Free Passing Strange by Daniel Waters

looking presentable in a fashionably wrinkled black denim jacket and low-heeled black boots. I even put in my contacts.
    My friends tell me my eyes look like diamonds, but they just look kind of colorless and glassy to me. They disturbed my Dad, though, so he’d bought me nice blue nonprescription contact lenses. They were pretty close to the color my eyes had been before I died. I felt sort of silly wearing them, but secret-agentish cool, too. Even so, I hoped none of my dead friends saw me wearing them.
    “Okay,” Dad said. He blinked when he saw my eyes. Anthony DeSonne always seemed to be on the verge of saying something when he looked at me, but whatever it was remained a mystery. Did he disapprove of my clothing? Did he think I looked nice? Did seeing me with blue eyes allow him to believe, if only for a few seconds, that I’d never taken my own life?
    Sometimes it’s better to let the mystery remain.
    “Let’s go,” he said.
    During the short trip to the Winford mall, Katy managed to convince our father to let me take her to the toy store while he ran his errands. I listened to Katy’s argument—which bordered on but never crossed into whining—without comment. To offer to take Katy myself would be to cross that unspoken line that demarcated my place within the home. For that reason I was thrilled when Dad, after the slightest hesitation, said that it was fine by him.
    “That is,” he said, as though he were bound by the same unspoken line of decorum that restrained me, “if Karen wants to.”
    “I’d love to,” I said, too quickly, no doubt.
    So we split up at the wide neon maw of the mall entrance, my father off in search of the newest cellular technology, Katy with her tiny soft hand in my own.
    “I can feel how warm your hand is,” I told her, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “I really can.” Katy beamed up at me with her eyes. Her naturally blue eyes.
    “I think blue eyes go better with this coat, don’t you, Katy?” I said as soon as our Dad was around the corner in the half deserted mall.
    Katy shrugged.
    “I like your real eyes,” she said. “Nobody else has eyes like you do, Caring.”
    I looked at my sister and saw how smooth and supple her skin was, how subtly pink, how rosy her cheeks. I felt like a ghost beside her, she was so filled with life.
    We walked around the birch tree that rose up from the first level of the mall, looking for the unseen birds that we could hear chirping away. I was still staring at the eye-level branches when Katy gave my arm a sudden tug.
    “Caring! Caring!” she said. “I want to go there!”
    She was pointing at the Wild Thingz! store, which had a window display of Halloween items left unsold after the holiday: masks, haunted houses, spiders as big and hairy as house cats, a rubbery painted leg that looked gnawed at the knee—all marked down fifty percent. “Prices slashed” the sign proclaimed, in a blood-spattered font.
    “You like all that scary stuff?” I said, surprised. A month before, Katy had burst into tears at the thought of wearing a fuzzy costume that would make her look like her favorite television puppet, and now she wanted to go rushing into a store filled with ghoul masks, dark cloaks, and spiderwebs.
    Katy gave a solemn nod.
    “You aren’t afraid?”
    “No such thing as momers,” Katy said, with true conviction. “Momers” was Katy-speak for monsters.
    “Well,” I said, “if you say so.”
    We walked into the store, where Katy began playing with the hacked leg. I had a brief moment of panic, wondering just how I could translate the story to our father on the way home if Katy blurted out that she’d been playing with body parts. Scanning the wall of concert T-shirts, I was thankful that Katy couldn’t read.
    “Squish, squish,” Katy was saying as she used the heel of the severed leg to stomp on the fat plush spiders that had spilled to the floor from a bin on the lower shelf.
    “Awww, poor spider,” I said. I