The Beautiful Dead (3 page)

C H A P T E R – T W O

I guess like
most things in this new world, including eye color and flesh complexion and
whether or not you’re dead, you just have to fake it.

I can’t tell
time here. Silvery grey-o’clock, that’s what time it is. Bleak, that’s the day
of the week.

My fellow roommate
cockroach scuttles up the wall. With a disgusted shudder, I decide it’s time to
get out of the house for the first time since my return to Trenton. The porch
shudders too, so unused to carrying weight I suppose. Each step down them, a
yawning of dead wood.

Walking the
dirt-lined street to the heart of the city, I allow myself a smile. I’m
determined to like this new life, whether I like it or not.

Maybe someone
at the bazaar carries roach spray.

The Town
Square turns out to be a decent walk from my neighborhood. A stage sits in the
middle of the plaza surrounded by boarded-up storefronts that all look closed
but aren’t. Men and women bustle about with their days, shopping, conversing. A
kid barters with a bothered old man over the worth of an antique from the
twenty-first century.

At the next
city block, I encounter a long and narrow schoolyard full of kids. Class must
be dismissed because the teenagers are gathered in little clusters outside. I’m
struck for a moment by how … normal everything seems. As I watch the teens chat
and laugh with each other, zipping up backpacks, sharing notes and gossiping, I
forget for a while where I am. It’s nice, being captured by something so
simple, so uncomplicated. I forget that I’m dead. I forget that all these kids
are dead too.

“I’ve never
seen you before.”

A plump, short
teenage girl with spiky brown hair and an eyepatch stands before me, a pink
backpack hanging from her shoulder and a thick scarf coiled about her neck.

“I’m new
here,” I explain.

“You seem a
bit old to attend school.”

“I meant to
Trenton. I’m not … I’m not in school.”

She studies my
face for a second. “I’m seventeen, but I’ve been attending this school for a
decade. If I were alive, I’d probably be married and knocked up in my thirties
by now.”

I blink, dazed
by her bluntness. I have to remind myself that in this world, even age is a
lie. And to think, I was just enjoying how normal everything felt. I didn’t
realize how fleeting that moment would be, else I might’ve appreciated it a tad
more.

“My name’s
Winter.”

“Mine’s
Summer. Just kidding, it’s Ann.” She smiles, her teeth sparkling with the
shimmer of braces. I try to smile back, it probably falls flat. “Don’t worry,
you don’t have to fake nothing around me. I wasn’t thrilled when I woke up in
this place a decade ago either.”

“It’s that
obvious?”

“This place
isn’t all that bad. Look at it like a long holiday weekend … There’s no work,
and Monday is forever, forever, forever away. The only thing you come to miss
is the sun.” She holds a hand up, peers into the sky. “I hope your favorite
color is grey.”

Quietly, I
ask, “Why can’t we see the sun?” For some reason or another, I’m embarrassed to
ask the question. I feel like a child asking her mother about the world. Why’s
the sky blue. How are babies made.

“Science
wasn’t my thing when I was alive, neither now that I’m dead.” She shrugs, her
backpack making jangling noises. “Undead, whatever. Hey, look on the bright
side. You’ll never get sick or age. You don’t gotta eat anymore either.”

“But I liked eating
… I think.”

She squints at
me. “You want in on something fun?”

“Fun?”

“Follow me.”

Assuming there
wasn’t anything I planned to do with my day anyway—if I can bother telling
where it ends or begins—I follow her across the street and down an alley. After
a few turns (and passing several shady-looking faces) we arrive at the back of
a building where several other teenagers are gathered. They’re arranged in a
big circle and appear to be kicking an oddly-shaped soccer ball back and forth
among them.

“Sporty,” I remark.
“Are we supposed to join in?”

“Not on your
first time,” Ann whispers back.

One of the
teenagers, a chubby boy wearing a thick striped scarf of his own, glances back
at us. “She cool?” he grunts at Ann, who just shrugs. “Alright.”

