Tiger Lily

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Tiger Lily

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tiger Lily

  Wende Dikec

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, places, or events is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case the author has not received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Tiger Lily

  Copyright © 2016 Wende Dikec

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: (ebook) 978-1-939590-59-6

  Inkspell Publishing

  5764 Woodbine Ave.

  Pinckney, MI 48169

  Edited By Vicky Burkholder

  Cover art By Najla Qamber

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The copying, scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For my precious boys;

  Timur, Devin, and Danyal.

  I’ll love you until the day after forever.

  “If we do not know life, how can we know death?”

  Confucius, 551-479 BC

  Chapter One

  I died because of a bad manicure. It wasn’t a nasty fungal infection from the manicurist using dirty equipment, or a cut that allowed deadly bacteria to creep under my skin and rot me from the inside out. I died because on impulse I let Mr. Wan of Wan Fine Lady Nail Salon paint my nails a color called Pretty and Pink.

  With my red hair and pale skin, pink is tricky, but I trusted Mr. Wan. When he told me, “New color, big discount for you, Lily Madison,” I didn’t realize he actually meant, “Bad color, nobody else wants it.”

  I’ve never been a risk taker. My idea of living on the edge was not having an extra bottle of hand sanitizer in my purse. I knew the pink would be a mistake, but I ignored my inner voice. I guess the smell of acetone and the hum of the nail dryers had lulled me into such a relaxed state that I didn’t realize how awful the color actually looked until I drove home in the BMW my parents had given me for my sixteenth birthday.

  Pretty and Pink was false advertising, but as I learned long ago in my ninth grade science fair project, neither the government nor the FDA regulates the names of nail polish colors. I didn’t have a case, but I felt extremely upset.

  I didn’t see the ice cream truck stopped in the middle of the road. I was staring at my nails, wishing I’d gone with my first choice, Princesses Rule!, a frosty pale pink that would have enhanced my natural skin tone. I glanced up just in time to narrowly avoid hitting the truck and several small children caught in a snow-cone-induced feeding frenzy.

  It’s funny how accidents happen in slow motion. I remember the shocked faces of the people on the street as I swerved and flew over a small embankment. Someone screamed, and it took me a full second to realize the high-pitched wail came from my own mouth. I’d started screaming the minute I’d steered away from the ice cream truck, screamed some more as my car became an airborne missile, and continued screaming until it landed in the deep, murky waters of Lake Eugene.

  I tried to open my door, but it refused to budge. My windows wouldn’t roll down either. I pressed the buttons anyway, even the one on the dashboard to turn on the radio, but none of them worked except my hazard lights. I didn’t know I had hazard lights, although I’d read all about them in my driver’s ed class. They blinked on and off, illuminating the darkness around me with an eerie, red, pulsating beacon.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and searched for something to break a window with, but couldn’t find anything. I swung my purse at it, pounded it with the heel of my shoe, and even tried stabbing it with my nail file. I reached for my phone to call for help, but it was too late.

  As the car filled with water and I gasped for air, the last thing I saw was that awful color on my nails as I scratched and clawed at the window until my fingers bled and everything turned black. As I died, I thought about my parents, and my friends, and all the things I would never get to do, and the fact that Mr. Wan had just lost his very best customer due to his own negligence. I hoped he would be sorry. Thinking about how bad he’d feel gave me just a little peace before I slipped away into darkness.

  “A fall into a ditch makes you wiser.”

  Chinese proverb

  Chapter Two

  Dying is highly overrated. I didn’t see a light or a tunnel or God or anything. I just felt at peace, like I floated on an inflatable raft in our pool on a perfect summer day with my eyes closed, bobbing gently in the water. I wasn’t worried about school, or my parents, or the possibility of UV rays damaging my skin and giving me premature wrinkles. In fact, I had no worries about anything, an extremely pleasant change for me.

  That lasted three minutes and thirty-two seconds, exactly how long it took for a stranger to yank me out of my car and resuscitate me. I discovered very quickly that dying is far more pleasant than coming back to life. First of all, I threw up. A lot. And everything on my body ached. My throat burned. My lungs were sore. My chest hurt, probably from the pounding it took when someone pumped all the water out of my lungs and restarted my heart. I cracked open my eyes open long enough to see a wet t-shirt and mussed blond hair before I passed out.

  I woke up later in the hospital, plugged into a bunch of machines and feeling awful, but dry, safe, and alive. My parents hovered over my bed, weeping as they clung to my hands. I wanted to tell them to stop, but my mouth didn’t work. I had a tube running down my throat and another stuck in my nose. I attempted to give them my best and most reassuring smile, but ended up drooling. My parents didn’t handle it well. They cried even harder.

  I rolled my eyes in frustration, and saw something on the ceiling, just above my head. A black, fuzzy blob. I watched in confusion as it hovered there for a few moments before slowly sliding across the room. I raised my hand to point at it, but my parents didn’t understand, and there was no way to explain it to them when the only noises I could make sounded like the gorilla we’d seen at the zoo last summer.

