Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (8 page)

I thought about it for a second. Nothing we’d done so far was wrong. Besides, this was what “being a friend” meant, wasn’t it? “Keeping a friend warm isn’t cheating.”

“A friend,” she said with a hint of remorse. “I could use one of those.”

An ATV sped erratically along the sand. By the hollering he was doing, he must have been pretty drunk. A policeman gave chase on a different ATV with flashing white lights and warned the man over a microphone to stop.

“So, after tonight, I’m guessing you think I’m a nutcase.”

I paused. She’d have gutted Selby if Esteban hadn’t teleported the knife away. Were it not an exchange for Debra’s life, I think I might have let her. “No. Just angry.”

Looking straight ahead, she said, “Now, do you believe I didn’t want him?”

“Yeah.”

She moved her lips underneath my chin and inhaled. “So, where does that leave us?”

Her timing couldn’t have been worse. I felt a tug at my insides, like I should say or do something about it. She’d been violated in a way I couldn’t understand. Maybe I hadn’t given our relationship its proper chance. Right now didn’t seem the right time to rekindle it, or to break off dating Rhapsody when we’d just started kicking it. In all honesty, I’d never had more than one girl interested in me at once. To balance two of them – they might as well be bombs.

At this point, if I dropped either one things would blow up in my face. So, I told the truth. “I don’t know.”

She kissed my cheek, opened the front door and sauntered inside. Lingering for a second to see if I followed her, she said, “Goodnight,” and closed the door without locking it.

I decided to stay outside for a few minutes before going back inside and trying to get some shut eye. It was a peaceful night, except for the occasional chilling breeze and the roaring, hissing surf. The moonlight shone on the beach and reflected off of the water. I watched as a couple ran into the water for a late night swim. They probably wouldn’t have suits on for long, so it was a good thing nobody could see them in the shadows.

Right before I was about to go inside, I heard a sound, like a woman yelling my name.

The couple continued splashing. Didn’t they hear it? Was that my imagination? I rubbed my eyes. The goose bumps on my flesh were real. The only thing warm on my body was the base of my neck where the prisms were. I wasn’t dreaming. This was happening.

Selby had led someone else to us, and she was screaming for me.

Following the path of the sound, I pinned it to a large rock, high and steep enough to be a bluff about a quarter mile away. I couldn’t detect the outline of a person in the smothering darkness, but she was there.

“Ja-son!” She cried out again. The next time was longer, more desperate. “Ja-son!”

How could someone be shouting loud enough for me to hear it that far away? Another superhuman? Great. Should I wake the others? I should wake them. Hadn’t the noise done it? The entire house was dark. I probably should have gotten them, but I didn’t.

Squaring my shoulders to its general direction, I took a giant leap and landed near the rock. In the shadows, I could only tell it was a small person wearing white, a woman perhaps?

Angry, I asked her, “What do you want?”

“You.” Her voice was so tender, I thought she might be an angel from my dreams.

She came closer, moving a little too fast for my liking. I balled my fists and rushed, tackling her into the sand. Grabbing her slender arms, I circled around and tossed her. She flailed and landed somewhere miles away. I readied to fly after her but she beat me to it, jumping from wherever I had thrown her. Her dirt-smeared face looked familiar in the moonlight. So did her tattered dress and the round aquamarine hanging around her neck.

“What was that about, throwing me halfway up the boardwalk? Jason, how am I doing these things?” Shocked, she pointed to her aquamarine. “This? Do you have one, too?”

My mouth dropped. She was playing dumb. She couldn’t be the person I had begun to think she was.

I'd almost fallen for this trick in the hospital. However Taylor came back to life, this time she wasn’t fooling me. I shoulder-tackled her and wailed at her face with punches she mostly dodged. The ones I landed didn’t seem to do much damage. She timed one of my punches so well that she grabbed my wrist, twisted it and head-butted me. “Why are you hitting me? Stop fighting me, Junior!”

