“Oh, Jo! I knew I wasn’t making it up or hallucinating. I knew you’d really come back,” Alex burst out suddenly. “I knew you’d give me the chance to explain.”
“Explain what?” I asked, the question out before I could stop it. “Alex, what are you talking about?”
“It was . . . that after . . . ,” Alex said, “before the accident, when I asked you to go to the prom. I kissed you.”
“I remember,” I said.
All of a sudden a horrible suspicion began to dawn. If we’d had a conversation like this under other, less otherworldly circumstances, I’d have pretty much had to figure that . . .
“Alex Crawford, are you trying to tell me you take it back?”
At my words, relief flooded Alex’s face. I don’t believe this! I thought.
“Oh, god, Jo. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Alex said. “I tried my best to make it up to you. I got the student council to approve all those memorials.”
“You do mean it,” I said. “This is unbelievable. You’re taking it back. I haven’t even been dead a month and you’re telling me you never really liked me in the first place. What happened to love at first sight?”
“Omigod!” a girl’s voice I couldn’t identify screeched. “There she is! There’s Jo O’Connor’s ghost! I think she and Alex are having a fight!”
Alex’s whole body jerked. His head whipped around like a sports fish on a line. I could hear my heartbeats, those things I was no longer supposed to have, thundering like a jackhammer in my ears. Though it could have just been the sound of all those footsteps suddenly pounding down the theater aisles.
I had no idea how many of them there were.
I didn’t particularly want to stop to count.
“Hey, Jo, what’s it feel like to be dead?” I heard a guy call.
I did the only thing I could. I answered the question.
“Right at this moment, it pretty much sucks eggs,” I said.
Then, finally, Elaine killed the lights, plunging the auditorium into total darkness.
During the confusion which ensued, I was the only one who kept my head. I whipped it back behind the curtains, yanked the stocking cap off my hair, and ran. Out the side stage door, down the short flight of steps, straight into Mr. Barnes.
“For heaven’s sake!” he exclaimed. “What is it? You look like you’ve just seen—”
“Oh, Mr. Barnes,” I sobbed out. “I’ve just seen the ghost of Jo O’Connor.”
Nineteen
“The minute I stepped into that theater, I knew. I just knew there was something freaky going on. I mean, I’m not even in Drama. How did I know to even go there in the first place? But then, all the women in my family are like that.”
I paused in the act of doodling instead of taking interview notes and glanced across the table at Khandi Kayne.
“Like what?” I inquired.
Several hours and what felt like several hundred interviews later, I was sitting in the library study carrel I’d established as my private office. It had a number of advantages. I could close the door, giving those students who came to see me a certain amount of privacy.
Spending the entire day at Beacon was a break in the routine. Following my encounter with Mr. Barnes, I’d phoned Mr. Hanlon and informed him of the latest ghost sighting. I figured it would look a little weird if I didn’t. He’d given his permission for me to remain at Beacon for the day, interviewing as many people as possible.
I could have done without Khandi Kayne.
“We know things,” Khandi said now, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The women in my family, I mean. We can just sense them.”
I drew a little witch’s hat with an arrow poking through the crown.
“You mean supernatural things?”
She nodded. “Personally I wasn’t one bit surprised to walk into that theater and see Jo O’Connor’s ghost. I knew as soon as I put my hand on the door handle that something funny was going on. I got all sort of lightheaded.”
Probably the blood trying to find its way through the labyrinth of your brain.
“I think it was because I could sense something evil,” Khandi went on.
Oh boy, I thought. Here we go.
Khandi had wanted to stab me, stab Jo O’Connor, in the back from the day we’d first met. Who says delayed gratification can’t be fun?
“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying Jo O’Connor’s ghost is evil?”
“Well, maybe not actually evil. That might be too strong a word,” Khandi said. “But did you ever hear of a happy ghost haunting someone? I just don’t think that happens. Besides, Jo wasn’t very good for Alex when she was alive. Why should she be good for him now that she’s dead?”
“It sounds as if you didn’t like her very much,” I commented.
Khandi gave a trill of nervous laughter as she eyed my notebook. “Well, I don’t know that I’d go that far,” she said. “I mean, I’d hate for you to quote me or anything. It’s just . . . I never really felt Jo was right for Alex. She only wanted to go out with him because he was student body president.”
You are so full of it, I thought. Images of red and white Christmas candy canes danced through my brain. I seized them and snapped their little striped necks. I flipped through my notebook, pretending to look for previously recorded information.
“I understand he asked her to the prom.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Khandi said with a sniff. “But I’ll tell you this.” She leaned forward as if about to impart a great secret.
“If Alex did ask her, it was because he felt sorry for her. But it totally backfired on him. I think that’s why Jo’s ghost is still here. She just can’t bear to let Alex go. Even she knows she’s a nobody without him.”
Nobly, I resisted the impulse to stuff my notebook down her throat.
“That’s an . . . interesting insight,” I said.
“Oh, well,” Khandi said, sitting back and preening ever so slightly. “All the women in my family are like that.”
