On the Day I Died (11 page)

“Don’t look into the mirror!” I cried.

But it was too late. In its flawless surface Blanche stared at her lovely face, transfixed by her own reflection. “Didn’t I tell you so, Evelyn? This mirror is exceptional.” She turned to admire her profile from the left, and then the right. She smiled at herself, sure and proud of her beauty.
The sin of vanity
.

And the mirror began to draw her in. Little by little, she withdrew into the glass as if sinking into a pool of darkening water.

Fixing my eyes on her face, refusing even to look in the mirror’s direction, I grabbed her about the waist. I pulled with all my strength, but gained no ground. She sank deeper and deeper. I was losing her!

Her lips were still pressed into a smile, although her eyes were no longer filled with self-admiration. Now they were welling up with fear and confusion. But she did not struggle. It was as if she was frozen, becoming as solid as the surface of the glass. And yet she was still
beautiful. So beautiful. All golden perfection. The special one.

It was so unfair
.

And suddenly, behind Blanche’s diminishing reflection, I saw my own—raw envy etched into my expression.

The sin of envy
.

Unable to tear my eyes away, I could only stare deep into the mirror.

Now the gallery was reflected to me, everything distorted and listing crazily. The curtains billowed and undulated. The wind moaned. And I felt the grip of the mirror. Its embrace was strangely warm. Gentle. So gentle. My mind objected, but my body surrendered. I felt myself descending, disappearing.

But before I was entirely gone, I willed myself to do one last thing—something I had never done before. With my last ounce of strength, I reached out and found Blanche’s hand in the growing darkness. I grasped it. A heartbeat passed; then her lace-covered fingers entwined with mine.

We had come into the world separately.

But we would leave together.

The mist was deeper now, lying over the cemetery like a shroud, and from the deep shadows emerged another girl. Mike blinked. Why hadn’t he noticed her before? She, too, had on a long skirt, but where Evelyn’s was
gray and simply made, this girl’s was red, elaborately ruffled and topped by a lace blouse and matching gloves.

“Blanche?” ventured Mike.

The ghost smiled prettily, then moved confidently through the swirling mist to sit beside her sister on the urn-shaped stone. “You told the story extremely well, Evelyn. I couldn’t have done better myself.” Reaching up, she wiped away Evelyn’s crystalline tears. “Honestly, I don’t know why you’re crying.”

“Because it is sad,” said Evelyn. “It is a sad story.”

“Sad?” guffawed Johnnie. “You dames deserved what you got.”

Scott sighed. “Let’s not start
that
again.”

“Death stories are always sad,” interjected Gina. “No matter if it’s murder, or monsters, or arson, they’re all sad.”

“It’s not the events that make them sad,” said Scott, “it’s what they represent.”

Johnnie raised his eyebrows. “Come again, wise guy?”

“Our lives ended way too early,” explained Scott. “Think of all the things we missed out on. All the things we’ll never experience.”

“Like learning to drive a car,” said David, his voice full of disappointment.

“Or going to college,” Scott added wistfully.

“I refuse to think about it,” said Evelyn. She jumped
to her feet. “The only way to bear it is to
not
think about it.”

“Dead and gone,” whispered Johnnie.

The cemetery grew so quiet, Mike could hear himself breathing. There was no other sound now. Not the moaning of the wind, or the creaking of a tree branch. He felt the ghosts’ sadness and longing deep within his own bones and wished he could help them. But there was nothing he could do, nothing except …

“Does anyone else have a story to tell?” he asked.

A girl stepped into the circle of moonlight. “I do.”

I
T WASN’T A CRUSH. It wasn’t puppy love. I knew what love was—
real
love. After all, I’d been reading about it for years—
Much Ado About Nothing
,
Romeo and Juliet
,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. In fact, I’d read all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays and all one hundred and fifty-four of his sonnets. You could say I’d gorged myself on Shakespeare (which is way better than gorging yourself on a bag of Milky Way miniatures), and if there was one thing I knew after all that reading, it was this: I
loved
Collin. With all my heart. And I knew I would love him until the end of time.

We didn’t meet until our senior year—not surprising, considering there were about three thousand kids at Schaumburg High School. Our paths never crossed, fate never intervened, until the semester we both signed up for drama class—me because of my obsession with the Bard of Avon, Collin because he needed an honors elective.

“Lily,” said Mrs. Childress on our second day of class, “would you read the role of Juliet, please?”

I cleared my throat, took a moment to think—
really
think—about the music of William Shakespeare’s passionate words.

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?

I paused then, and looked up from the page. And there he was!
My
Romeo,
my
Collin. He sat by the window wearing a pair of tan cargo pants and a yellow-and-green-striped rugby shirt, his black hair glinting in the afternoon sunlight, his lips as red and inviting as the apple I’d had for lunch.

