My So-Called Death

by Stacey Jay

  "You're the only stain I see, Trisha."

  "Did anyone ever tell you those chicken bones smell even worse than your breath, Clarice?" Oh! That one hit home, you could tell. Clarice did have bad breath. Like, unusually bad. Maybe it had something to do with the overbite. I didn't know, but she was certainly hacked off at Trish now, no doubt about that. She threw off her blanket and jumped to her feet.

  "You don't want to start with me, Trisha. I'm not the sort of enemy you can afford to make."

  Trish stood up, easily towering over the much shorter Clarice, even in her sock feet. "Are you threatening me?"

  "Maybe you're not as stupid as you look."

  "Bullying is against school policy, Clarice. You'd know that if you spent less time hiding under your blanket with your freak collection."

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  "School policy? You're quoting school policy? That is, like, clinically dorky."

  Clinically dorky? What exactly did that mean? A dork raised in a clinic? Clarice was losing her edge and her cool. She looked about ten seconds away from decking Trish. I had to get the situation under control before one or both of them got hurt. Whether she was a creepy chicken bone collector or not, I still had to live with Clarice for at least two more months, and I really didn't want Trish to get her so mad she decided to clip her toenails in my bed or something totally heinous.

  "Listen, ya'll. Let's just calm down. There's no reason to--"

  "Ya'll? Did you really just say ya'll?" Clarice turned on me with a snarl, spitde flying from the stank hole she called a mouth. Ew, the breath was worse than ever. Had she brushed her teeth this year? "What is your malfunction?"

  "Last time I checked, this was Georgia," I said, unable to keep a bit of haughty from my tone. "'Ya'll' is the standard and preferred pronoun of our region when referring to--"

  "You don't even know what a pronoun is, you stupid, pink... cheerleader! God!" Clarice was in tears by the time she ran from the room. What was with this girl? She was either screaming at me or bawling her eyes out. I was beginning to think she had a disorder of some kind, or at the very least needed some serious therapy.

  Which made me wonder--did zombies have therapists? I'd have to ask my health teacher tomorrow.

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  "Did she just insult you by calling you pink?" Trish asked, sounding as baffled as I felt.

  "A pink cheerleader," I mumbled, crossing to the door to peek into the hall. But Clarice had already disappeared. Probably gone to the girls' room to plot my and Trish's death.

  "She is seriously disturbed," Trish said. "No wonder all her roommates moved out."

  "All her roommates? How many has she had?"

  "Five, I think. Three last year when we were in eighth grade, and then Libby was in here before you came. She just got a transfer like three days before you started class."

  "Great, now you tell me," I moaned. This was so not fair! "What had I done to deserve the freakiest roommate on the entire DEAD campus? "Was it not enough that I'd been knocked unconscious my first week of school? "You're so lucky that you have a single, even if it is a sweat-hole. This whole Clarice situation just keeps getting worse."

  "Sorry, K. I don't want to freak you out, but Darby's the only one who will have anything to do with Clarice, and that's only because they both practice magic."

  I turned back to Trish, a scary new theory burbling to the forefront of my brain. "She practices magic, even though Principal Samedi tells us not to?"

  "Well, it's not like forbidden or anything, so Samedi can't really stop Clarice or anyone else from trying to learn the voodoo stuff, but..." Trish collapsed back onto my bed, clutching my smiley face-shaped pillow and chewing

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  on her lip. This was the thinking look, I realized, cheered by the knowledge that I was learning Trish's faces.

  "But what?" I prodded when the thinking went on for too long.

  "Samedi's never been too happy about it. I think she'd like to see Clarice leave DEAD, but Clarice has nowhere else to go. She's naturally Death Challenged, but her entire family died in the car wreck that made her that way."

  "Oh wow, that's awful." Now I felt really bad about loathing Clarice. I would have to try to reach out to her again, see if we could start over and at least be civil if we couldn't be friends. That was assuming, of course, that she wasn't the brain harvester.

