Laughter of the Undead Page 18

  “This was a bad idea,” he said eventually, allowing me to push myself farther away. A wave of guilt hit me when I saw that his clothes were also soaked in blood.

  I swallowed hard. “No, it was a good idea . . . in theory.”

  He stared at me for a long moment. “Are you all right, Izzy?”

  I gave a shaky sigh and wiped at my own cheek, still expecting to find blood there despite Connor’s care in wiping it all away. “I will be. I was just . . . ” I glanced at the body behind me, “So . . . scared.”

  “I should have helped you,” Connor muttered, almost to himself. “The other one tried climbing over the desk and I had to hit it about a million times with the chair before it stopped laughing.”

  I nodded and we fell into a silence broken only by a heater somewhere in the building trying to work and the wind outside.

  “I’m sorry,” I said suddenly. Connor blinked at me, startled.

  “For what?”

  I glared at the ground, and my voice got quieter, “I’m sorry I hated you.”

  Connor didn’t say anything for so long that I had to look at him. He was almost smiling. “Well, I’m sorry I’m an asshole.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he put up a hand to cut me off. “No, Iz, I'm an ass. Honestly. I let people call someone that had been my best friend in the world something that everyone knew she hated. And I called her that myself? A-S-S, that’s how you spell Connor.”

  I almost laughed. Even covered in blood and shaking from fear and adrenaline, Connor could still make me laugh. “Everyone called me Frizzy. Everyone. That’s not why I hated you.” I pulled my knees to my chest. “I hated you because everyone else loved you. Connor’s so nice. Connor’s amazing. Connor’s super hot. Stuff like that made me not want to like you.”

  He grinned, “Connor’s super hot?”

  I rolled my eyes. “If that is all you got out of what I just said, I am going to hit you.”

  A heartbeat passed before I took another deep breath. “And . . . well, I hated you because you abandoned me.”

  Connor’s smile fell, “I did.”

  Emotions I’d felt for years piled on top of the new ones building in my chest, and my throat tightened as I asked the question I’d been wanting to ask for seven years. “Why?”

  Connor sucked in a sharp breath and he looked up at the ceiling, clenching and unclenching one hand, “I . . . I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are,” I snapped, “but I want to know why you cut me off. Why you suddenly pretended you didn’t know me. What did I do?”

  My voice was shaking now even though I didn’t want it to. There were bigger problems in the world right now than seven-year-old hurt. We were covered in blood for heaven’s sake. I had just killed something that used to be a person. There was no worse time for this discussion, but I needed to know.

  Connor let out a sharp sigh. “You didn’t do anything, Izzy.”

  “Then tell me why!”

  “Because I had to!” It was his turn to snap. I glared at him for a long moment, and whatever irritation he felt faded from his face like his smile had.

  “Or at least I thought did,” he said so gently I almost couldn’t hear him, face turned to the floor. “I thought I had to.”

  “Why?”

  Connor cleared his throat. “I got bullied a lot when we were younger. You know that, and I know you did too, but . . . sixth grade was hell, okay? It was the worst year. It was the year I joined the football team because my dad said I had to, so I did, and I wasn’t like any of them. I was too small, quiet . . . And you know, too friends with you. We had practice every weekday after school and every day of the week I got beaten up. Not one practice did I get to leave without getting slammed into a locker or shoved in a toilet or just plain punched in the gut. They were trying to get me to quit, the older boys first and then the ones in our grade. They didn’t want me there because I wasn’t enough like them to be there. They told me I was too much of a freak to ever be a member of their team. They started coming for me outside of practice, during the day at school. They told me they’d start coming for you if I didn’t quit, but my dad wouldn’t let me quit. I put up with it for almost the whole year. Then, on one of the worse days, when they’d thrown me all the way to the ground and were kicking and pounding on me, someone stepped on my wrist and broke it. They pulled me out of football for the rest of the year, but I still had to go back the next year, and my dad said something had to change. I love my dad, but he seemed to think it was my own fault for being the way I was. He said something had to change . . . so it did. I stopped talking to you . . . and became one of them.”

