Free Passing Strange by Daniel Waters Page B

held out her hand at an angle, and each finger had a ring of some sort, some at the knuckle. “Nice to meet you, Karen.”
    I hesitated a moment before taking her hand, hoping that if I could concentrate on fur and sandy beaches and oven-fresh apple pie, Tamara wouldn’t notice how cold my skin was.
    “Nice to meet you too, Tamara not Tammy,” I said. Really corny.
    Tamara’s grip was vigorous; there was a strength in her wiry, gangling frame, hidden like the spark of unlife is hidden somewhere within me. If she thought I was clammy or cold, she didn’t say so.
    My sudden self-consciousness made her look around. There were few people in the store, and a pair of teenage boys by the CD rack were looking at us and whispering to each other. The blond one with the bomber jacket smiled and nodded in our direction.
    At me. He was smiling at me .
    My God, I thought. I’m actually passing .
    Tamara also saw the boys. She turned back to me with a wry, knowing smile on her face.
    “Hey,” Tamara said, finally releasing me, “I just thought of a great idea.”
    “I like…great ideas,” I said, hitching again. It felt so good to be mistaken for alive!
    “How about you apply for a job here? We just started looking for Christmas help.”
    “A job?” I said. Nothing could have been further from my mind.
    “Sure. You’d fit right in. Then your sister could come back and squish Grinches or goth Frostys.”
    “Is there really such thing as a goth Frosty?”
    “If there is, we’ll carry it. Come on, it’ll be fun. Besides,” she said, her voice dropping to the whisper of conspiracy, “I get a twenty-five dollar gift certificate for every employee I recruit as long as they stay through Black Friday.”
    I laughed. “A whole twenty-five dollars? You could buy Jason a bottle of Z for Christmas.”
    Tamara pointed a sharp-nailed finger at me, her silver-knuckled thumb upraised.
    “Now yer thinkin’,” she said. “Come on, let’s go fill out the application.”
    * * *
    Katy was asleep before we were halfway home. My father’s gaze drifted to the rearview when he heard the soft squawk of a snore from the backseat.
    “Thanks for letting me come tonight, Dad,” I said.
    “Sure,” he said, looking at me with what seemed like real affection. His face was almost the same shade as mine in the greenish light from the dashboard. “Katy loves being with you.”
    “I know. I love being with her, too.”
    “We should do this more often,” he said. “You coming out with us, I mean. Out places.”
    “I’d like that,” I told him. I wasn’t trying to be all cool or anything, just careful—because if I flipped out with Margiesque enthusiasm, he might get all weird, and that would be the end of his wanting to be seen in public with me.
    “We could go out more, to most places,” he looked back at the road, and sighed. “You know what I mean.”
    “I know what you mean.”
    He turned the car stereo on. He had one of his Santana discs in the CD player and he let it play, turning it low so it wouldn’t disturb Katy.
    “Dad?”
    “Yes?”
    “I was offered a job at the mall tonight. At Wild Thingz!”
    “Really?” he said. “Just like that?”
    “Just like that.”
    He shook his head, laughing. “You always were full of surprises, Karen,” he told me.
    And I waited for it; I could almost hear it at the pause at the end of his words, a memory lingering just out of reach. What I waited for was for him to call me “honey,” or “sweetie,” as in “You were always full of surprises, Karen honey,” which is the way he used to talk to me. Back when I was alive. I waited, but the words never came.
    I’m a firm believer in epiphanies. I wasn’t always, certainly not when I was depressed. A life of depression is a life without epiphanies. When most people think of the term “epiphany,” they think of a moment of great personal insight, but the word often has spiritual significance. I’d like to think that my