I Woke Up Dead at the Mall Read online

  Out of all those words, the one that slapped me right across the face was this: autopsy. I’d had an autopsy? Oh great. Was everyone (Nick?) picturing me naked on some table somewhere, being sliced and emptied and explored? How lucky am I?

  “Is the autopsy—the thing—all over? Do the police know for sure that I was murdered? Couldn’t it have been an accident?” I insisted.

  Bertha sighed. “Forget about the police. I know for sure. And the sooner you accept your fate, the sooner you’ll move on. Sarah, you’re just as murdered as everyone else. No more, no less. And you don’t hear the others complaining!”

  “Because we’re all happy we were murdered,” Nick side-commented to me.

  “What was that, Nick?” Bertha busted him. “Another question?” But he gave her that grin, and I had to wonder how often it had gotten him out of trouble when he was alive.

  “I was just saying,” he began. “It’s a little easier for us. We know how we died, and who did it. It must be tough for Sarah.”

  I think my face went a little bit pink when he said my name.

  “My murderer was at my funeral,” Alice added. “And it only made things worse.”

  “The Boy sends you to your funeral to say goodbye, to let go,” Bertha declared. “And besides, you’re a ghost. You can’t call the police or get anyone arrested, so what’s the point? This is why the Boy—”

  “Come on! Who is this boy?” Nick called out. “And who made him the boss of me?”

  Alice gasped. Lacey snorted a little laugh. Harry said, “Ha!”

  “I think we all want to know,” said Nick. He sat back, relaxed, like he was waiting for a show.

  Bertha clucked and sighed. (Hate that!) She searched the air for the words to speak. Here’s what she found: “It’s a title. The Boy is not exactly a boy.”

  I groaned. She wrote the letters

  B

  O

  Y

  on a whiteboard. And then she added words to each letter.

  Boss

  Of

  You

  “The Boy is not a boy—not a male child. The Boy is the gathering of the collective wisdom of humankind,” she explained. “The good, the bad, the kind, the cruel—it’s all there, and it is in charge of you. We are not ruled by someone outside of ourselves. The Boy is the best and worst of us, ruling us.”

  There was a massive, heavy, weary, ominous pause.

  “I have no idea what that means,” Nick said.

  (Good. Neither did I.)

  “It doesn’t matter. Here’s what you need to know about the Boy,” Bertha said, and I think we all leaned in a little. “Humanity is not all that wise or mature—as a species. Think of the world you just left—the one that killed you. We are children.”

  And our mission was to get back to that world as soon as we could. Really?

  chapter seven

  do you see dead people?

  Harry absolutely insisted that we go downstairs and move among the living. And Harry was sort of irresistible.

  “They have roller coasters!” he crowed. “What are we doing up here, being all dead? Boring! Let’s go live!”

  We stood in a row, peering over the railing from our top floor. We were so close but so far. We studied the living below us, twisted and mixed together in a crazy pattern. Harry began to lead us toward it all, and we all followed, except Alice.

  “No!” she said with a small cry. “I don’t like to be among them. It’s too much. That’s what sent me over the edge last time. They’re so alive, but they have no sense of it, no appreciation. They just want to buy things and argue. It’s unbearable.”

  Nick gave her a hug. “I’ll look out for you. I won’t let anything bad happen to you. I promise.” But Alice shook her head.

  “Look. I really need to go there,” Harry said. He was staring longingly at the crowd. “I was so sick for so long, I just want to see some of this life and stuff, I want to hear it and be around it.” He returned his gaze to us. “That’s my unfinished business out there. I got cheated out of so much life while I was alive.”

  Lacey took his arm and smiled at him sweetly. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

  That’s how Lacey, Harry, Nick, and I left Alice upstairs and made our way to the land of the living.

  When I was alive, I was able to move among the living like a ghost. So you’d think that being dead at the mall would be easyish for me. Or at least, I thought it would.

  Living people were loud, loud, loud. Especially the children. The adults walked around with odd, worried faces and didn’t seem to realize how they looked. Not one of them could hear their children calling to them until the kid yelled at least seven times. We slipped through them with shocking ease. Nobody saw us, heard us, or gave any sign that they sensed we were there.

