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As soon as biology was over, Enoch and I headed out to my car to talk. I tossed my backpack into the backseat before getting into the driver's seat with Enoch sitting awkwardly in the passenger seat beside me. He was a lot taller than Elliot so his knees were basically under his chin. I reached over and grabbed the handle to extend the seat back so he had enough room to be comfortable.
"So, I figure I'm just going to be blunt about this and hope you don't think I'm crazy," I told him, playing with my fingers instead of looking at him. "I see people die and then I'm basically the entrance to the afterlife, all the spirits I saw die pass through me."
There was a pregnant pause followed by an awkward silence. It stretched on for so long that I looked up from my hands to see if I had completely convinced him I was crazy. His face was amazed to put it lightly, his jaw a bit slack and a hint of a smile ghosting around the edges of his eyes.
"I knew it," he said quietly, still looking at me with big eyes. Then he smirked and exclaimed, "Hugh owes me twenty bucks."
"Great, you're betting on whether or not I have a something wrong with me. Well, congratulations, I do!" I told him, huffing as I turned around in my seat and crossed my arms over my chest. "This is exactly why I've never told anyone about what I see. They think I'm crazy!"
"I never said I thought you were crazy, Ivy, you're jumping to conclusions," he told me. "There's nothing wrong with being peculiar, I am, too. So are all my friends."
"I've heard that damn word more times in the last two days than I ever have in my life. What does it mean?" I asked, still facing forward with angry tears gathering behind my lashes. "If it's just another way of saying I'm weird, I already know."
"No, I'm saying you're not the only one who has a peculiarity, a magic power of sorts," he tried to explain. "I can reanimate dead and inanimate things."
I wanted to argue with him, but I realized his secret sounded about as impossible as mine. "Show me."
"How am I supposed to show you in your Corolla? There aren't exactly any spare hearts lying around," he replied. "We'd have to go to my house."
"Well, I don't have class again until one. What about you?" I asked, reaching into the backseat and getting my keys out of my backpack. When I saw the reluctance on his face, I kept pushing, "Prove to me this is real, that you're like me, and I'll completely trust you and tell you everything."
It was silent again, but the pause was shorter this time. "If we must, I'm sure you know where I live. I assume everyone in town does."
He lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of town next to his parents' mortuary. They also owned a funeral home in town where they brought the bodies for viewings after they embalmed them. I'd never been inside the place, but I'd always been dared to as a kid –it was basically a rite of passage. I was always too much of a scaredy cat to ever do it though. Instead of mentioning all of that to him, I just nodded and started my car.
The drive was quiet except for the music playing on the radio. When a song by Taking Back Sunday came on, I saw him tapping his fingers against his thigh to the beat of the song. I reached forward and turned it up a little, shocked we had the same tasted in music. The fact that we had anything in common was shocking to me actually.
"Didn't color you as a punk fan," he said after the song ended and a song by The Story So Far came on.
"Is this you being impressed?" I asked, waggling my eyebrows when I looked over at him.
He laughed out loud at that and seemed as surprised as I was that it happened. So I continued, "I impressed you AND I made you laugh? Holy shit, this is a monumental occasion."
It was easy to forget about all the bad things in my life when the two of us were together like this. When we were fighting, on the other hand, it felt like we could tear into each other at any second. It was nice to know we could shift gears if we needed to, and also for me to know there was someone I could talk to that helped me forget things.
"If you're lying to me, I'm going to be really disappointed," I told him honestly once our shared laughter stopped. "You make me forget about what's going wrong in my life, but only when we're not fighting. It'll suck to lose that."
He sobered up at my words and said, "I swear I'm not lying, I can reanimate things. I also don't mean to fight with you, you're just infuriating and I can't help it."
"You are quite possibly the hardest person to read in the world," I shouted, slamming my hands against my steering wheel once I parked in his driveway. "One second you're all doom and gloom then the next you're looking at me and smiling and holding my hand when I'm freaking out. I'm kind of dizzy, and not just from what I saw in biology."