  I stared at him for a long time. I remembered how badly he’d been bullied in elementary school. I remembered him breaking his arm too. He’d told everyone it was from a bike accident. He’d been weird the whole time he was in the cast, and the moment it came off . . . that had been when Connor vanished from my life. Next thing I knew, Connor was some hotshot on the football team, and everyone knew him and thought he was the best thing since the invention of the wheel. The Connor I knew was gone.

  “My first thought had been to stop getting beaten up, then start talking to you again,” Connor continued, “but I was eleven and an idiot and didn’t realize how hard it would be to apologize to my best friend. And you were . . . you’ve always been the best friend I ever had, Izzy. Darren and Sam didn’t give two shits about me. But the longer I waited, the harder it seemed, and the harder it was to be anything other than who I was pretending to be.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. I still wanted to be mad about it. I still wanted to hold him ditching me over his head like I had for the last seven years, but Connor’s story made sense. He knew he did the wrong thing, but he’d also done the best thing he thought he could. He was right. We’d been eleven, and eleven-year-olds always do dumb things. I couldn’t blame him for an eleven-year-old’s mistake. Even if he had tried to apologize to me last year or the year before, would it have even worked? I’d hated him so much that an apology never would have cut it until the world ended.

  I took a deep breath. “Connor?”

  He met my eyes like he was scared of what he would find there. He cleared his throat, “Yeah?”

  “I forgive you.”

  He let out a huge breath. “Oh, thank God. Are you sure? Because I wouldn’t.”

  I laughed a little. “Yes, I’m sure, Connor. I forgive you. Now can we please go back to your house? I'm covered in blood and it is unpleasant.”

  He smiled nervously. “Yeah, sure.”

  Connor pushed himself to his feet, his smile slowly losing its nervousness.

  He was still smiling when he offered me a hand. I took it and we stood staring at all the blood. There was so much of it. It reeked.

  We were both covered.

  “Tommy’ll be flipping a shit cause my phone only had like three percent battery. It probably died on him.”

  “There are worse things,” I muttered. Connor looked down at me, and despite how I could distinctly remember being taller than him, I had to look way up to meet his mismatched eyes. As beautiful as they were, his eyes were ringed by dark circles, deep purple against his skin, and the whites of his eyes had red lines as if he’d been crying. He had been crying. At that moment, I would have done anything to make sure he never cried again.

  “We good, Izzy?”

  I glanced up at him and as everything, seven years of hurt and loneliness stacked with two days of death and grief threatened to crush me, I took a deep breath. “Can I have a hug?”

  Connor smiled sadly and nodded, letting me bury my face in his chest. He squeezed me as hard as I squeezed him.

  “As good as it’ll get.”

  I washed my face about a dozen times, convinced that there was still blood there. Even when I turned the water off and stood there dripping, I still felt matted in blood.

  The power flickered again while I was showering and I wondered if it was the storm or the mons
ter’s fault. It wasn’t as long as before. I spent several minutes showering in the dark and almost disliked it when the lights turned back on, blinding me.

  This was Connor and Tommy’s bathroom. I’d used it a couple of times when I had to pee in the middle of the night, but I'd never looked in the shower. Like everything else that had Tommy involved, there was a dinosaur curtain, and there were toys matching the curtain in the shower like Tommy played with when he took a bath.

  Higher up were other soaps. “Grown-up” soaps. Connor’s soaps. I was taking a shower in Connor Storming’s shower, I couldn’t imagine how many girls had fantasized over that a week ago. That thought almost made me laugh.

  Standing under the water, I tried to feel something, but it was impossible. All I could feel was the cloying blood still clinging to me, warm even under the water that had turned cold when the power died. There was no blood on me. My arms were their normal olive tan. No black or red blood anywhere on me.

