I closed my eyes as the door opened, as the officers spoke the first words.
“Ms. DeSoto?”
I didn’t listen. I just felt the immense surge of anguish, of anger, of confusion that made me first understand the beat of a truly broken heart. The pain was so much I doubled over. I tried to think sweet thoughts of comfort, tried to project images of happiness, of myself as a small baby, of anything that might soothe her pain. But the anguish was too great, an immense flood of red and black that circled around her so much so that even the Takers that hovered around the police were blown off by it. It was like a supernova of the soul. It reminded me of a picture I once saw in art class, an immense painting of pain on a canvas that would never quite come clean.
“I can see it,” I said, when I could gather the words. “I can see pain.”
“You can see emotions,” Crazy T told me, “because you can see the part of hell opening up that gives people those emotions.”
“My mother really is in a living hell—because of me?”
“A soul can escape, but it can take years,” he told me. “I don’t see her escaping anytime soon, if ever. You, I don’t see escaping at all.”
The anguish swept over me again as my mother asked for just a moment away, as she went to my room, inexplicably, and checked for me, as if this was all a misunderstanding, as if her baby might still be under the covers. I could feel her shock. It was the only thing that matched her agony. She stumbled around, searching for the light, stumbled upon an old beer cap I had forgotten to pick up after Preggers and I had a few drinks in my room last weekend. She felt the odd texture, even underneath her slippers, reached down to pick it up. As the cops called out to her, she clung to the wall, briefly, holding the beer cap in her hand. The time: 3:44.
FIVE DAYS LEFT
Chapter 2
I tried to channel this Spree, to cut the misery short, but I felt pulled towards the last place I ever thought I’d spend any of my afterlife.
It was my old school, the Monday morning after my death.
Some kids were crying; some didn’t care, shuffling along on their normal day as if no one had died. Everyone was talking about me, Preggers, and Aliya, though, even the teachers. They had been called in for an emergency meeting. They were gossiping about how they thought I’d appeared drunk in class once, but how they said nothing. I smirked. Only once? I’d gone to school drunk dozens of times. Maybe if they had said something, I’d still be alive. Maybe not. I heard Mrs. Walters, my pretty blond English teacher, say: “She was a lost soul.” I never knew she felt that way. I thought she was just trying to be nice when she talked to me. Mr. Higgins, my portly science teacher, said that I acted like a little flirt in his class, which I suppose was true, and that he felt sorry for me. Mrs. Cowell, who had these giant lips, was the school psychologist, and said that I used to be such a good student, but that I’d skipped a few times and she had been worried.
As the principal marched in, along with crisis counselors and the rest of the school counselors, I could feel the weight on his shoulders. He was Mr. Buckley, a soft-spoken, kind man who genuinely loved kids—just not the gremlins they grew up to become. He had these old-school bifocals, and he tilted them before speaking. He spoke to thank the teachers for coming in early and then laid out the plan for the day. I felt myself pulled somewhere else.
Slumped over a locker in the hallway was Zipper, real name John Chatterly. Everyone called him Zipper because he kept completely to himself and looked a little like the character with the spiky black bangs from the old Doonesbury cartoon. He carried this commando style bag he was endlessly sifting through when he wasn’t getting bullied. He mingled with other kids well enough, but he was weird. He insisted on being called by his nickname, even by teachers. As he grew older, his demands grew more ridiculous. He once insisted that a picture of a brick wall appear in place of his yearbook photo. I think he just wanted to erase himself out of existence.
I talked to him years ago, when he was closer to normal. He liked me then. I liked him. We were a couple, if middle school couples count as real couples at all. I never thought of him since we broke up, but when I saw him, I thought that he was nice, but bizarre and depressed. He had these three Takers in black cloudy form hovering around him as if he were some kind of ghostly portal. I guess I was number four. His aura was dark, darker than black, with occasional red flare-ups that reminded me of a gigantic black hole we once studied in science class. He had ear buds and was singing out lines from “Angry Johnny” by Poe. He had pictures from the morning paper, pictures of our wrecked car, and had other kids’ pictures in the bag, marked with gun sites. One of the pictures was mine. It had no site markings, though. I wondered how such a psycho could walk the halls freely, but then I remembered that I’d kept away from him too.
