Following Christopher Creed (7 page)

"Very funny. A lot of people have seen him. Some people are just seeing lights in the woods—weird lights where there should only be darkness. But this one night, this group of, maybe, five kids, saw him. Most of us were at a basketball game. But not a single one has changed their story yet."

"I think I heard about that from other people," I said. "They were tripping?"

"What difference does it make? They
all
saw him. Blond hair, gangly, JCPenney polo shirt, Keds ... but all lit up in a white light."

Mary Ellen added, "There's only one person around here who wore JCPenney polo shirts to school every day ... only one kid whose mother was still dressing him in high school."

"You're saying what those kids saw was Chris ... because the person was wearing a JCPenney polo shirt? And how did they notice the sneakers?" I didn't want to burst their bubble, but it was my job to shovel through the horse droppings.

Mary Ellen said, "No, they thought it was Chris because he was surrounded by white light. As in, he was dead. A spirit. You could see through him. He looked just like he did when he left. The polo shirt was secondary."

A see-through Chris Creed. Witnesses: five.
Did he do a cartwheel or something? Is that how they noticed theKeds?

I felt like I was tipping into something I would have referred to back at school as a "sewer moment." Last month I covered that'séance in Windsor Hall—just for a fun write-up—one of the dorms that a few goth residents swore was haunted by the spook of one Billy Hamilton, who'd killed himself several years back. The fact that Billy committed suicide at home in Kentucky, in his own garage, made no difference. He had been a Windsor dormie, and now he stood over people's beds on the second and third floors and they awoke to find him staring at them and then exiting through a wall.

As a person who is well trained to wake up happy, call daily problems "opportunities," and meditate on future successes, I decided I would never, ever again join hands with people calling up the dark. My mood had seeped sewage for a couple days, which is my best description for battling the feeling that someone was constantly lurking behind me, staring and smiling hungrily. If you're blind, it's an even more unpleasant sensation.

What did you expect?
I asked myself. I had known I would run into some of this out here. I had invited it. "So, like, why do you want to see the ghost of Chris Creed? Do you ... want to communicate with him?"

I was trying not to deliver it in a caustic tone, but I didn't quite succeed.

"You believe he's alive," Kobe said, a note of disappointment in his voice.

"That's what Torey Adams believes. I follow his train of logic, not to derail
your
train. At the moment, I'm a journalist, so let's say I'm neutral."

"Well, we've got our reasons," Kobe said, and I waited for them, but Mary Ellen broke in.

"If we believe Chris Creed is dead, it's not because it's weird. It's because it's logical. Tell me how a kid leaves almost five years ago and manages to stay away," she demanded.

"I think one decent theory was on Adams's website," I pointed out. "Chris stayed with relatives in Texas who couldn't stand his mother, believed she could mess up a kid, and helped him hide."

"What about Justin and Matt?" she asked. "How could Chris go off and leave his brothers? Don't you think he would miss them?"

I had to agree about that. "Leaving your siblings behind and never getting in contact seems extremely heartless." Matt would now be a high school freshman. Adams had written even less about him than about Justin.

"So, how does Chris do that?" Mary Ellen persisted.

"I wrote a research paper on people who are successful at starting over. There's been studies on some people in the Witness Protection Program and some who ran away from home and never went back. A lot of those successful at 'starting over' have been able to shift their focus, view their old life as if it were somebody else's life. You become a new person."

"Wish I could become a new person sometimes," she griped. I sympathized.

"I suppose in cases like Chris's, that 'new person' thing helps people lose any false sense of responsibility for family members who, truthfully, need to learn to look after themselves anyway. Big brothers can't be at school, watching your back, and they don't exactly want to live at home while going to college. They want to get the hell out."

"You sound like one of those experts on Chris," Mary Ellen said. "They post on Torey Adams's website and leave endless descriptions of all the rotten things that mean kids did to them in school. Are you one of them?"

I caught a click in her voice, like maybe she was trying to be nice but wasn't much good at it. I could have given her a breeze-through of my catalogue of school hells, but I took it up a notch, not wanting her to get on the wavelength again that I was some target.

