Bad Girl Gone

by Temple Mathews

He was blushing. The Middle House kids, standing behind him, were peering at us like we were some kind of afterlife social experiment.

  I marched off, my body language clear. That was not cool. But as I was retreating, there was something I didn’t dare admit to myself, or I was going to be in big trouble. When Cole held me and kissed me, I liked it—a lot. I may have been dead, but I was still a girl.

  I didn’t know what to do. I had to get the hell out of there. I’d heard people described as being uncomfortable in their own skin. That was what I felt like now. I just wasn’t comfortable in my new form, my new body, my new being. It felt like I was wearing a wet dress. And at times it felt like … nothing, like I wasn’t even there. So I ran, jogging at first and then picking up speed, going faster and faster, flying. I whooshed up one hill and down another. I zoomed by a man lying on a bench and, as I passed him, he shuddered and held himself tightly as though I were a gust of wind. Of course to him, that was all I was. He couldn’t see me but he felt me. I wondered if I felt cold to him, or if I frightened him. I kept going, zooming around, trying to release all the tension I’d built up inside. I needed to let loose, needed to escape, needed to get my old life back. Yeah, good luck with that, Echo.

  DIARY

  I landed in downtown Kirkland and looked around. People were walking on the sidewalks and cars came and went and nobody once looked at me. The others from Middle House were nowhere to be seen. I wondered if they’d followed me. If they had, it looked like I’d outrun them. But when I turned around, there they were. Perched on a building, a car, an awning, and a telephone pole, like birds. Just waiting. Cole stepped out from behind a parked truck.

  “We’re not going to let you suffer this alone,” he said. “We’re all in this together. We help each other.”

  It occurred to me that I had lost my flesh-and-blood family and that these kids were trying to become my surrogate one. I didn’t want that. But I did want their help. Because come hell or high water, I was going to find out who murdered me and make them pay. I figured the best thing to do was to head back to the scene of the crime, so I pointed up the street and started flying. One of the perks of being a ghost is that you can get around really fast. I was outside my house in less than a minute.

  I remembered the day we’d painted the porch. A family project. I had bitched about it the whole time and now wished I hadn’t been such a brat. Why is it that when we’re living life, we don’t appreciate the moments we’re in—we always have to be thinking of something else? I vowed that if I ever got a second chance, I would do it right.

  The others from Middle House showed up a few seconds later. I kept trying not to notice how handsome Cole was, what strong shoulders he had, and how his eyes sparkled whenever he stared at me, which seemed to be more or less always.

  “I’m here for you, Echo. We all are.”

  “Thanks.”

  My house was eerily quiet. The yellow crime-scene tape still dangled from the door. I wanted to go in. Alone. It felt so personal. My house. My life. My death.

  “I need to go in by myself,” I said.

  It was as though I was ashamed of my murder, ashamed of being dead, ashamed of what had happened to me. What could I have possibly done to deserve such a fate?

  “If you’re looking for clues, maybe a fresh set of eyes would help,” Cole said.

  I shook my head.

  “No. For now, please just let me go alone.”

  He nodded and looked over at the other Middle House kids. They just stared stoically as they were prone to do.

  I stood at the front door and reached for the doorknob. Then I thought to myself, why bother opening the door when you can just go through it? I did and then moved very slowly up the staircase. On the wall beside the stairs was a picture gallery of me. Some frames had been knocked off the wall but most were intact.

  There were younger pictures of me at the bottom—in my crib, now on a tricycle—and me growing older the higher I climbed. Halfway up the stairs I was smiling, a goofy eighth grader. At the top of the stairs I was a full-blown, pouty, belligerent teenager.

  I went into my room. I knew right away that Mom had been in there. The bed was made. My clothes were all folded neatly. The things on my desk were arranged in perfect order. That was very unlike me. I was more of a lazy slob than a Tidy Tina type and made my bed possibly once a week and only when Mom yelled at me.

