The Ghost and the Goth (3 page)

“If you do, you’ll know she’ll pull you out of here in an instant and dump you in the nuthouse.” His gaze dropped down to my feet and the carpet. Only Grandpa Brewster and I could see the scorch marks. The damage to my shoe was real enough in this world, but unless someone touched the melted rubber on the side of my sole to find that it was still warm and freshly burned, it could have happened anytime. “I’m beginning to think that’s where you belong.”

“Then let me have my music back. It … helps.” I stole a quick sideways glance at Grandpa Brewster, who still stood next to me, silent for once as he watched our exchange. That couldn’t be good.

Brewster smiled, an expression of his I’d learned to dread. He turned (“About-face!”) and strode to his office door, pulling it open. “Mrs. Piaget!” he barked.

Something crashed, and I heard the sound of pencils or pens clattering as they hit the desk and rolled off onto the linoleum floor. “Uh, yes, sir?”

“Write Mr. Killian a pass to class. Tell his first-hour teacher he is not to have any kind of distraction during class, including music. Then, make sure the rest of his teachers know as well.”

“But, sir, he has—”

“That will be all.” He closed the door with a snap.

“I could skip class,” I pointed out as he returned to stand behind his massive desk. It wasn’t like I’d never done that before. I still managed a 3.4 GPA.

“I could recommend expulsion,” he said.

Dr. Miller, my psychiatrist, would be thrilled. It would give him just the excuse he needed to make the more permanent arrangements he felt I needed “to be safe.” Translation: a steady lithium drip and a kid who eats gravel as my roommate.

“What is your problem?” I demanded. “I’ve never done anything to you.” Until today, obviously. But he’d held this grudge from the first instant I’d met him.

“Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Killian?” He began shoving my books, notebooks, and folders back into my backpack any which way, crumpling pages and tearing paper. “You are an insult to every student here making a real effort. You’re a bad influence on otherwise responsible and well-behaved children, like young Miss Turner.”

I felt sucker-punched at the mention of Lily, but I refused to let it show. “That was a first-tier party.” No way in hell I was there. She shouldn’t have been either.

Brewster ignored me. “Not to mention, you’re a disruption and a distraction with all of your ‘special needs.’”

“You say that to all the sick kids?”

He paused, sensing trouble from a new direction. Public schools weren’t allowed to discriminate … for any reason. “You’re not sick, Killian. You’re troubled, maybe, and desperate for attention anyway you can get it, including manipulating your mother and digging through my trash to find out about my personal life. But you are not sick.”

I rolled my eyes. Why did people always think it was the garbage? Like they wouldn’t have noticed someone headfirst in one of their trash cans at the curb. I couldn’t remember how many times I’d had this argument. “What could you have possibly thrown away that would tell me your father is gay and—”

“You think you’re so clever. It’s my job to teach you that you aren’t, prepare you for the real world.” He chucked my now full backpack at me, but I caught it before it slammed into my gut.

“What if I’m telling the truth? Did you ever consider that?”

“It’s just a bunch of nonsense you’ve sold to that quack your mother takes you to.”

Actually, Dr. Miller had diagnosed me as schizophrenic—a real disease that was in the medical books and everything—but that wasn’t what was wrong with me. The voices I heard and the things I saw … they were real, even though no one else could see them. As far as I knew, medicine didn’t recognize that condition. Popular culture did, thanks to TV shows like
Medium
and
Ghost Whisperer
(Jennifer Love Hewitt is hot, but that show sucks ass) and various movies. But try telling one of the three adolescent psychiatrists in the dinky town that is Decatur that you see dead people. See what happens. It’s called a twenty-four-hour involuntary commitment.

“We’re done here.” Brewster stepped out from behind his desk and jerked his door open. “Get to class.”

As much as I hated being in his office, it was safer here than the hallway or even the classrooms. The fewer living people in the room, the fewer dead follow. In here I only had Grandpa B. to deal with, but out there, I’d be surrounded, engulfed, drowning in a sea of people dying to be heard. One of them in particular also seemed willing to kill me to get his point, whatever it was, across.

The thought of confronting him without Marcie or anything else to serve as a distraction made my palms damp with sweat. If he found me here and now, exposed like this, I’d be lucky if I ended up in the psych ward.

“Look, I only have a few weeks left here.” Focusing on a splotch of white on the nubbly carpeting where someone had obviously tried to bleach out a stain, I forced the words out, keeping my gaze down. I couldn’t stand to see him gloating. “I want to be out of here as much as you want me gone. Just let me have my music back. Please.”

“Means that much to you, hmm?” His highly polished black shoes, within my range of vision, rocked back on their heels and then forward again.