As usual, I was on a diet.

Oh, and his eyes. Did I tell you about his eyes? They were a brilliant blue, but not the blue of my favorite Abercrombie dress, the one that looked a little like the outfit Cleopatra was wearing the day she kissed Antony goodbye for the last time. No, Collin’s eyes were a brimming blue, as if on the verge of tears, and the sunlight streaming through the window danced on that blue like shimmer on a lake.

There are moments that stop the heart, you know?
Moments that seize your breath and halt the flow of your blood in your veins, and the clock stops—time stops—and you wait for something to bring you back again. And what brought me back was my name on his lips:

“Lily? What are you staring at? Do I have food in my teeth or something?”

O, speak again, bright angel!

And I knew. Just like Romeo knew the first time he beheld Juliet, or like Petruchio when he spied shrewish Katharina hurling a vase. Love had come crashing across the cosmos. Unknown. Unhoped for. Unexpected. Yet in a twinkling I understood that
this
was forever.

I stumbled through the rest of the passage, through the rest of the period. Then the bell rang and he crossed the room toward me.
For me
. His aftershave, spicy and exotic, invaded my senses, making my heart pulse wildly and my head whirl.

“Want to hang out tonight?” he asked.

I wanted to leap with joy, or run around in circles, or sing a song, or write a poem.

“Yes,” I whispered, because I couldn’t speak any louder.

After that day, Collin and I were always together—in the school cafeteria, in the hallway between classes, at the movies, the mall, each other’s houses. We carried
each other’s pictures in our wallets; spent Sunday afternoons bicycling together through Busse Woods; read to each other from our favorite books—mine
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
, Collin’s
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
. We discovered that it drove Collin nuts when I clicked my pen against my teeth while studying. We agreed that it was okay for me to listen to Sarah McLachlan and for him to listen to Jay-Z just as long as the other person wasn’t around. And we figured out that Collin should always stop for our soy sugar-free cinnamon dolce lattes
before
picking me up for school because I wasn’t a morning person, and that I should bake snicker doodles for him at least once a month because they were his absolute favorite—another of true love’s sacrifices because I was, like I said, dieting.

And then?

Life shattered.

We were coming home from the library that Saturday—Collin and me and his younger brother, Drew, when we saw a clutch of leftover birthday balloons waving from a mailbox. A handmade sign propped against a harvest-gold recliner read
GARAGE SALE
. Beyond it, a ton of junk stretched from the depths of a double garage, out onto the driveway and across the expanse of lawn.

All that glisters is not gold
.

Drew leaned over the front seat, a lock of his dark hair falling over the sprinkling of acne that had just recently cropped up on his forehead. “Hey, c’mon, you guys, let’s stop,” he begged.

Drew had a real thing for garage sales, especially the half-built car model kits you could sometimes find at them. Afterward, he would spend hours putting all those tiny plastic pieces together, the nostril-searing stink of model glue oozing out from under his bedroom door.

“Do you think my brother’s a nerd?” Collin had once asked me.

“Yes,” I had replied, “but a sweet nerd.”

Now Collin pulled over to the curb. He had barely stopped before Drew had the door open and was loping away in hot pursuit of treasure. We followed along behind, hand in hand, happy just to be together.

A dozen or so people milled around. Some poked through the racks of out-of-style dresses and jackets; others riffled through laundry baskets of used kitchen utensils or pawed over piles of stained baby clothes. I looked around for the stack of paperback books. Every garage sale has them, and sometimes I could actually find a dog-eared copy of
Macbeth
, or the Cliffs Notes version of
All’s Well That Ends Well
. That’s when I caught a glimpse of myself in a dresser mirror.

“Tell me the truth,” I said to Collin, “do I look fat to you?”

“You’re kidding, right?” he said, kissing my forehead.

“No, seriously.”

Collin’s eyes sparkled. “If you’re fat, you’re fat in all the right places.”

I poked him in the stomach just as Drew hollered,
“Hey, guys, check
this
out.” Stumbling around the tired furniture and jumbled tables of mismatched silverware and cast-off jewelry, he held out something dark and gnarled.

The thing was a knot of furrowed leather that sprouted five wrinkled fingers, each tipped with a cracked yellow nail. The fingers curved into a sort of agonized claw—a hideous mummy’s claw fringed with long black fur.

“What is it?” said Collin.

“
That
is a genuine, bona fide monkey’s paw,” came a voice from behind us.

We turned.

The garage sale’s organizer stood there, a plump middle-aged woman wearing a red velour sweat suit and gold sandals. She had just put on fresh lipstick, and when she grinned at us, her mouth looked like it was bleeding.