Forever Freaky

by Tom Upton

  I lingered there alone, in a world that wouldn’t exist much longer. Except that it was vanishing, it might not have been a bad place for me; there were no ghosts to trouble me, no people with strange thoughts going through their heads, no future to see, no gory visions whenever I ate meat. It was a world where I could have been normal, only there was nobody with whom to share it. I suspected that maybe I had always been wrong; everybody needs people, even me.

  When I looked back into the stall, I saw that there was about eight feet of rope coming out of the wall of black stuff. The roped wiggled impatiently on the floor, like some crazy snake.

  “Pathetic,” I murmured, shaking my head. “Truly pathetic.”

  Still I bent down and seized the end of the rope. I wrapped it around my waist and a moment later, a sharp jerk pulled me into the soft black wall and I was heading home.

  *************

  “What took you so long?” Jack demanded, standing over me.

  I was lying on the floor again, holding my achy head, but at least this floor, and the wall that had just hit headfirst, was in my world.

  “Just habitually tardy, I guess,” I said, and got to my feet. My skull felt like an enormous throbbing balloon. I had matching lumps on the crown of my head. If I didn’t watch it, I’d have to change my nickname from Freaky Jules to Knotty Cranium.

  I saw that Mary Jo was laid out across the sinks on the counter. She looked dead.

  “What did she do? Get knocked out?”

  “She came through unconscious,” Jack informed me. “She flew out of the aperture like a rag doll. She’s breathing and everything—just totally out of it.”

  I stood there studying Mary Jo. “She’s much less annoying when she’s unconscious.”

  “So what happened?”

  I shrugged. “I found her.” I gave him a bare-bones account of what had happened, what it had been like. I saw no reason to give him every last detail; he was altogether too obsessed with weird stuff.

  In return Jack informed me that it was now Saturday night, that, although it seemed to me only about an hour passed, I had been missing for nearly a full day. “It took more than an hour between the time Mary Jo returned and the time you popped back in,” he said.

  I grunted. “So time didn’t work the same there.”

  “Apparently not,” he said.

  I studied him from head to foot. He looked like a wreck. He looked like how I felt.

  “And you waited here?”

  “What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave you,” he said. “I spent most of this morning ducking Creepy Carl. I guess Saturday is when he buffs the hallway floors,” he added wryly.

  “I can’t believe you waited.”

  “You would have done the same for me,” he said.

  “You sure about that?” I really didn’t think I would have, but it was nice to know he thought better of me.

  We both stood there and looked at Mary Jo. She seemed so peaceful. Probably now she was actually dreaming.

  “So what do we do?” Jack asked.

  “We go home.”

  “We leave her here—like this.”

  “Sure. As soon as we open an exit door, the alarm will go off. So we prop the door open with something. The cops will check out the building, and, poof, they find her. A miracle, right?”

  “But what if she tells the cops what happened?”

  “Well, for one thing,” I said patiently, “you don’t have a thing to worry about. She never saw you, right? And what is she going to tell them about me? That I came to her in a dream and rescued her?”

  He shook his head. “They’ll send her to a shrink.”

  “Better her than me,” I said.

  Jack gathered up his rope, and stuffed it into his gym bag with his other things.

  Before we left, we checked the bathroom again. The black matter in the toilet stall was gone, and everything looked normal, except for the sleeping girl lying on the sink counter and the remnants of a huge slimy booger splashed across the floor.

  ************

  “You’re going to love this!” Melody roared.

  This was the first thing she said when I answered my cell phone. It was Sunday night, and I was still lying in my bed. I had slept on and off since I returned home in the small hours of the morning. My head ached. My knees hurt. My lower back was killing me. And I had had another nasty nosebleed that didn’t quite want to stop. So I was in no mood for Melody’s perkiness.

  “Mel, can’t it wait until tomorrow?” I asked.

  “No, no, you have to hear this.”

  “Please,” I begged.

  “They found Mary Jo Mason.”

  “Yeah, I saw it on the news.”

  “But the news didn’t give all the details,” she insisted.

  “No?” I was more than mildly interested in what had happened after Jack and I fled the school. How exactly had the cops found Mary Jo? What happened after they found her? Was she questioned, and if so, what did she say? All day I had been half-expecting the cops to knock on my door.

  “I got it all from my mom,” Melody said.

  “Give it up, bitch,” I told her.

  “All right,” she said. “The burglar alarm goes off last night at the school, right? So when the cops respond to the call, they find an open door. I think it was propped with an office chair or something. Anyway, they search the entire school for intruders, and they find Mary Jo.”

  “Really?” I said, faking surprise better than I thought I could.

  “Straight up,” Melody said.

  “See. I told you—there was nothing to worry about.”

  “Wait. Wait. There’s more.”

  “What?”

  “They found her in the bathroom, the bathroom she disappeared from.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She was sleeping on the counter.”

  “Really,” I said. “Isn’t that something?”

