by Amber Sparks
And we’ve done okay ever since. Maggie gives me a small allowance to do chores and buy groceries, and take care of Christmas sometimes when she’s asleep or at the casino. I guess people can get to depend on each other, even if they don’t really belong with each other.
JASMINE HAS JUST TEXTED me to say that she’s over at the stables again, where she does nothing but ride her horse around and stick its nose in a feedbag. So I decided to head to the library and check out a big ratty copy of Shakespeare’s Plays. I know this book well—I think I’m the only person that ever checks it out. I love the old-book smell, even though it makes me sneeze. Maggie says it probably gives me allergies, but what the hell does she know? Like she’s ever even opened a book in her life.
This time when I get the big heavy thing home, I turn to the tragedies (carefully because the pages are cracking and falling out of their binding). More specifically to Hamlet. I want to eat up all the lines, all the words, since Hamlet really is the most amazing thing ever written by anyone. I feel the same way every single time I read it—like somebody gave me a very tiny, sustained electric shock and I just can’t stop my brain from quivering. Anyway, suddenly I feel like a joint, but I don’t want Maggie to know. She worries sometimes that she’s a bad influence, as if there were any other kind in this town.
So I go over to the corner of me and Christmas’s bedroom, dig around under the bed until I find my own stash, and I roll a little fat joint. I can’t find my lighter, so I run to the kitchen, light it on the stove, and then run back to my room. Not like I have to worry; Christmas is napping with Maggie, and Maggie is all conked out on painkillers. I take a drag and breathe out slowly, coughing just a little bit, and then I start with one of Ophelia’s monologues, the one about the flowers and herbs after she’s gone crazy. I like reading about Ophelia when I’m high—it’s easy to imagine myself floating in a river, hair coiling around reeds and floating debris.
The ghost pops up, all wavy air and shadow in my way—she’s weird and sudden like that. Whatcha doing, she thinks at me. This is weed, I tell her. I offer her some, but she wiggles around uncomfortably. I never read Mister Shakespeare, she says, and vanishes. The shadow slips off my book. I don’t think they had much education, back in prairie times or whenever.
THE NEXT DAY, Jasmine calls. She’s broken again, and she wants me to fix her.
This happens more and more often now, though she’s been weird and semi-broken since we were little. Once I caught our mailman standing in her kitchen with his hand up her shirt. I never said anything, because his name was Jimmie even though he was middle-aged, and because he seemed a little slow to me. I suppose I probably should have told someone. He quit about three years ago—hopefully not to become a full-time sexual predator.
Anyway, Jasmine’s had a lot of problems all her life, you know? So I’m used to it. I sigh and I don’t tell Jasmine that I’m tired of fixing things, though it’s true. That’s all I do anymore, fix stuff—whether it’s Mrs. Morris’s busted lip from her meth-addicted, piece-of-shit son, or Maggie’s backaches, for which she requires me to get her copious amounts of weed—luckily, my friend Mike Ready is a drug dealer, in a very small-time way.
But I don’t tell Jasmine any of that stuff. I just sit in her living room listening to her bitch, and then finally I tell her we’re going sledding.
Sledding? She’s lying on the couch sort of feet up, and she flips her body around to look at me. But there’s pretty much no snow, she says.
I put on my uggo coat, and grab her pretty quilted pink one from the peg on the door and throw it at her. It lands on her head and I can’t hear what she says until she gets it off. And by then I have already said, I don’t care. We’ll use garbage bags. I heard that works. And there might be snow out by the mall.
We make her brother drive us there in his new truck, which we have to pay him ten bucks to do because he’s an entrepreneur, which means he doesn’t do anything for free. He always turns up his shitty metal real loud so we have to practically yell to hear ourselves. We are very careful to only talk about little things like school and homework and movies we like. We laugh like we always do when we pass by the Meadow Park Casino, with the big neon sign in front that flashes, EVERYONE’S A WINNER AT MEADOW PARK!!!! Four exclamation marks, no kidding. And what a fucking lie—if everyone was a winner, would the parking lot be full of the same Winnebagos, day after day, the owners inside dropping their Social Security money into the slots one quarter at a time? Nobody’s a winner in Meadow Park. But everybody keeps trying just the same.
