Dead Set: A Novel Page 5

  “How do you even know I have a tooth?” she asked.

  Emmett cocked his head to the side. “I get a lot of different kinds of people in my shop. I watch them. Watch them move and think and make the million small decisions that will lead them to the back room or out the door. You get to know people that way, the way I know you. You have toys. You have clothes. You have books. All sorts of childhood trinkets from a time when you were happy. You keep these things close to you. Some people call these objects ‘souvenirs.’ Others call them ‘talismans.’ ”

  “Is that why you want my tooth? It’s a talisman?”

  “Who knows?” Emmett said. “However, it is the price.”

  Zoe sighed. What choice did she have?

  “I’ll take it,” she said.

  Emmett smiled, showing his big white teeth. “I’ll have everything ready for you tomorrow. Your father will be so happy to see you.”

  Zoe walked home the same way she’d arrived at the store: by vague wandering and eventual luck. It seemed insane to her that she could navigate that way, but she was getting used to it.

  It was dark and the streets seemed unusually quiet, the lights unnaturally bright. Like the last time, instead of feeling nervous wandering in a city she barely knew and couldn’t really navigate, she felt a thrilling rush of energy. If this is what seeing Dad again will be like, it’s worth it, whatever crazy things Emmett might want. Besides, what’s he going to do with a tooth?

  She let herself into the apartment as quietly as she could. To her relief, her mother was asleep on the couch with the TV on, her shoes off, her jacket and purse in a pile on the one chair in the room. Zoe went straight to her room and closed the door without making a sound.

  Already the trip inside her father’s life had begun to recede in her consciousness until it was like the memory of a dream. She wasn’t sure if this was an effect of whatever magic powered the Animagraph—and magic was the only word she could think of for it—or the shock of feeling her father die. What she was certain of was that she had accepted a whole new idea into her life, just as she had begun to accept that she could never remember the exact route to Emmett’s store.

  Magic, she thought. Why not?

  She could hear the word now without judgment or irony. It was becoming just one more fact in the innumerable facts that she learned every day at home and at school. Algebra. The name of the largest mammal. The number of days in a row you can eat fried chicken without barfing. Ways to communicate with the dead.

  She went to her closet and pushed the clothes on hangers out of the way. On the floor was a box. She picked it up and tore off the sealing tape. Inside were her baby shoes, snapshots of her parents back at the warehouse, small stuffed animals, and a small pink plastic bottle with a white kitten on the top. My talismans, she thought. Zoe shook the bottle. Something rattled inside. Popping the top, she poured out the contents. Her last two baby teeth, the ones that had come out together, rested in the palm of her hand.

  She held the teeth up and looked at them, amazed that she’d ever been small enough for the tiny things. Then she put them back in the bottle, sealed it, and set it on top of her dresser.

  She took the compass from her pocket. “Tomorrow,” she said, holding it tight. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

  Four

  Zoe awoke early the next morning before the alarm went off. While in the bathroom for her morning pee, she realized that she was starving. She hadn’t eaten lunch or had any dinner after coming home last night. Even bone-dry KFC leftovers seemed appetizing at that moment. She went into the kitchen to forage for breakfast and found her mother sitting at the table, red-eyed and smoking. When her mother had quit smoking a couple of years earlier, she had threatened to strangle Zoe if she ever started, so Zoe made sure her mother never knew. There was an upturned peanut-butter-jar lid on the table, overflowing with burned-out Marlboro Lights.

  Official-looking papers were scattered on the table. Zoe had seen enough of them by now to know that they were legal documents. She tried to read them upside down, but the kitchen lights were off. All she could make out were a few words at the top of one page, words printed larger and darker than the rest: DENIAL OF CLAIM.

  “Your father doesn’t exist,” said Zoe’s mother. “Didn’t exist.”

  “Don’t say that. Dad existed.”

  “Not according to these assholes,” said her mother. Her voice was raspy from the smoke. There were dark rings under her red eyes. She looked like she’d been up all night.

