Julie thinks for a minute. ‘Okay. Hold on, R, I’ll come down.’
I go around to the front of the house and stand at the door, waiting nervously in my dress shirt and tie. She opens it, grinning shyly. Prom night at the end of the world.
‘Hi, Julie,’ I say, as if none of the previous conversation happened.
She hesitates, then steps forward and hugs me. ‘I actually missed you,’ she says into my shirt.
‘I . . . heard that.’
She pulls back to look at me, and something wild glints in her eyes. ‘Hey, R,’ she says. ‘If I kissed you, would I get . . . you know . . . converted?’
My thoughts skip like a record in an earthquake. As far as I know, only a bite, a violent transfer of blood and essences, has the power to make the Living join the Dead before actually dying. To expedite the inevitable. But then again, I’m fairly sure Julie’s question has never, ever been asked before.
‘Don’t . . . think so,’ I say, ‘but—’
A spotlight flashes at the end of the street. The sound of two guards barking commands breaks the night quiet.
‘Shit, the patrol,’ Julie whispers, and yanks me inside the house. ‘We should get the lights out, it’s after curfew. Come on.’
She runs up the stairs and I follow her, relief and disappointment mixing in my chest like unstable chemicals.
Julie’s home feels eerily unoccupied. In the kitchen, the den, the short halls and steep staircases, the walls are white and unadorned. The few pieces of furniture are plastic, and rows of fluorescent lights glare down on stainproof beige carpets. It feels like the vacated office of a bankrupt company, empty echoing rooms and the lingering scent of desperation.
Julie turns lights off as she goes, darkening the house until we reach her bedroom. She switches off the overhead bulb and flicks on a Tiffany lamp by her bed. I step inside and turn in slow circles, greedily absorbing Julie’s private world.
If her mind were a room, it would look like this.
Each wall is a different colour. One red, one white, one yellow, one black, and a sky-blue ceiling strung with toy airplanes. Each wall seems designated for a theme. The red is nearly covered with movie ticket stubs and concert posters, all browned and faded with age. The white is crowded with paintings, starting near the floor with a row of amateur acrylics and leading up to three stunning oil canvases: a sleeping girl about to be devoured by tigers, a nightmarish Christ on a geometric cross, and a surreal landscape draped with melting clocks.
‘Recognise those?’ Julie says with a grin she can barely contain. ‘Salvador Dalí. Originals, of course.’
Nora comes in from the balcony, sees me with my face inches from the canvases, and laughs. ‘Nice decor, right? Me and Perry wanted to get Julie the Mona Lisa for her birthday because it reminded us of that little smirk she’s always – there! Right there! – but, yeah, it’s a long way to Paris on foot. We make do with the local exhibitions.’
‘Nora has a whole wall of Picassos in her room,’ Julie adds. ‘We’d be legendary art thieves if anyone still cared.’
I crouch down to get a closer look at the bottom row of acrylics.
‘Those are Julie’s,’ Nora says. ‘Aren’t they great?’
Julie averts her eyes in disgust. ‘Nora made me put those up.’
I study them intently, searching for Julie’s secrets in their clumsy brushstrokes. Two are just bright colours and thick, tortured texture. The third is a crude portrait of a blonde woman. I glance over at the black wall, which bears only one ornament: a thumb-tacked Polaroid of what must be the same woman. Julie plus twenty hard years.
Julie follows my gaze and she and Nora exchange a glance. ‘That’s my mom,’ Julie says. ‘She left when I was twelve.’ She clears her throat and looks out the window.
I turn to the yellow wall, which is notably unadorned. I point at it and raise my eyebrows.
‘That’s, um . . . my hope wall,’ she says. Her voice contains an embarrassed pride that makes her sound younger. Almost innocent. ‘I’m leaving it open for something in the future.’
‘Like . . . what?’
‘I don’t know yet. Depends on what happens in the future. Hopefully something happy.’
She shrugs this off and sits on the corner of her bed, tapping her fingers on her thigh and watching me. Nora settles down next to her. There are no chairs, so I sit on the floor. The carpet is a mystery under ancient strata of wrinkled clothes.
‘So . . . R,’ Nora says, leaning towards me. ‘You’re a zombie. What’s that feel like?’
‘Uh . . .’
‘How did it happen? How’d you get converted?’
‘Don’t . . . remember.’
‘I don’t see any old bites or gunshot wounds or anything. Must’ve been natural causes. No one was around to debrain you?’
I shrug.
‘How old are you?’
I shrug.
‘You look twenty-something, but you could be thirty-something. You have one of those faces. How come you’re not all rotten? I barely even smell you.’
‘I don’t . . . um . . .’
‘Do your body functions still work? They don’t, right? I mean, can you actually still, you know—?’
‘Jesus, Nora,’ Julie cuts in, elbowing her in the hip. ‘Will you back off? He didn’t come here for an interrogation.’
I shoot Julie a grateful look.
‘I do have one question, though,’ she says. ‘How the hell did you get in here? Into the Stadium?’