The Ghost and the Goth

8 Will

“Did you know about this?” My mother’s voice intruded on a dream in which a large animated eggplant named Bob teetered on the edge of a cliff with thoughts of suicide and Parmesan.

I woke slowly, without opening my eyes. My eyelids felt gummy and stuck to my eyeballs, my head throbbed worse than it had yesterday, and my back ached from sleeping for hours without moving. I could feel the sunshine beaming in through the open blinds, warmer and brighter than yesterday. It had to be morning again.

“William, I’m speaking to you. Wake up!” Her voice held an unusual edge.

I peeled my eyelids up and squinted at her. She stood at the foot of my now-lopsided bed, a fistful of papers in her hand. “What are you talking about?” I mumbled.

“This.” She stalked forward and held the papers, fanned out in her hand, in front of my face.

The top one appeared to be a letter to Dr. Miller about a book….

I sat up straighter, ignoring the various aches and pains. “He was writing a book about us? Where did you find this? Did he give this—”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “I found it yesterday under the couch when I was cleaning after that stunt you pulled.”

The cleaning part made sense. My mom always cleaned when she was upset. The year my dad died, she wore out three vacuum cleaners. As for the rest … “What are you talking about?”

She shuffled the papers together in her hands and gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, don’t try that on me. I’ve been your mother too long, and besides, your father used to pull the same tricks before you. Moving things around when I wasn’t looking and claiming to know nothing about it.”

Alona. I flopped my head back on the pillow. It had to be. She was the only one who’d been here yesterday, at least as far as I knew. “What trick did you find yesterday?” I asked cautiously.

She rolled her eyes. “Are there any others more obvious? Dr. Miller’s papers spread all over the room and that frowny face made from the folders and notebooks. He was quite frightened.” She stared down at the papers in her hands, her mouth tightening in displeasure. “A scare he richly deserved in my opinion.”

“Oh,” I said. “That trick.” Wow. It must have taken a huge amount of energy from her to move all of that around without me nearby. The dead can touch things in our realm briefly — hence all the ghost stories about pictures falling off walls, doors slamming, lights turning off or on — but only with intense concentration, and it really drains them.

My mom perched on the side of my bed, bracing her feet against the floor to keep from sliding off. “That was you, wasn’t it?” she asked hesitantly. “You found out about the book somehow and wanted to punish him? You called a friend to come in while we were upstairs. Joonie, maybe. The back door was unlocked the whole time, I checked.”

She sounded so hopeful, the way she had it all worked out without any ghosts or supernatural elements involved. My father’s words to me when I was six echoed in my head. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to understand, Will. It scares her. He’d drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, while we waited for my mother to join us in the car. She was crying in the bathroom. I’d just ruined a rare night out for us in a restaurant by announcing that Grandma Reilly said not to order the fish because it looked old. Grandma Reilly, my mother’s mother, had died six months earlier of a heart attack. It’s a curse, sport, and I’m sorry that I’ve passed it on to you. Do the best you can to live a normal life, and try not to let it hurt the ones you love. That’s all I can say.

Except my father had screwed up on that one. I didn’t know how my mother would have reacted to hearing that her husband spoke to the dead, but I was willing to bet that she would have preferred that to him being dead. Still, he was my dad, and he was gone, so I did my best to abide by what he wanted.

“Yeah,” I told my mother. “It was me.”

She exhaled loudly in relief. “I thought so. Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on? Why all this staging and drama?”

Good question. Alona could have just told me what she’d discovered. When I woke up from the drugs that I’d allowed Miller to administer even over her protests. Okay, fair enough. Maybe she had reason to question my potential for follow-through on something like this. That still didn’t explain her sudden compassion for someone else’s problems, which was the true mystery.

“I didn’t think you’d believe me if I didn’t have proof,” I said to my mother. A reasonable enough explanation, if not the truth.

She sighed. “You’ll put me in an early grave yet. Next time, just tell me.”

