Backwards. Part 6

"Who took the sign-in sheet?" asked Mrs. Gilbert.

"I think Dan has it," replied Kendra, the picture of politeness.

"Dan?" Mrs. Gilbert frowned at him.

He gripped the balled-up sheet in his fist and headed for the door.

"Dan Franklin!" called Mrs. Gilbert. "Get back here!"

Dan continued walking. For once, I felt just as mute as him.

Dan ended up staying for detention after school. Mrs. Gilbert asked him why he'd taken the sign-in sheet, but he refused to speak. Whatever existed between him and Cat, he wasn't going to tell any teachers about it.

"So you're interested in D-day?" she asked, trying a different approach. She sat across from him at one of the center tables. "Is that for a project?"

"No."

"Personal interest, then?"

He shrugged.

Mrs. Gilbert kept folding and unfolding her hands. "Do you know what courage is?" she asked.

Doing something stupid and running like h.e.l.l, I thought, recalling the inspirational message on Dan's calendar.

"Courage is doing what's right even when you know it will make your life harder," continued Mrs. Gilbert. "It's never easy to show courage like that, but it's better than the alternative."

I drifted closer to Dan, intrigued. He lifted his head and met Mrs. Gilbert's gaze.

"To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the moment we stop doing what we know is right is the moment our lives begin to end." She unfolded her hands and let them flop back so her rings thumped the table. "Do you understand?"

I thought of Dan's body bleeding in the tub. Was there a point when he'd stopped doing what was right?

I nodded.

Dan nodded.

"Good." She folded her hands again. "So, are you ready to tell me why you took the sign-in sheet?"

Dan lowered his gaze. Bits of black gunk speckled her gold rings, darkening the crevices between the tines and diamonds. "No," he said.

"Suit yourself," Mrs. Gilbert replied. "Detention ends at five o'clock."

The only sound in the halls was the whir of the custodian's vacuum when Dan got to leave. He took the long way home, driving past the apartment complex where Cat lived. Then he pulled over a few houses down and watched her window, like he'd done the other day. If anyone had seen him, they probably would have thought he was stalking Cat, but after the incident in the library, I saw his actions differently. He wanted to do something good, only he couldn't figure out how.

Teagan was watching TV and talking on the phone when Dan got home. He went straight to his room and turned on his iPod. I hoped he'd fall asleep so I could escape for a while, but he stayed restless until dinner. Then he emerged, devoured a plate of lasagna, and retreated to his room without thanking his mom for dinner.

He got on the Internet. This time I paid attention to his searches. He looked up suicide techniques.

It's freaky what people will post under the guise of being helpful. Dan seemed familiar with some of the sites already, so I guess he'd been toying with the idea for a while. He found what he was searching for pretty quickly. I tried to avoid looking at the pictures, since I already knew more than I cared to about the subject.

At last, Dan brushed his teeth and called it a day. As soon as he lost consciousness, I broke free, eager to get away from him.

I went to the Coffee Spot first, in case Cat was there. Spooner hunched in the back booth, playing with his lighter. A couple other punk kids from school occupied the bench across from him, but no Cat.

I spotted TR hanging out at a nearby table with a family. A mom, dad, teenage daughter, and a boy around ten were all sharing two slices of pie. TR saw me and winked. With elaborate gestures, he pretended to devour a bite of peach pie on the teenager's fork.

"You're here early," I said.

TR slid out of the booth and stood. "Waster stole a bottle of vodka from his neighbors after school. He pa.s.sed out an hour ago."

"Oh. Sorry."

"Don't be, man. It means I get a big night. I'm celebrating." He pretended to pick up a gla.s.s and raise it.

"Celebrating what?"

"Today I made Waster stick his pinkie in an automatic pencil sharpener," TR announced.

"Really?"

"Yeah. He screamed like a little girl. It was flipping hilarious."

"Hold on," I said. "What do you mean you made him to do it?"

"Like I took over for a second and made him jam his pinkie into the little hole."

"How?"

"It was just the tip of his pinkie."

"I mean, how exactly did you take over for a second?"

TR drifted to an empty table and waited for me to sit. "That's the weird part, dude," he said. "You know how sometimes you can get close and suggest something to them? And then they do it, and you don't know if it's a coincidence or not?"

I nodded, thinking of how I'd urged Dan to look for Cat in the library.

"Well, this time I got so close that I noticed a gap."

"A gap?"

"It's like there were all his thoughts, and then there were the things his body did," TR explained, holding his hands a few inches apart. "And between them, there was this tiny gap. So I slipped into the gap, and instead of just suggesting things to him, I grabbed the reins and took over."

"Wow." I leaned back. This changed everything.

"It didn't last," he continued. "Once the pencil sharpener bit his pinkie, he shoved me out of the way and regained control. But for a second I was right there, steering the s.h.i.+p." TR grinned. "You should have seen it."

I thought of what I'd do if I could take over the zombie, even for an instant. My gaze s.h.i.+fted to a group of people coming in the door.

"You're looking for that weird chick, aren't you?"

"Maybe."

"Dude, you're obsessed," he said.

"I told you, she's why I'm here. I'm supposed to save her."

"That again?" He chuckled. "You know what I'm supposed to do?"

I shook my head.

"Get Waster to sharpen his pinkie," he said.

I laughed, which felt good since I hadn't laughed all day. The zombie almost never laughed.

We hung out in the diner for a while, but when Cat still didn't show, I wanted to try her place. TR offered to come. On the way, I asked him if he ever wondered why he got stuck in Waster and not someone else.

