Playlist for the Dead (14 page)

“Wait—you were a cheerleader?” I couldn’t picture it. Then I looked at her more closely, tried to imagine her hair a different color, her wearing one of those stupid outfits with the short skirt and sneakers with pom-pom socks, and all of a sudden I realized I had seen her around at school before she’d changed, surrounded by all her old friends. “Right. I see it now.”

“Too bad,” she said, and laughed. “I was kind of enjoying the fact that you seemed to be the last person who knew. Yep, I was a cheerleader, and I hung out with all of those guys, until the proverbial shit hit the fan. But let’s not talk about that now. Let’s have lunch and not talk about anything that makes us sad. We’ve got plenty of time for that.”

“Sounds good,” I said, and it really did. I liked the idea that she was assuming we’d have more conversations, that we would eventually be able to talk about everything. And it made me feel better about not asking all the questions I had, even though I was getting more and more curious about her relationship with Hayden. Had he actually known her real name?

But right now, I was happy to focus on the food she was digging out of that backpack. Packets of sandwiches, apples, a huge bar of chocolate, and a bottle of water. She really had planned ahead, and the thought of it made me nervous and happy at the same time. So much so that I worried if I’d be able to eat, but as soon as I unwrapped a turkey and avocado sandwich, I knew I’d be fine.

“Slow down there, buddy,” she said. “We’ve got all day. Here, have a drink.” She opened the bottle of water and handed it to me. I supposed we were sharing it, which seemed kind of intimate, in a good way.

“I can’t believe you did all of this.” I didn’t say “for me,” but that was really what I meant.

“I’ve been wanting to get to know you for a while,” she said, sounding almost shy, which wasn’t like her. “I wanted us to have a memorable afternoon, away from school and all the stuff that makes things hard.”

I knew exactly what she meant, though it made me kind of sad to think about the ways in which things were hard for her. From the way she said it I could tell there were more hard things than what she’d already told me, but now wasn’t the time to ask. “It’s definitely memorable,” I said. I wished I could think of the words to say it better, but being around her like this made me nervous, in a good way. I felt like I was hyperaware of every single thing about myself, and her—the way her sea-creature hair streaks somehow matched the vintage Celtics T-shirt I was wearing, as if we’d coordinated our outfits; the way a streak of sunlight coming through the window lit the spot on the floor where both of us were leaning on our hands, making her nail polish glitter and turning the hairs on my arm almost blond. I could hear that song playing in the back of my head.

Alison, my aim is true
.

It was the only lyric that really fit. But Hayden couldn’t have predicted this.

We spent the afternoon working through the picnic she’d made. We talked a lot about our families; Astrid was an only child and was jealous that I had a sister, and nothing I said about pinching and tattling and practicing makeup on me would change her mind. “Come on, you’re telling me that she introduced you to all the music you love and you’re still mad about a little lipstick?”

“You can’t ever tell anyone about that!” I said. “That’s the kind of stuff you’re supposed to do with your mom, but ours has to work all the time.” I told her about my dad the d-bag, but I didn’t get into too much detail—I didn’t want her to think about hers again.

“Yeah, I used to do that kind of girly stuff with my mom,” she said. “It’s funny—we got along really well when my dad was alive, but now that he’s gone, everything’s completely different. She wasn’t crazy about the new look, and now she’s starting to think about meeting people and it’s totally freaking me out. I mean, she’s acting like we’re friends, not like she’s my parent, you know? I don’t want to go shopping with her for date-night outfits.”

“I get it,” I said. “But don’t you think it’s better than her just assuming she’s going to stay alone? My mom’s been divorced for like eight years now, and I don’t remember her going on a single date. She’s just so stressed out working all the time I think she figures there’s no point, but it’s kind of sad. And your mom was married for way longer than mine, and nothing went wrong—maybe she just wants to remember what it was like to be with someone she loved.”

“You’re a much nicer person than I am,” Astrid said. “Hayden always said that.” She stopped and frowned. “Wait, we said we weren’t going to talk about sad things, and here we are, talking about my problems with my mom, and now I’m bringing up Hayden. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said, but I didn’t pick up the thread, and we sat quietly for a while. I loved being on the picnic with her, in a place that was special to her, and there was this moment when we’d finally eaten the last of the chocolate and were sharing the rest of the water when her face was so close to mine that I’d hardly have to move to kiss her. And it felt like maybe she was thinking the same thing, and maybe she even wanted me to. But another topic we hadn’t covered was Eric; I wasn’t sure if he was the boyfriend she’d talked about being so crazy about or the next guy on the list, but either way, I didn’t want to be someone who moved in on someone else’s girlfriend. If Astrid and I were going to get together, it had to start the right way, which meant she’d have to break up with him. But I was too nervous to ask her, and it wasn’t just the nervousness of being around her; I was afraid of what she’d say.

We stayed in the barn until the sunlight moved away from the window. It wasn’t yet starting to get dark, but the sun was definitely moving, and the sky was starting to fill with streaks of pink and orange. “We should head back,” Astrid said, but it took a few minutes before either of us could bring ourselves to move.

I didn’t want the day to end.

But eventually we cleaned up the trash from our picnic and folded the quilt together so it fit in her backpack. It felt almost like we were playing house. “Can I carry that for you?” I asked, trying to be, I don’t know, gentlemanly or something.

She laughed, that great Astrid laugh. “I’ve got it,” she said. “You just concentrate on keeping your balance in the woods.”

She had a good point. With the sun starting to set it was getting harder to see the path, so I focused on not falling down. I tried to think of a way to ask her about Eric but I didn’t want to ruin things.

“Why so quiet?” she asked, as we skirted a bunch of trees. Pine, maybe, from the smell. And the needles.

