The Dead Girls Detective Agency

by Suzy Cox

  “So, can I walk you home?” David asked when they finally did. I felt too dizzy to make up an excuse.

  We took a shortcut across the park, talking about the lameness of the film and the greatness of the Drums’ new album.

  “Sorry, I had to run off the other day,” David said. “I wanted to stay and talk some more, but—”

  “No, it’s fine, I get it,” I said, cutting him off. Who needed to hear a whole lot more of oh-I’m-part-of-an-insanely-hot-couple? “You needed to go catch up with your girlfriend. It’s cool.”

  “My what?” David stopped and looked at me with his eyebrows raised. His nose wrinkled as his brows disappeared under his bangs.

  “Your girlfriend,” I said. Why was he dragging this out? “You know, the pretty redhead who came to the square when we were talking last week? The one whose hand you grabbed as you walked across the road?”

  Oh God, shut up, Charlotte. You are one sentence away from being filed under stalker in his girlectory.

  David pulled his iPhone out of his pocket, wiping the screen on his combats. He touched some keys. “You mean this redhead?” he asked, showing me a picture of Square girl. I nodded. He laughed.

  “What?” I asked. This was beyond humiliating.

  “This would be Taylor. As in my cousin. My aunt’s daughter. She’s in town to check out colleges. That’s why she was down by NYU. We’re close, but she’s not my girlfriend. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. Well, in most states.” He smiled.

  Oh.

  “So why did you look so jumpy when she caught you talking to me?” I asked.

  He looked at me, and sighed. “Probably because … I don’t want my entire family to know I like a girl,” he said, dropping his eyes and concentrating hard on putting his cell back in his pocket, “before I’ve had the chance to tell her so myself.”

  My skin prickled and my face flushed. I hoped he was telling the truth. I hoped this wasn’t some stupid initiation dare Leon and the lax guys had set for the new kid: make spinach-teeth Charlotte think you like her, and we’ll introduce you to the properly hot girls later.

  There was a low rumble overhead. Baby thunder echoed off the trees. David looked up at the sky, which had turned from blue to black faster than a bad baseball bruise.

  “Got an umbrella in there?” he asked with a crooked smile, patting my flimsy shirt pocket. I shook my head. “Thought not. Then let’s go hide in there until this passes.” David pointed in the direction of the tunnel under the mall’s steps. “Come on, it’s going to get biblical on our asses in a minute.” He grabbed my hand. “Run!”

  It got biblical faster than that. Within five seconds to be precise. The rain came down so hard and fast that I couldn’t raise my head to see David running in front of me. I just held on to his warm, wet hand and let him guide me through, as I sploshed into puddles that weren’t there seconds before.

  We reached the shelter of the arches and stood panting.

  I looked out at the park. Water was flooding the fountain and bungeeing off the marble stairs. But weirdly, apart from the sound of the clouds lightening their load, it was suddenly kinda quiet. The tourists had run for cabs. The smarter-than-us New Yorkers had come out ready for rain. So there was just us, under the arches, dripping on our own.

  An enormous raindrop fell through a leak in the curved stone roof and landed on my nose. I yelped like a little kid and clumsily jumped backward, right onto David’s sneakers.

  “Shit!” I spun around, trying to simultaneously get off the poor guy’s feet and apologize, but instead I landed right in front of him. So close I could feel his warm breath on the top of my head and see it turn into white, spiraling clouds in the cool evening air.

  “I … um, I’m sorry about your Converse, but then I guess they were pretty wet already and I …”

  David smiled and brushed a lock of wet, matted hair off my forehead. Way to impress, Charlotte, I thought. Guys always put “drowned rat” at their top of must-have qualities in a girlfriend. Chances were my mascara was heading in the direction of Tennessee too. So now I was wet, clumsy, and ungroomed. I had it all going on. Whatever he said, he so could not like me. Not now. Not like this.

  I ducked my head down, concentrating on the puddles of rain splashing and growing on the concrete next to me.

  David took my face in his hands. I jerked at the action, too scared to misread or overthink what might happen next. He raised my chin, until suddenly there was nowhere else I could look. Apart from straight at him, as he leaned down and kissed me.

