The Dead Boyfriend Read online

  I suddenly pictured dropping it in my bag. My bag …

  I’d left it by the kitchen door. Taking a deep breath, I pushed myself away from the front door and made my way to the kitchen. I grabbed the bag by the twin handles and carried it up to my room.

  Holding the bag brought back all my panic, all the horror of that terrible scene beside Blade’s house. The tug-of-war—Blade and I battling over this bag in my hands.… If only … If only I hadn’t let go. If only Blade hadn’t overturned the bag.…

  The knife never would have fallen out. I never would have seen it or thought about it.… Or used it.

  I heaved the bag onto my bed and bent to paw through it. Yes. There it was. It took only a few seconds to feel the knife at the bottom, to wrap my fingers around the handle, and lift it out. It trembled in my hand as if it were alive.

  I held it in front of me and snapped it open. The silvery blade gleamed under the bedroom ceiling light, and tiny droplets of blood sparkled like jewels.

  Blade’s blood. I stared at the blade until I was nearly hypnotized by it. Stared at the glowing blood drops and the smear of blood near the handle. Stared until I wanted to scream. Until I wanted to explode.

  Yes. I suddenly knew I would explode—just go to pieces in a furious burst of horrifying energy—if I didn’t do something. If I didn’t tell someone.

  “I can’t stand it.” The words burst from my mouth. “I can’t take it. I can’t keep it all inside me.”

  I let the knife fall to the rug at my feet. But the sparkling blood droplets on the blade lingered in my eyes.

  Before I exploded, I had to tell someone. I had to confess what I had done.

  Julie. I thought immediately of my friend Julie. She was so practical, so sensible. She would listen to me. She wouldn’t freak out.

  I grabbed my phone in my trembling hand. The keypad came up. I stabbed at it, struggling to punch in Julie’s number.

  The phone rang twice before she answered.

  “Julie? It’s me!” I cried in a high, shrill voice. And the words just lurched from my mouth as if I were vomiting them into the phone. “I killed him! I did it. Oh, help me, Julie. Please help. I killed him. I just snapped. I lost it. I snapped. And I killed Blade!”

  17.

  I choked on the last words. My throat tightened and I couldn’t speak. Panting, I pressed the phone to my ear.

  “Who is this?” A hoarse voice on the other end, a woman’s voice I didn’t recognize. “Young lady, is this a prank call? If it is, it isn’t funny.”

  Oh, wow. I glanced at my phone screen. Wrong number. I’d called a wrong number.

  “S-sorry,” I stammered. I clicked the call off before she could say anything else. I tossed the phone into my bag.

  I dropped onto the bed and sat there hugging myself. I knew I wouldn’t get to sleep that night. I wondered if I’d ever sleep again.

  * * *

  Blade’s funeral was held in a small nondenominational chapel in North Hills. The chapel was long and narrow with dark wood-paneled walls and low wooden rafters overhead. Morning sunlight filtered in through narrow stained glass windows high on the walls.

  Two huge vases of white lilies stood under spotlights in the front of a small altar. A podium stood between them. And beside the podium was Blade’s coffin, made of shiny dark wood that glowed purple under the spotlights.

  The coffin lid was up, and, from my seat near the back of the room, I could see that it was lined with a white satiny material. The idea that Blade was lying lifeless in that box didn’t seem real to me.

  Organ music played in the background. People drifted in silently. Not very many. Blade’s family had moved to town so recently.

  I sat between Julie and Miranda. Julie kept squeezing my hand and asking if I was okay. I nodded and wiped my tears with tissue after tissue.

  I felt the whole thing was a dream. Staring at the tall flowers and the gleaming dark casket, the scene became a blur, and I knew I was about to wake up from this dream and go back to my real life. My real life with Blade.

  But there were his parents in the front row, older-looking than I remembered. I’d only met them once. They huddled head to head, sobbing together, sobbing and shaking their heads as if they too didn’t believe this could possibly be happening.

  Miranda sneezed. The sound echoed off the low rafters. A few people turned around.

  I gazed around and counted. Only nineteen or twenty people in the chapel. The pale, sad people dressed in dark colors squeezed together in the front two rows were relatives.

