Alive

by Chandler Baker

  In the spot where I’m standing, I revolve slowly in place, taking in a panoramic view. It’s then that I spot a face, someone I can’t place, whom I’m sure I don’t know, but the features are familiar.

  I move closer to the spot where he’s leaned up against a wall, talking to a heavyset girl whose bulbous rear end hikes a short black skirt up to the very top of her thighs. The closer I get, the more certain I become.

  As I approach, staring blatantly, the pair stop their conversation and stare back. The girl screws up her mouth into a sneer. Her look is punk rock meets 1940s pinup. Dark eyeliner fans out into cat eyes, and her heart-shaped lips are painted a shocking hue of cherry red.

  “Can I help you?” she asks in a way that suggests she has no interest whatsoever in helping me.

  “Daniel? Daniel James?” I say, ignoring her.

  He straightens. In person, he’s a shadow of the boy I saw in the photograph. He has none of the brightness, eye twinkle, or toothy grin I’d seen there. Instead, he’s as colorless as watered-down milk. If it weren’t for the haircut, I might not have been able to piece the features together to spot him, but his white hair, shaved on one side and plastered down over his left eye on the other, is distinctive in its irregularity.

  “That’s me. Dan,” he says in a voice that’s deeper than I’d expect given his skeletal frame and pale blue eyes.

  “I’m…” I hesitate. “Veronica Leeds.” I cringe at the use of this fake identity again. It hasn’t exactly worked in my favor in the past.

  The girl beside him curls in closer like a cat kneading her way into a beloved owner’s lap.

  “This is Raven,” he says, nodding in her direction, as though I’d asked. I wish Raven would get lost, but I get the sense that she’s staked her claim for the night and that extracting her would take jaws of steel and a tranquilizer gun.

  “I was hoping I could ask you a few questions, Dan.”

  “Depends who you are. You a cop?”

  I roll my eyes. “Do I look like a cop? I’m seventeen.”

  “Whatever.

  “Right, yeah, whatever.” I consider taking out my phone and calling Henry, but worry that Dan and his goth girl are set to dart like frightened animals.

  I take a deep breath. “Do you know a guy named Levi Zin?”

  A slick-looking tongue slides over Dan’s lips. “Why should I tell you?”

  “You don’t exactly look like you’re busy.” He shrugs. I exhale hard. “Fine.” I pull my wallet out of my purse and hand him twenty dollars.

  He grins. “Yeah, I knew him. Why?” There’s an uproar from the crowd. I glance back to see that the female lead singer dove offstage and is now crowd-surfing.

  Returning my attention to Dan, I make a decision not to volunteer any more information than necessary. “So he, um, passed away?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light, as if I’m merely curious. For his part, Dan doesn’t seem to be the brightest specimen, or maybe he’s just too drugged out to process beyond surface level.

  Two pale eyebrows crawl inward at the top of his nose. “You really don’t know? Levi kicked the can. He’s six feet under. Worm food.” He takes a sip from his plastic cup, eyes already heading from glassy to totally vacant.

  “You have a gift for imagery,” I say curtly. “Okay, so he’s dead. Did anyone take a particular interest in him either before or after his death?”

  “What does that mean?” Raven takes a break from swirling her finger around Dan’s ear to interject.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “I’m not sure,” Dan says. “Not really. I was friends with him. We played in a band together sometimes, but I wouldn’t say many people were super close to Levi. Nobody was even that shocked.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know—I guess he was in trouble a lot.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Dan slouches against the wall. “I’m not so sure I should keep telling you unless…” He nods at my purse.

  I narrow my eyes at him, but in a war between who can be more patient, Dan would most certainly win. I look in the crevices of my wallet and hold up a ten.

  He scratches his eyebrow. “It’s not as much.”

  “It’s all I have.” I hold it close. “Take it or leave it.”

  He tries to make a grab for it. “Take it.”

  “Not so fast.” I hold it tightly in my grip. “After.”

  He glares at me but continues. “Like typical stuff. Skipping school. Drinking. I don’t know. He thought he was destined to be some kind of rock god. Kurt Cobain. Andrew Wood. Layne Staley. Live fast, die hard, only-the-good-die-young type of thing. You know what I’m saying?”

