The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  This I sort of understood. My parents work on a college campus, and I’d spent some time around it. Sometimes people graduate but they don’t leave. They hang around for years, for no reason. I would think of ghosts like that, I decided.

  “Ghosts look like people, so you often can’t tell the difference,” Boo said. “You have the ability to see them, but it doesn’t mean you know what you’re looking at.”

  “It’s like hunting,” Callum cut in.

  “It is nothing like hunting.” Boo elbowed him hard. “They’re people. They look like living people, because you’re used to seeing living people. You assume everyone you see is alive. You have to consciously start separating the living from the dead. It’s tricky at first, but you get the hang of it.”

  “She’s down here,” Callum said. “I saw her on the Bakerloo Line platform.”

  We followed him down the steps to that platform. The London Tube had such a reassuring, almost clinical appearance— white-tiled walls with black-tiled edges, neat and distinctive signage, the cheerfully colored map . . . signs showing the

  WAY OUT and barriers to keep people moving in the right directions . . . staff in purple-blue suits and computer screens showing the status of trains . . . big ad posters and electronic ad boards that flashed mini-commercials. It didn’t look like something dug out of an old plague pit. It looked like a system that had been here for all of time, pumping people through the heart of the city.

  A train had just come in, and the platform emptied out except for us and the handful of people who were too slow. Then I noticed the dark arches at each end of the platform, the openings for the trains leading to the tunnels—the wind that blew in with each train came from there. And when the train left, I noticed one woman in particular down at the far end of the platform. The toes of her shoes were just over the edge. She wore a black sweater with a thick cowl neck, a plain gray skirt, and a pair of gray platform shoes. Her hair was long and curled off her face in large wings. I guess what drew me to her—aside from the fact that she didn’t get on the train and her vaguely retro outfit—was her expression. It was the expression of someone who had given up completely. Her skin wasn’t just pale, it was faint and grayish. She was the kind of person you didn’t see, alive or dead.

  “That’s her,” I said.

  “That’s her,” Callum confirmed. “She looks like a jumper to me. Jumpers do that a lot, stand on the edge and stare out. Never kill yourself in a Tube station. Tip number one. You might end up down here forever, staring at the wall.”

  Stephen coughed a little.

  “Just giving advice,” Callum said.

  “Go talk to her,” Boo said.

  “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  “You want me to walk up to her and say, ‘Are you a ghost?’”

  “I do that,” she replied.

  “I love it when you get it wrong,” Callum said.

  “Once. It happened once.”

  “It happened twice,” Stephen said, looking over.

  Boo shook her head and waved me down to the end. I hesitated a moment, then followed a few steps behind until we were next to the woman.

  “Hello?” Boo said.

  The woman turned, ever so slowly, her eyes wide and sad. She was young, maybe in her twenties. Now I could see her frosted, silvery hair and a heavy silver pendant around her neck. It seemed to weigh her head down.

  “We aren’t going to hurt you,” Boo assured her. “I’m Boo. This is Rory. I’m a police officer. I’m here to help people like you. Did you die here?”

  “I . . .”

  The woman’s voice was so faint that it barely qualified as a sound. I felt it more than I heard it. It made me shiver, it was so soft.

  “What? You can tell us.”

  “I jumped . . .”

  “These things happen,” Boo said. “Do you have any friends here in the station?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “There’s a lovely burial site just a few streets over,” Boo went on. “I’m sure you could meet someone there, make some nice friends.”

  “I jumped . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s okay.”

  “I jumped . . .”

  Boo glanced over at me.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You said. But can we—”

  “I jumped . . .”

  “Okay. Well, we’ll come back and visit. Is that all right? You have friends. You’re not invisible to everyone.”

  Callum looked very smug as we walked back.

  “Jumper?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Boo said.

  “Give me five pounds.”

  “We didn’t have a bet, Callum.”

  “I just deserve five pounds. I can tell a suicide from fifty paces.”

  “Enough,” Stephen said. “Rory, how did that go?”

  “It was okay, I guess,” I said. “Eerie. She just kept saying she jumped. And her voice was . . . cold. Like a cold breath in my ear.”

  “She was a quiet one,” Boo said. “Not very strong. Scared.”

  “Why do they wear clothes?”

  Callum and Boo laughed, but Stephen nodded.

  “That’s a very good question,” he said. “They should be naked, or so you’d think, right? Yet they always come back clothed. At least every time I’ve seen them. This lends itself to the theory that what we’re seeing is a kind of manifestation of a vestigial memory, perhaps even a self-perception. So what we’re seeing is less of how they were, but more of how they perceived themselves, at least around the time of their death—”

  “Skip this part,” Callum said to him. Then to me, “Stephen talks like that sometimes.”

  We returned the way we came, back up the escalators and back into the daylight.

  “Now,” Stephen said, “you’ve seen one, and you’ve seen that there’s no—”

  But my mind was elsewhere.

  “The clothes,” I said. “The guy I saw, if he was the Ripper, he wasn’t wearing old-fashioned clothes. Not, like, Victorian clothes.”