  Julie, Miranda, and I were the only ones I recognized from our high school. I turned and let out a sharp breath as I saw Vanessa, the girl with white-blonde hair, the girl Blade took to the dance club. She came walking down the middle chapel aisle. She kept her eyes straight ahead on the coffin at the altar.

  A few rows behind me, she turned. She saw me. She blinked. Stared for a moment, remembering. Then turned her gaze back to the front.

  I felt my face start to burn as if on fire. Did Vanessa know? She saw me go berserk at the club. Did she know?

  She walked right past my row and didn’t glance my way again. She took a seat in the third row, behind the family, behind those who were sobbing and moaning and wiping their eyes.

  I cried, too. The organ music rose, then fell. A young minister appeared, his head bowed solemnly. He had spikey dark hair and a black beard that he kept scratching as he gave his talk. He wore a brown sport jacket over dark slacks. His white shirt was open at the neck.

  “Please sit down, everyone. We will begin. If you are new to this chapel, my name is Reverend Norman Preller.” He had a soothing voice and spoke very softly into the podium microphone. The sound echoed off all the empty seats.

  “I want to confess that I never had the pleasure of meeting Blade.” Preller rubbed his beard. It made a scratchy sound in the loudspeakers. “But so many people have come to tell me what a fine young man he was, that I feel the pain of this tragedy almost as much as anyone who knew him.”

  Yes, it was a tragedy.

  Julie handed me another tissue. I wadded up the old one and stuffed it into my lap. I stared at the open coffin, at the white satin lining of the lid, and my thoughts wandered. I couldn’t listen to this soft-voiced minister who had never met the boy I loved.

  I thought about the night Blade and I parked up at River Ridge, high over Shadyside. The river sparkled beneath us in the light of a full moon.

  We got out of my car and spread a blanket on the grass. Then we lay there on our backs, holding each other and gazing up at the stars. It was such a clear, silver, magical night.

  We held each other and kissed and talked and talked. We talked together so easily. It was as if we had been close for all our lives. Blade talked about how his dream was to be an archaeologist. He wanted to live out on the prairie and dig up dinosaur bones and discover things about the distant past that no one had ever known.

  Funny. I said my life’s ambition was to leave Shadyside. That was my only goal.

  Blade teased me. He said my goal was too easy. He said we could leave Shadyside any time we wanted. “Let’s take off together,” he said, his lips brushing my cheek. “We could just leave a note for our parents and head west. How about Montana? We could go to Montana.”

  I laughed and poked him in the ribs. “Montana? Really? Why Montana?”

  He raised a finger and poked me back. “Aren’t you curious about Montana?”

  “Uh … no,” I said. “I’ve never thought about Montana.”

  “That’s why we should go,” he said. He pulled me close. “Or maybe we should just stay here forever.”

  That was an awesome night, a night I’ll never forget. I knew Blade wasn’t serious about taking off, but I didn’t care. I thought maybe someday …

  But now here I was in this dark, stuffy chapel. Instead of gazing at the stars, I was gazing at Blade’s coffin. The sermon was over. Prayers were said. And now everyone was sta
nding, and a line was forming to walk past the coffin to give a last goodbye.

  Blade’s parents stood against the wall. His mother had her face buried in a handkerchief. His father kept shifting his weight nervously, his face pale and grim. The relatives were the first to march past the coffin and offer their whispered condolences to the parents.

  I held back. “I don’t want to,” I said.

  Julie and Miranda took my arms. “You have to, Caitlyn,” Miranda said. “You want to say goodbye, don’t you?”

  I had a sudden strong urge to confess. To tell them what I had done. I bit my tongue and forced the impulse down.

  I joined the line to the coffin. Julie and Miranda stayed close behind me. At the front wall, Vanessa was shaking hands with Blade’s parents, nodding her head solemnly. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She turned and started up the side aisle, heading to the chapel exit. She didn’t look over at me.

  It all seemed unreal again. I felt as if I was floating over everything, not on the floor, not in this chapel. I wanted to be a bird, my wings spread, flying high overhead, not tied to the earth, not part of this horrible scene.

