Milo's Story: Stories from The Gateway: Companion tales to The Gateway Trilogy (4 page)

The smile was gone as quickly as it appeared, and I regretted the joke. “Sorry. Sometimes I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut. Actually, I never know when to keep my mouth shut.” I stuffed a few envelopes in silence.

“It’s fine,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t be surprised that the other kids told you that. I mean, it is true. I’m here all the time. I’m sort of famous for it.”

I tried to leave it at that, but I’m too damn nosy for my own good, so I took a deep breath and asked the question I was dying to know the answer to. “So… why are you here? Or I guess I should say, why are we both here? Because you and I both know I didn’t throw that lamp, and I’m willing to bet that it didn’t throw itself.”

She put down the envelope she was holding and began tracing her fingers absently over a thin white scar on her wrist. “I owe you an explanation. I know that. I’m really sorry I didn’t just give you one before, but… well, let’s just say that explanations rarely go well for me.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean that when I actually decide to give the real explanation, I usually wind up scaring someone off or landing myself on a new med,” she said with an utterly humorless laugh. It was the saddest, most hollow laugh I ever heard, and it dug out a little hole inside me.

That was the first place I made room for her in my life.

“Whatever you have to tell me can’t be as strange as what already happened to me,” I said, with a stab at encouragement. “I’m already scared, and I promise I won’t go telling tales to those hags no matter how weird your explanation is,” I said, cocking a thumb over my shoulder at the forms of the two nurses stationed by the door.

Hannah raised her eyes from her battered wrists and locked onto my gaze. She seemed to be deciding something, and I felt myself go completely still, like I was posing for a painting. I held my breath, waiting to see what her verdict would be, if she would judge me worthy of her secret. I felt the little hole in my chest open wider, as though aching to receive whatever it was she might have to tell.

Finally, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a little folded square of paper. Carefully she opened it up and smoothed it gently on her knee, where we could safely peruse it without the nurses noticing. It was a patient profile, like the one they undoubtedly had of me and every other kid in the place stashed away in some filing cabinet somewhere. This one was obviously old, though. The paper it was printed on was yellowed and curling at the edges, and the information looked as though it had been entered by hand on a typewriter. A small black and white photograph was stapled to the upper left hand corner.

“Who’s this?” I asked, leaning closer to her so that I could scan the paper.

“His name is Jeffrey Stone. He was the first patient assigned to that room when New Beginnings first opened in the ‘70’s. Of course, it wasn’t called New Beginnings back then. It was a private psychiatric hospital called The Fielding Youth Rehabilitation Center. It was a place that rich people could send their kids to secretly. They paid absurd amounts of money for the ‘experimental’ treatments and ‘innovative’ therapies they offered, not to mention the privacy and discretion of the staff. At least,” she said, rolling her eyes, “that’s what the pamphlets advertised. There was a stack of them filed in the same box where I found this.”

“Sounds horrifying,” I said, looking at the face frowning up at me from the photograph. He had close-set dark eyes and a pair of eyebrows that were dangerously close to meeting in the middle. “So what does this kid have to do with… anything? I mean, he’s gotta be like, a senior citizen now.”

“He would be, if he were still alive. Which he’s not. Say hello to the kid who threw your lamp.”

A long silence stretched between us. My mouth went dry. I swallowed hard and cleared my throat before I dared to break it. “I don’t get it.”

Hannah looked me in the eye, and again I could not move or look away. “Your room used to be Jeffrey Stone’s room. That’s where he stayed when he came here. That’s where one of his “innovative therapies” went wrong and he died in 1976. See?”

She pointed to a date at the bottom of the sheet, next to the typed word, “deceased.”

I stared at the place she was referencing, but couldn’t force the word to make sense; it just looked like a random grouping of letters. “I still don’t...”

“Wow, you’re really gonna make me come right out and say it, aren’t you?” Hannah said, with a slightly exasperated laugh. “Okay, then. He’s a ghost. There’s a ghost haunting your room, and he wants you out of there.”

I blinked. She held my gaze unflinchingly. I swallowed again, maybe just a bit convulsively, but I definitely kept my voice calm as I said, “And you know this because...”

“I can see him. Well, not just him. I can see ghosts in general. I see them almost everywhere I go. I have ever since I can remember, and I can’t do anything to stop it.”

Two things smacked me in the face at the same time. The first one was pretty obvious. This girl was telling me she saw ghosts, which in generally accepted reality, did not actually even exist. It was ridiculous. It was the very Fox-iest confession that could have come out of her mouth. In just about any other circumstance, I would have smiled politely, backed away slowly, and booked it the hell out of the room. There may have even been some screaming and hand-flapping involved. But the second smack stunned me where I sat, and I felt no desire to flee. This smack came from the realization that I actually believed her. I didn’t doubt a single word of what she was telling me.

I opened my mouth, not sure of what was going to come out of it, and heard myself say, “So, what am I supposed to do about a hostile, dead roommate who won’t leave?”

For a second, she looked as stunned as I felt. Then, her face split into a huge smile, and she let out a peal of laughter that made the nurses look up from their magazines for the first time.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, starting to wonder if I should have done the whole running and hand-flapping thing.

“It’s just… that’s it?”

“What’s it?”

“No staring? No questions? No running away screaming?” She shook her head, still smiling. “I’m not used to people believing me at all, let alone without a moment’s hesitation.”

“Well, I’m not used to crazy bitches telling me they see dead people, but we all have to adapt, I guess.”

She laughed again, and this time I joined in. We laughed more and more until the nurses were staring and we had to compose ourselves, dropping our heads and snorting silently over our work. We didn’t want to look like we were actually having fun, or they might decide to separate us and give us some other mind-numbing drudgery instead.

