Undead and Unappreciated (15 page)

T
his is how my tombstone read:

E
LIZABETH
A
NNE
T
AYLOR

A
PRIL
25, 1974–
A
PRIL
25, 2004

O
UR SWEETHEART, ONLY RESTING

“That’s just so depressing,” my best friend, Jessica Watkins, observed.

“It’s weird.” My sister, Laura Goodman, was staring. “That is very, very weird.”

“Our sweetheart, only resting?” I asked. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think it’s nice,” my sister said, a little hesitantly. She looked like a dirty old man’s dream with her long, butter-scotch blonde hair, big blue eyes, and red pea coat. You know how minister’s kids will sometimes go wild when they finally get away from their parents? Laura was the devil’s daughter (no, really), so her way of rebelling was to be as nice and sweet as possible. A dastardly plan. “It’s a little different. Most of the people I know would have gone with a Bible verse, but your mama certainly didn’t have to.”

“Given how things turned out,” Jess replied, running a hand over her skinned-back black hair, “It’s a little prophetic, don’t you think?” As usual when she put her hair up, she pulled it back so tightly, the arch of her eyebrows made her look constantly amazed.

“I think standing in front of my own grave is the last place I want to be on the first day of December, is what I think.” Depressing
and
creepy. Must be the holidays.

Jessica sighed again and rested her forehead on my shoulder. “Poor Betsy. I can’t get over it. You were so young!”

Laura smirked a little. “Like turning thirty wasn’t enough of a trauma. Poor Betsy.”

“So young!”

“Will you pull yourself together, please? I’m right here.” I stuck my hands into my coat pockets and sulked. “What is it, like ten below out? I’m freezing.”

“You’re always freezing. Don’t bitch if you’re going to go outside without your gloves. And it’s thirty-five degrees, you big baby.”

“Would you like my coat?” Laura said. “I don’t really feel the cold.”

“Another one of your sinister powers,” Jessica said. “We’ll add it to the list with weapons made of hellfire and always being able to calculate a twenty-two percent tip. Now Bets, run this by me again…how’d your tombstone finally show up here?”

I explained, hopefully for the last time. I had, of course, died in the spring. Rose in the early dawn hours the day of my funeral and gone on undead walkabout. Since my body was MIA, the funeral was canceled.

But my mother, who had been in a huge fight with my dad and stepmom about what to spend on my marble tombstone, had rushed to order the thing. By the time it was finished, no funeral, no service, no burial. (My family knew the truth about what I was now, and so did Jessica. My other co-workers and friends had been told the funeral had been a joke, one in very poor taste.)

So anyway, my tombstone had been in storage the last six months. (My stepmother had been pushing for plain, cheap granite, my initials, and my dates of death and birth; a penny saved is a penny earned, apparently. My dad, as he always did when my mom and Antonia were involved, stayed out of it.) After a few months, the funeral home had politely contacted my mother and asked what she’d like to do with my tombstone. Since mom had the plot and the stone paid for, she had them stick it in the dirt the two days’ ago, and mentioned it at lunch yesterday. You know how it goes: “Waiter, I’ll have the tomato soup with parmesan croutons, and by the way, honey, I had your tombstone set up in the cemetery yesterday.”

Jessica and Laura had been morbidly curious to see it, and I’d tagged along. What the hell, it made for a break from wedding arrangements and Christmas cards.

“Your mom,” Jessica commented, “is a model of scary efficiency.”

Laura brightened. “Oh, Dr. Taylor is so nice.”

“And just when I think your stepmother can’t get any lamer…no offense, Laura.” The Ant was technically Laura’s birth mother. It was a long story.

“I’m not offended,” she replied cheerfully.

“Have you two weirdos seen enough?”

“Wait, wait.” Jessica plopped the bouquet of calla lilies on my grave. I nearly shrieked. I’d sort of assumed she’d picked those up for one of the eighty thousand tables in our house. Not for my
grave
. Ugh! “There we go.”

“Let’s bow our heads,” Laura suggested.

“No
way
. You’re both fucking ill.”

“Language,” my sister replied mildly.

“We’re not praying over my grave. I’m massively creeped out just being here. That would be the final, ultimately too-weird step, ya weirdo.”

“
I’m
not the one on a liquid diet, O vampire queen. Let’s book.”

“Yeah,” I said, casting one more uneasy glance at my grave. “Let’s.”

T
he Winoka Falcons were on the verge of their third straight Community Junior League Soccer Championship. In sudden-death overtime, the score was tied at 1–1 with the Northwater Shooting Stars. Jennifer Scales, the Falcons captain, dribbled the ball across midfield. Four of her teammates charged forward with her; only three exhausted defenders were keeping pace.

Jennifer, who had turned fourteen the day before, wanted a win for her birthday present.