  Connor had left more than just a pair of sweatpants out for me. He’d left a shirt and underwear and a towel out too. I don't know what he thought I was going to do with the boxer shorts. I put my own underwear back on but used the shirt and pants.

  They were too big, all of them. I had to roll the pant legs up about a million times before they even kept me from falling when I walked, and cinch it as far as it would allow and they still wanted to fall down.

  The shirt wasn’t nearly as too big, but it was definitely Connor’s. The sleeves fell down past my hands and the hem to the light grayish purple shirt fell to my knees. I frowned, trying to imagine Connor wearing it.

  I stood in front of the mirror, glaring at my reflection. I was clean. I looked clean, the only thing on my face the occasional red spot of acne, but I could still feel the blood like it wouldn’t ever go away.

  When I went down the stairs, Connor was in the living room. He lay face down on the couch, upbeat screamo rock music played out of some stereo, maybe the TV, but I couldn’t tell.

  Listening to it, I discovered that they were super motivational lyrics for a song that stereotypically would have been about darkness, death, despair, and everybody dying.

  Even though his face was probably buried in a pillow, I could just hear him singing under the male lead of the song, and this observation informed me, that Connor can, in fact, NOT sing.

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

  Laughed too loudly and wildly for it to be normal.

  Connor pushed himself into a sitting position and whirled, for a second as scared as he had back at the police station. Of course, laughter. Laughter would never not be scary again.

  “What the hell, Izzy? Is my singing that bad?”

  I half nodded, half shook my head.

  He grabbed a remote from where it sat on the coffee table and hit a button to make the music stop in the middle of death screaming the word “smile”.

  I took a shaky breath, composing myself. “Sorry, sorry.”

  “Is something wrong?” He took a second, frowned at himself, and then corrected. “Something specifically wrong more so that before?”

  I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes, shaking my head, still giggling. “It’s nothing. I’m fine. Go back to your . . . whatever you were doing.”

  “Izzy . . . ” he knew I wasn’t really laughing. Well, I was laughing, but I wasn't laughing- laughing. The manic panic-filled sound that came out of my mouth did not stem from humor. I was starting to crack.

  “I honestly have no right to complain, Connor.” I dropped my hands from my face and shook out my arms until I could breathe without it hitching. “Whatever is wrong with me, I don’t need to complain to you.”

  He raised both eyebrows, putting his feet up on the table. “Is this like lesser pain guilt? Like 'I can’t be upset because what made me upset isn’t as bad as what makes you upset’? You realize that’s dumb, right? Everyone’s different. Shit’s happened to you too, and maybe it’s not as bad, but you can be upset, Iz.”

  I frowned at him.

  “Fine then, don’t tell me. Come on,” he said, jumping to his feet and starting toward me and up the stairs.

  “What are we doing?” I asked.

  “Cheering you up.”

  “Cheering me up?”

  He stopped on the stairs and turned to give me a deadpan look. “Yes. I am. And if it cheers me up too . . . bonus points.”

  “But Connor, you— ”

  “Izzy, if I think about that for more than a millisecond, I’m going to lose all ability to function. I need to be here with you and with Tommy, so, please, let me think about you.”

  He shot me a crooked almost convincing grin and kept going up.

  I raised one eyebrow but followed anyway.

  “Damn.”

  “Did you just cuss over Chutes and Ladders?”

  “Maybe . . . ”

  “Well, no cursing in front of the four-year-old.” I covered Tommy’s ears with mock affront and he giggled in my lap.

  Connor’s idea of cheering me up had been board games.

  After raiding Connor’s closet, we had a pile of about seven cardboard boxes in all colors of the rainbow, and playing them one after another had actually managed to take my mind away from everything. It looked like it was doing the same for Connor, which was what he’d asked for and clearly what he needed.

  It was almost as if everything were normal, like where there were no cannibalistic dead people and no one was dead. Like something wasn’t irrevocably broken in him or snapping in me.

