Backwards (9 page)

At last, Dan brushed his teeth and called it a day. As soon as he lost consciousness, I broke free, eager to get away from him.

I went to the Coffee Spot first, in case Cat was there. Spooner hunched in the back booth, playing with his lighter. A couple other punk kids from school occupied the bench across from him, but no Cat.

I spotted TR hanging out at a nearby table with a family. A mom, dad, teenage daughter, and a boy around ten were all sharing two slices of pie. TR saw me and winked. With elaborate gestures, he pretended to devour a bite of peach pie on the teenager’s fork.

“You’re here early,” I said.

TR slid out of the booth and stood. “Waster stole a bottle of vodka from his neighbors after school. He passed out an hour ago.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t be, man. It means I get a big night. I’m celebrating.” He pretended to pick up a glass and raise it.

“Celebrating what?”

“Today I made Waster stick his pinkie in an automatic pencil sharpener,” TR announced.

“Really?”

“Yeah. He screamed like a little girl. It was flipping hilarious.”

“Hold on,” I said. “What do you mean you
made
him to do it?”

“Like I took over for a second and made him jam his pinkie into the little hole.”

“How?”

“It was just the tip of his pinkie.”

“I mean, how exactly did you take over for a second?”

TR drifted to an empty table and waited for me to sit. “That’s the weird part, dude,” he said. “You know how sometimes you can get close and suggest something to them? And then they do it, and you don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not?”

I nodded, thinking of how I’d urged Dan to look for Cat in the library.

“Well, this time I got so close that I noticed a gap.”

“A gap?”

“It’s like there were all his thoughts, and then there were the things his body did,” TR explained, holding his hands a few inches apart. “And between them, there was this tiny gap. So I slipped into the gap, and instead of just suggesting things to him, I grabbed the reins and took over.”

“Wow.” I leaned back. This changed everything.

“It didn’t last,” he continued. “Once the pencil sharpener bit his pinkie, he shoved me out of the way and regained control. But for a second I was right there, steering the ship.” TR grinned. “You should have seen it.”

I thought of what I’d do if I could take over the zombie, even for an instant. My gaze shifted to a group of people coming in the door.

“You’re looking for that weird chick, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Dude, you’re obsessed,” he said.

“I told you, she’s why I’m here. I’m supposed to save her.”

“That again?” He chuckled. “You know what I’m supposed to do?”

I shook my head.

“Get Waster to sharpen his pinkie,” he said.

I laughed, which felt good since I hadn’t laughed all day. The zombie almost never laughed.

We hung out in the diner for a while, but when Cat still didn’t show, I wanted to try her place. TR offered to come. On the way, I asked him if he ever wondered why he got stuck in Waster and not someone else.

“Beats me,” he said. “Why does anyone get born as who they are? I mean, people don’t get to choose their family. Or their body. Or their gender, right? It just happens.”

“I guess.” TR never seemed to get tangled up in the big unanswerable questions. He just accepted things and went with it. Sometimes I wished I could do that. Still, I couldn’t accept that it was all merely chance. There had to be a
reason
I’d gotten stuck with Dan. Maybe it had something to do with him killing himself. Or maybe it was because he was empty — the closest empty vessel to Cat. “At least Waster has friends,” I mused. “Everyone hates the zombie.”

“Yeah. Well, I bet the zombie doesn’t puke on himself. Believe me, it’s no fun riding out the spins.”

“The zombie bites his nails and scratches his cheek with the chewed-off ends,” I said.

“Waster plucks his eyelashes and brushes his lips with them,” TR replied.

“The zombie smells his shoes before he puts them on.”

“Waster smells his pits when no one’s looking.”

“The zombie licks the sugar off donuts before eating them.”

“Waster licked his math book and gave himself a paper cut on his tongue.”

“No way.”

“Way,” said TR sticking out his tongue. “Right
dere,
” he added.

We kept trading stories about our corpses. It was funny — there were so many little things we knew about them that no one else noticed, but a lot of the things we shared were similar. I found that oddly comforting.

When we got to Cat’s place, TR let me step through the wall first. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to her room. The curtains were drawn, and the only illumination came from a few candles on her desk and the Christmas lights strung across the purple ceiling. The music streaming from her computer fit the dim lighting. Cat huddled on the floor, looking through old photo albums. Seeing that she wasn’t naked, I stuck my arm through the wall and signaled for TR to come in. It meant a lot to me that he’d waited.

TR drifted around the room, then knelt by Cat to see what she was doing. Every now and then, she pulled a photo out of the album and set it in a stack. She had a metal bowl in front of her full of ripped-up photos.

“Dude,” said TR. “She’s destroying her kiddie pictures. That’s messed up.”

“Not all of them,” I said, looking closely at the pictures she’d chosen. “Just the ones that show her scar.”

TR leaned closer and studied the torn photos in the bowl. “That scar on her lip? What’s the big deal?”

Cat-Lip,
I thought, recalling the crude drawing of her as the bride of Frankenstein on the sign-in sheet. I wondered if kids had always teased her for this one small flaw. Then again, it had probably never seemed small to her.

“If I had an album like that, I sure as hell wouldn’t destroy it,” TR said.

A few of the photos she pulled out looked like they’d been taken in a hospital. She seemed maybe nine or ten in the pictures, although it was hard to tell because there were bandages on her face. In one, she was giving the camera a thumbs-up, probably because she couldn’t smile.

“Maybe she wants to forget,” I said.

“Forget what?”

“Her past. The way people used to treat her.”

“If you forget your past, then who are you?”

“We don’t have a past,” I pointed out. “At least not one we remember.”

“Whatever, dude. This is depressing.” TR backed away. “I’m going to wait outside.”