“Okay, okay.”

She stood up and started for my door.

“What are you going to do about Dr. Miller?”

She looked weary suddenly. “I don’t know. You’re not going back there. I guess I need to report him to someone, and get a recommendation for another doctor.” Except Miller had been the most affordable option out there and the only one with an immediate opening for a new client on a regular basis. Now, maybe we knew why that was.

What an asshole. I wished I could have seen his face when he got a load of Alona’s handiwork. That was actually a fairly clever move on her part for one so newly dead. I was beginning to suspect that she hid a fairly sizable intelligence beneath her pretty face and bitchy attitude. Granted, it was an intelligence directed mostly toward popularity contests, backstabbing, and self-promotion, but intelligence just the same. Her move against Miller, whether for my benefit or her own amusement, had given me the reprieve I needed. It would take a few weeks, maybe even a month, to line up another psychiatrist, barring any more major incidents like the one yesterday, and I had a plan, maybe, to handle those, if Alona would agree. I felt pretty sure I could come up with an incentive to make that happen.

I shoved back the covers and got out of bed, feeling better than I had since before my dad died.

My mother’s mouth fell open. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“School. You talked to Brewster so I could get back in, right?” I crossed the room to rifle through the laundry on the chair and the pieces that had spilled over onto the floor, thanks to Alona, searching for a clean T-shirt and boxers.

“William, you don’t have to prove anything—” she began gently.

“Mom, I’m fine. I can do this.” I did a quick sniff test under the arms of my favorite black T-shirt. It said in plain block letters across the front, there is no spoon. No one else got it, but it worked for me, reminding me that reality was always up for question.

“What about Marcie? Your music?” She frowned. “Brewster gave you an in-school suspension for the rest of this week.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I have a plan.” Technically, I had bribery, and a dead homecoming queen who wanted my help. Close enough.

I doubled back to kiss my startled mother on the cheek and then headed for the shower.

Alona Dare died during zero hour on the Henderson Street yellow centerline, just twenty feet or so from the edge of school property. Zero hour was notoriously easy to skip, particularly if you put in the effort to show up in the first place, as Alona had that day.

Rumors continued to fly about why she’d come to school only to leave again, in such a hurry that she didn’t bother to look both ways. Some people said she never looked where she was going, expecting everyone and everything to get out of her way. So, it wasn’t so much an accident as her arrogance that had done her in. I suspected those people were seeking to make sense of the world by turning her into a cautionary tale, the lesson being, Look both ways. And don’t be such a bitch.

Other people whispered about suicide, pointing to her boyfriend, Chris Zebrowski, who was already tangling tongues with Misty Evans, Alona’s best friend. A subset of this same group claimed to have witnessed a private showdown between Misty and Alona that left Alona running from the building.

Either way, the result was the same. Alona was dead, Chris and Misty were publicly hooking up an indecently short amount of time after Alona’s funeral, and the population of Groundsboro High had something to gossip and whisper about for at least another few weeks.

I pulled the Dodge over to the side of the road on Henderson, next to the tennis courts, flipped the hazard lights on, and waited. Alona hadn’t committed suicide, I knew that. The girl had enough arrogance and self-esteem to choke a horse. She had, however, died a violent and unnatural death, which probably meant she was still tied to the exact place of her death. In this case, the middle of Henderson Street. Even though the bloodstains had long been scrubbed away, something of Alona likely remained, calling her back here over and over again at the time of her death. As a bonus, I’d only have to wait a few minutes to see if I was right.

Cars en route to the high school went by, people staring out the windows at me as they passed. Whatever. By now, they’d probably heard about what happened yesterday, and they were probably staring as much for that as for me sitting here. Still, I rolled down my window and pulled my cell phone from my front pocket and held it in my hand to give me the air of authenticity. Waiting in my broken-down car for a tow, that’s me.

“Hey, Will Kill.”

I looked up automatically, responding to that stupid nickname someone in the first tier had tagged me with.

