Fading Away

by Tom Upton

  “The girls’ bathroom is still sealed off,” Jack pointed out.

  “I know.”

  “No way of getting in there during school hours. That’s the bad part.”

  “The whole thing is the bad part,” I said. “I don’t want to go looking for this miserable tree-hugging bitch. By the way, what do you think is the good part?”

  “Well, the cops have been going in and out of the bathroom, but none of them have disappeared.”

  “That’s the good part?” I wondered; I loathed the police, especially detectives, anybody in an official capacity who might discover what I was. The idea of one or two cops going poof was a happy thought.

  “Sure,” Jack said. “If a couple cops vanished, it would be a real mess. The school would be overrun with federal authorities—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and who knows who else? It would be Men-in-Black City if it looked like something really weird was going on. We would never stand a chance to get into the bathroom and check it out ourselves.”

  “And there’s a chance now?” I asked.

  “If we do it after school hours,” he said.

  “You’re suggesting we break into the school at night.”

  “Too risky,” he said. “The school has an alarm with perimeter sensors. All the windows and doors are wired. But it doesn’t have interior motion detectors. So the best way to do it is to get locked in the school, find some hiding place and let the school shut down around us. That way we’d have the whole building to ourselves, after Carl the janitor leaves, which is no later than ten o’clock.”

  I stared at him. “You just figured all this out?”

  “I think fast.”

  “And you’re serious?”

  “Yeah, definitely.”

  “Did you figure out exactly how we’re supposed to get Mary Jo back?”

  “I have some ideas,” he said.

  “Meaning, no.”

  “I figured we have to play that part by ear.”

  After thinking it all over for a moment, I said, “This sounds like a really bad idea.”

  “So you want to try it?”

  “Yeah, for sure,” I said, concluding that a bad idea is better than no idea at all.

  “Tomorrow is Friday,” he said. “I figure it would be good to do it tomorrow. When they lock down the school, everybody will be in a hurry to get home. There will be less of a chance of anybody catching us hiding. I’ll tell my parents I’m staying over at a friend’s house. What about your parents?”

  “What Dad doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Mom pretty much lets me do whatever I want—she understands that I can see trouble coming from a long way off.”

  “So we’re good?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

  The waitress brought my omelet. As I ate it, I had flashes of fluffy yellow and white chicks. I tried to feel a sense of loss for them, but I couldn’t feel anything.

  7

  “The girl’s been missing for nearly three days.”

  “I know, I know, I know,” I said.

  It was Friday morning, and I was eating breakfast alone—except for Jerry, of course.

  Jerry was being wretched. I hadn’t thought it was possible for a ghost to be so impatient. He’d burned my toast three times, before I finally had to make it myself.

  Now I tried to eat my scrambled eggs and toast, while Jerry sat across from me, complaining that I was taking too long to find Mary Jo. He sat there in his uniform, looking like he belonged on a ghastly police-recruiting poster. Join the police force. Serve and protect. Get your brains blown out by an armed felon.

  “Three days is a long time to be lost in an alternate reality. No telling how much damage might be done to the girl. In the meantime, there have been three more accidents here that should never have happened. Two more car accidents—minor fender benders—and a senior citizen fell off a stepladder and broke his leg while changing a light bulb,” he said.

  “I’m working on it. It’s not that easy, you know?”

  “What’s the hold up?” he demanded.

  “There are cops at the school every day. The bathroom is still off limits to students. But there is a plan,” I said, and told him about Jack and about what we had planned for that evening.

  He thought for a long time, and then he said, “You know, technically, you’d still be breaking and entering, and trespassing. Those are some very serious charges.”

  “You said I needed to find her. You didn’t say anything about having to find her legally.”

  “I’m just saying, you’d be breaking the law.”

  “And how could I do it without breaking the law. I mean, I figure I have to get into the bathroom. I need to check it out. If I can’t even check it out, there’s no way I can find her. And how can I do that legally if it’s still a crime scene? You can’t make an omelet without cracking a couple eggs, you know.”

  He shrugged a thick shoulder. “I guess you’re right. I just don’t like the idea of you breaking the law.”

  “Think of it as the lesser of two evils. Maybe that will help.”

  “It doesn’t. I feel that I am turning you into a juvenile delinquent.”

  “Jerry, please, just—just stop talking about it, okay?” I said. “You keep talking, and I’ll forget the whole thing, I swear. I didn’t want to do it from the beginning, anyway.”

  “All right,” he said glumly.

  He still sat there, but kept his mouth shut. I was able to eat in relative peace for a few minutes.

  “So what about this guy? Jack—is that his name?” he asked.

  “Jack Kilgore, yeah.”

  “You like him?”

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  “But you told him about yourself, about what you can do.”

  “Everybody has a weak moment now and then.”

  “And you’re letting him help you with finding Mary Jo.”

  “Jack is an idiot,” I said. “He actually wants to help me. If he wants to be stupid, who am I to stop him?”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “Can’t you talk about the weather or something?” I asked.

