I Woke Up Dead at the Mall Page 17

  It flashed inside me as a two-word heartbeat: Nick. Right. Nick. Right.

  Here is the story that I think I was telling myself: being with Nick couldn’t possibly be wrong. It didn’t matter where we were. If we were together, we were exactly where we were supposed to be.

  I smiled at Nick, reached over, and kissed him. He touched my face and smiled sweetly.

  “I’m happy,” I said at last. It made no sense. And it may have been the first time I’d ever spoken those words in that order. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  I grinned and said, “Oh. You know.”

  (Oh. He knew.)

  It was happening. The kind of hypnotizing sense of belonging here, even though we knew we could never belong here. We were dead. Let’s leave this stuff for the living. Come on. Seriously. It was time to move. But we didn’t. We couldn’t. Maybe the rain had washed away our strength, along with our fear or any trace of worry. (That would be a miracle.) Maybe the sunrise had ushered in peace or calm or acceptance. Being here was changing us.

  We both rose and I took three steps forward. Nick still had my hand in his, and he tugged me toward him. He didn’t have to try very hard, did he? I sort of twirled back to him, into his arms and into a kiss. Even here, kissing Nick made my heart dance. It was chemical, it was physical, and it was ethereal. Maybe it was even magical.

  Maybe this was happily ever after, as in “forever and ever.”

  We broke from the kiss when we heard the voices of the dead all around us. They saw us, of course, and felt the need to comment. Nick and I just smiled and listened.

  “Hey! Get a room!”

  “Oh, isn’t it romantic?”

  “Come on, you guys!”

  Nick flinched at that last one, and so did I. It was a woman’s voice. No, it was a girl’s voice. And we both recognized it. Lacey was shouting at us.

  “Come on, you guys!” she repeated, louder and with less patience. I needed to turn around to see her, but the expression on Nick’s face slowed me for just a second. He seemed disappointed to see her.

  Lacey was excited and very, very, extremely proud of herself. She stood in the elevator, in the middle of the park. She peered around and then announced, “I’m here to rescue you! I can’t believe I did it!” she crowed. “Okay, it was Alice’s plan, but I’m the one who actually did it!”

  Nick and I stayed still. I waited for him to move toward the elevator. Maybe he was waiting for me to move. Lacey was too caught up in her tale of triumph to notice.

  “So, Alice has Bertha all distracted, making her have a big heart-to-heart,” she continued. “And yes, you’re welcome, I’m so strong, I actually got the elevator to work for me. And here we are! And yes. I. Am. Fabulous.”

  A small swarm of the dead had gathered around to watch and listen. They seemed in awe of her story, and Lacey seemed delighted to be the object of their awe. She was standing still and strutting at the same time. Only Lacey could do that.

  “Wow, Lacey,” Nick said. “You got the elevator to work for you? That’s incredible!”

  “I know, right?” She glowed. “Now, come on, already. Get in.” She looked around the park at the gathering dead. “You guys!” she squealed in notes and tones I had never heard from her before. “Look! Look who it is! Best celebrity sighting ever!”

  It was Oprah. But only our little audience of the dead noticed her. The living walked right past her. This was the Boy, of course.

  “Not so fast,” Oprah said.

  “Oh wow! Oh wow!” Lacey gushed. “Are you talking to me? Can you see me? Oh, of course you can! You’re Oprah! You can do anything. I love you! I really love you!”

  Nick and I wore matching smiles as Lacey fell all over herself in tribute and admiration.

  “Thank you,” Oprah said graciously. “Now. Have you actually asked these two people what they want to do? I have a funny feeling they’d rather stay here. And I’m all about free will, you know.”

  That was insane. Of course we wanted to get back to the mall. Didn’t we?

  “Can we have a minute to think about it?” Nick asked. I felt a chill and thought I was about to be sick.

  “No. We can’t have a minute to think about this,” I insisted. “Let’s go.”

  “Why do you want to stay, Nick?” Oprah asked. Our audience of the dead was growing larger. Nick looked at the crowd, and his speech slowed down a bit.