  “Just please don’t say that about Dad.”

  “I know, baby. I know,” said her mother with a kind of exhausted resignation. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do. We can’t live like this forever.” When her father’s software company had gone bankrupt, it took their savings with it. After that, the little money they had in a family trust disappeared frighteningly fast. Zoe’s mother kicked an empty moving box lying on the floor near the table.

  The way the flat morning light came in through the grimy little kitchen window, if she tilted her head just right, Zoe could almost see her mother as the girl in purple eye shadow. Beautiful. Happy. Confident. If she tilted her head back and looked at her straight on, it was her mother, raw-nerved and bone-weary.

  The girl in the purple eye shadow is dead. As dead as Dad.

  Zoe remembered her father watching his own mother die, how he’d been made mute by despair and hopelessness. How he’d carried the guilty memory of it his whole life.

  “It’ll be okay,” said Zoe, feeling like a liar as she spoke. She looked down at her feet, willing them to move. She took a couple of tentative steps. “It’ll be okay.” One more step and she was standing by her mother. She was afraid to look at her, but gently laid a hand on her shoulder. She felt her mother’s hand close over hers.

  Zoe’s mother put her arms around her and pulled her close, crying like Zoe had never seen her cry before. There was a flutter in Zoe’s stomach, a heat that rose to her cheeks. Part of her wanted to cry, too. But she’d already lost control in Emmett’s record store and the tears had stung, like her body was trying to force broken glass out through her eyes. Now she held the tears back, telling herself that she would never lose control again. Zoe rubbed her mother’s back as she cried.

  “It’ll be okay,” she repeated. It didn’t matter if she herself didn’t believe it.

  She saw her father by his dying mother’s bed.

  I just have to say it.

  School felt entirely new and strange. Not impersonal and oppressive, the way it had when she’d first arrived, just . . . strange, but not in a bad way.

  As she stood at her locker, the distance Zoe had felt toward the other students had changed. All the kids, the different tribes . . . they all looked different. A little less odd and a little more something else. What? Forgivable, maybe. Seeing through her father’s eyes, feeling his life pass through her, had changed something in her, but the sensation was even stronger here than it had been the night before.

  Zoe looked around the crowded hallway. The girls were all beautiful, all variations of the youthful version of her mother from the club. The cheerleaders, all smiles, texting each other madly, were more graceful than her mother. A cluster of girls in Dr. Who T-shirts and superhero and science-fiction backpacks seemed kinder, and some of them seemed more shy. Some of the girls were prettier, but not many. And none of them, not one, possessed the confidence her mother had had, that magic rock-star arrogance. The kind that didn’t push you away, but drew you to her.

  And then there were the boys. Zoe couldn’t remember the last time boys had registered on her radar. Since the funeral, boys had all blurred together into a kind of vague cloud of maleness that was easier to ignore than individual boys. Now she was looking at them again and remembering their mystery and allure. Boys’ walks fascinated her, so full of their random and unfocused animal energy. Zim, the boy she’d hung out with at her old school, had shared her first kiss with, had mutu
ally copped first feels with . . . he had a great walk. Too bad he turned out to be such a jerk, Zoe thought, remembering him drunkenly hitting on Julie at a party.

  Until now, Zoe had stayed mad at Zim, but even he seemed forgivable now—as young, stupid, lost, and overwhelmed by the world as Zoe herself. And there was his great hip-swinging walk. She remembered that he had always been much more handsome walking away than standing still.

  Around her twelfth birthday, when she’d first become vaguely interested in the mystery of boys, Valentine starting give her advice, especially on which ones to talk to and which to avoid. His general rule was to look out for the ones having too good a time. Happy was all right, but too happy was a big biohazard warning. These were the boys who were usually the kings of their cliques—jock heroes, drama-club darlings, and the rest. Valentine said that they were the ones who listened and believed it when some idiot teacher on a nostalgia high would tell their class, “These are the best years of your life.” Knowing all that as she did, though, didn’t always help when the less discriminating part of her brain kept her gaze locked on the boys’ gliding arms, their strong legs and hips.