  “You have to like somebody.”

  “Who says?”

  “Life must be so lonely for you.”

  “Lonely? What are you, kidding? I have annoying ghosts pestering me all the time.”

  He gave me a sad look, and shook his head. He stood up and drifted into the next room, finally leaving me to finish my breakfast in peace.

  8

  I got to school early, and sat in my car parked in the student lot. It was a gray day. The school looked like a castle beneath the sky of heavy dark clouds. The zero-period crowd was arriving by ones and twos, straying into the building. I could never understand why anybody would sign up for pre- and post-class activities. Weren’t regular classes enough? Does the world real need over-achievers? People whose sole purpose in life seems to be to remind the rest of us that we are total losers? I would have been content to stay in bed under my blankets. I could have done that every day, but especially today.

  It wasn’t long before Jack arrived and was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. He was the first living being to ever get into the car with me. My parents wouldn’t even ride with me; my driving was so bad because I was constantly distracted by some weird thing or other.

  Jack started going over his master plan with me again. He’d brought a gym bag that contained a large flashlight, a hundred feet of rope, and a notebook filled with hand-written spells.

  “I have to tell you,” I said. “I’ve been thinking things over, and I’m pretty sure this is the stupidest plan anybody ever dreamed up.”

  Jack was irked. “So you don’t want to go through with it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But I brought rope and everything,” he whined.

  “That’s what I mean. W
hy do we need rope? So if the plan doesn’t work, you can go and hang yourself?”

  “Rope is a good idea,” he said. “Rope always comes in handy.”

  “So does duct tape. You bring that with, too?”

  “I can’t believe you’re telling me this now,” he said, clearly disappointed. He was so dull he’d probably been looking forward to the whole event. He believed it would be fun. “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “I was thinking that maybe I could slip into the bathroom between classes.”

  But he was already shaking his head.

  “Too risky. Too many people around. If you get caught trying to get in during the day, that’s it. We won’t get another chance. Right now, they don’t suspect there might be a reason for anybody to want to get into the bathroom. But if they ever thought there might be some reason, they’d probably leave somebody to guard the room at night.”

  “So this incredibly lame plan is all we have?”

  “It’s not that lame,” he said. “It’ll get us into the bathroom without anybody else around. Now, have you figured out a hiding place?”

  I looked down at myself, and snorted. “Are you kidding? I can hide just about anywhere. I could probably stand in the middle of the hallway and turn sideways, and nobody would notice me.”

  He gave me a sour look. Obviously he didn’t think I was taking this seriously—and in many ways I wasn’t.

  “All right,” I sighed. “I was thinking the girls’ locker room. There are about a million places to hide there. The lockers are too small, but there’s a closet and air shafts, and other nooks and crannies.”

  “Good, that wouldn’t be too far from my hiding place.”

  “Which is?”

  “Under the bleachers in the main gym,” he said.

  “Uh, don’t they roll those in at night?” I asked. They were the type of bleachers that collapse toward the wall when you press a button.

  “No, the only time they do that is after a basketball game, so that they can clean the floor better.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I’m not going to climb under the bleachers if there’s a chance of me getting crushed.”

  I thought about that for a second. “Maybe I just ought to hide under the bleachers with you,” I suggested.

  “No, it’s better if we separate. If one of us gets caught, then the other can still get into the bathroom.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” I said, but still wondered. What if I was the one to get caught? Exactly what would Jack do once he got into the girls’ room? I didn’t even know what I’d do.

  “Look, it’s almost over,” he said. “After tonight, no matter what happens, it’s over. You find Mary Jo, or you try and can’t find her. In either case, you’re off the hook, right?”

  It seemed right to agree with him. Still I had a nagging feeling this wasn’t going to be so simple. I couldn’t envision anything bad happening tonight. But my foresight wasn’t always perfectly clear. Sometimes, the future was so clear it seemed like the past. At other times, the future was a vast muddle of possibilities. Right now all I was getting was muddle, and a bad feeling.

  9

  Later that day, after lunch and before English, I wandered up to the second floor so that I could pass the sealed girls’ room. I was not a curious person by nature. How could I be? I already saw and knew way more than I ever wanted to know. But, now, briefly, curiosity caught hold of me.

  I slowed as I approached the girls’ room. Three strips of bright yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the doorjamb. The solid wooden door itself wasn’t locked, because none of the bathroom doors in school had a lock. I had always supposed this was for safety reasons, so that nobody would accidentally get locked in the bathroom.

  It would be an easy matter to get inside. Just turn the door handle, push the door inward, and then slip between the lower and middle strips of crime-scene tape, much as a wrestler steps through the ropes to enter a ring.