  Lacey critiqued the fashion choices around her. “Now, that’s an ugly shirt!” and “Um, yeah, nobody is falling for that comb-over!” and “Where’d you buy that? Forever Ugly?” She got louder as she decided that she was hilarious. None of the living heard her. (And I wished that I didn’t, either.)

  “Don’t let Lacey scare you,” Nick whispered in my ear. “She’s all talk.”

  “I know!” I answered, a little more defensively than I should have.

  At Harry’s request, we went directly to the roller coaster, which was part of a whole cluster of rides. (Did I mention that this place was kind of big?) We filled the empty seats at the back of the ride, and if people could have seen us, we would have looked like two couples on a double date. Lacey threw her arms up in the air and shouted, “WOOOOOO!” for the entire ride. Harry looked at her and at the life all around him and laughed.

  Nick and I sat right behind them, silent as, well, the grave. We slowed to a high climb, with a big drop awaiting us. I shut my eyes and held on tight, bracing for (second) death.

  “It can’t kill you.” He shrugged. “Nothing can kill you!” And then we all screamed as we plummeted forward and finished the ride. My legs were shaky as Nick helped me out. But Lacey and Harry stayed in their seats.

  “Again, again, again!” Lacey cried, and Harry clearly agreed.

  “No way!” Nick protested. “That thing’s a death mobile!” He wasn’t a very good liar. We all saw that he loved the ride, but he knew that I didn’t. With Nick covering for my cowardice, we slipped into the crowd of the living.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “This is all part of my charm,” he said with a straight face. “I get us off the ride before I’m the one who gets sick. Works every time.”

  That charm was real and very much alive. I would have loved to bask in it for a while, but that was when the first weird thing happened.

  There was a toddler having a total meltdown over by the bumper cars, and his mother had no clue how to make his piercing shrieks stop (please, please make it stop). Nearby, three other mothers were tut-tutting and gossiping about her.

  “If she can’t control that child, she shouldn’t bring him out,” the tall mother said as the shorter two nodded.

  “People used to do that to my mom,” Nick said quietly. “I always hated it. If I was even a little bit less than perfect, they blamed her.” The little half smile usually on his face was gone. He looked grim.

  “They’re just being mean,” I agreed. And in a louder voice, directed right at the tall mother, I said, “And if they’re such mother-geniuses, why don’t they go over and help her?”

  And just like that, the tall one blinked hard, turned, and went over to the meltdown kid and his mother. She didn’t act like she had heard someone tell her to go. She just went. As if she had come up with this new thought completely on her own. She knelt down and spoke to the toddler.

  “Whoa,” Nick whispered. “What did you just do?”

  Before I could give the obvious “I have no idea,” the mother of the meltdown toddler began to screech at the tall mother:

  “Who asked for your help, lady? Mind your own busines
s!” With that, she yanked her son sideways onto her hip and carried him like a football away from all the rides. He temporarily stopped screaming and seemed to think that this was a fun ride.

  I backed away. Did I do that? Did I communicate with that obnoxious tall mother? How? I retreated all the way to one of the big map kiosks.

  Nick followed me there and looked back at the rides, the mothers, the kids.

  “She heard you. What was that?” he asked. “Sarah, that was weird.”

  “No. I don’t want to be weird.” As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. Only a weird person would say that.

  Nick tried and failed to swallow a laugh. He put one hand on my bare arm, which suddenly took all my attention. His hand was warm against my cool skin. His hazel eyes held some kind of gold flecks, scattered like stardust. If he was laughing, he wasn’t laughing at me. That was clear. His laugh was infused with kindness, and it worked on me like truth serum. I wanted to tell him everything about me.

  But just then Harry interrupted us. He and Lacey had abandoned the rides and made some new discoveries.

  “Legos!” he shouted over the crowd. “Let’s go. Legos!” He was pointing to an obscenely large Lego store. We circled around a mini Lego Park. There was a cluster of Lego tables, occupied by Lego-building children. They ignored the giant Lego robots, tigers, and trees looming above them and focused on their own little plastic pieces. It was a Lego zoo.