Instead of answering me, he got out of my car and headed into the mortuary. I swore colorfully under my breath before getting out and hurrying after him. I was wearing heeled booties and the driveway was gravel so I stumbled a couple times, making me get there even slower. He was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, an annoyed sigh leaving his lips when I stumbled inside. I guess my personality wasn't the only thing about me that annoyed him.
The place was cold, dark, and creepy, but the last thing I wanted was to let him see any more of my weaknesses. Whatever side of him I'd seen in the car was gone now and he was back to doom and gloom with the drop of a hat. If I showed him any chink in my armor, he would tear me apart over it and I don't think I could handle that.
"We have to go down to the coolers, I'm going to bring back a person for a couple minutes," he told me as he led me down a pitch black flight of stairs.
I clutched the railing along the side and felt out every step before I stood on it. Enoch went down the stairs quickly like he spent most of his time down there in the dark. If this dude could actually reanimate the dead, I don't even think it would be that shocking.
When I finally reached flat ground, I let out a sigh of relief. Enoch flipped on the lights and I was momentarily blinded, still seeing flashes of white light when he pulled out one of the bodies. It was lying on a metal slab and kind of made my stomach clench up. No matter how many gruesome murders I'd witness, I'd never seen an actual dead body in person before.
I watched Enoch as he grabbed a jar of hearts off the wall and brought them over to the metal slab. Then he rolled up the sleeves of his sweater to his elbows and got a scalpel off the table, cutting into the body's chest. The smell of formaldehyde burned my nostrils, making me tear up a bit, but I continued watching his calculated movements. This was definitely something he had practice in.
He reached into the jar and pulled out one of the hearts then turned back to the body and plunged his arm into the chest. I watched his face as he concentrated before pulling his arm back out and watching the body. The last thing I expected was for the body to jolt forward and sit up on the slab, his head turning to look at me and Enoch. His eyes were black pits staring straight into my soul and his skin was waxy and slack against the bone.
"You weren't lying. You really can reanimate things," I whispered, watching as the man slowly laid back down and stopped moving. I looked up at Enoch with big eyes, "You're like me, you can do things that can't be explained like I can. It's not just me."
He looked like he was about to say something, but he never got the chance to because my vision turned black as a spirit appeared in the room and drew my attention. It was the man I saw get shot yesterday in the auditorium, the vision that started all this with Enoch. His eyes were locked on mine as he slowly approached me. Then he reached out a timid hand and touched my shoulder, making pain explode through my head and a scream rip its way out of my throat without my permission. I hit my knees on the tile floor and clutched my throbbing head, but the spirit was long gone and the pain was just starting.
"Ivy? Ivy, are you okay? What's happening?" Enoch's voice was far away, the only thing I could focus on was the throbbing pain ricocheting around my head.
I didn't know I was moving until my face was pressed against something soft and I felt arms wrapped around me. I collapsed against Encoh's chest and clutched his body tightly to mine, trying to will the pain away through breathing like I usually did. I'd never been through one of these attacks with another person before and him massaging my scalp soothingly helped the pain slowly start to ebb away.
"You're okay, it's not real. The pain isn't real, it's in your head," he told me, rocking our bodies back and forth like I was a baby. "Well, obviously it's in your head because that's what you were holding, but I mean it's mental instead of physical. It's your brain telling you to feel it instead of an actual pain in your head, you're one of the most stubborn people I know so be stubborn and fight through it."
The pain turned into a dull throb and it was possible for me to sit up on my own. Getting shot was always one of the worst pains, but I'd never had to experience one to the head before. I thought being stabbed was bad, but it didn't hold a candle to this one.
When I pulled back from Enoch's chest, I saw that I'd gotten makeup on his sweater. "Please don't be an ass, but I got makeup on your sweater. I'm sorry, but I don't think I can't handle you patronizing me right now."
Instead of saying anything, he just stood up and offered me his hand. He then pulled me to my feet and kept my hand in his as he lead me back up the stairs. Once we were at the top, he hit a light and the bright one downstairs flicked off. So he could've turned it on before we went down the stairs, he was just intentionally making things difficult for me. That was something he seriously seemed to enjoying, taking the piss with me.
