35 #2
In panic, I seized control of my small metal limbs and screamed. I screamed and screamed and screamed until suddenly Nicola was there, crushing my clattering spider body to her chest and squeezing tight.
“It’s OK, Lu. It’s OK. It’s OK.”
I don’t want to die, I heard myself think, frantic and blubbering, metal limbs a juddering rictus of terror. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to die. Please don’t make me die. I don’t want to die.
“It’s OK,” she kept repeating, calm and clear, like a ghost begging not to die was normal and OK, not sad and pathetic. “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK.”
That night, Nicola, Ginger, and I all cuddled up beneath a blanket and watched The Walking Dead, starting from season one, episode one. The hard metal joints of my legs couldn’t have been comfortable squished between their bodies, but neither Nicola nor Ginger complained.
Ginger brought drinks, my drinks, the pink vodka Cruisers I’d brought to her tea party, so radioactive with chemicals that they looked as crisp and fresh as the day I’d plucked them off the shelf at the bottle shop.
Ginger used her car keys to slowly pry the cap off her bottle and then offered them to Nicola.
Nicola made full eye contact with her as she twisted the cap off with her hand.
“Oh,” Ginger said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“You’re so sheltered it’s scary sometimes,” Nicola replied.
Real scary, I agreed, even though I hadn’t known they were twist-offs either.
“Lucy says so too,” Nicola translated.
Ginger’s eyes flicked to me, picking off the cap of my own drink with my claw, even though I couldn’t actually drink it.
Still, it was nice to see three bottles sitting in a row on the coffee table.
By the second episode Ginger’s and Nicola’s were empty.
Mine stayed full, but when Nicola tried to steal a sip, Ginger elbowed her so hard that I was briefly worried she’d broken her rib.
We stayed there for hours, slowly getting more horizontal as the autoplay carried us from one episode to the next, not even bothering to skip the intro. Eventually, sometime in episode eight, as Ginger snored and zombies swarmed, Nicola pulled me close and whispered into my porcelain ear.
“You wanna see something that will piss you off?”
No. Why would I want to see that?
“I want you to see it.”
Why?
“Because you’re funny when you’re pissed off.” She rolled around, careful not to jostle Ginger, and picked her discarded suit jacket off the floor. From the pocket she pulled out a brochure. It had my name written across it in swirly black letters. “They handed these out at your funeral.”
My metal felt cold. Oh . . .
She opened it, turned to the last page, and showed me a photo printed there.
I knew that photo. It was the one that had been posted onto Instagram the night I died, the one that had made me throw my phone into the laundry pile.
I was dressed as the Hatter, my feet propped up, empty teacup in my hand, hat pulled down over my eyes.
“Still can’t believe you wore a waistcoat and tails.
Totally unfair to upstage us all like that. ”
My Meccano felt oddly warm. You looked good too.
“Nothing like this.”
I’m not seeing the part that’s meant to piss me off.
She tapped the caption with her pointer finger.
I reached out, pinched the brochure between my crab claws, and pulled it close so I could read it.
Lucy May McQuinn, age 20, at a tea party, dressed as Willy Wonka.
Motherfuckers.
Nicola snickered. Ginger stirred but did not wake. The people on the TV began running as the zombies attacked.
Tea party, I snapped. Tea. Party. Who typed that and didn’t stop to think, huh, isn’t that odd? What would Willy Wonka be doing at a tea party?
“Chocolate,” Nicola whispered. “Tea. Pretty much the same.”
I don’t even know how to begin with you.
“There’s still a chance that this is one very long, elaborate mental breakdown,” Nicola said. “In which case, hallucination, you begin and end with me.”
Her tone was light and playful, but the words still send a sting of unease through me. You don’t really still think I could be a hallucination, do you?
For a split second the subtitles on the screen changed. Square bracketed screams replaced with two words in glitchy, pixelated text. Do you?
“Nah.” Nicola gently scrubbed her fingers across my bristles of blonde hair and yawned.
“You’re way too fucked up to be fake. Besides, if you’re a dream, that means all of this is a dream, and .
