Jenny had turned Mo’s bowl of egg yolks into a breakfast casserole. His grandmother had once called Jenny the fifth rider of the apocalypse. The one who makes sure all the other riders actually go in for their dental appointments. And that they’re getting enough fiber in their diets. In the Pingcalypse, the world ended not with a whimper and not with a bang. Instead Jenny helped you check every item off the to-do list, and then the whole world, surprised and gratified and more than a little exhausted, ended with a ping.
There had been bacon and sausage in the casserole. He’d eaten almost half the tray, but by the time he was on his way down to Laura’s house, he was so hungry again he’d stopped off at the good bakery and bought a dozen doughnuts, half a dozen bagels, and three different kinds of cream cheese.
There was one awkward moment when he’d meant to dump the handful of change into the tip bowl and instead had reached inside it. Pushed coins around with his finger.
“What are you doing?” the kid behind the counter had said, and that jerked Mo out of his fugue state.
“Thought I saw something in there,” he’d said.
“Like some tip money?” the kid had said sarcastically.
“Like, uh, a roach,” Mo had said. “A really big one.” Then he’d dumped his change into the bowl that the kid was now looking at in great dismay.
He was on his mountain bike, which meant he had to balance the doughnut box on his handlebars, messenger bag loaded with bagels slung over his shoulder. The afternoon was sunny and warm, in the seventies at least, which was the least freaky thing about this day. When Jenny had asked where he was going, he’d said, “To see friends.” And she’d looked so happy about this he’d almost felt happy, too. Because she’d seemed so happy he had plans. And that his clothes were normal clothes. Meanwhile, he was happy he didn’t have to look at the Barry Manilow T-shirt. So they were both happy, and that seemed important because he was so, so very sad. Everywhere he looked, his grandmother wasn’t. And she never would be again.
And now he was about to spend quality time with Laura Hand and Daniel Knowe while his actual friends, people like Theo and Natalie and Rosamel, were messaging him, asking when they were going to see him. Theo and Natalie were back in town as of yesterday; Rosamel was arriving today. They were up for whatever! They were so sorry about his grandmother. And if he needed cheering up, they had a lot of great gossip, really good stuff. Rosamel, who had started off more or less a friend by default because she’d been the only other Black kid in the high school at Lewis Latimer who was also gay, was sad about some girl she’d met at Oberlin. Even Vincent Grove, who after clandestinely fooling around with Mo for half of last year had decided he was definitely not gay even though he really liked sucking dick—and who Mo had not broken up with because they were never really going out in the first place—even Vincent had DM’d Mo to see if he wanted to go hiking. For someone who didn’t want anyone to know he definitely wasn’t gay, Vincent had a real thing for performing acts of public indecency.
The point was, there were a lot of people he would rather be hanging out with, under normal circumstances. But of course, these were paranormal circumstances. And Vincent was a hot/cold kind of guy anyway. The colder you were, the hotter he got.
When Laura came to the door, he wasn’t sure at first if she was being weird because of how they’d been dead yesterday or if, like Mo, she had been thinking about this situation with Bogomil. How Mr. Anabin had called it a contest. A game. Because Mo had been thinking about that.
The Hands’ house was clapboard, one of the un-prettied-up, unrenovated houses you still saw in this neighborhood. Natalie and Theo lived around here, too. You could tell the long-termers from the people who had moved in over the past ten years because the shingles on their roofs were asphalt, the siding, if it was wood, a little scabrous. There was a small kitchen with an old dinette table, and in the living room, a monstrosity of a couch so enormous there wasn’t room for much else. White, too. Mo felt like Captain Ahab coming over for a dinner party at a co-worker’s house only to spot Moby Dick in the living room. Wait. Guys. You invited that asshole, too? You know what I’m going to have to do.
Laura took the doughnut box from Mo and said thank you, a little unenthusiastically in his opinion. Daniel seemed more genuinely interested in Mo’s arrival. But then, Daniel always seemed interested in other people so it was hard to know how genuine any of it was.
He said, “I’ve been hungry since I woke up. Are you weirdly hungry right now?”
“Yeah,” Mo said. “I am.”
Laura said, “I went through the buffet at Thai Super Delight three times. I ate so much rice they had to refill the rice cooker.”
