Forever Freaky (10 page)

I kept pulling her, and didn’t stop until we
were back where she’d started, in the girls’ bathroom.

“What are we doing here?” she demanded.
“Ohmigod, this isn’t getting creepy now, is it?”

“Just shut up, and do what I tell you.”

“I knew it, I knew it,” she moaned, in dread.
“Don’t touch me. I’m warning you—do not touch me.”

I pushed in the door to the middle stall, and
sure enough, the inside was half-filled with the black gelatinous
substance.

Mary Jo stared into the stall. She no longer
feared for her virtue, or whatever she had thought she was about to
lose.

“What is that?” she asked, wrinkling her
nose.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“It wasn’t there before.”

“It is now,” I said, “and you need to jump
into it.”

“Jump in it?” she screeched.

“It’s a dream. Who cares, right?”

“No way am I jumping in that. Not even in a
dream.”

Then the floor and walls started quaking,
this time with greater intensity than before. It lasted longer,
too, and didn’t cease until the large mirror over the sinks
shattered.

“We don’t have time for this,” I said. I
grabbed her by the shoulder, spun her so that she faced the stall,
and, as hard as I could, booted her in the butt.

She flew forward, and ended up sticking half
in, half out of the black goo. She looked back at me, and cried,
“This is so gross!” And then she was suddenly sucked in all the
way, presumably heading back where she belonged.

I lingered there alone, in a world that
wouldn’t exist much longer. Except that it was vanishing, it might
not have been a bad place for me; there were no ghosts to trouble
me, no people with strange thoughts going through their heads, no
future to see, no gory visions whenever I ate meat. It was a world
where I could have been normal, only there was nobody with whom to
share it. I suspected that maybe I had always been wrong; everybody
needs people, even me.

When I looked back into the stall, I saw that
there was about eight feet of rope coming out of the wall of black
stuff. The roped wiggled impatiently on the floor, like some crazy
snake.

“Pathetic,” I murmured, shaking my head.
“Truly pathetic.”

Still I bent down and seized the end of the
rope. I wrapped it around my waist and a moment later, a sharp jerk
pulled me into the soft black wall and I was heading home.

*************

“What took you so long?” Jack demanded,
standing over me.

I was lying on the floor again, holding my
achy head, but at least this floor, and the wall that had just hit
headfirst, was in my world.

“Just habitually tardy, I guess,” I said, and
got to my feet. My skull felt like an enormous throbbing balloon. I
had matching lumps on the crown of my head. If I didn’t watch it,
I’d have to change my nickname from Freaky Jules to Knotty
Cranium.

I saw that Mary Jo was laid out across the
sinks on the counter. She looked dead.

“What did she do? Get knocked out?”

“She came through unconscious,” Jack informed
me. “She flew out of the aperture like a rag doll. She’s breathing
and everything—just totally out of it.”

I stood there studying Mary Jo. “She’s much
less annoying when she’s unconscious.”

“So what happened?”

I shrugged. “I found her.” I gave him a
bare-bones account of what had happened, what it had been like. I
saw no reason to give him every last detail; he was altogether too
obsessed with weird stuff.

In return Jack informed me that it was now
Saturday night, that, although it seemed to me only about an hour
passed, I had been missing for nearly a full day. “It took more
than an hour between the time Mary Jo returned and the time you
popped back in,” he said.

I grunted. “So time didn’t work the same
there.”

“Apparently not,” he said.

I studied him from head to foot. He looked
like a wreck. He looked like how I felt.

“And you waited here?”

“What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave
you,” he said. “I spent most of this morning ducking Creepy Carl. I
guess Saturday is when he buffs the hallway floors,” he added
wryly.

“I can’t believe you waited.”

“You would have done the same for me,” he
said.

“You sure about that?” I really didn’t think
I would have, but it was nice to know he thought better of me.

We both stood there and looked at Mary Jo.
She seemed so peaceful. Probably now she was actually dreaming.

