The The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  Boo glanced both ways and ran across the street, barely missing a car. I stepped behind a big red mailbox and watched her talking to the woman, guiding her over to a more secluded spot. After a minute or two, a police car came down the street. It slowed and pulled up next to the playground. Out of it stepped the young policeman from the day of the murder, the one Jazza thought was a reporter.

  I felt myself go cold all over.

  “What the hell?” I said out loud.

  Now it was the three of them—the woman in the brown wool uniform, the young policeman, and my roommate—all in a very animated conversation. It was like the entire world was colluding to make me feel insane, and it was doing a really good job.

  I tried to make sense of the scene. The policeman had to be a real policeman. If he was a reporter, as Jazza suspected, he couldn’t go around in a disguise all the time. He wouldn’t have a police car. Boo had come into the school right after the murders. Boo went everywhere I went. As for the woman in the uniform, I had no idea who she was, and I didn’t care. The fact that Boo and the policeman were talking together in secret was enough.

  And then, one of the many other people coming down the street walked through the woman in the uniform.

  Through her.

  In response to this, the woman simply turned and glanced over her shoulder with a kind of “Well, that was rude” look. This was all I needed to see. There was something wrong with me, no question. I couldn’t stay there hiding behind a mailbox. The little green man came up on the street-crossing sign, so I crossed, my head swimming. I walked right at them. I needed help. I could feel my knees weakening with every step.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” I said.

  The three of them turned and stared at me.

  “Oh, no,” the policeman said. “No . . .”

  “I didn’t!” Boo said. “She must have followed me.”

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked, striding toward me. “You need to sit down. Come on, now.”

  I allowed the woman to guide me to the ground. Boo came over and squatted by my side.

  “It’s fine, Rory,” she said. “You’re okay.”

  The police officer kept back.

  “She needs our help,” Boo said to him. “Come on, Stephen. It was bound to happen.”

  The woman in the uniform was still hanging over me.

  “Just breathe evenly,” she said. She had one of those voices that you don’t argue with, or even question.

  “You’re fine, Rory. Honestly. You’re fine. We’re going to help you. Aren’t we?” Boo looked at Stephen as she said this.

  “And do what exactly?” he finally said.

  “Take her back to yours,” Boo said. “Talk to her. Jo, help me get her up.”

  Boo helped me up on one side while the soldier woman took the other. Boo did most of the lifting. The policeman, Stephen, opened the door to the police car and waved me into the back.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he said. “But you had probably better come with us now. Come on.”

  “Give her a paper bag to breathe into,” the woman in the uniform called to Boo. “Works wonders.”

  “I’ll do that,” Boo called. “See you later, yeah?”

  As a small crowd of interested onlookers stopped to watch, I allowed Boo and the policeman to put me in the back of the police car.

  20

  SO I GOT TO RIDE IN A LONDON POLICE CAR.

  “My name is Stephen,” the policeman said as he drove. “Stephen Dene.”

  “Rory,” I mumbled.

  “I know. We met.”

  “Oh, yeah. Are you actually a cop?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “So am I,” Boo added.

  Stephen was taking us right into the center of town. We went around Trafalgar Square, weaving our way around double-decker buses and cabs. We passed the National Gallery, where my day had started, and continued up the road, coming to a stop just a short distance beyond it. Stephen and Boo got out, and Stephen came and opened my door. He offered me his hand to help me out, but I rejected it. I needed to walk on my own. I needed to concentrate on a task, or I would lose my rapidly slipping grasp on reality. We were on a very busy street, full of theaters and shops and people.

  “It’s this way,” Stephen said.

  They guided me to a small alley. There was a pub hidden down there, and the stage exit of a theater. Then we passed under a brick arch, and the alley got narrower, and suddenly we were on a street that was like something out of Dickens and really out of place with the area around it. Cars couldn’t come down this way—the path was only about six feet wide. The houses were all made of brown brick, with old gaslights in front, huge windows with black panes, and shiny black doors with big brass knockers. You could tell that it used to be a little street of shops, and these were all the old shop windows. The sign on the wall said Goodwin’s Court.

  Stephen stopped in front of one of the doors and opened it by entering a code into a number pad. The building was small and quiet, with a very modern but plain entryway and a stairwell that smelled strongly of new carpet and paint. A series of lights came on automatically as we went up the steps to the third floor, where there was just one door. I could hear a television on inside—some kind of sports coverage. Cheering.

  “Callum’s home,” Boo said.

  Stephen made an affirmative sound and opened the door. The room we walked into felt large, considering the smallness of the street. It was sparsely furnished with two old sofas, a few lamps, and a battered table covered in papers and files and mugs. Everything looked like the cast-off pieces from someone’s grandmother’s house—one floral sofa, one brown. Floral mugs. The rest was IKEA or cheaper. I could tell that the place itself—its size, its newness, its careful maintenance—was well above the price range of its occupants.