  “If we stay here, we can, you know, finish our unfinished business,” he said.

  “Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm…,” Oprah hummed as she nodded and took that in.

  Lacey crooked her finger in our direction, saying, “Come here.” We obeyed but stayed just outside the threshold of the elevator.

  Lacey reached out and slapped Nick, kind of hard. “Wake up! You’re dead. Come back to the mall so you can move the hell on!”

  “I don’t think we need to resort to physical violence,” Oprah chided her, but she was laughing as she shook her head.

  “I’ll go!” a male voice called out from the crowd. It was the pervy ghost who sat underneath young girls on park benches. He lunged for the elevator, but Lacey scared him off.

  “Get back, sicko!” she shouted.

  “What about me? And her?” shouted one of the Gatsby ghosts.

  “Do they still have the food court?” asked the super-skinny ghost. “Take me! I wanna go and look at all the food. I promise not to eat any! I just wanna look!”

  The dead yelled among themselves. “Not her! Take me!” Mr. Screamer stood in the center of it all and, guess what, screamed. Nick turned me toward him and held my shoulders to bring me into focus.

  “We can be together. Here. We can look out for our families. Here. We can see the sun and feel the rain. We can live wherever we want, with nobody telling us what to do. Forever. Here.”

  “But look at them.” I pointed to the dead crazies around us. “What if we become like them? They’re so messed up!”

  “Hey! I heard that!” a dead guy called out to me, but I ignored him.

  “Stay with me,” Nick said. Those were all the words he used. But inside those three words, I heard an eternity of love and caring, of rain and sun (I wondered what snow would feel like as it passed through us!), of being together and alive in our own way. Here on Earth.

  “Oooh, girl. He’s a romantic!” Oprah cooed. (Could she hear what was underneath all his words too?) She turned her attention to the dead who were bickering for a chance to ride that elevator.

  “Enough!” she commanded them, and they obeyed with shocking speed.

  “I can’t hold this elevator much longer, you guys,” Lacey said plaintively. “Don’t you want to move on?”

  Nick framed my face in his hands and said it. He said it. He said it.

  “I love you.”

  I took his hands in mine, and smiled. “I love you.” The words felt perfect as they unfolded between us.

  That’s what made this next part so painful.

  “Nick. Please. I have to move on. And so do you. Please,” I said quietly, so quietly and slowly, because a well of emotion was stopping half of my voice. Nick was shaking his head. Tears sliced their way down my cheeks.

  “We can move on together,” I whispered. “We can. Please, Nick. Come with me.”

  “No. We belong here. We’re already together,” he whispered back. “This is perfect. Let’s not change it.”

  Oprah spoke to her audience. “Our lives, and even our afterlives, are made from the stories we tell each other. We are the stories we tell ourselves.”

  “Oh, just shut up!” I cried. The crowd let out an “Ooooh” in response. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Now!” Lacey sounded frantic.

  My heart, or something like it, pounded through my rib cage. I took a step toward Nick, then jerked backward, hard. Lacey had grabbed me by the hair and yanked me into the elevator.

  I was still in shock at the pain, violence, and swiftness of her actions a
s she reached out and did the exact same thing to Nick. We fell back against the wall of the elevator, a mere second before the door closed.

  “You two are such idiots,” she said. “You sort of deserve each other.”

  chapter thirty-five

  it’s as if i never left

  Don’t Look at My Bracelet

  Nick loved me. He said so. I tried to remember that during the elevator ride, and after. But it just kept slipping away.

  He wasn’t speaking to any of us. He bolted off the elevator, headed for parts unknown. His face was locked up, totally expressionless, like a sculpture of Nick but not the real Nick.

  This all sounds pretty bad, but I told myself that he’d get over it, and he’d see reason. I also told myself that Lacey was the one who had pulled him in. Not me. So he had no reason to be mad at me. (Of course, I was grateful to Lacey, and I wished I had done what she did. I maybe had to factor that in.)