We walked out of the morgue and to his house, his hand finding mine again after he unlocked the door. "I'm going to go upstairs and change my sweater, you can stay down here if you want to."
"I really don't want to be by myself just yet," I replied, moving closer and placing my other hand on his arm. "Sometimes they come in groups, I don't think I can handle doing another one by myself after that one."
He nodded tensely, eyeing my hand resting on his arm before leading the way up the stairs. The hall was decorated well, whichever parent did it had excellent taste. The entire house was actually really nice on the inside. If things weren't so tense between us at the moment, I would make a remark about it.
His room was dark with a bookshelf full of books on war and models of war weaponry stuck between them. The other shelves housed different books about biology, anatomy, and animal skeletons. If I had to picture what Enoch O'Connor's room would look like, this would be it exactly. Right down to the thick black curtains hanging on the windows that blocked out most of the sunlight.
"You're very predictable," I told him, making my way over to the book shelf and looking at the different titles. "All about war and science, so violent yet intelligent."
"Didn't you say you wanted to talk about your peculiarity? Why are you making fun of me?" he asked, coming up behind me.
I turned around to tell him about seeing Alyssa this morning and realized how close he was standing to me. His breath was brushing against my face and I had to tilt my head back a little to see him. He was so tall he would be towering over me if I wasn't wearing boots with a heel on them.
"I saw Alyssa Merriweather get killed this morning," I forced out even though breathing was suddenly a chore. "By Jerald Bentley."
"So, you can see people die and then they pass through you to get to whatever is beyond this plane of existence?" he asked, still standing close to me. "And you feel everything they felt when they do."
"Yes, it's just as terrible as it sounds," I admitted, feeling myself shrink down as I remembered the pain from earlier. "But the gunshot earlier might have been the worst one yet, it just kept ricocheting around my skull."
He reached up like he was going to brush my hair behind my ear, but he decided against it at the last second. It was almost like he was afraid to touch me after he'd showed me what his hands could do in the morgue. I didn't know how to tell him it was okay without making things weird between us so I made a sarcastic remark anyway.
"So you can only touch me when I'm freaking out?" I asked, trying to make things normal between us. "That's good to know."
"And you can't let a moment be, that's also good to know," he sassed back, stepping away from me and perching on the edge of his bed. "Do you want to talk to me about this or just be annoying?"
I pulled out his desk chair and sat facing him. "I saw Alyssa get killed by Jerald, but I don't know how to keep it from happening. She's going to think I'm a crazy person if I tell her I had a vision of her death."
"Yes, that would give you a one way ticket to the nut house," he agreed, rubbing his chin as he thought. "Are you friends with her? Can you ask about her relationship with Jerald and it not be weird?"
"Probably, but I have to be careful about it," I replied, chewing my bottom lip nervously. "If she gets a hint that something weird is happening, I'm pretty sure she'll shut down. Something tells me whatever she has with Jerald is a secret for a reason."
Jerald Bentley wasn't exactly the most popular guy in school. He had a reputation for being a total burn out who barely passed. One look at the kid and you knew the burnout part was right, his eyes were almost constantly red and bloodshot. Alyssa, on the other hand, was well on her way to being the next president of the United States. The last thing she needed was to have a loser like Jerald attached to her.
"Yeah, it must be awful for people to think cool girls like you hang out with loser like me," he sneered, his mask sliding into place.
That was the final straw, I wasn't going to deal with this anymore. "Look, I came here for help because you told me you'd give it to me. Instead, you're just taking advantage of me when I'm in vulnerable positions then making me feel like shit about myself and I'm tired of it."
I pushed up from his chair and stomped back down the stairs to my car. I'd handled having this peculiarity for seventeen years on my own, I didn't need any help now. Alyssa would have to listen to me, I just had to figure out the best way to go about it. There was no way I was letting her die, it wasn't any option.
Nothing can stay nice, they're both too stubborn.
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