The Ghost and the Goth

4 Will

All I had to do was make it through the day. Not easy, but possible. I’d survived for years before Dr. Miller had taught me the music trick, something he’d found helped his real schizophrenic patients. Once I got home this afternoon, I’d casually mention that Brewster took away my medically authorized privileges for being under a minute late. The tardy thing would be the only excuse Brewster could offer without adding credence to my “wild stories.” For that, my mom would be on the phone with the school in a flash. It was all about looking like I didn’t need it. Ridiculous, but I knew it would work.

Trouble was, that meant about six hours of torture stood between me and my goal, and Grandpa Brewster wasn’t helping.

“I always knew there was something different about you.” He followed me out of the office, sounding overjoyed. They all do, at first. “I need you to do something for me.”

I tucked my head down and started walking toward my Brit lit class, ignoring him.

“Now, don’t go and do that, kid.” He chased after me. “We both know you can hear me. I just need you to deliver a couple of messages.”

That’s how it starts. Just messages. It sounds simple enough, but wait.

“First, my son, he lives in Florida. I need you to go there and talk to him for me. I want him to know that I’m sorry for all the things I did and said to him…. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”

Uh-huh. See? Now not only am I flying out of state, I’m also supposed to talk to a man I’ve never met to explain to him that his dead father wants forgiveness. When I was younger, I used to try to help them, all the ones that talked to me. Obviously, flying out of state to deliver a message wasn’t possible then, either, but I did what I could. It only made things worse, though. The people who didn’t believe me inevitably ended up screaming at me or calling my mom, or worse yet, the cops. The people who did believe would have kept me there for days, crying and pleading with me to stay as a stand-in for their loved one. As a kid, that freaked me out more than the people who shouted at me. No thanks.

“Then, I need you to tell him not to give up on Sonny. I know you and Sonny don’t get along real good, but you have to talk to him, too. Tell him it’s not too late. He doesn’t have to screw it up the way I did.”

Me talk to Sonny, as in Principal Brewster, voluntarily? I don’t think so. I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulders and turned down the hallway to Mrs. Pederson’s class. Maybe she’d have a movie today — something I wouldn’t have to concentrate on while trying to tune out good old Grandpa whispering in my ear.

“It’s important,” Grandpa Brewster insisted. “Please. You’re the only one I’ve found who can do this.”

My resolve wavered a bit. The nice ones were always harder to ignore. I felt bad for them, stuck in that in-between place, watching the world and the consequences of their mistakes but unable to do anything to fix them. I couldn’t get involved, though. They would land me in a mental ward yet, if I let them.

Pulling Mrs. Piaget’s note from my pocket, I pushed open the door to Mrs. Pederson’s classroom, interrupting her midlecture. Great. I couldn’t catch a break today.

I handed her my pass and slipped toward the back of the classroom to my seat. Joonie, in the seat in front of me, turned her head slightly back toward me, pretending to examine the broken and chipped black polish on her fingernails. “Everything okay?” she muttered. Up close, I could see the dark smudgy makeup smeared under her eyes, and the safety pins in her lower lip flashed as she spoke. Today she was dressed in her standard uniform of a military surplus jacket, black T-shirt, a raggedy looking plaid skirt, torn stockings, and black Chucks. In addition to the safety pins, she also wore a variety of earrings in the outer shell of her ear, all the way from the bottom of the lobe up to where her ear touched her scalp. One of those earrings was a small silver hoop that matched the three in my left ear in virtually the same position — we got them at the same time. We’d been friends since freshman year — back when her name was April, her hair was blond, and she was the better student — so she knew the score with Brewster even if she didn’t know why.

I kept my gaze pointed down at my backpack while I pulled out the Brit lit textbook and my folder. We’d learned, the hard way, that Mrs. Pederson wasn’t as likely to catch you talking in class if she didn’t see you looking at each other. “Same old,” I said.

That wasn’t exactly true. Grandpa Brewster stood about a foot and a half off my right elbow, glowering at me, and the other dead in the room were taking notice.