  The occupant was sitting on one of the sofas, watching a soccer game on television. I saw the back of a head, with black, closely cropped hair, then a heavily muscled arm with a tattoo of some kind of creature holding a stick. The owner of the hair and arm raised himself up from a slouched position to peer over the sofa. It was a guy, one in a tight polo-neck shirt that stretched across his chest. He was probably about my age. It also appeared he knew exactly who I was, because he said, “What’s she doing here?”

  “Change of plan,” Stephen said, tearing off his coat and throwing it over a chair.

  “Kind of a major change of plan, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Turn the television off, will you? This is Callum. Callum, this is Rory.”

  “Why is she here?” Callum said again.

  “Callum!” Boo said. “Be nice! She just found out about you know what.”

  Callum held his bag of food out to me. “Do you want a chip?” he asked. When I shook my head, he dug in and retrieved a burger.

  “Are you going to eat that now?” Stephen asked.

  “I was eating when you came in! Besides, it’s not going to help her, letting my food get cold. What are you going to do now, exactly?”

  “We’re going to explain,” Stephen said.

  “Well, this should be interesting.”

  “It wasn’t my decision,” Stephen said.

  “She needs to know,” Boo cut in.

  Their conversation spun around me. I didn’t even try to follow it. Callum switched off the television, and I was planted on one of the sofas. Boo sat with Callum, and Stephen got a kitchen chair and sat directly in front of me.

  “What I’m about to tell you is going to be a little hard to accept at first,” he began.

  I giggled. I didn’t mean to. Stephen looked over his shoulder at the others. Boo nodded to me encouragingly. Stephen turned back and took a deep breath.

  “Have you recently had a brush with death?” he asked.

  “They should really include that question in job interviews,” Callum said.

  Boo elbowed him hard, and he shut up.

  “Th
ink,” Stephen said. “Have you? Has anything happened to you?”

  “I choked,” I said after a pause. “A few weeks ago. At dinner.”

  “Since that incident, you’ve been seeing people . . . people that other people don’t see. Am I correct?”

  I didn’t need to answer. They already knew.

  “What’s happening to you is a rare but far from unknown condition,” he said.

  “Condition? Like a disease?”

  “Not a disease . . . more of an ability. It won’t hurt you in any way.”

  Callum was about to interject again, but Boo reached over and punched the underside of his bag of fries.

  “Shut it,” she said.

  “I didn’t!”

  “You were about to.”

  “Both of you,” Stephen said, more seriously this time. “Stop. This isn’t easy for her. Remember how it felt.”

  Callum and Boo stopped tittering and tried to look composed.

  “What you’re seeing—”

  “Who,” Boo cut in again. “Who she’s seeing.”

  “Who you’re seeing . . . those people are real. But they’re dead.”

  Dead people you could see. That meant ghosts. He was saying I saw ghosts.

  “Ghosts?” I said.

  “Ghosts,” he repeated. “That’s the usual term.”

  “I know lots of people who say they can see ghosts,” I said. “They’re all crazy.”

  “Most people who claim to be able to see ghosts can’t. Most of the people who claim they have seen ghosts simply have very overactive imaginations or are easily suggestible. But some people can, and we are some of those people.”

  “I don’t want to see ghosts,” I said.

  “It’s brilliant,” Boo said. “Really. The woman you saw on the street. She’s dead. She’s a ghost. But she’s not scary. She’s lovely. She’s a good friend of mine. She died in the war. She’s so amazing. Her name is Jo.”

  “What I’m saying is,” Stephen continued, “the ability is rare, but it’s nothing to be concerned about.”

  “Ghosts?” I said again.

  “This is going well,” said Callum, shoving a handful of fries into his mouth. “I wish you’d done it this way with me.”

  “Let me explain,” Stephen said, adjusting his chair a little to back up an inch or so. “The ability to do what we can do . . . it’s not understood very well, but we do know a few things. Two elements need to be in place. One, you have to have the underlying ability. Possibly it’s genetic, but it doesn’t appear to run in families. Two, you have to come very close to death during your adolescence. This part is key. No one develops the ability after eighteen or nineteen. You have to—”

  “Almost die,” Callum said. “We all almost died. We all had the trait. Now we all have the sight.”

  They gave me a few moments to process this information. I got up and went to the window. There wasn’t much of a view. I could see the brown brick of the building a few feet away, and a pigeon roost on top of the opposite roof.

  “I can see ghosts because I choked?” I finally said.

  “Correct,” Stephen replied. “Basically. Yes.”

  “But I’m not supposed to be worried about it?”

  “Correct.”

  “So . . . if I’m not supposed to be worried about it, why am I sitting here with you? You said you were police. What kind of police? Why did the police come to tell me I could see ghosts? How can you even be police? You’re, like, my age.”

  “No age requirements in our line of work,” Callum said. “The younger the better, really.”

  “This is where it gets a little more complicated,” Stephen said. “We didn’t come to tell you that you can see ghosts. We happened to be working, and this happened to you today, and Boo thought you needed an explanation.”