  As I inched down the hallway, looking at the door out of the corner of my eye, I tried to probe the bathroom with my freak senses. I did this kind of thing all the time—especially when one or another of my classes was getting particularly boring and I wanted to see what was happening in the next classroom over. Now, I was stunned to discover that I couldn’t read the interior of the girls’ room. It was strange. At first I thought there was something wrong with me. I’d been doing this since I was six-years-old, and I had never, not even once, had a problem. But the inside of the girls’ room remained as much a mystery to me as to any of the other kids walking down the hallway. In a very small way, I, for once, didn’t feel like such a freak. I stopped in front of the door, and eyed it in wonder. My mind could see just behind the door— the pale tiles of small entrance hall, the doorway to the left leading into the bathroom—but that was all. I concentrated harder—which I never had to do—trying to see inside the bathroom itself, but it was as though somehow my senses were being prevented from seeing any further. Something was there, like a shield, and my mind probed it, like the fingers of a blind man, trying to feel its shape, its texture, its temperature. The harder I tried to probe it, the denser the shield became, and colder, finally becoming cold enough to give me a case of brain freeze, as though I had just gulped down a slushie on a hot summer day. And just as I had to reel in my senses, I heard the sound, a low rumbling noise that reminded me of the challenging growl of some wild animal.

  Okay, that’s new, I thought, and continued quickly down the hallway.

  The idea that there might be some living thing in the bathroom freaked me out but also fascinated me. What exactly could it be? Jerry had said that some entity had slipped into our reality, but it didn’t seem logical that the entity, once here, would choose to loiter in a bathroom. Jack, on the other hand, had not mentioned any entities; in his clue-less way, he talked of an aperture between realities, and seemed to believe rescuing Mary Jo was akin to rescuing somebody who had fallen down an old well. Now I was certain that both of them were wrong.

  I wanted to find Jack, and fill him in on this new development. Maybe he would change his mind about proceeding with the plan. But, really, I barely knew the guy; I didn’t know his class schedule, or where he might be found at the moment. So it would have to wait until the next time I would see him, tonight in the darkened interior of the school.

  10

  I wasn’t afraid of the unknown. So the idea of entering a dark bathroom in which there might be some dangerous otherworldly creature didn’t trouble me. I figured what was the worst that could happen? Some monster could kill me, but so what? I knew that only my body could be killed, while my spirit, the thing that was really me, would continue to live. The worse that could happen would be that I end up a spirit and have the chance to haunt somebody else the way spirits had haunted me since I was born.

  After my last class, I stopped at my locker and dumped off my books. Usually I was fast to leave school, but today I lingered, waiting for the other kids to go home. It was maddening. I wasn’t used to killing time, and a lot of kids didn’t seem to want to leave. They loitered in the hallways, standing in twos or threes, talking as though they had all the time in the world. When they headed toward the exits, they moved slower than snails. I stood in front of my opened locker, pretending to straighten the things inside, until finally there were just a couple stragglers in the hallway.

  I slammed shut my locker, and headed toward the gym.

  I looked through the window of one of the gym doors. Inside half the overhead lights were off, and the basketball court lay silent in the dimness.

  I pushed open the door and walked inside. The coaches’ office was dark and seemed locked for the weekend. The soles of my shoes squeaked softly as I slowly made my way toward the locker rooms. I figured if anybody caught me now, I’d tell them I needed to check in the locker room, that I’d lost a ring or something. I could be a very convincing liar. Lying is easy if you know wh
at is going through peoples’ minds. You know what mood they are in. You know pretty much what they are willing to believe. But, now, lies were not needed; there was nobody around. All the coaches and gym teachers had fled the school for the weekend, as Jack had guessed.

  I glanced at the bleachers. I didn’t wonder if he was already hidden beneath them; I sensed he wasn’t here yet. Probably he was somewhere in the school, still killing time.

  I entered the locker room. The lights had been turned off, but still there was enough light so that I could see without bumping into lockers or tripping over benches. I wandered around, looking for a hiding place. I had thought I might be able to hide atop one of the sections of lockers, but now I saw that the lockers were not high enough; I would have been easily spotted up there. I found the mop closet locked. And all the vent covers were screwed tightly in place. I felt like an idiot. Here I was, a freak that could see into the future, and yet I had not thought to bring a screwdriver.

  I sat on one of the benches that were bolted to the floor between the rows of lockers. I waited, but nobody wandered into the room. After a while, I figured I was safe where I was—I didn’t have to squeeze into some tight place to hide. I relaxed, stretching out on the bench, my hands crossed on my stomach. I shut my eyes and listened. The only thing I could hear was the distant dripping of a single faucet in the shower room. Soon I fell asleep, so much more easily than I did when I was at home and lying in a soft warm bed.

  When I awoke, the room was almost completely dark. I panicked. I wasn’t sure how long I had sleep—maybe too long.

  I jumped off the bench, and, feeling along the lockers and walls, I made my way back to the gym.

  The lights were all off, and the gym was lost in darkness. I walked carefully along the length of the basketball court. When I reached the end of the bleachers, I peered under them, but I couldn’t see Jack—everything under the bleachers was inky dark. I made a couple pssst sounds, just in case he, too, had fallen asleep. But I got no response. It didn’t make sense. He must be under there. I wasn’t sure of the exact time, but it should have been more than enough for him to get to his hiding place.