my life, halfway down the block. I wasn’t so late that I couldn’t have gone back, but for some reason I didn’t.
Having been trained to know when people are lying, Mason narrows his eyes at me. I assume Cassie’s doing the same, but I don’t look at her to find out. For a moment, I think Mason’s going to call me on it, but thankfully, he moves on.
“Daisy, I think you should know that we nearly couldn’t bring you back this time,” he says so quietly it’s almost like he’s breathing the words. His bluntness, I’m used to—Mason treats me like a partner, not a daughter— but I’m surprised by the idea of permanent death.
“Was it a bad vial?” I ask.
“No, it was fine,” Mason says. “It was… you.”
“He almost called time of death,” Cassie interjects. Stunned, I look at her, then back at Mason.
“Seriously?” I ask.
“It was very stressful,” Mason says. There’s a flicker of something like worry in his green eyes, and then it’s gone.
I think for a moment before coming to what I consider to be a pretty rational conclusion: “But it did work, so everything’s fine.”
“But it might not be next time,” he says. “I’m merely advising you to take precautions. Don’t you remember Chase?”
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
“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.
She lived down the street from us, in a sunny yellow house with dark green shutters and a WELCOME sign on the front door. Her mom was one of those overly cheerful types who showed up with freshly baked cookies the second your moving truck appeared. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s desire to worm into our world always unnerved Cassie. Paranoid, Cassie wondered aloud on several occasions if Mrs. Fitzgerald was actually a spy for a foreign government trying to steal the formula for Revive. She said that “suburban housewife” would be the perfect cover.
Two weeks after we arrived, Nora showed up on our front porch, undoubtedly shoved out the door by her mother, birthday party invitation in hand.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Nora.”
“I remember from when you guys brought the cookies,” I said. “I’m Daisy.”
“Yeah.”
We stared at each other in silence, me thinking that she looked like a Skipper doll and wondering if she owned any outfits that didn’t match from her hair clips to her sandals, and her looking at me in my cutoff jean shorts and red-and-white-striped T-shirt like I was from an alien planet.
“Here,” she said finally, offering me the tiny purple envelope. “It’s an invitation to my birthday party next weekend.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” Nora said. “See ya.”
The next weekend, I faked being sick and watched the partygoers arrive at Nora’s from the comfort of the window seat in my poster-filled bedroom. Looking back, that was probably the moment that defined Daisy Appleby. Those first weeks of school, Nora’s birthday was all anyone talked about: It was a boy/girl party, and if you weren’t there, you weren’t anybody. For the rest of the year, Nora was polite to me at block parties and in the halls at school. But by eighth grade, she was braces-less, in a B-cup, and on track to be queen of the school, and I was nothing but the weird neighbor who kept to herself. Unknowingly, I had dissed the most popular girl in school.
It made me invisible.
Not that I minded.
The Revive program is built on secrecy, and being invisible at school is never a bad thing. Even if I make friends, it’s not like I can get close to them. My family life is a facade, and we could move at any time.
Anyway, it’s not like I was lonely in Frozen Hills. I had an after-school study group and I hung out solo with one of the other members every once in a while. And I’m not one of those people who get all self-conscious about going to the movies or to see bands alone. I’m not sure when normal kids learn to be embarrassed about things like that, but thankfully, it never happened to me.
I carefully catalog three years of memories and by nine o’clock, when we pull into our new hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, I have concluded that my time in Frozen Hills was a success. I navigated junior high without any major issues. I maintained cover and managed not to raise suspicions or get too close to anyone or anything that I had to leave.
Ready to focus on the future, I tune in to the city outside the car windows.
“It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” I say.
