If I Die

17

“Hey, Kaylee,” my dad called, as his door squealed open at the end of the hall.

I jerked away from Tod so fast the whole room seemed to spin around us, and when I looked up, I found my dad watching us from my doorway, surprised into a rare moment of total speechlessness.

“Hey, Mr. Cavanaugh.” Tod swiveled to face him in my desk chair, and I could see my father struggling for a response.

“Tod, could you excuse us for a minute?” he said at last.

Tod gave me an amused look no one else could have interpreted. “I’ll be in the living room.” Then he disappeared, and the chair spun without him.

My father sighed and stepped into my room, closing the door behind him. “Could you please ask him to walk like a normal person when he’s here?”

I shrugged. “He’s not a normal person.”

“Is this going to be a regular thing now?”

“I don’t know how regular it could be, considering how little time I have left.”

My dad sank onto the end of my bed and picked at one thumbnail before meeting my gaze again. “This is going to sound stupid, considering the circumstances, but don’t you think this is happening kind of fast, Kaylee?”

Another shrug. “I guess that depends on your perspective. From Tod’s, it’s been a long time coming.”

He seemed to think about that for a minute, then stared at his hands again and nodded. “Yeah, I guess it has.”

I frowned at him in surprise. “You knew?”

“How he felt about you? It was pretty obvious, Kaylee.”

To everyone but me, evidently. “Is that why you were always mean to him?”

“I wasn’t mean to him. And I have to admit he’s certainly grown on me this week, with everything he’s tried to do for you. But yes. If things were different now—” meaning, if I were going to live “—I don’t think he’d be a very good choice for you.”

I laughed. “In all fairness, you should know that parental seal of approval is not a requirement for a boyfriend. In fact, it’s usually a deal-breaker.”

“Noted.” He sighed. “Seriously, though, what kind of future can you possibly have with a dead boy?”

“I’m sixteen. Even if I were going to live, college is as far into the future as I’ve really thought so far, and it’s not like the distance would be a problem for him.” One of the advantages of the reaper mode of travel…

“Kay, you may not be thinking about the future—you might not be even if yours were going to be…longer—but he is. Tod is eternal, Kaylee. His future is probably all he ever thinks about.”

“I don’t know, Dad. I think he’d rather live in the moment, because he knows how much future he’ll have. It must be overwhelming, facing forever. Don’t you think?” Not that I’d ever know…

“I guess.” He lapsed into a heavy pause, just watching me. “But my point is that none of that matters now. Tod isn’t my top choice for you, and if this were going to be a long-term thing, I’d insist that he follow all the normal social standards—no popping in anytime he wants, no popping into your room ever, and no visits after eleven. But this isn’t a normal situation, and I want you to be happy.”

“What does all that mean?”

My dad sighed and twisted to fully face me. “It means that Tod’s welcome here. Well, not here specifically,” he amended, glancing at the bed we both sat on for emphasis. “But he’s welcome in our home.”

“Thank you.” And suddenly I wanted to cry again. “You know, for a dad, you’re kinda awesome.”

The sudden mixture of pain and regret twisting through his irises was too much for both of us, so he squeezed my hand, then changed the subject. “So…how’s Nash taking all this, with you and Tod? Have you talked to him?”

“I don’t think he’d answer if I called.” I’d texted Sabine from Emma’s, though, to check up on him. She’d reported that he was kind of drunk, and very pissed off, and that I should stay away and let him get over it.

My father sighed. “Well, I can’t blame him there.” And neither could I. “Kaylee, I have to go meet your uncle, and I don’t want to leave you alone….”

“Dad, nothing’s going to happen today,” I insisted.

“You don’t know that. I was going to see if Alec could come over again, but if Tod’s already here and he’s willing to stay…”

“I suppose I could clear my schedule…” Tod called from the living room, and I laughed out loud.

“Yeah, I had a feeling,” my dad mumbled.

