Jump When Ready (8 page)

Martha walked us to the door in no particular hurry, but
she didn’t say anything more and I wondered if she might have vanished even
before the door fell closed.

~~~

Jamie stood at the bottom of the stairs, arms crossed and
staring up at us like he’d been waiting there the entire time. “What’s going
on?”

“A lot,” Nikki said. “None of it good.”

We went into the food court and filled Jamie in. My brain
was spinning after everything that had happened, while now I was trying to
figure out what to do with the things we’d talked about with Martha—that I
probably didn’t stand a chance at helping Bethany and all that stuff about time
and going back and souls getting trapped as real ghosts. But I couldn’t allow
myself to take all of that on right now.

 “Do you think Martha’s right about the whole Speaker
thing?” I said. “I was thinking maybe I could use it somehow. But it seemed
like she didn’t think it was a good idea.”

“My guess is she just doesn’t need it,” Nikki said.

“Why?” I kept drumming my fingers on the table, worried
sick about Bethany. Still, I needed to learn as much as possible. I already
knew that being with her wouldn’t make any difference if I didn’t have some
sort of plan.

“You heard what she said, right? Being able to interact
with the other realm isn’t necessarily a good thing. It can totally backfire.
Besides, she always discourages us from getting involved. And maybe…” Nikki’s
words trailed off while she thought about something.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe it’s about more than Martha just having a
Manipulator or a Speaker on her hands.”

Nikki looked at Jamie and it seemed like she was waiting
for him to say something.

Jamie stared back at her. “What?”

“Did I say anything?” Nikki turned back to me. “A
Manipulator can bother people. As you’ve already seen, not so fun for those on
the other side. It can be the same sort of deal for a Speaker, but it’s not
like you’re a total creep. Then again, you seemed pretty happy when you and
Curtis got back the other day.”

Nikki was never going to let me live that one down. She’d
probably loved watching my face turn red when Martha brought it up.

Jamie leaned in closer, the points of his mohawk poking
toward my eyes. “The whole objective for Martha is that we eventually move on.
She volunteered for this. That’s what Service is all about.”

Nikki clamped her hand over mine to make me stop tapping
on the table. “I’m sorry. I know you’re freaking. Anybody would be but it’s
making it hard to think.”

I forced myself to relax and sat back. “But what does it
mean?”

“It means Martha is ready to move on herself but we have
to first,” Jamie said. “It’s some sort of deal she made. I guess she’s okay
with that, but it’s a well known fact that people our age have a hard time
moving on. On top of that, those of us who can actually affect people on the
other side supposedly take forever. That’s where the whole scary ghost thing
comes from. Poltergeists and all that. Kids who keep bugging people for
decades. I bet the last thing Martha needs is two idiot, teenage ghosts keeping
her here for some sort of eternity.”

“What two idiot teenaged ghosts?”

Jamie and Nikki stared at me.

“Okay, got it.”

“Wow, those donuts smell great,” Nikki said. “Must be a
new batch.”

The weird thing was, while I hadn’t noticed before, now
all I could smell was donuts. But that’s how the food court worked. It made
whatever you wanted. Nikki must have wanted donuts so there they were.
Suddenly, I realized I was starving and couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten
anything.

Nikki turned to me and raised her eyebrows. “Do you mind
grabbing some?”

I looked back at her. “Did you like break your leg or
something?”

“Just don’t feel like getting up right now. Never mind.”

But all I could think about was the donuts so I went to