  “But this is the best part, the part you’re going to love. You know what the cops did after they found her?—Really, you’re going love this.”

  “Why? What did they do?” I asked.

  “They arrested her.”

  I sat bolt upright in bed. “They didn’t.”

  “No kidding. Slapped hand-cuffs on her and dragged her away.”

  “Wow,” I said. I felt a little like laughing, but then, instantly, I felt sorry for Mary Jo. She had been through an ordeal, whether or not she realized it.

  “Well, she didn’t have any identification with her, and she didn’t look much like the picture her parents gave the cops when she went missing,” Melody explained. “So, yeah, I guess they had to arrest her for trespassing. But after they found out who she was, they dropped the whole thing.”

  “You know what she told the cops?—I mean, about where she was for those three days.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and I could picture Melody rolling her eyes. “She told the cops some crazy stuff. It sounds like she’s in for some counseling.”

  “Well, at least they found her,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s the most important thing.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  After I got off the phone with Melody, I lay there thinking for a long while. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole thing. I’d found Mary Jo and brought her back and now she was safe at home with her family. Anybody else might have felt pride or satisfaction, but I didn’t feel those things at all. Mainly I felt selfish. I didn’t do anything for Mary Jo. I didn’t do anything because I was a caring, concerned person. Whatever I did, I did for myself. That was how I was, and I really didn’t believe I would ever change.

  The one thing that kept returning to my mind was what it had been like in that other reality. There I could not read people. I could not see the future. I had no flashes of freaky insight. For a brief time, I knew what it would be like to be normal, and having experienced that, I decided I could
never be that way. It didn’t feel right, because it wasn’t me. I was Freaky Jules, that was who I was meant to be, and for the first time I started to see that that was all right. After all, a lot of people are different, in some way and to some degree. There are a lot of freaks in this world, and one day, sooner or later, we are going to take over everything.

  All the excitement surrounding Mary Jo died down in the following weeks.

  Things went by to the same old routine, except now there was Jack. He started to join Melody and me for lunch every day. I didn’t really need another friend, but I didn’t mind. Some friendships begin with a secret, and once they begin they almost have to last—or else. I believed that Jack would always keep my secrets. Maybe someday I would finally break down and date him, but probably not.

  One day I felt an anxiety attack coming on in the lunchroom again. I had to go outside. The days were getting sunnier and warmer. The grass was dark green and the breeze was soft and the air smelled sweet. Everything outside calmed me down. I sat on one of the benches and relaxed.

  Awhile later, Jack sat on the opposite end of the bench. We sat there and didn’t say anything to each other for a long time. It felt good to share silence with him.

  Then he said, “I have three words for you.”

  “Jack, cut it out. We’ve already talked about this.”

  He looked confused at first, but then he got it. “Oh, no, not those three words. I wasn’t thinking anything like that.”

  “What three words are you talking about?”

  “Can you keep an open mind?” he asked.

  “It’s impossible for me not to.”

  “Okay, here it is,” he said: “Spontaneous Human Combustion.”

  “What?” I stared at him in horror.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “There are some seriously weird things going on.”

  “No.”

  “Jules, really, you need to hear this….”

  I was already on my feet walking away. I didn’t look back. I walked faster and faster, but knowing Jack Kilgore, I realized I would never be able to walk away fast enough.

  Freaky Jules

  Pants on Fire

  Adler Aardvarks’ outfielder on fire.

  The long-time rivalry between the Adler Aardvarks and the Medill Mavericks heated up this Friday evening—literally.

  The Aardvarks held a one-run lead in the fourth inning, when a routine fly ball turned out to be anything but routine. As Aardvark center-fielder, senior Jeremy Bliss, ran to catch the ball, over two hundred horrified spectators watched as Bliss apparently burst into flames. Quick-acting teammates helped to put out the fire, but not before Bliss sustained second- and third-degree burns over forty percent of his body.

  Bliss is currently in a hospital burn unit, where his condition is listed as serious.

  Fire investigators are baffled as to the cause of this bizarre incident, which is strikingly similar to two occurrences last fall involving members of the Mount Olive football team.

  “Athletes don’t suddenly burst into flames for no reason,” said Martin Durant, a fire department spokesman. “At this point, we are closely examining the uniform this young man was wearing.”

  The Aardvarks’ uniforms were manufactured by the same Chinese company that produced the Mount Olive football team’s jerseys.

  “This is the only commonality found between these three unusual events,” Durant went on. “We are awaiting test results on the chemical analysis of the uniforms, but that will take some time.”

  Meanwhile, we at the Adler Eagle wish Jeremy the speediest of recoveries.

  ***********

  I didn’t like baseball, or any sport for that matter. Sports, unlike me, belong to the normal world. Only normal people can gather enjoyment out of watching one guy trying to throw a ball past another guy who is trying to hit the ball with a piece of wood while all the other players wait around to see if the guy with the piece of wood actually hits the ball. That seemed to make sense to people, while I believed that baseball was the dumbest of activities.

