I Woke Up Dead at the Mall Page 5

  The doctors didn’t put up a fight. They knew they couldn’t save him, so they granted his wish:to die at home, not at the hospital. His mother slept by his side. She measured every inch of his suffering. Pain was his constant companion. When it overpowered him, he could click a button to summon morphine. It quieted the pain and clouded his mind.

  And then came the day when he was too weak even to click. The cancer was in his bones, and it held him prisoner in a cage of pain there on that bed. He felt his tears fall back into his ears. That was the only body part that didn’t hurt.

  His mother caressed his cheek and dried his tears.

  “No more pain, sweetheart. No more.” She clicked the morphine button. She clicked it again. She clicked it a lot. “Oh, my little love. My boy,” she whispered. “Be at peace now, Harry. I love you so.”

  Dad stood by her side. “I love you. I’ll always love you,” he said.

  His mind escaped into a fog. Then his heart. Then all of him. All done, all gone. There.

  chapter nine

  infinity beer

  “Wow,” Nick said to Harry. “You suffered. A lot.”

  “I know, right?” Harry said in a lighthearted voice. “Oh, and check it out. I died bald, and I’m still bald in my afterlife.” He laughed, shaking his fist at the sky. “Thank you, universe! Boy! Whoever! Way to go!”

  “Are you kidding?” Lacey asked. “Bald makes you look like a badass!”

  “Technically,” Alice said with some caution, “your mother killed you.”

  “Yeah.” Harry nodded. “She was a good mom. I reeeally needed to go.”

  “I’m glad you’re not sick anymore,” Lacey continued. “I hate being around sick people. Me, I died like I lived,” she said with a sneer. “Partying.”

  And without anyone asking, Lacey told us her Death Story.

  LACEY’S AWESOME LIFE AND AWFUL DEATH

  Lacey grew up on the Bowery. She was an only child, who was uninvited from all of the neighborhood playdates, one by one by one, because the wimp parents of other kids couldn’t handle her amazingness. Her favorite words were “Mine!” “No!” and “Shut up!” As she got older, she grew tired of spending so much time with her stupid parents. She got herself a circle of followers who knew, out loud and unquestionably, that she was in charge.

  Lacey loved her life. She loved her clothes, her shoes, her makeup, her jewelry, her room, her phone. She didn’t love school, but she got by. Even the teachers knew better than to mess with Lacey too much. It was never worth the loud, relentless argument that she could produce at a moment’s notice. Everyone at school followed her on Twitter and took it as a sign of cool if she allowed them to be among her many Instagram followers.

  Her tenth-grade boyfriend was pretty good. His name was Jorge. She decided to have sex with him right away, just to get it over with. It was okay, but really, what was with all that sweating and pushing? Lacey wondered what all the fuss was about. Still. Lacey and Jorge became a fixture at school.

  Jorge was a wrestler, but the school’s favorite sport was basketball. He should have known that eventually Lacey would trade up. In the middle of eleventh grade, right before Christmas, Lacey broke up with him. When they returned to school after the break, she was madly in love with a point guard named Manuel.

  Lacey was so damn happy, she couldn’t stand it. Everyone admired her, respected her, obeyed her. Including Manuel. And now, finally, at the advanced age of seventeen, she understood why the world was so crazy about sex. Manuel luxuriated in her body in ways that Jorge never had. She couldn’t wait to be alone and naked with him. Oh, Manuel, yes yes yes.

  But then she went to that party, over spring break. Everyone was there, and the apartment was packed and noisy. There was a keg, which made Lacey feel like they had infinity beer. She could have as much as she wanted. Unlike with some girls, beer didn’t make her fat. It just made her luscious. And happy. And loud. And even bolder than usual.

  “Poor Jorge,” she said. He was sitting alone on the sofa in the middle of the party, nursing a red plastic cup of beer. He looked miserable. Lacey felt her claws come out. “You should get a woman,” she advised him.