  Softly at first, like he was scared I was going to pull away, but when I didn’t, he dropped his hands from my face to my waist and pulled me close. As I reached my arms up behind his neck, his shirt was damp against me. His skin was cold—I could feel beads of rain on his cheeks—but his lips were warm. And all I could think as this buzz I’d never felt before flooded out from the bottom of my stomach, taking all the energy out of my legs, before it shot down to my toes, was that I was kissing the hottest guy I’d ever met in the middle of a crazy storm, and that I would do pretty much anything if someone could promise me the summer rain would keep beating down forever so that we never had any reason to leave the arch.

  I screwed up my eyes and made myself click out of the memory and back to the now. The now, where I wasn’t in a park. Or wet. Or even breathing.

  The now where I was dead.

  I looked down. David was still sleeping soundly. The way I’d felt then—that day and all the other days when he’d pulled me close and kissed me—could I ever feel like that again? Have that kind of physical reaction when I didn’t have a body anymore?

  I reached out my hand and put it against his, which was still holding the messed-up ancient ticket, spreading my fingers and hoping his would feel me, twitch awake, and curl around mine. But David simply shivered, pulling his hand away as if swatting a fly and tucking it under his pillow. I’d only been gone a day, couldn’t he sense it was me?

  Slowly I bent down and brushed my lips in the air above his. I willed that familiar feeling to be there: his warm breath, the pressure of his lips.

  But all I felt was nothing. I may as well have been blowing a kiss into the air.

  I felt something inside me stir, then drop. But I knew it was nothing to do with David—how he made me feel—and everything to do with me, and the realization of what I’d become.

  Chapter 9

  “AN AFTERNOON? IS THAT ALL?” KRISTEN SAID, acting shocked. “If anything ever happens to me, the school better give us the whole day off. Anything less is plain embarrassing.”

  Yep, I sure was glad I’d ported back to my high school.

  The gray school steps had been weirdly quiet. No one was running, no music was blaring out. Everyone looked kind of somber.

  I ducked inside to find a load of kids crowding around something on the wall. With Kristen and her surgically attached crew—the four next-prettiest members of Saint Bartholomew High’s cheerleading squad, the Tornadoes—standing right at the front of the throng (obv), staring at whatever the piece of paper was.

  It couldn’t be the notice for who had made the play this semester because that had gone up last week. And it couldn’t be the lacrosse team list either; that got decided in September.

  I walked over for a better look, but kids were blocking my way. “Excuse me,” I said loudly. Like that had worked when I was alive. I tapped my foot, wondering whether it was worth porting the couple of steps to the front of the crowd. Then I remembered I didn’t have to do that. I could just bust through my classmates.

  I took a few steps back—totally unnecessary but I felt like I should get a running start on my first try; I didn’t want to get stuck in any of them, after all—and ran. Whoa! Weird. Unlike appariting, running through the Living didn’t make me want to reexamine my breakfast, but it did kinda tickle. In the way a blast of AC does. I guess some of them must have felt it too, because the last one I bounced through, Alanna Acland, a girl fr
om my homeroom, shuddered.

  What was that expression my grandma used when I shivered for no reason? Like someone had just walked over your grave. Or through you more like.

  From my new vantage point, I could see what Kristen was bitching about: a piece of paper. A formal school notice. But it wasn’t about sports or the play or extra activities. Alongside the words was a massive picture—of me.

  “In memory of Charlotte Feldman,” it read, “who sadly passed away yesterday, school will finish at one p.m. today. Please take this time away from your studies to remember an outstanding pupil”—nice, but a lie—“who will be very much missed by all those who knew her.”

  I took a step back and looked around. Parker and Kari—friends from my homeroom—looked red-eyed. Mina Anderson, this quiet kid from my photography club, was sniffing. But everyone else? Not so much. It wasn’t like I was some major social misfit. I had a group of friends I’d been close to since junior high, but I doubted three-quarters of the student body would spend their afternoon off looking as teary as Parker and Kari. They’d need to know who I was to do that. The free afternoon was more likely to lead to a rise in students spotted goofing around drunkenly in the park than sales of Kleenex.