  I was never frustrated that I didn’t understand normal things. I was not obsessed with trying to become normal. I knew that would never be possible. I would always be a vision-seeing, future-predicting, mind-reading freak. About the best I could hope for was to learn how to live with myself.

  A few months ago, I discovered that there was a new addition to my paranormal abilities: telekinesis. I could turn light switches on and off with my mind. I could move around small objects. At first I was despondent that there was yet another weird thing for me to endure. I tried to ignore this latest ability, but during bored moments—and I had quite a few of those in the course of a day—I would amuse myself by twirling a pencil or levitating an eraser. I soon discovered that moving objects around with my mind required a great deal of focus, and while I focused on, say, arranging kitchen utensils neatly on a tabletop, my other freaky abilities became inert. I could not see random visions, most of which were dark and gory. I could not read minds and the sick thoughts people keep to themselves. It was a good trade-off, really; if I began to see or hear something disturbing, I just concentrated on moving something and all the bad things in my head went away—at least for a while. It was a great way to deal with stress.

  One Saturday afternoon in early May, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table at home. I was balancing a pencil on the tip of my finger. I made the pencil slowly turn, which made a tickling feeling on my skin.

  My mom sat across from me. She was still alarmed at my latest “gift.” She was aware of my other abilities, of course, but really those she couldn’t actually see. This was much more visual, and therefore much more disturbing.

  “Do you have to do that?” she asked.

  “It’s very relaxing.”

  “I’m trying to talk to you.”

  “I’m listening,” I said. “Just because I’m not looking at you, don’t think I’m not hearing you.”

  Mom was trying to have one of her heart to heart talks with me. Every now and then she felt compelled to sit me down and encourage me to try to blend in better with my peers. It was her way of being supportive; she knew that my having strange abilities isolated me from other people. She was always afraid that I would end up being some kind of weirdo old lady who scared all the neighborhood kids—in other words, she didn’t want me to turn into my grandmother. But even now, as she attempted to convince me I could be pretty much like everybody else if only I applied myself, she didn’t see the irony.

  “Mom, I’m moving a pencil with my mind,” I said. “Exactly how much do you think I can blend?”

  She sighed. “Julie, you’re impossible, really.”

  “And yet here I am.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “We are talking,” I said.

  “I mean, without the—whatever you call that.”

  “Telekinesis.”

  “Whatever. Can you put your hand down?”

  I lowered my hand. The pencil remained suspended in the air, still turning slowly around.

  She gawked at the pencil for a moment.

  “Julie, really!”

  I snatched the pencil from the air, and slapped it down on the tabletop.

  “There! Better?” I asked, feeling a little hostile.

  “Thank you.” She took a couple seconds to compose herself, to pick up her train of thought. “Look, maybe I haven’t been expressing myself so well. I understand that you will always be different from other people. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you are still a human being.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “You are,” she said. “Your dad and I have been talking.”

  “You need to stop that. The marriage will last longer.”

  “Julie, please.”

  I didn’t stay anything. I figured it was best to let her say what she was going to say, and have it over with.

  “We’ve been concerned with a few things about you. And th
is has nothing to do with your gifts. Your abilities,” she amended after I’d rolled my eyes.

  “Then what?”

  “It’s just that you’re so—I don’t know—emotionally detached.”

  “Yeah?” I said dully.

  “I mean, look, I’m a nurse, right? I got into the field because, basically, I care about people. I have sympathy and understanding. Your dad, too. He’s a fireman and, sure, that’s a good job but you can’t want to become a fireman without caring, without wanting to keep people safe. You see where I’m going with this.”

  “No, really, I don’t,” I said. “You and dad like your jobs?”

  She sighed. She seemed uncertain what to say. Then she blurted out, “Julie, your dad wants you to see a psychiatrist.”

  I was horrified. “Uh-uh. No way.”

  “He thinks you may be sociopathic.”

  “What! No, I’m not…. What’s sociopathic, anyway?”

  “That’s when a person has no feelings for others—no feelings at all. Some sociopaths end up, you know, killing people.”

  I stared at her. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I honestly didn’t know what to say. My parents weren’t really concerned that I wasn’t quite normal; they actually feared I’d turn into a mass murderer or something.

  “It’s just that you never show us anything,” she continued, uncomfortably. “You know, like kids usually show their parents.”

  “Oh, I see,” I murmured. “Well, you know me: I’m not going to go around hugging everybody.”

  “I understand that,” she said.

  “I do love you guys,” I said. “I just do it in my own way.”

  “Well, Dad doesn’t understand why you are the way you are.”

  “Maybe you should explain it to him,” I suggested.

  She looked aghast. We had never told my dad about my abilities, so he couldn’t possibly understand the affects that possessing them had on me.

  “You can’t be serious. He’d have you in a mental hospital in about two seconds. And I’d be right there with you. He’d never accept it—not in a million years. The guy doesn’t even believe in ghosts,” she added wryly.