In every room full of humans, you have about half as many dead. Some are associated with particular people, some are associated with a particular place, and some are just wanderers. In Brit lit, there were only about seven or eight on a regular basis. Most of them stayed tucked back out of the way — they hated the sensation of being walked through — and they didn’t usually cause a ruckus. That would change, rather quickly, though, if they found out someone could hear and see them.

In class today, we had a few grandfathers and grandmothers — I could only tell because of the clothing styles: out-of-date military uniforms, June Cleaver wide-and-puffy skirts with stiletto heels, and really short and wide ties on the men wearing suits. When people die naturally — of old age or whatever — and their energy stays here, that energy usually appears in the form of how the people thought of themselves. No one ever thinks of themselves as old, so they usually revert back to their early twenties, and the clothing changes, too.

At the front of the room, you had Liesel Marks, Mrs. Pederson’s high school best friend, and Liesel’s boyfriend, Eric. I hadn’t yet managed to catch Eric’s last name. Liesel did most of the talking. I wasn’t even quite sure why Eric was still hanging around. He seemed bored most of the time. Liesel and Eric had died in a car accident sometime in the late seventies while on their way home from the prom, hence her long polka-dot dress and his blue tuxedo. The ghosts of people who’d died violently and/or unexpectedly were essentially stuck in their moment of death.

From what I’d gathered during Liesel’s incessant rambling, Liesel had ditched plans with Claire, Mrs. Pederson, to go to the prom with Eric, a boy Claire had liked herself. Now, she was convinced that those two things, along with the sex she’d had with him in the backseat, had damned her to this in-between place until Claire forgave her.

Jackson Montgomery, however, was tied to the school rather than any particular person. He’d died unexpectedly on the basketball court here at school in the early eighties, thanks to one of those hidden heart defects you sometimes hear about on the news. He’d been a star forward, leading the team to the state finals when he fell to the floor in the middle of the deciding game. No defibrillators on-site back in those days. He’d died and the team lost, but Jackson, or Jay, didn’t seem to be aware of either of those things. Today, like every other day, he occupied an empty desk, his feet tapping against the floor in his eagerness to be called to the gym for the pep rally before that last game.

And, of course, we had Grandpa Brewster. “You can’t ignore me forever. I saw what you can do with my own eyes,” he said far too loudly.

I did my best not to wince. Damn Brewster for taking away Marcie.

One of the young-looking grandfathers fired a glare at Grandpa. “Hey, buddy, you mind keeping it down over there? My granddaughter’s trying to learn here.”

“She can’t hear me. Hellooooo?” Grandpa B. cupped his hands and shouted at the girl — Jennifer Meyer, one of Alona Dare’s cheerleading cronies, as a matter of fact. Of course, she didn’t even blink. If anything, she looked like she was about to doze off.

“Stop that,” Jennifer’s grandfather ordered. He was wearing a suit and one of those goofy-looking short ties — he looked like a mobster out of an old movie.

Grandpa B.ignored him and turned back to face me. “Do you see what I have to put up with, kid? Just do this one favor for me, and I can leave this way station to hell.” He glared over his shoulder at Jennifer’s grandfather, who, surprisingly, responded by flipping him the bird.

It sounded good, easy even, but experience had taught me otherwise. Half the time, the dead didn’t even know why they were still hanging around. Just because he was eager to deliver messages to his son and grandson was no guarantee that he’d be free afterward. Actually, it might be the opposite. The few times I’d witnessed people “moving on,” it had only been after doing or admitting something they’d put off as long as possible. Even in death, people were in denial.

I stared resolutely toward the front of the room, trying to concentrate on Mrs. Pederson.

“Some say that Shakespeare didn’t write all of these plays,” she droned on.

“You want to go visit Lil this afternoon?” Joonie whispered from the corner of her mouth.

“It’s only Thursday,” I said without thinking. For the last eight months, we’d gone to the hospital on Friday — the only day my mom worked the afternoon shift at the diner and therefore wouldn’t freak when I didn’t come home right away.

Joonie twisted around in her seat, her bright blue eyes flashing with anger. “You have a problem with going more than once a week?”

