After Me (13 page)

He laughed. “Give it up. I know you got it bad for the Biebs.”

“Busted,” I said. “Hey, we’re still on for tomorrow, right? My mouth’s been watering for one of those Cuban sandwiches ever since you told me about them.” Yeah, I couldn’t wait to bite into all that cardboard deliciousness.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll meet you and Annalee at the library. How many of the books did you finish?”

“All of them,” I said without thinking. When he gave me a doubtful look I said, “Okay, only half.”

“Which ones?”

I named off the first five that came to mind and ended with
The Great Gatsby.
“Thanks for the tips. They were all pretty good, especially Gatsby.”

Mr. Forrester called the class to attention just then, so Lew leaned over and whispered, “We can talk about it tomorrow night.”

I nodded then spent the rest of the class hoping that Annalee would get sick and couldn’t go with us. Nothing serious—just a mild stomach virus or something that would keep her home and let me have Lew all to myself for the night.

Guess I wouldn’t be getting that friendship badge anytime soon.

Chapter Nineteen

A
s soon as I got home, I e-mailed Flo to make sure it was okay to put Scott on my list of predators. While I was waiting to hear back from her, I created a new FaceSpace account so I could message Scott and set up our meeting. Within minutes of sending him the request to hook up with Hotgirl Jones—an admirer from Coral Gables High who just
loved
the way he looked in his football pants—Scott replied and invited me over. And since his parents were still out of town, he said we’d have the house all to ourselves. Woohoo!

It was after eleven before I got an answer from Flo, but the news was good.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: RE: Late Night Fun

Dear Miss Gayle:

Your request to punish the young man you described has been approved as a codicil to your termination agreement. However, while you may inflict injuries on him or others like him, you must stop short of taking their lives if they have taken none themselves. One more caveat: be careful to protect your anonymity so as not to jeopardize your mission.

Additionally, our Network Administrator has instructed me to inform you that your new e-mail address is still not acceptable.

Regards,

Florence

I logged off and quickly dressed in the clothes Annalee and I had gotten from the Goodwill that afternoon. No ski masks to be found in Miami, but we did find a red and black Mardi Gras mask with an elastic band. Even better, we’d found a black T-shirt emblazoned with a big red Z. I knew Zorro might sue if he found out that Zombie Girl had stolen his logo, but I decided to risk it. Black leggings completed the ensemble since I decided to go barefoot for comfort and fleetness of foot.

When I checked my reflection in the mirror after I was suited up, I got another idea. Using my FaceSpace profile picture as a model, I smudged some mascara around my eyes, then I used lipstick to add some “blood” dripping from my mouth. A little more red and black streaked through my hair and nobody should recognize Gwen even if the mask happened to come off. As a finishing touch, I applied some glittery black polish to my nails and toes. I might be dead, but I was still a girl. And totally fabulous.

I was about to slip out of the room and tiptoe through the house when I realized I didn’t need to use the front door. Since I didn’t have to worry about broken bones or sprains, I could jump from the window even though I was on the second floor. I dropped the fifteen or so feet to the ground without so much as a twinge of pain. I’d need a way to get back in when I came home, so I looked around and decided the banyan tree on the side of the house looked like my best bet.

I cut across the back yard and easily scaled the privacy fence. Super strength apparently improved my agility, a good thing since I’d need it to climb the tree when I came back.

Scott’s house was three blocks over in a more upscale part of the Grove. I probably could’ve made it there in just a few minutes if I cut through some yards, but I didn’t want to risk setting off any security alarms. Fortunately, the streets were enclosed in a canopy of trees that offered plenty of shadows for cover in case any night owls were out walking Fido.

Scott’s Spanish villa style house turned out to be quite the showpiece. Not exactly a mansion like the ones that bordered Biscayne Bay, but a lot ritzier than Karen and Brad’s house. I dashed across the brick courtyard that led to the keyhole doorway and saw a note taped to the front door. In handwriting that would’ve earned a smiley face sticker for a first grader, Scott had left me instructions to take the side portico to the pool area in the back.

When I went through the gate leading to the deck, I saw him lounging on a chaise by the pool wearing only a pair of red gym shorts, a wooden tub on the ground beside him filled with ice and beer, and music blasting from somewhere nearby. Good, that would make it less likely for the neighbors to hear Scott’s cries for help.

He had his eyes closed, so he didn’t know I’d come through the gate. I walked over and took one of the beer bottles from the tub, then I twisted off the cap and tilted the bottle slowly until the beer splashed onto Scott’s muscular chest.

“Shit!” He jumped up, nearly knocking the chair into the pool.

“Hope you didn’t bother to put anything in the beer this time.” I tossed the empty bottle into the water. “I won’t be drinking any, but it wouldn’t do you any good if I did.”

“What the—who the hell are you?” Confusion battled with anger for control of his face.

“I know it sounds incredibly cliché,” I said, “but I’m your worst nightmare, Scott. I’m here to teach you a lesson about taking advantage of stupid girls.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “And I don’t take lessons from nobody, especially some psycho chick who thinks she’s freaking Catwoman.”

“What’s the matter, Scott? No fun hooking up with a girl who’s not drugged and at your mercy?” I grabbed the chaise and threw it aside so there was nothing between us. “Don’t you wanna party with me?”

He laughed unpleasantly and looked me up and down. “Guess I could shut my eyes.”

I beckoned him with my fingers. “Come get some, asshole.”

He was in front of me in three steps and tried to grab my arms, but I met him with a punch to the throat that sent him reeling backward, coughing and gasping. He managed to stay on his feet, but I didn’t give him a chance to attack again. In an awesome imitation of all the roundhouse kicks I’d seen in action flicks, my foot connected with his hip and knocked him completely off the deck onto the lawn where he lay sprawled on his back.

