Page 14 of You'll Be the Death of Me

“Mom!” he blurted into the still silence. “Something happened to Dell!”

He’d called his mom?

Dell watched him continue to pace in his boxer briefs and yank on his hair in distress.

“I don’t know!” he said on a desperate breath. His words came out frantic and chopped up with sharp inhales. “I just woke up, and she’s not moving. She’s not—Fuck. Mom, I think she’s dead!”

Dell’s head began to spin with a sickening pace.

She was dead?

“Tommy!” she shouted in a panic. “I’m not dead! I’m right here!” She ran around the bed and threw herself at him, only to pass straight through with a sensation she could describe only as walking through a frozen waterfall made of electric cables. She stumbled on the other side with a horrified gasp.

Tommy felt it too. He shuddered a full-body shake and wrapped his arm around himself. His teeth chattered.

“Mom, I don’t know what to do!” he desperately wailed.

Dell couldn’t hear Evelyn on the other end of the phone, but she hoped she was instructing her son to call for paramedics.

“No! Nothing happened last night. I didn’t—” Tommy said, and stopped to listen more.

Dell took frantic inventory of herself. She looked down and saw that she wore her customary pajamas, a silky off-white nightgown with a lace trim, which hit her mid-thigh. She was barefoot, braless, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. There were no visible signs of an injury or wound. As far as she could tell, everything looked normal. She swiped her hand at her other forearm, half expecting it to pass straight through, but it landed with a smack instead.

Tommy didn’t respond to the sound. Nor did he respond when she loudly clapped her hands and shouted at him.

“Tommy!Thomas Giovanni Moratto!” she hollered, and clapped.

Nothing.

The sound of her voice to her own ears momentarily drowned out something that drew Tommy’s attention to the bedroom’s doorway.

“Shit,” he said into his phone. “Jason and Mariana just got here. They let themselves in every morning like a goddamned raid,” he told his mother.

Dell’s heart soared. Or, the space in her chest that used to house a beating life source lifted in hope. If anyone could help figure out what was going on, it would be her best friend and her assistant, the two people she spent most of her time with and who knew her every secret.

She abandoned Tommy swearing into his phone and ran for the stairs.

“Jason!” she shouted like that time sophomore year in college when she found a mysterious bump on her lip after making out with a boy from her chemistry class and went running to his dorm room for advice. It had been a pimple, and she hoped he was about to tell her now that whatever was happening was just as innocuous and she was in factnotdead but hallucinating or perhaps sleepwalking in a nightmare.

She hurtled herself into the living room to find Jason in his best neon jogging gear and Mariana in her biz casual, coffee in hand.

“Jason, I need your help!” she wailed, and launched herself at him, only to come out the other side of him with the same frigid, electric chill she’d felt upstairs.

“Whoa!” Jason exclaimed, giving her a moment of hope he’d noticed her. “It’s freezing in here.” He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. He rubbed them and looked toward the empty kitchen. “Where’s Dell?”

“Dunno,” Mariana said as she headed for the coffee station.

“I’m right here, you guys!” Dell desperately yelled at them. Her voice shattered off the walls to her own ears but left them unfazed.

“Maybe they’re still in bed. ItisSaturday,” Mariana offered.

Jason made a rude vomiting sound and mimed sticking his finger down his throat.

Dell shot him a glare on reflex. “Nice, Jay.”

But he didn’t hear her.

“Save it for the honeymoon, lovebirds! We’ve got a busy day! Food drives wait for no one!” he shouted in the direction of the stairs.