Mo watched her cram a salted-caramel doughnut into her mouth. Now there were two caramel doughnuts left. He grabbed one just in case. There was something about Laura’s posture, the way she had her head tilted, that he found peculiar. Her hand kept going up under her hair.
“What’s up with your ear?” he said.
“What?” Laura said. She clapped her hand over the side of her head.
Mo said, “You have an earache or something?”
“What do you mean?” Laura said quickly, but now Mo could see it in Daniel’s face, too. Something was up.
“Look, assholes,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on or I’m out of here.”
When neither of them said anything, Mo said, “Fine. Also, I’m taking the doughnuts.” He stood up. Stuffed half the doughnut he was holding into his mouth.
“Wait!” Daniel said. “Wait. Mr. Anabin put us back together a little wrong. I got one of Laura’s ears and she got one of mine.”
“Daniel!” Laura said. She looked mortified.
Mo ignored her. He thought he might burst out laughing. “That’s your secret? Really? Got anything else? Should we do a mole check? Birthmarks? I’ve got one right on my left ass cheek. It’s shaped just like a—”
“Bogomil was in my house last night,” Daniel said.
Mo sat back down. He put the doughnuts on the dinette table, first taking the last salted caramel even though he hadn’t finished the one in his hand. He took the basil strawberry, too. “You saw him? What did he do?”
“He licked me,” Daniel said. Then, “I thought it was my dog. Fart.”
“Okay,” Mo said. “And?”
“Fart’s dead,” Laura said. “He died while we were dead.”
“My grandmother died, too,” Mo said. He took another bite of doughnut and began to chew ferociously. What did it taste like? Ashes and rose petals. He almost gagged, forcing it down.
“Oh,” Laura said. “Oh no! Your grandmother is dead?” She and Daniel both looked horrified.
Mo remembered Laura was a romance fan. A fan of Caitlynn Hightower, specifically. He felt his teeth grind together. Had he put his mouth guard in last night? No. He’d probably been grinding his teeth ever since he’d come back from the dead. “Yeah, but don’t worry. I bet her publisher has at least another two Lavender Glass books in the pipeline.”
“Are you okay?” Daniel said.
“No,” Mo said. “But I’m not dead, either. Tell me everything else.”
“You first,” Laura said, and Mo, having been rude about the romance thing and having had some time to think about game strategy on his bike ride down from the Cliffs, told them about all the questions Mr. Anabin had refused to answer. This sparked a frustrating and somewhat heated conversation, of course, about that place. What they remembered. It wasn’t that they couldn’t remember. It was that it was almost impossible to articulate what they remembered. Mo thought they would have been better off with scrap paper and crayons rather than trying to put it into words. Or maybe just one crayon. The black one.
At last he said, “Look. We’re all in agreement this is really happening, right? We died and now we’re back, and these two assholes are going to make us play some weird game, and if we lose, we have to go back to that place none of us wants to go back to. So we’re all going to do whatever it takes not to go back. Right?”
Daniel and Laura both nodded. Nobody, apparently, was going to bring up the whole thing about how only two were going to be okay, the other two truly fucked. Laura said, “Did Mr. Anabin say anything else?”
Mo told them about the car hanging in the air over the collapsed road and how apparently Mr. Anabin using magic in turn gave Bogomil more magic to use.
“So maybe the opposite is true?” Laura said. “When Bogomil uses magic, Mr. Anabin gets more?”
“Who knows?” Mo said. “But those guys definitely don’t like each other. Maybe we can use that? Somehow?”
“We don’t think Mr. Anabin should know about the ear thing,” Daniel said. “Because it means they get stuff wrong occasionally. Maybe that’s a good thing. We watch and wait for them to screw up and see if it helps us at all when they do.”
Mo thought about this. “And we report back to each other what we observe. Everything. Just like I’m telling you everything.”
He saw Laura and Daniel look at each other across the table. “Okay,” Daniel said at last.
Laura said, “Fine. We tell each other everything.”
Did Mo believe them? Of course not. Laura was sneaky, and Daniel was whatever he was. Tall. Not particularly bright. But fine, if they thought he believed them, that was good enough for now. And maybe there would be a way out of this for all three of them. He realized he was rubbing his fingertips together. As if there were still chalk dust pressed into the whorls and the ridges.
“Are you there in your house all by yourself now?” Daniel said. He looked as if he couldn’t imagine anything worse.
