Just Kill Me

by Adam Selzer

  “Must have,” says Cyn. “But we can worry about that later. Let’s just get her back in the room. Quick, before rigor mortis starts in.”

  We load Mrs. Gunderson and her wheelchair into the van and drive back to the home, wheeling her right past Shanita and hoisting her onto her bed. She really does look like she just passed away in her sleep.

  I’m not freaking out, really, but I feel like I should be, and the fact that I’m not sort of disturbs me. What does it say about me that I don’t really mind having just sort of participated in ending someone’s life? I should feel upset about this. Guilty. Scared. I don’t know.

  But I feel calm.

  Everybody dies, and Mrs. Gunderson probably couldn’t have asked for a better way to do it at this point.

  Even though I feel like there’s at least a fifty percent chance that this was no coincidence, and Cyn really did punch Mrs. Gunderson in the brain while Rick was showing me the gorilla mask.

  I send Zoey a text begging her to tell me I’m not a psychopath. She’s seen enough of my stories to know my dark side. She sends a picture of a couple of cartoon characters hugging with a message:

  ZOEY BABY:

  If you are, then you’re MY psychopath, sweetie.

  I guess that anytime I’ve fantasized about making a getaway after committing a crime, I’ve imagined rambling through dark cobblestone alleys and through networks of winding tunnels under the ground. Our trip away from the nursing home is nothing that dramatic. It isn’t even as dramatic as running away from tagging walls with a pencil. We just sit in traffic, mostly. I guess it beats running through the sewers.

  At one point we get held up so badly that Cyn has time to run into a cupcake shop on Clark, just below Diversey Parkway. “If the traffic unfreezes, go around the block and pick me up,” she says, as Rick takes the wheel. “You guys want anything?”

  “I’m good,” I say.

  She bolts from the bus and into Molly’s Cupcakes, and I move into the front row, right behind the driver’s seat.

  “You can drive the bus too?” I ask.

  He nods. “I have my CDL. I’m actually going to be the driver for your first few solo tours, so I can jump in if I have to.”

  “So, how much of that was real?” I ask Rick. “Did Marjorie Kay Stone really write about creating ghosts by punching brains?”

  “Yeah, that part was real,” he says. “So was Mrs. Gunderson wanting to die. That prayer the other day wasn’t an act, it was what she did before every meal. There aren’t gonna be any sad faces at the funeral. Which I think actually is at your place.”

  “Does the brain punch actually work?”

  “Marjorie Kay Stone sure thought it did. I don’t know if she ever tried it, though. She probably did. She was pretty fucked up by the time we met her. But this. This was a prank, not an experiment. Didn’t Cyn tell you I was the biggest prankster in Magwitch Park?”

  She didn’t, but I’m not surprised. Now, while we wait for Cyn to get out of the cupcake shop, he tells me stories about filling the school toilets with Jell-O mix, so the water turned to gelatin, and something about smearing the floor of the gym with bowling lane oil.

  Cyn comes running back with a box of cupcakes just before the cars ahead of us start moving, and by the time we get through the light she’s already wolfing one down.

  “You’re really gonna eat that now?” asks Rick. “You just touched a corpse.”

  “She was pretty clean,” Cyn says, spraying frosting from her mouth. “Death’s not contagious.”

  “It just seems unhygienic.”

  Cyn turns back to me and says, “Is it, like, inherently less hygienic to touch a dead person than a living one?”

  “Depends on what they died of and how long they’ve been dead, I guess.”

  She offers us each a cupcake, but we both pass.

  I thought she didn’t mind the basement at the house because she was a badass, but now I think maybe she’s just the sort of person who has no “squick” reflex whatsoever. Which itself is kind of badass.

  Eventually we make it back to Halsted Street and into a lot by the river where the bus is parked between tours. This is more like the sort of hideaway I pictured: an overgrown lot, not too unlike the one at the body dump. If it weren’t for the city skyline visible over the tree line, you could pretend you were in the middle of nowhere. A few other tour buses are parked there, including both of the DarkSide ones.