Before he could recover, I dropped to the ground on top of him. With his arms pinned under my knees, I gripped his throat with one hand and held the other over his face in a claw like Mr. Miyagi in
The Karate Kid
.

“Time for your lesson, Scott. The next time you and your football buddies decide to put the new cheerleaders through an initiation at one of your parties, better stick to dunking them in the pool. I don’t care how stupid or slutty or willing to grovel they are, they don’t deserve to be drugged and raped.”

He obviously didn’t realize the gravity of his situation, because he tried to argue despite my hand around his throat.

“I told you I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said. “Me and my boys don’t need to drug
anybody
. We got girls begging us for it all the time.”

“Liar.”

I released his throat and drove my knuckles into the bridge of his nose, hard enough to break it but not hard enough to send bone fragments into his brain. He uttered a distinctly unmasculine scream and tried to free his arms, but I held him down as easily as if he were the little girl he sounded like.

“Okay, I’m sorry—shit!” Blood ran into his mouth from his shattered nose and mixed with his tears.

“Much better,” I said. “And you’d be smart to spread the word to your teammates too, because if I hear about anything like this happening again, every guy on the team is gonna pay with a broken bone. And it’s gonna be whichever bone they need the most to play football. You’re the quarterback, huh? Right-handed or left?”

“No… please!” His eyes were wide with fear. “I swear it won’t happen again!”

I shrugged. “Guess I’ll just have to break both of them.”

“The left! The left!”

I lifted my knee so I could deliver a karate chop to his right forearm. “Sorry. Don’t trust you.”

I stood up and watched him rolling around on the ground, holding his broken arm and sobbing. Was I a monster because I didn’t feel even a speck of sympathy for him? Maybe. But he sure as hell hadn’t felt any sympathy for the girls he’d drugged, so I guess that made us even.

“Okay, Scott, let’s review our lesson. Girls are not objects created to entertain the male of the species, and even when they’re drugged or drunk or just too stupid to make intelligent decisions and tell you no, that doesn’t give you the right to take advantage of them. Got that?”

“Yeah, I got it,” he whimpered.

“Excellent. And don’t forget to share your newfound knowledge with the other guys, ‘cause I’m holding you personally accountable for anything they do. Oh, and in case you’re wondering how I found out about your little roofie parties, you can thank Fallon and her bitchy cheerleader pals for gossiping in the bathroom without checking to make sure nobody’s in the stalls.”

I went back to the deck and picked up the tub of ice and beer, which probably weighed close to seventy-five pounds. Scott was still on the ground, although he tried to scramble to his feet when he saw me coming back.

“I said I’d do whatever you want. Please don’t break anything else!”

“Dude, how cruel do you think I am?” I gave him an offended look and pushed him back to the ground with my foot. “I’m not gonna break any more bones. I just think you need one more little reminder about why this happened in the first place.”

I set the tub on the ground beside him and smiled.

“Take off your shorts.”

* * *

W
hen I left Scott’s house ten minutes later, I was still so pumped that I knew I couldn’t go back to Brad and Karen’s yet. I took a detour down Bayshore Drive, hoping I could find a spot between the houses where I could get to the water. I needed a quiet place to de-charge or I was liable to wake everyone in the house when I went home.

I had to keep going south until I got to where Bayshore intersected with McFarlane, but I found a spot where I could cut through Peacock Park and get to a small pier. Sitting cross-legged on the end of the dock while I looked out at the moon’s reflection on Biscayne Bay, I could feel the electricity in my body slowly draining into the worn boards beneath me.

It felt so good to get vengeance for Caitlin and the other girls who’d been used by Scott and his douchebag friends. If I could’ve found something to make me feel this amplified while I was alive, maybe I wouldn’t have messed around and gotten myself killed. Of course, if I hadn’t gotten myself killed, I wouldn’t be here now playing Superhero. That was some irony that even Alanis Morissette should be able to recognize.

Ironic or not, one thing I knew for sure was that it felt incredible to do something that could actually make a difference in this crappy world. And I also liked being teamed up with the good guys for a change. My life before had been such a total waste. Maybe it would’ve been different if Cassie hadn’t died—I liked to think so at least—and this made me hope I was right. That there was some good in me after all.

But, yeah, I could totally get used to this Zombie Girl gig. In fact, I was starting to hope I wouldn’t find BOSSMAN anytime soon and have to leave, which was why I hadn’t even bothered to see if Cherry Licious had any new messages on FaceSpace when I got home from school that afternoon. I’d love the chance to take care of a few more junior scumbags like Scott and Dougie before I moved on to the big guys.

I lay back on the pier and looked up at the stars. Who was I kidding? There was another reason I wasn’t ready to leave yet, and it had to do with a certain blond chess champion. Maybe by this time tomorrow night, I’d know whether he felt anything besides friendship for me or if Annalee was the reason he’d asked us on our “date.”

Something to my left drew my attention and I sat up. About a quarter mile away, I could see a light at the end of another pier that stretched out behind one of the humongous houses on Bayshore Drive. It reminded me of the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock and how Jay Gatsby had loved her for so long even though he knew she belonged to another man.

A shooting star streaked across the sky just then, almost like an omen, and I decided to make a wish. It was incredibly selfish of me, but I wished with all my dead heart that Lew would like me better than he liked Annalee. I sat there a little while longer, thinking about things like the perfect crease in his khakis and his crazy math watch, and it didn’t even bother me anymore that I thought they were sexy.

Before I left, I paused and looked up at the sky again. “Hey, Flo, I don’t know if wishes are your department or not, but maybe you can put in a good word for me since I just struck a blow for the guys in white.”