  He watched her without moving his head, just looking up from under his eyebrows. She gave him a lot more advice, most of it about how to please a woman sexually, and all the annoying things he should stop doing. “That licking my ear thing was gross!” She was really loud now. “You don’t know nothing!” Everyone was watching her, listening to her. She wished she had a microphone. They laughed and hooted. Jorge didn’t move.

  Eventually Lacey joined the group that had migrated to the roof for more space and more air. Wow, she had had a lot of beer, and a shit-ton of Doritos. She and Manuel made out for a while, but her stomach was bothering her.

  “I’ll get you more beer, baby,” he whispered. His breath tickled her ear.

  She stood up, a tiny bit unsteady. But okay. She craned her neck to the right. Through the mist, she just barely saw the glittering lights of the Brooklyn Bridge. They made her smile. She liked things that sparkled.

  “Yo, bitch!” Jorge growled behind her. Not very loud. She turned carefully. She was near the edge and just drunk enough to need to be careful.

  “You talk too much,” he said. She was about to belch in response when suddenly he shoved her. Just one clean push on the shoulder and she was flying. The belch escaped her lips in place of a scream. It took several long seconds to land, but not long enough to really enjoy the view. She landed on a car hood, setting off the alarm. A broken neck. A lot of blood. A last glimpse of sky, hoping for a sparkling star. But it was cloudy that night.

  Lacey seemed to be amped up on anger. She got up from the table and walked around. When she returned, her face was red, especially her nose. She slammed a fist on the table. “That asshole thinks he can just kill me? Me? I was supposed to rule my world. I’m not supposed to be dead. I wish we had Internet here. I guarantee you that Twitter is exploding for me right now. I wish I could see. And you wouldn’t believe the things I’d post about him. He can’t end me.”

  But he did end her. And someone ended me. And Harry. And Nick. And Alice. Someone ended all of us, and all I wanted right now was a private place to cry for an hour or a day. I didn’t want to be over. Not yet. Not like this.

  “My funeral is going to be awesome,” Lacey decreed. “Everyone misses me like crazy.” Her voice cracked as she said “crazy.” A big tear rolled down her cheek. She sniffed loudly. “And I wanna haunt Jorge’s trial. They’ll all make him pay for what he did.”

  chapter ten

  sea life and see life

  It was official. I dreamed. I wasn’t supposed to, but I did. Don’t tell anybody.

  At first, this dream was about those mall walkers. They were doing their walking thing, but this time they whispered the word “she” over and over again. “She she she she she she!” After a while, it almost sounded like a rainstorm. But then the dream changed, because that’s what dreams do.

  Now I was in Washington Square Park. It was the middle of the night, and the park was lit up with blue, silver, and deep green. I stood dead center (ha ha) near the fountain. There was a man roaming around the park sort of aimlessly. He reminded me of the mall walkers. He wore a shabby, wrinkled suit and a hat. He came a little too close, looked into my eyes, and screamed. The sound of it could shatter bones and teeth. I turned and ran. He went in search of someone else to scream at, and I gravitated back to the fountain.

  “Be careful,” said a gentle voice just to my right. Mom. Mom once again, here in my dreams. I let out a kind of squeaking sound as she hugged me.

  “Oh, Sarah,” she whispered in my ear, and managed to pull away far enough to look at me. She smoothed my hair in that motherly way. “We need to stop meeting like this!”

  “Mom? Are you really here?” I wanted to say more, but my throat was choked with tears. “Am I going to keep dreaming about you?”

  “The important part
of me is here.” She pointed to my heart and added, “Always. But you’re sort of conjuring me up. Like a dream.”

  “It’s because of the Knowing, isn’t it?” I asked. “It’s the strand that connects us. This is the Knowing rearing its ugly, useless head.”

  “Wow. What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I died,” I answered, and Mom tried very hard not to laugh at me.

  “No, I mean what happened while you were alive? After I left?” she asked. “Remember when you saved that lady in the green coat? I wonder how old her kid would be today. Did you ever save anybody else?”

  “No. I couldn’t save you, Mom. And after that, I just didn’t want to know things anymore. Besides, the Knowing was just some kind of torment. It wasn’t a gift.”