  If high school worked like America’s Next Top Model, I’d have been voted off on week three on account of not being part of the right cliques. I liked it that way, but it meant I was never going to be voted Most anything. And (I cringed to think about it) certainly not Most Loyal Friend recently. I’d known Ali forever—well, since kindergarten, which is practically the same thing—but despite growing up together and seeing each other pretty much every day for ten years, we hadn’t been as tight lately. Not since I’d started dating David. At first I tried to get her to hang out with us—like that afternoon at the movies. But more often than not she said no and after a while I gave up asking. I felt bad about it. We’d always said a guy would never come between us. But somehow, without either of us really noticing, one slowly had. I’d hoped things would get back to normal. Now they’d never have a chance.

  “So, what shall we do?” Kaitlynnn, a blond cheerleader who always had the expression of someone who’d just eaten bad sushi, asked Kristen.

  I always thought it was kinda ironic that Kaitlynnn’s mom could earn enough as a high-powered lawyer to afford more plastic surgery than Heidi Montag, but she couldn’t give her only daughter a name that was spelled correctly. What was with the i and the y and that extra n?

  “Barneys or Bloomie’s?” Kaitlynnn asked. “Oh, or we could really mix it up and get my mom’s driver to take us to Century Twenty-One—there’s supposed to be an even more major sale on today.”

  “A discount store?” Kristen looked as sick as I felt post-porting. “I am not buying clothes that are going for a marked-down price because other people do not want them. Who do you think I am?” She threw a French-manicured hand in the air in disgust. It went right through my chest. Tickle.

  Kaitlynnn shrugged. “Just thought it might be a good use of some dead time, that’s all.”

  “Dead time! Ha!” said Jamie, Kristen’s deputy, who I always figured was picked for the job because it made Kristen look like she had brains as well as beauty. “You accidentally made a joke! You are sooo funny! Dead time!”

  Was there a factory somewhere off Manhattan where they churned these girls out, I wondered, watching as the other two members of the posse—who everyone secretly just called Blondes Four and Five because they were so Identi-Kit—joined in the giggling. If one cheerleader left, there always seemed to be a brighter, newer one to take her place.

  “Whatever,” Kaitlynnn said. “Homeroom. Let’s go see if anyone is crying over the dead girl in there.” She reread the poster. “Charlotte Feldman. I mean, who was she anyway?”

  “Curly hair, criminally cute boyfriend,” Kristen said. “Always wore way old Converse. Would have been pretty if she’d made something of herself and not always looked so sulky.”

  Seriously? Even when I was in another dimension I was still getting grief from these people. Wasn’t there supposed to be a no-bitch zone around the dead? And, hello, I was wearing DVF boots when I’d died. There was nothing “way old” about these babies. Though there would be if I really was stuck in them forever.

  The bell rang. The Tornadoes flipped their blond hair in unison and strutted down the hall.

  As I looked around I noticed that a few teachers and a couple of kids I knew—oh, Ali included, there she was—were wearing black. Was it because of me? I kinda hoped so. And I totally wished I could still talk to Ali about everything.

  The corridors cleared. I realized I better get going before a teacher came along and caught me out here when I should be someplace else and …

  Suddenly it dawned on me. I didn’t have to go to class. Ever again. I was invisible. In my high school. I could go anywhere I wanted to. Listen in on the most private of conversations all day long. And the best thing? No one would know. For the first time since I’d died, I was going to have some fun.

  I spent the morning spying on my classmates. Eavesdropping on their gossip. Snooping as they got their books out of their lockers. Watching when they thought no one else was.

  I sat on the restroom sink while the Tornadoes reapplied their lip gloss. (FYI: barring the ultracompetitive part when they tried to out-first-kiss-story each other, their conversation was just as inane as you’d think.) I watched while Drew, the drama club captain, secretly cut lines from the latest script so that he’d have a bigger role than this other, way more talented kid, Martin Forde. I saw Massie Jones, the smartest girl in school, cheat on her English quiz by looking at notes she’d copied on her arm. I watched the teachers be late for class because they were finishing their cigarettes. And the janitor deliberately making more scuffs on the floor, so he could complain to the principal about “those messy kids.”