What? She'd called me “Junior,” which pissed me off even more. I stumbled back, stunned and disoriented more than wounded. Taylor had matched me in strength and possessed the same powers. Our last fight had been short, but if she kept this up, I’d have to figure out a different way to win. Cursing at her, I yelled back, “Then stop screwing with my head!”

She approached me, hands up, as if she was surrendering. “You think I’m someone named ‘Taylor’?”

I backed up. “Yeah. King sent you. Who else would you be?”

Her lips parted into a smile. God, I'd missed that smile. “Your mother, of course.”

This was a new low, a twisted mind game for King to play with me. My mother being back from the dead was impossible. “Really?” I said with fake enthusiasm. “Yay! When were you born, Mom?”

“November 8 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”

She could’ve found that out from the Internet. “Favorite perfume?”

“Nora Hristoff’s ‘Fantasy’. You kept finding it on my bureau, no matter where I hid it, and you sprayed it all over yourself because you liked the flowery smell. The first time you did it your dad was furious because it cost a hundred dollars a bottle.”

The revelation was a punch to the gut. Not many people knew that about me, and it was unlikely Taylor could’ve read my mother’s mind and plotted to use it three years later. She did use to keep it on her bureau – a hand-carved teak relic Ray had purchased from Mexico.

“Alright,” I said, crossing my arms. “Then tell me about the day you died.”

White moonlight reflected off of her dress, which looked exactly like the one she’d been buried in. Her hair had large clumps of a substance in it. “You really want to hear that?”

I repeated the question. “How did you die,
Mom?”

“It was a Monday morning,” she said. “Ray sat with me all Sunday night. He wouldn’t go back to the house and hold you home from school, though I told him to. He knew.”

I swallowed hard. Ray screamed at me that morning to get myself together and go to school. I got ready, faked catching the bus, and ditched school until third lunch – which is when the school nurse finally caught up with me and informed me my mother was dead.

“Morphine had me in and out of consciousness. Ray phoned Aunt Dee, and she brought her best friend, Debra. I told both of them to take care of my baby.” She stopped telling the story to wipe away the tears streaming down her face. Managing a chuckle, she finished with, “Ray doesn’t know anything about raising somebody’s child, not even his own.”

Fighting the urge to hug her, I put my hands in my pockets. “Is it really you?”

She nodded, using a nickname only she called me. “Yes, Boogie, it’s me.”

I dropped to my knees in the sand and collapsed into a fit of tears. Soon a pair of slender, cold hands comforted me. I sobbed even harder. It was too difficult to believe.
My mother’s alive?
Wouldn’t that make her a zombie? She hadn’t tried to eat my brain, and she spoke like a regular human being. Her skin was rough, but
real
– she wasn’t an angel or a demon. Nor was she an assassin. She could have easily killed me by now if she was.

There was an agenda at hand and the Collective was probably involved. It always was. But for this brief glimpse of a perfect moment I didn’t care if it cost me my life.

I hugged my mother and she held me.

We stayed this way for minutes, saying, “I missed you,” trading sniffles and embracing. I didn’t smell her neck because there’s no way she had on perfume. Mud matted her hair down, which I realized was the wig the undertaker had fitted onto her head. I stifled the chill in my body, the one that came from this thought – she’d gotten muddy from climbing out of her casket. Chemotherapy robbed her of the hair I had been used to seeing her wear. All the skin on her body was rough, not just that on her hands. Guess that comes with being dead for a long time.

As we walked back in the direction of the Anderson house, I held her hand. I’d seen a lot of weird things over the past few months, but a resurrected mother topped them all. I’d dreamt of a day like this, when I’d touch her again and get to talk to her face-to-face. I always imagined it would be in heaven, or whatever waited for me after I died. Turns out, I didn’t have to wait that long.

CHAPTER EIGHT

breakfast and bullets

Mom answered my questions as quickly as I could ask them. No, she didn’t remember heaven or seeing God. Nothing after closing her eyes and taking her last breath in the hospital.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she reminded me, “because I don’t remember a hell either. Everything I taught you, everything we believe in, it’s still true.”