  “Sweetheart, that’s a bit childish. The gift wasn’t perfect, so you threw it away? Really?”

  I had never thought of it that way and deeply hated hearing it from her.

  “Listen to that voice inside your heart and bones,” she whispered. “It’s still there. The Knowing.” I stayed very still and listened. It gave me a stomachache, just like old times. Mom wrapped her arms around me. “You know now. You know: your dad is in danger.”

  “What do you mean? What kind of danger?” I asked.

  “Death danger. It’s all around him, like the sky,” she said.

  She was beginning to fade, and for some reason she was half-smiling at me.

  “See? This is what I hate about this Knowing thing. It’s incredibly frustrating. Why is he in danger? How? And what am I supposed to do about it? I’m already dead.”

  And I woke up.

  The mall wasn’t open yet, so I took myself downstairs, into the dark and quiet living world. When I was alive, my dreams were not this disturbing. I blamed the mall. And Bertha. And her shoes.

  The quiet of the place was almost oppressive, so I sang softly to myself. Just to fill the silence. When I was alive, music was my bf, my bff, and my chief consolation. Music still felt like my most vivid connection to Mom. Dead Mom. So I sang the same songs she sang to me in my dreams just after she died.

  Blackbird singing in the dead of night…

  “Hey!” A gruff voice shouted out, scaring me so hard that I froze in place. It was a security guard. He was super tall, with a lantern jaw and a belly that spilled over his belt. His voice was deep and oversize.

  “Somebody out here?” he asked, looking all around, at me, through me, past me.

  “I’m here,” I said tentatively, then louder. “I’m here.”

  He looked around again. I held my breath for a bit, and then I said, “Can you hear me?” He squinted in my direction. He’d heard me.

  “You’re kind of a cop,” I began, more to myself than to him. “I mean, you’re a mall cop, and that’s still a cop, right? Look, I need your help. You see, I was murdered in New York City, and…”

  He checked his watch.

  “I’m losing it,” he mumbled to himself. “Again.” He shook his head and walked away.

  “I’m here.” My voice choked. “I’m Sarah Evans. Can you hear me? Can you call my father? His name is Charlie Evans. He lives in Manhattan. Please! Can you see if he’s okay?”

  He stopped and looked back in my direction.

  “Hello?” I called in a voice that sounded a lot younger than it should have. “Charlie Evans. Just check on him? Please?”

  But he lowered his head and mumbled, “Why does everybody on the night shift go loony?”

  And then he was gone. I let the silence of the mall wrap around me like darkness.

  “Sarah? Is that you?”

  I jumped, flinched, twisted, and generally made a fool of myself when Nick’s voice shouted to me, “Come to the aquarium! It’s cool!”

  Dead girl walking with a thumping heart ready to burst out of her chest. That was me.

  There was a big sign pointing to the Sea Life Minnesota Aquarium, and when I looked in that direction, I saw a blue-green light in the distance. (And dead people should always go toward the light, right?)

  “Okay!” I shouted back, trying to sound like he hadn’t scared me half to death. (Half to life? How do I use that phrase?)

  There was a big metal gate blocking my way, and it was locked. I stood there feeling stupid and awkward, wondering how to get in. After a while, Nick called out, “You’re dead, Sarah. Just pass through the gate.”

  Of course. Sure. Obviously. I pushed my hand against the gate and felt a strange sensation. It was a bit like brushing my hand over a woolly sweater.

  My hand was on the other side of the gate. It itched. I stared at it and thought for a split second that I might have to spend eternity like this. And then I passed all the way through it.

  Wow.

  The aquarium was so enormous, you actually walked through it like you were inside a massive undersea tunnel, with the sea life all around and above you. The blue-green sweetness was enticing. Anyone who was suddenly surrounded by its beauty would instantly have to whisper, “Oooh.” And there was Nick.

  “Hey.” He grinned, looking away as a massive sea turtle drifted by. “Can’t sleep?” he asked. I nodded.