  “Watch out for the rats,” says Cyn, as we get off the bus. “And the spiders. We have to sweep them off the bus before the tours lately.”

  Rick walks over to the bushes by the river to pee, and for a second Cyn and I stand there, looking at the skyline. The John Hancock Center would make a great castle for a villain. All it needs is a forest of thorns growing up around the bottom forty or fifty floors.

  “So, tell me the truth,” I say. “Did you punch her in the brain?”

  “Hey, old people just die,” says Cyn. “Happens all the time.”

  I notice she hasn’t really answered my question.

  “Hey, I’m not judging,” I say. “I’m just glad I didn’t have to jump out at her with that gorilla mask.”

  Then she cracks a smile and says, “That was Rick’s idea. I wish I could’ve seen the look on your face.”

  “ ‘Fiercest killer in the animal kingdom,’ he said.”

  “That’s my crazy bathroom.”

  Meanwhile, Cyn’s crazy bathroom is singing “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” while he pisses in the bushes. When he’s done he shakes his ass at us a bit, zips up, and comes back toward us.

  Cyn nudges me and points to a chain-link fence, where something that looks like a dog is watching us. Only it’s not a dog.

  “Is that a wolf?” I ask.

  “Coyote. We see him now and then. Wasn’t that many decades ago we had wolves here, though. Back in the old days they used to have one day a year when they’d close all the businesses and chase all the wolves out of the woods and onto the ice on the lake. This space was all wilderness back then.”

  We climb into Cyn’s truck, and they start driving me to the Blue Line stop.

  “So, here’s what we didn’t tell you before your initiation,” says Rick. “We’re in talks with a TV producer who might want to make a show about us.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” says Cyn. “And you look more camera-ready than either of us, so having you on the team will make it more likely for us to get the show off the ground.”

  I’m touched that she’d think this about me. I’ve never thought of myself as exactly TV-star material, visually, but I’m not bad-looking or anything. My face is kind of pear-shaped and awkward, but with the right outfit it looks okay.

  “The big issue is really just making sure he won’t make us look like jackasses,” says Rick. “And that’ll be tough. You can’t really beat the system on those reality shows. No matter what you say, they can edit it to make it look like you’re saying whatever they want.”

  “This guy seems decent enough,” says Cyn. “And even if he makes us look as nutty as the idiots on Ghost Encounters, it’ll be good for the business. We’re getting buried by Tweed. Who is also talking to the same producer.”

  “It probably won’t happen,” says Rick. “Most producers are full of shit, and I’m not totally sure it’s the way I want to break into entertainment, being a ghost guy. But we need someone who can fill in for us anyway, so the show was a good motivator to find a third.”

  I think this over a bit.

  I imagine us doing like we did at the cemetery the other day, just wandering around telling stories and cracking jokes, on television.

  I’d have people writing bad comments about me online, probably.

  I’d have to be even more careful about Zoey.

  But the idea that Cyn thought of me for it, and that it could actually happen . . . it’s hard to resist getting excited.

  On the train ride hom
e, between chatting and fooling around with Zoey, I google the phrase “brain punch” and don’t find anything relevant. Either they made the whole thing up, or they found a closely guarded secret buried in the memoirs of Marjorie Kay Stone.

  I’m not sure which seems more likely.

  MEGAN:

  Good morning, you.

  ZOEY BABY:

  I love it when message alerts from you wake me up.

  ZOEY BABY:

  What’s up?

  MEGAN:

  When the OED says “see: windfucker,” you do it.

  ZOEY BABY:

  Uhhhh . . .

  MEGAN:

  Looking up swear words again. Buried in the F-bomb entry there’s the word “fuckwind,” and the entry just says “see windfucker.”

  ZOEY BABY:

  LOL. So what’s a windfucker?

  MEGAN:

  A type of bird, according to Thomas Nashe. (Yay, Thomas Nashe!)