“No,” Mo said. “Jenny’s there. My grandmother’s secretary. She’s pretty much been a part of the family since, I don’t know. Forever. She has an apartment in Bridgetree, but she’s been going through my grandmother’s stuff, and now that I’m back from ‘Ireland,’ I guess I’m her responsibility. Until I turn eighteen, which is in March.”
He told them about the egg carton and the feeling he’d had that Bogomil had been hiding in one of the yolks. “But then I just had a bowl full of yolks. And, in hindsight, that’s okay. I mean, what was I going to do if I cracked open one of the eggs and Bogomil jumped out? Make a delicious Bogomil omelet?”
“So you didn’t ever see him,” Daniel said.
“Yeah,” Mo said. “Apparently you’re his favorite.”
Daniel looked appalled at this notion, which irked Mo. Wasn’t Daniel’s whole thing that he liked to be liked? Letting people punch him. Kissing girls and making them cry when he broke up with them, then making them feel better again, just by being so persistently nice and understanding, such a good listener, such a good friend. All those half brothers and sisters following Daniel around, like a parade, all over town. Like Mo was supposed to like Daniel because his siblings were biracial like Mo. Suck it up, nice guy. Of course the scary thing wants to be your friend. Everyone else does.
“Wait,” Laura said, and grabbed the last doughnut. Cayenne blueberry. Rats. Mo had wanted that one. Doughnut in hand, she went running upstairs and then a minute later was back with a stuffed black lamb and no doughnut.
“Okay?” Mo said.
“Look at the name on the ribbon,” Laura said, and so Mo looked.
“Are you shitting me?” He took the Bogomil lamb from her hands. Gingerly. But it was just a stuffed animal, knitted black wool around some kind of squishy foam stuffing. Squish, squish. Button eyes. “Do you have a knife? Should we cut it open?”
Laura snatched it out of Mo’s hands. “I don’t think we have to do that. It’s just a stuffed animal.”
“What about Bowie?” Daniel said.
“First things first,” Mo said. He reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a notebook and a pen. He wrote down “GOALS” and underlined it. Then he wrote:
STAY ALIVE
FIGURE OUT HOW WE DIED. DON’T DO IT AGAIN
WHAT DO ANABIN/BOGOMIL WANT? FIGURE OUT. THWART THEM?
FIGURE OUT HOW THEY DO THIS CREEPY STUFF
MAKE THEM STOP IT
LEARN TO DO MAGIC (BUT IS THIS ACTUALLY A GOOD IDEA?)
BE CAREFUL AROUND ALL ANIMALS BECAUSE THEY MIGHT NOT BE
DON’T SCREW EACH OTHER OVER. SERIOUSLY
BOWIE???????
DID SOMEONE MURDER US? WHO?
WHY ARE WE HUNGRY ALL THE TIME?
FIX D & L’S EAR SITUATION (LOW PRIORITY)
NEVER THINK ABOUT ANY OF THIS AGAIN
He went back over the list, underlining every item. “Anything else?” he asked.
Daniel said, “Give me the pen.” On the side of the list, he wrote in very large letters:
KEEP SUSANNAH OUT OF THIS
“Agreed,” Laura said.
Mo wouldn’t have minded if Susannah had been a part of this, considering she was the only one out of this crew he actually liked. But then again, he liked her. “Okay,” he said. “Agreed. I have one more thing I need to tell you.”
“What?” Laura said.
“Wait,” Mo said. “I forgot I brought bagels.” He pulled them out of his messenger bag. “They’re all everything bagels. Because I want you guys to have everything.”
There was a pause. And then Daniel said, “I know you’re being sarcastic, but you actually did get us bagels and stuff. So go ahead and be sarcastic, although it seems weird since you’re also being nice. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Mo said. He felt a little abashed. But also as if he probably would go on being sarcastic.
It turned out that three kinds of cream cheese had not been excessive. When the bagels were finished, they dug cream cheese (chive, salmon, blueberry) out of the containers with their fingers.
Laura was still covering that ear up with her hair. Her non-cream-cheese hand kept going up to touch it. If she was still doing that on Monday, Mr. Anabin was going to be suspicious right away. There were no flies on that guy. As he thought this, he unwillingly and vividly pictured flies crawling on a dead body. Laying eggs. Rubbing their little legs together. The body, he suspected, was his own. Fuck you, Mo, he thought. Fuck you for dying and getting me into this whole situation.