“Don’t take none of that attitude from her,” Grandpa advised over my shoulder.

I caught myself shaking my head at him and forced myself to stop. “Of course not,” I told Joonie, taken aback a little by her sudden fury. “It’s just—”

“… Isn’t that right, Ms. Travis?” Mrs. Pederson came to stand at the head of our aisle, glaring down at us.

“Yeah,” Joonie answered sullenly.

“Yes, what?” Mrs. Pederson taunted.

“Romeo and Juliet was written as a tragedy, not a romance as most people think.” Joonie had an amazing ability to parrot back what she’d heard, even if her attention was occupied elsewhere. My life would have been so much easier if I had that gift.

A few people snickered.

Mrs. Pederson’s mouth pursed, and she twirled her finger in the air — the sign most of us would associate with saying “big deal” in a sarcastic manner. Only in here it meant “turn around.”

Once, Joonie would have rolled her eyes at me and we would have laughed about it, but now she just turned away from me in disgust and flopped back in her seat.

I waited until Mrs. Pederson moved on, her eyes focused on some other part of the room. “Joon,” I whispered.

She ignored me, fumbling to pull her battered book bag onto her lap.

“Come on …” I pleaded.

She ducked her head and dug around in her bag, resolutely pretending I didn’t exist.

“She won’t talk to you, but I will,” Grandpa B. offered.

Great. At the rate things were going with the few friends I had left, basically Joonie, I might have to take him up on that.

Before Joonie had morphed into the mass of black clothes and bad attitude she was currently, she’d been the weird girl who refused to shower after gym class, whose clothes didn’t quite match, and whose hair stuck up in odd places, like she’d never bothered to brush it before leaving the house in the morning. She had two older sisters — one a doctor and one with a full scholarship to some snooty women’s college on the East Coast — who could do no wrong. Joonie never measured up, and her father, an ultraconservative Baptist minister in town, always made that very clear.

Back then, I’d been pretty much the same guy I was now — the weirdo often caught muttering to himself or flopping on the floor in some kind of bizarre seizure. Then, at the end of my freshman year, when my dad … did what he did, that only made things worse, in every way imaginable.

In the beginning, Joonie and I had eaten together, walked to class, and partnered on projects together, because that meant we weren’t alone. Now we were friends. We still didn’t have that much in common, but our friendship worked. At least, it used to.

That changed when Lily moved here. Lily Turner had lived in some little town in southern Indiana until halfway through her sophomore year when her mom got a job transfer here. She’s a line manager for one of the Caterpillar manufacturing facilities.

Joonie’d found Lily looking lost and close to tears in the cafeteria on her first day and ventured a wary “Hi.”

Lily later told us that her school at home had consisted of about a hundred kids total. Her accent was heavy, and her clothes were all wrong. She wore church clothes every day — a long patterned skirt and a high-necked shirt or sweater.

The Jesus Club kids wouldn’t take her because Joonie, clearly a devil worshipper by the way she dressed, had talked to her. The braniacs were angry with her because she was smart enough that her arrival might screw up the class rankings. She didn’t play an instrument, nor did she have an unnatural love for math or science. The first-tier elite didn’t even know she existed. In short, she didn’t belong anywhere. So Joonie had taken her in.

Something about Lily made everyone, especially Joonie, light up. She was just so … uncalculating, so refreshing in her honesty. She was fascinated by our choice to rebel against the mainstream, not really understanding, I don’t think, that it wasn’t so much a choice as a process of elimination. She’d never seen anyone with lip piercings before except on television. She laughed, and blushed, easily.

Within weeks, she’d revealed her own dirty secret. She was addicted to soap operas and celebrity dramas. People was her book of choice … as long as no one saw her reading it. With the size of her old school and having known almost all the kids there from birth, she’d never experienced anything as convoluted and complex as our social structure. For her, the first-tier kids held an allure equivalent to movie stars with whom she could rub elbows. She tracked their comings and goings, their breaking up and making up, with a fervency that was unnerving.

That probably should have been a clue for us.

Regardless of whatever signs might or might not have been there, the end result was the same. Lily … was gone, and these days, Joonie might as well have been. Which left me on my own, except, of course, for my supernatural buddies.

