by Megan Crewe
If I squinted, I could almost make myself see Chester. His back stiff and upright under his starched white shirt, his arms folded primly across a desk that wasn’t there. Weird place to imagine a desk, but the ash tree had been his favorite spot. Every dead person seemed to have a place they liked best. They might leave it for a few hours now and then, but they never stayed away much longer. For Paige it was our house, for Norris the third floor of Frazer, for Bitzy the hall outside the gym, and for Chester, the front lawn, especially that tree.
He’d been a nice guy, Chester. He’d pick up all the parent gossip, hearing the murmurs exchanged in the cars as they dropped off their kids. I think he liked to pretend they were all his parents, too. Sometimes he’d even wander home with kids after school, but he’d never talk about what he saw. “Those things are meant to be private,” he told me once, his thin face even more serious than usual, when we were sitting under the tree at lunch hour like we often did.
He had a lot of opinions about right and wrong that way, and he wasn’t afraid to share them. It was kind of cool. The kids at Frazer, the living ones, could have learned a lot from him about honesty. From any of the dead, really.
Last June, he’d been here. In the summer, even, I’d wandered by a few times to shoot the breeze. But in September, I’d walked up to the tree on the first day of school, and he was gone. The faint smell of tea that had always hung in the air, even when he wasn’t by the tree—that was gone, too. I hadn’t seen him since.
I guess it made sense that the dead would go somewhere else, eventually. I mean, most people disappeared into the great unknown the second they stopped breathing. But he was the only dead person I’d known who’d been there and then not been.
Standing there on the school lawn, rubbing one of the leaves against my thumb, I felt my eyes go watery. I shook my head, trying to snap myself out of it. This wasn’t the place to get weepy.
The seniors by the stairs started moving. One flicked the roach into the corner, and they all packed into the school. I sighed. I could handle whatever happened—I’d handled worse. My boots squelched in the muck as I walked over to the door. I pushed inside and headed downstairs.
The hall outside the gym was empty, but the usual early morning basketball practice was in full swing. The coach’s shouts echoed through the doors, and balls pounded on the wooden floor. A girl bounded out of the gym and jogged to the water fountain, her face shiny with sweat. I walked past her, toward the pay phone alcove.
Bitzy shot through the wall like she’d been launched from a catapult. She spun around on one foot and followed with a plié. “I knew you were here,” she said. “I just knew it.”
I yawned, covering my mouth with my hand. “I’m here,” I agreed. “Way too friggin’ early.”
“Well, I’ve got stuff to tell you.” She put her hands on her hips and twisted at the waist one way and then the other. “Not so good as yesterday, of course, but hard to top that, right?”
“Right,” I said, my mood lifting. The thing with Tim had thrown me so far off I’d almost forgotten how close I was to seeing Danielle’s fall from grace. “So what’s up?”
“Well, there was this guy—shaved head, nice muscles, wears a baseball jersey all the time? He was telling his friends—”
As she talked, a door whined open down the hall. Whoever was holding it paused and leaned against it, the sharp angle of a shoulder showing through the window. A female voice chirped, “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think, Tim?”
I cut off Bitzy’s sentence with a “shhhht.” She leaned over to take a look.
“What?” she said, glimmering with curiosity.
“Never mind. I’ve got to go.”
“But I didn’t finish telling you!”
“I’ll be back later, and we’ll talk lots then. I promise.”
“You’d better.”
I cut through the cafeteria and headed up to my locker. My heart was pounding. Calm down, I told myself. It wasn’t like he’d come racing through the school after me. Then the people whose opinions he cared about might see him.
I walked past the few freshmen already scattering the hall. The scent of Norris’s hair oil hung in the air, but the kid himself was nowhere to be seen. Out watching track practice, I hoped. He’d remember about that for the next couple days, and then I’d have to remind him again. It could take a while to get something I could really use. Paul might have been just a few gropes shy of making it with Sharry, but now Danielle would be on red alert. He’d be steering clear of the equipment shed, I’d bet on that.
I opened my locker and stared at its contents. What classes did I have today, anyway? There was too much going on; I could hardly think. I closed my eyes and tried to push it all aside, if only for a moment.
Shoes squeaked on the linoleum around the corner. The soft, spaced footsteps of someone tall but light on his feet. I turned around.
Tim ambled around the bend, jerking to a stop when he saw me.
My options flitted through my head like leaves in a gust of wind. I could take off again. I could shut him down before he even got started. But . . .
I looked at him standing there awkwardly, his hands slung in his pockets, and all the snappy remarks I’d been forming died in my throat. Whatever Tim believed of the stuff people said about me, here he was in front of me, in the school this time, where people could see. I had to give him credit for that. If he wanted to take another stab at telling me what the hell he wanted with me, maybe I should give him a chance. I didn’t have to say anything about me if I didn’t think I could trust him.
“Hi,” I said.
“Uh, hi.” Tim swiped at the sprinkling of bangs that brushed his pale eyebrows. “I . . . look, I’m really sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean—It got a little crazy.”