. .” She glanced at Ginger sprawled out on the sofa beside her, yellow curls and flushed full cheeks, like a woman in one of those old paintings.
I knew it, I said.
“Shut up. Nothing’s happened.”
Yet, I added.
She didn’t argue.
Have you forgiven her? I asked. For not believing you?
“No,” Nicola admitted. “A part of me probably won’t ever forgive her for that. And maybe . . . maybe that will make us impossible. I don’t know. But I’ve loved her for a long time, Lu. Probably as long as you have. Ever since high school.”
You knew her, I said. You were her friend. I was . . . not that. Actually, I was pretty much the opposite of that. I was too caught up in my own bullshit, too scared, so I loved her from a distance. You loved her close up. I’m glad you’re the one getting the girl.
It was a soppy sort of thing to say, but what made it even soppier was that it was true.
Nicola and Ginger made sense, they fit, they fit so well that even if I’d had a heart that beat, and lungs that breathed, I wouldn’t have wanted to come between them.
The thing that hurt wasn’t the idea of them together, but me alone.
Except I wasn’t alone. Not really.
“Not sure I’d be able to compete if your boobs were still a factor,” Nicola said with a yawn.
I studied my scratched metal crab claws thoughtfully. My boobs were pretty great.
“That’s what they should’ve written on your tombstone. Lucy May McQuinn. Her boobs were pretty great.”
It was a stupid joke, but hearing it made me feel warmer, more centered, the darkness just that little bit further away.
Nic, can I tell you something?
“Oh no. Serious voice. What is it?”
Nothing. I just . . . You’re the most ride-or-die bitch I know, Nic. By miles. I reckon there’s a good chance you’re the most ride-or-die bitch on planet Earth.
She huffed out a low laugh. “Is that a compliment?”
Oh yes. Of the highest order. That’s what my grandma would say.
“Right. Just making sure.”
And you deserve to be happy. You do. And I .
. . I looked back down at Ginger then, at the chaotic spill of her curly blonde hair, at the pinched rosiness of her cheeks, the full shape of her, slumped and sleeping.
I don’t think you should forgive her, I said softly.
But I don’t think you should stop loving her either.
“I don’t think I have much of a choice about either of those things,” Nicola admitted.
Sounds messy.
“It’ll fit in with the rest of my life.”
For the next few minutes, we just watched The Walking Dead, time penduluming back and forth, sometimes slowing and sometimes speeding up, but never enough to really bother me.
It felt like I was bobbing along in a lazy tide, my head above the surface, the water carrying me forward, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but never so violently as to drag me under or smash to a stop against the nearby rocks.
“Hey, Lucy,” Nicola whispered after a while, voice so soft I almost didn’t hear it.
Hmm?
“You ever going to tell me what happened to Kyle?”
Maybe one day, I lied, and rested my porcelain head back against her chest, watching the TV.
“Because, you know, the reward for his location is up to $55,079, and you still haven’t paid a cent of rent.”
You’re still going on about that?
“Sure I am,” she said, and wrapped an arm around my head in a playful headlock. “Until I get my money, you’re not going anywhere, capisce?” Her bad Al Capone accent couldn’t hide the slight quaver in her voice or the shake of her fingers. “You ain’t sleepin’ with da fishes until I say.”
Sleepin’ with da fishes? That’s the best you got?
“Is that a challenge?”
No, why would it be a—
“You ain’t joining no heavenly choir,” she said.
“You ain’t pushin’ up no daisies neither.
The bucket? Unkicked. Those fjords? Not worth pining over.
I don’t care how tasty that dust looks, how bad the skeleton army needs new recruits, or how nice the farm over yonder is.
You’re not leaving, you freaky undead weirdo. You’re not.”
Quit it, I said, snipping my claws at her hands. I want to see this part. She released me and I settled down on her, trying to pretend my metal limbs weren’t clanking as I shivered through a strange surge of emotion.
Not anger.
Not pain.
But something that felt just as sharp, just as powerful, just as deep, if not deeper.
And I’m not undead.