The Sweet Dead Life

by Joy Preble

  I willed my heart to beat like a normal person’s instead of dancing in my chest like a lunatic. “You think that could be true?” I croaked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  Something inside me that had felt sad and broken knitted itself together just the tiniest bit. And Casey wasn’t even touching me anymore.

  Officer Jenkins tapped on my window. “Get a move on,” he grumped through the glass.

  “I’m gonna find him, Jenna,” Casey whispered, opening the door for me. “I’m gonna bring him home.”

  “It’s been five years, Casey.”

  “It’s okay,” my brother said. He lowered his voice. Officer Jenkins was right outside the Merc. “I’m a you-know-what now. That’s how we roll.”

  “Don’t ever say ‘how we roll’ again,” I told him. “Or I’ll report you to that AIC.”

  The bell rang. Nice. I was late for Algebra. Again.

  “How you doing today, Jenna?” Mr. Collins asked, pausing during aisle patrol while we were solving for x. “You had me worried.”

  “Doctor got me fixed up,” I said. “Gave me a shot and everything.”

  Mr. Collins patted me on the shoulder. “Glad to hear it.” He leaned down, treating me to his morning coffee breath. “I meant what I said yesterday. If you need something—if there’s something I can help you with, I want you to ask.” He sounded sincere. “And as long as you’re all healthy now,” he added, “I’ll tell Mrs. Monahan to expect you at detention this afternoon. That’ll take care of today’s tardy as well. Call it my little gift.”

  Or maybe not so much.

  “Dandy,” I told him.

  “That’s the spirit.” He straightened his A&M tie. I bleed maroon, he liked to tell us. Maroon and white were the A&M colors. I thought about Amber’s grudge against the Aggies. Maybe that Aggie angel had flummoxed her just like Mr. Collins was flummoxing me. But that was algebra; we were always looking for the unknown.

  I guess I stared at his tie too long. He spouted off another A&M analogy. Mr. Collins was big on analogies. “You need to think like an Aggie, Jenna,” he said. “If things don’t go your way, you haven’t lost. You’ve just run out of time. Next time you’ll beat the hell outta your opponent.”

  I didn’t want to think like an Aggie. Plus, part of the whole problem was that we didn’t know who our opponent was.

  MAGGIE GRABBED ME in the hall on the way to English. “You had me freaked!”

  Today she had on a dark wash denim skirt, black fishnets, black ankle boots and her same hoodie covering a black leather bustier. This was a new look. Maggie was all about new looks. My legs were so pale that if I wore fishnets, people would think I was wearing black and white checked tights.

  “I’m good,” I told her. “Really.”

  “Truth?” She scanned me like she was looking for a clue.

  I hooked pinkies with her. “Truth,” I said. “My enzymes were messed up. They took some blood and found out what to give me to make it better.”

  “You’re not wearing your boots,” she said.

  I sighed. “Nope. They were hurting my feet.” This wasn’t a lie. It also wasn’t the whole story.

  WE SCRIBBLED NOTES again in English.

  Maggie: Is ur brother hooking up with Lanie Phelps again? That’s what I heard.

  Me: Maybe.

  Maggie: Seriously?

  Me: Maybe.

  Maggie: Did u have doughnuts this morning? Bring me one?

  Me: Yes. No. Sorry. How did u know?

  Maggie: Caleb McIntyre saw you.

  She leaned over to whisper. Mrs. Weiss was at her desk, and we were supposed to be drafting persuasive essays on the topic of our choice. Mine was Should Public School be Mandatory?

  “Did you and Casey eat doughnuts with that Amber woman?”

  “Um, yes?”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No. I mean, yes. She was at Sundale eating kolaches. I talked to her while Casey was … yeah. I saw her.”

  “She ate kolaches with Casey?” Maggie crossed her arm. She’d said Casey’s name the way girls say the name of a boy they like.

  I heaved a sigh. This female attraction thing to Casey 2.0, A-Word version, was getting old. Maggie did not like Casey. Maggie thought Casey was a weed-loving pissant. I changed the subject. “We’re looking for my dad again. Casey thinks maybe we’ll actually find him.”

