Passing Strange

by Daniel Waters

  Poor baby, Pete thought. He debated leaning on Craig a little harder, because he could probably squeeze Christie’s home address out of him.

  “She called out two days ago, too. She must be at death’s door or something, because she’s worked every shift I’ve ever given her. She’s usually the one covering for everyone else.”

  “Yeah, that’s Christie,” Pete said, implying a long-time familiarity. He noticed that Craig didn’t try and correct him this time. “She must have gone to the doctor, then.”

  “Probably,” Craig said.

  Pete knocked on the counter with his knuckles.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

  He went back to his car, not knowing what to feel. Should he be worried about her? Or pissed that she’d taken the time to call Beady Eyes but not him? He cruised through her neighborhood, scanning mailboxes for “Smith.” He didn’t find any Smiths, but most of the boxes had no names, just numbers. He looped through each street three times, just to be sure, and then he drove to the school.

  If I can’t see Christie, he thought, then at least I can get going on the plan.

  The buses were already lined up along the curving ramp by the school, forming a vehicular wall that made seeing the school entrance difficult. Pete parked in the student lot and walked up the steps to the faculty lot, where he could get a clearer look at the entrance. There were a few cars parked at the end of the bus lane; parents of the dorkier children, he figured. He stood near one of the cars, smiling at a middle-aged woman who looked at him over the top of her People magazine. She smiled back. The humming buses gave the air a pleasant diesel smell; the vapor of their exhaust rose into the crisp air.

  Layman used to bring his stepfather’s truck into work most of the time, Pete remembered. Back before he died. Probably wasn’t doing any driving these days.

  Pete frowned at the sound of the end-of-day bell. They used to let the zombies out of class five minutes early so they could shamble on down to the buses without slowing everything down; with Layman being the only corpse left in the school, they probably abolished that policy.

  It wasn’t long before kids started spilling from the front doors. One of the first ones out was that little shrimp who had gone out for the football team, Thurston or Thornton or whatever his name was. He moved at a swift clip toward Pete. When he drew near, the recognition—and fear—showed on his face.

  Pete lifted his index finger to his lips, and winked. The shrimp wasted no time in getting into the car where his mommy sat reading People, slamming the door before she could even finish saying “Hi, honey!”

  Pete walked a little further up the hill. Kids were coming out in a steady wave now; he saw Harris Morgan and Holly Pelletier and a bunch of his other old “friends” as they fanned out to clamber aboard buses or cross down to the student lot. He saw a bouncing sheaf of pink hair that belonged to Scarypants’s pudgy friend. What was TC’s nickname for her? Something based on her anatomy, no doubt. Knockers. Pinky McKnockers, that was it. He laughed.

  Right behind Pinky came Scarypants herself. Pete almost missed her because she wasn’t as gothed out as usual. Her skirt didn’t look like it had been previously owned by a turn-of-the-century gypsy, for starters. She was wearing functional, not decorative, boots, and the coat she wore could be purchased at Macy’s and didn’t have to be special ordered direct from Transylvania.

  Her hair, though, was still long and as black as a crow’s wing.

  Behind her, like a huge lumbering shadow, shambled Adam Layman. Pete realized that he’d been holding the door open for the girls.

  Aw, how cute, he thought. What a gentleman. An undead gentleman.

  There were enough people walking around now that Pete didn’t feel as conspicuous, and Layman and his goth groupies were busy laughing at something the fat pink one said. Pete remembered how slow and ungainly Layman had been during the trial. The big dummy could barely even talk, but now it looked like he was making comments to the girls as they walked onto their bus. Then again, maybe Layman faked the whole thing in the courtroom, trying to pass himself off as a low-functioning zombie to try and garner additional sympathy from the judge.

  Pete watched the trio board and the bus pull away, then noticed another hulking oaf leave the school. He’d seen TC’s car in the lot, so he decided to join up with him there.

  TC saw him waiting. His face lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree.

  “Hey, Pete!” he said, breaking into a trot but then slipping on a patch of wet snow and bouncing into a parked car as he tried to regain his balance.

  “Easy,” Pete said as he walked toward him. “Don’t kill yourself.”

  “Yeah,” TC said, his stocking cap askew on his lumpy head. “Suicides don’t come back.”

  Pete forced a laugh. “So they say.”

  “Hey, what are you doing over here, anyhow? I thought you could get arrested if you came back or something.”

  “Or something. But thanks for shouting my name across the lot for everyone to hear.”

  TC looked shamefaced. “Aw, crap. I’m sorry, Pete.”

  “Forget it,” Pete said, punching his shoulder to show there were no hard feelings.

  “Hey, how’d your date go the other night? Get any?” TC said, trying to be inconspicuous about rubbing the spot on his arm where Pete had slugged him.

  “You know I did,” Pete said.

  “Sweet. She from around here? She looked sort of familiar.”

  “How would you know? Your eyes never went higher than her neck.” TC started to protest, and Pete feinted throwing another punch at his bruised arm. When he flinched, Pete drilled his other arm with his left, laughing as TC swore.

  “I’m just playing with you, man,” Pete said. “Can’t blame a man for checking out the merchandise.”

