Passing Strange, Page 3

  And I know why. Now I know why, although then I was nothing but devastated, in the grip of a devastation so complete that I couldn’t think clearly. I was so stupid, a coward. We’d been friends for so long, and for things to change…What would people think? What would people say? I realize now that it must have been just as hard for you to go through what we did.

  Harder, maybe. You stayed alive.

  I blinked, and my blue eyes were gone. Maybe they’d never been there after all. But as I looked more closely at my reflection I noticed other changes that didn’t go away when I blinked or turned my head.

  My face wasn’t as lopsided as it had been—as though the bones that had been shattered had started to knit back together. The bullet hole looked like it had begun to close up, but when I brought my fingers to my cheeks I could feel a bump just below the skin where the hole was. I pushed lightly and—this is another gross part, I’m sorry—I could see a flat gray lump, like a small pebble. Somehow the bullet had worked its way up to the surface of my skin.

  I leaned over the sink and pressed at the edges, squeezing slightly. A few seconds later I could feel part of the bullet protruding from my cheek, and then I brushed it and it clattered onto the basin with a small tinkling sound.

  The bullet was so small. I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger, then flicked it across my room.

  The hole in my face looked smaller, even after pressing the bullet out. It was no bigger than a nostril. I probed around the wound gently with my fingertips, and though there was still a slight sensation of looseness between my bones, the sickening movement beneath the surface of my skin was gone. The hole was centered on my cheekbone, which the night before had felt like small shards of pottery in a thick plastic bag. Today the bone felt solid, with maybe a slightly tenuous anchor to the rest of my face, but solid, nonetheless.

  I was healing.

  My body was repairing itself, and at an incredible rate. This was no hallucination. I had the slug to prove it.

  I stared at my reflection—vanity, vanity. I imagined—was I imagining it?—that there was a slight itchy sensation under my skin, as though my cells were reattaching themselves to each other.

  Zombies don’t heal. Tak’s cheek never healed. Tommy still has an open wound where he’d been shot with an arrow. The burns that Melissa received after her death have never gone away. Why was I healing? The type of wound didn’t factor into things, either—when Adam wears a T-shirt, you can see a raised bump on his chest from the bullet that killed him. I’d read hundreds of e-mails and posts that zombie kids have sent to Tommy’s site, mysocalledundeath.com, and I’ve never once heard anyone mention that they had the ability to heal.

  I wanted to call my dead friends and ask them if they had experienced this, but I was scared. I’ve always been one of the “fast” zombies—I can move and talk in a way that lets me pass for human—and I’ve always been conscious that my ability might make others feel bad. Traditionally biotic people hated me because I was dead; what if differently biotic people started to hate me because I was, well, coming alive?

  I went upstairs and turned on the television and surfed over to CNN. I still had no idea what made the police react so violently. There was some talk-show type thing on, so I went into the kitchen and took a handful of spices out of the spice rack. I went back to the couch, unscrewed the caps, and sniffed them one at a time. The cumin and the coriander I could smell, but not the nutmeg. Is there something about nutmeg that is scent-invisible to zombies, or is this a Karen-specific thing? Anyhow, my advice to zombiekind everywhere is to keep practicing your sense of smell. I’m convinced it’s one of the keys to life.

  Eventually there was a news update that had a brief segment on zombie murders. They ran the clips on the lawyer who we supposedly killed—Gus Guttridge. There were very grainy clips of the Guttridge home and some “zombies” removing lumpy forms that viewers were supposed to think were the corpses of the Guttridge family. One of the “zombies” looked a lot like Tak, if you didn’t know that Tak hitches on his left side and not his right like the big faker in the video is doing. One of the other fakes does this weird arms-out-in-front walk, along with not bending his knees at all. The faces are completely frozen, and I can only guess that they’re masks, the kind of thing that people who assume we all look alike would wear if they were going to pretend to be us.