  “Really?” Maggie’s mouth formed a little O. “Why?”

  I hadn’t expected her to question our motives. But this was Mags. She was looking for signs. “Because Mom told us she’s heard from him,” I whispered. “I’ll let you know what we find.”

  “Girls.” Mrs. Weiss put her finger to her lips and motioned for us to get back to work.

  “So that’s it?” Maggie whispered as I turned back to my essay.

  “Yeah. I’m not gonna get my hopes up.” This too, was true.

  “Maybe you should,” Maggie said suddenly, loud enough that Mrs. Weiss gave us another dirty look.

  “Why?”

  “Hope’s a good thing,” Maggie said.

  “So is doing your work,” Mrs. Weiss added. “Which I hope will show your best effort.”

  I hated when teachers eavesdropped.

  Maggie cast sideward glances at me until the bell rang.

  “You can tell me, you know,” she said as we pushed our way into the hall toward science. “Whatever it is. I’m your best friend, Jenna. It’s my job description.”

  “I know,” I said. But all the way to science, I wondered what it was going to be like having a secret that I had to keep forever.

  How I Got Out of Detention. Again.

  Casey’s theory—that Mom was right, that Dad was on the run from something, that the bad guys who had him on the run wanted him to resurface, so they’d defiled my boots with poison—all of it circled my brain for the rest of the day like a toilet bowl on permanent flush.

  Here are the questions that I came up with:

  1) How could my mom be right about anything, given her condition? (Then again, given what had happened to Casey, I was in a better position to believe the farfetched.)

  2) Speaking of Casey, why poison me and not my brother?

  3) Where was Dad? Why did Mom think he was in Mexico?

  4) Was there something about the last day we had seen Dad that might give us a clue? I had to trust Casey on this one. He knew from the beginning that Dad hadn’t come home that day. All I remember is that he and Mom kept telling me that Dad was on a business trip. Mom had insisted that she and Casey maintain this lie at my expense until she finally accepted that his disappearance was of the more permanent sort. At the time, their story seemed plausible. Dad was a sportswriter. Basketball season was in full swing and baseball had just begun. Usually, he covered home games, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe that he was traveling with the Rockets and then the Astros. The problem was, I was already a good reader and one of my father’s biggest fans. His columns were suddenly no-shows in the newspaper and online. Eventually, Mom and Casey had no choice but to tell me the truth.

  5) What would happen if and when we solved this whole mess? Would Casey still be here? Or would he disappear, too? Probably best not to overthink that one. He was here now. Did he know I’d printed copies of Dad’s columns from the online version of the Chronicle? I still kept this one folded up in my underwear drawer:

  Note: there was another half a page to this article, but it had fallen out of my journal before I pasted everything tight. That part talked about Dad taking me and Casey with him and teaching us the same stuff. He did not mention that Casey had the same gripe that had inspired the article: the game was too damn slow. This was why Casey liked football. (Plus, he was a boy from Texas.) I was the one who was more like Dad in that regard. I liked a game where I didn’t always have to pay absolute attention every second.

  AT THE END of the day, I headed to Mrs. Monahan’s room, prepared to gut it out with the othe
r delinquents. Among them was Corey Chambers, who chose to flop into the seat next to me, possibly so my nasal passages could bask in the foul reek of his cigarette smoke.

  “Anderson?” Mrs. Monahan began droning the attendance roster. I shuffled through my binder for my persuasive essay. Ah, detention: another example of how mandatory public school infringed upon our personal freedoms.

  “Bates?”

  Corey Chambers poked me in the arm. I ignored him. He poked again. Corey was as hard to get rid of as his fumes.

  On the other side of me, Madison Riley elbowed me and giggled. (Madison appeared harmless, but she could pull hair like nobody’s business—which she did on a regular basis if anyone looked sideways at her.) I looked up. My brother stood in the doorway of Mrs. Monahan’s room, gesturing to me with his finger. Had he actually gone to school today? I guess it didn’t really even matter, but this whole thing would be easier if we stuck to a plan. “When did your brother get so hot?” Madison asked. She was staring at Casey like she wanted to leap on him and wrap her skinny arms around his neck.