  "It is, but so is she. It's hard to feel sorry for her, you know?"

  I nodded. "Especially if she's the one out for brains. I mean, she's not a DP so she wouldn't be working the superpowers spell, but brains would give her own spells a lot more power than chicken bones, right?"

  "They would," Trish agreed.

  "Sounds like we need to find out where Clarice was this morning."

  "Totally, but we should be careful not to jump to conclusions. What if Samedi is framing Clarice for the brain snatching in order to get rid of her?" Trish's eye went wide, and I could tell she was really digging this latest theory. "That would explain why she was so insistent on the person who hit you being a woman or a younger guy."

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  "True." I still wasn't on the "Samedi is guilty" crazy train, but I couldn't deny there had been something fishy about her behavior in the infirmary. "Before we rule out anyone, we need to find out who was where."

  "And when," Trish agreed with a nod. "We should start with Clarice and the swim team since there will be a written record of whether any of them were absent or tardy or had first period free."

  "Sounds good."

  "So, when do we break into Samedi's office? Tonight or early tomorrow morning?"

  Wow. I'd thought I would have to do some convincing to get Trish on the breaking-and-entering bandwagon. Maybe I'd been wrong about her having a future in law enforcement--she might be destined for a career on the wrong side of the law instead. Which could also be cool, as long as she didn't kill people and limited her criminal activities to stealing from evil corporations who damaged the planet and made kids work in sweatshops and stuff like that.

  I'm of the opinion that some criminal activity is fine, as long as it's for a good cause and doesn't hurt innocent people. My mom says that makes me a sociopath and gives her a borderline case of the creeps, but I'm standing by my beliefs. Sometimes crime does pay, like when it helps you track down a brain harvester before anyone else is killed.

  "I say tonight."

  "Perfect." Trish grinned, obviously looking forward to

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  our fieldtrip as much as I was. "I'll meet you by the water fountains at the end of the hall at midnight." "Midnight."

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  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Secret messages from the High Council of the United States to the U.S. Undead community are encoded in the html of our national website: www.usofiiceworkersunitingforalessbraindead workspace.com.

  Simply go the homepage and click "view source." Then, follow the decoding directions in the back of your manual. The first two paragraphs will be due next Thursday.

  --Zombie Internet Technologies, Homework Directions

  "Could you hurry, please?" Trish hissed, wavering unsteadily beneath me like she was lifting a grown man with a donut-binging problem, not a former flyer for the PHS JV cheerleading team.

  I barely weighed a hundred pounds, for god's sakes. She was being a total wimp, as well as shattering my belief that she would have been a valuable contributor to a spirit squad in her former life.

  "You're crushing my spine."

  "I am not!" I whispered, pushing up on one square of the ceiling and moving it out of the way.

  Seeing as how we weren't seasoned criminals--yet--the office lock had been totally unpickable. So we'd decided

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  crawling through the ceiling was the only way in. As the smaller partner in crime, I'd been charged with the crawling.

  "You are too!" she groaned. "I think I heard something crack near my fifth vertebrae. I may never walk again."

  I rolled my eyes and did my bes
t not to think about how hard the tile floor beneath us truly was. If I took a dive off all five foot ten of Trish, I was going to re-dent my recently healed head and have a lot of explaining to do tomorrow morning at breakfast.

  "So...heavy!" Trish gasped for breath and began to tremble in earnest.

  "Just stand up a little straighter," I urged, forcing away flashbacks of my cheer-pyramid tragedy and wondering if I was too young to suffer from post-traumatic stress. "I can't reach."

  "This is as straight as I stand with my spine crushed," Trish grumbled, but did manage to stretch her wimpy beanpole self up a few more centimeters.

  I grabbed at the edge of the hole I'd made and flexed my muscles, never more grateful for the fact that I'd lifted weights in my former life. Not only did my little muscles give my arms great tone in a tank top, but once I'd hooked my right leg beside my hands, I had the strength to pull myself up and into the ceiling.