“Why do you keep talking to him?” Liesel asked Grandpa Brewster from her perch on Mrs. Pederson’s desk.

“This one can hear me,” Grandpa Brewster proclaimed proudly.

Damn. This was exactly why I should have kept my mouth shut in Brewster’s office.

I looked reluctantly at Joonie. Her cell was a knockoff of the iPhone. If she had it with her — she was forever leaving it at home in the charger — and wasn’t too mad to let me borrow it, I could probably hide it in my pocket and snake the headphones up under my sweatshirt. Mrs. Pederson might still notice, but it was worth a shot.

“Joon?” I whispered. “Got your phone on you?” I sneaked another glance at Liesel to find her frowning at me. That couldn’t be good.

Joonie lifted her head slightly, but she wouldn’t look at me. “What’s wrong?” She sounded cautious, like she wasn’t sure if she should still be angry or not.

“Nobody can hear us except us,” Liesel said to Grandpa B., but she didn’t sound completely convinced. Things were about to go from bad to worse.

“I need music.” As in immediately.

“Where’s Marcie?” Joonie didn’t know the exact nature of my medical condition — it wasn’t something you announce at the lunch table — but she knew that I had permission to have my iPod with me and on at all times.

“Brewster.”

“He can’t do that, can he? You have a note,” Joonie said.

Liesel hopped off Mrs. Pederson’s desk in her pink cloud of a dress and headed straight for me. “I don’t believe you,” she said to Grandpa B., who was still at my side. “Prove it.”

“He’s not supposed to … do you have your phone or not?”

Joonie shook her head. “It’s at home.” She turned to face me, her earlier anger forgotten. She looked worried, and her tongue clicked the safety pins against her teeth, a nervous habit. “Are you going to be okay?”

Grandpa B. leaned down next to my ear. “Hey, kid, come on. Just tell us if you can hear us. Make this dumb broad”—he jerked his thumb toward Liesel—“shut up.”

Not good. I raised my hand.

“Yes, Mr. Killian?” Mrs. Pederson sounded annoyed.

“Can I have a bathroom pass?” Screw Brewster. If I could get out to my car and home without being followed, I’d be home free. The dead weren’t omniscient any more than I was. Unless they had my address, they couldn’t find me. The trick was getting out of here in one piece.

“Oh, great, now you’ve spooked him,” Grandpa B. said.

“Will, you arrived twenty minutes late to my class. You have only twenty minutes left.”

“I know, but—”

“But nothing. I won’t tolerate this kind of disruption in my classroom. The pass you gave me”—she stepped back and pulled it from the metal podium that held her notes—“states that the privileges normally allotted to you have been revoked.”

“I’m just asking to go to the bathroom.” I tried to keep my voice calm, but even still, a wave of giggles and whispers swept over the classroom. God, I hated this.

“Hurry up,” Liesel urged Grandpa B. “She’s going to let him go.”

“No, she’s not,” Jay Montgomery offered from the other side of the room. “She’s evil.”

“Hey, watch it,” Liesel snapped. “That’s my best friend you’re talking about. Trust me, she’s going to fold. Claire hates it when she thinks the kids are mad at her. She is so insecure.” She gave a dramatic eye roll.

I shook my head, trying to ignore all the competing voices. It was getting harder and harder not to scream at them to shut up. “Please, Mrs. Pederson. I’m really not feeling good.” I wiped my damp palms down the legs of my jeans to dry them off.

She frowned at me, and sure enough, under the disapproving stare, I saw her expression soften slightly. “If you’re ill, go directly to the office, Mr. Killian. Don’t bother going to the bathroom to sneak a cigarette. I’ll check, believe you me.”

No use in trying to explain to her that I didn’t smoke. At least, not cigarettes and definitely not on school grounds with Brewster checking me every five seconds. “Thanks.” I gathered my book and notebook and stuffed them back into my bag.