  Unfortunately, I know exactly what he’s saying. My veins feel icy. Dan’s friend sounds exactly like the Levi I know. Where’s Henry? I do a quick sweep to see if I can spot him. No such luck. “But you were with him when he died?”

  Raven glares at me. “You don’t have to answer her question, you know.”

  I wave the ten and he shrugs her off. Clearly, Raven’s not meant to become a permanent fixture. He continues, stroking the gelled strand of hair over his eye. “Yeah. I’ve already told all this to the police, though.”

  “But I’m not the police.”

  “Right…Yeah, sorry…I don’t know, it was like…” He squeezes his eyelids over pinpoint pupils and shakes his head before reopening them. “It was terrible. Even for someone like Levi, who…I don’t know how to say this, but just seemed sort of destined for bad things. Levi was drunk and wasn’t paying attention, but still, that wire came out of nowhere. We were going so fast. When the boat crashed it sounded like an explosion. Like, I don’t know, like something out of Abu Dhabi. The wire just grazed my arm, but even still, it nearly cut it off.” Dan rolls up the sleeve of his shirt and holds out his forearm for me to examine. A fresh scar runs from the knobby bone of his wrist to his elbow. He shudders visibly, then replaces the sleeve. “Levi must have gotten knocked out and drowned, because when they fished him out of the waterway and pushed on his chest—” As human brains are inclined to do, mine is filling in the blanks, illustrating this story with the Levi I knew, my Levi. “You know the way they do in movies—seawater shot out of him like a fountain.” I swallow. This wasn’t my Levi, I remind myself. This was someone else, someone I’ve never met. The flashing red of the lights and the persistent thump of the bass feel trippy and wrong. Disorienting.

  I can’t help asking. “What did he look like?”

  Dan trains his insipid, waterlogged eyes on me more intently. “Who did you say you were again?”

  Onstage, the lead singer belts a violent scream that sends the crowd into another roar. Light flashes across Dan’s face. I smell sweat and skunked beer.

  “I’m a friend of the family.”

  For a split second, Dan’s eyes become unfocused, glazed over. He clears his throat. “Black hair like hers.” He points to Raven, who purrs at being noticed. “Tall. I think I have a picture of him on my phone.” Something thick and sticky globs at the back of my throat. Daniel fishes in his pocket and clicks through a few screens before turning the phone toward me.

  I take the phone in my hands and hold it close to my face to study. Suddenly, my chest cramps. I feel my heart being smashed into a box too small for it. Strangling. Wheezing. Sputtering for blood.

  The phone slips from my hands and cracks on the concrete floor.

  “What the hell!” Dan yells, diving to retrieve it.

  I clutch my chest, world spinning rapidly out of control like a kaleidoscope. Red lights flashing. Music pounding. I catch Raven’s arm to keep from plummeting to the ground. The pain in my heart threatens to buckle my knees.

  “Get off of me. What’s wrong with you, you freak?”

  Heart still crushed to the point I can’t breathe, I find the wall and prop myself against it. I shut my eyes, listening to the frantic notes of an electric guitar, which sound tinny and distant. The image of Levi’s beaut
iful, unforgettable face feels like it’s been tattooed under my eyelids.

  It’s him.

  My alarm goes off at too-early o’clock. Thoughts bubble to the surface, sleepy and muddled. Black hair. Tan skin. Shattered glass. Him.

  But at the same time…not him. Dozy eyes, unfocused. A look that I’m not used to. Smile directed away from the camera. What had he been looking at? I don’t know. I don’t know anything, I realize. My alarm chirps again. Repetitive. Irritating. I roll over and slap my hand over all of the buttons until it shuts up. My mouth tastes foul.

  Henry had to see it to believe it himself and for this, he had to wrestle the phone free from my new friend Dan and pay up another twenty. But once he laid eyes on the photograph, I watched as a curtain like an oncoming storm spread over his features. Him.

  Painful knots still fill my chest. There’s got to be a logical explanation, he said. We’ll figure this out. Will we? It hurts to move; hurts to breathe. I’m beginning to the think the well of logical explanations has run dry.

  There’s knocking at the door. “Stella! Are you up?”