“Yes—” I grimaced and forced the next word out “—sir.”

“Good. Then the consequences of going without will hold some significance for you.”

I jerked my gaze up from the floor to stare at him in shock. “Bastard.”

“Watch it, kid,” Grandpa Brewster muttered next to my ear.

An arrogant smile spread across Brewster’s face. Without taking his gaze from me, he called to the outer office again. “Mrs. Piaget, set Mr. Killian up with an after-school detention as well.”

“Oh … okay,” came the distant and faintly dismayed reply.

He gestured to the open doorway. “Time to collect your winnings, sport.”

In the process of hitching my backpack over my shoulders again, I stopped dead. Of all the stupid little names he could have chosen … “Don’t call me that.”

“What?” Brewster looked confused for a second before understanding dawned, along with an evil gleam in his eye. Never give a bully more ammunition, I know, but I couldn’t let that one go. I just couldn’t.

“What’s wrong with sport, sport?” Triumph rang in his voice. He’d found a weapon to get under my skin, and he wielded it with glee.

“Don’t.”

“Why not … sport?”

I could have told him the truth—that had been my father’s nickname for me, and hearing it from him with such disdain and condescension made me want to beat his face in. But that would have only given him more to work with. I could also have gone the human rights way—I’m a person with a name, use it—but he wouldn’t care about that. So, instead I went for the more direct route.

“Don’t call me that, or I’ll tell you things that’ll make you wish to God you’d turned your service weapon on yourself that night instead of chucking it in the Sangamon River.”

His mouth worked helplessly, but no words emerged.

Brewster had nearly offed himself thirty-some years ago, a few years after he’d come back from Vietnam, a young man who’d seen and done too much in a jungle half a world away. He eventually chucked his gun into the river instead, embarrassed about the fact that he’d even thought about suicide—a quitter’s way out. His grandfather—dead only a couple of years at that point—had been right beside him the whole time. The dead see everything, man, whether you want them to or not, and they tell a lot of it to me, even if they don’t know I’m listening.

“That’s nothing you should be talking about, kid.” Grandpa B. sounded alarmed.

I ignored him and pushed past Brewster to collect my pass, detention slip, and a sympathetic smile from Mrs. Piaget in the outer office.

I was opening the door to the main hall before Brewster recovered enough to emerge from his office, eyes wild, hands clenched at his sides.

“Let’s see how you survive the rest of the year without your special privileges, you little freak,” he spat at me, but he didn’t come any closer. Good enough for me.

“Bob!” Mrs. Piaget turned to stare at him.

Ha. It would be a miracle if I could make it an hour. But at least, when they carried me out, he wouldn’t be calling me sport. I nodded. “You’re on.”

T
he surface beneath me felt way harder than my bed and nowhere near soft enough to be a cloud. I reached out a hand without opening my eyes, and my fingers brushed over … was that gravel?

Opening my eyes, I found myself—where else?—just to the left of the yellow line on Henderson. Not a dream, not heaven, just right back where I’d started from. Dead in the middle of the road.

I sat up, swallowing the urge to start crying again. I mean, clearly I was trapped in hell, right? Doomed to live on, unseen and unheard, while my best friend makes out, goes to college with, and eventually marries my boyfriend. Just the thought of it made me want to curl up in a ball right there in the road.

So I did, resting my cheek against the warming asphalt. What, like I had somewhere else to be? Like someone would see me? Then I remembered how many times I’d seen hick guys spitting tobacco out the car window on their way to school—gross!—and I moved to the curb.

Behind me, the tennis courts filled with the sounds of life, people laughing, tennis balls bouncing, and the chain-link fence clanking. I turned around, startled. It was Mrs. Higgins’s first-hour gym class—I used to see them trooping across the softball field to the courts when I was in government and staring out the window in utter boredom, wishing I was anywhere but there.

It was halfway through first hour, already? This was not the way things usually worked. For the last three days, whenever I’d gotten tired—yeah, that still happened—I’d made my way home, curled up on the couch in my dad’s study, and closed my eyes. Then, presto. When I’d opened my eyes it was 7:00 a.m. again—I could tell by the buses going by—and I was on the road. Literally. It was like some giant reset button got pressed every day.

But this time … I didn’t know what to think. I’d never been “reset” in the middle of the morning before. Of course, I’d never disappeared before, either. I shivered. Where exactly had I gone? I couldn’t remember. Did it matter? Not really. I was still stuck here, that much was clear. Stuck here and helpless.

I stared past the tennis courts to the window where my government class went on without me. Now I would have killed for the chance to be bored by Mr. Klopinski. To be alive. To take Misty down in front of the entire caf. Then we’d see who laughs at Alona Dare. Nobody, that’s who.