  "Okay, throw me the rope." I turned around and reached out.

  "Just give me a second." Trish bent double, panting. "You are so much heavier than you look."

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  "Muscle weighs more than fat."

  "I think your bones are made of lead and you ate too much dinner."

  "I think you're wimpy and need to get to the gym," I said. "And you need to hurry and throw me that rope. The guards could come back any second."

  When we'd first snuck down the long hallway that connected the girls' dorm to the main school building, we'd seen several guards lingering near the office. Lucky for us, they'd gotten some sort of message on their walkie-talkie thingies and run off to another part of campus, but we couldn't afford to dawdle.

  "Okay, fine." Trish grabbed the rope and, by the fourth or fifth try, managed to throw it high enough for me to reach.

  "All right. I'm going in," I whispered, smiling at Trish's thumbs-up before I replaced the ceiling square, turned, and started the crawl.

  It wasn't nearly as gross up in the ceiling as I'd thought it would be, which made me feel a whole lot better about being the designated crawler. Not to be totally girlie, but I'm not big on bugs or spiders or cobwebs or massive amounts of dust or dead bodies that have been wrapped in plastic and allowed to putrefy. (We were at a zombie school; I had no idea what to expect.)

  After ten or twelve feet, I popped out another square of ceiling and peered down. Score. We were in. Now I just had to find something to tie my rope around. I needed

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  some way to climb back out of the office if I couldn't get the door open from the inside.

  Hmm... the choices were limited, but in the end I decided on a sturdy-looking pipe. Despite Trish's theatrics, I didn't weigh that much. The chances that I'd break the pipe and flood the office with water were fairly small. At least small enough for me to risk pipe damage in the name of solid investigative work.

  Within a few minutes, I was dropping my rope down into the office and lowering myself over the edge. Unfortunately, I'd neglected to think about the rope burn factor. Even with my foot hooked around the rope for extra support, I still had bright red, throbbing palms by the time I reached the floor.

  "Ouch, ouch, ouch." Crap. I'd just ruined my chances of climbing back out the way I'd come in. Which meant there would be no way to conceal the fact that someone had been sneaking into Samedi's office.

  Argh! This was so not good! By tomorrow morning, Samedi and her crew would be wise to the fact that their inner sanctum had been breached. Now I could only pray they didn't have the ability to dust for fingerprints on the ceiling or match my DNA to the skin cells clinging to the rope. In a normal school, I wouldn't even think about something like that, but here at DEAD I wasn't so sure. Principal Samedi could have a forensic team on staff, for all I knew.

  Though... it would seem she would have had Penelope and Kendra's bodies searched for prints if that was the case...

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  "Did they find any fingerprints on Penelope or Kendra? Did you hear anything about Samedi even looking for prints?" I asked, as I opened the door and let Trish inside. Turns out the lock was a simple dead bolt, nothing fancy, which meant the rope was a total waste.

  So far, a criminal mastermind I was not.

  "No, I didn't hear anything about prints, but Principal Samedi probably wouldn't go there. She's more of a magic person than a science person." Trish closed the door, then rushed to the registrar's desk at the back of the room and turned on the computer. "She'd probably work a spell to see who'd touched the body if ' she were really trying to figure out who was behind this."

  "Could she work a spell to find out who climbed down that rope?" I asked, starting to get anxious. "I scraped my hands so there's no way I'm going to be able to climb back up and hide it."

  "No worries." Trish dragged a chair over to the hole in the ceiling, turned an empty trashcan upside down on top, and then climbed up and tucked the rope back inside the ceiling. A second later, she'd tugged the tile back into place. I felt really, really dumb.

  "Why didn't I think of that?" I asked, beginning to doubt my own intelligence. Maybe the whole dead thing had caused my IQ to plummet.

  "Because you're short and don't have practice with these sorts of things."

