My So-Called Death

  My So-Called Death

  Stacey Jay

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks so much to Andrew Karre and Brian Farrey, my editors, and to all the people at Flux. You are amazing, professional, fun folks who have made this book a joy. Thanks to my agent, my sweet husband, preshush offspring, and amazing mom. And thanks to Liz Sutherland for being an exceptional lover of children, especially mine. You are a life-saver, Liz! Thanks to my critique partners Stacia Kane and Julie Linker, Jill at Square Books Jr. for awesomeness, and all the booksellers who have been so wonderfully supportive in my first year as a published author. You all rock my casbah! Lastly, but not leastly, thanks to my readers. I love your emails and appreciate you all so very much. Thanks, thanks, and more thanks.

  PROLOGUE

  All in all, it was a good day to die. If there really is such a thing.

  You hear characters in movies say that all the time, but does anyone really believe the words "good" and "die" belong in the same sentence?

  Still, it could have been worse. It could have been a dark and spooky night instead of a beautiful Georgia evening in late October, with a light wind whipping across the Peachtree High football field, making zombies seem like the last thing anyone needed to worry about...

  We were halfway through the second quarter and the Junior Varsity cheerleaders were kicking cheer tail with a pyramid of epic proportions. The entire squad was decked out in our new white and gold skirts and matching sweaters

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  with gold pom-poms and shining gold scrunchies completing the look of absolute spirited gorgeosity.

  There wasn't an eye in the stadium really paying attention to the lamo game as six sophomore girls based for three freshmen, who in turn hoisted another two freshmen on their shoulders. And then, like a rare and beautiful bird, the smallest of the freshman girls--a stunning five foot, one inch girl with golden-blond hair that does not often appear naturally in the twenty-first century and even more rarely on girls of half-Cuban ancestry--was basket tossed to the very top of the pyramid.

  Her brown eyes flashed with triumph as she stuck the landing, her size 51/2 sneakers sliding smoothly onto the waiting shoulders of the two freshman girls beneath her. Her muscled arms surged upwards into a V motion just as some player crossed the goal line, scoring six points for the Peachtree Peachpits Junior Varsity football team. The crowd went wild, and the girl knew it wasn't just because of the touchdown. They were in awe that a mere fourteen-year-old had nailed such a complex cheerleading maneuver.

  I was that smallest freshman, with the blond hair, the brown eyes, and the "ego the size of Texas," according to my mother. She says I'm compensating for the fact that I was totally fugly until I grew into my nose. My dad thinks I have a Napoleon complex. I, however, prefer to think I have healthy self-esteem.

  "Peachtree Peachpits! Go! Fight! Win!" I chanted along with the rest of the squad, our voices ringing with pride.

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  We were the only JV team in Georgia to dare such complicated stunts outside of cheer competitions with their abundance of professional spotters. As such, we never failed to intimidate the opposing cheer squad into the very dust. By halftime, those chicks were slinking from the field in disgrace.

  The Peachtree JV cheerleaders were legendary, and I the most legendary of them all. There wasn't a freshman girl in school who didn't want to be me (at least for a day), and there wasn't a freshman guy who didn't knock himself out trying to look up my skirt when I landed at the top of the pyramid.

  In fact, it was a boy trying to look up said skirt that ruined my life.

  Just goes to show that Mom was right all along. Boys, as a species, are way overrated.

  "Hey, Duke, Karen Vera's not wearing underpants. Look!" The shout was followed by a round of snorting from the benched portion of the Peachtree JV football team-- which was a lot of boys, since the coach for JV was a softy who let any hopeless wannabe be on the team.

  I scowled down my nose at the shouter, Kevin Jenkins, loser extraordinaire and total hanger-on to Duke Pearson, the studly sophomore I'd had my baby browns on ever since school started. No matter how irritated I was by this juvenile display, however, I did not for one second allow my tightly clenched muscles to loosen or my balance to falter. When one is at the top of a seventeen-foot pyramid, one cannot afford to let one's focus slip.

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  Unfortunately, I couldn't say the same for Rebecca and Madison, the two girls whose scrawny, unfocused shoulders I was standing upon. They looked up, for some reason feeling the need to check and see if I was indeed wearing my Spankies beneath my skirt--which I was, of course, duh--and that's when it all went to hell.

  Hips tilted forward as heads tilted up, hips tilting led to feet tilting, feet tilting led to knees bending, which, in turn, led to the complete and absolute sabotage of the entire pyramid. As people in the stands screamed in horror, all seventeen feet of cheerleader wavered unsteadily, each girl shifting her weight to compensate for the girl above or beneath while the two frantic spotters behind us scrambled to put our wobbling mess of a stunt to rights.

  Time slowed to a crawl as I pinwheeled my arms, desperately trying to triumph over gravity. But there was no way to stay on top. No matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to stand straight and tall on the shoulders of people who were suddenly not there.

  I toppled backward, falling head first toward the black asphalt of the track. I didn't even have time to scream, just a split second to stare up into the sky, streaked with red from the setting sun, and wonder if Kevin Jenkins would feel properly guilt-ridden for killing me.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  A genetic anomaly means that a gene has been modified by an accident called a mutation. This mutation changes the function of the gene, which gives information to the body that is different than the information received by the majority of human life forms.

