The Ghost and the Goth (4 page)

A crowd surrounded Killian, people I’d never seen before. A man in an old-timey military uniform, some chick in a (gag) pink polka-dot prom dress, a young guy in a baby blue tuxedo with a ruffled front (maybe polka-dot’s date?), some dude dressed as a basketball player, only his shorts were
waaay
too short and his socks were pulled up all the way to his knees, two girls in poodle skirts (no lie!) and those black-and-white shoes … and those were just the ones I could see. The mass just kept shifting and moving around him, making it impossible to see all of them, and the racket was unbelievable.

“Tell my granddaughter that—”

“—My parents need to know it was an accident.”

“I’m sorry, kid. I didn’t know this would happen. Listen, though, if you can tell my boy—”

“Did I make it? Did we win? I can’t remember—”

“Thank God, you can see us. We’ve been waiting so long to tell someone—”

I stuck my fingers in my ears to block the voices.

Childish, I know, but it was either that or scream. There were so many of them, and the pleading and the crying ate away at my last nerve. Why wasn’t Mrs. Pederson, the Brit lit teacher, out here breaking this up? She hated “hallway disruptions,” and they were right outside her classroom door. Who were these people anyway? Some of them looked young enough to go to school here, but I’d never seen them before. And with their clothes—can you say fashion crisis?—I would have totally remembered them.

Then I saw a familiar face in the crowd. He’d ditched his mop and bucket somewhere along the way, but I’d recognize that disgusting blue jumpsuit anywhere. My friend, the creepy janitor, was talking to Will.

I lowered my fingers from my ears to try to hear him.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” he whined, pawing at Will’s shoulder. “You got to tell them that. Those kids …they were asking for it, teasing me like that. Didn’t give that judge no right to kill me.”

Holy crap. He
was
dead … at least as dead as me. That meant they probably all were: polka-dot girl, tuxedo guy, basketball-player dude, all of them. And every single one of them had gotten to Will Killian before me.

Ugh. I hate waiting in line.

A
ll I had to do was make it through the day. Not easy, but possible. I’d survived for years before Dr. Miller had taught me the music trick, something he’d found helped his real schizophrenic patients. Once I got home this afternoon, I’d casually mention that Brewster took away my medically authorized privileges for being under a minute late. The tardy thing would be the only excuse Brewster could offer without adding credence to my “wild stories.” For that, my mom would be on the phone with the school in a flash. It was all about looking like I didn’t
need
it. Ridiculous, but I knew it would work.

Trouble was, that meant about six hours of torture stood between me and my goal, and Grandpa Brewster wasn’t helping.

“I always knew there was something different about you.” He followed me out of the office, sounding overjoyed. They all do, at first. “I need you to do something for me.”

I tucked my head down and started walking toward my Brit lit class, ignoring him.

“Now, don’t go and do that, kid.” He chased after me. “We both know you can hear me. I just need you to deliver a couple of messages.”

That’s how it starts. Just messages. It sounds simple enough, but wait.

“First, my son, he lives in Florida. I need you to go there and talk to him for me. I want him to know that I’m sorry for all the things I did and said to him… . I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”

Uh-huh. See? Now not only am I flying out of state, I’m also supposed to talk to a man I’ve never met to explain to him that his dead father wants forgiveness. When I was younger, I used to try to help them, all the ones that talked to me. Obviously, flying out of state to deliver a message wasn’t possible then, either, but I did what I could. It only made things worse, though. The people who didn’t believe me inevitably ended up screaming at me or calling my mom, or worse yet, the cops. The people who did believe would have kept me there for days, crying and pleading with me to stay as a stand-in for their loved one. As a kid, that freaked me out more than the people who shouted at me. No thanks.

“Then, I need you to tell him not to give up on Sonny. I know you and Sonny don’t get along real good, but you have to talk to him, too. Tell him it’s not too late. He doesn’t have to screw it up the way I did.”

Me talk to Sonny, as in Principal Brewster, voluntarily? I don’t think so. I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulders and turned down the hallway to Mrs. Pederson’s class. Maybe she’d have a movie today—something I wouldn’t have to concentrate on while trying to tune out good old Grandpa whispering in my ear.

“It’s important,” Grandpa Brewster insisted. “Please. You’re the only one I’ve found who can do this.”

My resolve wavered a bit. The nice ones were always harder to ignore. I felt bad for them, stuck in that in-between place, watching the world and the consequences of their mistakes but unable to do anything to fix them. I couldn’t get involved, though. They would land me in a mental ward yet, if I let them.

