How could he have been so stupid and let her goad him into bashing in her skull before he got the chance to make her do the things he’d wanted her to do? He was supposed to be the one calling the shots, not her. That’s what the gun was for—it always turned them into sniveling little girls begging for mercy, willing to do anything he said if he wouldn’t kill them.
But this time he’d been cheated when the little whore had pushed his buttons and made him lose his temper. Sure, it had felt good to turn that pretty face of hers into hamburger meat, but not as good as the things he’d been planning to make her do.
Julian's fury eased a little as he pulled out of the McCarthy grounds and passed the other mansions on his way out of San Marco. He loved pretending he was house shopping and would someday own one of the huge riverside estates instead of working as a personal assistant to the wealthy men who owned them.
By the time he reached the Interstate on-ramp that would take him downtown, he had consoled himself with plans to amp up the online relationship he’d been fostering with a naughty little thing who called herself WETNWILD16 and had been dropping hints in her messages that sparkly things really turned her on, and Vera McCarthy had a more than ample supply of what she called “disposable” jewelry—complimentary trinkets from upstart jewelers trying to get exposure. She never missed the things Julian pilfered to send to his online sugar babies.
Yes, he’d start this one out with something sparkly, then he’d reel her in with something sporty and fast, and this time he would make sure she stayed alive long enough to repay him for his generosity.
He raised his hand to hit Annalee, and I literally saw red—the same as when I’d sent Dougie flying into the tree. Before I could stop myself or even think about what I was doing, I had my hand around his throat and pinned him to the wall with his feet dangling ten inches from the floor like stinky wind chimes.
“Big mistake, Rufus,” I said. “Nobody talks to my friends like that, and you’re even stupider than you look if you think you’re gonna touch her. I’m gonna give you exactly thirty seconds after I put you down to get your shit and get out of here for good. If you’re not gone by then, I’m gonna break off two important body parts, the loss of which are gonna keep you from hitting anybody ever again and also from being able to pee without a catheter. You got that, douchebag?”
Even with the red filter over my vision, I could tell his face was turning a deep purple shade that meant he couldn’t breathe let alone speak, but he managed to nod and signal his agreement. I released his throat and he fell to his knees on the floor, coughing and gasping for breath.
“One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…”
“Hey, the bell rang,” Lew said, "didn’t you hear it?”
I looked around and realized everyone was leaving the room, then I said, “Oh, guess I got distracted by this crazy book. That little Scout chick is a trip.”
He narrowed his eyes and said, “What part are you on?”
“They just found out the hole in the tree is filled with cement.” I stood up and dropped the book into my backpack. “Pretty lousy thing to do if you ask me.”
A slow transformation took place on his face, and I knew he hadn’t believed I was really reading it until then. He was looking at me as though he were seeing me for the first time, and my knees actually got weak when he smiled at me.
And to think it was all because I finally went into a library.
When I got on the school bus the next morning, the guy I'd tossed across the yard the day before stuck his foot out in the aisle in front of me and said, “Better watch your back, bitch.”
I smiled at him and said, “How’d you get that lump on your head, Tree Boy? Unless you want some foot pain to go along with that headache, you better move that smelly cross trainer outta my way.”
One of his hands wandered up to the back of his head and he muttered something about how I’d be getting mine, but he took his foot out of the aisle and didn’t meet any of the curious looks from the people around him.
“Yeah, I thought so,” I said before walking away and sitting in the first empty seat I came to. I was still snickering to myself when I noticed the girl across the aisle—a mousy little thing wearing clothes that had to have been through at least two previous owners—looking at me curiously. I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she was looking at, then I changed my mind and smiled at her instead, and she looked startled for a second before smiling back at me.
I tilted my head in Tree Boy’s direction and said, “Hope that guy’s not a friend of yours.”
“Dougie? No way,” she said, frowning at the back of his head, then she leaned toward me and whispered, “You should’ve stomped on his foot.”
Since the transdead weren’t immune to accumulated grime, I still had to shower and wash my hair like everyone else, so I got my pajamas and went into the bathroom. While I was standing under the pulsating stream from the massaging showerhead, I realized I missed little things like how good it felt for a hot shower to pound away the tension in sore muscles. I could feel the water hitting me, but I couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold. Apparently, the neurons and synapses of the transdead didn’t continue to transmit the way they did in the living.