  I don’t think Stephen had been concentrating too hard on me until I said that. I almost saw his pupils refocus.

  “That’s correct,” he said.

  “I told you,” Boo said. “She’s a quick one.”

  “So, this Ripper ghost whatever . . . he’s not the Ripper. Not the Ripper from 1888.”

  “That’s what we concluded from your description,” Stephen said, sounding somewhat impressed. “So we stopped pursuing that angle.”

  “So how do you figure out who he is?”

  That made Callum laugh and turn away, clasping his hands behind his head.

  “Well,” Stephen said, “we’re using his choices of location, combined with your E-fit image . . .”

  “But how do you find some random dead guy from whenever?”

  Even Boo turned away now. “We have ways,” Stephen said. The bright look in his eye had gone out, and he stared at the people sitting on the lions. I had asked something they didn’t want to be asked. I got the sense that the more I pressed this, the more unhappy and possibly unhinged I would become. I had to embrace the daylight, the sanity I had at this moment.

  “Fine,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

  “We just wanted to give you some experience with your new ability,” Stephen said. “But we have to get back to work. Boo will take you back.”

  “Wait,” I said as Stephen and Callum turned to go, “one more question. If there are ghosts, does that mean there are . . . vampires? And werewolves?”

  Whatever misery I had caused by my previous question, it was wiped out with this one. They all laughed. Even Stephen, who I didn’t know could laugh.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Callum said.

  24

  GHOSTS, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET:

  Souls, spooks, shades, poltergeists, revenants. Generally regarded to be people returned
from the dead, though there are also ghost animals, and ghost ships, and even ghost trains and planes and articles of furniture and plants. Often known to linger around places they lived in or died in, looking sad. Both can and cannot be photographed, though when photographed, may appear as a blob or orb of light. Science rejects and confirms their existence. Can be contacted through mediums, who are all fakes.

  In other words, the Internet was useless at teaching me anything, except that a lot of people had strong feelings about ghosts, and every culture in the world had something to say about them, through all of history. Also, a lot of people online who claimed to be ghost experts were clearly much crazier than anyone from my town, which was saying something.

  What was reassuring, I guess, was the sheer number of people who believed in ghosts and who claimed to have seen them. I certainly would never be lonely. And they couldn’t all be crazy.

  There were about a half-dozen television shows devoted to the subject of ghost-hunting. I watched a few of these. What I saw were crews of people sneaking around houses with night vision cameras, jumping at every noise and saying, “Did you hear that?” Replaying said noise over and over—and the noise was always a little bump or a door closing. Or they’d have some piece of machinery that they’d hold over a spot in the room and they’d say, “Yup, a ghost was here.”

  Not very impressive. Not one of them was seeing an actual, talking person. The shows, I concluded, were all bull, designed to entertain people who really liked to see things about ghosts, no matter how lame they were.

  This little research project of mine, however fruitless, was good at keeping my mind level. I was doing something, and doing something was better than doing nothing. And here’s an amazing fact about the human mind: it can cope with a lot. When something new enters your reality that you don’t think you can deal with, your mind deals. It does everything it can to accommodate the new information. When the information is so big and so difficult to process, sometimes your brain skips stress and confusion and goes right to a happy island, a little sweet spot.

  My new ability didn’t interfere with my life. I got used to seeing Alistair—and after all, aside from his haircut, there was nothing odd about him. He was just a grumpy dude in the library. Though he was slightly less grumpy now that he had a bunch of albums and something to play them on. He secreted the iPod Boo had given him with his albums somewhere in the library and he made it clear that he was willing to trade homework for more music. We had found a currency that he accepted.

  And I saw Boo every day—someone with the same ability that I had—and she wasn’t even remotely bothered by it.

  I didn’t forget, exactly, but this new knowledge slipped to the back of my mind . . . and I adapted. I was able to move on to more pressing matters, like the upcoming fancy dress party. After several nights of discussion in our room, we had decided to go to the party as the Zombie Spice Girls. Boo was a natural for Sporty, since she could have thrown either one of us over a wall without breaking a nail. Jazza was going to be Ginger, because she had a red wig and a strong desire to make a dress out of a Union Jack flag. (Although it had been explained to me several times, since Jaz’s uncle was in the navy, that it was called a Union Jack only when it was flown at sea. Otherwise it was just a Union flag. I was learning all kinds of things in London, mostly about ghosts and flags and disbanded girl groups, but still. Learning is good.) I, apparently, was a natural for Scary. I asked them if this was because my hair was dark, and they both just laughed, so I had no idea what that was about. Mostly, our costumes involved putting on some zombie makeup, tight clothes, and high platform shoes that Boo bought in a secondhand store. We had a plastic bone to represent Posh, and if anyone asked about Baby, we were just going to say we ate her.

  Boo was down the hall getting some fake tattoos drawn on by Gaenor. Jazza was squeezing herself into her Union Jack dress, which she had made out of a decorative pillowcase. I was trying to tease out my hair as big as it could go.

  “You never showed me your essay,” she said, out of the blue. “The one on Pepys. You said you wanted me to read it over.”

