The Rest of Us Just Live Here (12 page)

The cop turns off his flashlight. I hear Henna breathing, and I reach out in the darkness to take her hand. She must hear me breathing, too, because she’s already reaching out to take mine.

The cop takes off his sunglasses.

In the pitch darkness, his eyes are glowing. Glowing blue. Just like the deer.

All around us in the night, the other cops take off their sunglasses, too. A circle of glowing blue eyes watch us in the silence.

“Go,” Henna whispers. “Just go.”

I shift into drive, but the cop’s hand shoots in
way
faster than should be possible and grips my arm, hard enough to hurt.

And he’s pointing his gun in my face.

For a long minute, all I can see is the barrel of that gun.

“You aren’t the ones we want,” he frowns, sounding disappointed. He lowers the gun, puts his sunglasses back on and moves away. Out there, in the darkness, the blue lights disappear two by two.

I don’t wait. I step on the gas and with a burning of wheels, we race off into the night.

“Mike,” Henna says.

“I know,” I say.

“Mike,”
she says again, just saying my name, not asking anything. I don’t even know where I’m going, I’m just driving as fast as I can away and away.

I hear Henna say, “I’ve never been so happy not to be an indie kid in my entire life.”

She starts crying, and we do that for a while, just drive and cry.

Mainly out of relief for being alive.

Things get darker in the days after the cop incident.

There are two more dead indie kids. I didn’t really know either of them, except to see them in the hallway at school, but still. “This is worse than when they were all dying beautifully of cancer,” Henna said, and she’s right.

The cops are calling one a suicide and the other a car accident.

The cops are saying this.

And why should we doubt the cops?

Henna and I told Mel and Jared and, fine, Nathan what happened, but none of us told our parents. How could we? My dad’s automatically out of everything important. (I’m not even sure I’ve seen him this week, just evidence – discarded clothes, snoring – that he’s in the house somewhere.) My mom’s in pre-campaign mode, which is probably not the best time to tell her the local policemen have gone crazy and are threatening her son. (I told her I broke the mirror hitting a mailbox; she just sighed and handed me the insurance forms.) Henna’s parents would pack her off to a convent, and even Mr Shurin would be overly concerned and get involved in all the wrong ways.

We’re just going to stick together and tough it out and try to live long enough to graduate. The usual.

The surviving indie kids disappeared from school for a bit. No one knows where they went. No one knows what they saw there. No one knows why they all came back on the Friday.

They won’t tell us what’s going on, even when we ask them.

“What’d they say?” Jared asks Mel over lunch.

“That we wouldn’t understand,” Mel says, frowning like she’s about to fire the world from a job it loves. “But one of them showed me a poem about how we’re all essentially alone. As if they’re not the biggest clique of togetherness that ever was.”

Everyone knows the indie kids don’t use the internet – have you noticed? They never do, it’s weird, like it never occurs to them, like it’s still 1985 and there’s only card catalogues – so we can’t find them discussing anything online. The vibe seems to be that it’s totally not our business. Historically, non-indie kids were pretty much left alone by the vampires and the soul-eating ghosts, so maybe they have a point.

But the deer who caused our accident. And the zombie deer coming out of Henna’s car. And the scary cops. It’s like when adults say world news isn’t our worry. Why the hell isn’t it?

“They don’t look like you,” Mel says, when the prints of my senior photos come in. “I mean, not even a little.”

I didn’t bother with digital files; I knew they were going to be gruesome. The prints are meant to go into my graduation announcements, the ones with that pointless extra bit of tissue paper and double envelope you send to relatives in the hope they send back money. But maybe even that’s out.

“You could be your second cousin, maybe,” Henna says, leaning against the counter at the drugstore. We’ve stopped by Mel’s work to check up on her, even though it’s broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.

“We don’t have
any
cousins,” I say. “Dad’s an only child and Uncle Rick doesn’t have kids.”

Henna blinks. “I’ve got like forty.”

“Excuse me,” a skinny, scraggly man says behind us.

“For methadone you need to talk to the pharmacist,” Mel says, without even looking up from the photos.

“You’re not the pharmacist?” the man asks.

We all turn to him. He kind of freaks out at the attention, pulling his arms around the heavy-metal T-shirt that hangs from his collarbones and shuffling away to the pharmacy counter at the back.

“Poor guy,” Mel says. She goes back to my pictures. “You look like a court artist’s drawing of yourself on the stand.”

Henna gasps. “You
do
look like that.”

I move closer to her, pretending to get nearer to my photos. I brush my arm against her arm. It’s elementary school shit, but she doesn’t move away. It’s been over a week since the cops stopped us, but we haven’t kissed again or even really talked about it. We’ve spent a lot of time together, but all in the company of our friends. Still, the thing with the cops was so threatening and bizarre and unexplained, it made kissing seem kind of childish. For the moment, at least.

“At least you can’t see the scar,” I say.

Jared’s hands have helped the stitches already come out, but without slabs of make-up, there’s still a hoof-made gash in my face. It’ll heal more, I know, but the scar ain’t going anywhere.