  “Well, either way, you lose,” I grinned. He made a “hmph” sound and I laughed, putting a hand out to Tommy for a high five, who obliged happily.

  Connor rolled his eyes, “What do you guys wanna play now?”

  Tommy leaned over almost falling out of my lap to point to the box on the bottom. “Dis one.”

  Pretty Pretty Princess.

  “Hey!” I glared from Connor to the box. “This is mine! I was wondering what happened to it.”

  I glared at Connor and he shrugged, laughing. “You left it here.”

  Tommy pushed himself to his feet. “Connor, I want play the princess!”

  “Seriously, little man?” Connor suppressed a snicker, “The princess game?”

  Tommy nodded excitedly, pushing on Connor's shoulder. “Please?”

  I laughed, “Seems like that’s what he wants.”

  “All right. But I’ll have you two know I am the master at that game.”

  “Are you?”

  “You bet.” He held his fist up definitely. “I will be the prettiest princess of them all.”

  Fifteen

  Connor

  March 5th - 4:26 p.m.

  Levi Graves with thunder in his eyes would have been a lot scarier if I wasn’t too busy being embarrassed by the fact that I was the prettiest princess of them all.

  “What the shit, man?”

  Levi stood in the entryway with his arms crossed over his chest looking pissed off.

  I blinked at him and grinned sheepishly. Not the normal reaction one should have to someone as scary as Levi glaring at you, but it’s what I did. I’d won against Tommy and Izzy so now I was the prettiest princess of them all and looked about as ridiculous as it sounded.

  “Uh . . . hi. How’d it go?”

  Levi’s face hardened. “Fine,” he growled.

  I blinked at him, my air of humorous sheepishness fading. He looked so angry, so . . . something, but at the same time, his face displayed nothing. I didn’t know how I could tell, but I could feel, maybe from his eyes, that something was deeply wrong.

  I pulled the stupid crown off and the earrings, standing. “Fine isn’t the word I’d use, Levi.”

  He took a step back from me and whatever was behind his eyes, the anger or whatever it was, made him seem . . . dangerous, I guess.

  He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Levi . . . ”

  “Levi!” I turned as Izzy burst in from the kitchen, To
mmy gripping the edge of her shirt, and her face broke into a grin. Izzy rushed up to him, leaving Tommy in the doorway, and whatever was in Levi’s eyes faded as he smiled a little at her. She gripped his forearms. “You came back! Are you okay? What happened? Did you find Alec?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “Of course, I came back, I said I would.”

  Izzy let out a long breath, gripping Levi’s forearms so hard her knuckles were white. She let go after a second and turned to me, took in the jewelry I still wore, and laughed— not the scary wild broken laugh she’d laughed before we’d played the games but a real laugh.

  Levi looked up at me too. “But seriously, Storming. What are you wearing and why?”

  “You are the king of bad timing,” I said, rolling my eyes and crossing my arms over my chest, ignoring the fact that I still had on some of the stupid jewelry.

  “Yes, he is,” Izzy smiled at me, “and you are the princess of it.”

  I rolled my eyes again.

  He turned to Izzy, a smirk plastered on his features, but it seemed fake. “What were you doing that got him dressed up like a drag queen?”

  With another eye roll, I pulled the necklace off and dropping it into the blue round box. “Okay, first off, looking like this I would be the world's saddest drag queen. I wouldn’t deserve the title. And secondly, we were playing a board game called Pretty Pretty Princess.”

  “Why . . . ”

  “It was his idea,” I protested, gesturing to Tommy, who still clung to the back of Izzy’s shirt.

  “Yet you went along with it?”

  “Oh, shut up, Levi,” I muttered jokingly. Having finished de-jeweling myself, I shut the round blue box and pushed it into a white cardboard box and put that on a pile of the other board games.

  “Come on, Izzy, help me put these away,” I said, taking half the stack and getting to my feet. Izzy nodded and followed me after filling her own arms with the games, Tommy coming over to stand by her again.