Ah—wait. It’s not a hunter at all. It’s a tall, severe-looking woman, who has features that were probably mysterious and sexy thirty years ago. Now they have the worn, grubby look of dull pencils. She makes a face when she surveys the broken shutters on our house, then picks her way around the crushed pinecones in our driveway.
I turn up the television as Dad answers the door. I’m watching another rerun of Gilligan’s Island. I used to say I hated this show (Coconuts can’t be transformed into circuit breakers, Professor), but I started watching the reruns right after graduation and never stopped, so maybe I don’t hate it, after all. Maybe I just hate coconuts.
Dad appears in the doorway, eyebrows raised. “Um...she’s here for you.”
I blink as Mary Ann straightens her pigtails.
The severe lady appears over Dad’s shoulder, her coat bright white against the cheap wood paneling in this room. I click the TV off and rise warily.
The woman looks at me, lips pressed into a forced smile. She turns to my dad. “Might we have a moment alone?”
“Sure,” Dad says, shrugging. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”
“Thank you,” the lady says, though the warmth in her voice feels as fake as her hair looks. She waits till Dad walks away, till she hears him shut the door and descend into the basement.
“Um, hi. Can I help you?” I ask, extending a hand.
“Do you remember me?” she asks. “You went to school with my stepdaughter. I’m Beverly Windsor-Snow?”
Elise’s stepmother.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, dropping my hands in my jean pockets.
We stare at one another for a long time.
“Well. I...” She inhales, then drops her voice. “It’s come to my attention that you’ll be kissing my stepdaughter next Tuesday.”
I frown—she’s not supposed to have information like that, but I guess when you’re rich, you can afford to buy it. “That’s right,” I say.
Beverly nods at me, pauses, like she’s choosing her words carefully. “I’m not sure if you know this, but Elise and I never got along very well. She was a rather...difficult child.”
I exhale, almost laugh in agreement. She gives me a hard look, then moves on.
“Things got bad when her father got sick. Battling out his will made things nasty between us. She got almost everything. She doesn’t even need it, in that stupid artists’ colony she’s living in, but she refused to give me a penny. So the reason I’m here, Emmett, is I have an offer for you.”
She dips a silky hand into her purse, pulls out a thick white envelope. When she hands it to me, I see the flash of green bills straining at the flap. They’re crisp and new; I pull the mouth of the envelope apart to confirm what I already suspected. Hundred-dollar bills.
“That’s a down payment. Five thousand dollars. Finish the job and I’ll give you another twenty. Every year. For the rest of your life.”
I look up at her, eyes wide.
“What’s the job?”
Beverly steps toward me, licks her lips. “You’re supposed to kiss Elise on Tuesday. I want you to botch it. Say it didn’t work. Say you lost the talent. Say anything you want, but don’t kiss her. Don’t wake her up.”
“Twenty thousand dollars, for life?” I ask wondrously. I look at her, baffled. “To not do my job?”
“If she’s dead, I get the inheritance. And I need that money. It’s worth paying you dearly for. Surely you didn’t want to kiss dead people forever? You can go...do something. Whatever it is you want to do,” she says, tossing her hand at me. “Stuff animals with your father, I don’t know. Watch television all day. Buy new carpet,” she says, glancing dismally at our ratty floors.
“Just for not kissing her. That’s it. No strings,” I say, waiting for a catch.
“No strings,” she says. “The hippies she lives with don’t have access to her inheritance—they pooled together their pennies to hire you. So if you don’t kiss her, her week will have expired before they can get someone new. She stays dead.”
She’s right. Six days is already pushing it for a kiss. No one has ever successfully kissed someone back after seven. Elise Snow stays dead. I hand my father a check for his bills.
I leave.
I become something new. Something great, something better than a kisser who brings back the rich. Something important. Anything important.
I nod at Beverly, smash the envelope in my hand.
I thought Fourteenth Street was in the rich part of town, both because it’s Elise Snow’s address and because most of the numbered streets are lined in shiny condos. Apparently the lower numbers, however, still boast old brick warehouses with dirty windows that overlook the harbor. I squint at the address on the building, then at my slip of paper, wondering how this can be right. Elise Snow can’t live in a place like this. That’s crazy.
But it says this is 706 Fourteenth, so... I sigh, trudge to the dented metal door on the side. Knocking hurts in the cold, double so when combined with the sharp, cold breeze coming off the water. I hear shuffling inside, movement; the door swings open.
The guy is covered in tattoos, colorful ones with colors that fade in and out like watercolors instead of ink. He sighs when he sees me, grins.
“I’m here for—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says, sounding relieved. He steps aside, waves me in. “It’s him!” he calls out.
His voice bounces through the warehouse, across half walls and partitions and winding metal staircases. This place is full of mismatched furniture and wall murals of pinup girls. The guy grins at me as we hear a scurrying of feet. Other people hurry toward us from what seems like every direction. They’re covered in piercings, tattoos, splattered paint. They have feathers or beads in their hair; they have smiles on their lips.
They hug me.
I’m not really sure how to handle that. I’m really not sure how to handle liking it.
“So...” the guy who answered the door says after I’ve been hugged about eight thousand times. Everyone is staring at me eagerly. I’m used to that. I’m just not used to wanting to stare back.
“Where is she?” I ask. Remember. You’ve got a job to do. Botch it.
“Oh, sorry, of course. Through here,” a petite girl says, waving me forward.
The warehouse is a maze of rooms, studios, workshops. “What is this place?” I ask as we slide through a sculpture studio.
“It’s our house. And our workshop. And everything else.”
“A colony,” I say, remembering Beverly using the term. “Like an artists’ colony.”
“Yep,” the guy at the door says. “Something like that.”
“So...you guys make a living off your art, then? Like, you do this professionally?”
“Ah,” he says. “You don’t make a living from art. You make art from living.”
I want to punch him for that damn hippie phrase, but I find myself nodding instead.
“Here,” a girl says, stopping suddenly in front of me. She meets my eyes a long time, like she sees something there, then steps aside so I can see through the doorway of a bedroom.
And there is Elise Snow.
Dead people are never pretty—they’re made to look that way by undertakers, but really, once the life is gone, the pretty is gone, too. Elise Snow is no exception. She looks rocklike, her skin tone similar to the blank wall behind her. The wall seems odd, empty, compared to the rest of this place. I walk toward her; the others crowd into the doorway. I glance back at them—