It isn’t until
I’m closer that I realize the ball isn’t a ball.

“What the
hell?” I blurt. “That’s someone’s—”

“Isn’t it
genius?” Ann leans into me. “Just because we’re dead doesn’t mean we can’t have
fun. Hey, but if you want to be part of the Heads, you can’t tell anyone about
what you see here. It’s, well … more or less breaking every Trenton law.”

“We have
laws?”

The soccer
ball—I mean,
the
head
—calls out “I’m done! I’m done!” and one of
the teens kicks the head into the air, catches it, then helps return it to the
person to whom it belonged—a girl I hadn’t noticed who was standing there
without a head the whole time. Two kids holding the body up, another friend
helps snap her back together. I see she’s a sweet thing with freckles and two
blonde ponytails. Yes, that really did just happen. I’m watching this happen.

“You know we
don’t feel pain,” Ann reminds me, probably noting the shocked expression on my
face. “So it’s just a little way for us to blow off steam. Not everyone in this
town is overjoyed at being—whatever we are.”

Another kid,
tall and gangly, excitedly volunteers to be next, unwrapping the black scarf
around his neck, revealing a less-than-sightly fracture—where he’d clearly
removed his head for a past game, I presume—and proceeds to decapitate himself.

I look away. “So
…
that’s
what’s with the scarves …”

“Every town
needs its misguided youth, I reckon.” Ann grins. “The law’s trying to kill us
over and over. Pretending we’re still alive, like we still eat and bleed and
have pulses. We know better.” She prods me with a bony elbow. “Still angry
about the whole being-dead thing?”

“I wasn’t
angry,” I murmur, finding myself helplessly distracted by the boy’s head as it
gets footed and bumped around by the circle of teens. It’s like I can’t not
watch.

The joy in
their eyes … This is what we’ve come to.

And then I
can’t watch. I turn without remark and backtrack my way out of the alleys to
the main street. I make it to the curb, breathing and attempting to regain my
composure. It isn’t until after five or six breaths that I remind myself how
very unnecessary it is for me to breathe at all. How capable I am of just
standing here, doing nothing to sustain my consciousness. How capable I am of
just twisting off my own head.

Why did I
bother letting Grimsky pull me from that cliff? I’d be better off in a million
pieces at its foot. Why bother with any of this at all?—Wasn’t one death
enough?

“Not your
thing, I get it.” Ann has caught up to me, speaking to my back. “I misjudged
you. Thought you were bored and needed a little fun.”

“I need a
pulse.” I clench my eyes and chew on my teeth. “I need to blush when I’m
embarrassed. I need … I need to remember who I was!” I crouch down, unable to
stand anymore. “I want to know my name!”

“It’s Winter.”

“My
real
name!”

Ann sits down
on the curb next to me. “I went through this too. Before I had my Life Dream, I
was furious about what I’d lost … Whatever memories, whatever friends and
family, I was furious it was gone. But I don’t think you’d miss it as much if
you knew what it was. No one ever misses their Old Life.”

“I miss seeing
the sky. I miss feeling my heart race, I know that much.” My lips purse
together. I can’t control how angry this is making me and for some reason I
don’t care to hide it. “A fall from a cliff should kill us … It just isn’t
natural that it can’t.”

“It’s really
too bad. I was hoping you’d play with us. Such a shame, you have a nice neck
too.” Ann sighs. “Maybe they’ll let me graduate this year. I have eight high
school diplomas at home, wanna see?”

“Another
time.” I put my head between my knees. It’s the strangest sensation, knowing I
can’t actually feel anything like nausea or weakness or whatever, but my mind
is telling me I should.

“Another time,”
Ann agrees. “See me when you have a free day. I live in the fourth quarter,
west end.”

“Wherever that
is,” I remark sulkily.

She stands,
adjusts the backpack on her shoulder. “I should get home before my mom starts
to worry.”

“Your real
mom?” I ask acidly, without caring how insensitive that might sound.