get some. Sure enough, fresh donuts were waiting on the counter—glazed,
chocolate, cream filled, you name it. When I got back to the table, Nikki and
Jamie were staring at each other.

 “Nothing at all, right?” Nikki said. “Honestly?”

“Why would I lie?” Jamie said. “What about you? Are you
trying to tell me something?”

“Not exactly. I’m just kind of wondering if maybe—” Nikki
stopped when she realized I was back.

I waited to be sure they were done, then tried to get
them back on track, “So, the whole Manipulator, Speaker thing. What does it all
mean? Is there anything we can do with it?”

Nikki glanced at Jamie again, then sighed. “That’s a
great question,” she said. “I just wish I knew.”

Gone Too Long

After talking to Jamie and Nikki, I kept trying to put
things together. First of all, I wasn’t sure if being a Speaker was that big of
a deal. As far as I could tell, the fact that I’d even managed to catch
Bethany’s attention was enough to earn me the title. But what good had it done?
It wasn’t like I’d been able to stop anything from happening.

On the other hand, it seemed like being a Manipulator put
you in a different league altogether. After all, Curtis could inflict a serious
case of the willies upon the Tommy Balboas of the world armed only with a bar
of soap. Maybe I could get him to help. But would he? I didn’t really get the
best feeling about it. From what I’d seen, Curtis seemed committed entirely to
maintaining a bad attitude.

Still, I had to try. So, I climbed to the third floor and
knocked on Curtis’s door. At first, the music kept blaring in there. I think he
was listening to Led Zeppelin. When I knocked again, the music stopped.

“What’s up?” Curtis said from somewhere inside his room.
It didn’t sound like he was approaching the door.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Who’s me?”

I could easily imagine Curtis smirking.

“Henry.”

“Henry the dead kid? Or Henry the kid between lives?”

It seemed like a test. I knew which answer would get the
best result. “Henry the dead kid. Got a minute?”

Curtis laughed. “A minute? God, you’re hilarious. The way
things are going, I’m guessing I could spare a century.” The door whacked
itself open against the wall. “Enter,” Curtis said, from where he lounged
across the room on a black leather sofa.

His place was dimly lit with black-light posters
featuring bands from the 60s and 70s. Lava lamps gurgled and glowed. If there
were windows, they must have been covered by dark curtains.

I crossed the room and took a seat across from Curtis. He
listened while I told him about my situation, although he didn’t say anything
when I finished. He just kind of sat there staring into space.

“So, what do you think?” I asked. “Can you help me?”

Curtis sat up straighter and stared at me. For a moment,
I felt my hopes rise. Then he said, “Can I think about this?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Didn’t you understand what I
just told you? My sister’s been abducted! Look, I need your help.”

Curtis ran his hand through his hair, pulling it back before
letting it fall around his face again. “Look, bro, I get that. But the thing is
I’m really not much of a people person. Know what I mean?”

I jumped to my feet. “So, you’re saying no? You can’t
possibly mean that! Come on, am I hearing you right?”

“I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with your hearing.”
Curtis said. “After all, that’s not an issue. Here, the blind can see and the
mute can sing. I’m just saying I need some time to think about things.” Curtis
grinned and winked. “Can you possibly check back with me later? You know, like
maybe in the morning. Whenever that is.”

I stared at him, fighting the urge to take a swing at his
face. When he didn’t say anything more, I turned and walked toward the door.
“To hell with you.”

“So they say,” Curtis said from behind me. “But who
believes in any of that?”