“It’s going to be fine,” Mel says. “Once the redness is gone, it might even look kind of amazing.”

“Nobody really sees scars after the first time,” Henna says. “Not anyone who matters, anyway.”

“Yeah,” I say, flatly, “people who make fun of my face probably aren’t my friends.”

Henna reaches up and traces her fingers lightly over it, running down from the tip below my cheekbone, over the wider part on the flat of my cheek, to the little curlicue on the side of my chin. “It’s still you,” she says. “Everyone will be able to see
you
.”

She keeps her fingers there for a second. Yeah, I really want to kiss her again.

“Um,” the scraggly man says, back at the main counter while his prescription gets filled. “Could I get a pack of Marlboro?”

Mel grabs a pack off the rows of cancer-addled faces and tumoured lungs in the racks behind her and rings it up. The man is still so obviously shy of us, he fumbles with his money, dropping a five-dollar bill on the ground. I lean to get it, but Henna’s better placed. She lifts it up to him.

“I know you,” the man whispers, not looking her in the face. He slides the five plus another ten at my sister.

“You do?” Henna asks.

The man looks at her once, then away again, shyly. “Teemu,” he says.

Henna slumps like her clothes suddenly weigh an extra hundred pounds. “Erik?” she says. “Erik Peddersen?”

The scraggly man nods.

“Oh, Jesus,” Henna says, under her breath, but out of surprise, not scorn. The scraggly man blushes anyway.

“Strange shit going on,” he says, still not making eye contact.

“I don’t think it’s vampires,” Henna says.

“No,” Erik says, firmly. “They’d have come for me if it was.”

There’s an empty, silent moment, where no one’s blinking and Erik is obviously growing more uncomfortable. Then “Number Nine,” says the voice of Pratip, the pharmacist, over the loudspeaker, and Erik immediately heads off without looking at us again. We watch him go.

“Friend of your brother’s?” Mel gently asks.

“In his band,” Henna says. “Haven’t seen him since it all ended. Guess he had a hard time coping.”

She pulls her good arm into herself, almost visibly shrinking. I put my own arm around her, and she leans into me. I kind of hate myself for thinking how nice it is.

“That won’t be us,” Mel says, meaning Erik. “Whatever happens, that’s not going to be us.”

And she says it like she’s demanding a promise.

“Your sister is like a cute little robot,” Tina, our manager, says. “I just want to eat her right up.”

Meredith sits alone at a booth in Grillers. Jared’s piled the table in front of her – the part not covered in homework and school hardware – with enough cheesy toast and blueberry lemonade to ruin every Jazz & Tap class she’s ever taken.

“I want a kid,” Tina says, looking at her hungrily from the waitress station.

“Get one from Ronald,” Jared says, stealing a fry from a plate.

“He’s
infertile
.” She whispers it louder than her normal speaking voice.

“You should adopt,” Jared says. “Adoption is a moral good.”

Tina makes a face. “Yeah, because Ronald’s exactly the kind of guy who makes a good impression on a social worker.” She sighs, looking around Grillers. “Grumpy night. Everyone’s in a bad mood.”

She’s right about that. I’ve had more complaints tonight than I’ve had in the last six months. One guy even sent back his
water
.

“There’s a weird feeling in the air, isn’t there?” Tina says. “All those kids killing themselves at the high school.” Jared and I exchange a look but don’t correct her. “You can feel it when you’re driving home at night. God knows what could be out there in those woods.”

Tina would have been twenty or so when the soul-eating ghosts came, so just that little bit too old to be directly involved. Still, you always wonder how much people know and just don’t say. Or pretend not to know. Or purposely forget.

Meredith leans out of her booth to catch my eye, even though she sat in Jared’s section. He’s more generous with the blueberry lemonade. I go over to her.

“What’s up?”

She shows me her pad and swipes through a bunch of web pages. “There’s nothing about it on the main news sites, not even if you search.”

“You shouldn’t be looking anyway. Leave it to me and Mel to take care of–”

“But if you go to the right places,” she says, ignoring me and opening a few locked-door discussion rooms on weird boards for things like obscure Japanese toys and underground video games. She turns the pad to me, several windows open.

I want to keep scolding her, but I can’t help but scan the pages. Lots of references to
blue eyes
and
indie kids dying
and
the Immortals
. Lots about
the Immortals
.

“Most of it’s speculation,” Meredith says. “‘Immortals’ could mean a lot of things, but people are thinking maybe a kind of multi-dimensional thing. Or elves. Or angels, even. And the blue lights are an energy that kills you or brings you back to life or something. I’ll bet that’s what the deer were running from.” She sinks her chin down to her hands on the table. “Nobody knows for sure because the indie kids aren’t talking to anybody but themselves. It’s happening a lot of places, though. In some version or another.”

“Just like the vampires,” I say, almost to myself. Then I see her worried little face. “But you’ve got nothing to worry about. They never come after little mites like you.”

“What if they cancel Bolts of Fire?” she asks, and you might think this is a ten year old asking a selfish question when people are dying. Not Meredith. She’s asking if everything’s going to be all right. It probably will be, but when did “probably” ever help anyone?