  “Oh . . .” I rubbed the gray makeup hard into my face. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

  “What did you end up writing?”

  I had no idea what I’d ended up writing. I’d typed it, but I’d barely read it. It had something to do with the concept of a diary kept for both public and private reading and how that affected the tone of the narrative. So I lied.

  “I compared it to modern accounts of major events,” I said. “Like Hurricane Katrina. He was writing about the Great Fire of London, which was where he lived. I wrote about how you talk about things that affect you personally.”

  That was actually a genius idea. I only ever have genius ideas after the fact. I should have just written the damn paper.

  “You and Boo have been getting along a lot better this week,” she said, doing a chest check. Her dress was really tight. This was a whole new Jazza coming out—almost literally. Normally, I would have started joking about this, but I smelled trouble. Those words meant, “You haven’t told me anything about Boo this week, and now I am convinced you like her better than me.”

  “I’ve accepted her,” I said as breezily as I could. “She’s our pet.”

  Jazza gave me a slight sideways look as she pulled the dress up a little higher over her girlish assets. It was wrong to refer to Boo as a pet. That was normally the kind of thing Jazza would censure, but she said nothing.

  “It could be worse,” I said.

  “Of course,” Jazza said, going over to her bureau. “I’m not saying, you know, that I . . . but . . . I’ve . . .”

  Boo returned, dressed in a shiny tracksuit with a lopsided ponytail. I was pretty sure those were just some of her actual clothes, and not something she had gotten as a costume.

  “Watch this, yeah?” she said, immediately going into a handstand and walking a few steps. Then she tumbled over and crashed into Jazza’s desk, almost knocking over her photos. “Haven’t done that since I was fourteen.”

  Jazza looked at me through the mirror as she attached her false eyelashes.

  There was a look on her face that suggested a rapidly dwindling patience level.

  We had decided to stick together for at least a half hour, so that everyone could comprehend our group costume. We would share custody of Posh the Bone. The prefects had done a really good job transforming the refectory into a Halloween-ish party venue. Eating in here every day, I had forgotten that it was an old church. These decorations really brought that out—the candles in the stained-glass windows, the fake cobwebs strung everywhere, the low lighting. Charlotte, dressed in a very shortskirted policewoman’s outfit, was leading the dancing brigade, jumping around at the front of the room, her long red hair flapping up and down like a matador’s cape. She was head girl, and she would show us how to party if she had to.

  I wasn’t really sure why Charlotte had decided to come to the party as a stripper. I found myself at a loss for words as she complimented us on our costumes.

  “You’re a . . .” I tried to find the right thing to say. “Really . . . hot cop?”

  “I’m Amy Pond,” she said. “From Doctor Who. This is her kissogram outfit.”

  It was a good moment to catch sight of Jerome. He was wearing normal clothes with loads of scribbled-on pieces of paper stuck all over them, and his hair sticking up, a coffee mug in his hand.

  “Tell me what you want, what you really, really want,” he said.

  We had been planning for someone to ask us that.

  “Braiiinnnnssss,” we said in unison.

  “It’s both sad and incredibly impressive that you were all ready with that one.”

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “I’m the Ghost of the Night Before Exams.”

  “And how long did it take you to come up with that?” Jazza asked.

  “I’m a busy m
an,” he replied.

  We formed a group on the side of the dance floor—me, Jazza, Jerome, and occasionally Andrew, Paul and Gaenor. Boo, we quickly discovered, was very serious about her dancing. She was right up front, by the DJ stand, doing complicated moves and the occasional surprise handstand.

  The room was hot—we were all sopping wet in no time. The stained-glass windows had a veneer of steam. And unlike American dances, they didn’t screw things up with that awkward slow dance every five or six songs. This was all dance, with lots of remixes, like an actual club. My Scary Spice outfit, which consisted of a sports bra and oversized pants, was actually a blessing. I would have sweat through a shirt.

  Jerome and I didn’t dance together, exactly, but we did remain side by side. Every once in a while, he would (seemingly accidentally) touch my waist or my arm. Anything more than that would have been too much of a statement, but I felt I got the message. He also had prefect jobs to do, so he would regularly disappear to refill bowls of food or tend the bar. That was another strange thing—the bar. An actual bar, with actual beer. We had tickets that allowed us two pints each. I have absolutely no idea how this was managed. Jerome had tried to explain it to me—how even though the law was that you had to be eighteen to drink in a pub, the circumstances varied, and at a closed event with teachers somehow this was legal. I got one of my beers, but I was jumping around and sweating too much to drink it. I would have vomited instantly. But two beers seemed to be nothing to the average English student. Everyone else gulped them down, and I was pretty sure that the two-ticket rule was not being very strictly enforced.

  As the night wore on, there was a not-unpleasant funk in the air, the scent of beer and dancing. I started to forget any time I wasn’t at this place, with the lights strobing against the stained glass and the stone walls, the teachers in the shadows, checking their phones out of sheer boredom.

  In fact, at first I thought he was a teacher. He came up behind Jazza. The suit, the bald head.

  “What’s the matter?” Jaz yelled happily.