Except for maybe Will Killian.

Frowning, I stood up and started pacing, just in time for Jesse McGovern’s green and nasty hooptie to pass right through me as he sped from the parking lot to his loser classes at the trade school in town. I ignored the cold shuddery sensation, trying to focus on a vague memory struggling to come to the surface. I remembered hearing Leanne and Miles bitch about me and seeing Misty kissing Chris, that was clear enough. After that, though, everything started to get a little fuzzy. The bell had rung, and people had started walking into the building, and then …

Will Killian’s mocking smile and pale blue eyes appeared in my head. He’d laughed at me. He’d looked right at me and grinned, delighting in my misery. Any other day I would have been worried that someone like
him
was making fun of
me
, but today, all I could think about was, to do that, he had to have been able to see me. Hear me, even.

If Killian could see or hear me, maybe other people could, too. Maybe I wasn’t really dead. At least, not all the way. Though what I’d seen at my funeral would indicate otherwise. I’d watched them lower the casket into the ground and—

I shook my head, sending my hair flying across my face. No. I wouldn’t think about that now. Being dead and trapped here forever, unable to
do
anything, that wouldn’t be fair.

There had to be another explanation, and Killian probably knew all about it, freak that he was.

All I had to do was make him tell me.

Too easy. After all, he could
see
me, right? Freak or not, Killian was still a guy.

I flipped my hair back over my shoulders, smoothing it down. After another quick second to tug my shorts back down into place—evidently getting hit by a bus gives you a semipermanent wedgie—I was ready to go. I couldn’t do anything about the big tread mark that ran diagonally across my white shirt, though I hated it, and my favorite M·A·C lipstick was probably still in the locker I shared with Misty. If she hadn’t taken that for herself, too.

I looked pretty good for a dead girl, though, if I did say so myself. Not that I could see my reflection or anything, but when I’d first woken up here days ago, I’d immediately checked my arms and legs for gaping cuts and bones sticking out and gross stuff like that. I found nothing but a few bruises and scrapes that went away, like, the next day. My face, which I’d explored cautiously with my fingers, appeared similarly undamaged. Apparently, according to the coroner, I’d died of massive internal injuries. But nothing you could see out front. Awesome. Killian didn’t stand a chance.

For the second time today, I headed around the edge of the tennis courts and up toward the school building. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much farther this time than I had the first. Double doors, big glass ones with that chicken wire stuff threaded in between the panes, blocked the main entrance. Typically, they stood open when everyone got here in the morning, but now with classes in session, Principal Brewster had locked everything down tight. All the better to keep a random psychopath out, never mind the ones in the student body that were locked in by the same measure.

I reached for the metal handle, just to jiggle it to see if the door might pop open, and my hand passed through it. I yanked my hand back and cradled it against my chest until the cold tingling feeling passed. It didn’t make sense. Cars and people passed through me, yeah, but I still managed to walk on the ground, sit on a chair at the funeral home, and—

Suddenly the doors in front of me seemed to shift and grow larger. What the—?

I looked down and found my feet sinking into the concrete sidewalk, like at the beach when you dig your toes in and the wave washes more sand over you until your feet seem to be gone. Only this was the real thing.

Oh, no, no, no. I squeezed my eyes shut tight.
The ground is solid, the ground is solid.
I just kept repeating it to myself until I could feel, once more, the sensation of concrete beneath me.

I cracked one eyelid open to check and sure enough, I was back on the ground instead of in it. Unfortunately, my shoes and socks did not make the transition. My toenails, painted in Very Berry, sparkled up at me, under a light layer of dust. Great.

Whatever. At least I’d learned something.

“The ground is solid but the door is not. The ground is solid but the door is not.” I stepped forward, prepared to feel like an idiot when my head smacked the glass. Instead, the cold tingling sensation I’d felt in my hand when it passed through the handle spread through my whole body.

Then suddenly, I was on the other side of the door in the overheated little vestibule between the outer doors and the inner ones, standing on the rubber-backed mat they’d left out from the last rainy day. Yes! Finally something was going my way.

Following the same technique, I walked toward the second set of doors, and in seconds, I found myself barefoot on the cold linoleum in the main hall.

“All right!” I took a second to dance around like an idiot, tossing my hair the way a certain traitorous former friend of mine and I used to when it was just us and we were being stupid and watching videos on MTV2. In some respects, being able to do what you want without worrying about someone seeing you was kind of refreshing.

“Glad to see someone’s having a good day,” a morose voice said somewhere to my left.