“See? I told you.” Liesel folded her arms across her chest. “He’s no different than anyone else and—”

As I stood up and slung my backpack over my shoulder, Grandpa Brewster gave me a little shove. I should have been expecting it, given what he’d seen with the cigarette in Brewster’s office. But they were normally so reluctant to touch us….

I staggered sideways, like an insta-drunk, and tripped over my own feet, going down to one knee.

Both living and dead gasped.

“Oh, my God,” Liesel whispered.

“Mr. Killian, are you all right?” Mrs. Pederson stepped toward me.

“Will?” Joonie half stood in her seat, clutching her bag to her stomach.

“He can see us? Does he know the final score of my game?” Jay asked.

“You okay, kid? I didn’t mean to push you so hard.”

“Can he get us out of here?” Eric asked.

“I just need him to talk to my wife,” Jennifer’s grandfather jumped in. “She’s thinking about marrying that old geezer who owns the park model next to ours in Arizona.”

I yanked my hood over my head and covered my ears with my hands on top of it. “I need to leave,” I shouted over the din. Too loud, Will, too loud. The wide-eyed look of fear on Mrs. Pederson’s face confirmed that. To her, of course, I was yelling for no reason. “Joonie … I mean, April, take Will to the office now,” came her muffled command.

To her credit, Joonie jumped from her seat, nearly overturning her desk. She yanked the strap of her book bag over her head to rest it on her opposite shoulder, and took my wrist in her cool hand.

“Come on. Let’s go.” She helped me to my feet, her words a distant murmur over the ringing in my ears.

We headed up the aisle and across the room. Mrs. Pederson stepped back behind the safety of her podium, and as we made our way out the door and into the hall, every pair of eyes followed us.

Unfortunately, so did my ghostly fan club.

“Dibs,” Liesel announced.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t call ‘dibs’ on something like this,” Jennifer’s grandfather said.

“We’ve been waiting the longest. Eric and I should get to go first. You, like, just died a couple of years ago.”

“I’m the one who found him,” Grandpa B. pointed out. “The rest of you just get in line behind me, especially you, chickadee.”

“All I want to know is the score. How hard can that be? Did we win? You got to know, man.” Jay’s fingers clutched at my other arm.

“Lost by two,” I said, though I knew, somewhere inside, he already knew that.

Joonie turned her head to stare up at me, her face, framed by her jet black hair, even paler than normal. “Will? You still with me?” Despite having seen this kind of thing from me before, she was scared. I couldn’t blame her. It scared me every time, too.

He pulled harder on my arm. “I don’t believe you.”

I tried to shake his hand off, causing Joonie to stumble and list heavily to the left. Her shoulder collided with the edge of the lockers in the wall, and she winced.

“Joon, you okay?”

She nodded, though tears made her blue eyes more sparkly and bloodshot. “You have to hang in there, Will. After what happened to Lily … I can’t deal. I can’t.”

“You’re lying, man. You’re lying. We won. I know it,” Jay insisted.

“Check the trophy case, and leave me the hell alone,” I told him before turning my attention back to Joonie’s pleading gaze. “I’m trying. Brewster wouldn’t believe me and—”

“Don’t blame this on him.” Grandpa B. bumped into my side, jostling for position with the others.

I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye, and suddenly, Evan, the ghostly janitor who mopped the floors all day, every day, appeared next to me. He shoved Grandpa B. out of the way.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Evan pleaded, tugging at my shoulder. “You got to tell them that. Those kids … they were asking for it, teasing me like that. Didn’t give that judge no right to kill me.”

“Just let go, please,” I said.

But it was Joonie who listened to me, Joonie who let go of my wrist with a hurt look on her face. With no support on my other side, Evan managed to pull me down to one knee. Other hands began grabbing at me.

I resisted the urge to fall to the floor and curl in a ball to protect myself. “Joon—” I began.

“Hey!” an unfamiliar female voice shouted. “Listen up, you dead people.”

That got everyone’s attention. The ghosts stopped clamoring and pulling and arguing to look around. I followed suit and found myself staring at a pair of female legs so smooth they gleamed. Sleek muscle curved beneath the lightly tanned skin, especially at the calf, where imagination easily supplied the sensation of my hand resting there. Despite everything, my heart thumped a little harder.