“Don’t worry,” he said, looking down at the pictures. “I’ll get you trending on Twitter.”
I could tell that he channeled some of his anger at me. His aura suggested that he was planning something that would make the news. Not necessarily a school shooting in the gun-kids-down-in-the-cafeteria sense, but something just as awful. The weird thing is, he was so closemouthed, and such a good kid who did what he was told that as obvious as all this was to me, it wasn’t obvious to anyone else. I could see a small pistol in his backpack; I could feel him handling it. But no one else ever saw him for what he was. The kid barely kept up on Facebook, unless he was stalking victims. He seldom texted and preferred to keep to a book. He was just a kid off the radar, even his own parents’ radar. He walked to school through the woods opposite Sherman Street—watered down survival training, I suppose—arriving early to print out homework at the school library. As withdrawn as the kid was, he was still smart and got good grades. He could put up a facade. For that reason, he was never in the counselor’s office, even though just being around his aura gave me an icky feeling.
I fought my Taker impulses, fought not to add my anger to his own. Something pulled me into the hospital room with Steph—something that felt like anger. She was just regaining consciousness from a night of fitful rest, just being reminded of what happened. I could see her aura—a pink, protective, loving energy with the blackness that now entered because of what I had done. A friend texted her as the friend was arriving at school, wishing her love. I knew that Steph was furious, and rightly so. She knew I’d be mourned and remembered well, that her mother’s killer would be cried over that day, while her mother would just be kept in the town’s prayers. I felt she was right to hate me. I’d hate me too.
“Pure anger,” Crazy T said. “You gotta love the taste of it.”
I didn’t know he was still around. I’d felt consumed with my own aura.
“Is it time for Spree?” I asked.
“Not just yet,” he told me. “You have a few things you must face first.”
I knew what he meant. The school kept calling to me. I could feel myself being drawn to an ocean worth of grief, anger, indignation, loss. There was every emotion I could imagine, even some I couldn’t, all swishing together in a huge sea of negativity. A few waves of red and blue swept through me, before moving on to the next kid.
Mrs. Cowell was busy hanging up these giant sheets of art paper in the halls as the kids gathered around the gym. I sensed that kids were supposed to sign them with a personal message to my mother. The principal, a few crisis counselors, guidance, and a few of the more personable teachers met the kids and guided them to the gym, as if it was a mile away. I wondered why many came to school at all, but I sensed that they wanted somewhere to meet, to hug, to grieve, in a public way, somewhere away from the cameras of the reporters who were already on site at the school.
“She was such a good friend,” Laurie Schmidt, my old friend in band, said.
I wasn’t a good friend. We hadn’t spoken in years, but I could feel that the tidal wave of emotion had consumed her anyway.
“I yelled at her just before she left,” Gretchen Wasoki sai
d.
She hadn’t really yelled, just told me she was trying to get to her locker. I’d forgotten the comment as soon as she made it, but I’d never have the chance to tell her so.
Behind the seniors came freshmen, also crying. They knew something had happened, didn’t know me personally, but knew of me, and cried out of obligation.
After all these kids I only half-remembered, Alex came walking in. He was too cool for the bus, the star soccer captain who always had a car, even freshman year. He wore black sunglasses that matched his curly black hair, and they just barely managed to cover up his red eyes. He looked taller than I remembered, about six feet, and more muscular, with a spray-on tan. As cheesy as the image looked to me now, I knew he was the only guy I could ever say I loved. I could feel, in the subtle teals and blues that circled around the kid, that he’d loved me too. I could also sense, in the maroons that darkened his overall mood, that he was angry, irate even, at my stupidity, at my infidelity, at my death.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen told him as he walked by.