She just
shrugs, unoffended. “What’s a real mom, anyway?” Then, with half a smile, she’s
on her way down the road.

I watch her
for a while, not sure how to feel. I want to cry, but know full-well that isn’t
possible. On the bright side, I guess that makes one friend I’ve successfully
found. Ann, a teenager who’s been seventeen for at least the last ten years and
who, for fun, pulls off her head and plays soccer with a group of law-breaking
teens. My Second Life is so purposeful and fulfilling now.

I take a short
glance at the sky, noting it’s still silver-o’clock. I could get used to grey.

I spend a lot
more time on the curb just watching people go by … Groups of suited men, pairs
of teenagers dismissed from school, young couples in love, a lady with a cart
full of candlesticks, three tall men laughing about something that happened at
the factory … After a while, things start to feel a little normal again. I’m
almost convinced that I’m alive, just sitting on the curb of some town I’m
visiting, people-watching, some nice afternoon.

Until I remind
myself I can pull off my arm.

“Dear!” cries an
old lady, clutching her face. “You’ve had an accident!”

I glance to my
left, as though noticing a fly on my shoulder, only to realize I’ve indeed just
pulled off my left arm with my right.

“To the
Refinery, you must!” the old lady urges me, throwing a shawl over my back as
though attempting to hide me from the onlookers. “We must fix that at once!”

Yes, I pulled
off my own arm. No, I don’t care. The old lady hurriedly leading me back to the
Refinery, I’m not even upset about this stupid Second Life anymore. I’m not
angry about my stupid pulse that isn’t there, or the unfunctioning pointless
parts inside me. The fact that I barely felt my arm come off, that something
that
grotesque has no more an effect than a fly landing on my skin … That’s what
kills me.

Back on the
work table with the large woman who created me not so long ago, she’s sewing my
arm back on when she whispers, “Death is such a blameless chore!”

The. Only.
One. Left. To. Blame. Is. You.

When I’m
ushered out of the squatty pink building, rubbing my arm with the stupid
illusion that it’s sore after a tiring surgery, I honestly debate pulling it
right back off.
Here, you can give this to someone else—I don’t need it
.
That’s what I’d tell the large refinery lady. I’d mean it too. I’d give
everything back, my legs, my empty lungs, my icy eyes, every useless piece.
Maybe I was an organ donor when I was alive. Maybe I’ll be one in death too.

“You look
lost.”

I look up. I
can’t believe it. My eyes are met by the one and only Grimsky, the man who
saved me from the cliff. He leans on a dead tree that hangs over a long stone
bench. Of course I’d run into him, of all the hundreds of people to encounter
in this city. Just seeing his sweet smile warms me instantly, makes me forget
about all those stupid things, makes me forget how I just tore off my own arm.
“Lost as ever,” I admit in many ways.

He steps away
from the tree. I see his thick brooding eyebrows, his porcelain skin. A few
steps closer, he smiles again and says, “Need help getting home? I realized the
other day that you live really close to me.”

I find in
staring at his smile that I rather like it, the way the corners of his long
lips create dimples in his smooth pale skin. I almost reflect his smile, unable
to help myself. “I think I already miss eating,” I confess quietly.

“Hey, we can
still drink,” he points out, cocking his head to the side. “Sometime we could
have one together. There’s a lovely tavern in the strip, just up the road.”

Looking into
his soft, forever-welcoming eyes, I wonder if I’ve been looking at all of this
wrong. If I have no memory, then there’s nothing to mourn. Nothing to miss … No
family, husband, lover, like Helena said.

I put on a
smile. “When I’m ready, I’ll be happy to take you up on that drink offer.”

“We have all
the days of the world for you to get ready, Winter.” He grins. “Welcome to the
End of Time.”

His voice is
like ... coffee creamer. I don’t know what that means. It’s raspy, but flows like
silk off his tongue. Maybe he was an actor when he lived, or an orator. Perhaps
a poet. That feels the best, calling him a poet.