Later

32

During my last test in math that year, I looked out the window and saw Kenneth Therriault standing on the basketball court. He did his grinning-and-beckoning thing. I looked back at my paper, then looked up again. Still there, and closer. He turned his head so I could get a good look at the purple-black crater, plus the bone-fangs sticking up all around it. I looked down at my paper again, and when I looked up the third time, he was gone. But I knew he’d be back. He wasn’t like the others. He was nothing like the others.

By the time Mr. Laghari told us to turn in our papers, I still hadn’t solved the last five problems. I got a D- on the test, and there was a note at the top: This is disappointing, Jamie. You must do better. What do I say at least once in every class? What he said was that if you fell behind in math, you could never catch up.

Math wasn’t so special that way, although Mr. Laghari might think so. It was true for most classes. As if to underline the point, I bricked a history test later that day. Not because Therriault was standing at the blackboard or anything, but because I couldn’t stop thinking he might be standing at the blackboard.

I got the idea he wanted me to do badly in my courses. You could laugh at that, but there’s another old saying that goes it’s not paranoid if it’s true. A few lousy tests weren’t going to stop me from passing everything, not that late in the year, and then it would be summer vacation, but what about next year, if he was still hanging around?

Also, what if he was getting stronger? I didn’t want to believe that, but just the fact that he was still there suggested it might be true. That it probably was true.

Telling somebody might help, and Mom was the logical choice, she’d believe me, but I didn’t want to scare her. She’d already been scared enough, when she thought the agency was going to go under and she wouldn’t be able to take care of me and her brother. That I’d helped her out of that pickle might make her blame herself for the one I was in now. That made no sense to me, but it might to her. Besides, she wanted to put the whole seeing-dead-folks stuff behind her. And here’s the thing: what could she do, even if I did tell her? Blame Liz for putting me with Therriault in the first place, but that was all.

I thought briefly of talking to Ms. Peterson, who was the school’s guidance counselor, but she’d assume I was having hallucinations, maybe a nervous breakdown. She’d tell my mother. I even thought of going to Liz, but what could Liz do? Pull out her gun and shoot him? Good luck there, since he was already dead. Besides, I was done with Liz, or so I thought. I was on my own, and that was a lonely, scary place to be.

My mother came to the swim meet where I swam like shit in every event. On the way home she gave me a hug and told me everyone had an off day and I’d do better next time. I almost blurted everything out right then, ending with my fear—which I now felt was reasonably justified—that Kenneth Therriault was trying to ruin my life for screwing up his last and biggest bomb. If we hadn’t been in a taxi, I really might have. Since we were, I just put my head on her shoulder as I had when I was small and thought my hand-turkey was the greatest work of art since the Mona Lisa. Tell you what, the worst part of growing up is how it shuts you up.