  One of the shy girls, in glasses and a Wolverine T-shirt, dropped a book and a handsome boy in a basketball team jacket didn’t see. He started to trip. A little switch went off in Zoe’s brain and she saw her father falling down next to his car in a parking lot. The handsome boy caught himself, shot Wolverine girl a dirty look, and continued down the hall. Zoe felt a tightness in her chest, but it was over in a second. She turned back to her locker, closed it, and hurried away.

  To continue our discussion from yesterday,” said Mr. Danvers, “who can remind us of the definition of a predator?”

  Zoe was doodling on a piece of paper in her notebook. She couldn’t concentrate on much of anything, even a topic as cool as predators. She distractedly drew long, ragged sets of triangles. Gradually they linked up into long rows.

  Teeth. There were dozens of sets of teeth leering up at her. She’d covered that whole page with them.

  “Care to join us, Zoe?”

  She looked up, suddenly embarrassed. The whole class was looking at her.

  “Yes? Sorry.”

  Mr. Danvers gave her a quick, reassuring smile. “Holly was kind enough to remind us of the definition of a predator. I wonder if you remember the name of the act predators carry out?”

  Zoe glanced down again at the jagged teeth and shook her head. She was letting her mind drift off to the dark place again. Like before, when she wouldn’t talk for days at a time and her mother would be crying while on the phone to the doctors. It was stupid. She was happy now. There was no reason to let the darkness swallow her. I’m going to see Dad. I’m happy, Zoe told herself. I’m happy.

  “Predation,” she said.

  “Excellent,” Mr. Danvers said. “And what do most predators eat?”

  “Other animals.”

  “Making them?”

  “Carnivores.”

  “Give that girl a cigar,” said Mr. Danvers. A few kids in the class laughed. He turned and wrote CARNIVORE on the blackboard, then added a few more notes underneath.

  Absynthe caught her eye and gave her a little wave. Zoe waved back. “How’s the boy?” mouthed Absynthe. Zoe glanced up at the board to make sure Mr. Danvers was still writing, then she mouthed to Absynthe, “I’ll tell you later.” Absynthe nodded and turned back to the front of the room.

  “All predators have special skills and adaptations that help them hunt and catch their prey,” Mr. Danvers told the class. “Great white sharks are a good example. In their snout, they have an organ called the ampullae of Lorenzini.” He paused to write this on the board. Zoe copied the words, though she had a feeling that by tomorrow she’d have forgotten what they meant.

  “This organ,” Mr. Danvers continued, “can detect the tiny electrical currents generated by all living things. Sharks also have an incredible sense of smell. Great whites can detect a drop of blood in the water from five kilometers away. Anyone know how many miles that is?”

  A shaggy, blond boy in a plaid shirt a couple of sizes too big for him thrust up his hand, then blurted out, “Three point one one miles.”

  Mr. Danvers nodded. “Thank you, Alex. I’d have settled for three, but you get extra brownie points for knowing about the point one one.”

  Zoe tried to write down everything that Mr. Danvers said, trying to stay focused so she wouldn’t start drawing teeth again.

  “Snakes are another advanced predatory species. They use highly developed organs in their tongue and mouth to literally taste the air. And they do it very accurately,” said Mr. Danvers. “Most snakes have lousy eyesight, but a lot of snakes, pit vipers, for instance, make up for this by seeing their prey another way. They have infrared—heat—sensors in pits on their face, between their nostrils and their eyes. They use these sensors to hunt prey at night.”

  In Zoe’s mind’s eye a picture formed of Emmett in his dark store, lurking there all day, and maybe all night, happily dusting the record bins in total darkness. At first it was funny but then the image of him moving around the store in the dark, just another shadow, nothing more than a trick of the light, made her uneasy.