Jasmine has a cure for her brain failure, sort of. She has a little pill case, like old people have where the pill slots are labeled with the days of the week. Hers is pink and the contents keep changing, because the doctors can’t quite get it right, the dosage or the pills. Sometimes the medicine starts working, pushing and prodding her until she starts to come out of herself. She does other things those days besides smoke and eat chocolate and draw pictures of horses and wear this old pink My Little Pony bathrobe she got when she was younger (I had a matching one). She’ll come over and watch movies with me, and draw these amazing, crazy comics about a group of weird misfit superhero chicks. She’ll comb her hair and put on makeup and act like things matter, ask me questions and listen to the answers, and do super well in school without even having to study. She’s always been the smartest person I know.
But then the medicine will stop. Jasmine doesn’t know why. The doctors don’t really know why. Lately it seems like she’s always halfway waiting for the days when the medicine stops working. Then her hair goes unwashed, and her parents can’t get her to go to school. Then she starts to sleep all day and stay up all night long, lots of times with these strange guys, older guys she meets god knows where. She’s more of a ghost than my ghost girl, then. And she draws the damn horse pictures, soft penciled strokes tracing the same lines over the same musculature, again and again and again.
SOMETIMES I HATE NOT HAVING a history. I mean, I know a little about the English side of my family, but nothing about my dad’s side. Maggie thinks he might have been an American, but she’s not sure. My mum never told her. It makes me feel off-balance sometimes, the not-knowing.
We had to do reports in American History last year on our ancestors. It was supposed to show that we’re a nation of immigrants, because everybody comes from somewhere else. Well, except Native Americans, of course. There are a ton of Guatemalan and Somali kids in my school that like, literally just came to the States so their parents and older brothers and sisters could work at the meatpacking plant outside of town.
My ghost was around way back in the day, so I sort of cheated and asked her about her own family. Normally her conversation is so absolutely boring, all gardening and sewing patterns, but this time I was taking notes like “Oh what tell me more” so fast I couldn’t get it all down.
When it was my turn to give my report, I said that my ancestors were Swedish farmers who bought their land cheap from the railroads when they came to America in the 1800s. I talked about how their farms failed one bad summer, how the crops just sat there unsold and rotting. Ms. Nivens got all teary when I got to the part about how my great-grandfather Sven finally gave up on the farm, sent his sons off to work in the stockyards and his daughter off to be a maid, and hung himself in his own grain elevator.
Sven was really the ghost girl’s dad. That’s her story. It was easier than admitting I didn’t have a story of my own.
IT SEEMS LIKE NOBODY writes really grand stories the way they used to. I mean, I’ve always loved all the stories and novels and poems and plays where it seems like the author just took everything that’s ever been true about life and people, and stuffed it into the pages and let it grow out like some strange, bloody, chaotic plant.
I don’t think that the things that happen to people nowadays are any less grand and spectacular than they used to be—it’s just that nobody writes about the new big stuff anymore. Or at least nobody we
read in high school. The stories have gotten so small. All this stuff they want us to read, like, cool, that’s great that this kid is hanging out at some grocery store or whatever, okay, but are you going anywhere with this? Because, meanwhile, this kid that used to live in our park, Dan, just a few years older than me, just OD’d and died. Junk cut with worse junk. And this spring some kids just disappeared from my school and we found out they got deported after the government raided the packing plant where their parents worked. And people are getting killed in genocides and terrorist attacks all over the world, and dying of starvation and rioting about food. I mean, it’s not like we’re lacking for big stuff to write about here.
For me, I just like to see all the people and places and emotions and conflicts and struggles all exploding out of the pages of one single amazing book. Because that’s how life really is, right? You don’t get to just sit there and concentrate on one tiny little thing. Life just comes at you from everywhere and you have to deal with it all at once. Human life is a huge, messy, complicated, unbelievable thing. No wonder some people still don’t get that we used to be apes just flinging our shit at each other.
THE GHOST FINDS ME when I come home and sort of drapes herself over me, all warm and sad and invisible. Aunt Mina is in the kitchen, drinking a Diet Coke and gossiping with Maggie. I slide past her to get to the fridge and grab a Coke for myself, and when I open it, I notice she’s just staring at me. In this intent, focused, batshit kind of way.