“Yeah, it did.”
“Can we—Would you give me another chance to explain?”
“Sure. Spill away.”
“No one’s using the student council office right now,” he said. “We can talk there.”
I followed him down the hall and around the corner, past the classrooms, to the little side hall where the student council did its work. Tim pulled a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door. He held it open for me to step inside. There were a couple of couches and a coffee table between them, a computer on a desk in the corner, and a mini fridge beside it. I settled down on one of the couches, sweeping aside chip crumbs. Tim sat across from me. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees.
“All right,” I said, to get us on the right track, “so this is about your mom, right?”
For a few seconds, he lost his tongue. He inhaled, slowly.
“I guess you know, a couple months ago—”
“She died,” I said, nodding. “What do you think that has to do with me?”
He looked at his hands, then up at me again. There was no trace of yesterday’s smile. “I think,” he said carefully, “that you know something about those books I was carrying. Is that right?”
I eyed him and said nothing. I’d agreed to listen, not to talk.
“So, I mean, can you do it? Like, contact the other side? Or maybe you know a way, or you know someone who does. . . . I know it’s not really my business, but . . . it’s really important to me.”
He sounded desperate. Really desperate. A feeling I could recognize. I ran my fingers along the edge of the coffee table, watching him.
“If there’s some way I could talk to her,” he continued, the words rushing out now, “contact her, see her, however it works, I’d do anything. I know it’s a weird thing to ask. I just thought there was a chance that you might have some idea—”
I held up my hand, and his mouth snapped shut. So he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t heard her. He just wanted to. And he didn’t know what I could do, just that I could do something psychic or magical, nothing specific, just enough for him to wonder.
I bit my lip. I could tell him I didn’t know, that what I did ha
d nothing to do with this, that he should just try whatever those books told him to do, and maybe it would work out. He missed his mom, and I was sorry for him, but he was also Tim Reed, VP. Tim who was good friends with Matti and Paul and Danielle and the rest of them. . . .
Something clicked, and the gears in my brain started whirring so fast I could almost hear them.
Tim would know things about Paul, about Danielle, things Norris and Bitzy might never stumble onto. This was the key to the vault, handed right to me. If I worked things right, I could have enough to show everyone—to show Danielle—just how far from perfect she was. And Tim would get what he wanted at the same time. Both of us, happy. What kind of idiot would I be to pass on a chance like that?
I’d be the kind of idiot who’d rather keep a few things secret from the school VP.
“Have you told anyone?” I said.
His forehead crinkled. “Told?”
“About the contacting-the-dead thing.”
He had the nerve to laugh. “Are you crazy? Tell people I’m trying to get in touch with my dead mother? Yeah, right.”
Of course not. “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean about me.”
“I haven’t said anything about you.”
“Not even a hint? Why do your friends think you’re bugging me?”
“You think they know?” he said. “They wouldn’t even care. Anyway, this has nothing to do with them. Look, I’m not going to say anything to anyone about any of this.”
He had all the symptoms of sincerity, too: the clenched hands, the unblinking gaze, the defiant chin.
“We’ve got to be clear,” I said. “If I do hear you’ve been talking about me, and I will hear if you do, you’ll get the opposite of help. All right?”
He nodded.
“And I’ll want you to do a few things in exchange.” I hesitated and decided to leave it at that. He’d be more likely to let something slip about his friends if he didn’t know what I was after.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s fair.”
“I can’t guarantee anything,” I continued, measuring my words. “Do you have any reason to think your mom’s stuck around?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“Well, I can’t just snap my fingers. A lot of people are just gone, and that’s that. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll find nothing.”
“That’s okay,” Tim said, hope flickering in his eyes. “I just want to try.”
I let out my breath. “As long as you’re ready. She could have been the best mom ever and still have shot off to the next plane of existence without a second thought. They just do that.”
Tim nodded, but his face shifted. The top part, around the eyes, started to sag, at the same time his mouth and jaw tensed up. That moment sealed the deal. I looked at him, and it was Paige all over again. Paige pulling that face four years ago, every time she’d screamed herself silly trying to get Mom to hear her. Paige making it this morning when she’d remembered Mom was away, again, as always.
Part of me said that Tim had no right to look that way, that lost. He had a dad, he had tons of friends, he had hope. If he had any clue what it was like, to really be left, the way Paige was, with no one but me and none of the people she wished she had . . .
But all of me knew that you couldn’t fake that face. Not in a million years. Everything he’d said, he meant it.
“All right,” I said. “I’m in. For now.”
“Thank you,” Tim said. “Really, thank you. I already have a bunch of stuff . . . obviously we can’t do anything here.” He twisted around on the couch and looked at the wall clock. I think he’d have dragged me off right then if he could have.
“Missing math will kill me, but I can skip the afternoon,” he said. “Catch you at the beginning of lunch?”
I shrugged. If Mr. VP figured it was okay to cut a couple classes, I wasn’t going to play the Goody Two-shoes. “Works for me.”