As one of the Northwater defenders approached, she kicked the ball sharply to the left, into what could have been open field. It skimmed the grass and nestled squarely in the instep of her teammate, Susan Elmsmith. Jennifer grinned in delight at her friend’s sudden change in pace and direction. There were times she was sure the two of them could read each other’s mind.

Susan advanced on the enemy net with gritted teeth. Jennifer slipped behind the defender who had challenged her and matched pace with the last opposing fullback, being careful not to slip offsides.

Unfortunately, it had rained most of yesterday, and though the skies were clear today, the ground was treacherous. More than twenty yards away from the goal, Susan went skidding into the grass and mud with an angry yell, just managing to push the ball a bit off the ground and over the foot of the fullback. It came spinning by Jennifer, and in a tenth of a second she saw her shot.

She darted forward and kicked the ball straight up with her toe. Then she somersaulted into the air, twisted, and sent the ball sailing toward the net with a hard kick. For an upside-down instant she saw the goalie dangling in the sky from the earth above. Then she twisted again, completed the midair roll, and landed on her feet as the ball flew past the goalie’s reaching fingers.

Game over, 2–1, Falcons.

She turned back downfield grinning, already anticipating the slaps and congratulations from her teammates. But all the players on the field were staring at her in surprise, and a little bit of…fear?

“How did you do that?” Susan’s eyes, usually almond-shaped, were wide with shock. “You turned upside down…It was so
fast
.”

“Duh, it had to be,” Jennifer shot back. They were gaping at her as if she’d pulled a second head out of her butt and kicked
that
into the net. “Jeez, any of you could have done it. I was just closest to the ball.”

“No,” Terry Fox, another teammate, said. Her voice sounded strange and thin. “We couldn’t have.”

Then the field was crowded with parents from the stands, and their ecstatic coach, who lifted Jennifer by the elbows and shook her like a maraca. She forgot about the odd reactions of her friends and reveled in the win.

In all the ruckus, she didn’t think to look at her mother’s reaction to her stunt. By the time she sought her out in the crowd, the older woman was cheering and clapping like everyone else.

Winoka was a town where autumn wanted to last longer, but found itself squeezed out by the legendary Minnesota winters. Like many suburbs, it had new middle-class neighborhoods built on top of old farmland and inside small forests. The Scales’s house, at 9691 Pine Street East, was in one of those lightly forested neighborhoods, where every house had a three-car garage, ivy-stone walls, and a mobile basketball net on the edge of a neatly manicured lawn. It looked incredibly typical. Jennifer could never figure out why this bothered her.

The night of the championship, however, she wasn’t thinking about the house. She was thinking about her friends. She wanted her mother to think about them, too.

“Freaking out! Acting like I had sprouted wings!”

Dr. Elizabeth Georges-Scales was a woman who didn’t often show emotion. If her daughter had been paying close attention, though, she might have noticed a slight pull at the edges of her solemn eyes.

“When the coach took us out for ice cream afterward, everyone seemed cool,” Jennifer continued. “But I still caught Chris and Terry staring at me when they thought I wasn’t looking.”

“It was quite a jump,” Elizabeth offered mildly.

“I see players on the U.S. team do it all the time.”

“Really.”

Jennifer hissed softly. If the older woman wasn’t looking right at her, Jennifer would swear she didn’t have her mother’s attention at all. Typical! A vague and absent look, meaningless verbal agreement, and no maternal instincts whatsoever.

Did you actually give birth to me, or did you just crack open a test tube?
She did not say this aloud. The rush she’d get from forcing a reaction from her mother was not worth the weekend grounding she’d receive.

Besides, she had to give her mother credit for being at the game today—and every other soccer game Jennifer had ever played. And this was one of their longest conversations in weeks.

So Jennifer passed on the insult. “They were weird, is all I’m saying. High school just started, I’m under enough pressure…now this!” The ringing doorbell jerked them both out of the conversation. “I’ll get it.” She grabbed cash from her mother’s hand and answered the door.

The delivery guy was tall, blond, wiry, and unfortunately plagued by enough acne to cover twelve boys his size. “H-have a nice s-supper,” he stuttered after passing her the bags of food. He wouldn’t stop staring, so she finally stuffed some cash in his shirt pocket and shut the door on him.

It was her eyes, probably. Sometimes boys stared at her eyes. They were a shining gray—almost silver—and seemed to cast their own light. Her father had similar eyes, and grown women stared at
him
as much as gangly boys stared at
her
. The idea of her dad as a babe magnet grossed her out, but her mom never seemed to notice.

“My!” Jennifer said, spreading out the delivered feast. Lemon chicken and pork spareribs for her, beef lo mein and potstickers for her mother, white rice, about a thousand tiny soy sauce packets, and factory-wrapped fortune cookies for both of them. “What a delicious meal, Mother. How do you find the time?”