  “Your brother’s here,” Corey said. Nobody at Ima Hogg had quite mastered the art of the obvious like Corey. He leaned closer and stage-whispered, “tell him to let Dave know I need to talk to him later. It’s urgent, dude.” Corey called everybody dude, regardless of gender. Even the teachers.

  “Colvert?” Mrs. Monahan looked up and frowned.

  Casey stepped into the room with a bright-toothed smile. “You are looking well today, Mrs. Monahan,” he said politely. Mrs. Monahan had been Casey’s social studies teacher when he was at Ima Hogg. She was one of those barrel-shaped people with all her weight in the middle and spindly legs that looked like they could barely support her. There was no way in this life or the next that she could look “well.”

  The other twenty-five juvenile offenders jerked their heads up in unison.

  “Mr. Samuels, what are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “I need Jenna,” Casey said.

  “Can I talk to Casey?” I was up and skidding to the door before Mrs. Monahan—who (naturally) seemed as dumbfounded as Madison by the new and improved Casey—could say no.

  “Why are you here?” I whispered. Not that I didn’t appreciate it, but if he actually did spring me from detention, I worried that people would start talking. I wanted to attract as little attention to myself as possible right now.

  Behind me, I heard Madison giggle again. Perfect. Now there was no way that people wouldn’t talk.

  “Because I think I figured something out,” Casey said. He shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper.

  It took me a few seconds to recognize what he was holding. After all, I hadn’t looked at it since I shoved it into the kitchen junk drawer about two years ago. For three years before that, it had been stuck to the refrigerator with a Domino’s Pizza magnet. Originally, my father’s note had been up there, too. But after the millionth time I’d come into the kitchen and found my mother reading the note and crying, I’d ripped the note into pieces and thrown it into the garbage. Later, I discovered that Casey had pulled it out, taped it back together and hidden it in his sock drawer. Somehow the expired certificate for a fajita dinner for four from Manny’s Tex Mex had escaped my wrath.

  “Are you showing me this because you want fajitas?” I decided not to ask the obvious follow-up: Had he been smoking? Maybe angels didn’t have to eat, but pot could still make him hungry. I eyeballed him. He didn’t look high.

  “I’ll tell you in the car,” Casey replied. He stepped back in the room. “It’s an emergency,” he said to Mrs. Monahan.

  She hesitated, looking from Casey to me and then back to Casey, who turned on that high-wattage smile again. “Then you better go,” she said to me.

  I didn’t have to be told twice. I rushed to grab my crap before Mrs. Monahan remembered that this was the Samuels family, for whom she did not have a great deal of affection.

  “Couldn’t you have at least have made her mark down I was there?” I huffed as Casey whisked me down the hall. “I’m going to have detention until the end of time.”

  “You know it doesn’t work that way, Jenna.”

  “You sure? Maybe there’s a loophole for sisters. Maybe you just need to ask. Like restaurant specials. Sometimes they don’t give you the discount unless you say something.”

  The Merc was parked in front of the school. I buckled myself into the passenger seat. Officer Jenkins was nowhere in sight. Casey handed me the Manny’s fajita certificate and peeled out of the driveway.

  “Read it,” he said.

  I quoted: “This certificate entitles the bearer to one complimentary fajita dinner for four. One pound of beef or chicken, flour tortillas, pico de gallo, refried beans, rice, and guacamole salad. No substitutions.” At the bottom was the long expired expiration date. I frowned at my brother. “So? This is your big clue? This is what your angel powers have gotten you? What do we learn from this? I’ll tell you. Nothing.”

  “Not that part, Jenna. The logo. At the top. The Manny’s logo.”

