Slow Dance in Purgatory (11 page)

             
"Okay.  But Shad is here..."

             
"I'll keep my eye on him," Johnny said, as if that weren't humanly impossible.

             
Maggie walked toward him, and Johnny moved from the doorway, letting her pass him into the hallway.  As she did, the ends of her hair rose and reached for him, and her skirts clung to her legs as if she had rolled for an hour on thick carpet. 

             
"What the..?!"  Maggie's hands shot to her skirt, trying to maintain her modesty.

             
Johnny reached out and ran his hand along her hair from crown to tips.  Immediately, the locks fell in heavy relief, and her skirt swooshed back down around her legs.  Maggie's heart pounded, and her skin practically hummed with awareness.

             
"What did you do?"  Maggie gasped.

             
"It was static electricity.  I just reversed the charge."

             
"How?"

             
Johnny shrugged again.  "As a man thinketh, so does he." 

             
"That's from the Bible, right?"

             
"It is.  But I can't give you a better explanation.  I seem to be made up of energy.  I attract it, and then I'm able to release it and use it.  I don't know how."

             
"Is that how you control the music?" 

             
Johnny nodded, looking down at her as she walked beside him, hands clasped behind her back.

             
"You scared me that time up in the hallway when I saw you, and then again in the dance room the other day.  Why did you do that?"  Maggie wasn't sure she had forgiven him yet.  Nor did she understand him at all.  Scare her one day, save her the next.  To say Johnny Kinross was an enigma was putting it mildly.

             
"You scared me, too."   Johnny stopped and turned toward her.  "I didn't know you could see me, and when you called out to me it startled me, and I reacted.  The music reacted with me.  I didn't mean for it to happen." 

             
"Oh.”  Maggie supposed that made sense.  “But what about the day I came early to dance?  How did you know I had dreamed about that song?"

             
Johnny raised his eyebrows in question.  "What song?"

             
"That ‘Johnny’ song.  That was very mean of you."  Maggie stuck out her chin, challenging him to disagree.  His lips twitched a little at her stony expression.

             
"I don't have any way of knowing what you dream, Maggie.  I… felt… you walk in to the school and I was…. excited… to see you.  Then you said that I wasn't real.  It made me angry.  I guess I wanted to show you that I was....real, if that's what I am."  Johnny's mouth quirked cynically.

             
"But
that
song?"  Maggie countered, incredulous. 

 
             
“I didn't think about it.  I just pulled that song out of the air, literally.  Songs are easy to access.  Every song that has ever been played is there in the ether somewhere, playing endlessly.  Energy isn't really created or destroyed, it's simply redirected."

             
Maggie shook her head in amazement, and Johnny began to walk again as if he hadn't said something completely mind blowing.  Maggie watched him for a moment, and he turned back toward her, waiting.

             
"Is that what happened to you?"  Maggie said hesitantly.  "You weren't destroyed....just redirected?"

             
"No, Maggie.  That's the problem."  Johnny's eyes spoke volumes as ancient as time.  "I wasn't redirected."

             
"What does that mean?"  Maggie whispered.

             
"I seem to be stuck here, or stuck in between here and somewhere else."

             
"You mean somewhere between life and death?”

             
"Maybe…..or between Heaven and Hell.  I guess this is Purgatory.  I'm trapped in high school." Johnny's voice was dry with irony. "The place I hated the very most, and the funny thing is, I begged to stay.  When I was dying, I begged to stay.  I refused to go." 

             
They walked together for several minutes.  Maggie noticed absently that his feet made no noise in the deserted hallways.

             
"Maggie?" 

             
"Yes?"  Maggie looked up at him and blushed at the intensity of his gaze.

             
"What year is it?" 

             
"It's November of 2010."

Johnny sagged where he stood, and the absolute desolation that played over his features had Maggie reaching out to him.  She clasped both of her hands around one of his, and he jerked at the contact, shocking her with a sharp frisson of static.  She didn’t let go, though.  All she could think about was how it might feel to never touch another human being for over 50 years.  As if he could read Maggie’s mind, Johnny's hand clenched hers like a drowning man, and Maggie felt a sensation similar to that of holding her hands close to a television or a computer screen without actually touching it - like a humming, buzzing heat radiated out from him.  Her breath caught in her throat.

             
"Mags?"  Shad's voice was a high pitched mix of laughter and scared confusion, and Maggie jerked like she had been shot.  Johnny vanished like she'd flipped a light switch.  Her hands, now empty, were posed mid-air.  Why hadn't Johnny warned her Shad was coming?

             
Maggie's hands dropped to her sides, and she slowly turned towards Shad, her mind a tangled torrent of excuses and alibis.

             
"Margaret O'Bannon, what in the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. are you doing?"  Shad invoked the name of Martin Luther King only when he was truly bowled over.  Thankfully, his mouth also went in to hyper drive.

             
"Wait….you saw him, didn't you?  You saw the ghost?  Can you see him now?  Is he nearby?"  Shad went into Ninja stance, his basketball forgotten, bouncing forlornly down the hall.  "What did he look like, Mags?  Can you see through him?  Did he float?"  Shad did a couple lunges and karate chops to the left and then the right.  Then he glanced in terror up at the ceiling, as if the ghost of Johnny Kinross were waiting to drop over him like a net.

             
"Shad...calm down!"  Maggie tried to interrupt Shad's blithering tirade, but he was moving down the hallway in Ninja squat, arms still high and poised for an attack by a ghost… or anyone with a black belt.  Retrieving his basketball, Maggie followed behind him, trying to convince him that Johnny Kinross wasn't going to drag him off. 

