Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott

Author:Elizabeth Scott [Scott, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416960607
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2009-09-08T05:00:00+00:00

38

I DON'T KNOW HOW ANNABEL CAN STAY on the swings so long. Ray, right after we moved here, took me to a playground near Shady Pines. I'd expected it to be like the apartment, saggy and old, the grass beaten down and sparkling with shattered glass.

But it was gorgeous. Everything was new and shiny and sturdy, glinting in the sun. A woman who spotted the two of us standing there, Ray telling me to go play and me looking at him, checking to see if it was a test, sure it was because that's what Ray did when we first moved here, tested me all the time, said the city had just donated it.

"I hope it looks like this for more than a week," she said, and Ray laughed and I cringed, the shiny metal too new for me. The kids around it, on it, not like me. I was still brand new, but even then I understood they were not like me. They were a test, and one I had to pass. My heart wasn't as hollow then, still beat with soft thumps of hope.

Even so, I didn't swing, and the playground got taken over by taller kids, ones who sat on the swings and smoked and did things under the slides, and if we drove by and saw them Ray never slowed down to look. Was always proud of me for not looking either.

As if I wanted to see. I know what everyone is capable of, the ooze inside. And those kids' embraces just reminded me of what waited for me. What always waited for me.

Ray never looked for playgrounds after that one time. He didn't need them, he said, wasn't like those sweaty-eyed perverts lurking around, hoping to glimpse a flash of child flesh, bend of an elbow, piece of thigh.

"Sickos," he said. "They just want to look. They don't want to take care of someone. Aren't capable of it. Don't know what love really is." Wrinkled his face, shaking his head. "I feel sorry for them. Don't you?"

Hot hand on my head, blessing curse. Love, Ray would say. My special love for my special girl.

Red-faced, pushing, eyes closing, flying open to look at me, oh Alice, oh Alice, my girl.

I look away from Annabel kicking her feet up into the sky and watch the grass under my feet. Once, on a talk show, this death expert said it's everything underground that makes grass so green. That dead things make the living.

I want to lie down on the bench then, or better yet, on the grass, rest on something living and see if I can hear the dead underneath. But I can't, because then people will look and Ray doesn't like looking, wants me silent, his little ghost girl.

I lean over and touch the grass instead. I have not felt grass in years. Ray doesn't like me getting dirty.

It doesn't feel like much of anything, and I am oddly disappointed, like when the soap operas are taken

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