  “Working on what?” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re assisting with the investigation. You’re a witness. It’s standard procedure to watch over a witness.”

  Finally, I did the math. I was a witness. I could see ghosts. I had seen someone on the night of a Ripper murder, someone Jazza couldn’t see, even though he was right in front of her. Someone whom no camera could film. Someone who left no DNA. Someone who walked away without a trace . . .

  I had the not entirely unpleasant sensation of falling. Falling, falling, falling . . .

  The Ripper was a ghost. I had seen the Ripper. The ghost Ripper.

  “I think she’s figured it out,” Callum said.

  “What the hell do you do?” I asked. “If he’s a . . .”

  “Ghost,” Boo said.

  “Then what do you do? You can’t stop him. You can’t catch him. He knows I saw him. He knows where I live.”

  “You need to trust us,” Stephen said, holding up his hands. “You’re actually the safest person in London right now. You need to go on with your life completely as normal.”

  “How do I do that?” I asked.

  “You’ll adapt,” he said. “I promise. The initial shock wears off quickly. A few days, a week, and you’ll be fine. We’re all fine. Look at us.”

  I looked at them—Stephen, so young and so serious. Boo, smiling away next to me. Callum, keeping suspiciously quiet and shoving food into his mouth. They did look pretty normal.

  “I’ll be with you,” Boo said. “I’m staying until this is all over. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

  “So I just go back?” I said.

  “Correct,” Stephen replied.

  “And go to class, and play hockey, and talk to my parents—”

  “Yes.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “We can’t tell you that,” Stephen said. “I’m sorry. What we do is classified. You can’t tell anyone that we’ve met. You can never discuss this conversation. You just have to trust us. We are police. We are looking after you.”

  “How many more of you are there?”

  “The entire force is behind us,” Stephen said. “The security services. There are people working on this at every level of government. You have to trust us.”

  I had never experienced this feeling before. My heart had been going fast all through this discussion, but now it slowed and I was almost sleepy. My system could take no more. I sat down on the sofa again and put my head back and stared at the ceiling.

  “I need to go to bed now,” I said. “I just want to go home.”

  “Right,” Stephen said. “I’ll take you two back.”

  Boo walked me to the door and out into the hall while Stephen got his coat and keys.

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure that was a good idea,” I heard Callum say.

  21

  AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR AT THE UNIVERSITY where my parents teach, you can see parakeets in the trees. This is because some students get pets during the year, and they think they’re temporary, because some people are just like that. When they leave campus, they open up the cages and let the birds fly right out of the window.

  My uncle Bick has a soft spot in his heart for the birds left behind. During exam week, he drives around looking for them. He really means well, but Uncle Bick can be a little scary looking, with his bushy beard and his battered truck with the WANT TO SEE MY COCKATOO? sticker on the back, cruising around slow by the dorms. Eventually, someone freaks out, and campus security gets called, and Uncle Bick gets pulled over and has to explain that he’s just trying to rescue parakeets. Since they never believe him, he has them call my mom’s office, because she is his sister and his lawyer and a Distinguished Member of the Faculty. Then my mom sits Uncle Bick down and explains where the state of Louisiana stands on Peeping Toms (a fine of five hundred dollars and up to six months in jail), and how it really isn’t good for her career to have her brother repeatedly stopped on campus under suspicion of violating said Peeping Tom law—and then Uncle Bick rails on about the poor little parakeets and how something should be done. After about an hour of this, we all go
out for pit barbecue at Big Jim’s Pit of Love because there’s just no point in talking about it anymore. This family ritual of ours signals the start of summer.

  One year while out parakeet hunting, Uncle Bick caught a little green one he named Pipsie. Pipsie had clearly had a hard life. When Uncle Bick found her, she was sitting on a stop sign, tweeting her head off. She had a broken wing and was missing one foot. Other parakeets would have given up, but Pipsie was a survivor. She managed to get herself on top of that sign and get rescued. I don’t know how. She couldn’t fly.

  Pipsie was undernourished and dehydrated, and her feathers were coming out. Uncle Bick nursed little Pipsie back to health with a care and devotion I couldn’t help but admire. He’d sit for hours, dripping water into her beak through an eyedropper. He fed her mashed food from the end of a coffee stirrer. He bound up her broken wing until it healed.

  “Look at how she adapts,” he’d say whenever I came into the shop. “Look at her. She’s a lesson to us all. We can all adapt.”

  Which is great, except . . . Pipsie didn’t really adapt. Her wing healed crooked, so she could only fly about six inches off the ground in semicircular patterns. She fell off the perch all the time, so Uncle Bick just kept her in a box on the counter. One day, Pipsie got it in her tiny bird mind that she could fly again. She got up to the edge of the box and surveyed the landscape and spread her crooked wings and went for it. She fell off the counter and landed on the floor, just as the delivery guy swung the door open and rolled in three hundred pounds of birdseed on a hand truck.

  This is all I could think about after Stephen told me to “adapt.”