Passing Strange by Daniel Waters Page A

rushed.
    “How was church?” I asked.
    “Long,” was his reply.
    I watched Katy play. Eventually she asked me if I wanted to help her bring her dolls to her room so we could play with them there.
    “Why don’t we stay here and play?” I said to my sister, knowing that Mom didn’t like me in her room. “It’s so pretty by the tree.” It was a reflexive suggestion on my part; I didn’t know that my mother was watching us from the doorway, wiping her hands dry with a dish towel.
    Mom smiled at me. I know this doesn’t seem like much, but it meant the world to me. I was so used to the tight expression she wore when she saw me with Kaitlyn, so used to her manufacturing some silly errand for me to do just to keep us apart. But this time she smiled and sat on the couch in the living room while Kaitlyn and I played dolls, looking at the newspaper, then a magazine, and then her library book. She was supervising but not policing, I guess.
    Kaitlyn had four dolls, two blond Barbies, a brunette, and another that had a few strands of crinkly blond hair attached to the taupe plastic dome of her head. This one was Señorita, and it was Katy’s favorite, even after the haircut. As usual, Katy asked me to be a Barbie named Anne, one of the blondes.
    “This dolly is a zombie dolly,” Kaitlyn said, handing me bikini-clad Anne.
    “She’s very pretty,” I told her.
    “She’s the dead one,” Katy said, “so she’s the prettiest.”
    “You think so, Katy? The other girls are pretty, too.” I tried not to look up at my Mom.
    “Anne is the prettiest one. But nobody likes her.”
    “Because she’s the prettiest?”
    “No,” Katy said, using a microscopic plastic brush on Señorita’s remaining strands. “Because she’s dead.”
    I glanced at my mother then, but she was pretending not to hear our conversation. She turned a page after wetting her index finger.
    “Anne is sad,” Katy continued, “but she’s still very, very pretty. And she likes to dance.”
    “Well,” I said, standing Anne up on the toes of her impossibly arched feet. “Maybe the other girls will try to like her if she’s really nice and friendly.”
    I twirled Anne slowly on the carpet, and then pushed one of her legs in the air and back down again, humming a slow but happy tune. Katy had Señorita and the other blonde join in the dance by hopping them up and down six inches off the floor, as though the carpet was a dolly trampoline.
    “They’re friends now,” Katy announced. “We need to decorate their house for them.”
    See how easy it could be for zombies and trads to get along? I looked at my mother. She turned another page. Quick reader.
    “When I grow up, I want to be a zombie, too,” Kaitlyn said.
    My mother either didn’t hear or was pretending that she hadn’t heard.
    “No, Kaitlyn,” I said. “You don’t want to be a zombie. It’s much more fun to be alive.”
    Isn’t it funny, the look a child can give you to let you know just how insane they think you are? Kaitlyn gave me one of those looks just then.
    “Someday you’ll be alive again, too, Caring,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. She started brushing zombie Barbie’s hair with the pixie-sized brush, and that was her final word on the subject.
    An hour or so later dinner was ready.
    “Would you like to sit at the table?” my mother asked me. Behind her I saw my father nearly drop his glass of wine.
    “I’d love to,” I said, and I sat with them, watching them eat.
    Katy started yawning around seven thirty, and my father picked her up to take her to bed, but not before she wriggled out of his arms to plant a kiss on my cheek. She Godzilla-stomped her way to my mother and kissed her, too. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see my mother turn away from Katy’s kisses, as though the zombie virus could be passed by kissing, but she didn’t. Katy gave her a big wet one on her cheek, and Mom responded with a flurry of little pecks and a smooch on the lips that