“So what do we do?” Jack asked.

“We go home.”

“We leave her here—like this.”

“Sure. As soon as we open an exit door, the
alarm will go off. So we prop the door open with something. The
cops will check out the building, and, poof, they find her. A
miracle, right?”

“But what if she tells the cops what
happened?”

“Well, for one thing,” I said patiently, “you
don’t have a thing to worry about. She never saw you, right? And
what is she going to tell them about me? That I came to her in a
dream and rescued her?”

He shook his head. “They’ll send her to a
shrink.”

“Better her than me,” I said.

Jack gathered up his rope, and stuffed it
into his gym bag with his other things.

Before we left, we checked the bathroom
again. The black matter in the toilet stall was gone, and
everything looked normal, except for the sleeping girl lying on the
sink counter and the remnants of a huge slimy booger splashed
across the floor.

************

“You’re going to love this!” Melody
roared.

This was the first thing she said when I
answered my cell phone. It was Sunday night, and I was still lying
in my bed. I had slept on and off since I returned home in the
small hours of the morning. My head ached. My knees hurt. My lower
back was killing me. And I had had another nasty nosebleed that
didn’t quite want to stop. So I was in no mood for Melody’s
perkiness.

“Mel, can’t it wait until tomorrow?” I
asked.

“No, no, you have to hear this.”

“Please,” I begged.

“They found Mary Jo Mason.”

“Yeah, I saw it on the news.”

“But the news didn’t give all the details,”
she insisted.

“No?” I was more than mildly interested in
what had happened after Jack and I fled the school. How exactly had
the cops found Mary Jo? What happened after they found her? Was she
questioned, and if so, what did she say? All day I had been
half-expecting the cops to knock on my door.

“I got it all from my mom,” Melody said.

“Give it up, bitch,” I told her.

“All right,” she said. “The burglar alarm
goes off last night at the school, right? So when the cops respond
to the call, they find an open door. I think it was propped with an
office chair or something. Anyway, they search the entire school
for intruders, and they find Mary Jo.”

“Really?” I said, faking surprise better than
I thought I could.

“Straight up,” Melody said.

“See. I told you—there was nothing to worry
about.”

“Wait. Wait. There’s more.”

“What?”

“They found her in the bathroom, the bathroom
she disappeared from.”

“Yeah?”

“She was sleeping on the counter.”

“Really,” I said. “Isn’t that something?”

“But this is the best part, the part you’re
going to love. You know what the cops did after they found
her?—Really, you’re going love this.”

“Why? What did they do?” I asked.

“They arrested her.”

I sat bolt upright in bed. “They didn’t.”

“No kidding. Slapped hand-cuffs on her and
dragged her away.”

“Wow,” I said. I felt a little like laughing,
but then, instantly, I felt sorry for Mary Jo. She had been through
an ordeal, whether or not she realized it.

“Well, she didn’t have any identification
with her, and she didn’t look much like the picture her parents
gave the cops when she went missing,” Melody explained. “So, yeah,
I guess they had to arrest her for trespassing. But after they
found out who she was, they dropped the whole thing.”

“You know what she told the cops?—I mean,
about where she was for those three days.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and I could
picture Melody rolling her eyes. “She told the cops some crazy
stuff. It sounds like she’s in for some counseling.”

“Well, at least they found her,” I said.

“I suppose that’s the most important
thing.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, and couldn’t think of
anything else to say.

After I got off the phone with Melody, I lay
there thinking for a long while. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the
whole thing. I’d found Mary Jo and brought her back and now she was
safe at home with her family. Anybody else might have felt pride or
satisfaction, but I didn’t feel those things at all. Mainly I felt
selfish. I didn’t do anything for Mary Jo. I didn’t do anything
because I was a caring, concerned person. Whatever I did, I did for
myself. That was how I was, and I really didn’t believe I would
ever change.