~~~

After I finished throwing things around in my room, I walked
down the hall still trying to calm down. I knocked on Jamie’s door, then
Nikki’s, wondering if either would open. For all I knew, they could be at the
food court or pool. Maybe bowling or skydiving. Possibly riding dinosaurs. Who
could say?

Amazingly, both doors opened. We stood there staring at
each other.

“We need to talk,” I said.

Jamie looked at Nikki, then back at me. He shrugged.
“Sure, dude. How about we go to your pond? Nikki says it’s nice.”

I still had to come up with some sort of plan, so going
there to talk made as much sense as anything else. And it wasn’t like there was
any real travel time involved. Once we were outside, it didn’t take long before
we were walking on a path leading off the road, the same path I remembered
walking with Bethany and John when I was a little kid.

I didn’t want to mention my conversation with Curtis. In
a way, I felt bad now for asking him to help first. Despite Curtis’s skills as
a Manipulator, it seemed more important now to enlist these two people I’d come
to know and trust. And from the way Jamie and Nikki acted around each other—the
bantering and the whole frenemy routine—it seemed like they’d known each other for
a while. I wondered if the time they’d been here had taught them anything I
might be able to use now to help Bethany. Which brought to mind what I’d been
wondering about before.

“How long have you all been here?” I asked.

Jamie answered first. “You mean Earth years, right?”

“Um, yeah.” Until he said it, I hadn’t realized there
were any other kind.

Jamie reached out to a passing dragonfly. It landed on
his finger, wings humming, then took to the air again. “About twenty-five, give
or take.”

I shook my head wondering if I’d heard right. “
Twenty-five
years?
Hang on, that’s impossible. You’re about the same age as me.”

“Well, not exactly,” Jamie said. “I kicked it when I was
fifteen. I’ve been here for a while. But, yeah, I still see myself being
basically that age. I mean, it wasn’t like I was ready to grow up or anything
like that, never mind die. They say that happens a lot when people suddenly
find themselves dead with no warning.”

“You mean between lives, right?”

“Just testing. Well done, you get an A. To be honest, I
was just saying that for Naomi’s benefit. She’s still sensitive about it.”

We walked along the path, sunlight streaming through the
branches above, while Jamie told me about his last life. As it turned out, he’d
been part of the original Goth crowd back in the 80s. Not surprisingly, his
favorite band had been the Cure.

Jamie told me how he’d died suddenly of a cerebral
embolism one day, this weird blood clot deal that smacked into his brain and
basically blew it up. Extremely unusual, he said, even for an adult never mind
a kid. Just one of those freaky things that happen to people. One in a million.
Lucky Jamie.

“One minute, I was staring into the refrigerator
wondering if my mother would freak if I ate a sandwich before dinner. Next thing
I knew, I was saying hello to people here. Still holding a jar of mayonnaise,
actually. Who knew you could bring condiments?”

Nikki filled me in on Simon and Naomi. Simon’s death
would have been laughable if, well, it hadn’t killed him. He’d also been fifteen
and it happened when he was crossing a street in London. He’d been so intent on
checking out some girls that he’d walked right in front of one of those
double-decker buses. Splat, no more Simon. This happened in 1965.

“1965? Holy crap,” I said. That was over 30 years before
I was even born, never mind now.

“Right at the height of all the Beatlemania stuff,” Nikki
said. “I guess he was really into all that. He wanted to come to the U.S. too.
Back then, everyone thought America was totally cool. In a way, I do think of
Simon as part of the British Invasion—he’s sort of the bad aftertaste.”

Naomi’s story, on the other hand, was nothing but sad.
She’d been at some sort of national park with her family and she ran off a
cliff trying to catch a butterfly. She’d been 11 at the time. This part really
freaked me out—she died in 1957.

“Yeah, she was just a little kid, really,” Jamie said.
“She still kind of is, but that’s cool.”

I was starting to wonder if Nikki was going to talk about
herself but finally she sighed loudly, like she was ticked off about something.
Then she told me that she’d died when she was sixteen. She’d grown up in Los
Angeles and had hoped to become a professional dancer. She’d just been accepted
to a prestigious high school for the arts and was going to start in the fall.
Unfortunately, she’d been hit by a car while riding her bike one day that
summer. She’d died in 1969.

“As you can probably tell, I still get kind of pissed off
about all of it sometimes,” Nikki said. “I really wanted to go to that school,
for one thing.”

“You do seem to have some bitchy moments,” I said.

“Whatever. Get used to it.” Nikki smacked the back of my
head lightly for effect.

“What about Curtis? What happened to him?”

I looked over at Jamie, who looked sad all of a sudden.
Strangely, he hadn’t seemed particularly sad before, even as he’d been
describing his own death. But I guessed that was all ancient history for him
now.

“Curtis is a different deal,” Jamie said. “I wasn’t sure
I wanted to tell you, all things considered. But, okay, he died when he was
seventeen. He jumped off the top of an apartment building in Seattle.”

“You mean fell off, right?”

Jamie shook his head. “No. Curtis really did commit
suicide. He’s been here since 1972. I guess he had a tough life and you kind of
expect someone to take a while getting over that sort of thing. But he seems to
keep heading in the wrong direction, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I really don’t,” I said.

“Did Martha maybe mention to you what hell was?”