  I looked at the logo: a series of Mexican sombreros. Underneath was Manny’s Tex Mex slogan: A taste of old Mexico, Texas style. I snorted a laugh. If Dad had left me with one thing, it was the knowledge that while tasty, Tex-Mex cuisine was not authentic Mexican food.

  “Read it, Jenna.”

  “I just did.”

  “Read it again. Out loud.”

  “You read it, if it’s so thrilling to you. Have you been smoking again?”

  “Jesus, Jenna.”

  “You really shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, you know. That AIC must mark your demerit sheet every five seconds.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Mexico, Jenna!”

  I smirked. I knew I was annoying him. But not half as much as he was annoying me. Quid pro quo, if he still insisted on keeping secrets from me, even now.

  “What about Mexico?”

  “Mom keeps insisting that Dad’s gone to Mexico.”

  That got me quiet. But it still didn’t add up to anything.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder about Dad’s note and this gift coupon, Jenna? I did. Not right away—everything was such a crazy mess. But later, I thought about it. He leaves this short note. Y’all take care. I love you. We all know it by heart. We read the damn thing a million times. But the coupon. I never could figure that out. Did he just set the certificate there by mistake? Or maybe he wanted us to have one last good meal. After awhile, I stopped thinking about it. I had to. Only today I started wondering.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. I had tried to block that day out of my head, too. The day our dad left us: April 22, five years plus eight months ago. The day everything changed. Whatever had happened to the Samuels family since then all tied back to that one April 22.

  “Jenna,” Casey said softly, his hands gripping the steering wheel and his eyes focused on the street. “What if it wasn’t random that Dad left us that Manny’s certificate? I know Mom’s not all there right now, but what if on this one thing, she really is? I think this is our clue. I think Dad meant for us to find it.”

  My heart bounced a couple extra times. I refused to get my hopes up again (damn you, Mags!), even if I agreed that Dad probably wasn’t dead. No offense to Mom or anything, but her mumbling that Dad’s disappearance had something to do with Mexico—a word on the Manny’s gift certificate—was about as thin a connection as anyone could come up with.

  I sighed. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say that for some reason this was our clue. It’s been so long, Casey. What good is it going to do us?”

  We were passing a CVS Pharmacy. The Merc shuddered as Casey yanked the wheel. He pulled into the lot and shoved the gear shift into Park.

  “I have to try, Jenna.” The pained, determined look on my brother’s face made him look a whole lot older and smarter than usual. And it wasn’t just because he was more handsome now, either. “If I don’t try, then what was th
e whole point?”

  He looked away, and then looked back. “And yeah, you were right. Half a joint only, though. Okay? Way early this morning after I dropped you off. So don’t worry about me driving. You shoulda heard my cell phone go off. Sounded like a fire engine in my pocket. Scared me half to death, if I wasn’t already dead. Ha! Jesus.”

  He ran a perfectly steady hand through his perfect hair, a gesture that might have appeared anxious on a shaky and disheveled living person. But it didn’t, which made me anxious. It looked like a high-budget but poorly-acted movie clip of anxiety. For the first time ever, the last thing I was disturbed about was Casey driving stoned.

  “Amber was pissed, let me tell you,” he said. “Supremely hacked off. For a couple of minutes, she made it seem like they were gonna revoke the whole thing. Maybe even send me to the other place. Although if that’s what sends you to the other place, it must be pretty damn crowded.”

  I bit my lip, hard. I wondered if there was ever going to be a point where my mouth didn’t want to drop open every time my brother said something. Casey had never been one to spill out his feelings like monkeys tipping from the barrel. Now he was telling me stuff, or what he could. But I got something now: I couldn’t blame him for keeping secrets. It was Amber’s fault. She was his one connection to whatever came “after,” and she was holding back on him. That stupid lump returned to my throat. All the gut-sharing came with A-word territory. He was awkward at it because he was still Casey. That hadn’t changed. Or possibly he just didn’t want me to realize he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

  “Amber’s meeting us at home,” he went on while I tried to process. “Mom’s blood work came back. There’s something fishy there, too. But what we need to do is try to remember every single thing that happened that day in April.”