Ben Rogers hung his head out the open window of his Land Rover. “Classes are held inside the building, freak.”

I smiled tightly, my cheeks hurting with the effort. “Really? Thanks a lot.” Dickwad. For the millionth time, I wondered what Lily had found so fascinating about him and his kind.

Someone behind Rogers, waiting to turn into the school parking lot, laid on the horn.

Looking disgruntled at my lack of reaction, Ben pulled his head back in and accelerated abruptly, his tires screeching when he rounded the corner into the parking lot.

“God, I hate it when he does that.” Alona’s voice suddenly sounded next to my ear, and I jumped. “What does he think this is, The Dukes of Hazzard ? He is so not Johnny Knoxville.”

I turned to find her in my passenger seat. She stretched her arms over her head with a big yawn, seemingly unconcerned at her sudden and unexpected arrival.

“What are you doing in here?” I demanded. “You died out there.” I jerked my thumb back toward the road.

She lowered her arms and glared at me. “Thank you, Mr. Obvious. How should I know? Yesterday, whenever I disappeared, I kept waking up in your room. Like that wasn’t a pain in the ass.” She rolled her eyes. “I had to keep walking everywhere. Also? You snore.”

I gaped at her. “What are you talking about?”

She ignored me. “What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked with a frown. “I thought you’d be tugging at your chains in the crazy house by now.”

I held my breath and counted to five before responding. This was just who Alona was. She didn’t mean to be demeaning and … actually, yeah, she did. “You helped me, I came to say thanks,” I said through gritted teeth.

She frowned again. “You mean scaring off the chin-rubber?”

I raised my eyebrows, confused, until she furrowed her brow and nodded in mock thoughtfulness while her hand came up to support her chin, the top two fingers tapping just below her lower lip.

Startled by her cleverness once again, I shook my head with a reluctant smile. “Chin-rubber, yeah.”

She nodded. “He’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

I grimaced. “We found the papers about his book. You left those for us?”

“He’s skeevy.” She lifted a shoulder. “Figured you might want to know about it.”

“Thanks,” I said cautiously. So, she’d actually done me a favor? Maybe she wasn’t quite as bad as she seemed. Maybe.

She heaved a deep sigh. “Yeah, you’re welcome, I guess.” Her head drooping, she slumped down in her seat and stretched her long legs out in front of her.

I cleared my throat, trying to drag my eyes away from the sight. What can I say? I’m a leg man. “What’s the matter?”

“Aside from the obvious?” She threw her hands up in the air. “I don’t know. I thought I had it figured out yesterday.”

“Had what figured out?”

“The afterlife. What I’m supposed to do to … move on, find the light, whatever.” She waved her hands dramatically.

“And that is?” It didn’t bode well for my plan if she’d found her own way to fix her situation. I’d have no value to her then, and Alona Dare did not do favors. At least, I wouldn’t have thought so until today.

A horn honked and Alona automatically looked up, a smile starting to form and her hand lifting to wave … until she realized they couldn’t see her. The smile disappeared and her hand fell back to her lap. “This bites,” she muttered.

“What did you figure out?” I asked, reminding myself to be patient.

She turned toward me, tucking one leg underneath her. “Okay, so I thought about what you said and…” She stopped, frowning. “Aren’t you worried about what people will think, seeing you out here talking to yourself?”

“Actually, I—”

She held up a hand. “Wait, never mind. I mean, they already think you’re crazy. Talking to yourself might be one of the more normal things you’d do.”

My jaw tight, I held up the cell phone in my hand. “Speakerphone.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You have speakerphone on that old thing?”

“No, but they”—I gestured to the people in the cars waiting to turn at the stop sign—“don’t know that.” Cell phones with speakerphone or, even better, Bluetooth were the best invention yet for disguising conversations with people no one else could see. It became so normal to see someone seemingly talking to the air that half the time I suspected people didn’t even think to check for the phone. Plus, it saved me the effort of coming up with a less believable lie. Back in sixth grade, I told my mother I was rehearsing lines for a play when she caught me. My dad knew better, but my mom kept asking, for the better part of the year, when the first show was and could she buy tickets.