I jumped and turned to see a janitor, dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit, approaching me slowly as he pushed one of those buckets on wheels. The school was set up like a giant
H
. The main hallway, where I stood, was the crossbar in the
H
. He was coming from the first left branch of the
H
, where the library and the English classrooms were.

“You can see me?” I whispered, hardly daring to believe it.

“Of course I can see you.” He paused, lifting the mop into the wringer thing at the top of the bucket and squeezing it. Dirty nasty water flowed out. “You’re tracking prints all over my nice clean floor.”

I turned around to look at the ground behind me and saw nothing but gleaming tile. “Uh, okay. Whatever.” I shook my head. “If you can see me, too, that means I must not be dead. At least, not completely, right?” I bounced on my toes in excitement. Forget the fact I was talking to the janitor—a thirty-year-old guy with bad skin who never left high school? Hello, his picture was the
definition
of loser—I finally had proof that things weren’t as bad as I thought.

He let out a bellowing laugh, revealing snaggly teeth and a serious need for whitening strips. “Honey, you’re definitely dead. You just ain’t the only one here.”

He pulled the mop from the bucket and plopped it on the floor, the carpeted floor. Only the main hall was tile. All the branches of the
H
, including the one where he still stood, had that gross, government surplus, every-color-and-no-color-at-the-same-time carpeting.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He ignored me, shoving the mop back and forth across the floor. “Damn kids, always leaving a mess.”

The carpet didn’t get wet, though, at least not that I could see, and then he was pushing past me with his mop.

“Watch it.” I jumped back, expecting a cascade of cold yucky water to reach my toes, but the water seemed to puddle only directly under his mop. Weird.

“Never thinking about what they do, what kind of work it makes for the rest of us,” he muttered, rolling his bucket past me.

“Wait.” I turned to follow him. “What did you mean I’m not the only one? I mean, yeah, clearly I’m not the only person who’s ever died but … Oh, my God.” Even as I watched, the janitor walked right through the trophy cases in the main hall, still mopping and mumbling to himself. Why would he do that? There was nothing behind that wall except the courtyard and …

I inhaled sharply. The old gym. The entrance had once been there. Before they built the new addition ...way back in, like, 1992. It was
soooo
before my time, but Maura Sedgwick, suck-up that she was, once did this big history project on the school. Total snoozefest, but the old pictures were kind of cool. You should have seen the way people ratted their hair back then. Totally gross. My mom … I mean, someone once told me that back in the sixties women used to use sugar water to make their hair stiff, and they’d wake up to find cockroaches nesting in there.
Ewww
.

Tragic hairstyles and bugs aside … did that mean the janitor guy was dead, too? He could walk through walls and stuff, just like me. But he could see me and hear me, just like Killian. Killian wasn’t dead. He just dressed like it.

I frowned. Answers would be good here. Unfortunately, none of the ones I came up with made any sense. That left me only with my original plan. Find Killian and make him tell me what was going on.

Before I could even pick a direction to start walking, though, the PA system speaker on the wall gave a preemptive staticky buzz. Cranky old Mrs. Piaget—she was, like, forty and totally hated me for looking like I do; I mean, hello, a little moisturizer wouldn’t kill her—was coming on to make announcements. Crap. That meant I only had a few minutes before second hour ended and everyone filled the halls. Given how cold and shaky it made me feel when one or two people passed through me, I had no interest in being trapped in the hallway with four hundred milling human bodies.

“Attention, attention.” Mrs. Piaget’s voice boomed into the main hall. “Mark Jacobsen and Tony Briggs, please report to the office before the start of third hour.”

Panicking, I ran toward the gym, the second right branch of the
H
. The auto body shop, a small outbuilding, was attached to the far side of the gym through a temporary walkway that they’d never gotten around to making permanent. It reportedly flooded every time it rained, not that I had much occasion to be over there, anyway. The auto body shop was where all the weirdos, outcasts, and burners lived, always getting a pass from the shop teacher, Mr. Buddy—no really, that was his name—for permission to leave the regular classes to finish up some “project.”

As I bolted past the office, also part of the main hall, I heard the sounds of a commotion nearby. People crying, yelling, even what sounded like begging. Oooh, a fight, maybe? Ask me when I was alive, and I would have totally denied it, but there was nothing more fun to watch than a girl fight.

Intrigued in spite of myself, I slowed to a stop, my feet slipping a bit on the tile, and peered down into the second left branch of the
H
, where all the noise seemed to be coming from. There, looking like the latest hip-hop star to be pulled into court, was Will Killian, staggering down the hallway, his head tucked under his sweatshirt hood and his shoulders hunched. Joonie Travis, the weird psycho goth girl with the dyed black hair from my psychology class, stood under his arm, helping him walk.