CHAPTER
6
Two hours later, I was sitting in history class listening to Mr. Minopoplis lecture about the Civil War, and my stomach was churning in its own little rebellion. What the hell had I done? Tim had looked at me with his sad eyes and I’d agreed to help him—Tim, who had dozens of girls fawning over him, who could have had anything he wanted.
Except this. No one else could tell him if his mom had stuck around.
I probably should have just kept my mouth shut. What if I didn’t find her? He’d be disappointed, maybe even angry, despite all his reassurances. Who was to say he wouldn’t go running his mouth off about me then?
Even if I did find his mom, then what? What I knew about mother-son relationships could share the space on a single neuron with my understanding of steam engine maintenance. Probably I knew more about steam engines.
I’d tried to do it the other way around once. There’d been a girl hanging out by my junior high school, one of the first dead people I’d seen after Paige. I had no idea what I was doing, only that this kid kept bugging me to let her parents know she was still around, and it was driving me even crazier than I already felt. So I dug up her mom’s e-mail address and tried to get in touch. The mom, unsurprisingly, was even less certain of my sanity than I was. She sent back a screaming message threatening to call the police on me if I mentioned her daughter again.
And look at Paige and Mom. Was I setting Tim up for something like that, knowing his mom was there but never being able to talk to her, to hear her acknowledge him?
I pressed the heels of my hands against my forehead. I had to get out of here, give myself a little time to think. It was almost lunchtime. I could probably get away with a puke run.
If you dash out of class with your hand over your mouth, teachers assume you’re off to empty your guts into a toilet and will forgive you for not coming back. Especially if, like Mr. Minopoplis, they happen to know that you happen to know that they filched one of the school’s TVs last year.
With the way my stomach was flip-flopping, I wasn’t totally faking. I slid my arm into one of my shoulder straps and checked to see if Mr. M had noticed my preparations. He was busy writing a bunch of dates on the chalkboard. Jumping up, I swung my pack over my shoulder, clamped my hand to my mouth, and ran. I was out of the room before Mr. M even turned around.
I kept running until I got to the stairs, in case someone peeped out to see where I was going. Heading up to my locker, I slowed to a jog. My heart pounded against the tightness in my chest. When I got to the end of the hall, I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the cool steel. Sighing, I willed my body to relax.
Norris seeped out of the wall so close his jacket tingled through the side of my arm. “You’re out early,” he said.
I straightened up and opened my eyes. “Broke out of class.”
“Cool.” He hunched his shoulders, his jacket collar brushing his ears. “Something going down that I should know about?”
“Got a little field trip happening in a few minutes.”
His eyes lit up. “Where’re you going?”
“I’m not sure. I’m going on a ghost hunt for someone’s dead mom, so we could end up just about anywhere.”
I hefted my backpack, then chucked the whole thing in my locker. The afternoon was going to be hard enough without lugging that thing around. To hell with homework.
Norris floated around me. “A ghost hunt?” he said. “What for?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I said.
“I guess not. Who is this someone, anyway?”
“Tim,” I said. “You remember the note—and this morning . . .”
Norris stared at me. “Doesn’t that guy have enough people doing favors for him? I thought he was near the top of the hit list.”
“Well . . .” I scowled at my locker. “He kept bugging me. And I figured I might get some dirt out of it. And anyway, it’s not like anyone else can do this favor for him.”
“Hey, if you think it’s worth it. What are you going to do if you
find her?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m kind of hoping she didn’t stick around.” Chance, at least, was in my favor. If even a quarter of the people who’d died in this city had decided to hang around, I’d have been buried in them.
Norris shrugged. “Yeah, I bet she took off to the great beyond already. No worries.”
He said it casually, but the bitterness crept into his voice anyway. Norris didn’t know what the “great beyond” was any better than I did, and I doubted he cared that he was here and not there. It was the thing with his dad that bugged him.
My first year at Frazer, Norris spewed a lot of tough talk, like “I was getting beatings from the day I was born” and “That kid needs to be smacked around like I was.” Making like he was better for it. His dad, I dragged out of him one day, was up at Summerlea General, and had been for a long time, with one of those diseases that takes its time killing you. Norris would disappear for a few hours every now and then to visit.
Then, last spring, I found Norris skulking in and out of the lockers, so dark I could have mistaken him for a shadow. “He died,” he said. “The bastard finally died, and he didn’t show up. He just left. He’s gone.” I guess he’d wanted to have one last chat with his dad, set some things straight. I think he’d been waiting for that. And he didn’t get it.
Remembering that, I felt a jab of annoyance at Tim. Why should he get handed to him what everyone else had to do without? Death was supposed to be difficult. Life was supposed to be difficult. It’d figure if even death bent over for this guy.
“Just promise me you’re not going soft on these kids,” Norris said.
I laughed. “Not much chance of that.”
“Good. It was a really long time before you came, Cass. I hardly remember it, but . . . I know it was boring as hell.”
He dimmed as he said it, and I reached toward him without thinking. In a little more than a year I’d be out of here. But I didn’t want to remind him of that.