  I poked around in my closet and found a shoe box. Inside were some expensive shoes and a handful of costume jewelry. I felt a tinge of guilt as I flashed back to the time when I’d shoplifted those things. I wasn’t some kind of master thief, but I was kind of shocked at the memory just the same. Why would I steal stuff when we had enough money? I guess I just had to let the naughty out. Hell, nobody’s perfect. I put the shoe box back where I found it. Then I sat down on my bed and flopped backward and gazed up at the ceiling. When I was about seven, my dad had used a stepladder to stick up little stars on the ceiling that glowed in the dark. It was daytime, so they weren’t glowing now, but in my memory they shined brightly.

  I thought back to when I used to write about my dreams amongst the stars. Then I remembered something. My journal! I got down on my knees and dug under the bed and opened a plastic alligator treasure chest—Welcome to Florida!—and took it out.

  Lying on the carpet, I read. It was more or less a chronology of my life, just like the pictures on the stairs. At first, the entries were mostly about new toys, Christmas, and birthday parties, being mad at Mom or Dad and about other kids in school, and a couple of silly boy-band crushes.

  But once I hit puberty, everything changed. I had discovered love. And lust. And I began to write about the boy next door. Andy. I flipped to the end to find the latest entry. As I read, I felt a rising panic.

  Dear diary,

  I am so in love with Andy that it hurts. Sometimes I think I’m going to die because of it.

  I love him so much every beat of my heart becomes more and more painful. Why? Because I know I’m going to lose him. There’s just no way we’re going to live out our lives in some storybook way with me being the doting wife and him the faithful husband. It’s all going to go to shit just like everything always seems to. And I don’t want to be around when that happens. I know my heart’s gonna break. It’s just going to swell up and swell up and swell up until it bursts in my chest.

  I’m so afraid he’s going to break up with me. I’ve seen the way he’s been looking at Dani. That bitch. I think about taking a brick or knife or a hammer and killing her. But then he’d probably love her all the more. I don’t know if they’ve even kissed. But I bet they have. I don’t know what to do. Every morning I wake up I’m torn. I think I just want to die. Just get it over with … just get it over with now. If I kill myself, he’ll always love me no matter what. Eternal love! I could do it. I could. I think.

  I must have been interrupted while writing. I flipped the pages. Blank. No more entries. I closed the diary and put it back in the box and under the bed. My thoughts were finding new pathways, dark places I was uncomfortable poking around in. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the vision I’d had at my funeral. I tensed up, trying to will it to come to me, then relaxed. I knew I couldn’t force the visions; I had to let them come. I felt a sharp pain in my chest and then a sound like thunder banged in my head.

  Once more, my murder came to me, and again it was disjointed and unfocused, the shapes and colors and sights and sounds bleeding into one another. The knife plunged again, sinking into my heart. I felt a cut on my hand. A defensive wound. But then I saw my own left hand on the knife—for just a split second—and my world tilted. Was there another hand on the knife, too? I couldn’t tell—it was playing out too fast, the looping vision wobbling, smearing. And the blood. There was so much blood.

  Then it was over. I opened my eyes. The room was quiet. I was alone with my thoughts and a very big question. Was it possible that I was so distraught over the thought of losing Andy that I h
ad killed myself? I shook my head. Oh god, no—I hated knives, always had. But maybe I’d used that as punishment. Maybe I’d used the very thing I’d feared most to end my own life. How creepy would that be? I felt like something slimy was snaking its way up my spine. But what about my Saint Christopher medallion? Had I taken it off myself?

  A faint breeze lifted the curtains in my window. A moment later, as I was rising to leave, I sensed someone behind me.

  “Cole?”

  “I didn’t mean to invade your space, but I called out your name and you didn’t respond. I was afraid maybe something had happened to you.”

  “No, I’m…” I wanted to say “fine,” but that was clearly not the case. My universe had been seriously compromised and I was sick with doubt.

  “Cole, how did you die? I mean, you were murdered, right?”

  His eyes slid off me and found a spot on the carpet.

  “Yes.”

