“YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE Rafi lives!” Dino yells across the store, but the joke’s on him. I’m not going to his stupid boyfriend’s house.
Dino’s an idiot. I bet he’s still in the store thinking if he stalls a while, he’ll come out and find me waiting for him like a good little July. That boy’s gonna be surprised when I’m gone.
Problem is I don’t know where to go. I get in the car and crank the engine and put it in drive and then idle for a minute. I’m not going home—mine or Dino’s—but I’ve got to go somewhere, so I pull out of the lot, turn right, and drive.
This is so easy for Dino, isn’t it? Telling me to show up at my house looking like death and surprise my mom with my new situation. I know exactly how that would go. She’d scream and then cry. She’d hug me and drag me inside and spend the next few hours trying to feed me. At some point Jo would wander downstairs and my dad would come over, and we’d celebrate like me being not-dead was some kind of miracle.
Guess what, though? This ain’t no miracle. A miracle would be if I’d opened my eyes in the chop shop without these disgusting cuts across my chest or with the top of my skull attached to my head by actual skin instead of stitches. If I could finish the musical I’ve spent most of my summer rehearsing for or start my senior year and graduate or find some ugly dress to wear to prom, which I’d end up going to with Benji ’cause he’d be the only person who asked.
The miracle would be getting my life back. And I want that. I want it more than I’ve wanted anything, and that includes seeing my name at the top of the Paradox Legion leaderboards, though making those gamer assholes who give me grief see my name up there would be pretty sweet too. No, I want my life back more. And I’d take it if I knew I could keep it. That’s what Dino doesn’t get. This isn’t living; it’s waiting. Waiting for whoever raised me to change their mind and take it away again.
I look up and see 7-Eleven and cut a hard turn and pull into the parking lot. I check myself in the mirror and it isn’t pretty. My hair’s lost its shine, and while the makeup’s keeping me from looking gray and dead, it also makes me look flat. Not much I can do about it, though. I dig through Dino’s car and come up with a five-dollar bill and about three more bucks in change.
The inside of the convenience store is harsh yellow, and the woman behind the register barely looks at me. I walk straight for the Slurpee machine, grab the biggest cup, stick it under the blue-flavor nozzle, and pull the lever.
Nothing happens.
I pull again.
“Come on!” I try the Coke flavor, which is a seriously inferior Slurpee flavor, but not so much as a drop drips from it either. I stand and watch the motor spin inside the machine. “I know you’ve got Slurpee in you. Give it up!”
I pull the lever so hard that the entire machine and the cups and lids on the counter shake and rattle.
“Is there a problem?” calls the woman from the counter. Her thick eyebrows are dipping to her nose.
“The machine’s full of Slurpee, but it’s not working. I want a goddamn Slurpee!”
The woman sighs with weary resignation. Like she’s accepted that this store is hell and that her punishment is to spend eternity helping hapless idiots like me. Her dirty-blond hair is tied in a ponytail that hangs past her waist, and a charm bracelet dangles on her wrist, making tinkling sounds as she walks. When she reaches me, she gives me a hard stare but then shoos me out of the way.
“I already tried that,” I say as she holds a cup under the nozzle and pulls the handle. She glares in response.
After a minute, she pulls off the panel in the front and looks underneath. “How bad would it scuttle your night if I slapped an ‘out of order’ sign on the front and left this for the day crew to fix?”
“My best friend Dino—except he’s not my best friend anymore; he hasn’t been for a year and I’m starting to wonder if he ever was—and I used to have a gaming night every Friday.”
“Role playing?”
“Video.”
The woman turns up her nose.
“Before either of us had a car, I’d bike from my house and he’d bike from his and we’d meet in the middle. Here. Load up on snacks—”
“And let me guess,” the woman says. “Slurpees.”
“Exactly!”
I don’t know how many Friday nights we spent slurping Slurpees and flying spaceships, but there’s a whole chunk of my life that feels like it was forever. That I was born playing games with Dino and that we would die playing games together.
The woman grabs a wad of napkins from the condiment station next to the hot dogs and wipes grease off her fingers. “If he’s not your friend anymore, why do you need a Slurpee tonight?”
Nostalgia had drawn me here, but I don’t know why it’s so important that I get a Slurpee. Judging by what happened at Monty’s, it’s not like I’ll be able to drink it without wanting to puke, which I assume I’m also incapable of. But then the idea that’s been brewing in the corner of my mind bursts forward.