  He sat down on the floor, maybe to get a bigger picture of the sea life that floated over our heads. I was still just standing there like a complete idiot. He smiled that wicked grin and invited me to sit down across from him. (Walk three steps, Sarah, and sit down without being stupid.)

  “You’ve already been murdered, so you’ve probably been through the worst thing already. What are you so worried about, Sarah?”

  (Great. He could tell that I was worrying. About sitting down.) Never fear. I managed to sit across from Nick. Our legs bent at the knees, looking like fake mountain ranges.

  “They can hear you,” he said. “Living people can hear you. Can we please talk about that bit of weirdness?”

  “I’m not sure if anybody really did hear me,” I began, but Nick shook his head and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

  “Did that mall cop hear you just now?” he asked. I shrugged uncomfortably. He focused on me so absolutely, I felt like a creature under a microscope. Oh, to change the subject/focus, please. “It’s okay, Sarah. I won’t tell anyone. Not if you don’t want me to.”

  I believed him. There were some people you could just look at and know they were telling the truth. That was Nick. There was something solid and old-school about him. My mom and dad would have liked him.

  “I think maybe he heard me a little,” I conceded. “When I was singing.”

  “What is it about you, Sarah? You look sort of familiar to me, but I’m sure we never met when we were alive. I definitely would have remembered you.”

  Oh, and I would have remembered him. Absolutely.

  “Isn’t it amazing that we both ended up here, dead, together, at the same time?” he asked. I searched for a word stronger than “amazing,” but I gave up. “I’ll tell you a secret: Bertha almost sent me away from the mall when I first got here.”

  “Why?” I asked, a tiny bit panicked at the thought that he could actually leave this place.

  “It’s because of the way I died. After she read my questionnaire, she said that I could have gone to some spa instead of the mall. It ended up being my decision. Apparently free will is a big deal.”

  “Wow. A spa would be…,” I began, but I stopped myself from saying anything that might make him reconsider his very good decision to be here. At the mall. With me.

  “What’s your story?” he asked.

  I made myself smile. “I don’t have one.” There. True fact.

  Nick edged toward me, and I resisted the urge to make a quick and clumsy exit. I stayed. He smelled good, sort of like a tree in a rainstorm. (Why was I feeling my pulse in both hands? By definition, I had no pulse.)

  “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he whispered. His breath was soft and sweet.

  On the floor, in the dark, Nick wove a magic spell over me while a shark passed ab
ove us, its face frozen in a tragic frown.

  NICK’S DEATH STORY IS A KILLER

  Nick never knew his father, and that was fine by him. Based on what his mom said, the guy was a deadbeat. “We should never have ordered that second bottle of wine. That’s how I ended up knocked up,” she would say sometimes, then realize that she needed to add, “But I’m glad I had you, Nicky.”

  His mom dated a string of bad boyfriends. She didn’t see it, but everybody else could. The landlord would shake his head and say, “Another loser. How do they all manage to find her?”

  Nick learned early on to stay under the radar around those boyfriends, at school, anywhere. He was sort of invisible, which meant that he was safely lost in the crowd. Medium grades, medium social life. There was safety in his anonymity.

  But that changed when he was just a skinny thirteen-year-old boy. He came home to find that the latest bad boyfriend had made his mom cry, so Nick punched him and told him to get lost. Bad boyfriend punched him right back. Nick was in pain, but he didn’t cry. There was a purple swelling on his cheekbone, which made him look tough.

  That day, the boyfriend left for good. And Nick’s inner superhero was born.

  Now Nick began to stand out from the crowd, finding solutions to every problem. Sometimes he was kind of reckless, calling out bad drivers, people taking up two subway seats, and rude bicycle messengers. He embarrassed his friends and made his mother nervous.

  Nick learned to cook. And we’re not talking microwave burrito or mac and cheese. He started out making comfort food, aimed at healing his mother’s occasional broken heart. But he learned how to experiment and improvise. He enjoyed one-upping famous TV chefs. The thing about the kitchen was this: it played fair. If he combined ingredients that he liked, and cooked them long enough, but not too long, the kitchen rewarded him with pure joy.