Pulling Mrs. Piaget’s note from my pocket, I pushed open the door to Mrs. Pederson’s classroom, interrupting her midlecture. Great. I couldn’t catch a break today.

I handed her my pass and slipped toward the back of the classroom to my seat. Joonie, in the seat in front of me, turned her head slightly back toward me, pretending to examine the broken and chipped black polish on her fingernails. “Everything okay?” she muttered. Up close, I could see the dark smudgy makeup smeared under her eyes, and the safety pins in her lower lip flashed as she spoke. Today she was dressed in her standard uniform of a military surplus jacket, black T-shirt, a raggedy looking plaid skirt, torn stockings, and black Chucks. In addition to the safety pins, she also wore a variety of earrings in the outer shell of her ear, all the way from the bottom of the lobe up to where her ear touched her scalp. One of those earrings was a small silver hoop that matched the three in my left ear in virtually the same position—we got them at the same time. We’d been friends since freshman year—back when her name was April, her hair was blond, and she was the better student—so she knew the score with Brewster even if she didn’t know why.

I kept my gaze pointed down at my backpack while I pulled out the Brit lit textbook and my folder. We’d learned, the hard way, that Mrs. Pederson wasn’t as likely to catch you talking in class if she didn’t see you looking at each other. “Same old,” I said.

That wasn’t exactly true. Grandpa Brewster stood about a foot and a half off my right elbow, glowering at me, and the other dead in the room were taking notice.

In every room full of humans, you have about half as many dead. Some are associated with particular people, some are associated with a particular place, and some are just wanderers. In Brit lit, there were only about seven or eight on a regular basis. Most of them stayed tucked back out of the way—they hated the sensation of being walked through—and they didn’t usually cause a ruckus. That would change, rather quickly, though, if they found out someone could hear and see them.

In class today, we had a few grandfathers and grandmothers—I could only tell because of the clothing styles: out-of-date military uniforms, June Cleaver wide-and-puffy skirts with stiletto heels, and really short and wide ties on the men wearing suits. When people die naturally—of old age or whatever—and their energy stays here, that energy usually appears in the form of how the people thought of themselves. No one ever thinks of themselves as old, so they usually revert back to their early twenties, and the clothing changes, too.

At the front of the room, you had Liesel Marks, Mrs. Pederson’s high school best friend, and Liesel’s boyfriend, Eric. I hadn’t yet managed to catch Eric’s last name. Liesel did most of the talking. I wasn’t even quite sure why Eric was still hanging around. He seemed bored most of the time. Liesel and Eric had died in a car accident sometime in the late seventies while on their way home from the prom, hence her long polka-dot dress and his blue tuxedo. The ghosts of people who’d died violently and/or unexpectedly were essentially stuck in their moment of death.

From what I’d gathered during Liesel’s incessant rambling, Liesel had ditched plans with Claire, Mrs. Pederson, to go to the prom with Eric, a boy Claire had liked herself. Now, she was convinced that those two things, along with the sex she’d had with him in the backseat, had damned her to this in-between place until Claire forgave her.

Jackson Montgomery, however, was tied to the school rather than any particular person. He’d died unexpectedly on the basketball court here at school in the early eighties, thanks to one of those hidden heart defects you sometimes hear about on the news. He’d been a star forward, leading the team to the state finals when he fell to the floor in the middle of the deciding game. No defibrillators on-site back in those days. He’d died and the team lost, but Jackson, or Jay, didn’t seem to be aware of either of those things. Today, like every other day, he occupied an empty desk, his feet tapping against the floor in his eagerness to be called to the gym for the pep rally before that last game.

And, of course, we had Grandpa Brewster. “You can’t ignore me forever. I saw what you can do with my own eyes,” he said far too loudly.

I did my best not to wince. Damn Brewster for taking away Marcie.

One of the young-looking grandfathers fired a glare at Grandpa. “Hey, buddy, you mind keeping it down over there? My granddaughter’s trying to learn here.”

“She can’t hear me. Hellooooo?” Grandpa B. cupped his hands and shouted at the girl—Jennifer Meyer, one of Alona Dare’s cheerleading cronies, as a matter of fact. Of course, she didn’t even blink. If anything, she looked like she was about to doze off.

“Stop that,” Jennifer’s grandfather ordered. He was wearing a suit and one of those goofy-looking short ties—he looked like a mobster out of an old movie.

Grandpa B.ignored him and turned back to face me. “Do you see what I have to put up with, kid? Just do this one favor for me, and I can leave this way station to hell.” He glared over his shoulder at Jennifer’s grandfather, who, surprisingly, responded by flipping him the bird.

