Playlist for the Dead

by Michelle Falkoff

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Advance Reader’s e-proof

  courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  DEDICATION

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title

  Dedication

  1. How to Disappear Completely

  2. Crown of Love

  3. Mad World

  4. Invisible

  5. One

  6. Pumped Up Kicks

  7. I Don’t want to Grow Up

  8. Diane Young

  9. Smells Like Teen Spirit

  10. One Step Closer

  11. The Mariner’s Revenge Song

  12. Adam’s Song

  13. Alison

  14. This is How it Goes

  15. Despair

  16. On Your Own

  17. Let it Go

  18. Say Something

  19. Everybody Knows

  20. How to Fight Loneliness

  21. Conversation 16

  22. Last Goodbye

  23. Hurt

  24. For Emma

  25. Cosmic Love

  26. The Mother we Share

  27. It’s Only Life

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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  ALL MY YEARS of watching TV made me think it was possible you could find a dead body and not know it until you turned the person over and found the bullet hole or stab wound or whatever. And I guess in some ways that was right—Hayden was lying under the covers, tangled up in a bunch of his lame-ass Star Wars sheets (how old were we, anyway?), just like he always was when I slept at his house.

  Hayden had always been a hard sleeper; sometimes I had to practically roll him out of bed to get him to wake up. Which wasn’t easy—he was short and kind of round, and while I’m a lot taller, I’m more of a string bean kind of guy, and when he was out cold he was hard to move. When I saw him lying there I sighed, trying to figure out how to incorporate the apology from the night before, the apology I’d come over to give him, with the apology for dumping him out of bed onto the floor.

  The sound of my sigh seemed loud to me, though, and it took me a minute to figure out why: Hayden wasn’t snoring. Hayden always snored. My mom, who’s a nurse, thought he had sleep apnea; the sound of his buzzing made it all the way down the hall to her room when he stayed at my house. She kept trying to get him to talk to his mom about getting some kind of mask that would help, but I knew that would never happen. Hayden didn’t talk to his mom unless he absolutely had to, and he was even less likely to ask his dad.

  The silence in the room started to freak me out. I kept trying to convince myself it was nothing, that Hayden had just found a good position to sleep in that quieted his steady drone or something, but that would have been some kind of minor miracle, and even after five years of Hebrew school I didn’t really believe in miracles.

  I gave his leg a little shove. “Hayden, come on.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Hayden, seriously. Wake up.”

  Nothing. Not even a grunt.

  I was just about to grab a stormtrooper’s head and pull down the sheets when I saw the empty vodka bottle on Hayden’s desk, standing in between his laptop and his model of the Millennium Falcon, just next to where he was sleeping.

  That was weird—Hayden didn’t drink at all, not even at the few parties we’d been to. And from what I could tell he hadn’t had time to take as much as a sip from the keg last night. There was no reason for that bottle to be there. Unless he’d been even more bent out of shape than I realized; he could easily have taken it out of his dad’s liquor cabinet when he got home.

  I felt my stomach churn with what I realized was guilt. That must have been why he wouldn’t wake up: he was hung over. Even through my guilt, I couldn’t help but start laughing. Hayden’s first hangover—I was going to give him so much shit for this when he finally woke up. Then I’d drag him off for a greasy breakfast and we’d make up. And everything would be fine.

  Now he just had to wake up.

  I moved closer to the head of the bed, sniffing cautiously in case he’d puked. The air smelled like it normally did in his house, overly disinfected, the pine scent overwhelming anything else. I swear his mom must have had cleaners come in every single day. I debated whether to roll him over or just pull the pillow out from beneath his head, but just as I went for the pillow I knocked over the empty vodka bottle with my elbow. It fell to the floor with a clang, taking down some other stuff with it.

  I bent over to pick it up. No need to have Hayden wake up pissed that I’d made a mess; we had enough to talk about as it was. I grabbed the bottle, and then saw a prescription bottle next to it and grabbed that too. It was a bottle of Valium. It had Hayden’s mother’s name on it. And it was empty. I didn’t know how many pills were supposed to have been in there, but according to the date on the bottle, she’d picked it up just a couple of days before. Which meant she’d gone through a whole bottle practically overnight.

  I looked at the vodka bottle.

  Or Hayden had.

  And then I saw one more thing I’d knocked on the floor. A thumb drive, next to a torn-off scrap of notebook paper. For Sam, it read. Listen and you’ll understand.

  That’s when I called 911.

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  THE MORNING OF HAYDEN’S FUNERAL I couldn’t get out of bed. I don’t mean that I didn’t want to—if anything, I wanted the day to go by as quickly as possible, and if getting up was the first step, then I was in.

  But I couldn’t do it.