"Some people post on
ChristopherCreed.com
because they have been abused terribly by classmates. Others post there because they're runaways. I'm one of the few who have the dubious distinction of being both."

"You ran away?" she asked, studying me with more respect.

"I call it 'leaving home,'" I said. "I was almost eighteen."

"Tell us about it," she said with an excited little hop on her butt. "Where are you from?"

I laughed, feeling defensive. I understood that people were curious as soon as I said I was a runaway. But they didn't understand the caution you need to take. I said, "Are you going to post it on
ChristopherCreed.com
?
'There was this guy, Mike Mavic, out here who ran away, too, and now he's a reporter at Randolph State!'
I've got a mother a lot like Mrs. Creed—only worse. She used to be a cop, an investigator, in Oklahoma City. She was one of the first officers on-site at the Oklahoma City bombing. But she's still resourceful. I've often imagined her scouring
ChristopherCreed.com
and other sites frequented by runaways, reading the posts, trying to figure out if one of them's me."

"Well ... what was she like? What did she do that made you run away?"

I felt RayAnn perk up. Her family was much more fun to talk about than mine—we hadn't actually gotten to this question yet. I leaned way forward with a groan, putting my elbows on the tarp and drumming my fingers. This wasn't exactly the way I had wanted this conversation to go. Not only was it about me instead of them, but it was a difficult question to answer. I probably would have avoided it if Mary Ellen hadn't found my hot button with her next thought.

"It's just that you seem so ... calm, so ... together. You're blind, you left your family..."

"Yeah, I call that bad frequency," I shared with a laugh. "I was on it for years."

"But look at you. You're in a really smart college, and you're a reporter, and all this cool stuff that a lot of normal kids would not even be. Just tell us how it came about. And I won't bust you on
ChristopherCreed.com
or anywhere. We've kept Justin under wraps, haven't we?"

I knew my life could be a testimonial that would help others. I was one of those "if I can make it, you can too" types of people who could make a living giving motivational speeches, probably. I was becoming a Zig Ziglar, a Napoleon Hill, I told myself every day. But I had a long way to go.

"Tell ya what," I tried. "I'll answer any questions you want about my past—given you won't bust me—if you tell me where Justin is so I can interview him."

There was a long silence, and one of them swallowed. "We can't. He'll kill us," Mary Ellen said. "But if he contacts us, we can promise to tell him about you, give him your cell number."

"We're leaving Sunday morning," I said. "I really wanted to do a little better than a phone interview from my desk in Indiana with my deadline five minutes away."

"I can pretty much ... guarantee he will call you by tomorrow" was all Kobe would promise, taking out his cell. "You could say Justin and I are tense toward each other, especially since my secret fave project happens to be his brother and certain people have big mouths. But I'll do him this one and tell him you're looking for him. Give me your number."

As I spat out the last digit, Mary Ellen continued, as if the deal were sealed, "So, what happened at your house?"

I drummed on the tarp some more. This was why I don't tell many people I took off. It's very, very hard to describe. I sighed. "I wish I could say I was beaten, molested, and thrown down into a fruit cellar where the cockroaches could have at it. It was nothing so dramatic."

"She didn't beat you?" Mary Ellen asked.

"Occasionally when she was drinking she would do something violent, but mostly she drank, I think, to drown out the memories of the Oklahoma bombing. She was one of the police who ended up pulling dead kids out of that daycare center."

"My uncle's a fireman, and he pulled dead bodies out of the Trade Center just after 9/11, and he didn't turn into a drunk over it," Mary Ellen pointed out.

"A whole schmear of events actually followed it, if you want to talk about bad frequency." I shuddered but kept my grin. "My dad died maybe a month after that. We farmed corn. He fell off the tractor somehow, got caught under the wheel."

"Wow," she said.

"And ... drumroll ... between the bombing and my dad dying, my mother found out she was pregnant with my sister, Merilee."

"Ohh..."

I hoped she'd leave it alone, but she was the inquisitive sort.

