The Guardian's Playlist

by J Powell Ogden

  As I settled down on a waterproof stadium cushion, I aimed the light around the tiny clearing until I found Michael leaning casually against our tree. I glanced up above his head at the little plastic ring I’d looped onto one of its branches, and he followed my gaze and grinned.

  “I scared off a raccoon last week that was intent on stealing that thing, the little thief.” I was about to ask him how many of the animals could see him, but he rubbed his hands together impatiently and squatted down in front of me. “So…what’ve you got in the bag?”

  I dragged it up onto my lap, reached in and pulled out a book of matches. He groaned. I looked up, alarmed. “What?”

  “Catherine,” he groaned again. “Don’t be a dumbass. Didn’t you learn your lesson last time?”

  “What last time?” I asked, reaching into the bag again and lifting out my perfect little jack-o’-lantern. “What are you talking about, Michael?”

  When I looked back up at him, he was grinning. Then he looked off to the side and into the woods, sighing as if in relief. “I thought…” He laughed softly. “I thought for some stupid reason you brought a pack of cigarettes.”

  “You thought that was the surprise?”

  He nodded sheepishly.

  “Crap, Michael. Do you like this one better?”

  “It’s awesome.” He sank down in front of me and watched me pull the top off and light the little candle I’d placed inside. I fit the lid back on and then gently set the glowing jack-o’-lantern on the ground between us. It cast wavy triangles of light onto the forest floor and a warm earthy glow upon his otherworldly skin.

  “Happy Halloween!” I said.

  His eyes crinkled up at the corners. He stared quietly at it for a while, deep in thought, but slowly, his brows knitted themselves together, and he suddenly threw up his hands in frustration.

  “I’m sorry I thought…I just…” He cleared his throat, flustered. “You have everything going for you…two great parents…you’re smart…” He paused and then glanced away self-consciously. “You’re freaking adorable…”

  My heart thrilled at that, but when he looked back, he was upset. “I couldn’t understand that first night why you wanted to screw that up, by smoking, that is. You know it was stupid, right? I was glad when it looked like you were about to hurl…” he went on and on as if he were scolding a small child, which was how he was making me feel, which was stupid, because he was actually younger than me. Why did he have a monopoly on rebellion? Why did I have to be perfect?

  “You never did tell me why,” he pressed. I knew him well enough now to know that I wouldn’t be able to distract him again, but the reason he sought was stuck in my throat.

  Where did he get off asking me for it anyway? He was no bastion of—

  “Catherine, you’re smart enough to know the consequences…” He shook his head again, and that’s when my reason tore itself free and threw itself violently into his hypocritical face.

  “You don’t think I know the damn consequences?” I snapped hotly. “I see them playing out every day at home! In my perfect world. It sucks to watch…to hear someone dying in the room next to yours, and it sucks worse to know they did it to themselves. I wanted to know if it was worth it! I wanted to know if—”

  He was startled by my furious counter attack, and he fumbled his words. “Wh...what are you—”

  “My grandmother is dying,” I said sharply, and then I stared him down. There. The splinter was out.

  Oh Christ…

  I wasn’t prepared to face the mangled mess it left behind. I didn’t want to deal with that part, so I clamped my mouth shut and looked away. He was silent for a moment, just breathing. Then he sighed himself into the glowing candlelight and reappeared within my new field of vision. He was nearly invisible within my shadow.

  “Catherine…” he whispered.

  I wrapped my arms around my legs, and buried my face in my knees.

  Tell him…

  No.

  Let go…

  No!

  You don’t have to be alone in this. He really—

  “NO!” I lifted my eyes and set my jaw. He was startled again. The small amount of candlelight that made its way around me reflected temptingly in his darkened eyes.

  “Catherine…” he whispered again, and though I could still see the faint outline of his face a few feet in front of me, the sound of his voice came from just above my left ear, and I closed my eyes and leaned into it. How did he do that?

  “How long does she have?” he asked quietly. He was trying to draw me out. His voice was hypnotic.