  Harry was blissed out. Lacey was blissed out watching Harry be blissed out.

  “I loved Legos when I was alive. I made really cool things with them. And I could have built a whole house with this many Legos,” Harry proclaimed as he turned left, then right, taking in the Lego wonder of it all. “Wow.”

  I tried, really tried to focus on Legos, but it wasn’t easy. Nick stood next to me. I hated being so aware of him and his presence. But I was. I couldn’t help it. He gave off a kind of energy that a dead guy shouldn’t be able to generate. I wanted to turn to him, face him, talk to him, listen to him. He was so inevitable.

  “Okay now. It’s just us, so talk to me. Did that woman hear you?” asked Nick, a note of admiration in his voice.

  “I don’t know. I wish I knew. But I don’t know,” I answered. (Idiot, idiot, idiot!) I gave up trying to have a conversation with Nick just yet.

  A group of children abandoned their table of Legos, and Harry stepped right up, ready to build something stupendous in their absence. But when he touched one, his hand passed right through it. He tried again, focusing on just one stray Lego. But he couldn’t touch it, couldn’t hold it. Couldn’t play. Being dead wasn’t all fun and games.

  And for a second there, I thought he was going to cry. He bowed his head. “Oh. Of course.”

  Lacey rushed to his side to comfort him as a new collection of children swarmed the table and began to demolish everything that had been built there. Harry watched them enviously.

  Here’s the second weird thing that happened:

  One little girl stood apart from the other kids. And I swear, she was looking right at Harry. Her mouth was open, and her eyes were wide.

  She saw him. She did. And she was terrified.

  “Go on, sweetie. Go play!” her mother urged her. The other kids all seemed fine, but the girl stared at Harry and shook her head. She was the picture of dread as her big eyes filled with tears.

  “Harry,” Lacey loud-whispered. “She can see you. Get out of here. Now!”

  Harry looked like his heart might break. All he wanted was to play, and he ended up scaring a little girl. Not fair. The mother (who didn’t see Harry at all) took her daughter by the hand and dragged her to the table, saying, “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you don’t develop decent social skills!”

  Why did I rush over to the table? What did I think I could do there? I mean, I knew for sure that I would never have done this when I was alive. I stooped down next to the frightened girl as Harry and Lacey retreated.

  “Legos are fun,” I whispered to the girl. She took a breath and reached for a stack of red plastic bricks.

  “Did she see you?” Lacey asked Harry. “Did that kid see him?” she asked us. “She looked really freaked out. I think she saw him!”

  “Maybe,” Harry replied. “But she’s okay now.”

  She was. She was even starting to talk with some other little kids, and maybe that satisfied her mother’s need to see her daughter’s decent social skills. Lacey clapped. “Harry, you’re special! She saw you!”

  Nick opened his mouth, and I knew he was going to say something about me being heard. But somehow he knew I didn’t want him to say it. Please don’t put me in the spotlight. Don’t say what you’re going to say. Please. He stopped. He understood.

  Harry half-smiled at us, but his blue eyes looked a bit bluer.

  “I changed my mind. I want to go upstairs, where we can do things. And eat,” Harry suggested. The melancholy in his voice tugged at my heart. We left without another word.

  chapter eight

  we are the stories we tell ourselves

  Food was the best thing ever. If I were alive, I’d eat and eat and eat and let myself get huge. I wouldn’t care. I loved food.

  We all officially loved our food court. I had waffles with bacon and ice cream for dinner. (Don’t judge. And by the way, delicate little Alice ate a brick of cheese, popcorn, and a Cinnabon roll. So there.)

  “Harry can be seen by the living!” Lacey said for the hundredth time, devouring a pile of chicken wings. “He’s special!”

  Nick gave me a big-eyed cartoony look, pleading with me for permission to reveal that the living could hear me. Maybe it was my old instinct to hide in the crowd, camouflage myself like one zebra in a big, fat herd of zebras. There’s safety there. So I slowly shook my head. Please don’t tell them. And he got it.