Wait, what?
How the crap did I know anything about neurons or synapses? And not only that, I realized I suddenly understood how the whole nervous system operated. Great, my transformation into nerd girl obviously involved more than just crushing on chess players. I was turning into some kind of freaking brainiac myself. The super zombie strength was cool, but this had to be the lamest superpower ever.
FROM: florence@blueyonder.net
TO: dead_girls_do_it_better@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: What the [redacted]?
Dear Miss Gayle:
Apparently, an addendum to your termination agreement was inadvertently left out of your paperwork, and the new objectives were just uploaded today. In addition to your prime directive of finding the man who killed you, you must also learn to handle normal human emotions, since you did not experience them while you were alive. This explains your feelings for the young man you mentioned. Don’t be surprised if you also feel a strong desire to befriend another girl your own age. These things are not negotiable. So, in the vernacular of yourself and your peers, you need to “deal.”
Don’t forget to change your e-mail address to something more appropriate.
Regards,
Florence
He looked me up and down and laughed. “Just trying to make up my mind how much to offer you.”
I put my hands on my hips and said, “Give it up, jerkwad. You wouldn’t have enough if you robbed Bill Gates and won the Nigerian lottery.”
His face lost its smirk, and his hand shot out to grab my wrist as he said, “Don’t get uppity with me, you little tramp!”
Maybe it was because it was the same thing BOSSMAN had called me on the night I died, but his words echoed in my head as though they were being broadcast from a loud speaker. It suddenly seemed like I was looking through some kind of red film or at a TV with the tint turned completely to red. I snatched my arm free and pushed him in the middle of his chest with both my hands, and he went flying backward at least ten feet to thud against a sycamore tree in the yard behind him.
I stared at my hands in amazement and said, “Sweet. Super zombie strength.”
I tried to pay attention to what Mr. Forrester was saying about the chapter we were about to start, mostly to keep myself from looking sideways at Lew, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t resist checking out his short blond hair with its razor-sharp part, the way his blue Oxford was buttoned all the way up to his neck, the ring on his left hand with the strange black stone, and the almost manicured look of his fingernails. And instead of wanting to laugh at any of it, I found it all weirdly appealing.
What the crap was going on?
At one point, while I was trying to figure out what the weird numbers and symbols on his watch meant, he looked up from his note taking and said, “What are you staring at?”
“What kind of crazy watch is that?”
He glanced at it and said, “They’re square roots—instead of twelve, it has the square root of 144. They’re the same thing.”
“Yeah, I’ll have to take your word for it on that, guess it's a math thing or something, huh?”
He rolled his eyes and went back to taking notes.
I logged off the blog and opened my FaceSpace page to check for new friend requests. With a name like Cherry Licious and a profile picture of legs clad in lacy thigh highs, I’d been getting plenty of requests and private messages from guys of all ages, but none of their names or personal info sounded like the one I was looking for: BOSSMAN. What a joke. I bet that pathetic loser wasn’t the boss of anything but his favorite video game.
I shut down the browser and lay across the bed. I still wasn’t used to all the things that were different about me now, and I only had a day and a half before I started school on Monday. Like the Transdead Trustee guidelines had said, I hadn’t felt any emotions since I came back, but at least I could still appreciate a good joke. Flo probably hated that.
Thirty minutes later, I was in the back of a Miami patrol car, sobbing my poor misguided little heart out. I guess the two cops felt a little sorry for me, although that didn’t keep one of them from feeling me up when he searched me before putting me in the car. Anyway, they took me to the juvie center, and after convincing my case worker that I’d had enough of life on the streets, I got sent to a group home while I waited for a foster family to take me in.
I’ll skip the sordid details of the group home except to point out that if I’d been there any longer, I’m sure a couple of the male workers would’ve been my first victims. And I couldn’t help feeling bad for real girls like Gwen who had to live on the street or in places like that. My life before had really sucked, but this was a lot worse.
