Chapter 2 #3
Something must have broken in my brain this morning because I can’t seem to think straight.
The wood floor feels warm through my tights.
Caught in the strange intimacy of his makeshift hideout, my blood rushes through my ears with a carbonated hiss.
Words tumble out of my mouth before I can catch them.
“I wouldn’t know. I’m always the new kid. ”
He grins, showing off teeth crooked enough to seem sharp, and sniffs me. This lunatic, this absolute feral madman, leans forward and sniffs my hair—then lifts my arm up by the sleeve so he can sniff that too.
“I don’t know,” he says. “You smell old as dust to me.” Still sniffing. “Decrepit. Practically ancient.”
My head spins. Normally, I can’t breathe around new people, trapped by the smog cloud of expectations, introductions, small talk, hesitant attempts to know and be known.
But this boy holds my MP3 player out to me and my vision hyper-focuses, every color oxygen-rich and supersaturated, fixated on his thumb covering the cracked screen.
Hoping he doesn’t notice, I reach out and pinch my leg, checking to see if I fell out of my body by accident.
It hurts. I’m still meat-bound, just broken. My brain spits static, and I feel like I’m falling, like I’m staring backward through time and I’ve been here before, like I know the exact way his hand feels laced in mine—
Fever-warm. Calluses.
No, that’s stupid. He’s like… seventeen, tops, even if he does have gray hair.
Where could he have gotten calluses? I shake off the feeling, force a smile, take my MP3 player back.
Whispered music spills from my earbuds scattered on the floor between us.
God, I should get up. I should walk away as fast as I can and pray nobody saw me.
I’ve been here three days and I’m already the weirdo, I should know better than to make it worse.
I should…
But I don’t want to. Something holds me there, in that bubble of peace beneath a library table, warm in the glow of his attention. I scour my thoughts for any scrap of self-preservation, embarrassment, common sense, but it just isn’t there. Only the carbonation in my ears, a fizzing possibility.
Buoyed by ill-advised bravery, I risk a little. “Why do I feel like I know you?”
Something flickers in his eyes, there and gone before I can place it. Mischief? Interest? Whatever it is, it sets a fishhook in my belly button. He leans in and I lean with him.
“Must have been a past life,” he says and grins. Lowering his voice, “How’d you die?”
His words catch in my rib cage like a windblown dandelion seed, the first spark of wildfire. Before I can stop to think, I tug my bag down under the table with us. Pulling out a drugstore lipstick, I slash it across my neck, an arterial cherry red I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to wear.
“Beheading in the public square.”
He grins and tells me, “You need a green ribbon, Jenny.”
This time, I do slip ever so slightly out of my body. Suddenly too big for my bones to hold, I float around my own skin like a heat haze.
That’s a reference—Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz, a floppy little paperback with the creepiest black cover a nine-year-old could find.
I used to obsess about that story—the woman who wore a ribbon around her neck every day of her life until her husband removed it and her head fell off.
I’d hide under the bed to read it, huddled in the monster’s den for safety in numbers, imagining how it would feel to fall off my own body, the stomach-dropping sensation of left-behind meat, the wood floor hard against the broken knot of my spine.
Out in the real world, beyond our little monster’s den, the bell rings.
The boy clambers out from under the table, offering me a hand up. Flattered by the vintage chivalry, I take it—
Calluses.
God, it hits me like a freight train and suddenly I know exactly what falling off your own body feels like. It feels like my party trick. It feels like this—holding a hand I know as well as my own when I don’t even know the name of the boy it belongs to.
Before I can ask, before I can shove my soul back in my skin like an errant sleeping bag and relearn how to work my traitorous mouth, he snags my dangling headphone cord and pops one in his ear.
He smiles at me, tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear—doesn’t even mind that it’s wet—and gently slots the other earbud in mine.
I swear I feel my rib cage cracking, whatever windblown seed landed there exploding out in fiery foliage and glossy roots. I suck in a shaky breath and his chest rises too—one long inhale strung between us and David Bowie.
“Come on,” he says, tangling our fingers, and his smile is just for me. Like I’ve given him something more than a moment and a shared song. “Us dead kids gotta stick together.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask, swallowing twice to keep my voice from shaking. “How’d you die then?”
“Well, I was invited to this party—pretty girl, dark hair, maybe you know her? She had this killer playlist…”
“Shut up,” I protest, laughing.
Tethered together, he plunges us into the rushing torrent of students, swimming us between bodies like a boat he was born to steer.
“Hey,” he says, head tipped, black eyes twinkling with mischief. “Don’t invite me to your suicide party if you don’t want me to dance.”