  Many Traditionally Alive people assume such a mutation can only lead to disease or death, but for the Death Challenged, our genetic anomaly leads to an entirely new way of life.

  --Total Health for the Death Challenged, 5th Edition

  My very short-lived career at Peachtree High ended the day I fell from the top of the stunt pyramid and died. But didn't. That day I found out I wasn't ever going to die a normal death. Because I wasn't a normal person, I was a genetic anomaly. A mutation. A defect.

  I'll stick with anomaly. It certainly sounds nicer, doesn't it? (Good thing I have that healthy self-esteem. Otherwise the whole "mutant" diagnosis could have done some major emotional damage.)

  In brief, I am Death Challenged.

  So what is Death Challenged, exactly?

  Death Challenged is just a politically correct term--

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  like horizontally gifted (fat) or petroleum transfer technician (gas station attendant)--for a zombie. It didn't take me long to figure that one out, no matter how traumatized I was for the first twenty-four hours of my non-death.

  There's just about nothing more terrifying than falling to your death and having your brains splattered all over the pavement. Unless it's falling to your undeath and having your brains splattered all over the pavement.

  Thank god my parents were there in the stands supporting me, even though Dad is a professor of Medieval Literature who hates football and Mom spent most of the game on the grassy area near the stands letting the trips crawl around and drool on each other. (The trips are my one-year-old brothers and sister: Kyle, Keith, and Kimmy. My parents had triplets when I was thirteen. And they were goofy enough to name all of their children with K names. How lame are they? I'd be embarrassed to share if I weren't dedicated to historical accuracy, much like my professorial father.)

  So Mom and Dad wer
e there when the back of my skull burst open like a pomegranate seed and it looked like I'd bit the big one. But hadn't.

  They both rushed to my side to find my brains all splattery and me without a pulse, but still mysteriously conscious and complaining that Kevin Jenkins deserved to have his head beaten to a bloody pulp for what he'd done. Luckily, my dad's research into our family's history had revealed some interesting phenomena when it came to our deaths-- or nondeaths--so he wasn't too freaked.

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  Back in Cuba, Dad's great-great-aunt had been chased out of her seaside village for looking about twenty years old when she hit her sixtieth birthday. No matter how nice she was or how kick-ass her Ropa Vieja (literally "old clothes," but also a name for yummy shredded flank steak in a tomato-based sauce), the other villagers got creeped and thought she was a witch.

  But according to family legend, this aunt survived the witch hunt and her flight from her native country and was still alive and kicking today, living somewhere in Venezuela. And she wasn't the only weirdo. There were others, including a great-great-great-grandfather in Spain and a ninety-year-old third cousin who could still pass for a man in his early thirties.

  Dad had been trying to get in touch with all three for years to get the real story and separate fact from folklore, but had met with little success. Mom, of course, thought Dad was nuts and all the stories a bunch of bull-honkey. Until that day on the football field when her own daughter became one of the family freaks. Then she became a believer. Big time.

  So while Mom hyperventilated and rounded up the trips and the crowd gasped and wept to see a beloved spirit leader so seriously injured, Dad scooped my brains back into my skull and hustled me to the car before the paramedics could arrive on the scene. Thank god he did. I mean, even the Death Challenged need brains to function. And I don't know what would have happened if normal people had figured out I was Undead.

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  I probably would have ended up in some sort of top-secret government experimental facility hooked up to a million tubes. The creepy men-in-black types would certainly have wanted to know why I was still chatting people up days after my heart stopped beating.

  Instead, I got a visit from the principal of DEAD High herself, Theresa Samedi. The doorbell rang only seconds after we'd arrived home, and Dad opened the door to a very unique looking visitor.

  "Don't worry. I know what's happened to your daughter, and I'm here to help."

  Samedi's super-pale skin, short, spiky black hair, and long, flowing black dress would normally have freaked out my straight-laced dad big time. He's very anti-goth, and has been known to pass out fingernail-polish remover and notes suggesting counseling to college guys in his classes who do the black nail thing. My mom says he's just old-fashioned, but I think there might be a fingernail polish phobia involved. My grandmother has really long nails and is always touching up her manicure, even at the dinner table. Dad says the smell gives him a migraine, and he has to "take to his bed" for several days after Nana comes to visit. Issues, much? I say he should take a cue from himself and seek out the school counselor.

  But I guess Samedi's words and the compassion in her big, almost black-brown eyes put Dad at ease, because he let her in, no questions asked. Luckily for curious individuals like myself, however, she explained her presence right

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  away. Turns out she's super tuned in to the psychic vibrations of the Undead and knew the exact moment when I crossed the line from perky alive cheerleader to perky zombie splatter victim. (Just because you don't have a pulse doesn't mean you can't be perky.)

  "You mean... she's dead, but she's not?" Dad asked, once introductions had been made and we were all comfy on the couches in our living room.