  “How did it happen?”

  He took a deep breath. This was clearly difficult for him.

  “Her name was Meryn. She was older. She hung around with a bad crowd, was into drugs and other stuff.”

  “What kind of other stuff?”

  He didn’t want to say. But when I locked eyes with him, he spit it out.

  “She sometimes sold herself.”

  “Oh. Crap.”

  “Yeah. Drugs cost money, and her parents were poor. So she threw it down on the streets. I had a … I guess you’d say a schoolboy crush on her. She would lean out her window and kiss me and it was like … heaven.”

  I waited, eager to know what had happened, but I didn’t want to push him. I kept quiet and just looked at him. His eyes had tears in them.

  “I thought we were, like, boyfriend and girlfriend. I was an idiot. But I loved her. She broke up with me one night and I couldn’t take it, so I followed her. Downtown. She met some guys, owed them money, I guess, because they started to rough her up. She fought back, hard. And then one of them had this pipe in his hand, was going to bash her skull in. I rushed to her and…”

  Cole now lifted the hair from his brow and for a moment his death mask appeared, his forehead split open, brains and blood spilling out. The vision vanished in an instant.

  “So you … died for her.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. She got the hell out of there and left me lying in the street. She was really scared, but still—so much for true love.”

  My heart melted. He’d loved that girl so much that he’d sacrificed his life for her.

  I raised my arms to hug him.

  “Can I?”

  He didn’t answer. I took that as a sign it was okay to hug him, and I did. It felt really good, like for just these few seconds, we were human again, with actual human feelings.

  “Echo…”

  He wanted to say something. But we both heard the same noise outside and turned toward it. We moved to the window, then looked down and saw Walker’s truck parked on the street. We went downstairs and outside. Walker carried a silver florist’s box and was muttering to himself on the porch, pacing back and forth as he read the crime-scene tape.

  “DO NOT CROSS. DO NOT CROSS. DO NOT CROSS.”

  There was something wrong with this man’s brain. I had been holding on to a strong hatred of him, convinced because of the missing knife that he was the one who’d killed me. But I wasn’t 100 percent sure. I watched as he knelt down and took the top off the box. Inside there were flowers, a dozen white roses. Pure Love.

  “My fault … so sad … my fault … my doing,” he whispered. “Eileen…”

  He knew my real name. He must have looked at the school records, or maybe he read it in the paper like everybody else. I would have killed to stay alive just so my real name wasn’t tossed around.

  “Eileen … never should have happened … my fault … I did this … I did this to you.”

  It sounded like he was confessing, coming to the scene of the crime to make peace with God or something. Tears spilled from his eyes. With his left hand he slapped himself—really hard—right in the face. Then again and again.

  “My fault! Mine!”

  He sobbed loudly. The other kids from Middle House were gathered around.

  “Give us the word and we will spook this creep until he’ll want to shove a knife in his own belly,” said Darby.

  They were good and ready to scare the living crap out of Walker, but something wasn’t quite right. He was already terrified and it gave me an idea. I would enter him.

  “No,” I said. “I got this.”

  DAMAGE

  As Walker continued his self-punishing diatribe, I closed my eyes and rushed at him. I felt a violent shudder—and then I was in. As I passed through his flesh, I was more cognizant of the feeling this time. It was like walking into a thick velvet curtain that slides over you.

  Once inside, it was a different story. Walker’s mind wasn’t a happy place. He was having all kinds of thoughts, his brain firing away, juggling images and sounds, a kaleidoscope of dread. When you’re in someone else’s brain, it’s incredibly disorienting, sights and sounds flashing at you like shooting stars from a thousand different directions. I told myself to breathe deeply, and I did, and the images began to slow down enough that I could make some sense out of them.

  Walker saw himself on his knees, crying. He wasn’t in school; he was in a dark, smoky place, an apartment of some kind. I held on to that image and rode it. It was a memory and I stayed with it. The room he was in—we were in—was rocked with explosions and plaster rained down from the ceiling.