  The newscaster, looking grave, ha-ha, said that one living impaired person was taken into custody, and others were wanted for questioning. I guess they didn’t think they should mention that the cops fired about a hundred bullets at us.

  As mad as I was over the coverage, or rather the lack of coverage, I was happy that the report only mentioned one zombie in custody. Poor George. I was very sorry that they’d caught him, but I was also glad that the other Sons of Romero (or, as I think of them, the Beastie Boys) managed to get away. I hoped that they weren’t as, well, hole-y as I was.

  I touched my face again. Already the hole seemed a little smaller than it had been a few minutes ago. My friends don’t heal; all of the Sons of Romero, except Tayshawn, bear some scar, some visible reminder that they are no longer among the living. George has wounds that no living person could endure. Tak’s cheek and skinless knuckles mark him as dead, and Popeye creates “bodifications”—new wounds and scars he thinks of as artistic statements—that further distance him from the living.

  I switched off the television and stared at my reflection in the flat black glass. The televisual replay of my near-redeath experience—or maybe my nap!—reminded me that I wasn’t without responsibilities.

  I was supposed to work that night. Nearly get reterminated one day; the next, start worrying that you’re going to miss your shift at the mall. I thought about calling in sick—which was hilarious—but decided to text Tamara instead, to see if maybe she could switch shifts with me.

  My father bought me a cell phone about six months after I died. He paid for it and paid the monthly bill up until last month, when I started working. We didn’t make a big deal about it or anything. I’d gotten him to open up an account for me at a local bank, so I could use an ATM card instead of having to walk in all the time and try to pass as human. It was tough enough doing it at the mall every shift—I don’t know if I would have gotten away with it if Wild Thingz! wasn’t an alternative store. Anyhow, one day I handed my father two twenties and told him it was for the cell-phone bill that month. He took the money without saying anything, but I think he was pleased.

  When I was done texting Tamara, I called my favorite breather. She said hello on the first ring, her voice a stuttering whisper as she said my name in the form of a question.

  “Hi, Phoebe,” I replied, whispering, myself. “Can you talk?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I’m on the bus. With Adam.” Even through the “cellusphere,” I could hear the little hitch in her voice when she spoke again—not a zombie hitch, which is caused by having to concentrate on moving the air through your body and getting your tongue in the right position, but a human hitch. You know—an emotional one.

  “Karen,” she said, “I’m so happy to hear your voice!” She was, too. It warmed my dead bones, it really did.

  “Awww,” I said. She and Adam are so cute. I’m more than a little jealous. They are they first two people I kissed since dying.

  “Phoebe, I wanted you to know I’m all right. Just peachy.”

  “Karen, where are you? Are you really all right? Tak said you’d been killed! He was over at Adam’s, and he took him…”

  “Phoebe…”

  “Out to the Oxoboxo, and he wanted Adam with him, and this morning on the news they said you killed…”

  “Phoebe.”

  “That horrible lawyer, the one that got Martinsburg free. And his whole family! Karen, I know it can’t…”

  “Phoebe!” It was like talking to Margi, really, but with more logic and a softer voice. “Slow down! All will be revealed. But start with Tak, please. He’s o
kay?”

  “He’s fine. Well, not fine, really. He’d been shot a couple times. And he went…”

  And she told me where he went. I was going to ask a series of clarifying questions: what do you mean, what are you saying, what what what. But for some reason, a chill—a metaphorical one, of course—ran down my spine. The “cellusphere” was probably the least secure of all methods of communication, ever.

  “Phoebe,” I said. “Forget I asked. We’ll talk about that stuff later, okay? Is there anything else you can tell me that’s public knowledge?”

  There was a pause, but gawd bless her, Phoebe knew exactly what I was getting at.

  “They’ve got George,” she said, carefully. “The police Tasered him, and it seems to have…shut him off. He’s not…animate.”