  Floating … floating … My heart pattering like a hummingbird heart.

  And there I was, gazing into the satiny coffin, staring at Blade’s lifeless face. It was Blade and it wasn’t Blade. His face was smothered behind a layer of makeup. His cheeks a bright pink. His hair matted in a clump on his head.

  And the eyes … the blank stare … the glassy eyes. Open. Why did they leave his eyes open?

  I sucked in a breath and pulled back. I suddenly didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want to see my face reflected in those fake glass eyes.

  Someone moaned. I think it was Blade’s mother. Someone behind me sobbed loudly.

  Julie grabbed my arm. We started to move past the coffin. But I let out a startled cry—and stopped. I stopped and stared in horror as Blade blinked those glassy green eyes.

  His head slid to the right, then the left. And then it began to raise itself off the white satin pillow.

  I gasped and clapped my hands over my mouth. I grabbed onto Julie with both hands as my knees started to fold. I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out.

  Was I imagining it? Was it my guilt wishing him back to life?

  No. The room rang with screams and shrieks of horror, choked gasps and moans of disbelief.

  “No … No … Noooo…” Blade’s parents howled and raised their hands high in front of them, as if shielding themselves from the horror. In the middle aisle, an older woman slumped in a dead faint to the floor. No one rushed to help her. All eyes were on the coffin.

  All eyes were on the corpse, as slowly … as if in slow motion … slowly … Blade sat up.

  18.

  “He’s moving! He’s climbing out!”

  “He’s alive!”

  “Blade—can you hear us? Blade?”

  “Oh my God! This is impossible! This is crazy! Oh my God!”

  Frightened voices rang out through the chapel. No one moved. Miranda and Julie had backed away from me. They huddled together at the side of the altar, their faces pale, eyes bulging.

  I stood with my hands clamped to the sides of my face, frozen in front of the coffin, just a few feet from the moving corpse.

  “A miracle! A miracle! My boy is alive!” his mother cried.

  “A doctor. Is there a doctor here?” a woman shouted. “We need a doctor.”

  “He’s alive! Get him out of there! He’s not dead!”

  Blade raised himself, his body stiff, his lips clamped tightly together, glassy eyes straight ahead. With his painted pink cheeks and lipsticked lips, he reminded me of a ventriloquist dummy. I suddenly felt like I was in one of those horror movies, the ventriloquist dummy coming to life, evil and menacing.

  Of course, he was dead. I killed him. I watched him bleed out. I knew he was dead.

  But here was Blade, my sweet dead Blade, sitting up in his pearly white coffin.

  I watched his hand come up, so slowly, as if every inch was painful to him, as if every slight move was a challenge. Yes, Diary, his right hand slid up, and he turned his body. Twisted himself toward the horrified, paralyzed crowd of people who had come to mourn him.

  The glassy eyes surveyed the crowd, moved from his parents to the middle-aged couple beside them to the older man leaning on a cane, all frozen in amazement, in disbelief.

  He turned some more, a hard twist of his body. And now his eyes were on me. They had no pupils. They were solid green, the color of spring grass.

  He trained his eyes on me and … and his lips trembled. His cheeks strained. He was trying to talk. Trying to open his mouth and talk. But his lips were sewn together.

  He struggled and strained, mouth twisting into an ugly expression. Finally, he gave up. Eyes still on me, he raised his hand—and pointed. Pointed an accusing finger at me. The finger trembled in the air, then steadied itself, and he pointed me out to everyone.

  I could almost hear his voice, almost hear him saying, “She killed me, everyone. She’s the reason I’m a corpse.”

  “Ohhhhhhhh.” A moan escaped my throat. I couldn’t bear to face him. I knew I’d see those neon pink cheeks, those sewn-together red lips, the blank, blind eyes forever. Forever.

  “Ohhh noooo.” With another animal moan, I spun around to escape the horrifying sight. And saw a figure standing halfway up the aisle. A figure all in black.

  Deena Fear.

  Her straight black skirt came down nearly to the floor. She wore a black vest over a pleated, dark purple dress shirt. She stood in the aisle with her hands outstretched, curled into tight fists. And she was muttering, muttering something rapidly to herself.