  MEGAN:

  Also, a word one of Shakespeare’s friends used for obnoxious people.

  ZOEY BABY:

  Hehe. Look up a good new word I can call you. A pet name.

  MEGAN:

  Welllllll . . .

  MEGAN:

  Some OED words for “sweetheart” include: Powsowdie. Suckler. Heartikin. Flitter-mouse.

  ZOEY BABY:

  Awww . . . you’re my flitter-mouse.

  ZOEY BABY:

  How’s the new story coming?

  MEGAN:

  LOL. It’s great. It’s the Emperor and the Evil Queen. Kind of a joke story.

  MEGAN:

  They’re going at it inside the Couch tomb. But the story all takes place outside, with people seeing flashing lights coming from under the crack in the door and thinking it’s haunted. The story is all the crowd’s conversation.

  ZOEY BABY:

  LOL.

  MEGAN:

  Then someone will slide their phone under the door to get a photo of what’s happening in there. . . .

  MEGAN:

  The picture will just show a wrinkly ass, and the people will all run away screaming.

  ZOEY BABY:

  LOLOL! I can’t wait to read it.

  ZOEY BABY:

  Still thinking about last night. Mmmm.

  MEGAN:

  It is safe to say I will never forget last night as long as I live.

  Chapter Eight

  Later that morning, after an hour of working on my Evil Queen/Emperor story, I decide to head for a coffee shop, where I can post it from a public ISP that no one can trace to me. I’ve always been careful about this sort of thing. Paranoid, even. Especially now that I might just possibly be getting a TV show.

  When I step outside, Mom is trimming bushes in a long dress. Formal wear, practically. Dressing up all the time is a funeral home thing. Her dad used to mow the lawn in suits.

  She tilts her head up and gives me a hard look.

  “You have some explaining to do.”

  My blood runs cold for a second.

  Mom and I get along pretty well, but I’m always scared that one day she’s going to find out just what kind of person her daughter really is. She wouldn’t learn anything new about me if I told her I had a girlfriend, but what if she actually read what went on in some of my e-mails and texts to Zoey?

  Or, worse, if she pokes around on my laptop and sees what I write in my stories? There are some so messed up that I never even post them, and if she saw those, she’d probably haul me off to some old-school asylum where they still have electroshock machines and a yard full of unmarked graves. I think part of the reason I got the lip ring was to ease her into knowing her daughter is a bit of a freak. Like, maybe it’ll be less of a shock if she ever hacks my phone.

  And now there’s the new fear that Zoey has turned out to be twelve and the cops have been called.

  Not to mention the fact that I just participated in the death of another person last night. It’s weird how that’s about the last thing that occurs to me in the split second before I respond.

  I pick up an old brown leaf that’s still on the ground from last fall and act like I’m distracted by it.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “Cynthia Fargon called a few minutes ago.”

  The leaf trembles in my hands.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “She was arranging a funeral for someone at a nursing home she’s working at,” she says. “But in the process, she mentioned that she just gave you a job as a ghost-tour guide.”

  There’s some anger in her voice, but if that’s all she’s found out, I’m relieved. I knew I’d have to talk to her about the job sooner or later. I toss the leaf aside and sit down on the porch. The wood is hot against my thighs. I hate wearing shorts.

  “She and her friend Ricardo started a historical ghost-tour company,” I say, emphasizing the word “historical.” “They offered me a job as a guide, and I’ve been, sort of, you know . . . training.”

  Mom sighs and takes off the gloves she’d been wearing.

  “First of all, you’ve obviously been lying about being out with Kacey. Here I was all happy for you that you seemed to be seeing someone.”

  “This is actually better. Kacey has a parole officer, you know.”

  “And did you even stop to think about what it could do for the business here if people think you’re going to be hovering over their dearly departed mother with a proton pack, or whatever they use?”

  “I’m not going to do that,” I say. “The tour is mostly history stuff, not, like, telling people that a temperature drop means there’s an invisible dead person floating around. And I’m sure no one uses those backpack-size proton packs from the 1980s anymore. There’s probably an app for that now.”

