dad could have said something, but did he really expect me to listen? Remembering stuff from a week ago was like…a whole week ago.
“Like I told you before, after your last day of school I made arrangements to go to our cabin. This is a good time for me to take off. We’ll practically have the whole lake to ourselves. The fishing will be great. And we can…remember your mom, stay through her birthday this time.”
“But Dad…I can’t. You never said…” I had trouble breathing.
My father clinched his argument by bringing up Mom’s birthday. His “ritual” of going to the cabin was about the two of us remembering her. He’d made a whole ceremony thing, whether we stayed for her birthday or not. Before we left the lake, we burned candles near the shore. The two of us. We talked about her—and to her—like she was still with us. Guess she was.
I’d gone with Dad to our cabin near Healy, Alaska, every year since Mom died, more out of guilt than really wanting to. I had done it for him, but being reminded how she died only made me feel worse. I made sure Dad never knew how I felt. It didn’t take a crystal ball to know he’d send me to more shrinks. After I quit talking about what happened the day of the crash, I went along with our trips to the cabin, making it seem like I’d put it behind me. It was easier than telling him the truth—that I hated remembering how she died, especially with him.
To make things worse, I didn’t want to leave town when Nate could use my positive vibes. I needed to know he’d be okay. With him heading for a dangerous climb, I had to be in town, to listen to the radio that Tanner had set up. Dad would ruin everything.
“Come on, honey. This is our tradition. We do it every year.”
“Can’t we skip it? I mean, for one year? I’ve got things to do. I can’t…”
He never let me finish. “What things?”
I heard the anger in his voice and he got that funny look on his face, like he’d go ballistic. Dad came with a warning label. Whenever he was about to blow, two wrinkle lines showed between his eyebrows and his nostrils flared. He had that look now, the same one I probably had, thanks to him. These days, we really knew how to punch each other’s buttons.
“What’s so important in your life that you can’t take time off for your old man? You used to like going to the cabin.”
Operative words—used to—but I’d grown out of wanting to spend time with him. I wasn’t a kid anymore. Our ritual at the lake only reminded me of what I had taken from him…from us. I didn’t see the point, not now. With Dad glaring at me and expecting an answer, my heart pounded and my face got real hot. I thought he might see straight through me to the guilt I had over Mom’s death that always threatened to choke me. I couldn’t tell him how I felt about Nate. Telling him would spoil everything. It would be the worst.
“I’m not going, that’s all.” I turned before he saw the tears welling in my eyes. I didn’t want him to know he could still make me cry.
“Abbey, come back here. We’re not done.” He yelled after me, but I wouldn’t go back for round two.
I grabbed my coat and put my snow boots back on. I had to get out of that house—a mortuary filled with dead people. I was tired of sharing my life with the dead. They’d turned into a constant dark memory of my mother. I had two more years of high school. I should’ve been looking forward to them, but I couldn’t see where things would ever get better.
After my mom was killed, I couldn’t deal with the unwanted attention. I curled up in a ball, not wanting to feel anything or do anything normal. Not feeling was the only way I got through it. For some kids, that made
it open season on me, especially after they found out what Dad did for a living. I became a target for every cruel joke in town. The abuse caught on like wildfire. Even if I wanted friends and a normal life, I knew that would never happen.
Kids called me the ghoul next door, Zombie Queen, a citizen of Cremation Nation, and Necro Girl—I’d heard it all. I hated, hated, hated being reminded of my never-ending link with death.
Why didn’t Dad get that?
Twenty minutes later
Tanner didn’t live far from me. I’d walked to his house plenty of times. After the sun went down, the heaping piles of melting snow reflected blue haze over everything. With my boots crunching into the slush, I heard the strange echo of my own footsteps. I’d heard that noise before and it always sounded like someone following me. I turned and looked back, peering into every shadow, looking for anything that moved.
I felt like the dumb babysitter in a slasher movie, a seriously stupid chick who opened the door to a guy who cut out her heart and watched it beat in his hand, even after everyone in the theatre had screamed, “Don’t open the door!”
But I didn’t see anything, not this time.
“Damn it,” I whispered. I hated being scared.
I spun and looked around. I didn’t see anything in particular, but I felt something or someone watching me. I felt cold and my feet were numb. Even my goose bumps had goose bumps, but that strange creepy feeling didn’t go away, no matter how much I wanted to laugh it off. This time when I ran, I heard my footsteps and my mind played tricks on me. I didn’t want anything to be there, but I swear to God, this time I saw something move.
“Who’s out there?” I yelled and my voice cracked. Babysitter chick, revisited.
When I picked up my pace, I heard it—a loud caw in the trees over my head. It could have been a crow, but when it eclipsed the moon, I saw the size of its shadow on the snow. It was big. Real big. I looked up and got dizzy. Everything spun and sweat trickled down my spine. Without the sun, the night sky closed in and the trees stirred like bodies skulking around me.