  "No, she's dead," Principal Samedi said, ruffling her fingers through her spiked hair all casual-like. As if this weren't the worst news ever! "Her heart will never beat again, her core body temperature will be much lower than an average person's, and her skin will be vulnerable to rot if she doesn't take the proper precautions."

  Ewww! Rot? For a second I thought I might yack at the very word, but then Samedi handed me a box of popcorn chicken--you've got to love it when company brings treats--and I realized I was famished. I mean, like, hungrier than I'd ever been in my life. I started scarfing while Principal Samedi chatted up my parents, explaining the genetic mutation stuff.

  "When we become something society cannot accept, we must find a new society." Samedi smiled and handed my parents some pretty colored brochures showing all these happy zombie kids studying up on a new way of death at DEAD High. That really is the name of the school. The institute of Death Challenged Education for Adolescents and the Deprogrammed.

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  "A school? For... dead people?" Mom asked, looking understandably freaked.

  "Undead adolescents," Samedi corrected. "There are schools for educating those who become Undead later in life, but DEAD High is strictly for teenagers in seventh through twelfth grades. We're the oldest Undead boarding school in the central United States."

  "We've never considered boarding school. We want Karen at home," Mom said, struggling to concentrate while the trips crawled all over her, whining and fussing.

  My sister and brothers sensed something was wrong, and, in their babyness, had decided being held by Mom was the only thing that would give them comfort. Too bad she didn't have a few extra arms. Humans were clearly not designed for the "more than one baby at a time" thing. I didn't know what god was smoking when he decided my mom needed three little blessings at the ripe old age of thirty-seven.

  "I'm afraid it will no longer be possible for Karen to live with you, or in the human world at all," Samedi said in her calm, authoritative voice.

  "Excuse me, but who are you to tell me what is or isn't possible for my daughter?" Mom asked in her less calm but equally authoritative voice.

  "Let's hear Principal Samedi out. We're out of our element here, honey." Dad plucked Kimmy from Mom's lap, begging her with his eyes not to pick a fight with the creepy zombie lady. In that second, I saw that he was

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  scared of Samedi. This probably would have made me scared of her too (my dad's no wimp, despite his glasses and aversion to strenuous exercise) if the popcorn chicken I was chowing wasn't so amazingly yummy. I mean, how could a woman who brought such hot, greasy goodness be bad?

  "Yes, please. Do let me explain." Samedi leaned closer to Mom and Mom chilled out, almost like Samedi had hypnotized her or something. I'd certainly never seen my mom recover from pissed-offedness so quickly before. But maybe she was just going into a mild state of shock. Death--even when it was an "undeath"--probably had that effect on a lot of people. "Over the centuries, the Death Challenged have learned that we must keep a low profile. Integration with living society is simply not possible for our kind. It isn't safe for us to reveal our true nature."

  "Because people are afraid. Intolerant of anything extremely different," Dad said, in his professor voice.

  "Exactly. Invariably, the Undead are hunted out and destroyed, no matter how civilized our behavior or how earnestly we seek to integrate ourselves into the human world." Samedi's words sent a little chill down my spine as visions of zombie-hating mobs danced through my head.

  Mobs. Not a good thing. Unless it's a mob gathered at a pep rally to get psyched up for a big game, and even then you have to be careful. School spirit can be as destructive as any other deep, passionate emotion if it's allowed to get out of hand.

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  "So we've created several secret schools, places where young people can complete their conventional education while also learning the skills they'll need to survive and thrive as a member of the Death Challenged community. Our world is...different, and Karen will need help to adjust."

  "So how much does this school cost?" Dad, ever the practical member of our family. "Karen has a small college fund, but we'd planned on her getting free tuition at the university where I teach, so--"

 
"The school is fully funded by donations from older, established members of our community. There will be no out-of-pocket expenses for your family, aside from school supplies and whatever Karen will need to make her dorm room comfortable."

  Dorm room? Ugh, did I want to live in a dorm room?

  I wasn't sure, but I seemed unable to concentrate on anything but shoveling more chicken in my mouth. Dang, but the stuff was good. Addictive, even. I could see it replacing chocolate as my number one food jones.

  "I promise you, Mr. Vera," Samedi said, laying a small, white hand on Dad's arm, "Karen will be well taken care of."

  "What if we say no? What if we think Karen should stay with us?" Mom asked, seeming to come out of her trance when Samedi shifted her attention to my dad.

  My new principal turned her slightly less friendly black-brown eyes back to Mom. I swear I could feel the room get

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  a little colder. Samedi was nice, but man, I wouldn't want to be on her bad side. "Once the funeral has been held and--" "Funeral?" Mom's volume made the trips start fussing even more, but I could still hear Samedi's calm voice over the din.

  "Karen will have to have a funeral and be mourned by her loved ones as if she has passed on. She must be dead in the living world's eyes."

  "But I--"

  "She will be able to return home to visit," Samedi said, calming my mom down a bit. "That is, assuming your family observes the rules of our community and Karen learns to cloak her true appearance with the proper illusion spell."

  "We can do magic? Like witches?" I asked.

  "No, nothing like witches."

  Well. Kill that buzz before it even got started.