  The effort it’d take to lift my head feels insurmountable. “Define up,” I yell back to Mom.

  “Stella Cross! We cannot be late!” Even through the door I can tell she has a serious case of the I-mean-it’s.

  I groan loud enough for Mom to hear it through the door. We never go to church and I have no idea why Elsie should need to be christened anyhow. I’m sure her soul will be perfectly safe, holy water or no.

  “I can’t hear movement!” Mom jiggles the locked door.

  “Okay, okay.” I shove the blankets down to my ankles and crawl out of bed like a zombie from its grave. “I’m up.”

  One day. Just get through this one day. I say this as a promise to myself. Besides, I have no other plan at the moment, so I’m not sure there’s another choice.

  On the other side of the door, I find Mom busy fastening a pair of earrings, her entire head of hair rolled up in hot curlers. “I ironed a dress for you. It’s hanging in the laundry room. And can you do something with that hair?”

  I scrunch the stringy black mop in between my fingers. To my mom’s credit, she hadn’t made a big deal when I’d chopped it off. I’m sure she wrote it in her Stella files. Probably under the heading POST-SURGERY REBELLION, but she let it go. So I’ll try for her because I can tell that she’s entered the crazy zone, the mode usually reserved for cleaning the house before we have company. When we used to have company, that is.

  “Stephen!” she yells, padding off barefoot down the hall.

  My dad, clean-shaven and dressed in a suit and paisley tie, whooshes past her. “I can’t find the camera battery. Have you seen it? Morning, Stel.” He lifts his chin and nods before jogging over to look under the living room sofa. I follow him with my eyes, feeling weird and adrift. Thoughts, theories, and opinions are mixing wildly in my brain, half-formed, the cogs of steampunk machinery turning over and over, clicking in and out of place. And yet neither of my parents can see through me to this place of palpable turbulence.

  Inside the laundry room, I slip into a knee-length navy-blue dress. I realize with a pang that it’s the one Mom bought me for my Stanford admissions interview. I haven’t told them yet that I missed the application deadline. I don’t know when I will. I zip the dress. How can any of that matter when I’ve just found out that my ex-boyfriend’s face matches the face of a dead boy? Which means what, exactly? That my ex-boyfriend is, in fact, dead?

  At least the dress covers up my scar nicely.

  I’m pinning my hair into something less shaggy and more coifed when I hear a scream from the kitchen. “Mom!” I rush out. “Are you okay?”

  “Shoot, shoot, shoot.” She blots at a dribble of coffee on her cream pencil skirt. “It’s not coming out.”

  “Here, let me try.” I hurry to wet a dish towel.

  “No, no.” She shoos me away. “I’m an idiot.” She smacks her forehead so hard I expect it to bruise like an overripe apple. She shakes her head, chin dimpled and lips pressed together. “Can you go put Elsie in her christening gown? I need to change. It’s ruined.” The look on her face is pained.

  “Of course, Mom. Are you sure?” Tears have started to pool in her eyes, so I throw the dish towel down on the cabinet and scurry off to Elsie’s room. I shut the door behind me to seal off the chaos. Elsie peers at me through the bars of her crib.

  “’Ella?” She removes her thumb from her mouth and scrunches her tiny sausage fingers. “’El-la.”

  I rest my back on the door and take a deep breath. The room smells like vanilla and baby powder. “Yes, hi, Elsie,” I say patiently. “Our family has gone loony tunes, Elsie. Did you know that?”

  I have gone loony tunes, that’s for sure. I’m finding it impossible to come up with a non-crazy explanation for the fact that I’ve been seeing a dead man walking.

  Elsie pats her hands together before depositing her favorite thumb back between goopy lips. Soft baby curls practically float off the top of her head, and I watch her balance on a base of two chunky toddler thighs.

  A frilly white gown six inches too long hangs from the edge of a changing table. Folded on top of the table are a pair of petite lace gloves and a matching bonnet.

  I cringe at the bonnet. “Don’t blame me for this,” I say, fingering the abundance of white ruffles.