Fuck you, too, dead Mo said right back. Flies crawling out of his ears and mouth. Little wriggling eggs under the fingernails. On his tongue.
Mo put down his bagel.
He’d taken a long look, earlier, at the side of Daniel’s head. It wasn’t obvious that it wasn’t Daniel’s ear, but once you gave it more than a cursory look, it did kind of stand out. Laura had a nice ear. A good lobe. The one on the other side of Daniel’s head wasn’t half as sexy. But hadn’t Mo read somewhere that most people had uneven ears? One bigger or smaller or whatever?
“Stop looking at my ear,” Daniel said. Then, in a total non sequitur: “Maybe we’re pregnant. Magically pregnant. That could be why we can’t stop eating. Magic babies.” He said the words “magic babies” with such satisfaction that Mo raised his eyebrow.
“Not funny,” he said. “But we can’t rule out the possibility that there are unknown consequences to all of this. We’re weirdly hungry, but we’re eating bagels and doughnuts, not human flesh, so maybe this is more of a psychological side effect than a magical one. On Monday if we’re still this hungry, we can just ask Mr. Anabin about it.”
Daniel said, “Does anyone know where Mr. Anabin lives?”
Nobody did. Mo said, “Actually I looked him up online. To see what I could find.”
“And?”
“Not much,” Mo said. “An article from when he was hired. A piece about the production of Bye Bye Birdie last year. A quote in another article about when the grocery store opened. Kind of a ‘man on the street’ quote. He said he was excited about ‘the terrific selection of yogurts.’ ”
“None of this is how I pictured my life after graduation,” Laura said. “I didn’t even get to graduate.”
“I didn’t even get to submit applications,” Mo said. “A real shame. Think of the application essays we’ll never write! How Being Dead Taught Me to Be an Angrier Person. The Time I Wondered If I Was Magically Pregnant. Why I Am Upset About My Ear. Who Was That Guy I Saw and What Did He Want?”
And then he told them about the mysterious person who had stood in the street and looked up at Mo’s bedroom window. He told them how the person had beckoned to him to come down.
“Bogomil,” Daniel said.
“It wasn’t Bogomil,” Mo said. “I would have known if it were Bogomil.”
“Then it was probably Mr. Anabin,” Laura said.
“It wasn’t Mr. Anabin, either,” Mo said. “It was someone else.” Even as he said it, he felt such a strong wave of yearning, longing, that all the hair on his neck stood up. He picked up his half-eaten bagel, appetite restored.
No one, he felt quite convinced, had ever felt like this in the presence of Bogomil, the way Mo had felt looking down at the person who looked up at him. No one had ever yearned for anything other than Bogomil’s absence.
Oh, why hadn’t Mo just been quicker? It had been like one of those scenes where two people run toward each other in a beautiful field. Except Mo hadn’t moved fast enough. Anyway, Mo was a little dubious about what happened after those commercials cut away and also about what had been happening before. Probably it hadn’t been good or else the people wouldn’t feel the need to run at each other like that. They could just sort of stroll. Or they’d already be walking side by side and probably not in a field, either, because why did two people who clearly loved each other that much and had been cruelly separated for some reason just happen to be in the same field at the same time? Had there been a kidnapping? A Children of the Corn situation? Some terrible and dispiriting music festival in the middle of nowhere with no phone reception? How happy he would be right now to be at a dispiriting music festival instead of here.
Daniel said, “But you don’t know for sure. It could have been Bogomil or even Mr. Anabin trying to lure you out by making you think it was someone else.”
“Why would they do that?” Mo said. “Why would they bother? Mr. Anabin gave me a ride home and was a huge supernatural jerk the whole way. And Bogomil can apparently just show up disguised as a dust bunny or a dust gerbil and nibble on my ear and if I were you I wouldn’t even realize it until later because I’m an intellectually incurious extra-large bran muffin.”
Daniel looked sadly at him and Mo glared back. He had never, ever liked this guy. Not the first time he’d ever seen him, not at any point ever since. And Daniel couldn’t stand it, not being liked. It was kind of insane how good it felt, not giving Daniel what he so clearly wanted.
Laura said, “Good guys don’t just show up creepily outside someone’s house in the middle of the night and wave at them and expect that they’ll just come outside. And bad guys would be more cunning.”