  “She’s pretty hot.”

  “In every way. But listen, I’m not here to talk about my many sexual conquests—neither one of us has the time for all that! But I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what you said about getting back at Layman.”

  TC, flattered that Pete actually took something he said seriously, grinned. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. But I want us to be smart about it, you know? I wasn’t thinking clearly enough when we first went after Williams.”

  “That got out of hand. If Layman hadn’t showed up…”

  “Yeah, but he did. But I’ve thought of something that’s going to destroy him. Him and Williams both. It’ll be like pounding nails into their empty coffins.”

  “Williams is in D.C. right now. He was actually on TV the other day, talking about zombie rights or some crap. Can you believe that? He…”

  “Whatever,” Pete said, cutting him off. “I bet you anything he’s still in love with Scarypants. What I’ve got planned is going to derail the whole zombie love train.”

  “What are we going to do?” TC asked.

  Pete looked around as though suddenly suspicious of the kids heading out to their cars. “Later. I’ll give you the full plan later. But here’s what I want you to do…”

  TC leaned in close as Pete’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  “You know where Layman lives?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you know his creepy girlfriend lives right next door?”

  “Seriously? No, I didn’t know that. How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been watching them for a few days now.”

  “No shit?”

  “None. Here’s what I need you to do. Cruise by his house a couple times a day, and see what you can see. Pay attention to what cars are in the driveways. Layman’s stepfather owns a garage or some crap, so there’s always a couple junkers around. Take a notebook and write down the times you go by and what you see. If you can figure out who’s driving what, even better.”

  “Like, you want me to see who is home when, that sort of thing?”

  “Exactly,” Pete said. TC was grinning like the idiot he was. “The more info
rmation you can get, the better. I know that Layman has two older brothers and his mom and stepdad living in his house. Kendall lives with her parents, but I don’t think she has any siblings.”

  “Okay. You want me to go now?”

  “See if you can go by around four thirty-five o’clock. I’m going to follow their bus.”

  “You want me to come with you? If there’s nobody home…”

  Pete shook his head. “No, no. I want to plan this. From what I can see they don’t go anywhere but their houses and school. Doing something here would be too dangerous, which leaves us with one option. But I want it to be flawless. I don’t want their families around, nothing. Flawless.”

  “What are we going to do?” TC asked.

  “Later,” Pete said, knowing full well that “we” weren’t going to do anything.

  When he was done giving TC his marching orders, he followed bus 3 along its route, managing to position himself two cars back, until it stopped off in front of Layman’s house. Phoebe and Adam both disembarked, and Phoebe walked Layman to his door before trekking through the light snow to her house.

  To her empty house, he thought.

  He watched her get a glittering ring of keys out of her bag and unlock her door. Her house was empty, with only a yapping little mutt to greet her, a mutt that Pete could take care of with a quick kick to the head. Her parents were at work; the earliest he’d seen them home was five thirty.

  She must have felt someone walking over her grave, because she turned and looked over her shoulder in his direction while opening her door.

  Pete turned his head away and joined the flow of traffic as the bus ahead went into gear.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DYING WAS NOT PLEASANT.

  Coming back wasn’t any better.

  I was in the hospital morgue when I returned from my suicide, in a room full of corpses, none of whom would be making the return trip. I was alone.

  Really and truly alone. I didn’t see any white lights, I didn’t hear any warm voices or see an outstretched hand. My faith was pretty clear on what was in store for people like me.

  The morgue was locked, but only from the inside. Even so it must have taken me an hour to get the door open. My body wasn’t working right; my arms flailed, my hands were bent into hooks. Sounds were coming from my open mouth and I couldn’t stop them. I dragged myself into the hall, but when I reached a stairwell, my body didn’t remember what it needed to do, so I had to crawl. I’d made it halfway up the flight when a nurse saw me and screamed loud enough to collapse the roof.

  I was there for quite a while before they found a doctor brave enough to help me the rest of the way up.

  I was given a hospital gown. Someone retrieved my information and called my parents.

  “They probably won’t come,” I heard someone say.

  But they did.

  Depression isn’t something that can be adequately explained to someone who has never felt it before, to someone who thinks it can be cured with a hug, a bouquet of flowers, or a pink teddy bear. Bouts of depression can be triggered by external events—and maybe mine was, when I realized that you and I weren’t going to be together—but even this fact, as devastating as it felt at the time, wasn’t the reason I took a bottle of sleeping pills and drifted away in my bathtub. The reason was internal, not external—the pain I felt would never, could never go away. This is what I thought and believed. That pain had been with me before you and I fell in and out of love; sometimes I think it was there before I was even born, a dark twin that preceded me into this world. Pain was the only thing in my life I had faith in.

  Dying wasn’t peaceful, either. Imagine someone setting fire to your throat and your lungs and your chest and then you being too weak to do anything but watch and wait. That’s what drowning was like. Nothing romantic about it at all.

  Supposedly I’m the only one who has come back from suicide. And now I was the only one that I knew of who was healing. I tried to convince myself that it all must be for a reason. Did my heart really beat?

