1st 5 Pages December Workshop - Johnson

Name: Tiffany Turpin Johnson
Genre: Young Adult Speculative Thriller
Title: The Phoenix

CHAPTER ONE

This just in: There's a dead boy at my window.

I've faced death before, but this is different. My mom nearly drowned in our bathtub seven years ago. I was only nine when I found her drifting in a sea of pale red water.

Now, I look out at my ex-best friend Evan as he clings to my window frame in the moonlight. A year and a half ago we sprinkled his ashes (so we thought) behind the Coral Beach High School football field. His parents said some nice things, and a lot of kids cried. The principal even shut down school for a few days. Seemed like an overreaction to me, but when the most popular guy in school disappears and turns up dead, overreaction is status quo.

Yet somehow here he is, staring at me through the glass with eyes wide and bloodshot and definitely alive. His hair is all gone, his skin so sickly pale it glows silver in the moonlight, and there's a huge, jagged scar running across his skull. Beneath the hospital gown his body is shrunken, concave. Not at all the quarterback I remember. Despite all that, I'm sure it's him.

Even though it can't be. People don't just come back to life. The Reanimist Association raised an animal or two in its day, sure, but the one time they tried with a human was a total disaster. So bad that no one talks, or even thinks, about resurrection anymore. Jenny's Law makes it illegal to attempt.

No one's stupid enough to try resurrection again. Not even the RA.

Right?

"Brie," Evan says, voice muffled through the window, "are you in there?"

I blink a few times, so hard that blue spots swirl on the backs of my eyelids. Am I hallucinating again? It's four a.m., so who knows if my eyes are telling me the truth. I know I could trust my camera, but I'm afraid to move to get it.

Okay. I have to be logical about this. If I'm hallucinating, why would I hallucinate a Frankensteiny Evan? We haven't spoken since elementary school. That's been more than a third of my life ago now, a good part of which he spent being dead. I'm over him. Completely. So why would I see him now if he weren't really here?

Evan reaches up one hand to tap on the windowpane. When the sleeve of his hospital gown rolls down, I see that part of his right thumb is missing. Something about that empty space where the other half of his thumb should be transfixes me, holds me still and silent, but then the sound of his fingernails tap-tap-tapping on the glass makes me recoil in the darkness.

"Brie." I watch his lips shape my name. He leans toward the window, opening his eyes even wider, as if that will help him to see me lurking to the far side of my pitch black bedroom. "Brie," he says again. "Let me in." I can hardly hear him through the glass, and though the voice is raspy and exhausted, damaged even, I recognize it. He must really be here.

"Evan," I whisper, and find my feet shuffling forward without permission. I get all the way to the glass before my legs freeze and pull me to a halt.

On the other side of the window, Evan lets his head fall forward, pressing the scarred flesh of his bald forehead against the pane. He closes his eyes and presses the palms of both hands flat on the glass. I feel mine rising to meet them, pressing against the window with my fingers lined up to his. His fingers eclipse mine in all places but one, where the sad little half-thumb ends in a jagged knuckled stump.

"Please let me in," he says, speaking so softly now that I can barely hear him at all and have to read his lips forming the words. "Someone's after me. Brie. Please. Let me in."

"Evan," I say again, the word a mere breath this time.

I think of the day we first met, the day he disappeared, of all the days between. The scrawny little boy whose long auburn hair always fell into his evergreen eyes. Who shared ice cream with me on blazing summer days and let me have the melty chocolate bits at the bottom of the cone. Who let me camp out at his house whenever Mom went on one of her binges.

The same awkward little boy who grew up into the gorgeous guy that pawed my stepsister on our living room couch after games on Friday nights.

I shudder and shove that image away.

What if he's a vampire, and he's going to eat me if I let him in? God, that would be so cliched. Plus he's not glowing or fangy or anything. He's not even dripping blood. Not a vampire then.

Probably.

I unlock the window and slide it open.

CHAPTER TWO

Before I can do anything else, Evan tumbles through the window and throws both arms around me, forcing me to stumble backwards until I hit the bed and we crash into a pile. He smells vaguely of something chemical, a familiar odor that I can't quite place. Whatever it is, it burns my nose. Instinctively I shove him away and scramble toward the headboard, drawing my legs up to my chest and wrapping both arms around my knees as tight as my muscles will allow.

He sits perfectly still at the foot of the bed, staring at me with deer-in-headlight eyes. The hospital gown crinkles with each of his quick breaths.

I have no idea what to say. We're both breathing hard now, and staring, staring, just all this stupid staring. What do you say to a dead boy? A boy you weren't even friends with anymore when he died?

The longer we sit in silence, the more I feel like I should say something, anything, to kill this moment and move on to the next. But everything I can think of sounds idiotic.

What are you doing out of your grave?

Does Jesus really wear Jesus sandals?

Have you missed me at all since fifth grade?

I turn on the bedside lamp. Evan squints, waits, clears his throat.

"Thanks for letting me in," he says after a while. His breathing has slowed somewhat, and I realize I've been holding my breath while imagining all the ridiculous first lines I could drop.

I let out a huge breath and say, "Um, sure. No problem." I clear my throat and add, "So what are you doing here, anyway?"

No success picking a clever first question. It's not even possible for him to be here, so why bother asking? God, what if he's not here? I think I was only joking before when I thought I might be a bit whacko, but holy hell, what if I'm right? It wouldn't be the first time.