"Beats me," he said. "Why does anyone get born as who they are? I mean, people don't get to choose their family. Or their body. Or their gender, right? It just happens."

"I guess." TR never seemed to get tangled up in the big unanswerable questions. He just accepted things and went with it. Sometimes I wished I could do that. Still, I couldn't accept that it was all merely chance. There had to be a reason I'd gotten stuck with Dan. Maybe it had something to do with him killing himself. Or maybe it was because he was empty - the closest empty vessel to Cat. "At least Waster has friends," I mused. "Everyone hates the zombie."

"Yeah. Well, I bet the zombie doesn't puke on himself. Believe me, it's no fun riding out the spins."

"The zombie bites his nails and scratches his cheek with the chewed-off ends," I said.

"Waster plucks his eyelashes and brushes his lips with them," TR replied.

"The zombie smells his shoes before he puts them on."

"Waster smells his pits when no one's looking."

"The zombie licks the sugar off donuts before eating them."

"Waster licked his math book and gave himself a paper cut on his tongue."

"No way."

"Way," said TR sticking out his tongue. "Right dere," he added.

We kept trading stories about our corpses. It was funny - there were so many little things we knew about them that no one else noticed, but a lot of the things we shared were similar. I found that oddly comforting.

When we got to Cat's place, TR let me step through the wall first. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to her room. The curtains were drawn, and the only illumination came from a few candles on her desk and the Christmas lights strung across the purple ceiling. The music streaming from her computer fit the dim lighting. Cat huddled on the floor, looking through old photo alb.u.ms. Seeing that she wasn't naked, I stuck my arm through the wall and signaled for TR to come in. It meant a lot to me that he'd waited.

TR drifted around the room, then knelt by Cat to see what she was doing. Every now and then, she pulled a photo out of the alb.u.m and set it in a stack. She had a metal bowl in front of her full of ripped-up photos.

"Dude," said TR. "She's destroying her kiddie pictures. That's messed up."

"Not all of them," I said, looking closely at the pictures she'd chosen. "Just the ones that show her scar."

TR leaned closer and studied the torn photos in the bowl. "That scar on her lip? What's the big deal?"

Cat-Lip, I thought, recalling the crude drawing of her as the bride of Frankenstein on the sign-in sheet. I wondered if kids had always teased her for this one small flaw. Then again, it had probably never seemed small to her.

"If I had an alb.u.m like that, I sure as h.e.l.l wouldn't destroy it," TR said.

A few of the photos she pulled out looked like they'd been taken in a hospital. She seemed maybe nine or ten in the pictures, although it was hard to tell because there were bandages on her face. In one, she was giving the camera a thumbs-up, probably because she couldn't smile.

"Maybe she wants to forget," I said.

"Forget what?"

"Her past. The way people used to treat her."

"If you forget your past, then who are you?"

"We don't have a past," I pointed out. "At least not one we remember."

"Whatever, dude. This is depressing." TR backed away. "I'm going to wait outside."

"You don't have to wait for me."

"What else am I going to do? Get smashed by a truck?" He shrugged. "I'll wait."

After TR left, I watched Cat tear some pictures out of her yearbooks. She started with middle school. She wasn't smiling in any of these. Instead, she kept her mouth as flat and ordinary as possible. When she got to her freshman-year photo, she looked different again. She must have had another surgery, and her scar was like it was now - a small, jagged line above her top lip. She smiled in this photo, only it wasn't the wide, unself-conscious smile she'd had as a child.

Cat held up one last photo of herself as a seven- or eight-year-old kid, dressed as a clown for Halloween. A woman knelt next to her. They were hugging and making goofy faces. The woman's eyes reminded me of Cat's. She'd appeared in a few earlier pictures, yet not any later ones. It could have been her mom. I remembered what Dan had said the other day about how he and Cat used to go to group counseling sessions years ago, and she was the only one who got what he was going through. So maybe her mom had done something similar to Dan's dad and left to start a new family.

In the picture, Cat looked happy. She was holding a bright-orange plastic jack-o'-lantern. Her cheeks were painted white, and her mouth had been outlined in red. Her mom wore red clown makeup, too, and both of them were scrunching their noses and sticking out their tongues as they smiled.

Cat took a candle from her desk and set it on the floor by the bowl of torn photos. Then she held the Halloween photo up by the flame, studying it.

No. Keep this one, I told her.

My words made no difference. Cat moved the picture over the candle until the corner caught fire. She turned it, letting the flames creep up the side and singe her fingers before she dropped it into the bowl with the others. The photos curled and smoked, then turned black. Orange light reflected off her eyes, same as when she'd stared at the burning house. She carried the bowl to the window, switched on her fan, and blew the smoke outside.

I hated seeing her destroy her past. More than anything, I think she wanted to be accepted. Not to conform, like everyone else, but to be herself and not be rejected. So I stayed with her and whispered to her. Even if it was pointless, I told her that she was beautiful and that she'd always been beautiful, until she lay down and closed her eyes.

When I finally left, I found TR sitting on the curb in front of her house.

"She asleep?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Good," he said. "Now let's find something crazy high to jump off of."

We climbed a radio tower at the edge of town. I followed TR up it without looking back. I figured I owed him for waiting for me. After at least ten minutes of climbing, we reached the red light at the top, and I glanced down. The ground loomed so far below that the houses looked tiny, and I could feel the tower sway. Panic gripped me. I clung to the metal rungs, cursing myself for going so high.

"You afraid?" asked TR.