  I shook my head, but my thoughts broke my rules. They let themselves out. Just like my reason. Only they just wanted to be understood.

  “I don’t know…months…weeks. No one tells me anything. I guess I don’t ask. I don’t want to know,” I murmured and then looked up into his face. Yeah. I wanted someone to understand.

  “She’s suffocating, Michael.” I pulled out my inhaler and held it up for him to see. “I know what that feels like, and it scares me.” I looked down at it with growing resentment, my muscles tensing all the way up my back, in my throat, in my jaw, and I cocked my arm back to wing the damn thing into the shadows that surrounded us.

  “Don’t!” His voice was an anxious bullet that knocked my arm down. “What if you need it?”

  I let my hand drop back into my lap and twirled the little case in my fingers. I was too much of a baby to do what I really wanted to do, which was to chuck it all—the meds, the inhalers, the doctor appointments—just to see what would happen, to see if I could survive without them. And at that moment, I finally realized what I was afraid of.

  “I don’t want to die like…her…” My voice caught, and I breathed hard to smooth it out.

  “You won’t…” he started to reassure me. I was used to that. People worrying about me then telling me everything would be alright. It was annoying. Extremely. I just rolled my eyes and stuffed the offending object back into my pocket.

  “Right,” I said, scowling.

  “Catherine…I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” I turned my head away and gazed back into the eyes of the jack-o’-lantern. I’d cut out his eyes and made him smile. I felt my jaw tense and focused on relaxing it. “Can we please talk about something else now?”

  In my peripheral vision, I saw his shape slowly fill in to the left of the jack-o’-lantern, and I shifted my gaze slightly to take in his expression. He was studying me carefully, and for a minute, he didn’t say anything. Then he looked down at his feet.

  “Um…I really miss my left Converse,” he said, and then he wiggled the mangled naked toes of his left foot. “It was my favorite.”

  He glanced up anxiously into my face from under his long lashes to see if he’d said the right thing. He had, and I almost laughed. Almost. I’d forgotten that he knew what it felt like to desperately not want to talk about something. I escaped with him to the new topic.

  “So…is that the only thing you miss?”

  He thought for a minute. “I miss my favorite jeans. They were light blue, like totally broken in, and they had this little frayed hole above the right knee.” He gestured with his hand to show me where. “A real hole, not one of those pansy holes made by the manufacturer.”

  I felt the tension easing out of my shoulders. “Go on.”

  “Um…” He closed his eyes for a minute and then said, “Bruce Springsteen.” He lifted his hands to an imaginary guitar and started to play as he hummed the opening notes of “Thunder Road.”

  “I love that song! It was playing on the car stereo when my dad let me take his car out on the highway for the first time!”

  He paused in his playing and asked, “What kind of car?”

  “A 1971 Dodge Demon.”

  “So…you drive a Demon, and you talk to ghosts dressed as a witch. That’s freaking awesome!” he laughed and picked his air guitar back up. “That’s the song I would’ve picked if I’d
learned to drive.” Then he looked off into the forest, still strumming, and added, “It was my dad’s favorite. He liked to play that when me and my mom and him went out for a drive. He would sing it to her, horribly…” He paused, cleared his throat and went back to concentrating on his playing.

  “So you must have inherited your voice from your mom then?”

  “Among other things,” he murmured. He didn’t look up from his playing, and I wondered if his mom was the one who’d sung the Irish lullaby to him, but I let it go.

  “So, we have your tennis shoe, your jeans, Bruce Springsteen, anything else?”

  He bobbed his damp blonde head up and down a few times as he played and then lifted his fingers up.

  “My fingernails,” he said matter-of-factly. “They feel weird, weirder than the rest of me, like…really numb…” He brought them up near his face to study the ragged nail beds. They still looked raw and incredibly painful.

  “Do they hurt?” I nodded to his fingers.

