I can’t help but feel responsible for them—it is my fault that they’re back from the dead—but they don’t need me to help them steal clothes. I can’t stay with them every second of the next seven days. No one likes a helicopter witch.
I make my way over to Riley, who is poking at her roots while looking in a mirror next to a display of knit hats. She scowls at her reflection, wrapping a piece of her long hair around her index finger. “Do you think bleach would take? I mean, my hair was always dead, right?”
“It couldn’t hurt to try,” I say. I have no idea if it’ll work, but then again, the little I do know about hair dye is from Riley anyway. She taught me how to do her hair because her arms get tired when she has to reach the back of her head and she gets punchy when the bleach starts to sizzle her scalp.
She tugs at the skin under her eyes, exposing the pink curve of blood vessels in her lower lid. As she moves on to checking her gums, I can see a corner of myself in the mirror, too. My hair is frizzy and windblown. My makeup is smeared from sweat and tears. There’s dirt on my neck. I look more like a zombie than she does.
“What is the last thing you remember, Ry?” I ask.
She frowns at me in the mirror and reaches for a gray beanie. She tugs it down over her ears. There’s a bouncing bauble on the top of it that makes her head look pointy.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s not how my brain is used to working. I never think, ‘What’s the last thing I can remember?’ I just remember or I don’t. Like, I remember eating roasted potatoes for dinner, but I don’t know when. I’ve been dead for almost an entire week. What if I’m remembering a dinner from months ago?”
She has a point. I comb my fingers through my hair until my reflection is less ghoulish.
“You don’t remember June and Dayton’s service?” I prompt.
She tries on a slouchy green hat. “No.”
“Do you remember finding out that they were dead?”
I had been over at the Greenways’ studying when Xander got a phone call from June’s parents asking if he’d seen her that night. Even though they were broken up, it wasn’t unusual for the two of them to study together or be at the same parties—honor society kids tend to stick together. Hours later—after I had run home for family dinner and gone to sleep—Riley called, sounding shell-shocked. Her dad had been summoned to Aldridge Park to retrieve June and Dayton’s bodies. He brought Mrs. Greenway with him because Xander was too bereft to help acquire his dead friends. Riley hadn’t been able to stay on the phone with me for long because she needed to hold her brother while he cried.
“Neither of you could sleep after the call came in,” I tell her now.
“No,” she says, her voice on the edge of growling. “I don’t remember any of that. I get that you’re trying to help, Mila, but please stop. I don’t like that you know things about me that I don’t. And even if I got all my memories back, I’m going to die again soon, so what does it matter?”
Her words hit like a punch to the gut, and my breath catches. I want to shake her by the shoulders and scream in her face. You helped me bring you back, I think to myself. You sent me the book. You lit the way. I did this for you! Oh, and by the way? I did actual magic, so cheer up, because maybe fairies or unicorns are real, too!
Instead, I manage to grind out an “I’m sorry. I’ll, um, leave you alone, I guess.”
I stumble away from her, leaving her to her hats and misery. She doesn’t stop me.
It’s not that Riley has always been the easiest to be around. She’s the only person I know whose surliness can equal mine. Her dad used to call us the Frowny Girls until Riley schooled him on how telling women to smile is sexist trash. But I’ve never felt her crabbiness aimed at me, at least not like this. Normally our foul moods combine together and aim outward. Now, though, there’s this black cloud hanging over us, edging out the relief our reunion brought me.
It’s like she doesn’t want to be here.
It’s like she’s mad that I brought her back.
I can hear June and Dayton debating something a couple aisles over. The rising and falling of their voices sets my teeth on edge. I can’t help but feel like prey when they’re around. It’s not like I value their opinion of me, but it’s exhausting to have to counter every insult and be on the defensive at every turn, especially without Riley to help me out.
Acid burns up my esophagus. It wasn’t that long ago that I was puking my guts up, and I realize I should probably throw down a couple of bucks for a bottle of antacid. One of us should actually pay for something. The other girls are planning on wearing their new black clothes right out of the store. Even if they’re caught on camera, it’s not like anything bad could happen to them. Or, at least, nothing worse. Getting murdered has really shifted everyone’s threshold of what counts as shitty.
The aisles in front of the shuttered pharmacy are packed tight with vitamins, protein shakes, and the faint smell of ammonia. I pick up a bottle of generic Pepto-Bismol. The plastic safety wrap around the rim bites into the skin at my thumb as I drag my nail along the easy-tear perforation. The cap twists off without any child-safety tricks. Chalky mint floods my senses as I throw back a shot of the pink sludge.
Holding the open bottle to my chest while I will myself to choke down another swig, I walk out of the aisle and make my way deeper into the store. Everything looks so mundane. I brought the dead back to life and yet there’s an empty McDonalds cup hidden on the shelves of the kitchen section. There are literal walking corpses here and yet there aren’t any scented candles that smell like real apples. I did big, real magic using a bunch of flowers and an old-ass book, and I feel just as lonely now as I did when my best friend was dead.
I turn toward the home-goods section. I don’t know how much a pillowcase costs on its own, but I would pay a lot of money to keep anyone in my family from asking why mine is missing. Mom would never stop lecturing me about taking good care of my possessions—read: her possessions that she lets me use—and Izzy and Nora would never back off if they thought I’d used it for magic. Which I did. So a replacement, even a mismatched replacement, is better than sleeping on a naked pillow. I won’t even begin to imagine how totally fucking bonkers Mom would be if she saw eyeliner stains on a bare pillow.
Before I can turn into the bedding section, a tremor runs up my arms and legs. For a second, I think it’s another wave of nausea, but I immediately realize it’s something else. A deep thorniness—the hollowed-out bone marrow feeling of not sleeping mixed with the spine-scraping of trying to chug something carbonated. My neck cracks to the side of its own volition, the joints popping.
That’s when the screams get to me. The bottle of Pepto explodes pink goo all over the floor and the toes of my boots. I kick it out of my way, picturing Dayton’s fine-boned hands cracking into a blue-vested employee’s skull. Why didn’t I take her seriously when she said she was a zombie?
My boots skid on the cement floor as I whip myself around the corner to the accessories department, where I left Riley. June and Dayton are with her, all of them staring at a shattered mirror. Suddenly, real fear digs its claws into me, holding me back from them. Standing in front of me aren’t the dewy faced, fancy-clothes-wearing girls I walked in with. They are transformed or, I guess, reverted to their former states of decomposition.
June’s yellow cardigan is on the floor. With a choking sound that might have started as a scream, her hands scrabble against the skin around her neck, which is mottled with a livid purple-and-black bruise in a V shape that angles up to her ear.