  It’s just your mind playing tricks on you, she told herself. Trying to drag you back to the dark place. Emmett was odd, maybe even a full-on fruit bat, but he’d never done anything creepy or hurt her. In fact, he’d shown her a whole new world. Emmett was giving her back her father. How could that be a bad thing?

  Mr. Danvers went to the shelves and took down the big jar of animal teeth. “Everyone come on up. I’m going to show you the kind of specialized teeth predators have.” He dumped the jar on the tabletop.

  As Zoe followed the rest of the class to the front of the room, she heard a girl say, “Ew! Are those people’s?”

  Mr. Danvers held up a couple of yellowed, flat-topped teeth. “They look like it, don’t they?” he asked. “They’re chimp molars. Very similar to ours.”

  Zoe squeezed in and looked at the teeth Mr. Danvers was holding. They did look very human, if a little bit big. I really don’t want to lose my last baby teeth, she thought. And how would Emmett know the difference in that dark store? An idea formed in her mind while Mr. Danvers went on about sharks biting through steel cables and how some snake teeth were like needles and perfect for injecting poison, but she wasn’t listening anymore.

  As class ended, Zoe busied herself at her desk, shuffling papers and stacking and restacking her books, waiting for the other students to file out of the room. Mr. Danvers sat at the lab table writing in a black spiral-bound notebook. Zoe walked to where he sat, rehearsing the question in her mind, trying to sound relaxed and spontaneous.

  “Mr. Danvers?”

  He looked up, a little surprised. “Yes, Zoe. What can I help you with?”

  Zoe set her books down on the lab table. Animal teeth were still strewn across its surface. Some had been moved into little piles during class. Canine. Feline. Bear. Snake. Shark. Zoe picked up a shark tooth the size of a shot glass. It was heavy and she remembered that it had belonged to a kind of prehistoric shark the size of a school bus.

  “We talked about all these killers and carnivores, but they all seem the same to me, you know?” she asked. “I mean, lions and tigers and bears are all killers, but you haven’t said which one is the best predator.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Danvers said, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise. “I thought the answer to that was obvious. It’s us. Humans have hunted and killed every species of animal on the planet, many to extinction. No other predator can claim that.” Then he added, “None that we know of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mr. Danvers set down his pen and laced the fingers of his hands together. “Back in the early eighties, a handful of important biologists thought that we could pretty much close the book on mammal species, that we’d found every single kind of mammal on the planet. Then, in Madagascar, people started discover
ing new species of lemurs, a kind of primitive primate. Suddenly there were a lot more mammals around than a lot of smart people had ever thought possible.” He paused for a moment and opened his hands. “Who knows what else is out there, hiding in the deep rain forests, on mountains, or in underground burrows? The dinosaurs ruled the world for more than a hundred million years before we came along. Maybe there’s something out there that will knock us humans off our perch as king of the food chain.”

  Zoe set down the shark tooth and picked up one Mr. Danvers had said was from a lion. It was bigger than her thumb and curved like a dagger. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mr. Danvers. “We’ve got another million years or so before we have to worry about poodles and tabbies taking over.”

  Zoe smiled. “Want to help me put these away?” Mr. Danvers asked, reaching for the jar he kept the teeth in. He put the empty jar in the middle of the table and began dropping handfuls of teeth inside.

  Suddenly the plan Zoe had been thinking about evaporated. She didn’t want to steal from him after all. “Shouldn’t we be separating these by species or something?” she asked.

  Mr. Danvers shrugged. “I like a little chaos. When things get all mixed together, sometimes you see things you would never have seen otherwise.”

  Zoe nodded, wondering how she could ever have thought about ripping off someone as genuinely okay as Mr. Danvers. She dropped handfuls of animal teeth into the jar, mentally kissing her baby teeth good-bye.

  A teacher Zoe didn’t recognize, an older woman wearing lipstick just a little too bright for her prim dress, came into the room. “Mr. Danvers,” she said. “The vice principal would like to see you.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Messina,” he said. The woman nodded, giving Zoe a quick, inquiring glance before she left.