"So, what did she do besides drink, if she didn't beat you?"

I just kind of threw it out there, fixating on getting them to bring Justin to me. "It was weird ... sort of like we were
married.
I don't mean anything sexual by that—she never, like, tried to jump in my bed or anything. My dad died when I was in second grade, and by fifth grade, some kids had cell phones. Kids would always talk on their cells at school with friends. I was always talking with my mother. She knew exactly when the bells would ring. There I'd be, on my cell, talking about the bills or taxes or my little brother and sister. She didn't want me to have friends. She was really possessive, controlling, and if I asked to go anywhere, she would say, 'We've got all this work to do.'
We've, we've, we've
...It was never
her,
never
me,
always
us.
"

"So, you ran away?" Mary Ellen digested this. I guess it didn't seem like enough. She hadn't lived through it.

"My senior year, I got a girlfriend. Finally. For about a week. That was the last straw. You should have seen my mother carrying on. She said Sydney wasn't a nice girl, she was from a bad family, all this stuff, but the truth was, it could have been
any
girl. Sorry it's not any juicier than that."

"You felt strangulated." She finally got it.

"Exactly. I could see the rest of my life unfolding ... I would take care of her until I was seventy and she was ninety-five, and she'd still be dishing out orders in her 'once a cop, always a cop' tone. So, in my case, I didn't mind leaving my brother and sister. She never had that sort of relationship with them. Besides, they were scrappy and feisty. I didn't have that nature. I was a peaceful guy. Better to just ... make like a tree and leaf, before she chopped me down like that...
Giving Tree
story." I was stumbling. I hadn't exactly tried this aloud too often.

"And she has no idea where you are?" she asked.

"Nope. But she's still trying. She got my cell phone number once." I chuckled.

"How do you know? Did you talk to her?"

"No. It was last fall. I was walking to campus one morning and my cell rang. I looked down, and there was my old phone number. I jumped nine feet in the air."

"You didn't pick up?"

"It was all gut instinct. Over in a flash. I connected the call so she wouldn't hear my voice on voice mail, and I was walking past this duck pond. I heaved the phone straight into the pond. I cut class, zipped on over to Verizon Wireless, and had a new phone, new number, and a hacker friend destroying the history of my file, all within half an hour."

RayAnn cracked up. She had heard this part of the story. She went on, "A lot of people were walking to campus and saw him throw the phone into the pond. We had just met. They thought it was me, and that I was hot for Mike, which I was. But they thought I was, like, stalking him or something."

I tossed an arm over her shoulder as they laughed.

"Do you have an assumed name?" Mary Ellen asked.

"Mike is really mine. The Mavic I picked up in Tijuana, Mexico, for two hundred bucks, along with a fake driver's license, fake Social."

"Mavic is really not your last name?" RayAnn asked incredulously.

"How could I keep my real last name with an ex-cop for a mom?"

They sat quietly, absorbing all of this, I guess. "So, are you going to get Justin for me?"

"I'll really try, honestly," Kobe said, though I sensed strongly that their inability to get him right now, right in front of me, was bull. I hoped at least they would start punching a cell number as soon as we left.

Mary Ellen shuddered. She noted accurately, "I was such a jerk when you first came out here."

RayAnn laced her fingers through mine.

I supposed that was a Steepleton version of an apology. "That's okay," I said cheerfully. "It's not like I'm inexperienced. Do you mind if I ask... Why do you act like that?"

"I don't know." Her head disappeared as she lay flat again with a sigh. "I'm the only girl in a family of four older brothers. I get picked on too."

"But somehow that doesn't make you sympathetic," I said in what I hoped was a journalistically neutral way.

"You would think. I don't know why I hate on people. I never really thought about it before, but I do it ... because I
have
to. If I sense weakness in another person, it infuriates me," Mary Ellen confessed.

"Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'm like a dog. Do you ever watch that show
The Dog Whisperer?
Cesar Millan, the dog expert guy, says that dogs bite weak energy. That's why you should never run from them or show fear."