“She said it had something to do with anger and hatred.”

“Right, she always makes that clear right off,” Jamie
said. “And, I guess, if you stay angry like Curtis—I mean unforgiving, hateful
angry—for a long enough period of time, you start to go there. After that, it’s
really hard for anyone to pull you back again.”

No one said any more as we walked toward the pond. I
understood. Maybe there wasn’t anything to be done about Curtis. He was looking
like a lost cause. But even that didn’t matter right now. I needed to help
Bethany and time was passing. Already, I guessed it to be late afternoon. In
the time we’d spent walking to the pond, I hadn’t exactly come up with a plan
and I felt bad about spending that time to talk about how everyone had ended up
here. But at least I’d had a chance to get to know Jamie and Nikki that much
more. And when before I’d wondered if all I might hope for was advice, now I
felt differently.

When we reached the water’s edge, I turned to face them.
“I need you two to come with me,” I said, not doubting they’d agree.

Only a moment passed before Jamie said, “I don’t know.
That’s probably not the best plan.”

Then Nikki. “Same here. I mean, I’d like to help and all
that. But, well, you know…”

Silence followed, my heart sinking. It seemed like you
could never be sure about anything, or anyone, in this place where I now lived.

Then I felt myself getting pissed off. “Why? Got
something better to do?”

Nikki and Jamie looked at the ground.

“What’s the deal? Come on, you guys, look at me!”

Jamie made eye contact first. “It won’t make any
difference.”

“He’s right,” Nikki said.

I glared at them. “So the better plan is to do nothing?”

“It’s not like that,” Jamie said. “We both want to help.
But, listen, after I Transitioned, I kept trying to get through to my family. Nothing
ever happened. They had no idea I was even there. It was like some sort of
nightmare and finally I had to stop trying before I went insane.”

“Same thing for me, basically,” Nikki said. “I hate to
even talk about it, but I watched my parents lose all their money when they
trusted a bad man with their investments. I watched my sister marry a total
loser who abused her. She was sad and alone most of the time and I couldn’t
once reach out to her. I watched as my parents grew old and died, and again when
my sister ended up dying of cancer. For decades, I kept going back but it
didn’t matter that I was there or that I could hear their thoughts. Not once
did my being there make a bit of difference.”

We remained silent for a while after Nikki finished. I
guess neither me or Jamie knew what to say.

Then, Jamie turned to her. “Wait. You just said you could
hear their thoughts.”

“Don’t even go there,” Nikki said.

“That’s what you were getting at before, wasn’t it?
You’re a
Reader
and you never said anything! Why?”

Nikki glared at him. “Because it’s entirely useless.
Worse than useless, it’s painful. No one should be able to do that. Why would I
tell anyone? Besides, what about you?”

“What about me? Like I said before, I’ve got nothing for
you. Sorry if that ruins whatever theory you’re working on. I can’t believe you
never mentioned this before.”

Nikki turned to me. “I know what you’re thinking. That
just because I can hear the thoughts of living people, I can help you. Listen,
I can’t help. I know.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what Jamie and Nikki were talking
about but I could guess what Nikki’s theory was—it couldn’t all be a
coincidence. Curtis was a Manipulator, I was a Speaker, and now she’d admitted
being a Reader. I had no idea what it all meant but I had to trust my
instincts.

“No, you’re wrong,” I said. “Those people who took
Bethany. Everything about them is a lie. You could tell me what they’re
thinking.”

Nikki thought for a moment. “Possibly. It doesn’t work
all the time. It depends.”

“But it works some of the time, right? If you can get
inside their heads, then maybe I could tell Bethany, or someone else. I don’t
know, but we have to try.”

Nikki looked up at the sky. She didn’t say anything at
first and I wondered if she might be imagining the faces of her lost family.
Who could say where they might be now or why they’d gone to some other place
when their own lives ended?

Finally, she said, “Sure, I guess. I mean, I never quite
managed to help my sister but we could at least try to help yours. Just don’t
get your hopes up, okay?”

“Let’s just see what happens.” I held out my hand. “Come
on, let’s go.”