I Woke Up Dead at the Mall (5 page)

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.

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.

“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.”

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 above 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.

In his junior year he met Fiona. Or rather, he saw her. A lot. She was an A-plus student (compared to his lengthy B-minus track record, because he never thought that future chefs required amazing report cards). She played varsity volleyball. She was president of the Drama Club. Nick was determined to get to know her. So. He auditioned for the school production of
Our Town
. He didn't get the part, but he managed to kiss Fiona in the audition. And she took notice.

Their first date was on a warm spring night. He took her to a hipster coffee place downtown after dinner and a movie. They stayed out much later than she was supposed to. Life was so damn sweet.

The guy who mugged them was short. He was sweating, and his voice was thin. He seemed more scared than Fiona or Nick. His hands shook. Maybe that thick metal gun was too heavy for him. Nick stood in front of Fiona, who didn't want to be protected.

“You don't scare me,” she hissed at the guy.

“Okay, okay, everybody stay calm.” Nick used his most soothing voice. “Here's the money. Here's everything. Just take it.” He was talking directly to the gun. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His inner superhero knew that this gun contained the Nick version of kryptonite.

But then the guy went for Fiona's necklace. And she wasn't going to give it up.

“Oh please,” Fiona said. “What are you going to do, shoot us?”

The guy sort of grunted and raised his gun a little higher, a little more forward. Nick grabbed Fiona's arm and pulled her as they tried to outrun a bullet. Or die trying.

“Ohhh!” Fiona cried.

That's the last thing Nick heard, if you didn't count the gunshot. He wasn't sure if he heard that or not. Maybe he heard his own head hit the ground. Maybe.