Playlist for the Dead(6)

It was really hard to be here without him.

The store was all but deserted in the middle of the day. After school there was usually a bunch of kids wandering around, geeks like Hayden and me, and younger kids, too. When we’d come at night there were often older guys there, collectors, I figured, with day jobs. But this was a place the assholes from school never came. It was a safe place. True, there were almost never any girls here, but guys like me and Hayden didn’t tend to do so well with the ladies anyway.

Maybe I’d spoken too soon, because as I walked around, I noticed a couple of other people browsing, and one of them was a girl. Definitely a girl. Tall, like me, with kind of a pointy face—sharp chin, straight skinny nose. Her mouth was painted a deep burgundy and she had a lip ring with a turquoise stud in it. And a big mass of whitish-blond hair, with black streaks. She was the girl from the funeral. She was cute. Well, more interesting-looking than cute, but whatever look she was going for, I was into it.

And she seemed to be headed right for me.

I felt a rising sense of panic and fought the urge to hide.

Then she was right in front of me, and her mouth was moving but I couldn’t understand anything she was saying. What was wrong with me?

I must have looked really confused, because she smiled, reached out her hand, and pulled on the wire dangling in front of me.

Of course—I still had my earbuds in. No wonder I couldn’t hear her; I’d been blaring music from the playlist.

“You’re Sam, aren’t you?” she repeated.

She knew me? How did she know me? I nodded.

“Is that all you’ve got?” she asked. “Usually when someone initiates an introduction, you should ask her name.”

“Sorry,” I said. Figures I’d screw up my first conversation with a girl who actually seemed willing to talk to me. Still, I couldn’t tell if she was being serious. “I guess I’m a little out of it today.” She had to understand, right? She’d been at the funeral too.

“Understandable,” she said, and kind of smirked at me. So she had been kidding? I still wasn’t sure. “I’m Astrid.”

“Cool name.”

She smiled widely. “Picked it out myself.”

Before I could ask her anything else, the lanky hipster-looking dude from the funeral walked up in his super-tight skinny pants and put his arm around her. She turned to him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “And this is Eric. Eric, this is Sam. Hayden’s friend.”

Did that mean she knew Hayden? She couldn’t have—I’d know. But she knew who I was, and that didn’t make sense either. I didn’t think anyone knew who I was.

“Sorry to hear about your friend,” Eric said. “He sounded like a good guy, from what Astrid’s told me.”

So she did know Hayden. I couldn’t imagine how. And why wouldn’t he have told me? “He was,” I said.

“Anyway, didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll just be outside, whenever you’re ready.” He flicked Astrid in the arm and left the store. It seemed like a weird gesture for someone I assumed was probably her boyfriend, but I was hardly an expert on romantic relationships.

I was dying to know how Astrid knew Hayden, but I didn’t know where to start.

Luckily, I didn’t have to. “Look, I swear I’m not some crazy stalker, and I didn’t mean to freak you out, but I did follow you here,” Astrid said. “I just wanted a chance to tell you how sorry I am about Hayden. I only knew him for a little while, but he was a really nice guy, and I still can’t believe he’s really gone.”

“Me neither,” I said. “So . . . you guys knew each other?”

“Sort of,” she said, and pulled on one of the black streaks in her hair. “I know you guys were friends, and I saw you leave when all those hypocrites got in line to make speeches about him, so I thought you might like to know that there are other people out there who are going to miss him. For real.”

I knew she’d said “were” because Hayden was gone, not because he and I weren’t friends anymore. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about the night he died and how awful everything had been, especially between us. I didn’t want to look at Astrid—I didn’t want her to see whatever look was on my face and think it was because of her—so I turned to the glass case next to where we were standing, which held action figures from various games and other trinkets.

“Hayden used to make fun of people who bought stuff like this,” I said. “He called them dolls for dorks, as if that was going to somehow distinguish us from them.”

“Kind of like that Venn diagram of dorks versus geeks versus nerds?” she asked.

“You’ve seen that too?” I asked. Was this some kind of joke? A girl follows me into my favorite store and knows all about the stuff I’m into? “Anyway, one of these figurines kind of reminds me of Hayden’s character in Mage Warfare.” I waited for her to ask me what that was, but she didn’t. This was getting even stranger, but in a kind of awesome way. I’d never met a girl who knew what Mage Warfare was. But then again, I’d hardly hung out with any girls.

“Which one?”

I pointed to one of the figurines. It was maybe four inches tall, a long-haired man in a cloak and a floppy hat, holding a wand.