“Oh, hey,” I said, jumping up from my bed when he headed for the door. “Take this to Uncle Brendon…” I plopped into my desk chair and pressed the space bar on my laptop to wake it up, then jabbed the print screen button. My printer whirred to life and spat out a black-and-white copy of the Crestwood faculty page, including the yearbook photo of one Mr. David Allan. “Maybe it’ll turn out to be the same incubus he knew.”

“I doubt that, but I guess it’s worth a shot.” My dad took the page I held out, with Beck’s picture circled in red. “Don’t make me regret leaving you two alone,” he warned, as I followed him into the living room.

When the front door closed behind him, I turned to find Tod watching me, and I knew that if my father had seen the heat churning fiercely in the reaper’s eyes, he never would have left the house at all.

“Well, he’s right about that, I guess,” Tod whispered into my ear as I wrapped my arms around his neck. “There’s no more time for regrets.”

I parked across the lot from Sabine’s car on Wednesday morning and avoided Nash’s locker on the way to class, but there was no way to avoid the rumors, and they were already buzzing by the time I got to school. “She cheated on Nash?” a girl from my French class said, clearly unaware that I was walking behind her in the hall. “I would have thought it’d be the other way around. Who was the other guy?”

The girl next to her shrugged, hauling her backpack strap higher on one bony shoulder. “Never saw him before. But he was thoroughly covetable.”

It was hard not to laugh out loud, thinking of Tod’s potential ego boost. Too bad it came at the expense of my own self-image.

“So…does that mean Nash’s up for grabs again?” the first girl asked, and I couldn’t resist—what did I have to lose?

“Yeah, he’s available, but you don’t have a Popsicle’s chance in hell,” I said, falling into step beside them, enjoying their twin shocked expressions. “And if you even try, Sabine Campbell will kick your face in.” Sabine was still fairly new, but already working on infamy. “She’s got dibs.”

Both girls stopped and gaped at me, and I smiled all the way to class.

“So, what happened last night? Did Tod come over?” Emma demanded in a whisper the moment I slid into my chair. And evidently the flush I could feel crawling over my face wasn’t answer enough for her.

“Yeah. He stayed till his shift started at midnight.”

“And…? Did you do it?”

“Shh!” I glanced around the classroom, cheeks burning even hotter, but no one seemed to have heard. “And no, we didn’t.”

“Is it because he’s dead?” she whispered, leaning closer. “Is that a problem? Does his blood still circulate?”

“Em! No, that’s not the problem.” Was it? I hadn’t actually asked. But he was warm to the touch, which seemed to indicate good circulation… “There’s no problem. We’ve been together less than twenty-four hours.”

Emma frowned, like I’d lapsed into Greek. “If there’s ever been justification for an accelerated physical connection, this is it. He’s been waiting for you for months, Kaylee, and you don’t have much time left.” The pained line across her forehead was the only indication of how upset she really was, in spite of an obvious determination to wear her brave face. “And, if I can indulge in a moment of selfishness, we’re running out of time for the ‘guess what I just lost’ phone call. It’s, like a rite of passage.”

“You can’t be serious.”

She shrugged. “I’m not saying you should sleep with Tod just so we can have one last best friend tell-all. But, should you go down that path, I solemnly swear not to judge you.” She placed one hand over her heart. “And to provide the ice cream.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“That’s all I’m asking. So…is it weird?” she asked, while the other students settled in around us, most staring at Mr. Beck as he wrote last night’s homework problems on the board.

“Is what weird?” The fact that Tod was dead? The fact that I soon would be? The fact that a couple dozen people had seen my very public breakup with Nash, over a stolen kiss from his brother?

“Being with him, after thinking of him as a friend for so long.”

“It’s kinda weird,” I admitted, not quite able to hide my smile. “But not because I already know him.” In fact, that was kind of cool. We hadn’t had any awkward getting-to-know-you moments, beyond his whole Peeping-Tom admission, which I’d decided to forgive, on the condition that it never happened again.