“Very funny.” Elizabeth smirked. “You know perfectly well neither of us wants me to cook.”

Jennifer grinned back, glad of the momentary connection. “True, true. Hey, some stuff you cook is really great. For example, your eggs. And, your, uh, soup. Your soup is the best.”

“I’ll tell the Campbell’s Corporation you said so.” Elizabeth was really smiling, now. It didn’t happen often, and Jennifer observed how young her mother looked.

She usually preferred not to notice. She had once overheard a couple of boys in her eighth-grade class who had been to her house. The way they talked about her mother made Jennifer uncomfortable, to say the least.

Height seemed to be the draw. Height made legs longer, inexplicably made shoulder-length honey-blonde hair shinier, even cheekbones higher. It somehow made emerald eyes sharper, and smoothed out the pronounced curves from bearing a child. And this tall frame moved with a sort of direct grace that didn’t remind Jennifer so much of a medical doctor as a gymnast.

By comparison, Jennifer felt inadequate. While her mother’s height made her beautiful, Jennifer’s made her feel like a misfit. The only place she felt at home was on the soccer field, where everybody was yards away from each other and nobody had time to compare your body to everyone else’s. In the crowded hallways of Winoka High, in front of every boy and girl she knew (and many she didn’t), her height and eyes stood out, her loud laugh stood out, and the silver streaks that had just shown up in her blonde hair this year
definitely
stood out.

The hair really bothered her. While her father had pointed out that the emerging color matched her eyes, she could not stand that her hair had begun to turn “old-lady gray” before she even turned fourteen. First she had tried dye, but the silver strands never seemed to hold the color. Then she considered wigs, but she felt ridiculous the first time she tried one on in a store—and of course, she knew a wig would never work on a soccer field. Nowadays, she just wore simple hats whenever she could. Threads of silver always seemed to wriggle out from under the brim.

Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, Jennifer thought she looked like an older version of her mother.

The aroma of the lemon chicken chased away uncomfortable thoughts, and she began to eat.

“Your dad’s coming home tonight,” Elizabeth offered between bites of lo mein.

“Really.” The mention of her father irritated Jennifer. “Seems soon.”

“It’s been five days,” her mother pointed out.

“Like clockwork, I guess.”

“Perhaps you could show him that soccer trick.”

Jennifer let her fork fall loudly. “If he wanted to see it, he could have been at the game.”

“You know he goes when he can.”

“I know he goes on another business trip to nowhere, once or twice a month, and I never know if he’s going to be there or not.”

“It’s his job.”

“I thought being my father was also his job. It was the championship game.”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

“Sure he did. Every time he flies off on another trip, he has to move his own feet and step onto a plane.”

There was a pause. “It’s not like that.”

Jennifer pushed away the chicken. “I hate that you think it’s no big deal.”

Elizabeth pushed her own meal away. “Jennifer, honestly. When he’s around, all you do is tell him how irritating he is. Then he leaves, and you complain that he’s not around.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be a rational, emotionless robot like you, Mom. Cripes. Why can’t
you
be the one that leaves every couple weeks?”

Jennifer immediately saw from her mother’s startled reaction that she had crossed over several lines way too fast. She hadn’t meant the conversation to go like this. It had seemed so pleasant just a minute ago.

Before she could muster the will to apologize, her mother was up from the dinner table and dumping the rest of her dinner into the dog dish. Phoebe, a collie-shepherd mix with enormous black, pointed ears, came racing out of the living room at the sound of food hitting her bowl. Just like that, Phoebe was in the kitchen and her mother wasn’t.

By the time Jonathan Scales got home that evening, his daughter had immersed herself in charcoal sketches. Piles of chalky black-and-white drafts of angels, dragons, and faeries littered the floor of Jennifer’s bedroom. As he edged open the door, he pushed some aside.

“Hey, ace. Drawing up a storm? How’d the game go?”

Jennifer fixed her eyes on his. “For someone who claims to be my father, you do an amazing impersonation of someone who doesn’t know
anything
about
anyone
else around here.”

Jonathan sighed and closed the door.

Later that night, Jennifer and her mother were talking over leftovers. They were both smiling this time, but then suddenly Jennifer changed. She could feel her skin
moving,
and her face stretching. Glancing down at her hands, Jennifer saw the backs of them turn electric blue, and her fingernails grow rapidly and thicken. When she looked back up, her mother was staring at her—not with surprise or fear, but with calm hatred. The older woman’s features were dark and horrible. Her mortal enemy.

With lightning reflexes, she surged over the kitchen table, opened her jaws, and bit her mother’s head cleanly off with a bloody snap.

Then she woke up.