Alex looked back, said nothing, kept walking on.
He bumped into Zipper, who wasn’t watching where he was going. Alex looked at the kid and said nothing.
“Prick,” Zipper said, and kept walking.
I sensed, in the sudden swirls of green, that Alex didn’t take Zipper seriously, that he’d found joy in bullying the kid, in pounding away at the strange and unfamiliar.
“What’d you say?” Alex asked him.
He grabbed Zipper’s backpack—the one that had the gun in it—and gave it a shove. Zipper went circling towards the wall. I wanted to make the gun go off, to get people to notice, but I couldn’t do a thing. I didn’t yet know how.
No one laughed. Everyone knew the tenor of the day.
Zipper murmured, but Alex didn’t follow up. He just went up to the paper mural Mrs. Cowell had just finished putting up and picked up one of the markers she’d attached to a string.
I stood over his shoulder, looking on as he wrote:
Hello, Mrs. DeSoto:
I’m sorry your daughter was such a whore and a drunk.
Kids who’d seen him write it stood back as he walked away.
The teachers were too busy congregating with the students, huddling and crying with them, to notice.
Even though my mom would never see the comment, I felt so pissed I could slap Alex. He cheated on me too, though after, I admit, I’d cheated on him. Just last Monday we were all lovey- dovey, throwing chalk at each other in Mr. Higgins’s class. I thought we were moving on.
Today, this.
I saw Alex scamper off, towards a bathroom stall. He locked himself in, pounded on the stall a few times, and then broke down and cried like the kids he made fun of.
I wanted to hold him, but I couldn’t.
I just knelt by him and said: “I wish I could undo it all, but I can’t. Just know that I love you too.”
Just then I felt myself pulled elsewhere, up and floating, above the crowds of crying kids huddling off the buses and into the gym, away from the anger, the grief, the accusations.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Looks like someone’s made her Death Day wish,” Crazy T said.
His voice sounded uneven. His black hole eyes sparkled in this reddish light of insanity.
“It’s no matter,” he said. “I want you to see something before we go.”
He pointed to the image of Zipper holding my picture.
At that moment I remembered. Zipper had cried when we broke up in eighth grade. I laughed before heading off to have my first beer in Preggers’s basement.
Yeah, I was a bitch.
“He liked me too much,” I said.
“He loved you,” Crazy T said, mockingly.
I watched as Zipper stalled himself up in another bathroom, then took the gun out of his backpack.
“Maybe today’s the day,” he said to himself.
I could tell Alex had humiliated him. I could feel how sensitive he was, could see it in the pink orbs that floated around him. If they only knew how alike they were, they could grieve together.
But a world of status and condescension separated them: the world of high school.
“You wanna help?” Crazy T asked me. “You wanna undo it all? Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you got behind the wheel.”
I watched as Crazy T transformed himself into a cloud of blackish mist, like the Takers hovering around Zipper, urging him on.
“Don’t do it,” I whispered to Zipper. “Forget me. Live. Just live.”
I could see Zipper jump up a bit, then calm down and put the gun back into his backpack.
He zipped it up and busted out of the stall, off to his first period class.
* * *
Faint whispers of light surrounded me, and I knew I was somewhere else, somewhere that looked a little like the smoky haze of a never-ending party. Around me was music blaring in colors along with silver shadows dancing, spilling into each other, and the smallest hints of gold that framed the whole place in infinite metallic fire. I felt I was in a field, surrounded by creatures I couldn’t even make out. Their presence felt unsettling, but familiar.
“Is this hell?” I asked.
I searched around for Crazy T, but I heard no answer.
“The Spree,” I heard an unfamiliar voice say. “Land of lost souls.”
“I can’t quite make it out,” I said.
“You will—in time,” the voice said. “Every teen does.”
“Why have I been called here?”