I’m not sure I believed that, after seeing what I’d seen. Did God ignore my prayers?
Is He cruel or sarcastic? Am I too big of a screw up for even Him to save?

“I woke up and saw this on my chest,” she said of the aquamarine stone. “This strength it gives me, it’s
amazing
. I dug myself out. Good thing it was pitch black by then.”

I digested the whole “dug-myself-out-of-my-own-grave” part of the story.

Unbelievable. The aquamarine, the same one that had poisoned her with cancer was responsible for her revival.

I have no mental filters, so the questions kept coming. “Can I feel your heartbeat?”

Mom shrugged her shoulders and extended her right hand. “Here. Take my pulse.” She showed me how to place my fingers over her wrist.

I held my breath and waited. And waited.

She giggled, moving my fingers further along her arm. “No, silly. Down here.”

Her dry skin had the texture of rough leather. I detected the steady throb. Curious, I checked my own pulse. They sounded almost the same. This was confusing. She’s alive with a pulse but
dead?

Hand-in-hand, we walked along the wet sand, letting the chilled white foam from the incoming surf lap at our bare feet. The saline in the air revived me. I wouldn’t sleep tonight and didn’t feel as if I needed to do so. Off in the distance, I spotted Sasha’s darkened house. I slowed my pace. I was in no rush to explain this to my friends. “That way,” I said, pointing in the summer home’s general direction. “We’re going to my friend Sasha’s house.”

Her eyebrows raised. “Is Sasha a foreign boy or a girl?” She knew Sasha was a girl. She just wanted me to say it.

“Girl. Ex-girlfriend, if you’re wondering.”

“Ray let you have a girlfriend?”

I huffed. “I don’t live with him. And I’m almost sixteen.”

“Oh.”

Time had passed for me, but I had been a twelve-year-old the last time my mom and I had seen one another. Even though I wasn’t allowed to, I had my first girlfriend at that age. She was an Indian girl with long hair. We didn’t do anything much. She kissed me like my old neighbor who pecked everyone she knew on the mouth.

“I live in Grandma Barbara’s house with Debra. You know, Aunt Dee’s best friend. Oh yeah, and my little brother, Zachary. Ray gave up custody of me right after you…went away.”

Mom stopped with a crazed look in her face. “He did what? Who’s Zachary’s mother?”

“Debra. He divorced her and married a woman named Julia months ago.”

She cursed my father with words I’d never heard her use. “I’m sorry,” she said, covering her mouth. “Your father, he…he named his son Zachary? And Julia Mosri? The intern? I knew she was trouble when he hired her. The things she wears.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t see what the big deal was over a simple name. “Why are you so angry?”

Mom didn’t answer me. Whatever he had done cut her deep. She kept quiet for a while. Thinking about it all, her reaction made sense, though. Mom and Ray dated for many years prior to getting married. She'd trusted Debra to take care of me, not her husband. I don’t know why Zachary, or his name, upset her. I didn’t want to ask.

As we continued our stroll, the horizon brightened on the edges. Was it that late? I didn’t have much time to come up with a reasonable explanation. Nothing I said made sense. Though if all of the aquamarines brought back the dead, I could see why it could cause problems in King’s hands. I didn’t like it, but we had to leave the beach house and get help. The people who could do something about it might not be on our side.

I couldn’t take the quiet anymore. “My new girlfriend’s name is Rhapsody,” I said. “You’ll get to meet her soon.”

She jerked her head back. “What kind of mother names her child ‘Rhapsody’?”

“Yeah, but it fits her.” I remembered that she and Rhapsody’s father George worked at the same factory. “Did you know George Lowe? He worked at the factory, too.”

She slapped at her head. I’d seen girls with braids do that because they itched. It looked every bit as crazy when she did it. “Name sounds familiar. That place was a pit, Jason. After a while, everybody started looking angry, or sick and depressed.”