  He shook his head, and a wry smile crossed his lips. “Nah…it’s like I spent the morning with a special effects artist. The cuts and scrapes feel like they’re painted or glued on, mostly numb to the touch.” He looked up at me, and I inched closer, reaching out tentatively with my fingers.

  “Can I?” He pulled his hands away, but glanced up cautiously into my face and then held them back out palms and forearms up, fingers curled over, steady and waiting for my touch. I lifted my hand over the place where his fingernails should have been, then took a quiet, anxious breath before gently touching the tips of his fingers. He shivered but kept his hands and arms still. I felt nothing solid, but a fuzzy sensation travelled up my arm, like a pulse of heavy static electricity without the shock. I yanked my hand back, startled, and looked up into his face. He gave me a strange look.

  He said, “See? No pain, but…shit. That felt weird.”

  I rubbed my forearm absently. “Have you touched anyone else since you became a ghost? Does it always feel like that?”

  He laughed out loud. “What. Do you think I’ve been cheating on you, Genius?”

  My cheeks burned. “I was just—”

  “Relax.” He lifted his chin and laughed again. Then he looked away self-consciously. “Yeah, I did a little experimenting right after I—” My eyes went wide.

  Seeing the look on my face, he hurriedly added, “Chaste experimenting, strictly G-rated, and no, it only feels that way with you, with anyone else it feels…um…strange, but not nearly as intense. And no one but you ever noticed I was there. I don’t know why.”

  I inched closer still to get a better look at the lacerations that laced his forearms, but my attention was drawn to older, completely healed wounds beneath them. Small, pale and shiny raised circular scars. There were three of them on his left arm. I had one to match them on my palm. My cigarette burn. I held up my palm next to his arm for comparison.

  He saw what I was looking at and pulled his arms quickly away and tucked them in close to his body.

  “What happened to your—” But I didn’t have to finish the question. He’d been burned, too. Either he’d done it to himself or he’d been abused. My stomach rolled completely over.

  “Oh, Michael…”

  “You promised!” he snapped, and I dropped my hands and concentrated on keeping my eyes dry.

  My cell rang, and I blinked. Then, Michael was gone. I cut my eyes from the empty space in front of me to the face of my cell.

  10:00 p.m. My dad’s phone. He was probably wondering when I was coming home. I ignored the call and looked around for Michael. He had reappeared and was observing me pensively from a distance.

  “You should go,” he murmured. “You shouldn’t be out here this late alone.” He faded slightly for a moment and then cocked his head to the side as if he were listening for something.

  “I’m not alone.”

  “Yeah. You are. There’s nothing I could do if anyone…you know…”

  I had never thought about that, and I gathered up my stuff. When I was ready to go, I walked over to him and glanced up into his ghostly, pale face.

  His jaw twitched, and he nodded stiffly. There was tension between us. I’d uncovered part of his secret, and he was keeping the rest of it locked up tight. He didn’t trust me enough to share it. I’d find out though. If my mom couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me what happened to him when he was little, I’d find out another way. I’d find out who was responsible for burning him and, God forbid, anything else that had happened to him. I’d make sure they paid, and then we’d deal with the pain that was left behind together.

  Maybe then he could go home.

  FIFTEEN

  THE DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

  THE HISTORIC KING home was perched on a cliff overlooking Lake Erie in Bay Village. It was over a hundred years old and built almost entirely out of weathered local limestone. The home, which had been in Mrs. King’s family since it was built, was meticulously landscaped in the front and bordered on three sides by a high wrought iron fence. The back was largely overgrown. Rose bushes overran the brick patio, and tangled vines crawled all over a wrought iron gazebo. The only explanation was that Jason’s mother, Dr. Natalia King, liked the seclusion the dripping foliage provided for her family.

  I’d struck out with my own mom earlier that day. It was November first, All Saints Day, which is a holy day on which Catholics are obligated to attend Mass. As usual, she had fought with Mina over receiving Communion, which Mina continued to refuse, just like she had ever since her son was denied a Catholic funeral after he committed suicide. But that happened years ago, before I was born. The Church didn’t treat suicides that way anymore, but that didn’t matter to Mina. She was still angry, and it was likely she would stay that way. I could hardly blame her. I think I would have felt the same way.

