by Stacey Kade
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.
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. W
hy 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.
All 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.