“They know things and they have insights. Fascinating combination.”
“We like to think so,” Khandi said.
The bell rang, saving me from further information on the matriarchs of the Kayne clan.
“Thanks a lot for your time,” I said, closing my notebook to signal that the interview was over.
“Don’t you want a picture of me?” Khandi asked.
By the end of the day I’d compiled the following fascinating facts. Jo O’Connor’s ghost had:
1) Confronted Alex in the Little Theater, vowing to haunt him forever over the fact that he intended to dump her. (I probably don’t have to tell you that one came from Khandi. Ironically it was the only one that came anywhere near being accurate.)
2) Been seen sitting at her favorite table in the snack bar eating a chocolate donut and drinking a Coke during morning break.
3) Appeared on the basketball court in the middle of senior boys’ P.E. A thing which had caused the school’s best free throw shot maker to miss the basket. A circumstance which he insisted would otherwise never have occurred, it was so unusual.
4) Shown up in the office of Ms. Geyer, the head school counselor, pleading with her to be allowed to attend graduation. Ms. Geyer was briefly treated for hypertension, then sent home for the rest of the day.
And those were just my top four faves.
As far as I could tell, about the only people on campus not claiming to have seen Jo O’Connor’s ghost were the two who might legitimately be able to say they’d actually done so: Alex and Elaine. Both had kept their distance throughout the day. Elaine had gotten her two cents in, however. Stuffed into the locker assigned to Claire Calloway was a note that said, “I told you so.”
“Claire?”
I jumped, the pen I clutched in my numb fingers making a jagged line across the notebook page. All day long I’d waited for this moment with a mixture of dread and antic
ipation.
“Hey, Alex,” I said.
He looked absolutely awful. Tired and drained. He looks confused and unhappy, I thought, and felt guilt swarm up to choke me.
“Okay if I sit down?” Alex asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Alex pulled out a chair and sat down across from me. I made sure my glasses were securely on my face.
Don’t think about Jo O’Connor now, I thought. Don’t think about all the mistakes you’ve made. Concentrate on being Claire Calloway. On doing her—your—job.
“I wanted to thank you,” Alex said.
I felt my jaw wobble as I struggled not to let it drop open.
“That’s nice. What for?” I asked.
A faint smile moved across Alex’s tired face.
“For not immediately hounding me with billions of questions I don’t know how to answer.”
“Oh, that,” I said. I flipped open the notebook to a clean page. “So, Alex, how was your day?” I asked.
He laughed, and I could feel some of the tension flow out of him.
“I think the safest thing I can say is interesting,” he said. “I was wondering if I could . . . talk to you about it.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I said, wishing my heart wasn’t beating quite so fast. “Where would you like to start?”
“I don’t quite know.”
“How about if I ask questions, then?” I said. “I think that’s why they call this an interview.”
Alex smiled again.
“So, tell me. Do you usually play things safe?”
Alex looked surprised. “What makes you ask that?”
“The phrase you just used,” I answered. “You said, ‘the safest thing I can say’. Somehow, it made me wonder whether the choices you’re used to making are the safe ones. It’s always seemed unusual to me that someone with your track record would see a ghost at all.”
Who are you? I thought. Will you tell me, Alex?
“Okay,” he said. “I guess I get that. And the answer would have to be yes. I think that was one of the things that first attracted me to Jo.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Jo was different,” Alex said.
“It seems that you and”—I made a show of consulting my notebook—“Khandice Kayne would agree on that.”
Alex snorted. “Don’t even go there,” he said.
“Is it true what they say?”
“Depends what it is.”
“That you fell head over heels for Jo O’Connor, then realized you’d made a mistake. It’s been suggested you were going to dump her, but she died before you got the chance. I’m sorry if that sounds unfeeling.”
“I was not going to dump her,” Alex said, his tone emphatic. “You can’t dump someone unless you’ve actually gone out.”
“I think you’re playing with semantics,” I said. “The impression I’ve gotten over the last couple of weeks is that you and Jo were attracted right from the start. Today people are saying her ghost totally freaked because you told her you’d made a mistake. That’s kind of confusing, don’t you agree?”
Alex was silent, staring down at the tabletop. On impulse, I closed the notebook with a snap.
“Totally off the record,” I said. “I won’t use anything you tell me in an article unless you give me permission. What was really going on between you and Jo O’Connor?”
Just tell me the truth. Whatever it is.
Alex gave a sigh. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I answered.
His eyes flickered to my face, understanding in them. “Before I met Jo, that’s exactly what I would have said. But there was something about her that struck me right off. She was . . . ”
“Different,” I filled in, using the word he’d used just a few moments ago.
“That’s right,” Alex said. “The first time I saw her, she was standing at that burger joint across the street. You know the one?”
I nodded.
“Staring at something that wasn’t there.”
“That is different, I have to admit.”
At this, he actually gave a rueful laugh.
He feels better talking about it, I thought. I wondered how I’d feel by the interview’s end.