The one thing that kept returning to my mind
was what it had been like in that other reality. There I could not
read people. I could not see the future. I had no flashes of freaky
insight. For a brief time, I knew what it would be like to be
normal, and having experienced that, I decided I could never be
that way. It didn’t feel right, because it wasn’t me. I was Freaky
Jules, that was who I was meant to be, and for the first time I
started to see that that was all right. After all, a lot of people
are different, in some way and to some degree. There are a lot of
freaks in this world, and one day, sooner or later, we are going to
take over everything.

All the excitement surrounding Mary Jo died
down in the following weeks.

Things went by to the same old routine,
except now there was Jack. He started to join Melody and me for
lunch every day. I didn’t really need another friend, but I didn’t
mind. Some friendships begin with a secret, and once they begin
they almost have to last—or else. I believed that Jack would always
keep my secrets. Maybe someday I would finally break down and date
him, but probably not.

One day I felt an anxiety attack coming on in
the lunchroom again. I had to go outside. The days were getting
sunnier and warmer. The grass was dark green and the breeze was
soft and the air smelled sweet. Everything outside calmed me down.
I sat on one of the benches and relaxed.

Awhile later, Jack sat on the opposite end of
the bench. We sat there and didn’t say anything to each other for a
long time. It felt good to share silence with him.

Then he said, “I have three words for
you.”

“Jack, cut it out. We’ve already talked about
this.”

He looked confused at first, but then he got
it. “Oh, no, not those three words. I wasn’t thinking anything like
that.”

“What three words are you talking about?”

“Can you keep an open mind?” he asked.

“It’s impossible for me not to.”

“Okay, here it is,” he said: “Spontaneous
Human Combustion.”

“What?” I stared at him in horror.

“I’m serious,” he said. “There are some
seriously weird things going on.”

“No.”

“Jules, really, you need to hear this….”

I was already on my feet walking away. I
didn’t look back. I walked faster and faster, but knowing Jack
Kilgore, I realized I would never be able to walk away fast
enough.

Freaky Jules

Pants on Fire

Adler Aardvarks’ outfielder on fire.

The long-time rivalry between the Adler
Aardvarks and the Medill Mavericks heated up this Friday
evening—literally.

The Aardvarks held a one-run lead in the
fourth inning, when a routine fly ball turned out to be anything
but routine. As Aardvark center-fielder, senior Jeremy Bliss, ran
to catch the ball, over two hundred horrified spectators watched as
Bliss apparently burst into flames. Quick-acting teammates helped
to put out the fire, but not before Bliss sustained second- and
third-degree burns over forty percent of his body.

Bliss is currently in a hospital burn unit,
where his condition is listed as serious.

Fire investigators are baffled as to the
cause of this bizarre incident, which is strikingly similar to two
occurrences last fall involving members of the Mount Olive football
team.

“Athletes don’t suddenly burst into flames
for no reason,” said Martin Durant, a fire department spokesman.
“At this point, we are closely examining the uniform this young man
was wearing.”

The Aardvarks’ uniforms were manufactured by
the same Chinese company that produced the Mount Olive football
team’s jerseys.

“This is the only commonality found between
these three unusual events,” Durant went on. “We are awaiting test
results on the chemical analysis of the uniforms, but that will
take some time.”

Meanwhile, we at the Adler Eagle wish Jeremy
the speediest of recoveries.

***********

I didn’t like baseball, or any sport for that
matter. Sports, unlike me, belong to the normal world. Only normal
people can gather enjoyment out of watching one guy trying to throw
a ball past another guy who is trying to hit the ball with a piece
of wood while all the other players wait around to see if the guy
with the piece of wood actually hits the ball. That seemed to make
sense to people, while I believed that baseball was the dumbest of
activities.

I was never frustrated that I didn’t
understand normal things. I was not obsessed with trying to become
normal. I knew that would never be possible. I would always be a
vision-seeing, future-predicting, mind-reading freak. About the
best I could hope for was to learn how to live with myself.