She is silent for a while, and I’m about to show myself when she suddenly laughs, closing her eyes and shaking her head. ‘I actually miss that stupid… I miss R ! I know that’s crazy, but is it really that crazy? Just because he’s… whatever he is? I mean, isn’t “zombie” just a silly name we came up with for a state of being we don’t understand? What’s in a name, right? If we were… If there was some kind of…’ She trails off, then stops and raises a mini-cassette recorder to eye level, glaring at it. ‘Fuck this thing,’ she mumbles to herself. ‘Tape journaling… not for me.’ She fast-pitches it off the balcony. It bounces off a supply crate and lands at my feet. I pick it up, tuck it into my shirt pocket and press my hand against it, feeling its corners dig into my chest. If I ever return to my 747, this memento will go in the stack closest to where I sleep.

Julie hops onto the balcony railing and sits with her back to me, scribbling in her battered old Moleskine.

Journal or poetry?

Both, silly .

Am I in it?

I step out from the shadows. ‘Julie,’ I whisper.

She doesn’t startle. She turns slowly, and a smile melts across her face like a slow spring thaw. ‘Oh… my God,’ she half giggles, then hops off the railing and spins around to face me. ‘R! You’re here ! Oh my God !’

I grin. ‘Hello.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses, trying to keep her voice down.

I shrug, deciding that this gesture, while easy to abuse, does have its place. It may even be vital vocabulary in a world as unspeakable as ours.

‘Came to… see you.’

‘But I had to go home, remember? You were supposed to say goodbye.’

‘Don’t know why you… say goodbye. I say… hello.’

Her lip quivers between reactions, but she ends up with a reluctant smile. ‘God, you’re a cheeseball. But seriously, R—’

‘Jules!’ a voice calls from inside the house. ‘Come here, I wanna show you something.’

‘One sec, Nora,’ Julie calls back. She looks down at me. ‘This is crazy, okay? You’re going to get killed. It doesn’t matter how changed you are, the people in charge here won’t care, they won’t listen, they’ll just shoot you. Do you understand?’

I nod. ‘Yes.’

I start climbing up the drainpipe.

‘Jesus, R! Are you listening to me?’

I get about three feet off the ground before I realise that although I’m now capable of running, speaking and maybe falling in love, climbing is still down the road for me. I lose my grip on the pipe and fall flat on my back. Julie covers her mouth, but some laughter slips through.

‘Hey, Cabernet!’ Nora calls again. ‘What’s going on? Are you talking to somebody?’

‘Hang on , okay? I’m just doing a tape journal.’

I stand up and dust myself off. I look up at Julie. Her brows are tight and she bites her lip. ‘R…’ she says miserably. ‘You can’t…’

The balcony door swings open and Nora appears, her curls just as thick and wild as they were in my visions, all those years ago. I’ve never seen her standing, and she’s surprisingly tall, at least half a foot above Julie, long brown legs bare under a camouflage skirt. I had assumed she and Julie were classmates, but now I realise Nora is a few years older, maybe in her mid-twenties.

‘What are you—’ she starts, then she sees me, and her eyebrows go up. ‘Oh my holy Lord. Is that him ?’

Julie sighs. ‘Nora, this is R. R… Nora.’

Nora stares at me like I’m Sasquatch, the Yeti, maybe a unicorn. ‘Um… nice to meet you… R .’

‘Likewise,’ I reply, and Nora slaps a hand over her mouth to stifle a delighted squeak, looks at Julie, then back at me.

‘What should we do?’ Julie asks Nora, trying to ignore her giddiness. ‘He just showed up. I’m trying to tell him he’s going to get killed.’

‘Well, he needs to get up here, first of all,’ Nora says, still staring at me.

‘Into the house? Are you stupid?’

‘Come on, your dad’s not back for another two days. Safer for him in the house than on the street.’

Julie thinks for a minute. ‘Okay. Hold on, R, I’ll come down.’

I go around to the front of the house and stand at the door, waiting nervously in my dress shirt and tie. She opens it, grinning shyly. Prom night at the end of the world.

‘Hi, Julie,’ I say, as if none of the previous conversation happened.

She hesitates, then steps forward and hugs me. ‘I actually missed you,’ she says into my shirt.

‘I… heard that.’

She pulls back to look at me, and something wild glints in her eyes. ‘Hey, R,’ she says. ‘If I kissed you, would I get… you know… converted?’

My thoughts skip like a record in an earthquake. As far as I know, only a bite, a violent transfer of blood and essences, has the power to make the Living join the Dead before actually dying. To expedite the inevitable. But then again, I’m fairly sure Julie’s question has never, ever been asked before.

‘Don’t… think so,’ I say, ‘but—’

A spotlight flashes at the end of the street. The sound of two guards barking commands breaks the night quiet.

‘Shit, the patrol,’ Julie whispers, and yanks me inside the house. ‘We should get the lights out, it’s after curfew. Come on.’

She runs up the stairs and I follow her, relief and disappointment mixing in my chest like unstable chemicals.

Julie’s home feels eerily unoccupied. In the kitchen, the den, the short halls and steep staircases, the walls are white and unadorned. The few pieces of furniture are plastic, and rows of fluorescent lights glare down on stainproof beige carpets. It feels like the vacated office of a bankrupt company, empty echoing rooms and the lingering scent of desperation.

Julie turns lights off as she goes, darkening the house until we reach her bedroom. She switches off the overhead bulb and flicks on a Tiffany lamp by her bed. I step inside and turn in slow circles, greedily absorbing Julie’s private world.

If her mind were a room, it would look like this.

Each wall is a different colour. One red, one white, one yellow, one black, and a sky-blue ceiling strung with toy airplanes. Each wall seems designated for a theme. The red is nearly covered with movie ticket stubs and concert posters, all browned and faded with age. The white is crowded with paintings, starting near the floor with a row of amateur acrylics and leading up to three stunning oil canvases: a sleeping girl about to be devoured by tigers, a nightmarish Christ on a geometric cross, and a surreal landscape draped with melting clocks.

‘Recognise those?’ Julie says with a grin she can barely contain. ‘Salvador Dalí. Originals, of course.’

Nora comes in from the balcony, sees me with my face inches from the canvases, and laughs. ‘Nice decor, right? Me and Perry wanted to get Julie the Mona Lisa for her birthday because it reminded us of that little smirk she’s always — there! Right there! — but, yeah, it’s a long way to Paris on foot. We make do with the local exhibitions.’

‘Nora has a whole wall of Picassos in her room,’ Julie adds. ‘We’d be legendary art thieves if anyone still cared.’

I crouch down to get a closer look at the bottom row of acrylics.

‘Those are Julie’s,’ Nora says. ‘Aren’t they great?’

Julie averts her eyes in disgust. ‘Nora made me put those up.’

I study them intently, searching for Julie’s secrets in their clumsy brushstrokes. Two are just bright colours and thick, tortured texture. The third is a crude portrait of a blonde woman. I glance over at the black wall, which bears only one ornament: a thumb-tacked Polaroid of what must be the same woman. Julie plus twenty hard years.

Julie follows my gaze and she and Nora exchange a glance. ‘That’s my mom,’ Julie says. ‘She left when I was twelve.’ She clears her throat and looks out the window.

I turn to the yellow wall, which is notably unadorned. I point at it and raise my eyebrows.