  Our part of the mall was a different universe; it was so clear to me now. This was no place for the living. The air felt different, and so did the light. There was a cool, clean simplicity here and it chilled me. But the warm, pulsating, mad beauty of life among the living was officially my drug of choice. It took me less than one minute to start missing it all. Oh no. No.

  I wanted to go back. What if Nick was right and we should have stayed back there? What if we belonged there, together? I shook that thought out of my heart.

  “Sarah!” Alice called out from the entrance to Staples. “You’re back!”

  Bertha soon appeared by her side.

  “Oh my, oh, oh, oh my…,” she said slo-o-ow-ly. “You’ve returned. You’ve actually returned. How did you …?” But then she looked at Lacey. Math completed, she did one of her cluck-sighs (still hate them) and said, “Of course. I should have known.”

  “I saved my dad!” I announced to her. Her smile was tinged with a bit of sadness.

  “Good for you, my dear. Good for you.” She looked around. “And Nick? Where is he?”

  (Yeah, I didn’t want to go into all that. Not yet.) “He’s here,” I said. “Somewhere. In the mall. Here.”

  She shook her head. “Incredible,” she murmured. But then she looked at me and pushed the sadness out of her smile. “Welcome back, Sarah. You’re welcome here, indeed. And you must be hungry.”

  As soon as she said it, I was. In fact, I was ravenous.

  “Go. Eat. Let me see about Nick. We’ll reconvene anon.”

  I wasn’t sure when “anon” would be. But it sounded ominous.

  We three girls were at the food court, having a huge dinner. I was wondering about the story I would tell myself/tell them about the time with Nick. Lacey cut right to it.

  “So.” Lacey elbowed me. “You and Nick. All alone. All night. Two nights. Did you do it?”

  “What?” I asked, as in How can you ask me that? not Whatever do you mean?

  “You’re so pathetic,” Lacey said. “Wasted opportunity. That’s you! Go find him, girl. What the hell are you waiting for?”

  “He seemed terribly upset,” Alice said tentatively.

  “Yeah,” Lacey agreed. “But he’ll get over it when he realizes that I saved the day. And he has a girlfriend who’s kind of hot. In a nerd/skinny-white-girl kind of way.”

  “Thank you,” I said, genuinely surprised at her kindness. (Note to me: never underestimate Lacey.)

  “Hooray for Lacey,” Alice added.

  I hadn’t checked my bracelet since we had returned. It was Disney Princess pink.

  My dad had a cousin who was profoundly deaf and talked in his sleep. See? No matter our circumstances, we’ve simply got to tell our stories. Do you know why Earth is never quiet? It’s because the whole place is teeming with life, and life itself is so noisy. The heavy silence in our section of the mall came from that absence of life, and it took (almost) all of my attention. Almost. The thing is: I needed to talk. To Nick.

  There he was. Nick. Fast asleep in a bed in the middle of a cluster of beds, in Sleepy’s. I hurried to him. I wanted to kiss him, hold him, touch him, and breathe him in. I climbed into the bed and found my rightful place, right by his heart. He stirred.

  “Sarah,” he whispered. “I’m sorry about before. And I’m sorry about—”

  “Me first,” I interrupted him. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to choose for yourself. And I’m sorry that I’m not sorry that we’re here together.”

  He laughed a little bit. “Come here,” he said. But I was already here. Very here.

  He leaned over me and kissed me. Maybe it was because of the victory of the day, I wasn’t sure, but this kiss held more passion, more subatomic energy, more life than any kiss before it in the history of kisses.

  And just like that everything changed. The energy between us shifted. We both knew that this was the end of us talking and the beginning of us taking off our clothes. We blinked at each other and that said it all. Me first. I didn’t hesitate, but I did move kind of slowly, deliberately. In that small moment when I was separate from him, shirt traveling up and over my head, I thought one single word: yes.

  Yes. It was time. Nick. Sarah. Now.

  And as the shirt fell to the floor, I became aware of every nerve ending in my skin (and was deeply glad to be wearing the cute bra with the lace). My heartbeat accelerated but stayed true. Nick. Right. Nick. Right.