  Behind the owl-like glasses, her eyes were locked on the corpse.

  She kept her fists tight and straight in front of her. In one fist, she carried some kind of silver ornament. An amulet, shaped like a bird with wings outstretched.

  She held the amulet in front of her, tilted her head back, her lips moving rapidly. And I realized she was chanting, chanting words in a strange language, chanting under her breath, her face tight with concentration.

  She raised the amulet above her head and the corpse moved. She swung her fists and the corpse swung its arm. She twisted the amulet up and down, and the corpse nodded its head.

  It took me a long time to realize she was controlling him.

  Chanting a little louder, she moved down the aisle toward us, her arms straight out, bird amulet gripped in front of her. She was breathing hard. Her eyes were tight slits. Her jaw was clenched in concentration.

  Deena Fear brought Blade back to life.

  “Deena!” I shouted her name. “Deena—what are you doing?”

  She ignored my question and kept chanting, her lips moving rapidly, her eyes locked on the moving corpse. She took another step toward the coffin. She jerked her arms hard, and the corpse shuddered.

  A hush fell over the chapel. Everyone watched Deena, watched the corpse, watched the horror show in amazed silence. The woman who had fainted was recovering in a pew at the side. Two little girls dressed in black hugged each other, crying loudly.

  “Deena—” I called to her again.

  “Come back, Blade,” she murmured, stepping closer. “Come back now. Come back. Come back.” Rivulets of sweat poured down her forehead and cheeks. The amulet trembled in her fist.

  She raised her eyes to me. “Don’t interrupt. This takes so much concentration … so much energy. I … I…”

  I gasped as her eyes rolled up in her head. She uttered a short choking sound. Her knees collapsed. Her hands fell to her sides. And she collapsed onto the chapel floor. Her head bounced hard against the wood. The amulet slid under a pew.

  She didn’t move.

  Screams all around. I spun back to the coffin and didn’t see Blade. I took a lurching step toward the alter, peered into the satiny casket lining, and saw him on his back. Eyes blankly staring up at the ceil
ing lights. Arms at his sides.

  Dead again.

  Not moving. Lifeless head sunk into the satin pillow. Not breathing. A corpse. A corpse. A corpse once again.

  Blade’s mother had collapsed to the floor, legs outstretched, her back against the wall. Her husband was trying to get her to take a cup of water. But his hands were shaking so hard, he spilled it on her.

  People were screaming. People were crying. Julie and Miranda hid themselves behind one of the tall lily vases. They were talking rapidly, both talking at once, both making wild gestures with their hands.

  A doctor trotted to the altar. He gazed frantically around the chapel, unable to decide who to help first. People sat devastated in the pews. A man slumped at a side pew, holding his hand over his heart, groaning loudly.

  The doctor dropped to his knees in the aisle and leaned over Deena Fear. He raised her wrist, feeling for a pulse.

  I moved over to Julie and Miranda. The three of us did a group hug, holding onto each other as if trying to hold on to reality, the real world, the world we knew where corpses didn’t sit up in their coffins. Julie wiped her eyes with a damp handkerchief. Her cheeks were red from tears.

  I felt a lot of things all at once. Alert and tense. Waiting for the next impossible thing to happen. Numb. And mainly frightened.

  The doctor rubbed Deena’s limp hand between his hands. I heard Deena groan. He reached behind her back and guided her to a sitting position.

  She blinked and shook her head. Her black hair had fallen over her face. She brushed it away with both hands. “So much energy…” she murmured.

  The doctor said something to her, bringing his face down to her ear. I couldn’t hear what he said. The chapel had been silent, but now everyone was talking at once.

  The doctor stood up, brushed off the knees of his dark suit pants, and moved to the man in front who was still pressing a hand over his chest.

  Blade’s parents were clinging to the sides of the coffin now, staring down at their dead son. His mother whispered something to him. Was she hoping he would sit up again?

  I shuddered. I watched Deena climb to her feet. She grabbed the back of a pew to steady herself. Her glasses were crooked. Her face was as white as paper, and her chin and lips were trembling.