  It was a weird feeling, kind of like being stuck in a block of ice. I pictured that scene from Star Wars where Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite, hands in front of him as if he could somehow protect himself, mouth half open in silent protest. It was an image Hayden had always found haunting; he said it freaked him out every time he saw it, and he’d seen The Empire Strikes Back maybe a thousand times. I’d seen it nearly as many but for some reason I thought the whole carbonite thing was hilarious, and it was even funnier how twitchy it made Hayden. For his birthday I’d bought him an iPhone cover with the frozen Han Solo image on it, and I’d slipped frozen Han Solo ice cubes into his soda.

  Remembering the look on his face made me laugh, and laughing seemed to break the spell. I could mo
ve again, though I didn’t want to anymore. Moving meant I was awake, and being awake meant Hayden was really dead, and I wasn’t quite ready to admit that yet. And laughing felt wrong, but also good, and the fact that it made me feel good also made me feel guilty, which brought me back to wrong. Really, I didn’t know how to feel. Sad? Check. Pissed off? Definitely.

  What were you thinking, Hayden?

  “What?” My mother cracked the door open and peered in at me. Her curly brown hair was twisted into a braid, and she was wearing a dress instead of scrubs. “Did you ask me something, Sam?”

  “No, just talking to myself.” I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud.

  She opened the door wider. “Still in bed? Come on, we’ve got to get cracking here. You know I’m not going to be able to stay for the whole thing—I’m going to be late for work as it is.” She snapped her fingers a couple of times. She wasn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy type.

  “I can’t get ready if you don’t get out.” It came out sharper than I meant it, but she must have understood because she closed the door without saying anything, but not before hanging something on the back of my door on her way out. A suit, the one I’d worn to my cousin’s wedding last summer. She must have ironed it for me. I felt like even more of a jerk than I already did.

  I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and pulled up the playlist I’d found on Hayden’s thumb drive. He’d left it for me, knowing I would find it, probably even knowing I’d find him—I was always the one to apologize first after our fights. I couldn’t stand staying mad. He must have realized I’d come over, even after how we’d left things.

  I’d been listening to it constantly over the past couple of days, trying to figure out what he meant. Listen and you’ll understand. What was I supposed to understand? He’d killed himself and left me here all alone, and left me to find him. And I was pretty sure it was my fault, though that wasn’t something I was prepared to think about at the moment. But I’d listened and listened, looking for the song that would confirm it, the song that would lay all the blame on me. So far I hadn’t found it.

  Instead, I’d found a confusing collection of music from all over the spectrum—some recent stuff, some older. Some songs I knew; others I didn’t, and given that Hayden and I had developed our taste together—or so I thought—that was surprising. I’d have to keep listening to see if I could figure out what he’d been talking about, though I wasn’t sure what the point was.

  I scanned the list for something funeral-appropriate. Most of the songs were pretty depressing, so there wasn’t an obvious choice; I started with a song that reminded me of the first time I’d worn the suit I was about to put on. It was gray and a little shiny and I’d worn it with a bow tie. My cousins, preppie throwbacks, already thought I was weird, so why not give them some proof? Mom was cool about it, just said she was happy I had a sense of personal style and an opinion about my clothes. She’d been a sharp dresser herself, back when she and my dad were still together, when she used to try. Now she rarely changed out of the scrubs she wore to work. Rachel, my older sister, was less cool about the suit and called me a dork in a bunch of different ways before Mom made her go back upstairs and change out of the dress she’d wanted to wear. Which, let’s be honest, was kind of trashy for a family wedding.

  Hayden had come over as I was getting ready, to see if I wanted to go to the mall with him. And by “mall,” he basically meant one store—the only store we ever went to. The Intergalactic Trading Company. The rest of the kids at school tended to hang out on the other end, near the sporting goods store. We rarely went down there. I’d forgotten to tell him about the wedding.

  “Nice suit,” he said, in his quiet way, making it hard for me to tell if he was being serious or sarcastic. I was never sure, with Hayden. With me it was easy; I was always being a wiseass.

  “Whatever. You wouldn’t be caught dead in one, right?” I winced now, remembering it, but even then I knew it wasn’t really true. Hayden would do whatever his parents told him. He didn’t like it, but it was better than the alternative.

  He shrugged. “The bow tie helps,” he said. “But it would look way cooler with a T-shirt under it. Like this one.” He picked up the Radiohead shirt lying at the foot of my bed, the one he’d given me after going to see them on tour. It read HOW IT ENDS, HOW IT STARTS.

  I rolled my eyes. “Does it really have to be Radiohead?”

  “What’s wrong with Radiohead?” he asked, but he knew what I was going to say. We’d had this argument a million times.