It sounded good, easy even, but experience had taught me otherwise. Half the time, the dead didn’t even know why they were still hanging around. Just because he was eager to deliver messages to his son and grandson was no guarantee that he’d be free afterward. Actually, it might be the opposite. The few times I’d witnessed people “moving on,” it had only been after doing or admitting something they’d put off as long as possible. Even in death, people were in denial.

I stared resolutely toward the front of the room, trying to concentrate on Mrs. Pederson.

“Some say that Shakespeare didn’t write all of these plays,” she droned on.

“You want to go visit Lil this afternoon?” Joonie whispered from the corner of her mouth.

“It’s only Thursday,” I said without thinking. For the last eight months, we’d gone to the hospital on Friday—the only day my mom worked the afternoon shift at the diner and therefore wouldn’t freak when I didn’t come home right away.

Joonie twisted around in her seat, her bright blue eyes flashing with anger. “You have a problem with going more than once a week?”

“Don’t take none of that attitude from her,” Grandpa advised over my shoulder.

I caught myself shaking my head at him and forced myself to stop. “Of course not,” I told Joonie, taken aback a little by her sudden fury. “It’s just—”

“… Isn’t that right, Ms. Travis?” Mrs. Pederson came to stand at the head of our aisle, glaring down at us.

“Yeah,” Joonie answered sullenly.

“Yes, what?” Mrs. Pederson taunted.

“
Romeo and Juliet
was written as a tragedy, not a romance as most people think.” Joonie had an amazing ability to parrot back what she’d heard, even if her attention was occupied elsewhere. My life would have been so much easier if I had that gift.

A few people snickered.

Mrs. Pederson’s mouth pursed, and she twirled her finger in the air—the sign most of us would associate with saying “big deal” in a sarcastic manner. Only in here it meant “turn around.”

Once, Joonie would have rolled her eyes at me and we would have laughed about it, but now she just turned away from me in disgust and flopped back in her seat.

I waited until Mrs. Pederson moved on, her eyes focused on some other part of the room. “Joon,” I whispered.

She ignored me, fumbling to pull her battered book bag onto her lap.

“Come on …” I pleaded.

She ducked her head and dug around in her bag, resolutely pretending I didn’t exist.

“She won’t talk to you, but I will,” Grandpa B. offered.

Great. At the rate things were going with the few friends I had left, basically Joonie, I might have to take him up on that.

Before Joonie had morphed into the mass of black clothes and bad attitude she was currently, she’d been the weird girl who refused to shower after gym class, whose clothes didn’t quite match, and whose hair stuck up in odd places, like she’d never bothered to brush it before leaving the house in the morning. She had two older sisters—one a doctor and one with a full scholarship to some snooty women’s college on the East Coast—who could do no wrong. Joonie never measured up, and her father, an ultraconservative Baptist minister in town, always made that very clear.

Back then, I’d been pretty much the same guy I was now—the weirdo often caught muttering to himself or flopping on the floor in some kind of bizarre seizure. Then, at the end of my freshman year, when my dad … did what he did, that only made things worse, in every way imaginable.

In the beginning, Joonie and I had eaten together, walked to class, and partnered on projects together, because that meant we weren’t alone. Now we were friends. We still didn’t have that much in common, but our friendship worked. At least, it used to.

That changed when Lily moved here. Lily Turner had lived in some little town in southern Indiana until halfway through her sophomore year when her mom got a job transfer here. She’s a line manager for one of the Caterpillar manufacturing facilities.

Joonie’d found Lily looking lost and close to tears in the cafeteria on her first day and ventured a wary “Hi.”

Lily later told us that her school at home had consisted of about a hundred kids total. Her accent was heavy, and her clothes were all wrong. She wore church clothes every day—a long patterned skirt and a high-necked shirt or sweater.

The Jesus Club kids wouldn’t take her because Joonie, clearly a devil worshipper by the way she dressed, had talked to her. The braniacs were angry with her because she was smart enough that her arrival might screw up the class rankings. She didn’t play an instrument, nor did she have an unnatural love for math or science. The first-tier elite didn’t even know she existed. In short, she didn’t belong anywhere. So Joonie had taken her in.

Something about Lily made everyone, especially Joonie, light up. She was just so … uncalculating, so refreshing in her honesty. She was fascinated by our choice to rebel against the mainstream, not really understanding, I don’t think, that it wasn’t so much a choice as a process of elimination. She’d never seen anyone with lip piercings before except on television. She laughed, and blushed, easily.