  His hands traced a line across my back. And it felt like I was a black-and-white photo magically rippling into color wherever he touched me.

  “Sarah?” he said softly. “Are you sure?”

  Okay, maybe we weren’t on the exact same page here. I faded to black, white, and gray.

  “Aren’t you?” I asked, without looking back at him.

  He kissed my back, and then my neck and my shoulder. I was transforming into color once more. His hands wrapped around my waist and almost made me laugh. Was I joyful or ticklish? Not sure. I turned to face him. He smiled and breathed me in.

  I tugged at his shirt a bit. “You,” I said. And his shirt fell over mine.

  I touched his shoulders, which were even more amazing up close. When our bodies pressed together, I felt like I owned him, I possessed him. He was mine. In living color.

  I got the feeling that I was the one initiating this, continuing this, building it up to greater heights. For a girl who’d had zero boyfriends when she was alive, it was a little strange. Maybe even disappointing.

  “We should use protection,” Nick whispered after a while. He slowed us down.

  “Can the dead get an STD? Or pregnant?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.

  But he sat back. He stopped. And my heart fell through the floor. Oh no. Oh no. He didn’t want me. That’s all I could feel, and it felt utterly wrong and painful and totally humiliating.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, dreading the answer, hiding the pain (I hoped).

  “Before we do anything more, I think you should know something.” He paused, and my mind raced to figure out that something before he could say it. And then he said it.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “I’m leaving the mall.”

  (My brain turned into a pile of lint, because this made no sense.)

  He continued. “I died saving Fiona. Remember?”

  “Just for future reference,” I interrupted, “it’s not cool to talk about some girl when it looks like you’re about to have sex with a completely different girl. I’m just sayin’.” I curled my body up tight, wishing I didn’t feel so totally exposed.

  He smiled. “Point taken. But here’s the thing. Saving her means that I died a hero. That’s why Bertha offered to let me go to that spa place. It’s totally different there. You can move on a whole lot faster, or…”

  He was leaving. He was leaving the mall. He was leaving me. Something in my brain was exploding. I was losing the ability to speak or understand words of any kind.

  “I’ll find out tomorrow. Bertha is talking with the Boy tonight,” he concluded.

/>   Where to begin? Well. I began by putting my shirt back on. Fast. I stuffed my bra into my pocket. Just like that, passion transformed into blind anger. And I was ready to start swinging.

  “First of all, you didn’t die a hero. You guys were trying to run away. You told me yourself: you didn’t take a bullet for her. You just got in the way of one.” My voice was like metal.

  “Let’s not get technical. I was getting her away from—”

  Nope. I wasn’t letting him finish.

  “Second, we’re almost ready to move on, and we could move on together. You’re going to run away now? Now?”

  He shook his head. Maybe he wanted to speak, but I wasn’t done yet.

  “Third, yeah, maybe you get to return a little sooner, but that won’t help your mom. You’ll come back as a new life. A new baby! And you won’t even know her.”

  “See, that’s the thing. It’s different for them,” he began, but I wasn’t listening. I was half-aware that my face was burning, and I was shaking just a little.

  Nick waited a decent interval.

  “Over there it’s different. You can move on. Or become an angel. You can look out for people. And after that whole haunting experience, I know for sure that’s what I want to do.”

  If I spoke now, I’d cry, so I just breathed. Damn those trees and rainstorms. He held me close, which I loved and hated, which stressed me out beyond measure.

  “Let’s get this straight. You’re leaving me. For your mother.”

  “This isn’t about her, or any one person. This is my mission, my fate, Sarah.” His voice was cotton-soft, but it hurt like hell. “I don’t need to move on.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t go.”

  chapter thirty-six

  the billion stages of grief

  We were all at breakfast, but I wasn’t hungry. I opted to be really pissed off at Nick, instead of sad or scared that I might be losing him now and for the rest of time. My jaw was clenched so hard it hurt.