  “Some of their stuff is okay,” I said. “But what really makes them different from Coldplay? White English dudes who went to fancy universities and are probably too smart for their own good. But girls think Chris Martin is hot, and they think Thom Yorke is weird looking, and so Coldplay sells a bazillion albums and Radiohead has to reach out to geeks like us. Something about it just doesn’t seem right.”

  “You’re way off,” he said. “Radiohead is on a different planet than Coldplay. Kid A might be the greatest record ever made, and Coldplay gets sued for plagiarism every time they release a single. Just talking about them at the same time, is, like, disrespectful to Radiohead.”

  I loved getting Hayden all riled up. Back when we were little, Mom would worry about how much we fought. She’d come into my room when we were yelling at each other—okay, I was yelling; Hayden was rationally and patiently trying to explain his position, even as a kid—and she’d knock on the door. “Everything okay in there?”

  “We’re fine,” we’d both say. And we were.

  Just remembering it made me miss him.

  I stopped getting ready for a minute and focused on the music coming out of my speakers. I wasn’t surprised he’d put “How to Disappear Completely” on his mix, since it was his favorite song (“Idioteque” was mine—despite how I needled Hayden, I agreed, Radiohead was infinitely better than Coldplay). I tried not to think too hard about the lyrics, about Hayden sitting there making this mix before making his final decision. I hated imagining him wanting to fade away like that.

  My fists clenched, fingernails digging into my palms, and I tried to calm down. I’d spent the past few days alternating between missing him and hating him, feeling guilty and shitty, not knowing how I was supposed to be feeling but wanting it to be different, somehow. He’d left me alone, and I’d never have done that to him, no matter how mad I was. It had made it almost impossible to sleep, so on top of everything else I was exhausted. Exhausted and angry. A great combination.

  Except being mad just started the cycle again, a cycle that was becoming familiar. Get angry. Blame Hayden. Feel guilty. Miss him. Get angry again. This was punctuated occasionally with the urge to scream or hit things, neither of which I could manage to do. Why couldn’t I be normal and just feel sad, like other people?

  “Sam, get a move on!” Mom called from downstairs.

  Back to missing him. I needed to do something to make myself feel better, though. I went to the laundry basket, dug out my old Radiohead T-shirt, and put it on under the suit.

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  THE CHURCH WHERE THE FUNERAL was being held was on the east side of Libertyville, the rich side. The Stevenses, Hayden’s family, lived there. Mine didn’t.

  From the outside the church looked almost like a really fancy ski lodge, all dark wood and exposed beams—it had probably been built by one of the architects responsible for all the McMansions on that side of town. The wood was lighter on the inside, which had a high arched ceiling and a sparkly modern-looking chandelier hanging down. Almost like they wanted people to forget it was a church.

  My family was Jewish, so the only church I’d ever been to was the Catholic one on my side of town, where all the kids I went to school with had their First Communions. We’d just moved to town so I didn’t really know anyone, but one of t
he kids in my class had invited everyone to his and Mom said I had to go if I wanted to make friends, though it didn’t really work out like that.

  The Catholic church had looked more like what I’d expect a church to look like: white on the outside, with a crucifix at the altar and lots of stained-glass windows. This church looked almost nothing like it, except for the fact that there were two columns of pews that ended with an altar. At the foot of that altar was a coffin, and in that coffin was Hayden. Probably also wearing a suit.

  By the time we showed up the place was almost full. Rachel had taken off to sit with her friends as soon as we walked in the door, shocker, and so it was just me and Mom walking up and down the aisles, trying to find seats. The first few rows were filled with Hayden’s family—I saw his family and Ryan, his older brother, as well as some aunts and uncles and cousins I recognized from the times I’d gone to Hayden’s house over the holidays. Since my family didn’t celebrate Christmas, Hayden would invite me over to have dessert with them after they’d finished opening their presents and having their big fancy dinner. Hayden was always grateful if I showed up, since it got him away from the table faster. His mom was always on his case about how much he ate, and Christmas was the worst. If he even looked at a second piece of pie, she’d give him a sharp look and say, “Do you really need that, Hayden?” But Hayden would never fight back. He wasn’t like that. He’d do anything to keep the peace.

  They’d never deserved him, his family.

  The rows behind Hayden’s family were filled with obnoxious rich people from his side of town and their obnoxious kids, friends of Ryan’s who’d spent years torturing Hayden, some at Ryan’s direction. They all thought life would always be as easy for them as it was right now. Rich jocks like Jason Yoder who hired tutors to get them through the hard classes, girls like Stephanie Caster with nose jobs and personal trainers who would have been beautiful without either but who now all looked exactly alike. I mean, they were still cute, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t the same. It made me furious, seeing them all sitting there, acting like they were so sad when all of this was at least partly their fault. How could I feel so out of place at my own best friend’s funeral?