Luckily, after only three days in the group home, I got the good news that a family who was willing to take a teenaged girl had contacted the agency. The next day I met the Shermans, my new foster family. Brad, Karen and twelve-year-old Nathan—yuppies with a heart of gold, determined to save the world, one teenaged delinquent at a time. Gwen’s a lucky girl for sure.
PAYING IT UPWARD Blog
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Okay, so here’s my first week as Jada The Pervert Slayer.
I woke up in an old warehouse somewhere in Miami, surrounded by empty Thunderbird bottles, syringes, and used condoms. I couldn’t resist testing what Flo had told me, so I broke one of the bottles and stuck the jagged edge into my palm. Nothing—no blood, no pain, and the cuts started to close up almost immediately. It would’ve been kinda cool if not for the whole being dead part.
I found a purse beside me (a hideous pink sequined thing) that held my new ID cards but no money. The character profile for Gwen said I had been living on the streets and prostituting myself to pay for my meth habit, and once I got outside in the sunlight, (which neither fried me nor made me sparkle) I realized they’d dressed me in my work clothes—a black shirt tied in a knot between my boobs, hot pink booty shorts, and silver stilettos. Actually, the purse matched the shorts perfectly. Gwen was color coordinated at least.
"You had a verbal contract with us that must be honored, Miss Gayle.”
“What contract?”
She typed something then looked at the monitor and said, "This one.”
I watched the screen go black, then I saw myself when I was thirteen, kneeling on the floor next to my bed with my eyes turned heavenward. Flo turned up the volume on the monitor, and I heard myself promising that I would do anything to keep my best friend Cassie from dying of leukemia.
“But that’s not fair,” I said. “Yeah, Cassie went into remission, but look what happened to her later. I shouldn’t have to keep a promise for that.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t argue semantics here. You said you would do anything, and now it’s time to pay up.”
I took the papers she handed me and scanned the one on top, then I looked at her as if she were crazy and said, “I have to track down predators until I find the one who killed me? Are you kidding me?”
“Another pointless question, Miss Gayle.”
I threw the papers down on the counter and said, “Okay, then here’s a question for you. Why do I have to go back as some kind of psycho zombie chick as punishment for what that sicko did? He’s the one who should have to pay for it, not me!”
“Oh, he will, make no mistake about that. Your job is to bring him to justice sooner than he expects, possibly putting others like him out of commission along the way.” She pointed to a yellow box of text at the bottom of my assignment page and said, “And you’re not being punished, you’re paying an early termination fee. As are all Transdead Trustees, you’re being sent back to complete what was left unfinished in your life.”
“Okay, so what’s my assignment, scrubbing floors for being a slob while I was alive?”
Flo looked at her monitor and said, “No, I’m afraid you won’t be staying with us at all, because there’s an administrative hold on your account.”
“A hold—who put it there?”
One of her eyebrows went up and she said, “It’s an administrative hold, so do you really need an answer to that question?”
“Okay, fine," I said, "so what does it mean exactly?”
“It means, Miss Gayle, that in order to clear your account, you’ll have to serve time as a Transdead Trustee back on Earth.” She typed something else then said, “I’ll print out your instructions and answer any questions you may have before you’re sent back.”
“Sent back?” I sat up in my chair and leaned forward to say, “You mean I get to stay alive?”
“Not exactly, you'll be among the living and will appear to be one of them, but you won’t be alive, per se.”
“My account?” I almost laughed. “You mean I was supposed to be saving money to bribe my way in here or something?”
“No, it’s your Afterlife Account, and it’s what determines whether or not you’re admitted and where you’ll be assigned.”
“Oh, jeez.” I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling. More angels. With harps. “If you’re gonna put me someplace like this, I’d rather just burn for eternity.”
“No, this department is reserved for people who had no sense of humor when they were alive,” she said. “For the most part, we’re staffed by IRS agents and high school English teachers.”
Tablet Guy stopped at an empty cubicle about halfway down the aisle and turned to look at me. “Have a seat here. Someone will be with you momentarily. Don’t touch anything.”
I gave him a salute. “Gotcha. No hacking into God’s e-mail while I wait.”
He frowned and took a silver stylus from his jacket pocket to enter something on the tablet. “Impudence doesn’t help your case any, young lady. If anyone in this department had a sense of humor, we wouldn’t be assigned to this office.”
