As Dead As It Gets

It took a moment for me to realize he actually wanted me to come up with something. And I would totally have fed him a line of BS, except I couldn’t even think of one.

“Nope,” I said, feeling my cheeks redden. “Fresh out of ideas, I guess.”

“Maybe you could start,” Ben said gently, “by admitting that you’re not strong enough.”

I glanced up in surprise.

“Alexis, you are a weak person,” he said. “We all are. And you’ve got to accept your weakness or you’ll never be free.”

Well, he did kind of have a point. This had all started because I’d had a moment of utter spinelessness. If I hadn’t been so terrified of being blind, I wouldn’t have taken the oath to Aralt again. And maybe I could have focused on finding some other way to stop Lydia, instead of just thinking about myself and my own well-being.

“Try saying it,” Ben coaxed. “Admit it.”

Accept your weakness. And suddenly I felt weak. I felt helpless. After all, wasn’t my whole life proof that there was something fundamentally wrong with me?

“I’m…” The letters on the index card blurred, and I found myself leaning on the podium, my breath catching in my chest, desperate not to cry in front of a room full of people. “I’m…weak?”

Ben started applauding. Most of the kids slapped their hands together once or twice out of obligation.

And Megan sat forward in her seat, clapping like her life depended on it.

ASHLEEN PULLED THE DOOR OPEN, and the thudding beat of music spilled out around her. Her face lit up. “Hi, you guys!”

Being addressed as “you guys” or “you two” instead of “Alexis” was something I was getting pretty used to. It had been almost a month since Jared and I started showing up at parties together, and people at school had stopped thinking of me as single. I even stopped thinking of me as single.

“Hey,” I said, trying (but failing) to match her enthusiasm.

“Come in, come in,” Ashleen said, moving out of the way so Jared and I could pass. “It’s cold tonight, isn’t it? I think the hedgehog’s going to say six more weeks of winter tomorrow.”

Jared coughed to cover his laugh. I could only shake my head and smile. “I don’t know,” I managed to say.

“Coats in the dining room, people and food in the game room,” she said. “The pizzas just got here.”

Jared realized he’d left his phone in the car, so I waited for him while Ashleen straightened out the welcome mat and stood up.

“Jared’s really nice,” she said, looking after him wistfully. “You’re soooo lucky.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Does he have any friends?” She lowered her voice and patted her dark wavy hair. “Single ones?”

Every unattached girl, I was learning, wanted what I had—a boy whose eyes always traced her movements in a crowd, who would leave any conversation to stand silently at her side. And most of them seemed to think I was covered in magical boyfriend dust that would rub off on them if they talked to me.

Yeah, seeing Carter and Zoe together was still a shock, every single time.

But at least I could turn to Jared and lose myself in his presence—let him nuzzle my neck, talk quietly into my ear, wrap his arms around my waist and rest his head on my shoulder. We were one of those couples—the kind that are always irritatingly wrapped up in each other. Who never have much to say to anyone else.

Life was good. I’d wanted to be average, and that was what I got. My grades were better. I slept more. I saw Megan every week—even if I did have to sit through Brighter Path meetings to earn the privilege. Instead of worrying about Kasey and me making pacts with the devil, my parents were starting to worry that Jared and I were getting too serious too fast. I’d done some shoots for the yearbook, and I went to the weekly meetings. I wasn’t sure if any of the other staffers liked me, but I enjoyed being part of it—part of something bigger than myself.

And best of all by far: in four weeks, there had been no sign of Lydia. No shadows in my car, no disembodied laughter, no yellow roses, no more missing girls. I concluded that I must have dropped the glass bird in the street, where it had been pulverized by a passing car or the blessed, oblivious crunch of a mailman’s boot.

My days had a slow, steady rhythm. They still had good parts and bad parts, but there were no insanely bad parts, which was a huge improvement over my recent past.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that, in some ways—in a lot of ways—it was like finding myself washed ashore after spending five months lost at sea.

But sometimes when I lay in bed at night, or happened to catch a glimpse of a picture in a magazine or on a wall, and saw a dead woman staring pleadingly from her spot next to a nail polish model, or a burned face in the middle of a family photo taken at somebody’s vacation house, I felt a stab of…

What was it?

Fear? Dread? The suspicion that I was just fooling myself and it could never last?

All of the above?

The party spilled out of the game room onto the back patio, where a group of kids were huddled around the fire pit. Over the course of the night, I caught a few glimpses of short blond hair and forced myself to ignore the subsequent soul-crunching pang. At one point, I looked up to see Carter watching Jared and me. Did his soul crunch? Did he feel the same pang?

He didn’t act like he felt it. As always, he was near Zoe, with a hand on her shoulder. I watched his fingers drift across her skin in a way that threatened to hollow me out.

So I leaned deeper into the crook of Jared’s arm. He pulled me closer and touched his lips to the side of my face, then went on talking to some random kid about a video game. I saw a girl across the room gazing at us with undisguised envy, and reminded myself how lucky I was.

Jared’s hand slipped around my body, just under my ribs. “Ready to go?” he asked, in a voice only I could hear.

I nodded. We’d only been there for two hours, but we were never the first to arrive—or the last to leave.

“Bye, guys,” he said to the whole room, giving a wave. People waved back, and we started for the dining room, where our coats were slung over a chair.

I stopped in the kitchen and put my hand on Jared’s chest. “Hang on,” I said. “I need to find Ashleen. She wanted to borrow my Spanish notes from yesterday, and I need her e-mail address.”

Jared took a deep, impatient breath. “Does it have to be now?”

“It’ll only take thirty seconds.”

“We already said good-bye.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I know those girls, Alexis. You go back to say one thing, and fifteen minutes later you’ll still be talking about some idiotic reality show.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but then I looked up at Jared’s face.

“Please,” he said. “I’m just not in the mood to be here right now.”

“All right,” I said.

“Let me help you with your coat,” he said, standing behind me to slide it over my arms.

I heard the sound of a throat being cleared, and looked up to see Carter at the door to the dining room, watching us.

How long had he been there? How much had he heard?

Even though I knew Jared had seen him, he took a second to straighten the collar of my coat, like I was a little girl, before seeming to notice Carter and asking, “What’s up?”

They’d crossed paths at several parties, but they’d never been formally introduced. And I got the distinct feeling tonight wasn’t the night to do it.

Jared put his arm around my waist and shepherded me out, not waiting for Carter’s reply.

It bugged me in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. As we made our way down the sidewalk, I thought about saying something, but glanced over at Jared and saw that his expression hadn’t softened.

Whatever, I thought. Not like Carter and I had anything to say to each other anyway.