Finally, the laughter played out and we were both left staring down at the dour face of Jeffrey Stone. His expression leeched the rest of the humor from the situation.

“Seriously, though,” I said, pointing to him. “You see them all the time? Like, right now in this room?”

Hannah shook her head. “Not all the time. I mean, it’s not constant, but it’s pretty close. They have a tendency to find me when I move to a new place. I’ve gotten good at ignoring them, but sometimes I get one like Jeffrey that make it difficult.”

“How many are there at New Beginnings?”

“Seven in the building. A few more on the grounds.”

“So the doctors call them hallucinations and you just have to go along with it?”

“What’s the alternative?”

“I don’t know. Proving it? Showing them evidence, or whatever?”

Hannah laughed again, but it was a bitter little sound. “It’s a lot harder than you think, even with people who’ve seen something strange, like you have. Sometimes I would get fed up with pretending and try it. It only ever ended one way: a severe psych eval and stronger meds. Trust me, if you saw some of the places they wanted to put me, you’d stop trying, too.”

“Yeah, I guess I can see that,” I said. “Sometimes it’s just easier to pretend, isn’t it? Just go along with it.”

“I’m guessing you’ve got some experience with that, too,” she said quietly. I could feel that penetrating, analyzing gaze on me again, but I didn’t mind, somehow. After all, she’d just trusted me with her biggest secret in the world, and I was practically a complete stranger.

“Well, not like you,” I said. “I mean, I can’t imagine hiding what you have to hide. But, yeah, I’ve done my fair share of capitulation, just to survive.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there’s all kinds of euphemisms for why I’m here, but it all boils down to the same problem. I’m gay and my dad can’t handle it.”

She just looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to go on.

I put up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I know, I know. It comes as a real shock. After all, I’m so masculine. I mean, can’t you just feel the testosterone rolling off me in waves?”

She giggled. “Oh, is that what that is? I thought I felt something.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty hard to ignore. Anyway, I realized early on that he thought there was something wrong with me, even before I could have put into words what it was. It was the way he looked at me, with this little wrinkle between his eyes, like I was doing something distasteful just by being there. I hated it when he looked at me like that, so I started doing the things he seemed to want me to do. I tried really hard, but generally failed miserably at whatever it was, usually one sport or another. Actually, I discovered I was a pretty good long distance runner, and I got really excited that at last I’d found the thing that was going to satisfy him. But after watching me run one race, he told me I needed to quit track. He never told me why exactly, but it must have been the way I looked when I ran; instead of making me look like the other guys, I think it just made me stand out even more by contrast.”

“That’s awful,” Hannah said.

“It’s no legion of ghost stalkers, but it sucks, no lie,” I said, trying to keep it light. “That’s not the worst of it, though. I was so desperate to get out of the last place he sent me that I wrote home and told him I had found a girlfriend, and that I couldn’t wait to introduce her to them when I got home.”

“You… invented a girlfriend?” Hannah asked, making an obvious effort to keep the judgment out of her voice.

“Worse than that,” I said. “I actually asked some poor girl out. Her name was Haley, and she was so desperate for male attention that she would have thrown herself at a serial killer on death row if he’d so much as winked at her. I knew how vulnerable she was, knew I would damage her somehow, but I asked her out anyway. It’s probably the shittiest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.”

“But he gave you no choice,” Hannah said, and placed her tiny hand on my arm. It was cold and stiff, like it was made of porcelain. It only added to the aura of fragility.

“I don’t know if that’s true, but it felt true,” I allowed. I didn’t shy away from her hand. There was something comforting about it. I focused on its cool pressure while I finished my story. “Haley must have known on some level that I was using her, but she ignored it, just like I did. Haley was released a couple of weeks after me, and we put on this hideous performance of a relationship for like, six months. I brought her over for dinner, held her hand, kissed her good night, used couple-y nicknames that make you want to vomit, all of it. But everyone kept demanding more of me; she wanted more, my dad wanted more, and soon I couldn’t pretend any longer. It all cracked and fell to pieces under the pressure and the scrutiny. Haley wound up on suicide watch, and I, after a series of unfortunate life choices I won’t get into, wound up here.”

Hannah pressed her little hand into mine, and I took it as easily as if it had been Phoebe’s. We sat for a few minutes in the silence, not looking at each other.

“Wow, you’re a real downer, huh?” she said at last, her face utterly serious.

I burst out laughing. “Yeah, sorry, that was a real ray of fucking sunshine. I should save that kind of thing for group sessions. I bet I’d get a therapy gold star.”

“Thank you for telling me. I think it’s good for me to remember that other people have to pretend, too.”

“See?” I clapped her on the back. “Doesn’t it make you feel better to know that you’re just one of the freaks?”

“I fit right in,” she said, smiling. “What a relief!”

“Just another one of the unloveables. Congratulations.”

“You know,” she said, her expression brightening, “that would be a great name for a band.”

I considered this. “You’re right, sweetness, it certainly would. A really hipster one that only did covers of underground girl grunge bands from the ‘90’s. We could write some incredibly deep lyrics, what with all our teen angst. Do you play any instruments?”

“Nope, not even a little. You?”

“Not since my mandatory piano lessons during elementary school. I’ve completely blocked all memory of the wretched thing. So I guess we’re shit out of luck.”

“I guess so.”

“So in the meantime, what do we do about this stud?” I asked, tapping a finger on the scowling face of Jeffrey Stone.

Hannah sighed. “I don’t know. He’s been in that room since he died, and he’s really adamant about staying. I’m not sure I’ll be able to convince him to leave, even if I do get the chance to go back in there.”

“Maybe I can just request another room?”