  I was a wreck after my partial confession.

  I barely left my tomb for, like, three days. The blue fog returned, as obliterating as ever. There’s no refuge from your problems in death.

  When my parents called downstairs to me I wouldn’t answer, and pretended I was far away. My father came down to check on me, once, but whatever he saw in my eyes scared him so much that he didn’t make a return trip, and no doubt he forbade my mother or sister to go see me. I didn’t go to work. I didn’t even move. I was worse than sick. I was dead, and feeling it. I guess it was the closest I felt to the time when I killed myself.

  Maybe I should have felt overjoyed. Maybe my heart really did beat. Maybe I wasn’t just healing or regenerating or anything; maybe I was actually coming back. But sometimes almost feeling alive is worse than not feeling alive at all. When I was depressed, that’s what I felt like, like I was almost alive. And knowing I’d never quite make it the rest of the way.

  Three days of having the fog press in on me, surrounding me. I didn’t even want to move.

  I think I know why the confession triggered the blue-fog response. I was trying to atone, after all—I was trying to exonerate myself and my friends for the Guttridge crimes, I was authentically reconnecting with my parents, I was, in my own way, trying to ask God for His forgiveness. All good things. But there was one essential piece—in some ways the most essential piece—that was as yet unaddressed.

  The piece I didn’t get to confess.

  The piece about the one I love.

  I’ve been thinking about us since I saw Adam kiss Phoebe in the back of Margi’s car. That kiss brought back the memory of all the times we’d kissed, and how each time it felt like something was slipping out of my grasp, because each time brought us closer to the decision we both knew we had to make. You didn’t want to hide anymore, but I couldn’t stop. And because of it I’ve been hiding ever since.

  After we said good-bye, we both tried to live our lives as normally as possible. Accent on the “normally.” It took you a while, but eventually we started seeing other people. And then I saw my love kissing someone else.

  It wasn’t the kiss that killed me. I did that all myself. The blue fog took me away. Kisses don’t kill; depression does. There aren’t any reasons for most young suicides beyond depression, just triggers.

  I don’t know why I was made this way. I don’t know. I may never know. All I know is that when he leaned in and lowered his mouth to yours, his big body blocking all but your eyes, I felt like I was dying, felt it more than when I really did die a few months later. And when your arms went around his neck, it might as well have been your hands around my throat.

  I try not to think of those things.

  I try to stay positive, you know.

  But, Monica, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

  * * *

  My confession, obviously, was incomplete, and with it, my atonement and my absolution. I’d been able to confess to suicide but not to the other piece; faced with the totality of my cowardice again, the blue fog came rushing in. I considered laying on train tracks, immolating myself with gasoline, scarring my body so completely that I couldn’t heal again.

  But on the third day I heard Katy crying, and dragged myself upstairs to see what was wrong.

  “Caring!” she shouted as soon as she saw me climb the stairs. She ran to wrap her arms around my legs, almost sending us over backward.

  “Karen,” my father said. I thought he looked awfully pale, and then I realized that after three days in my basement tomb I was probably a fright to behold.

  “Caring, I thought the bad mans got you!” Katy said, cutting him off. For such a peanut she had a mighty grip, and it took me a moment to unwind her long enough to return her hug.

  “Oh no, honey,” I said, guilt flooding me. “No bad men are going to get me.” I hoped I was telling the truth.

  “Where were you? Where were you, Caring?” />
  I looked at her. She was like a tiny version of me, but without the scars and sins. As guilty as I felt about frightening her as I had, I also felt something like warmth blossoming inside me. It was as if her face, troubled and fraught with worry as it was, were like the sun, dissipating the blue fog that surrounded me.

  “I was somewhere else,” I told her. “But I’m back now.”

  And I was. There was no other way to explain it. The blue fog was beaten back, and I approached my new purpose in “life” with renewed clarity. I was going to solve the Guttridge murders, but even more, when it was all over I was going to stop hiding. Stop passing.

  And I was going to find Monica, and I was going to tell her the things I had to tell her.

  Dad took me for a ride after I crawled up from the tomb.

  Or rather, I took him for a ride.

  “Feel like taking a drive?” he said, tossing me the keys.

  “Where to?” I asked, once I was behind the wheel.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Anywhere you want to go?”

  I thought about it for a minute.

  “Yes,” I said. I took him to the Haunted House.

  There was police tape across the porch and the doorway. I cut through the tape with my fingernails.

  “Who lives here?”

  “My friends,” I said. “Well, they used to.”

  The front door let loose a nice Haunted House-y creak as I pushed it open.

  “So this is where you hang out?” Dad said, peering into the gloom.

  “Used to.”

  “Comfy,” he said. He took a seat on the battered futon in the living room. “I called your boss for you. I said you were sick and would be out a few days.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Karen,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “Um, no, Dad. I’m not okay.”

  Dad wasn’t as easily brushed aside by flippancy as many people I knew.

  “Karen,” he said. “Are we going to lose you again?”

  “We,” I said, the word out of my mouth before I could stop it. And once it was out I kept going. “I don’t see any we here other than you and me, Dad.”