  She would normally have laughed at that, but today the jokes aren’t scoring me any points.

  “It doesn’t matter what you really do. People are going to think you’re like those idiots who pretend to hunt for ghosts on TV. They’re going to picture you poking around the basement trying to catch people’s souls in some kind of pseudosciencey . . . net.”

  “Your potential customers won’t even know about it,” I say. “I use Dad’s last name, not the one on the sign.”

  She tosses her gloves on the ground and shakes her head.

  “Come on,” she says. “If we’re gonna fight, let’s fight inside. It’s too hot for this shit.”

  “Agreed.”

  Upstairs, Clarice, our cosmetologist, is sitting at the kitchen table, wearing too much lipstick and reading the paper through her enormous red glasses. She already knows, apparently.

  “Morning, Megan,” she says. “Catch any ghosts last night?”

  “Just one, but it was catch and release, so we let it go back to its grave.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Megan,” says Mom.

  She sits at the table and motions for me to do the same. I take my seat and get ready.

  “Look, my lip ring didn’t scare people away from the business,” I say. “And everyone who knows me knows I like girls. That didn’t hurt business any, either.”

  “I know that,” says Mom. “You know I’ve tried very hard to let you be yourself, and let you be a normal teenager, and all of that. If anyone doesn’t want me embalming their aunt because of who you are, they can bury her themselves. But I can only afford to be so picky with customers, Megan. We haven’t had a funeral here in more than a week.”

  “Stupid internet,” I say. “Everyone just watches videos on how to DIY an embalming now.”

  Clarice smiles, but Mom doesn’t.

  “This is different,” says Mom. “I can’t blame people if they don’t want their loved ones’ remains being ghost-hunted.”

  I get up and pour myself a bowl of cereal (a mix of Cocoa Puffs and Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch) while I try to think up a response to that one.

  The hell of it, the worst part, is that I totally understand Mom’s point of view. Worrying about ghost hunters is way o
utside of what funeral-home customers should be expected to accept.

  Then Mom makes an argument in my favor.

  “On the other hand,” she says, “when Cyn called, she was setting up a funeral for a nursing-home resident who died overnight.”

  “Right,” I say, jumping onto this new thread. “Working with her might bring in more business than it scares away.  And besides that, I’m sure I can keep anyone who comes on the tours from finding out where I live. If anyone asks, I’ll say I live in Pilsen or Logan Square or something.”

  “Hipster,” says Clarice.

  Mom pours herself a cup of coffee while she mutters to herself. She doesn’t like to talk about it, but the business isn’t in great shape. It’s gotten bad enough that she never really talks about me taking over when I grow up anymore, which she used to at least hint at now and then. It was never a rule that I had to follow in her footsteps, and she didn’t try to push me too hard, but she used to find all these excuses to tell me what a purposeful, satisfying job it is, trying to subtly make me want to grow up to be the fourth-generation owner of the Raskin Family Funeral Home (Raskin was her maiden name).

  Now she never brings it up at all, like it’s just an unspoken fact that the business won’t last long enough for me to make a career out of it. We’ll be lucky if it lasts until Mom is ready to retire.

  I hate to think of her having to go to work for some other home if ours goes under. She always tells horror stories about what rackets some corporate funeral homes are. But she doesn’t really have any other skills that I know of. This is her life. The life she was raised for.

  “I bet we could work something out with the home,” I say. “People die there all the time. That’s what people do in nursing homes. Die, and watch The Lawrence Welk Show.”

  Mom adds more sugar to her coffee.

  “You’re also going into the city by yourself for this job,” Mom says. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

  “The only time I’m ever alone is between the Blue Line stop at Clark and Lake and the Rock and Roll McDonald’s,” I say. “The whole strip is well-lit and there are always lots of people. If anyone asks me to join a gang or take drugs, I’ll say ‘no’ and tell them about the Lord.”