  Elsie will be baptized at the Church of the Sacred Heart, the same church my parents and I have been attending every couple years for Christmas since I was born. The church’s symbol consists of a traditional heart shape, adorned with a crown of thorns and bursting with flames. Mounted on top of the burning heart is a cross and below that a lance puncturing the bleeding organ. Since my diagnosis, I’ve never liked attending. The image unsettles me, and I’m approaching Elsie’s baptism with dread.

  What’s so sacred about a heart anyway? Mine’s gone, replaced by somebody else’s. The doctors switched it for a better model and I’ve been suffering ever since. Suffering like that supposedly sacred heart of Jesus.

  Gently, I lift Elsie from the crib and set her baby bottom down on the plush carpet. She giggles as I unbutton her onesie. “That’s right. Be good for Stella,” I coo. Her tiny body shivers under the light draft from the air-conditioning vent.

  Elsie reaches for me, fingers splayed, in that way babies do, back arched—stretched—striving like she’s trying to grab a star. I slide the christening gown off the hanger and hold it to my chest, looking down at her squirming. “Once all this white goes on, Else, all bodily functions must cease, capisce?”

  Elsie cooperates when I sit her up and pull the frock over her head. Once I’m finished, it’s hard not to laugh. There’s more ruffle than there is Elsie. Sometimes it pays not to be the Replacement Child, after all.

  “Right. The final touches.” I’m crawling to my feet and turning to the changing table for the lace gloves and bonnet when I hear a voice say my name in an urgent tone.

  Stella.

  A shiver brushes my neck. I turn, expecting to see my mother having entered the room in search of help scrubbing her skirt or pinning on a brooch. The words that are halfway past my lips stumble and flutter helplessly into silence.

  A streak of darkness blurs across the room and my blood freezes at the sight of a shadowed silhouette lurking in the corner behind the crib.

  Tingles scuttle like insects over my scalp. I’m unable to move.

  The figure looms, motionless, human in form but not in substance. Without taking my eyes off the dim outline, I inch closer to Elsie.

  Its darkness sucks the light out of everything around it. Even the damp sunlight trickling in from the window is extracted from the air and sunk into shadow.

  “Who…who are you?”

  The figure cocks its head. Eyes on me. Watching.

  Elsie babbles words that are intelligible only to her. She’s not close enough to touch. A needle of fear pins me like a butterfly to a display board. Heart f
lapping.

  “Elsie, come here,” I whisper. The smell of baby powder and vanilla has been pulled out of the air and replaced by that of mothballs and urine.

  I take a step closer to my sister, but as I do the figure dissolves, reappearing in a thick but foggy mass just behind her.

  I scream.

  Black fingers reach for her. The figure crouches. A head tilts hungrily and Elsie cries out, wails for “’Ella.”

  I watch in horror as a shadowy hand plunges through the back of her tiny skull. A gray talon pokes out her mouth. She gags. Chokes.

  I spring to life, unsure of what to do. I try to beat back the shade. Fists punch at the air. I fight to pull it off of Elsie and the thing screeches in protest.

  Her strangled wails spur me to fight harder. Another shadowy, clawlike hand pushes through my sister’s small chest. Grabbing. Grabbing.

  The stink of sour breath stings my nostrils. Whimpering, I nearly gag.

  My vision is swimming. It hitches, giving the sense of a shift to double vision. I blink. Blink again. Wrenching my eyes to focus on the spot where my hands are gripping, I see only Elsie and my fingers wrapping themselves around her neck as though they belong to someone else. I freeze. My rear end drops to my heels and I sit back slowly. My hands are rigid as they draw away from my baby sister’s throat.

  There’s nothing here. Nothing in the room with me. Her wails pierce the silence, grounding me. It wasn’t real. None of it was real. A trick. A lie. My stupid, stupid brain.

  I scoop Elsie off the floor and hold her to my chest. Her chin rests on my shoulder and her screams bounce directly off my eardrums. It doesn’t bother me. She could scream all through the night and I’d gladly listen.

  I rub her tiny back and bounce her up and down the way she likes me to do.

  There’s a click behind me. Footsteps. “Stella!” I twist around. My mom is standing above me. Air whooshes out of her and she pushes her bangs off her forehead. “You guys scared me. Is everything okay?” At this point, Elsie’s wet sobs are beginning to dry up. I can’t see her face, but I’m sure the entire lower half is plastered in snot.