  The blob came to rest at the foot of my bed, and I realized we weren’t alone in my room. A boy sat there, cozy as could be, with his arms folded across his chest. He had dark hair that fell across his forehead, brown eyes, and black blob bouncing merrily just above his head. I didn’t recognize him. I would have remembered meeting someone that hot, especially someone dressed in black from head to toe and looking like trouble. Big trouble. The kind of trouble nice little redheaded girls from the suburbs stayed away from if they possessed any common sense at all. He had a smirk on his face as he watched us, like we were some kind of entertaining sideshow.

  “Who are you?” The words sounded garbled as they escaped from my lips, but he seemed to understand. He raised one dark eye
brow in surprise.

  “You can see me?” he asked, his voice deep and husky. I nodded, trying to give him my best “duh” look. Hard to do with tubes coming out of my orifices.

  Around my age and good looking in a bad-boy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks sort of way, he caused me to feel a little hot and bothered, and not just because he’d made himself at home in the middle of my hospital room. He smoldered with the kind of sexy I’d only seen in movies, and in the “Hunk of the Month” calendar I kept hidden in my desk drawer in my room. There was something strange about him, too, besides his obvious appeal. He looked oddly fuzzy around the edges, like a blurry photo taken when someone moves at just the wrong moment. Even as I squinted at him and tried really hard to focus, he never quite solidified, and the effort it took exhausted me.

  It must be the drugs, I thought as I drifted off to sleep. A nice and very comforting idea, but completely wrong.

  I woke up the next morning to bright sunshine streaming through my window, my parents sleeping awkwardly in cots set up next to my bed, and more blobs floating near my head. Sexy Shadow Guy was nowhere to be seen.

  I laid there, staring at the dark orbs, willing them to disappear, but they didn’t. As I sat up slowly, every muscle in my body aching, the blobs began to vibrate with excitement. They’d been waiting for me to wake up.

  “What the heck?” The tubes were gone, and although my voice sounded scratchy and weird, it jerked my mom out of a deep sleep.

  “Lily-bean?”

  My mother was not a low maintenance type of person. A great deal of time and effort went into being Iris Madison, but right now, she existed in a state of complete disarray. Her clothes were wrinkled, her hair a total wreck, and she looked like she’d aged ten years in one day. I knew it would require weeks at a spa for her to get back to normal. I understood the extent of her distress when she pulled me into her arms and sobbed on my shoulder. She’d slept in her favorite pink Chanel suit and had put the skirt on backward.

  My father didn’t look much better. In spite of the tan he’d acquired through his daily golfing sessions, he seemed pale. They’d thought they’d lost me yesterday. Even I’d thought I’d lost me yesterday. My father wrapped both of us into a giant bear hug. Sweet but slightly claustrophobic.

  “It’s a little hard to breathe with both of you hugging me like this.”

  They moved away just a bit, but my mom wouldn’t let go of my hand, and my dad kept patting my head. They couldn’t seem to stop touching me.

  “Awkward,” I muttered under my breath, and finally they both backed off.

  Flowers and several bouquets of balloons filled my room. Most of them said “Get Well Soon,” except for the one from Mr. Wan. It said “Merry Christmas.” I knew it was from him because no one else would have sent me a Christmas balloon in March. That cheapo had gotten me a balloon from the discount bin.

  I took a deep, cleansing, calming breath, and looked back up at the ceiling. The blobs still hung out there, and another one had joined the party.

  My father seethed, but not about the blobs. “That stupid car. We should have gone with the Audi. They have a better safety rating.”

  “No, George, it was that ice cream truck parked right in the middle of the street,” said my mother.

  I shook my head. Not a pleasant sensation. Everything swished back and forth inside my skull. “No. It was because of Pretty and Pink. I got distracted.”

  I tried to show them the nail color. Most of it had chipped off and my hands looked bruised and swollen. My mom started crying again as soon as she saw my fingers. My dad looked like he wanted to hit something, or maybe sue someone. Probably the latter, since he was a lawyer. I suddenly felt a little nervous for Mr. Wan, the ice cream man, and all the fine people at BMW.

  “Who was that boy who came to visit last night?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  My mother frowned. “No one was here except for us, sweetie.”

  My head ached so much I couldn’t think straight. Maybe I hadn’t seen that boy at all. Maybe I’d just been dreaming. A black blob swirled and swooped over my bed, and another circled around the light on the ceiling.

  “What are those things?” I raised a shaky hand and pointed at them. My parents looked at where I pointed, confusion written all over their tired and worried faces.

  “What are you talking about, darling?” asked my mother.

  “Those fat, dancing blobs on the ceiling. What are they?”

  My parents stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, their bodies very still. I could feel the tension in the room increase about ten notches.