  The room was spinning but I held on. Now I could see why Walker was crying. He was kneeling over two bodies, a woman and her daughter, both dead from bullets that had ripped through them. They were Iraqis, and Walker was a marine. He had an M16 automatic rifle in his hands. He must have broken down the door and shot them before he even knew what he was doing. Casualties of war.

  Images of knives appeared before me now and I saw Walker cursing in his office back at school as he stared at the contents of his knife box. The lock on it had been cut away and he was angry. He replaced the broken lock with another one and locked his knives—all but the missing one—back up tight. He kept hitting himself on the side of his head—doling out his punishment repetitively, forcefully.

  He remembered the time I was locked in the supply closet. My being inside him must have triggered it. I’d been wrong about him. He didn’t lock me in; I’d somehow trapped myself in there and he’d come to help me, not harm or punish me. He remembered seeing my backpack overflowing with supplies. So I was a school-supply thief, too. My self-esteem, my good-girl image of who I thought I’d been, took yet another hit. I had another thought. Maybe the universe knew what it was doing when it called my number. All along I’d thought I hadn’t deserved to die, but what if … what if I had?

  Walker went back to thinking about his war trauma and his inner pain was threatening to overtake me, so I wrenched myself free from his body. My little venture into the mind of Walker had taught me some important things. He was miserable with guilt over what he’d done as a soldier. It was the ghosts of the woman and her daughter who he thought were haunting him. And the knife from his collection had been stolen from him. He must have read about me being killed with a hunting knife and did the math and blamed himself. That’s why he was here now, to try and make amends.

  “Leave him alone,” I said to the group. “He’s not the one.”

  “Are you freakin’ kidding me?” said Darby.

  “This is messed up,” said Cameron.

  My new friends were disappointed. They’d been circling like a pack of wolves, ready to pounce and kill, but I’d called them off. They looked off into the distance, searching no doubt for some other prey, but appeared itchy because they didn’t know where or when or how they’d find it.

  Walker looked so sad. I took an extended deep breath and started walking, then flying. The others took flight and followed. In minutes, we were b
ack at Middle House. At dinner we ate like ravenous fools. Then Cole walked me to my room.

  “Sorry it wasn’t him. I thought for a minute you were going to be…”

  “Free?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Thanks. I’m so … tired.”

  Cole nodded.

  “Sweet dreams.”

  He touched my shoulder. My stomach tingled. My body tensed as he moved closer. He smelled wonderful. Then his lips, his amazingly soft lips, kissed my forehead. The back of my neck flushed. I wanted to complain, to tell him no, he couldn’t just do that, but it was too late. The kiss lingered and he was already halfway down the hall, and about three-quarters of the way into my heart.

  I turned and crept into bed and pulled the covers up over my head and slept fitfully, my dreams a collection of scattered images. Love and hate. Fear and longing. Life and death.

  * * *

  I woke up during the night bathed in sweat. I swore I wouldn’t get used to this, I wouldn’t let being in constant pain be my new normal. In the morning I avoided Cole—I couldn’t let my eyes meet his or he’d know immediately that I adored the feel of his lips—and slipped out a side door. A feeling was pulling me toward school. Maybe I had a sixth sense that I’d find my killer there. Or maybe I just wanted to see Andy again. Either way, I slipped out of Middle House without telling a soul and was roaming the halls of school before second period began.

  I passed Ellie Wagner, a girl who I’d always thought kind of liked me. I turned and followed her and the scent of her cheap candy perfume. She was always a little bent. Maybe that’s why I had a soft spot for her. She went to her locker, which was a few down from mine. She opened it and pulled out a bag of licorice and bit into a red piece. Brian Gottberg, a freshman but tall and broad shouldered, got all stud-like and sauntered up to her, tossing a look at my locker, which had graffiti scrawled on it. Angel Bitch. Weird. You’d think they’d make up their minds.

  “Hell of a thing,” he muttered, referring to me, no doubt.

  “I’m not shedding any tears,” said Ellie.