“It was you who called us.”
A girl stepped forward, dressed in gothic attire, with painted black eyebrows, empty eyes, nose rings, and burnt black skin. She stepped forth from the song, the music circling around her.
“We lost our names when we lost our lives, but you can call me Burn Girl,” she told me. “I’m the oldest of the lost souls, after Crazy T. I like to burn things. Hence the name.”
“How nice.”
Several more shadows materialized. One looked like a preppy girl with hair-sprayed red curls, ripped jeans, and scabs all around her body. Casting a larger shadow still was a thin male figure hanging from a tree, its neck disjointed.
“This is the land of killers, isn’t it?” I asked.
“We’ve all killed. I set fire to a party I wasn’t invited to, killing seven girls,” Burn Girl said. “I was never caught until I set a fire so big I couldn’t even escape from it.”
“And I cut and cut and cut until there was nothing left to cut,” the red-haired girl said. “They call me Cut Girl.”
“Naturally.”
“And I was a bully, sentenced to die the way my victim did,” the hanging shadow called out. “I don’t have a name.”
“We’re what you can see and feel of The Spree right now,” Burn Girl said.
“You’re Takers,” I insisted.
“We’re the Takers who surrounded you when you got into the car, when you drove it, when you crashed, when you were beheaded,” Burn Girl told me.
She pointed her singed finger at another apparition. It was me, a corpse with its bloody head in its hands, its eyes staring out into the metallic fire.
“You will join us soon enough,” the hanging shadow said. “Every Taker does.”
“What exactly is a Taker?”
“Keepers preserve life; we take it,” Cut Girl said. “We’re drawn to the thrill of killing, of blood,” she said. “I can taste your blood—even now.”
“Once you see what you’ve done, you’ll join us,” the hanging shadow told me. “A Taker must be with other Takers, must feed off of them.”
“But first,” Burn Girl said, “you made a Death Day wish.”
“I have to save the people I’ve hurt,” I replied. “I have to save my friends from ending up dead. I have to stop the school shooting.”
“You won’t succeed,” Burn Girl told me.
“Let me try.”
>
“Your wish will be granted,” Burn Girl told me, “but know that we’ll be there, watching, and that we’ll pick our own Taker to go against you.”
“Crazy T,” I said.
“It’s his special project,” Burn Girl told me. “He died killing just two of his classmates. Zipper could be the first school shooter to kill them all.”
“Not if I can reason with him.”
“You can’t.”
“Let’s wager, then. I lose—I’m all yours.”
“You can’t barter with what we already have,” the hanging shadow told me. “But if you lose, you take whoever Spree tells you to, whenever Spree tells you to. You take Crazy T’s place until hell calls you.”
“Agreed.”
“You have a school week until the shooting,” Burn Girl told me. “Five days.”
I felt myself pulled away from the parties, from the endless fires of color. I could see the school in the background and right in front of it, the hanging shadow, or Rope Man, as I called him, twisting in the air. Flies swarmed around him, and a smile took his lips as the lunch bell rang and kids with senior lunch privilege leaped through him on their way to their cars.
* * *
Later that day I wandered the halls of the school I couldn’t believe I wanted to save. Crowds of kids huddled and cried, while others were walking and talking, without a care in the world, but too afraid to even smile. Half of these kids spread rumors when I was alive. Now they all bawled like they were my friends. Not one ever said I had a problem drinking. Not a one ever really cared. Yet they set up a Facebook page in my honor, as if I’d died a saint and not a drunk. Special texts of “Remember Fay” circulated with funny comments I supposedly said. I was never that funny. And then there were the banners. I walked up, right through a couple of kids planning out how they’d cheat on Chemistry homework.
“Fay:
I remember that time I held you on the river by Sue’s house. We laughed and talked and nearly fell off the boat. You were my first kiss. I’ll treasure you always. Kade.”
Spree (YA Paranormal) Page 2