  I don’t remember what I said then, or if I said anything, but I did remember George heading off down the hill in front of St. Jude’s, toward the police, drawing both their fire and their ire. Doing so gave the rest of us just a little bit wider of a window to escape.

  Poor George. My hole-y heart was breaking.

  Eventually I said something about how sad that was. Then I said something like, “Wow, a lot happened while I was watching TV last night.”

  Phoebe caught on, such a smart girl. “We really need to talk, Karen. It seems like ages since I’ve seen you.”

  “I know what you mean! But I had to call in sick to school. I just haven’t been feeling myself lately.”

  Phoebe laughed. It was good to hear her laugh, even if our conversation was a little forced. I wondered if she’d be laughing if she knew I’d just plucked a bullet out of my face.

  “Actually,” she said, “you might not want to go to school. Technically you aren’t allowed to go anymore.”

  “Adam’s still going, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. But we’re trying to keep it quiet. So far, Principal Kim has let him, even though she could probably get in big trouble. Should we meet at the mall?”

  “Probably not the mall,” I said. “How about I let you know?”

  “Okay,” Phoebe said, and I could tell from her tone she thought I was hiding something from her. “I’ll get Margi to drive us over.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t ask me if I was working, in case someone really was listening in on the call. Kind of dumb, really, because you’d think if “they,” whoever “they” are, were bugging my phones, they would also be able to figure out that I’ve been passing as a human and working in the mall at Wild Thingz! for the past three weeks.

  “Okay, then.” I paused, not because I’m a slowpoke but because I didn’t really want to hang up. “See you later.”

  “Karen?” she said, that hitch back in her voice. “I…I’ll see you.”

  Phoebe has such magnetism. Such an attractive quality. I didn’t want to let her go, not after what I’d just gone through.

  But I had to.

  “Okay, sweetie,” I said. “’Bye.”

  I’m a little in love with her, I guess. But so is everyone else.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I WENT BACK TO WORK ONLY one night after being shot full of lead. Who says American teens aren’t as dedicated a workforce as generations past? (Or should that be “generations passed,” yuk yuk). By way of clever disguise, I placed a small Band-Aid over the bullet hole in my cheek.

  I was trying to pass everything off as my personal vision of “normal,” despite what had happened. Dad called, like he always does on his way home, and I offered to get something in the oven like I always do, and he said that’s okay, Karen, the way he always does—I always offer, even though I know my mother has placed a taboo on me preparing food of any sort. She doesn’t want me touching the oven, microwave, or coffee-maker, either, for fear that I’ll contaminate them with my deadly death germs. She’s never told me this directly, of course—she’d have to speak to me for that to happen. But I get the idea that she doesn’t even want me in the kitchen.

  Dad always calls me on my cell, now, even though there’s a perfectly good wall-mounted cordless phone just inside the kitchen door.

  “I have to work tonight,” I said.

  “I remembered,” he said, sounding weary. Sometimes work made him that way, sometimes having a living dead daughter did. “Karen, were you home last night?”

  “Home is where my heart is,” I said, Creative Truth-dodging 101. “Why?”

  “Some pretty disturbing things happened,” he said, “involving differently biotic people.”

  He’s so cute; he still can’t say “zombie” around me without getting all embarrassed. He summarized the evening’s events for me: alleged murders, a videotape, desecration of a church(!), shots fired.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said. “Those poor people!” I didn’t indicate whether or not I meant the Guttridges or the differently biotic people. Instead I asked Dad who the zombies were.

  “They weren’t positively identified,” he said. “I didn’t see the video, but on the radio they said that the killers, and this one zombie that was arrested, were pretty, ah, ‘zombified.’ Like with visible wounds and such.”

  “And such?”

  He cleared his throat, the sound like a roll of static on my cell phone. “Like with parts missing.”

  “Oh my.”

  “I’ve heard rumors that others have been rounded up across the state,” he said. “Some released to legal guardians, some not.”

  Rumors. Stories not making the local or national news.

  “Maybe work isn’t such a good idea tonight, Karen.”

