The guy cutting pie with a cafeteria butter knife stops and turns his head to me. He is also wearing an enormous smile. I raised the actual dead last night, but these kids are giving me the heebie-jeebies like whoa.
“We’re raising money for the Dayton Nesseth memorial fund,” he says, pointing down at their butcher paper tablecloth, which I have avoided reading. It’s covered in drawings of rainbows and trees and hearts like a shitty yearbook collage. It says: Bake Sale for Dayton’s Memory Tree! Help us plant a magnolia tree that will keep Dayton Nesseth’s memory alive forever!!!
“A tree,” I say to the smiling bake sellers. I suck my teeth in thought. Residual Pepto makes them grainy. “Doesn’t that seem kind of, I don’t know . . . fucked up? Considering that Dayton literally died hanging from a tree?”
Smiling Girl’s smile fades from cheery to pleasant as she considers my question. “No,” she decides. “It wasn’t a magnolia tree. This one will have beautiful flowers that Dayton would have loved.”
I can’t help but look out, hoping to catch a glimpse of Dayton to gauge her reaction. Last I heard, she was pretty pissed at trees.
“What about the other girls?” I ask, not looking at the smiles directly anymore. These two are less terrifying if I watch their eyebrows instead.
Smiling Guy’s eyebrows pull together. “They weren’t in show choir.”
“Yeah,” says Smiling Girl. “Maybe their clubs did something nice for them?”
Just brought them back from the dead and paid for a week’s worth of snacks, I think, walking away without buying a cookie. Before we split up in the Walmart parking lot last night—well, super early this morning—the girls hadn’t yet decided what they could or wanted to eat, so I’d sent them on their way to Yarrow House with a bag full of peanut butter, crackers, and Gatorade.
Now I’m worried that if Dayton has any kind of sugar craving, she’ll reveal her corpse face to the smiling kids and demand a free cookie. Not that I think the show-choir kids don’t deserve to be terrorized—they are a plague on our school and, really, society at large—but Dayton would definitely blab that I was the one who brought her back from the dead. She wasn’t the brightest star in the sky before she was murdered—she once asked our freshman science teachers when unicorns went extinct—so a full week of being actually brain dead can’t have helped.
The other booths are equally—or more—offensive. The swim team is asking people to sign Dayton’s framed swim cap so it can be hung in the locker room. People are collecting money for a yearbook tribute that they are calling Gone but First Let Me Take a Selfie. There’s a raffle for a Starbucks card if you can correctly guess all of June’s favorite things. And, inexplicably, there’s a face-painting booth where a group of sophomores is being transformed into sophomores with My Little Pony cutie marks on their cheeks.
“This is actually worse than I pictured it,” Riley says, appearing at my shoulder. She’s wearing a black Giants cap, the brim pulled down to her nose, obscuring all but her downturned lips.
I can’t stop the rush of relief I feel at seeing her. I know that my dead-girl radar has already buzzed, but it’s extra comforting to feel her disdain for the event radiating. It’s an inch away from being totally normal. She falls into step beside me, keeping her shoulders up to her neck so no one passing by us will be able to see her face.
“Were you gonna mention this?” She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a folded paper with a piece of tape flapping on the top. Her last bathroom selfie stares up at me. The program from her funeral. She must have found it on display somewhere. It wouldn’t be hard—it seems like they’re on every bulletin board. “Aniyah wrote a poem about me?”
I snort. “Oh my God, isn’t it the worst?”
She flips the program over and reads, “Riley: she looked at the stars so shyly. I think I looked at the stars pretty forwardly. Like ‘Fuck you, stars, I’m staring right at you!’”
“Maybe she just admired you. Thought of you highly.”
Her lips slant up. “Then she should have lied and called me smiley.”
After endless lectures from Toby on the dangers of rhyming incantations, Riley and I loved making up the worst couplets. Most of the time, I liked it even more than real spellwork.
“Did you sleep okay?” I ask. “I mean, do you sleep now?”
She flinches a shrug and stuffs the program back into her pocket. “I slept as much as I could with June and Dayton talking all night. It was like crashing a sleepover that no one wanted me at.”
I stub the heel of my boot into the pavement. “I can’t believe I brought them back, too.”
“Toby always said the magic you work would come back times three. I didn’t think it’d be so literal.”
“Me either.”
“And I could think of better ways to spend my afterlife than in an abandoned house with two people I’ve hated since kindergarten. Also, when you’re not with us, we’re, you know, disgusting monsters. Yarrow doesn’t have running water, so I can’t get the formaldehyde stink off my skin.” She watches as a pair of face-painted girls giggle and run past us. “I guess I don’t really want to be alone in water anyway. Drowning kind of ruins the charm of a hot bath.”
“Right. Sorry. Fuck.” Without thinking, I reach for the elastic band at my wrist and snap it. I sense Riley’s question without having to look at her. You can’t hide new developments from your best friend. Not that I’m trying to hide it.
“It keeps the screaming to a minimum,” I explain.
“Fair enough,” she says in that way that means that she won’t press for more information if I don’t want to give it. And I don’t. There’s no way to explain the rubber band snapping without going into detail about how not okay I was without her. I don’t want it to seem like I’m guilting her. It’s not her fault she’s dead, and I’m not going to fish for a thank-you for bringing her back. Especially because I’m not sure that I’d get one.
We skirt around the edges of the courtyard. I spot Dayton in giant black sunglasses and one of the beanies Riley stole. She gives me a covert wave before unscrewing the lid on a bottle of Gatorade and taking a long drink. I really never thought I would see the day that Dayton Nesseth waved to me from across the courtyard. Who knew necromancy could make you so popular?
Dr. Miller is sitting alone at a card table with an assortment of pastel pamphlets spread over it. She doesn’t smile at me, but she makes a lot of intense eye contact. “Camila. How are you?”
“Fine,” I grumble. I throw a shoulder into Riley’s arm to push her along, but she doesn’t budge. She pulls her hat down even lower and sneaks a glimpse of Dr. Miller.
“You’ve already replaced me with a woman in a red blazer?” she says under her breath.
“Shut up,” I whisper back.
Dr. Miller seems oblivious to the fact that she is the subject of our private chat. She makes a theatrical scooping motion at Riley. “Are you one of Camila’s friends?” She stresses the word friend as though actually physically throwing it in my face. I know what she wants to say is See, Mila, and you said your only friend was dead. And what I want to say in return is Yes, she’s back for a little vacation unless I can figure out a way to sacrifice more moths to keep her alive past Sunday.
Dr. Miller gives a genuine smile as her line of sight travels beyond me and Riley and into the distance. She picks up her hand and gives an almost adorable finger wave.
“Xander!” she calls.
Riley nearly jumps out of her skin. Cursing a mile a minute, she stumbles and spins away, disappearing into the crowd just before Xander appears next to me.
His face is shadowed and grayish with exhaustion, but he manages some of his sparkle when he sees me. He opens his arms, and my brain takes a second to say, This is a weird wave, before I realize that it’s a hug. I’m enveloped in warm Xander smell—eucalyptus deodorant, ocean salty sweat, and a tinge of cumin earthiness. I don’t think we’ve ever hugged before.