“Oh.” Alona thought about it for a second. “Pretty smart.”

I bit back a sarcastic reply. For the moment, I needed her, and I didn’t want to run her off just yet. “So what were you saying about figuring it all out?”

“Oh, yeah.” She promptly became more animated. “So, I thought about what you said, about resolving my issues and moving on to the spirit world.” She emphasized her chosen term and leveled a warning glance at me.

I held up my hands, protesting innocence. If she didn’t want to be called a ghost, fine. Even if that’s what she was.

“Except it didn’t work out very well. I tried communicating. You know sending signs of my presence, tipping things over …”

My mouth fell open. “You tried haunting people?”

“No, I tried communicating. It’s not my fault if they got scared. Besides, it was only a few people, and they totally deserved it,” she said defensively.

“When did you do this?” I demanded.

“Yesterday when you were in la-la land.”

I rubbed my forehead. The fact that she was still here was a miracle, then. For ghosts, nothing drains their energy like trying to cause harm. And when their energy dips low enough, they disappear … for good. “What exactly did you do?”

“What does it matter to you?” she shot back.

“Just tell me.” I’d have to figure out damage control. If she was going to be sucked back up permanently any second now, then my plan was history.

She picked at the edge of her thumbnail. “Among others, I may have visited a former friend’s house and knocked over a few things while she was making out with”—she grimaced in distaste—“her new boyfriend.”

“Chris and Misty.” I sighed. “They’re not your unfinished business.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, unless I completely misunderstood what I saw, you didn’t even know about them until yesterday. As in three days after you were already dead and stuck here.” I could see she didn’t want to believe me. “Whatever. Did you scare them?”

A cocky smile emerged on her face. “Yeah, a little.” She hesitated and then leaned closer to me, excitement making her whole body tense. “It was so cool. I only knocked down pictures with me in them, right? That way they’d know it was me.” She frowned. “But there weren’t that many pictures of me up anymore, so really I only got to push down one, and they didn’t even notice because the music was so loud—”

“Alona,” I tried to interrupt. Even as she spoke, the tips of her fingers were turning translucent.

“But then I decided to find her yearbook because—”

“Alona!”

“What?” She looked over at me, decidedly irked.

I grabbed her wrist and held her disappearing hand up in front of her face.

Her green eyes grew wide. “Oh, crap, not again. It’s getting worse. Yesterday whenever I tried to communicate, I kept being pulled away … to that other place.” She shuddered. “The one I can’t remember.”

“Do you think that might have been a clue?” I muttered, releasing her wrist before it dissolved, too. “Say something nice,” I commanded.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “In your dreams.”

“It doesn’t have to be about me,” I said with some exasperation. “It’s probably better if it isn’t, because it has to be genuine.”

“What are you talking about?” She stared at me.

I resisted the urge to shake her. “Look, I don’t have time to go into a whole lot of explanation on this. Your ankles are already gone.”

She glanced down at her footless legs and squeaked in horror.

“Say something nice,” I repeated, feeling a growing sense of panic. If she’d been “communicating” all day yesterday, this might be it, her final visit to Middleground.

“Why are you helping me?” she asked with a frown.

“Why do you care?” I snapped. “Just do it.”

“Will? Is everything okay?” Joonie’s voice came from my right.

I looked over to find Joonie’s beat-up black VW Bug, requisite skull and crossbones etched in the paint on the driver’s side door, stopped in the road, just ahead of the stop sign. Joonie had her window rolled down, all the better to stare at me more clearly.

“What happened, the Dodge finally give out on you?” Joonie asked, her painfully thin black brows drawing together over her bloodshot blue eyes. I always wondered, with her eyebrow piercings, if it hurt for her to make certain expressions.