Now, if I could just get Nash to forgive me sometime in the next day or so…

“So, are you and Tod a couple now?”

“I don’t know. It seems kind of pointless to put a label on it, considering that we’ve only really got one day together.”

Emma’s face crumpled, and I wished I could take the words back. Evidently that was one reminder too many.

“How can you be so casual about this?” she demanded in a fierce whisper, brushing tears from her eye with the side of one finger, like she was wiping off a smear of eyeliner. “It’s like you don’t even care.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” I whispered back, leaning closer to keep from being overheard. “But I don’t know how else I’m supposed to act. This isn’t like dying of cancer, Em. I’m not sick, which is a huge plus, obviously, but I’m not going to linger for another month while I say my goodbyes. There’s no wiggle room, and I can’t tell the world that I won’t be here after tomorrow. So I don’t have any choice except to go on living for the next twenty-four hours, trying to distract myself from how mind-bendingly final the whole thing seems by bringing down our demon teacher.” And by spending time with a living dead boy whose interest in me I’d discovered much too late to properly explore.

And by trying to explain to Nash why I’d kissed his brother, then asking him for forgiveness he had no reason to give either of us.

“I know. I’m sorry.” Emma sniffled and pulled a tissue from the minipack in her purse. “It just feels like you’re leaving me. Senior year’s going to suck with no best friend.”

“Yeah, sorry about that.” But at least she’d have a senior year….

“I wish there was something…” Em began, but then the late bell cut her off, and Mr. Beck closed the classroom door.

Math sucked even more than usual that day, mostly because every single minute counted down by the clock over the door felt like a minute of my life wasted. And I didn’t have that many minutes left to spare.

I watched Mr. Beck as he went over the homework I hadn’t done, then called people up to the board to help him demonstrate the day’s lesson. There was nothing inappropriate about him in class, and I had to keep glancing at Danica’s empty chair to assure myself that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

During the rush for the door after the bell rang, I caught Mr. Beck watching me and Emma—the very first overtly predatory look I’d seen from him—so I pretended to search through my backpack for something until we could reasonably be last in line for the exit. Then I threaded my arm through Em’s and glanced over my shoulder, shooting Mr. Beck my best vixen smile, trying not to show the nausea churning in my stomach.

Emma spun to face him from the doorway and held up eight fingers, silently mouthing “eight o’clock.” He nodded, anticipation firing in his gaze like sparks from a bonfire, and she tugged me into the hallway.

Where I almost ran smack into Nash and Sabine.

“Can I talk to you?” Nash asked, before I’d recovered from the near-collision, and that’s when I realized he’d come looking for me. Neither he nor Sabine had any other reason to be in the math hall between first and second period.

“Yeah.” We both had class in four minutes, but school had never mattered less. This might be my only chance to explain what had happened and why. To see for myself how he was handling the breakup. To ask him to forgive Tod, even if he couldn’t forgive me—it was killing me that I’d come between brothers, and I wanted to clean up at least that part of the mess we’d made before I lost the chance.

“I’ll see you later, Em,” I said, and I couldn’t help noting the fury on Sabine’s face as she and Emma watched us walk off together toward the parking lot. But there was something more there, beneath her anger. She was…worried. About what? That I’d try to take him back?

Nash took an immediate left when the glass doors closed behind us and wound up leaning against the wall, just out of sight from the hallway. For nearly a minute, we both stared at the ground, and I assumed that, like me, he wasn’t sure how to start this conversation. So I jumped in.

“I’m so sorry about yesterday,” I said, through the lump that had formed in my throat. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. Any of it.” Though my lame apology couldn’t possibly make things okay between us, any more than his apology was able to fix things when he’d messed up.

“I was kind of hoping you’d say that.” Nash leaned with one shoulder against the bricks, facing me from a foot away, and I couldn’t quite interpret the intense swirl of greens and browns in his irises. “I don’t want to fight, Kaylee. Especially now. I don’t want you to die mad at me, or thinking that I’m mad at you. So if you say it meant nothing, I’ll believe you. It’s Tod I’m pissed at anyway, not you.”