“You don’t have to wait for me.”

“What else am I going to do? Get smashed by a truck?” He shrugged. “I’ll wait.”

After TR left, I watched Cat tear some pictures out of her yearbooks. She started with middle school. She wasn’t smiling in any of these. Instead, she kept her mouth as flat and ordinary as possible. When she got to her freshman-year photo, she looked different again. She must have had another surgery, and her scar was like it was now — a small, jagged line above her top lip. She smiled in this photo, only it wasn’t the wide, unself-conscious smile she’d had as a child.

Cat held up one last photo of herself as a seven- or eight-year-old kid, dressed as a clown for Halloween. A woman knelt next to her. They were hugging and making goofy faces. The woman’s eyes reminded me of Cat’s. She’d appeared in a few earlier pictures, yet not any later ones. It could have been her mom. I remembered what Dan had said the other day about how he and Cat used to go to group counseling sessions years ago, and she was the only one who got what he was going through. So maybe her mom had done something similar to Dan’s dad and left to start a new family.

In the picture, Cat looked happy. She was holding a bright-orange plastic jack-o’-lantern. Her cheeks were painted white, and her mouth had been outlined in red. Her mom wore red clown makeup, too, and both of them were scrunching their noses and sticking out their tongues as they smiled.

Cat took a candle from her desk and set it on the floor by the bowl of torn photos. Then she held the Halloween photo up by the flame, studying it.

No. Keep this one,
I told her.

My words made no difference. Cat moved the picture over the candle until the corner caught fire. She turned it, letting the flames creep up the side and singe her fingers before she dropped it into the bowl with the others. The photos curled and smoked, then turned black. Orange light reflected off her eyes, same as when she’d stared at the burning house. She carried the bowl to the window, switched on her fan, and blew the smoke outside.

I hated seeing her destroy her past. More than anything, I think she wanted to be accepted. Not to conform, like everyone else, but to be herself and not be rejected. So I stayed with her and whispered to her. Even if it was pointless, I told her that she was beautiful and that she’d always been beautiful, until she lay down and closed her eyes.

When I finally left, I found TR sitting on the curb in front of her house.

“She asleep?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Now let’s find something crazy high to jump off of.”

We climbed a radio tower at the edge of town. I followed TR up it without looking back. I figured I owed him for waiting for me. After at least ten minutes of climbing, we reached the red light at the top, and I glanced down. The ground loomed so far below that the houses looked tiny, and I could feel the tower sway. Panic gripped me. I clung to the metal rungs, cursing myself for going so high.

“You afraid?” asked TR.

“Hell, yes,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

“Not of falling,” he said. “I’m more afraid of
not
falling.”

I realized that was it exactly. Beneath the ordinary fear of smacking the ground lurked this deeper, more disconcerting fear. What if I didn’t fall? What if I just floated away and detached from everything?

“Fear will cause what you fear,” I said, reciting the message etched into the wall.

“Then we better not chicken out,” replied TR. “On three?”

I nodded.

“One . . . two . . . three!”

I shut my eyes and let go.

At first, I thought my fear of floating away had come true, because the wind didn’t rush past my ears. In fact, nothing seemed to change. But when I opened my eyes, I saw the metal rungs of the radio tower drifting by slowly.

I looked up at the stars in the black sky above. Then I turned and looked down at the lights twinkling in the distance like a whole other universe of stars below. Each one was a streetlamp. A neighborhood. A home. A car. A family. A person. I thought of Cat sleeping beneath one of those lights. And the zombie. And Teagan. The more I imagined people beneath the lights, the more they called to me, sure as gravity. I started to fall faster. The rungs of the radio tower drifted by at a walking pace. Then a jog. The ground below grew larger and more defined.

“Yeeeee-haaaaa!” yelled TR. He fell face-first with his arms spread wide, like he wanted to hug the ground. “Holy freaking balls, this rules!”

I kept falling.

Hills, rocks, sand.

Trees, leaves, grass.

Father, mother, sister.

Teagan, Dan, Cat . . .

“Yes!” shouted TR once he touched down. “That was awesome!” He grinned at me. “Want to go again?”

We climbed the tower a few more times. We had to keep jumping to see what called us back.

By the time the stars dimmed and the sky started to lighten, I almost looked forward to returning to the zombie. After all, this might be my chance to change things. Yesterday is a new day.

TR and I split up at the cutoff to Dan’s house. He paused at the end of the block. “Look for me in school,” he said.

“How will I know it’s you?”

TR’s eyes crinkled as he flashed his goofy, lopsided grin. “You’ll know,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

From the moment the zombie woke up, I tried to make him do things. Following TR’s advice, I sank into Dan until his thoughts surrounded me. I couldn’t make out what went through his head, yet I could feel all these whispers brushing against me and tugging at my being like currents in a river. Then I found it — a quiet space between him and the world. A gap.

I slipped into the space, feeling more connected to Dan’s senses than ever. He continued shaving, the tiny vibrations of the electric razor tight against his skin.
Your nose itches,
I whispered.
Scratch it.

The zombie’s hand lifted, causing the razor to snag a bump on his cheek. A sharp sting pricked his jaw. Instantly, Dan’s presence snapped into place, forcing me aside. He studied where the blade had nicked him and held a tissue to the cut. I distanced myself from the pain, uncertain whether or not the zombie had raised his hand because of me.

Dan messed with his hair for a while before he gave up and left the warmth of the bathroom. He shuffled to the kitchen. I tried to find another gap. He tensed when he saw his mom, and his whispering thoughts increased, taking on an anxious tone. She had her back to him as she fiddled with the coffeemaker. He pulled a bowl down from the cabinet and filled it with his usual cornflakes. Then he opened the refrigerator to get some milk.