Mo grimaced. “Actually, uh, I went outside.”
Daniel said, “You went outside?”
“In my defense,” Mo said, no doubt defensively, “it had been a really terrible day. Night. Whatever. I probably wasn’t thinking, you know, clearly.”
“And then what?” Laura said. “Mo, you went outside and then what?”
Mo said, practically shouting, “And then I got out to the street and there wasn’t anybody there. Whoever it was wasn’t there anymore. So I went back inside and went to bed.”
“Sorry I asked!” Laura said.
“No,” Mo said. “Sorry for yelling. I’m just a little freaked out about everything. That’s it. That’s the whole box of doughnuts.” He looked sadly at the table, where the box of doughnuts was, indeed, still empty.
“So now what?” Daniel said.
“Now nothing,” Mo said. “Tomorrow we show up and do magic for Mr. Anabin. I have no idea how we’re supposed to do that. Either of you do anything magical since last night when we got back from the dead?”
“No,” Daniel said.
Laura said, “No. Maybe we’re supposed to try to do it together?”
“Like Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board?” Mo said. “Sure, I’m game.” Though he wasn’t. This was where it all went wrong for Black people, sitting around a table with two white people, fooling around with magic. But what else was he supposed to do?
Laura said, “Let’s all concentrate on something. The saltshaker. Mo, you try to turn it into something else. Like a pepper shaker.”
“No way,” Mo said. “Go big or go home. Let’s turn it into a hairless cat.”
“A hairless cat?” Daniel said.
“Yeah,” Mo said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to touch one of those.” He concentrated on the saltshaker. Tried to imagine a totally bald cat there in its place. When that didn’t work, he thought of Mr. Anabin flicking his finger. Flicked his finger. Be a cat, he thought. Be a weird cat. Come on.
“Let’s all try,” Daniel said. “Everyone at the same time.”
“Do they have whiskers?” Laura said. “I want to make sure I’m imagining it the right way.”
“I don’t know,” Mo said. “Hold on.” He looked up sphynxes on his phone and showed them the picture. “How about this one?”
They all stared hard at the saltshaker. Tried flicking their fingers at it one at a time and then all together on the count of three. The saltshaker remained a saltshaker.
They tried to change it into a pepper shaker. That should have been simpler, but it wasn’t.
In the end, Laura said, “Well. We can keep trying. What about how we died? We’re supposed to figure that out, too.”
Mo said, “We know it was Daniel’s birthday.”
Laura and Daniel nodded.
Mo said, “So that’s a clue, right? You guys did a show. See where I’m going?”
Daniel said, “Yeah, okay. We ask around. I’ll ask my parents. Because it was my birthday. And Laura can ask Susannah. And we can go up to the Cliff Hangar.”
“Exactly,” Mo said. “Scooby-Doo around. I was there with Rosamel Walker, I think. I think there was something I was supposed to do with Susannah. But I have no idea what. I’ll talk to Rosamel.”
Laura said, “Okay, but we keep trying to do magic, too, right?”
“Do whatever you want,” Mo said. He checked his watch. “But I think Mr. Anabin’s messing with us. Whatever it is that he wants us to do, he wants us to fail first. So we’ll pay attention on Monday.”
“We could just not show up,” Daniel said.
“Sure,” Mo said. “Do that and see how it goes. Okay, I’ve got to run. Got places to be.”
“What places?” Laura said suspiciously. “Where are you going?”
Mo said, “Why? You wanna come along, bestie? We gonna sync our Google calendars? I was thinking I’d go for a quick hike. Clear my head.”
“Be careful,” Daniel said. “Even if that wasn’t Bogomil last night, he’s still out there. And if it wasn’t Bogomil, then that’s someone else we should probably be concerned about. Plus Bowie. He’s out there, too.”
“I’ll be careful,” Mo said.
He grabbed his messenger bag and was already halfway out the door when Daniel said, “Hey, Mo? I’m really sorry about your grandmother.”
“Me, too,” Laura said. “I’m so, so sorry, Mo.”
Mo said, “You should come see this. Both of you.”
Laura and Daniel joined him on the porch. The roof of the porch, the railings, the exterior walls of the house, Mo’s bike in the driveway, every blade of grass in the Hands’ yard, were carpeted with moths. There must have been thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands, in diameter no bigger than a nickel. They were dusty white until their wings lifted, the undersides velvet blue.