  “I should get Dr. Carter,” said my father softly. My mom nodded and took my hand again, her face as white as my hospital sheet.

  Dr. Carter, a very nice old man with bushy eyebrows and a bald spot, thought I’d gone nuts. He didn’t say that in so many words, but I understood. Once he had every possible part of my brain scanned and saw nothing physically wrong with me, he concluded I might be crackers.

  I hadn’t seen Shadow Guy again, but I saw the floating black shapes everywhere. They followed me down the hall to the CAT scan. They sat next to me as I waited for a blood test. The original group had doubled, and then tripled in size. I had nearly twenty blobs sliding across my ceiling and dancing around my room by the time I was done with all the testing.

  I knew I wasn’t crazy, so I decided lying was the best policy. I wanted to go home, and there was no way Dr. Carter would let me go anywhere if I still saw a bunch of black blobs.

  “I think I’m fine now, Dr. Carter,” I said as a big, furry mass landed on the shiny baldness of his head and began bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. “I’m not seeing those black spots anymore.”

  My parents heaved a sigh of relief. The blob on Dr. Carter’s head slid down to his shoulders and wrapped itself around his neck like a scarf. I tried very hard not to stare at it.

  “I’m so glad to hear that, Miss Madison.” He looked over to my parents. “Lily suffered from oxygen deprivation. It’s possible that she had a residual optical issue caused by the trauma she endured. If it has resolved, I’d say it’s safe for her to go home.”

  I smiled at him in relief. A little optical issue and oxygen deprivation might explain everything, even the strange Shadow Guy. No need to mention him or the blobs again. If I just ignored them, eventually they’d all go away and leave me alone.

  The blob that had been around Dr. Carter’s neck took a flying leap into his shirt. It must have wiggled and twisted all the way down his body because a few seconds later it shot out the bottom of his pants and over his shoe.

  Ignore it, ignore it, I thought to myself as it flew up to the ceiling and danced around happily before zooming out the window and coming back in through the wall.

  I plastered a giant, fake smile on my face. My cheeks began to hurt, but I feared Dr. Carter would know I lied through my teeth if I didn’t keep it up. Fortunately, he didn’t suspect anything. He patted my arm gently.

  “You’re a very lucky young lady.”

  “I know.”

  I hated to lie about the blobs. I hated to lie about anything, but I had no choice. My parents had been through enough. They didn’t need to know I still saw things floating around my room.

  Dr. Carter gave me a warm smile, his blue eyes twinkling. “There’s someone outside who’d like to see you.”

  I’d been secretly hoping Shadow Guy would show up again. When Dr. Carter opened the door, however, a completely different boy walked into the room. With his curling blond hair and blue eyes, he could have been a male model, maybe even for Abercrombie. He carried a bouquet of yellow roses, my favorite flower in the whole world. I grinned up at him like an idiot.

  “Josh Parker wanted to stop by and check on you,” said Dr. Carter.

  My mother gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. My father gave Josh a firm handshake that morphed into a group hug and included my mother. A giant blob flew around th
em, dancing happily up and down my mother’s back. My parents weren’t normally huggers.

  Dr. Carter explained, “Josh pulled you out of that lake. He saved your life.”

  Josh, the golden god and apparent hero, seemed flustered by the attention. He smiled and shrugged as he handed me the flowers, his nervousness making him even more adorable. I wished I could have met him under better circumstances. The first time I’d been dead, and now I looked like a total mess.

  “Thanks.” I stuck my face in the roses to hide my embarrassment. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I felt my cheeks get hot and knew they definitely clashed with my red hair.

  Josh, so beautiful it almost hurt to look at him, ran a hand through his perfect curls. I doubted he’d ever had a bad hair day. I tucked my own hair behind my ears, feeling like a total mess, especially next to Josh’s ultimate perfectness.

  “It’s a good thing you kept your head and turned on your hazard lights. If you hadn’t, I might not have found you in time. I’m really glad you’re going to be okay.”

  I didn’t correct him about the hazard lights or about keeping my head. We exchanged numbers, although my phone currently rested at the bottom of Lake Eugene. My parents had probably already ordered me a new one, and Josh’s promise to text me soon made me feel even better than the drugs in my IV drip.

  The blobs slid onto my bed, and covered me like a giant, creepy, blanket. I tried to reach for one, to see what it felt like, but my hand went right through it. Fortunately, no one noticed my attempt to pet the black spots that floated in front of me, and I intended to keep it that way.

  “Friendship is one mind in two bodies.”

  Mencius, 385-302 BC

  Chapter Three

  Dying and coming back to life proved to be a novelty at Lakeside High, and I got lots of attention from the other students. I’ve always been popular, but this was completely different. People stared at me in awe now and not just because of my fashion sense and excellent eye for color.

  “Do you remember getting pulled out of the water?” asked my friend, Jessica.