The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried(41)

I sneak a peek at the messages and drop my phone with a gasp.

Now people are really paying attention to me, so I mouth “Sorry” and quickly crouch to retrieve my phone. I hold it close to my chest and slowly look.

Staring at me from the screen is a selfie of July flashing her best July grin. From inside her coffin.

I peel off from the group and dash around the corner. I hide behind an ostentatious mausoleum that has an iron gate and stained-glass windows so that I can look at the photos without anyone seeing. It’s definitely July. In one selfie she’s giving me the finger and she added a text bubble with the words, “I told you not to let them bury me in this dress!” In another she’s baring her teeth and added a picture of a cartoon brain to it and the words “Nom, nom, nom.” There are at least a dozen more, none of them funny, though I bet July thinks they are.

DINO: July?

DINO: Is this a joke? Is that really you?

DINO: July???

She doesn’t respond. But it has to be her. I knew her stupid idea wouldn’t work. She’s still alive. Not-dead. Whatever. Or maybe someone’s pranking me. No. No one would do that. If it’s July, though, why isn’t she answering? And where the hell did she get a phone?

“Dino?”

Shit! I press the lock button on my phone and step onto the path, nearly running my father down.

“You okay, son?”

My dad’s wearing his funeral suit. Plain, black. Unlike my mom, it’s pretty much the only outfit he owns in black.

“What’re you doing here? I thought you left.”

Dad nods. “Decided to stick around. Pay my respects. Saw you take off.”

“I’m fine.”

My father is a man of few words. Sometimes people tell me I inherited that from him, but it’s not that I feel I have nothing to say, it’s that what I have to say rarely feels valuable. My dad though, he watches. Waits. Speaks when he feels like it and usually feels like what he’s saying has merit.

“I saw what you did with July.” My breath catches in my throat for a second, but then Dad claps my shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”

“God, Dad, can we not?”

“If you can put aside your feelings to prepare your best friend, then you belong in the business.”

I can’t do this. But I don’t want to argue with him at July’s funeral either, especially not with her sending me selfies from inside the casket. I grip my phone tightly, my palms sweaty, ready for it to buzz again, but it remains still and quiet.

“I should get back to the funeral.”

Dad nods and sends me on my way.





JULY

OF COURSE MY BATTERY DIES. Fucking figures the only thing dead in this coffin is the one thing that shouldn’t be.





JULY

DINO’S GONNA LOVE RUBBING MY nose in this one. Telling me how I ended up spending most of the day and night in a coffin because I was too pig-headed to admit I didn’t have the first clue what I was doing. But what else could I do? Let me spin out how else things could have gone down.

Scenario 1: The kind-of-dead, rotting corpse of July Cooper knocks on the front door of the house she once called home. Her mother, bleary-eyed and groggy, answers the door, sees the puffy, ashy, decaying face of her recently deceased daughter, screams, faints, and hits her head on the tile floor. July’s younger sister, Jo?lle, hears the scream, rushes downstairs, and finds zombie July hovering over the body of their comatose mother. Jo doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, grabs a shovel from the garage, smashes July’s head in, and then cuts it off and burns the body just to be sure. July’s mother wakes up shortly after. Two days later Mrs. Cooper drops dead. She’d developed a subdural hematoma from hitting her head on the tile.

Scenario 2: Dead July goes to see her father at his apartment. He’s not there when she knocks—probably at work—so she lets herself in with her key and waits for him to return. Later that evening, Mr. Cooper comes home from work. Upon seeing the daughter he believed to be dead, he has a heart attack and dies.

Scenario 3: Taking the dubious advice of her once–best friend, July Cooper reveals her undeath to Dino DeLuca’s parents. Mr. DeLuca is rendered unable to move other than to sit in a chair and clean his glasses, but Mrs. DeLuca has been preparing for a moment like this her entire life. As a young woman, Jenn had believed there were things beyond life that defied explanation—vampires and witches and zombies—even though she’d found no evidence of them. As she grew older, married, and had children of her own, she never stopped believing that one day she would discover the truth. And now the truth was standing in front of her in the form of her son’s ex–best friend. Jenn DeLuca abandons the funeral business and reveals July’s existence to the world. They become overnight superstars who go on tour so that everyone can see the girl who cheated death. But one night, as they’re leaving a venue, the rowdy crowd turns violent. They want what July has. They want to live forever. They rush July and Mrs. DeLuca and tear them to pieces, carrying tiny bits home to their families, and July Cooper is forgotten by the next news cycle.

Scenario 4: Evil. Government. Scientists.

Scenario 5: The slowly decomposing but still animated corpse of July Cooper flees Palm Shores and travels the world. Being that she doesn’t need to eat or breathe or sleep, she can hide anywhere—in the darkest hold of a cargo ship, in the trunk of a car, in the luggage compartment of an airplane—which she does. Over the years, she visits countries she never dreamed she’d see. She explores the world in a way only someone who’s died and come back could. Yes, she continues to rot, but eventually her body attains a kind of desiccated equilibrium that, while not pretty, works for her. But while July explores the world, she’s not part of it, and therefore doesn’t realize that death remains suspended so long as she goes on. Prior to July Cooper’s mysterious reanimation, roughly 151,000 people died throughout the world each day, which figured to 55 million per year, and 129 million babies were born, adding a total of approximately 74 million people a year to the population of an already overcrowded planet. But with death on a hiatus, population growth doubles overnight. In five years, there are over half-a-billion new mouths to feed. In ten years, overcrowding leads to food shortages, wars, global destruction, and plagues.