I didn’t want to tell her what was really on my mind, so I had to think fast. “Hayden’s mom brought me a bunch of his stuff this weekend,” I said. “She even gave me his computer, but I can’t get into it because it’s password protected.” I felt guilty using Hayden as a shield to keep from talking about Eric, but it’s true that the computer was on my mind, along with a million other things.

Astrid turned around and narrowed her eyes at me.

“What? Do you think it’s morbid and creepy that I want to look at his computer?” I asked, worried even as I said it that it might be true.

“Not at all. She gave it to you, so she wants you to be able to use it. You’re curious about what’s on there, right?”

“Of course.” We’d finally made it out of the woods, and the two late buses heading east and west were lined up in front of the school. “This one’s me.” I pointed to the west bus.

“I’m east,” she said. Well, that answered that question. I’d spent the day hanging out with a cheerleader from the rich side of town. Never would have seen that one coming.

“I guess I’ll see you later, then,” I said. “Thanks for the picnic.”

“No problem,” she said, and then paused. “Hey, Sam?”

“What?”

“That password? Try ‘Athena,’” she said, and then got on the bus.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

And I was in. Simple as that. Or not so simple, really; I had a million questions. Who, or what, was Athena? Why was it important enough to be Hayden’s password? And how did Astrid know? Not to mention the still-open question of what really happened to Jason and Trevor—my brain felt like a whirling blob of confusion. It was all too much. I had to focus on one thing at a time, and right now, I was focused on Hayden’s computer.

I’d always been a little bit of a snoop. I’d found the hiding place for Hanukkah presents every year until I was ten, when Mom finally sat me down and said, “You know you’re just ruining it for yourself, right?” Yup. I was just starting to get how much the surprise of the gift was part of the fun, sometimes even more so than the present itself. But even though I stopped looking for Hanukkah presents, I didn’t stop looking through Rachel’s stuff trying to find a journal (not a chance; she wasn’t much of a writer, and even if she were, she’d be great at hiding it), or even through cabinets trying to find Mom’s stash of Oreos (she thought if she hid them she wouldn’t have to share, but she was wrong). And I considered myself the king of Internet stalking; the few times Hayden or I found a girl we liked I’d practically put together a dossier on her, though neither of us had ever had the guts to use it. At least as far as I knew.

This meant that the process of going through Hayden’s computer should have been one of the most exciting things I could imagine. The combination of satisfying my innate nosiness and possibly finding out once and for all what had made Hayden do what he did, even if it meant confirming my own culpability—catnip, right?

Yet I sat there staring at Hayden’s home screen for what felt like hours. I didn’t know what to do first—check his email? Read his documents? Go through his music? All of the options felt wrong, and not just out-of-order wrong, but not-okay, bad-person wrong. Like many snoops I was a private person myself, and the idea of someone going through my computer, even after I was dead, was horrifying. It seemed like everyone these days was all about letting everything hang out, but not me. I liked seeing what everyone else was doing without revealing myself in the process. And as far as I knew, Hayden had always felt the same way. Looking at his stuff now felt like a major violation.

Not to mention that ArchmageGed could apparently show up at any time, on the computer and in real life, and if he was really Hayden, he might be pissed. Maybe he was even watching me right now, crazy as it might seem. And if there was any chance that ArchmageGed was somehow involved in what happened to Jason and Trevor . . . if he could make all those terrible things happen to them, what would he do to me?

But, I reminded myself, this computer technically was mine now. If anyone could look at Hayden’s stuff without being overly judgmental, it was me. I really only had three options: 1) wipe the hard drive and start over; 2) leave Hayden’s stuff where it was and just start using the computer myself, without looking at any of it; or 3) dive in. Was there really any question about what I would do?

I tried to be as methodical as I could. If it were my computer it would have been easy; I was a complete slob in real life, but my computer was perfectly organized, everything in files and folders with names that accurately described their contents. Hayden was the opposite, though—he was super tidy with his stuff, but his computer was chaos. He seemed to save everything to the desktop; it was wallpapered with files bearing titles that made no sense, or were misspelled. Dyslexia or no dyslexia, this was the computer of someone who just didn’t give a shit. I guess he figured no one would see it.

There should be a word for the thing that reactivates guilt, the trigger that made my skin prickle and my ears turn red, that made my head almost involuntarily droop, that made my pulse race with anxiety, then slow back down when I realized nothing had actually happened. Then maybe someone could find a drug to counteract it. Of course, there could already be one, but for now I’d have to manage without it.

I decided first to go through the documents. I reorganized the desktop so they were at least in alphabetical order, and then I started reading. All I found, though, were Hayden’s old papers from school and the typed-up responses he’d saved from his teachers. The essays themselves were gibberish; he’d tried to write papers about movies or music he’d liked, but watching him try to explain the raining frogs scene from
Magnolia
, for example, was painful. Because I knew him, I could tell where he was trying to take really complicated ideas out of his head and get them across to his teachers, but their responses made it pretty clear that they weren’t seeing it.
The number of grammatical errors is unacceptable for writing at this level
, they’d write. I saw draft after draft of each paper—he saved them all—where he tried to fix all the problems they identified. But his writing wasn’t getting any clearer.
It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you’re incapable of getting them across to your readers
.

I’m sure they hadn’t meant to be cruel, but I could imagine how he’d felt. Reading the comments, I wondered how close he might have been to flunking out, if they even did that anymore. I’d offered to help him a million times, but he’d always refused; I knew now he hadn’t wanted me to see what he was doing on his own. He was one of the proudest people I knew, and look where it had gotten him. Based on what I was seeing, college was out of the question. Why hadn’t his parents let him see a specialist? They were so insistent that no one know their kids weren’t perfect; they’d expected him to just power through it on his own.