Then I raised my gaze a little further and found … red gym shorts, a white T-shirt with a big tire tread mark across it, shiny blond hair falling across one shoulder. I groaned. Alona Dare.

Frowning, Joonie knelt next to me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just …” I shook my head and stared at Alona, standing in front of me, her hands on her hips, like she was preparing to lead some kind of cheer. “I thought for sure you were going straight to hell.”

Alona glared down at me. “Hey!”

Joonie looked stricken. “Me?”

“What? No, never mind. Can you just help me up?” Alona’s appearance had managed to distract the deadly dozen — well, half dozen — and I wanted to take advantage of it while I could.

Joonie knelt beside me and lifted my arm across her shoulder again, but she still seemed shaken.

“Are you new?” Liesel asked Alona. Then, turning to Eric, she whispered, “She must be new.”

“All of you, step back and go haunt somebody else,” Alona said. “I found him first.”

Her pronouncement produced a chaotic burst of sound from the others, but at least it was directed at her instead of me this time.

“You can’t—”

“Hey, new girl, some of us have been waiting for—”

“—Just want to know the score.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered to Joon.

Still pale, she nodded. We stood up together and started to edge through the cluster of ghosts. If Joonie thought it was weird the way I moved to avoid invisible-to-her obstacles, she said nothing. She was used to occasional strange behavior from me, and it wasn’t something we ever discussed. There were lots of things we didn’t talk about. It was easier that way sometimes.

“Look, here’s the deal,” Alona declared. “I’m not having a very good day, so I’m only going to say this once. I found him this morning. If he’s helping anyone, he’s helping me first. He’s mine. End of story.”

The moment she finished speaking, a strange blast of wind carried through the corridor, tumbling Alona’s perfect hair and sending a chill over my skin. An odd sense of something having clicked into place fell over me.

I stopped. “Did you feel that?” I asked Joonie.

“Feel what?” Joonie repeated.

“The wind. It—”

Joonie took a cautious step back from me, her eyes wide. She slipped both hands into her bag, like the temperature had just dropped to below zero and it was her only shot at saving all of her fingers from frostbite. “Are you hearing something?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

I shook my head, hating the confusion and naked fear I saw on her face. “Never mind. Forget it. Let’s just go.”

But she didn’t move. Her gaze was fixed on me, and her hands fumbled inside her bag for something, maybe the phone she’d forgotten she’d left at home? That she would feel like she needed to call someone because she was scared of me … that hurt. “Joonie? I don’t—”

Movement flashed near the corner of my eye, and I automatically turned toward it, expecting another sideways assault from Evan the janitor. Instead, a dizzying black cloud of energy hovered about three feet away. The edges of the thing rippled the air, like the shadow of heat escaping from a closed-up car on an August day. It grew larger, taller, wider, and darker, until it blotted out the overhead lights.

My heart sailed into my throat, and I couldn’t breathe. It’d been a few weeks since I’d seen it last, and just like every time before, I’d hoped it would be the last time. As in the last time it came around for me, not the last time I survived it.

“Will?” I heard Joonie’s voice distantly. “Are you okay? Are you still hearing … the wind?”

The ghosts scattered — Liesel ran screaming with Eric on her heels, Grandpa B. hightailed it past me, presumably to the office again. Jay and most of the others just turned and walked silently through the wall of lockers.

But not Alona. She remained rooted to the spot, staring upward at the horrible cloud. “What … what is that thing, Killian?” Her voice still sounded remarkably normal, despite the tremor in it.

This “thing” was the reason I knew Alona Dare hadn’t committed suicide, no matter what the rumors were. When you killed yourself, all the negative energy — the sadness, the self-loathing, the fear, and the desperation — remained. Most of the ghosts like that were just sad and silent wanderers, vague shadowy outlines of who they’d once been. In this case, the negative energy was so strong, it had consumed any hint of who the person had been, leaving little more than a physical manifestation of pure anger. I’d never seen anything like it before, but that was okay. I didn’t need any hints to figure this one out.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, trying to sound calm. “What are you doing here?”