“It’s for him,” I say. “My friend. We’ve been hanging out tonight for the first time in a year, but mostly we’ve been fighting, and I want us to be okay but I don’t know how to get there. I’m hoping a Slurpee will help.”
“Sure, whatever,” she says. “But is there any way I can convince you to get your reconciliation Slurpee elsewhere?”
“Please,” I say. “I need this. I didn’t realize how much I needed it until right now. Bringing Dino a Slurpee will remind him of those Friday nights lying on the floor in his room or mine, shooting enemy ships, talking about everything and nothing, wondering what our futures were gonna to look like.” I laugh to myself. “There was this time for, like, three months when Dino was convinced he was gonna be a filmmaker, so he recorded everything on his phone and tried making a movie out of it, but I fell asleep while he was showing it and he got so pissed.”
The woman breaks in and says, “This is thrilling, but seriously, if you can fix your problems with a Slurpee, you can probably fix them without one.”
Ding!
Someone comes into the store. The woman sighs again and returns to her post, leaving the question of whether or not she’s going to fix the machine unanswered. I need to go pick up Dino, but now that I’ve got it in my head that I want these Slurpees, I don’t want to go back without them, and the woman is being mighty unhelpful.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of the girl that came in as she heads to the drink cooler. She’s humming a familiar tune, so I take a quick peek. Frumpy skirt, glasses, brown bouffant. Oh shit! Zora Hood.
I drop to a crouch and duck walk to the edge of the aisle so that I can glance around the corner. She must be on her way home from Hairspray rehearsals. That’s why I recognized her humming. She’s my understudy for the summer show at Truman High that I’m in. Was in. Whatever. She opens the cooler door and pulls out a couple of root beers, then stops at the chips and grabs two bags before heading to the counter. I’ve got to get out of here.
While the cashier is ringing her up, I creep toward the door, sneaking along the back end of the aisles to avoid walking near Zora. I’m clear. I’m going to make it. I open the door and then I hear, “July?”
For not even half a second, I freeze. Barely noticeable, right? She couldn’t have seen me pause, which was hardly classifiable as a reaction.
“July Cooper?”
But, of course, she did. I speed up, digging my keys from my pocket. I get into the car and start the engine and reverse out of the lot as quickly as I can. Zora runs out of the store as I’m pulling away. If my heart hadn’t been cut out and stuffed into a plastic bag before being shoved back into my body, it would be beating so damn hard right now.
What the hell was I thinking? How would I have explained to Zora Hood why I, a girl who died a week ago, was in a 7-Eleven trying to buy a Slurpee? This is why Dino didn’t want me to leave the funeral home. He feared something like this would happen. It nearly did. What if that had been my dad? He doesn’t live far from here. He could’ve gotten a craving for beef jerky or a burrito and decided to run to the corner store and seen me and then everything would’ve been a mess. Maybe the best course of action is to pick up Dino and drive to his house and hide until I know how long this is going to last so that I don’t get into trouble.
I stop at a red light to make a U-turn, and Zora pulls up beside me in her dad’s pickup truck. Her windows are down and she’s yelling, “July? Is that you?”
Thank goodness my windows are tinted, but why won’t this light change?
“Roll down your window!” she yells.
I ignore her. That’s my only option. Ignore her and hope she goes away.
The light changes to green, finally, and I floor it, pulling a U-turn and heading toward Walmart. I glance in my rearview and spot Zora behind me. She always was too persistent for her own good. Nice enough, but she didn’t know when to back off. And now I have no idea what to do. Obviously, I need to lose her—I can’t bring her to Dino and get him in trouble—but I’m not sure how.
There! A Taco Bell, and there’s a cop car in the lot. I cut into the turn lane, wait for a gap in traffic, and pull into the lot. I park far enough away to avoid too many people but near enough that I’m visible to the police cruiser. Then I kill the engine, lock the doors, crawl into the back seat, crouch down on the floor, and wait.
It’s less than a minute before Zora is knocking on the windows and calling my name. My plan, which isn’t honestly much of one, is to hope that the cop will come out of Taco Bell, happy and full of chalupas and sour cream and hot sauce, see some random girl freaking out around the car, come to investigate, hear Zora explain how she thinks she saw a girl who’s supposed to be dead driving a car, and arrest her for obviously being on lots of drugs. It’s horrible, but it’s all I’ve got.
“July? I swear to God I saw you. Come on! Open the car!”
“Hey,” a second voice says. “Is there a problem?” At first I think it’s the cop, but no. I know that voice. It’s Dino.