             
By the time they had shut off the lights and exited the school, Shad had resumed normal posture, and his speech had returned to its regular speed, which was still almost too fast to follow.  It wasn't until they pulled out of the school's parking lot and headed for home that he fell silent.  The silence was almost worse than his non-stop chatter, and Maggie wiggled uncomfortably.  Shad looked out the window and said nothing until Maggie pulled into his grandpa's driveway.  Dim light shone through the front window, and Maggie could see Gus rocking in his chair in front of his old fashioned television.  It still had rabbit ears on the top, although she didn’t think rabbit ears worked on TV’s anymore. 

             
"I know you're holding out on me, Mags," Shad said softly.  "I saw you!  You were standing there in the middle of an empty hallway like you were reaching out to someone…or touching someone.  That was super freaky, Mags."  Shad looked scared, and he reached for the door as if he were suddenly afraid of her, too.  "What I can't figure out is why YOU aren't freaked out, too."

             
"It was nothing, Shad!"  Maggie laughed weakly, and it sounded wrong even to her own ears.  Her ability to lie to strangers obviously didn't translate to lying to people she cared about.  "Everything is okay.  You don't have to worry."  At least that much was the truth, and the ring of sincerity must have satisfied Shad, because he sighed and proceeded to open his door. 

             
Suddenly, the lights of another vehicle swung around the corner, and a run-down pick-up truck jerked to a halt alongside Irene's classic Caddie.  Shad froze in his seat, his hand gripping the open door.

             
"Shaddy!  Is that you, baby?  Shadrach!  Come help me with my bags."  A thin, black woman with matted corn-rows hanging half way down her back tumbled out of the driver's seat and was pulling odds and ends out of the back of the poorly parked truck.  Apparently, Malia Jasper had decided to come home.  Maggie looked at her young friend and wondered what was worse, losing your mother to death, like she had, or losing her year after year, over and over again, every time she decided to split.

             
The door to the little house opened, and Gus's thin frame filled the doorway, backlit by the blue glow of the television.  He flipped on the porch light, and even from the harsh shadow, Maggie could see the strain on his face.

             
"See you tomorrow, Mags," Shad sighed like he carried the weight of the world, or at least Honeyville, on his shoulders. He stepped out of the car and shut the heavy door behind him.

             
"Shad!"  Maggie called after him, wondering if she should hang around for moral support.  Shad leaned down, sticking his head through the partially opened window.  “Please go, okay, Mags?  Just .....just go, okay?"  He pleaded sweetly, and Maggie nodded her consent.

             
He withdrew his head, and Maggie backed out, wishing she could help, but knowing that there wasn't a damn thing she could do.  Yep, life sucked sometimes. 

***

             
Maggie wasn’t sure what had awakened her – but the moonlight shone brightly through her open curtains, and the room was lit up in white moon glow.  She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up, disoriented and grumpy.  She cried out in terror as a big man suddenly loomed at the end of her bed.  He didn’t lunge for her or seek to silence her scream, but instead lumbered over to the cushioned window seat that jutted out below her big window that looked out over Irene’s flower garden.  She knew him…he’d been in her room before.

             
With some difficulty, Roger Carlton knelt beside the window seat and pulled the cushion off.  Inserting a key into a little lock that had been covered by the pillow, he lifted the seat, exposing a hollowed out area that looked empty except for the large book of some sort that he pulled from inside.  Grunting heavily, he heaved himself up, shut the lid, and then sank back down on it.  When he opened the heavy tome, Maggie could see what looked like newsprint and black and white photos. 

             
The ghost of Roger Carlton perused the pages slowly, one by one.  Maggie couldn’t see what he was looking at, but he seemed absorbed by what he studied, his face twisted in concentration.  She knew he wasn’t really in her room.  This was simply something he’d done many times when he was alive, and she was getting a repeat performance…again.  The book he read may very well be sitting inside the window bench at this very moment, or it could have been moved before he died.  Still, her heart pounded and her limbs shook as she watched him finger the words and pictures intently, turning a page only after staring at the previous one for what seemed an eternity.

             
Suddenly, his image winked out, and Maggie was left staring at the empty bench, its cushion restored, completely alone in her room.  On shaking legs, she crept from her bed and pulled the thin cushion from the bench.  She tried to lift the lid as she had seen Roger do, but it was locked tight.  Maggie stood, looking out the window into the backyard at the light and shadows that colored the empty flower beds, leafless trees, and bristly shrubs in varying shades of grey.  She would really have to see about getting a new room.  This was the second time she’d had to wake up to Roger Carlton.  She didn’t think she could stomach sharing her room with his old secrets.

8

“LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT”

Kitty Kallen - 1954

             
Maggie didn't see Johnny on Monday before school, though she came early and waited, trying to dance and failing miserably.  She had even called out to him and tried not to be hurt when he didn't come.  What had happened?  Had the revelation of the year been too much for him?  She had thought of a million things she wanted to ask him, and a million things she could have told him.  She should tell him how his mother had married, he would like that wouldn't he?  She could tell him what Gus had told her, that his mother had never really stopped looking for him, and how she had never believed he had left his brother willingly.  But those things were so personal.  How could she possibly talk to him about anything like that?  The whole thing was a minefield that Maggie was afraid she would have to cross at some point.  If she ever got to see him again, that is.