I didn’t tell her about the Collective or why she and George got cancer in the first place. Not now. The timing seemed off. Her deep brown eyes searched my face for answers. She could tell I was hiding something. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to talk about it. And she couldn’t read my mind.

Mom sighed and said, “We never did to get to have a talk about girls.”

Of all the conversations I wanted to have with her over the past three years, that wasn’t one of them. I waved my hand. “No, please. Debra filled me in. Condoms, vaginas, I get it.”

“Not about that,” she said, laughing and smacking her head. “Dating and who to date. And abstinence, not condoms. No sex until marriage.”

Marriage? Was she for real?
Who does that anymore?
I wondered about how much I knew about the opposite sex. I didn’t think she’d have a problem with me taking out Rhapsody – nobody else did. I didn’t have enough friends to judge me over hooking up with a Goth. Anyway, she had left her punk clothes and makeup at home. There was no danger of that throwing my mom’s judgment off. It was a part of who she was, and while I wasn’t into everything she liked, we got along well.

Mom slapped at her wig until it became lopsided. She took it off and with a primal yell, chucked it far into the ocean. Beneath it, her black hair was curled and cropped. “That thing itched like a nest of biting mosquitoes,” she said, brushing her hand through her scalp.

We stood at the wooden ramp to Sasha’s house. “Come on up,” I said, making a “come here” motion with my index finger. “We’ll figure this thing out, together.”

She shook her head. “Go up and do it without me. I’ll be right here.”

“I’ve done everything without you for three years.”

Mom gave me a strong hug. “I’m not leaving you again. I promise.”

“Neither am I. Kick the sand off of your feet. Sasha’s sensitive about that.”

She dragged her feet all the way up the wooden porch. We walked inside. Sasha was waiting for me. She’d kept the door unlocked. Wrapped in a rust orange comforter, she had dozed off on the couch.

The sound of the hinges startled her awake. Bleary eyed and half asleep, she slurred her words. “Who’s this?”

There was no other way to answer her question. “My mom.”

“Say what?” Sasha yawned and gathered herself, still cocooned in her blanket. After rubbing her eyes, she found herself staring at my mother’s tattered dress and the aquamarine hanging around her neck.
A resurrection might be the strangest thing to happen since we got our powers
. “I’m assuming she’s not the next person to try and kill us in disguise.”

“No. Not before breakfast, anyway,” I quipped.

“I’m Anna Champion. You must be Sasha.”

My mother and Sasha shook hands. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Ma’am,” she said.

“No ‘ma’am’. Miss Anna is fine with me.”

I told Sasha everything I knew, from planting the aquamarine in the dirt to fighting Mom near the rock bluff. Sasha shifted her weight back and forth from leg to leg, thinking. This was a game changer for everything.

“I wondered what you did with that after Courtney slipped it to you.” She pointed at my mother’s neck. “King wants to use those to reunite the Collective, I’m guessing.”

Some of the group members, including his wife, died in Carrington – a solar storm in 1859 that made the green emerald, scarlet emerald, goshenite, heliodor, aqua-marine, and morganite source crystals explode. The remaining eight members split up.

What did he have planned beyond a reunion? World domination? Again? What for? While Sasha and I were talking, my mom toyed with the decayed fringes of her dress.

The lace edging crumbled into powder as she moved it around between her fingers. She’d need something else to wear.

Sasha noticed me staring at Mom and shot me a look telling me to stop. “Miss Anna, let’s go down the hall and get you something else to wear. It looks like we’re close to the same size.”

I took the opportunity to wake the others without startling them. I tapped Esteban’s shoulder and he teleported himself away. A second later he popped back into the room. “Sorry, dude. I’m a light sleeper. I’m up.”

“Good. We’re out.”

He nodded in agreement.