“Sort of.”

“What does saying something nice have to do with anything?” Alona, now a torso only, demanded.

“Are you waiting for a ride?” Joonie asked, disbelief coloring her tone. No wonder, considering I probably could have crawled to the school on my hands and knees and still made it on time.

“Tow truck?” I offered as a possible explanation, though when she saw my car in the lot later, it might trigger a few questions. “Do it, unless you want to be gone forever,” I said to Alona, out of the side of my mouth.

“This is bullshit,” Alona muttered. “Fine.” She took a deep breath and said loudly, “I’m happy to be here.” She threw up her arms, now missing from below the elbow. Nothing happened.

I fake coughed. “Has to be genuine.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Joonie frowned at me. “You seem a little … disconnected.”

“Stop being my mom, J. I get more than enough of that at home,” I said gently.

She stiffened, her mouth opening to rip me a new one, no doubt, when she caught herself. “Sorry,” she said with a forced grin. “You bring out the mama bird in me, I guess.” Her expression clouded. “Especially when I have to drag your half-conscious ass out of school the day before.”

“I’m fine. I promise.” Or, at least, I might be fine, if I could get Alona to say one genuinely positive thing.

“It’s a warm spring day, and that makes me happy,” she shouted angrily.

Riiight.

“Listen.” Joonie leaned out of her window. “I went by the hospital yesterday. Saw Lily.”

Next to me, Alona stopped shouting random and fake compliments to everyone (“Your friend’s tongue-piercing is very shiny”) and everything (“The tennis courts look really … green today”) and looked at me. I felt her gaze, but I kept my focus on Joonie, trying to maintain a neutral expression. Alona didn’t need any more ammunition against me. “Yeah?”

“We need to talk.”

I shifted uncomfortably. Joonie held herself responsible for Lily’s accident, for the fight that had, in theory, driven Lily away. But Joonie blamed me, too, and I didn’t know why. I mean, she was right, of course, but she didn’t know about Lily’s call to me, the one I’d missed. I couldn’t tell her because I knew once she thought about it she’d realize that I would have been Lily’s second choice for help. She was always much closer to Joonie … until that stupid fight.

Last summer, a few weeks before school started, Joonie had shown up at my house without Lily for movie night. When I’d asked what happened, Joonie had waved it away and eventually, at my pressing, said they’d had a fight.

“About what?” I’d asked.

She’d looked away, staring out the window instead of at Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing it up on screen as the Terminator. “Boys.”

I still didn’t understand how a fight about boys could be that bad, particularly since neither of them had been dating anyone. But understanding girls, even ones I had as my friends, wasn’t exactly something I had a great deal of success with, so whatever.

The problem was, now, I didn’t know how to feel guiltier and more shamed than I already did, and I couldn’t apologize for something Joonie knew nothing about. In short, it was horrible and destroying whatever was left of our friendship.

“Yeah, okay,” I said finally, not sure what else to say.

Another car, Kevin Reynolds’s old Geo Metro, pulled up behind Joonie and honked.

Joonie responded by tossing him the finger. “If you’re not in Pederson’s class, I’m coming to find you,” Joonie warned as she shifted the Bug back into gear.

I shook my head. “I’ve got in-school suspension this week, apparently.”

She frowned.

“I’ll catch up with you, I promise. You better hurry up. Brewster will be looking for you to be late.”

The Bug stuttered and then revved, pulling up to the stop sign, where Joonie conscientiously came to a full stop, prompting another honk from Kevin.

“Your friends seem to care about you,” Alona said next to me, her voice holding more than a trace of wistfulness. “Like they’d really miss you if you were gone.”

I looked over at her, a bobbing head three feet above the passenger seat, like some kind of green-screen movie magic, and watched as the rest of her body took shape and filled in again. She really meant what she’d said, and while not exactly a cheery sentiment, she’d intended it as a compliment.

I flopped back in my seat, exhausted. “There. Was that so hard?”