  It was touching that he could still feel concern for me. I’d have loved to say, “Sure, you’re right, Dad. I’m going to stay with you and the moms and little Katy and we can have popcorn and play Parcheesi and it’ll all be just swell!” but of course I couldn’t. That nagging feeling of responsibility kept creeping in. Responsibility to my job, to the undead everywhere who’d one day learn from my example, but mostly just responsibility to myself.

  “I think work is a better idea than ever, Dad,” I said, but humble-like. I didn’t want to oversell it.

  “You’ve been banned from school, too,” he said. “Your principal called.”

  That sort of took me by surprise. “Um, yeah. I couldn’t get on the bus.” Advanced Truth Obfuscation 201: not a lie exactly. I couldn’t get on the bus, being too shot up. I could almost hear the gears of his brain turning during our connection.

  “Karen,” he said, “what are you trying to prove with the passing thing?”

  That was a pretty complex question. I could have played tennis with him—what was he trying to prove by allowing me to do the passing thing? But instead I chose to respond with rarely applied knowledge from an almost forgotten class in Karen’s Syllabus of Human Interactions: I used Intro to Unguarded Moments.

  “Good question, Dad. The easy answer is that I just want to be like everyone else.”

  He waited.

  “But it wouldn’t be the true answer, at least not for me. I’m sure there are tons of zombies who would give that answer and it would be one hundred percent correct—most people want to fit in, to be like everybody else. Not me. I want to seem like everybody else.”

  “Explain that to me, please.”

  “I didn’t know this when I first took the job, Dad. I just thought it was cool that I was tricking everybody. It was sort of exciting. For a while it felt like fitting in. But then I realized that it was even better than fitting in. I’m hiding in plain sight. I may seem like everybody else, but I’m really, really different. And I like that.”

  He sighed. “That makes sense. Sort of.”

  I could have told him more, like how passing was the opposite of my “persona” at school, wearing the too-short Catholic-school-girl shorts and patent leathers every day—the difference between purposely calling attention to myself versus purposely not calling attention to myself.

  “I know, it’s hard to explain. But I’m trying to not be ‘the dead girl.’ I’m trying
to just be ‘me.’”

  “At work.”

  “At work.”

  “Karen, I think things could get very hostile for you if people find out.”

  “It’s pretty hostile for me already, Dad. I might as well do something. This could be useful to other zombies some day. It’s useful for me right now.”

  I could hear him thinking again.

  “Come on, Dad,” I said. “Fight the power.”

  So much for not overselling. But he laughed. He’d been a Reagan-era punk, after all.

  “Okay. What time do you need to be there? Six?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you later, Karen.”

  “Bye, Dad.”

  I could still hear him thinking after I clicked my phone closed. He was wondering if he trusted me too much. He wondered if too much trust led to my suicide the first time around, and even though counseling and conversation has indicated repeatedly that it was not trust—or lack of love, conscience, etc.—that led to that act, you can’t always explain your feelings.

  Anyhow, I went to work with a tiny bandage on my cheek to cover up the bullet hole. Dad didn’t notice it when he picked me up, but Katy saw it right away.

  “Caring’s got a boo-boo,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice, after a very exuberant hug. Did I mention how cute she is?

  Dad stopped whatever he was doing—sorting bills or some such—and turned to me, the question clear on his face.

  “I did it walking in the woods,” I explained. “Low branch. It’s just a scratch.”

  The bandage was the first thing Tamara commented on when I got to work. She got a different story.

  “Pimple that got out of hand,” I said. What a liar! One of the best things about being dead is not having acne!

  I went into the back room to sign in. My boss, Craig, who usually starts giving orders the moment you walk in, looked up from his paperwork and asked me what I did to my face.

  “Cut myself shaving,” I said. And then I said, “Sir,” because we have that flirty antagonistic thing going on.

  He shook his head, his pierced lip curling. “Restock the Z display.”