  But my mom was troubled deeply over Mina’s separation from the Church, and by the time I came home from school, she was in no mood to talk about anything. She waved me away when I approached her about Michael’s childhood and then disappeared into her room and locked the door.

  So here I was, in the middle of Plan B. After draining my savings account, I waited on the King’s front steps with a new cell phone while the wind buffeted me from all sides. It was bitter cold, and the heavy gray clouds that hung low in the sky were supposed to pelt us with ice later. The Halloween wind the night before hadn’t been bluffing.

  Evelyn, Jason’s thirteen-year-old sister met me at the door. She was dark-haired and tall, like Jason, and she was just beginning to show her curves. She smiled when she opened the door. Evelyn had always liked me—unlike her mother, who’d never thought I was good enough for her son. I was too “middle class.” Except for the one time she walked in on us in his room, Jason and I spent our time together when his mom wasn’t around. Embarrassing doesn’t even begin to describe that moment. She’d only had to give Jason a look before he was showing me out the door, but that look in her eyes still haunted me.

  “Hi, Cate,” Evelyn greeted me. “Does Jason know you’re—”

  “Hey, Cate!” Jason called from the top of the marble staircase in the two-story foyer. Then he fired his gaze down on his little sister. “Did you finish your homework, mud face?”

  She rolled her eyes before she nodded.

  “Then you’ll find some sushi in the refrigerator. I picked some up on my way home from school.” Evelyn’s face lit up, and she took off toward the kitchen. Sushi was her favorite food. Jason leaned over the iron railing and called down to me, “Come on up!”

  I kicked off my shoes and headed up the cold stairs, passing the oil paintings of his grandparents on my way. The house was huge, but in a carved-up, mazelike way, and when only Jason and Evelyn were home, which was most of the time, it seemed as if the rooms and hallways went on endlessly, losing themselves in hidden corners. There were six bedrooms and four bathrooms upstairs. Jason’s room was all the way down at the end of the hall at the back of the house. He waited
at the top of the stairs until I reached him and then stepped aside so I could go ahead of him, brushing his hand lightly across my back. Manners were paramount in the King household.

  His queen-sized bed was next to a huge, wood-framed window that looked out over the cliff at Lake Erie. If I could have had any room in the world, this would have been it. From his bed, you could see the sailboats, the freighters, and the summer storms whipping the waters up into chaos, and it seemed like it stormed almost every time I was here last summer. But today, the entire view was shades of gray: dark gray choppy water, lighter gray clouds, and lighter still, the rocky concrete break wall that stretched far out into the lake. Even the crumbling stone fence that separated his backyard from the fifty-foot drop down to the small beach below was gray.

  Jason grabbed an armful of textbooks off his bed and dumped them on his desk on top of a pile of binders that were thick with dog-eared notepaper. He shoved a black suit down toward the foot of his bed. I saw the Armani label before it rolled up on itself.

  “Sorry, I’ve got three tests tomorrow and a paper due in Latin, and I’m supposed to do this benefit thing with my mother tonight.”

  “I can come back,” I said.

  “No. It’s fine. Just let me…” He pulled his suede comforter up over his wrinkled sheets, propped a few pillows up against his ornately-carved, mahogany headboard and settled down against them, facing me, his light blue eyes, as always, curious and attentive.

  “So…what’s up?” he said. He never changed. Now that the mess was hidden away, he seemed perfectly relaxed in bare feet, a pair of faded black sweats and a white T-shirt. I was on edge. It felt strange to be in his room after the way we’d been last summer. On top of that, I could feel all of the muscles in my back tensing as I thought how best to phrase the question I needed to ask him. I decided to start with restitution.

  “Well, I finally got your new phone,” I said, holding out a white bag.