  "And you do?" I snorted, as Trish sat down behind the desk and took control of the mouse. She had aced Zombie

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  Internet Technologies last year and was great with computers, so we'd decided she should take point with the computer stuff.

  "I spent a couple months in a juvenile detention center when I was twelve. I learned a lot of little tricks while I was there, but I knew my share before I went in."

  "What?" Oh. My. God. I was hanging out with a criminal! I backed away from the desk, possessed by the sudden urge to turn and run back to my room. Sure, I'd been cool with imagining Trish's future as a crime lord, but faced with the actual reality of a BFF who'd done time, I wasn't so sure.

  "Relax. It's not like I murdered someone or something. I got caught shoplifting one too many times, and my mom thought it would teach me a lesson to go to juvie, so she didn't fight the sentence." Trish shrugged, her attention focused on the screen in front of her. "And it did teach me a lesson. It taught me not to get caught."

  "Yeah." Play it cool, just play it cool, Karen. You can hang with the criminal element. Blechk, who was I kidding? I was the least criminal person I knew! At least until tonight. "Not getting caught is good."

  Trish sighed. "The shoplifting thing was just a stage I went through after my dad left. I'm totally over it now." Her gaze slid toward me, and for a second I saw the fear that I would judge her and not be her friend anymore in her eyes. "You know?"

  "It's cool. I understand." And... I did.

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  After all, who was to say I wouldn't have done the same thing in her place? If my dad had left Mom and me and the trips and run off with some girl six years older than me, never to be heard from again, maybe I would have started stealing too.

  More likely I would have run away, because my mother would have been declared mentally unfit to parent due to the stress of caring for three infants all by herself and a social worker would have come to try to place me and the trips in foster care. But that was beside the point. The point was, Trish and I were cool.

  "Good." She smiled, but her grin faded as she turned back to the screen. "But this is not so good."

  "What?"

  "The entire swim team was out first period. Looks like they didn't have to report to class because of the meet or something."

  "Crap!" That meant our suspect list hadn't been narrowed the slightest bit. All the breaking and entering had been for naught! Unless... "What about Clarice? I know she has a class first period. Religions of the Dead and Undead, I think. Was she there?"

  "Looks like... she was..." Trish clicked a few more times. "Not there. At least not for the first part of class. She was marked tardy, and check this out."

  I leaned down to look at where she'd pointed. "Darby
was tardy too. That's--"

  "Very suspicious." Trish's lips pressed into a thin line

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  as she shut down the computer and wiped the keyboard with the edge of her sleeve. Looks like she was taking my fingerprint worry to heart, no matter what she'd said about Samedi preferring magic over science.

  "Very. Do you think they were off harvesting brains together? Maybe they're saving them up for some sort of magic?"

  "Could be," Trish said. "Darby is Deprogrammed, so she could be trying to work that spell everyone's been talking about, the one that would make her into a super zombie."

  "But why would Clarice be helping her with that? What's in it for her?"

  "A super BFF? Maybe she's just so desperate for friends that she--"

  We both heard it at the same time, the metallic click as the door handle turned, followed by creaking as it swung open on its hinges. The filing cabinet in front of us offered a few seconds of cover, but we were going to have to find a place to hide. Fast!

  Trish dove under the desk and, after a second's hesitation, I followed. It was going to be a tight fit under there, but there just wasn't anywhere else to go. Trish's eyes bulged as I crammed in beside her, but she didn't say a word, even when I accidentally clocked her in the nose with my knee. (Don't ask, it was really crowded under there. I don't know how my knee got that close to her nose, it just did.)

  Heavy footsteps sounded on the tile floor, each one landing with a horrible, echo-less finality that heralded

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  my and Trish's impending doom. I squeezed my eyes shut as they got closer, operating under a preschool belief that whoever this was couldn't see me if I couldn't see them. I knew it was stupid, but I didn't care. I didn't want to look!