Dead Beautiful

“Is that why Gideon had the files?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been following him around all year; you know that. But I don’t have any evidence that he was involved in Cassandra’s disappearance. The files you found in his room sounded promising, but those are gone now.”

I took his hand. “You’re a good person.”

Dante shook me off. “I’m not.”

I gave him a level look. “I’m not afraid of death.”

But I was afraid of losing the people I loved. And the question still remained: Who killed Eleanor and Cassandra?

Dante and I spent time together every evening, his “condition” bringing us closer together than we had been before. I finally felt like there were no secrets between us, and Dante suddenly became comfortably familiar and excitingly unfamiliar, like exploring an old mansion and discovering things that were always there but you never noticed before. I sat through my classes impatiently, counting the minutes until I would see him. The more I learned about the Undead, the more I grew to accept who Dante was, and even envy it. There were a lot of upsides to being Undead. For one, because he was already dead, he couldn’t be killed by normal means, which made taking risks a lot easier. He never had to worry about the weather being too cold, and since he never slept, he had endless amounts of time. That’s why he was so well read. And best of all, he couldn’t feel pain—emotional or physical. Unless I was near him. What I wouldn’t give to have that power. If I didn’t feel pain then I wouldn’t be tormented by the death of my parents, which I still couldn’t make sense of.

Later that week when I went downstairs to meet him, I saw the silhouette of a figure standing in the shadows by the stoop. I ran over and wrapped my arms around him, only to discover that it wasn’t Dante; it was Brett. He looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else,” I said, my face turning red.

“That’s okay,” Brett said, letting out a sigh of relief. “I’m just glad you’re not Mrs. Lynch.”

I laughed. “Yeah. Okay, well I’m going to go.”

Brett nodded and retreated into the shadows.

Dante was waiting around the side of the building. Before I could ask where we were going, he took my hand and led me toward the center of campus. It was a cold and windless evening. The trees stood around us, barren and lifeless.

“How old are you?” I asked, leaning against the trunk of a giant oak.

Dante played with a lock of my hair. “Seventeen.”

I looked up at him. “How old are you really?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the sky, counting in his head. “This will be the sixteenth anniversary of my seventeenth birthday.”

“And how long have you been at Gottfried?”

Dante laughed. “Just two years. And I’ll only stay here two more. Gottfried might be eccentric, but it’s still a high school.”

Right, I thought, blushing at how silly my question was. Obviously it would look suspicious if all of the Undead stayed here while everyone else was graduating.

“How did you die?”

Dante took my hand and led me into the middle of the green. “I drowned.”

I thought about all the times I’d been swimming in the marina. Drowning seemed lonely and alien, like dying in a different world.

“What happened?”

“I told you how we lived in a really remote area of British Columbia?” I nodded and he continued. “One summer, I was out on a walk with my little sister, Cecelia, teaching her how to split wood, when she fell through a partially frozen pond. I jumped in to get her and brought her back to the house, but after a week she couldn’t eat and was coughing and shivering uncontrollably. Pneumonia, we thought. Our neighbor was a bush pilot. He offered to fly us to the nearest city.

“We all got into his tiny water plane, and about an hour in, something went wrong. The plane crashed in the ocean, somewhere off the Pacific coast. The whole way down my father was holding us, shouting prayers into the wind. I was seventeen.”

My scarf blew loose from my neck, dangling in the wind, but I barely noticed. “Everyone died?”

“I think so. I don’t know. I washed ashore somewhere in California. I never saw my parents or sister again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

I turned to him. “If your sister wasn’t buried, and she washed ashore like you, she could be out there somewhere too.”

“I know. I think about her all the time. But her body might have been destroyed. The plane caught fire when it went down. That much I do remember.”

“So, since you weren’t buried, you...you...reanimated, and now you don’t have a soul?”

“Yes.”

“What does it feel like?”

He paused, trying to find the right words. The sky was bruising into night, framed by the silhouettes of the trees lining the path, their brittle skeletons swaying in the wind. “Do you trust me?”

I nodded. Dante led me to the snow by the side of the path.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

I closed them, and he tied something around my head. It felt like a scarf. I stood very still. He slipped off my jacket. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll give it back.”

I began to shiver. After a few minutes my fingers started to go numb in the cold. My nose began to run. My lips felt dry and chapped. Without being able to see the world around me, all the sounds of nature blurred into white noise.

Dante took my hand and led me around the path. I walked with small tenuous steps, stumbling over bumps in the ground and relying on Dante to make sure I didn’t fall.

“This what it feels like on the worst days,” he said. “I can’t feel anything. I can’t smell, I can’t taste, I can’t hear music—just noise. Even my vision is different. I can see things, but it’s like I’m color-blind. Everything is the same, but somehow muted.”

He took the scarf off. I blinked at the brightness of the night as the world slowly came back into focus. “And this is what it’s like when I’m around you.”

I studied him with a newfound understanding. How could someone live like that? “But it doesn’t happen with anyone else? You’re sure?”