I can’t help but tune out, but I’m surprised when I find my thoughts floating back to Frozen Hills. Usually, I assess and move on. This time, something is bugging me.
Was there a missed opportunity there?
“Everything okay?” Mason asks, sensing my distraction.
“Everything’s fine,” I say. “I just think that maybe—if I get any party invitations in Omaha—I might actually accept.”
four
I take a break from decorating my new room when a text alert chimes on my phone. It’s Megan, one of the kids who died with me in Iowa eleven years ago; another of fourteen living “bus kids” that make up the Revive program test group. Megan lives in Seattle, but we keep in touch. Initially, we bonded over the program. Then we grew closer, like sisters who realize they’re actually friends, too.
>My stomach sinks as an old memory sets in: Seven years after the bus crash that started it all, Chase Rogers died again, for seemingly no reason. He was Revived repeatedly, but—Mason told me—he seemed to have developed an immunity to the drug. Then he died for good.
“I’m not like him,” I say quietly. Bess comes and sets down the check, which silences us for a few minutes.
“I’m not like him,” I say again when the coast is clear.
Mason looks deep into my eyes. “I hope not. Just be more careful, all right?”
“All right,” I agree.
Another family is seated at the booth directly behind us, so the conversation is over for now, at least.
“Are my gorgeous ladies finished eating?” Mason asks loudly enough for others to hear. The mom at the table behind us sighs. Mason can be charming when he wants to.
I look down at my plate, which has discarded raw onions, wilted lettuce, and a quarter of a pickle left on it.
“Uh… yeah,” I say in my best disinterested-teenager voice.
“I sure am,” Cassie says, patting her flat stomach. “I’m stuffed to the gills.”
“Great,” Mason says. “Then let’s clear out.”
We walk up to the front counter. As we wait for Mason to pay, Cassie fixes a stray piece of my long hair in that absentmindedly automatic mom-ish way. She looks at me with love; I roll my eyes and brush her hand away.
After Mason leaves a five on the table for Bess, he opens the OUT door, causing the bells on top to jingle, and holds it for his wife and daughter. In the parking lot, when we’re still visible to the other diners, I stare at the ground and walk three steps behind my parents while they hold hands and Cassie laughs at nothing.
Then we get in the SUV and drive away.
three
Maybe it’s growing up as part of an elaborate science experiment, but I can’t leave a place without conducting a postmortem. So I spend the next few hours of the drive rehashing the past three years in Frozen Hills: a mental autopsy on Daisy Appleby by newly anointed Daisy West.
We moved to Frozen Hills the summer before seventh grade, after I died from asphyxia in Ridgeland, Mississippi. Well, outside of Ridgeland, if we’re getting technical: I was swimming near some houseboats at the reservoir and got carbon-monoxide poisoning from an idling boat.
If I was going to die again, I consider myself lucky that it happened in the summer before school started. Even luckier: Junior high in Frozen Hills was grades seven through nine, so I started with all the other brace-faced, zit-covered seventh graders. Days after I finished decorating my Juno-inspired bedroom, the school year began.
“Thinking about the past few years?” Mason interrupts my thoughts, smiling at me in the rearview mirror. He’s familiar with my system.
“Yes,” I admit. “I’m thinking about a birthday party.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding. “For Nora…”
“Fitzgerald,” Cassie and I say in unison.
“Yep,” I say before retreating into my brain.
Nora Fitzgerald.