I left him to go to Rhapsody’s room. In a perfect world, we would have shared this bed and spent half the night hooking up in it. That was before my enemy delivered an ultimatum and my mother rose from the dead. She was fast asleep and snoring, her mouth open enough to show her two front teeth. Undeniably cute and hard to resist, too bad I didn’t have a cell phone anymore. I’d have taken a picture and looked at it when we were apart.

Kneeling on the bed, I touched Rhapsody’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Hey.”

She moaned, her eyes still closed. Curling into a tighter ball, she said one word. “No.”

“We gotta go.”

“Two minutes. Get in.”

“Can’t.”

Rhapsody flung back the covers. “World won’t collapse in a hundred seconds. Get in.”

Two minutes wouldn’t hurt, would they? I obliged her and slipped into the bed. We kissed for longer than that. Rhapsody moved my hands to her back where her bikini was tied. With my finger wrapped in one of its bows, I became aware of a presence behind us. My lips stopped moving. Rhapsody vanished. Was it Sasha or my mom? Which would be worse? “Yeah?”

Mom’s warm alto voice oozed with disappointment. “I’m off to the shower. You two better get dressed.”

I hopped out of bed and walked into the hallway. Still in her burial dress, my mother followed behind me, I guess to make sure I didn’t double back to the bedroom. My invisible girlfriend could follow me anywhere without being detected. She didn’t think of that.

We took turns in the bathroom – my mother used the one in the master bathroom, and Sasha used the one Esteban, Rhapsody, and I had shared. I watched TV with Esteban while we waited. Rhapsody still hadn’t materialized. It wasn’t that bad. We'd had all of our clothes on.

Sasha wrapped up her shower before my mom did. Then Rhapsody, Esteban, and I had showered. All four of us were in our bodysuits and Mom still hadn’t come out. She’d been in there so long that the hot water ran out and I had to wash in ice cold water. Though invulnerable skin shields me against both extremes, hot and cold, it was uncomfortable.

Fully dressed, Rhapsody dropped her disappearing act. She combed her fingers through her stringy wet hair and sat on the couch between me and Esteban. “Well, this is a story for the grandkids,” she joked. “My boyfriend’s dead mother caught us hooking up.”

“Whoa!” Esteban broke from his television-watching trance. “What?”

Out loud it sounded ridiculous. I played along. “At least you weren’t topless.”

“Yeah. There’s that,” she said, rolling her eyes.

I told them about leaving the aquamarine in front of Mom’s grave. They listened. When I finished telling the story, the one thing Rhapsody said was, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

Why hadn’t I? From the start I hadn’t thought it would work. The only cases of resurrection I’d ever heard of were in the Bible and I wasn’t sure they were true. I think I someone would’ve mentioned Jesus wearing a radioactive aquamarine on Easter Sunday.

I didn’t know about the others, but I was ready to eat a serious amount of food.

Cooking meant shopping. Shopping equaled delay. And we couldn’t wait long.

Someone knocked at the door, yelling “delivery.” I checked the time on the TV screen. It wasn’t even seven-thirty yet. I stood up and unlocked the deadbolt. Must be nice to be rich.

Without warning, a force from the other side pushed the door open. It caught me off-guard. I lost my balance and tumbled to the floor. Police. One of them yanked my arms behind my back and restrained my wrists with metal cuffs.

“Careful,” he shouted to his partners while straddling my back. “They might be armed.” With my face pressed to the hardwood floor, I couldn’t tell anyone’s whereabouts. Two more officers went ahead of us, while two of them stayed back. The officer read me my rights, keeping my face mashed on the cool wooden floor. When I broke free and flew off, I wouldn’t need either of them identifying me.

I read the arresting officer’s thoughts. His last name was McCoy. Joyce had reported her credit card stolen. The cops had tracked the Chinese food receipt to this address. Joyce had blamed it on a credit card scam in the area, not Sasha.
Is she trying to protect her daughter?

McCoy pulled me to my feet. Before he could see my face I snapped the handcuffs and pulled my mask down. By the shock registering in McCoy’s eyes, he’d never seen a human being do that before. With prisms, I was more than a short, skinny kid.