  I heard Leon Clark actually tell one of the lax guys that it was a “bummer” I’d died because I was “pretty hot for a muso chick.” Kari burst into tears again mid–math class and had to go see the nurse. Mina offered to clean out my locker, neatly putting everything in a bag for my parents to pick up. And, in the staff room, Mr. Millington told the substitute it was terrible to see “such promise extinguished so young” and that my chem was “really coming along.” I guess it’s true what they say: People (well, the decent ones) remember you way more favorably when you’re not around to remind them of the truth.

  Fascinating as it was, after some comprehensive investigation (which would have made Nancy full of pride and given Lorna at least a week’s worth of gossip), I came to one conclusion: The kids at Saint Bart’s had three theories about my death.

  “Charlotte was high at the time,” Drew said when Martin came into the rehearsal room, asked what he was doing and Drew tried to create a diversion to cover his tracks. “She always looked totally out of it.” Martin nodded fervently, which made me feel way happier about those cut lines of his. “Charlotte was a total pothead. Why else didn’t she get more involved with school activities? Seriously, dude, did you ever see her outside of this place? Hailie, the junior who does our set design, said she knows someone who was on the platform when Charlotte tripped and it was because she’d smoked something so strong it would have knocked out the quarterback.”

  “My sources—and of course I am not revealing who—say that she and that cute boyfriend of hers were on the rocks,” Kristen said, touching up her Urban Decay sparkle pout gloss in the bathroom mirror. “She clearly knew he was going to break up with her, so she threw herself under the F train in some fit of, like, desperation. She knew he was too hot for her—and it was only a matter of time before he realized that too.”

  “I heard that David and Charlotte were on the rocks,” Massie told her BFF Vicky as she handed in her 100 percent correct, 100 percent cheated-on English test, “because he caught her making out with Mr. Millington, our chem teacher. Come on, why else would she still be able to take that class
after she’d flunked every test she took last year? And why she took all those ‘science tutoring sessions’ with Mr. Millington over the summer?” Massie lowered her voice. “I bet David had threatened to tell the principal, and she knew the affair was coming out any day soon. Think about it: committing actual suicide was preferable to the social suicide that would ensue when everyone at school heard about that little indiscretion.”

  It was all bull. Ridiculous, stupid BS that, if I hadn’t been having the kind of crappy week I was, I might have actually found funny. But death seemed to have dulled my sense of humor.

  The one thing no one was saying was that I’d been murdered. Which, for a load of city kids, was surprisingly PG.

  Why did no one suspect the truth? How had my murderer covered any tracks so cleverly that no one had any idea I’d been pushed. I guess it was crowded on the platform. And no one ever looks anyone else in the eye down there in case somebody’s a psycho. It’s the law of the subway. It’s actually kinda the perfect place for a genuine psycho to commit a murder unseen.

  Whatever. Feeling confused and needing some space, I ported over to the library, which—next to the photography room—happened to be my favorite place in the whole sorry school. It wasn’t like I was a Nancy bookworm. More that, it was always quiet. Which meant I could come here to think. Or to gossip with Ali and Parker. Or, occasionally, do some work.

  I walked through the door, resisting the urge to giggle as the wood tickled my body, and made my way over to the classics section—the most private place in the library because kids seldom read them, so they never went back there. I slumped at the table in front of Homer and Virgil. In school at least, David and I hung out here a lot. We’d sit here and talk about our day—not too loudly of course, or Library Girl, this geeky little sophomore who seemed to be the student body’s self-appointed shhhh! policewoman, would come over and tell us to be quiet. One time, she caught us kissing—I know, but it was a whole lot classier than eating each other’s faces off on the school lawn in full view of every other student and the occasional passing tourist bus—and she actually threatened to report me to the principal. Would David ever be able to study here again without thinking of me? I doubted it. It was probably too painful.