The second period bell rang, and my head rang with it, and it actually took me the length of that clanging to figure out what he was really saying. And when it finally sank in that he wanted to get back together, my guilt was almost too thick to breathe through.

“Nash, I…” I glanced at the ground, at a complete loss for words. He didn’t know Tod and I had moved beyond that first kiss, and he’d obviously come to school assuming that if he forgave me, we could pick up right where we’d left off. “Things aren’t the same anymore.”

“I know,” he said, before I could decide how to continue. “Everything must feel so weird for you now, knowing it’s all going to end. I don’t even want to think about you being gone. I just want to spend this last day with you, and we can forget about what happened yesterday. That’s not important now. What’s important is salvaging what time we have left together.”

Crap. I’d never felt more guilty in my life, and it was worse knowing that he wasn’t mad at me when he had every right to be, and if I weren’t about to die, we both knew he would be.

“Nash, I really appreciate that—” Lame. “—and I know you’re just trying to make sure that my last day on earth doesn’t suck.” True. “But we can’t get back together just because I’m going to die tomorrow. That’s not a real reason.”

“We shouldn’t have broken up in the first place,” he insisted, and I realized he was only hearing what he wanted to hear. Competing vines of unease and guilt wound slowly up my spine, tightening as he continued. “When I messed up, you forgave me. Now I’m forgiving you. You were scared and confused—who wouldn’t be in your position—and he was there, like he’s always there.” Nash shrugged. “I’m still gonna kick his ass the next time he has the balls to face me, but today’s about us. You and me. So let’s get out of here and have some fun. This may be our last chance.”

He reached for my hand, but I pulled away before he could touch me, and an irritated twist of green shot through his irises, piercing stubborn composure to reveal something stronger and darker than mere determination.

Uh-oh.

“Nash, I need you to understand something,” I said. “Tod was the catalyst for our breakup, but he wasn’t the reason. He’s not the source of our problems. Nothing’s been the same between us since the winter carnival.” Since the thing we didn’t talk about. It was always there between us, making him too cautious and putting me on edge. “You know that.”

“That’s not true.” He shook his head firmly, stubbornly. “We moved on. We were fine. It was working.”

“No it wasn’t. Not like it used to.” I was always afraid he’d slip up, and it would happen again—even Sabine had told him that. Hell, he had trouble trusting himself half the time. “I’ve tried to put it behind me. I tried so hard, and I didn’t realize it wasn’t really working until I felt something that did work.”

“What are you saying?” He looked like I’d just smacked him in the head with a two-by-four—like he didn’t know whether to cry or strike back.

Why was there no greeting card for letting a guy down easy the day before you’re scheduled to tumble into the dark hereafter? “I’m sorry for what I did. I’m sorry for how this happened. And I’m so, so sorry that I didn’t see the problem sooner. I didn’t want to see it, because I wanted us to work.” My vision blurred with tears and I had to swallow the lump forming in my throat. I didn’t want to say what needed to be said, but it wasn’t fair to either of us to leave this hanging. “But we don’t work. Not as a couple. Not anymore.”

Nash shook his head, frowning, more frustrated than surprised now. “Yes we do.”

“Nash, you need someone with more than I have to give you. More than I’d have, even if I were going to live.” Someone who didn’t have to talk herself into trusting him. “You need someone who understands the way you think and sees into your soul.”

“That’s you.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t understand what’s going on in there most of the time.” I glanced at his chest, where his heart beat beneath his shirt, then back up to his face. “I don’t know what you want from life. I don’t know where you want to go to college. I don’t know where your father’s buried. I don’t even know how you feel about losing Scott and Doug. You don’t tell me any of that.”

“Because I don’t want to scare you!”

“That’s my point. You need someone you aren’t worried about scaring.”