“I think that made more sense inside my head. What I mean to say is that she looked interested. As if she was trying to figure out a puzzle and was willing to stand there until she did. Most people would have walked right on by and never noticed anything was unusual. Or they would have pretended not to notice even if they had. Jo wasn’t like that. She didn’t seem to be afraid of what other people thought.”
“Surely everybody’s afraid of that, to a certain degree,” I countered.
“Okay,” Alex nodded. “I’ll give you that. But Jo never came across that way. If anything, it was just the opposite. It was almost as if it didn’t occur to her to worry about what other people thought because she knew what they were thinking before they did.”
Boy, did you give Jo the benefit of the doubt, I thought.
“So you’re saying she was psychic,” I couldn’t resist saying, deadpan.
Alex gave a quick, surprised laugh. Then, slowly, his smile faded as he considered. “I think what I’m saying is that she understood how people fit together,” he said. “She had a perspective nobody else had. Totally without realizing it, she made me see how much of my life was same old, same old.”
“But you thought you made a mistake,” I said.
“About being in love with her. Not about her being great,” Alex said. “I just suddenly realized she wasn’t the one I wanted.”
“Who do you want, Alex?” I asked.
Alex shook his head swiftly, and I felt a sharp emotion shoot through my chest. Relief. Disappointment. What I was doing really wasn’t fair.
“Even off the record, I can’t tell you that. It wouldn’t make a difference anyway. She doesn’t know. I didn’t want to say anything until I’d talked to Jo, and then . . . ”
“Then Jo was kind of hard to talk to,” I filled in. “Is that what you were trying to do today? Tell her the truth at last?”
“Sort of,” Alex said. “You probably think I’m nuts for thinking I see her ghost at all, don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s better not to rule out too many possibilities, in my experience.”
“Now you sound just like her,” he said.
I swallowed past a lump in my throat that was easily the size of the state of Texas.
“Does this mean you’ll let me give some advice?” I asked.
“Just so long as it’s not take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”
“Do you think Jo would want you to be unhappy?”
“That’s your advice?”
“It’s a question and I think you should answer it,” I said. “Is—was—Jo the sort of person who’d want you to move on, or would she want you to be all obsessed by guilt over what happened in the past?”
“People always do that, you know,” Alex said.
“Do what?”
“Ask themselves what the person who’s dead would have wanted. Personally, I think it’s an excuse to go ahead and do what they want.”
“Answer the question, Alex.”
“I didn’t want to hurt her,” he burst out. “Everybody’d seen the way I felt. It’s not like I tried to hide it. How was I going to explain I’d gotten it wrong? I just didn’t know what to do.”
On impulse, I reached out and covered his hand with mine.
“I get that,” I said. “Maybe Jo does too. Maybe that’s why she came back. To tell you that she understands. That she wants you to move on, to be happy. Maybe she can’t move on until you do. Did you ever think of that?”
“No, I didn’t,” Alex admitted.
“Try thinking about it now,” I said. “After what you’ve told me about her, it’s hard for me to believe Jo would want you to walk arou
nd being miserable, though I bet she wouldn’t mind if Khandi Kayne did.”
Alex gave me a slow smile. “Okay, I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Good.” I took my hand from his. My fingers tingled, just like they had when we’d clasped hands the very first day we’d met. Only now I had a feeling I knew the cause: Whatever had happened between Alex and me was over. We’d never hold hands again.
“It’s getting kind of late. I’d better go,” I said.
I stuffed my notebook into my bag and rose to my feet.
“Before you do, can I ask you a question?” Alex asked.
“Of course you can,” I said.
“Will you go to the Beacon prom with me, Claire?”
Twenty
“What did you just say?” I asked, stupified.
Before Alex could respond, I held up a hand.
“Please excuse me. That sounded very rude, and I didn’t mean for it to. It’s just . . . you’ve kind of surprised me, I have to admit.”
“That’s my fault. I’m sorry,” Alex said, his face beginning to turn red. “I just thought you might like someone to go with when you cover the event for the paper,” he plowed on. “I think that’s supposed to be part of the exchange, isn’t it?”
“I honestly don’t know, but I suppose it would make sense,” I said. “Wouldn’t that be kind of boring for you? I mean, it’s not like it would be a real date. Right?”
“Right,” Alex said. “But you would be doing me a favor. I’m pretty much expected to go. . . . ”
“Why don’t you ask what’s her name?” I asked.
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know. You wouldn’t tell me,” I said.
Alex expelled air as he got the lame joke I’d made.
“Look,” I said. “I appreciate the gesture. I honestly do. But it’s your one and only senior prom, Alex. Don’t you think you should go with someone who means something to you instead of someone you barely know? If you won’t ask the mystery girl of your dreams, why not ask Elaine Golden?”
“Elaine?” Alex echoed, his face stunned. “What made you suggest her?”
“Wasn’t she Jo’s closest friend? She’d be likely to understand if you wanted a date that wasn’t really a date, wouldn’t she?”
How Not to Spend Your Senior Year Page 11