Dead Set

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 mutually 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 discovering 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.

Mr. Danvers got up and took a sport coat that Zoe had never once seen him wear off a peg on the far side of the shelves. “Would you mind putting away the teeth for me? Just set the jar back on the shelf.”

“Sure,” said Zoe.

“Thanks,” said Mr. Danvers, and he left, giving her a quick smile before closing the door behind him. Zoe continued dropping teeth into the jar, but her mind was racing.

This is a sign, she thought. The universe wants me to take it.

Still, she dropped teeth into the jar. If she hadn’t already decided to be a good girl, to not steal and just give Emmett her own damned teeth like she’d promised, this wouldn’t be a problem.

What the hell does he want my tooth for, anyway? she wondered. The idea was bothering her more and more.

Zoe dropped the last of the teeth into the jar, hesitated, and then screwed the lid shut. Another second of hesitation, then she took the jar and set it on the shelf with Mr. Danvers’s other science specimens.

As she picked up her books, Zoe was again hit by the image of Emmett sitting quietly in his dark shop all night, waiting for her to bring him her tooth. She set down her books and took the jar from the shelf, going down on her knees behind the lab table. She twisted the lid, but it wouldn’t move.

She heard the door open. A voice filled the room. “Jim?” It was an adult. Another teacher’s voice. Whoever it was took a couple of more steps into the room. “Jim?” There was a pause. Zoe didn’t move. She held her breath, and from her crouched position, it felt like her heart was going to beat right out of her chest. A moment later, though, she heard an annoyed exhalation of breath and the teacher leave the room, closing the door behind.

Zoe let out her breath and sucked in air. Her hands were shaking. She tried the lid again, but it still wouldn’t move. She tapped the top of the jar on the floor a couple of times and tried again. This time the lid twisted off easily. She dumped the teeth on the floor and sifted through them quickly. In the jumbled mess she couldn’t find the one she wanted. Then she wondered how long she’d been looking and when Mr. Danvers would get back. Panicked, she started scooping teeth back into the jar. When she picked up the last handful, there it was: one perfect human-looking chimp tooth. She pocketed it, screwed the lid back on the jar, and left the room as quickly and quietly as she could.

Absynthe was coming down the hallway, hiding an unlit cigarette cupped in her hand. She looked surprised, then put her hand over her mouth, her eyes widening in amusement. “Outside,” she said. Caught off guard by the order, Zoe followed her.

Absynthe led Zoe around a corner of the school and into a cul-de-sac under a set of rusted, cobweb-covered emergency stairs that looked like they couldn’t support even one of the skinny fashionista girls, much less a bunch of panicked students.

Absynthe held out the pack and offered Zoe a cigarette. Zoe shook her head. “No thanks. I quit,” she said. She had to cut herself off. She almost said, I quit when I was in the hospital. She wasn’t ready to talk about any of that yet.

Absynthe put her hand on Zoe’s shoulder. “Please tell me the guy you’re sneaking off to see isn’t Mr. Danvers.”

Zoe stared at her for a second. “What? No!”

Absynthe gave her an appraising look. “So, what were you doing in there? Checking your grades?”

“Yeah.”

“Liar,” Absynthe said, more amused than accusing.

Zoe leaned back against the wall. “The guy I’m going to see. It isn’t what you think. It’s more complicated. I don’t know exactly how to explain it.”

Absynthe lit the cigarette and nodded. “I get it. An older guy, right? Yeah, I’ve been there. Watch your back. Those college boys can turn weird on you.”

Zoe almost laughed. An older guy. You’re right about that, she thought. But if you only knew the rest.

“I’m a little mixed up about some of what’s going on right now,” she said. “When I work this out, maybe I’ll tell you all about it. Okay?” She looked up at Absynthe and the girl’s face was more serious than Zoe had expected. “I’m going to have to tell someone and my mom is totally out of the question.”

Absynthe nodded. “Moms are like that. First they kill you with kindness, and then they ground your ass.” She nodded to the nearby exit. “Run off to your secret rendezvous that’s not what I think. But remember that when you’re done you owe me a story.”

“Deal,” said Zoe.

Absynthe gave Zoe the appraising look again. “You know,” she said, “you’re cuter than I think you want to be. I was considering luring you out here and kissing you, but it seems like maybe you have enough going on right now.”

Zoe blinked at the girl a couple of times. “Oh. Yeah. I think I do.”

Absynthe smiled. “Don’t worry. You’re safe. For now.”

“Uh. Okay,” Zoe said, trying not to look as surprised and confused as she felt.

“Go see your sugar daddy,” said Absynthe, waving her hand toward the street.

Zoe started back along the cul-de-sac. Halfway down she spun on her heels. Absynthe was puffing away on her cigarette and looking at her. “Wait a minute,” Zoe said. “Older guys turn weird? And now you want to kiss me? I think you owe me a story, too.”

Absynthe laughed. “Deal.”