“He’s not getting it,” Sabine said, and I whirled around to find her walking toward us, from the direction of the quad, her sneakers silent on the spring grass. How long had she been there? “Maybe because you’re leaving out one important detail.” She stepped onto the sidewalk and aimed an angry, challenging look my way. “Why don’t you tell him what this is really about?”

“Go away, Sabine.” My pulse spiked, and I realized with one glance at her that she knew what he didn’t want to hear and I didn’t want to tell him—that Tod and I weren’t a once-kiss mistake. That we’d gotten together for real after Nash and I broke up—either because she’d read my fears, or she was just plain perceptive. Or both. “This is none of your business.”

“What is this really about?” Nash glanced from her to me with dread twisting tight coils of brown and green around his pupils.

“She’s talking about Tod, but this isn’t about him. He’s not what went wrong between us.”

“What about Tod?” Nash demanded through clenched teeth.

I exhaled slowly. “He and I…kind of…got together last night.”

Nash’s irises went still, and the only interpretation I had for that was that he didn’t know what to feel. Then the colors in his eyes burst into furious motion—a true storm of color. “What the hell does that mean? You slept with my brother?”

“No! You know, there are entire moments in some people’s lives that aren’t about sex!”

“You were the one pushing the issue this week, Kaylee,” he snapped, jaw tight, forehead deeply furrowed.

“I know. And that was a mistake.”

Too late, I realized what I’d said, and how he would misinterpret it. “Sex with me would have been a mistake?” He bristled with anger, but the wound went deeper than that, and we all three knew it. “Why? Because you’re so pure and spotless, and I might have tarnished your shine?”

“That’s not what I—”

“That is what you meant.” He was getting louder, and I was afraid someone would hear him, but there were no windows on this side of the building, and the doors stayed closed. “You’re purity personified, and I’m one big moral question mark. So I guess you’re really doing me a favor. Maybe I won’t look so bad when you’re not standing next to me,” Nash snapped, and my face stung, like he’d slapped me. Tears formed in my eyes, but I blinked them away, clinging to anger as I faced the death of any hope I’d had for us parting on good terms.

“What is wrong with you?” He’d never spoken to me like that before. He wouldn’t.

“I caught my girlfriend making out with my brother in front of half the school!” He was shouting now, his hands curled into fists at his sides. “I think that entitles me to a little anger.”

“Yeah, it does.” I wasn’t going to deny that. And I’d been pissed when I’d caught him kissing Sabine, even though he hadn’t initiated that. “But I don’t know what else you want me to say. I’ve never been sorrier about anything in my life. Tod feels so bad he’s prepared to spend the rest of your life trying to make it up to you.”

“But he wasn’t sorry enough to keep his hands to himself last night, was he?” His eyes shined with angry tears, even as his irises churned with pain. “You let him touch you?”

“Oh, hell…” Sabine mumbled. “Don’t answer that.”

I glanced at her in surprise, and she seemed to be trying to tell me something without actually saying it. Some kind of warning. But by then I could hardly see through my own anger.

“That’s none of your business,” I said softly. Yet I could feel myself flush.

Nash blinked, openly wounded for a second before fresh fury rolled over him, straightening his spine, squaring his shoulders.

“Fine,” he said through clenched teeth, and the bright green coil of malice twisting in his eyes seemed to suck the air straight from my lungs. “I guess I should have seen this coming. I mean, you two have so much in common, like death, and lies, and spying on people you claim to care about. He’s the cold corpse to your frigid bitch.”

His words stung so sharp and deep that at first I couldn’t breathe. Even Sabine looked surprised by the venom in his tone, and in the second it took me to recover, I realized something was truly wrong. Nash wouldn’t talk to me like that, no matter how mad I made him, or how badly I hurt him. He wasn’t that kind of guy.

“Give me your hand.” I reached out for it when he refused, and when he tried to step back, I lunged forward and caught his fingers.

They were ice-cold.

No. “Damn it, Nash.” I turned to Sabine without letting go of him. “He’s using again.” And it was all my fault. Again.