  “It was a fluke,” Harry insisted.

  “So, Sarah. You’re being all chopped up on some slab, huh?” Lacey asked me, chewing with her mouth open. “Who are the suspects? Who were your enemies?” She grinned, putting her high-heeled feet on a second chair. The stilettos stuck outward like weapons.

  “Maybe it wasn’t an enemy,” Nick offered. “Maybe it was a spurned lover. Broken hearts make people do crazy things. Did you spurn many lovers while you were alive?”

  (Should I be flattered that he assumed there were lovers for me to spurn?)

  “No,” I said, and I suddenly felt so stupid, so empty. Shouldn’t there be at least one brokenhearted boy back on Earth, pining for me? There wasn’t. Lacey was sneering as she shook her head in pity.

  “I still wonder, who makes all this food?” Nick’s question rescued me from the awkwardness of the moment. “I wish they’d add some shitake mushrooms to the stir-fry.”

  Lacey blinked in confusion. “No. I won’t eat anything named after shit,” she said with some finality. Nick didn’t laugh. Because Nick was a good guy.

  “Well. I love mushrooms,” I chimed in. “But I’d have to pass. Mushrooms were the last thing I ate before I died. At my dad’s wedding.”

  Lacey was so excited, she nearly spit out a chicken wing.

  “Your dad got remarried?” she sat up, dropping her feet to the floor. “You’re so stupid. The wicked stepmother did it. It’s so obvious. She killed you to make room for her own kids.”

  “She isn’t wicked—she’s wonderful. And she doesn’t have kids, and we got along great. I don’t know, maybe the caterer was a psychopath who wanted to kill some random person?” It didn’t sound very likely. I knew that.

  “Nice try,” said Harry. “But we’re all in this place for a reason. We were young New Yorkers who were murdered. And murder is pretty personal.”

  He sounded so ridiculously casual, like, Oh hey, I was ordering coffee, and they were all out of soy milk, but that’s okay, because they had two percent milk, and I’m not lactose intolerant. And by the way, we were all murdered. The end. Really?

  “You had cancer,” I said. �
��Who would kill somebody who’s already that sick?”

  “Do you really want to know?” Harry asked the group. Yes, we did. And that’s how it all ignited. Our Death Stories.

  HARRY AND CANCER AND LIFE

  Harry’s first battle with cancer was when he was five years old. He was not a saintly sick boy. In fact, he’d be the first to tell you that he was a total brat. He yelled at everyone, especially his parents.

  When you’re five, life is supposed to be fair. But cancer was so unbelievably unfair, Harry had to rail against it. It didn’t help that he had been the middle child of three, who constantly fought for his toys, his place on the sofa, his song in the car, his choice of game, his anything.

  He did not want cancer and would happily have given it to either of his brothers, if only he knew how. Chemo made him sick, bald, weak, dizzy, and tired all the time. One fine afternoon, he fixed the bald problem by painting his head with permanent marker. He added Count Chocula eyebrows. It was a look.

  But then it passed. He was done. Cancer-free. The laundry-marker toupee faded, replaced by real hair. But his bratty behavior had become a habit. Besides, it worked.

  When Harry was nine years old, he figured out that everyone caved in to him because he was loud and because he was Cancer Boy. Not because he was right. This discovery didn’t make him angry. But it did make him cry. He looked at himself like he was a character in a movie, and he didn’t like what he saw. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t all at once, but he managed to stop being a huge jerk. And he started to enjoy his cancer-free life.

  And then the cancer came back. He was fourteen this time. Old enough to know that life wasn’t fair. He wasn’t a brat anymore, but he did cry sometimes. Doctors carved out his organs. They poisoned him with chemotherapy and fried him with radiation. But the cancer kept winning.

  When he was seventeen, he sat his family down. “There’s nothing more to do,” he told them. “No more surgeries, no more treatments. You have to let me go.” His mother wept. His father sobbed. His brothers cursed cancer’s existence. Harry hugged them. “I don’t want to leave you. I love you guys. But I think I kind of have to go.” Harry’s brothers dissolved into a puddle. And Harry cried too.