Aunt Mina terrifies me. She’s the craziest old lady. I try to run past, but she grabs my arm and holds me there, smoking with her free hand and looking not exactly at me but sort of past me, her eyes a little bit unfocused. She blows smoke out of her nostrils, which makes me cough, and she slowly shakes her head in this way that reminds me of one of the really old-ass sea turtles at the zoo.
There’s a dark aura, she says. She coughs a gross wet cough, and I try to get loose. Tragedy envelopes you, child, she says. It surrounds you.
I have no idea if she means the ghost or me.
Aunt Mina knows all about tragedy. Everyone says so. She smokes long, thin cigarettes, and wears tons of jewelry, so much that she clanks and creaks and jangles when she moves. She owns her own business, out of her duplex. It’s a small room with green curtains and a super old computer and super loud printer and a whole bunch of ashtrays. When she prints stuff, the neighbors bang on the walls and the dust comes up all around you, like a filthy snow globe.
She used to be in love, a long time ago, way before I was born. Not with her husband, which is part of the tragedy. She had an affair, and they had a baby, and the baby was Cal, I guess. Apparently everybody knew, even her husband, but he must not have cared because he stayed married to her for another fifteen years until he died of cancer. And then Cal abandoned her too, which good riddance really, so she kind of adopted me and Christmas and Maggie. Anyway, she’s a very strange old lady—really old, with skin so thin you can see all these purple veins underneath, and brown stains on her hands and cheeks. And now she stares at me with those weird watery eyes that old people have, until I kind of shake myself free and slither around her to the bedroom. The ghost sort of relaxes, like a coil unwinding. I can tell she thought Aunt Mina could see her.
I know I’ve been bitching about the ghost girl, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. She’s okay. I imagine most ghosts are boring—if you stick around long enough without doing any changing it must make you pretty stale, sure. But I think maybe she’s here to protect me or something. Lately she’s gotten much bolder. Yesterday, for example, the ghost girl saved me from Mike Ready. We were sitting on a picnic table in the Randall Park shelter, and he just kind of leaned over and grabbed me with one arm and tried to unzip my jeans with his free hand. He mashed his face into mine, like something would happen if he kept it there. I actually thought for like half a second that he must have lost his balance and fallen into me, before I realized what he was doing. I tried to move away but he was holding me pretty tight. I felt the ghost then, felt the weird sizzling energy that comes off her, and it smelled angry, burnt. I felt her push that power forward, like a magnet, and Mike fell back and right off the table. He hit his head on the bench and landed in the dirt. It was kind of funny, but I didn’t laugh because I didn’t know who else I’d get Maggie’s weed from if Mike wouldn’t sell it to me.
What the fuck did you push me for, bitch? Mike stood up, pissed, brushing the dirt off his ass.
I shrugged. I dunno. I like somebody else, okay?
Who?
Nobody you know. A senior. I thought this was smart of me. Mike would never want to get in a fight with a senior, so he probably wouldn’t ask any more questions.
Huh, Mike kind of grunted at me. Well, don’t think I’m gonna sell you any discounted stuff anymore, he said. You can pay the same price as everybody else.
I sighed in relief. So you’ll still sell to me?
Business is business, he said. And anyway, you’re not that hot.
Mike’s dad owns a cherry-red Camaro. He parks it in his driveway in the summer and washes it by hand every weekend, wearing teeny-tiny shorts and no shirt. It explains a lot about Mike.
But I had to tell the ghost girl off. I know you lived in like, violent times, I said, but nowadays you can’t just go around pushing people. They’ll get pissed and push me back, because they don’t believe in you. She seemed upset, and vanished pretty quick after, which is okay because I needed some time to myself, and ghosts are real goddamn needy, you know? Even the good ones.
OUR SCHOOL JANITOR, Mr. Pete, told me to come downstairs to his office today after PE. (His name is John Pete, two first names, WTF right?) I was freaked out but a janitor’s almost like a teacher or principal—you can’t exactly say no. His office is next to the boiler room, so it’s hot and creepy and dark and there are plenty of places a person could hide if they wanted to ax-murder you or something. When Mr. Sweeney was the janitor, it was even creepier, because he was old and crabby and reeked of alcohol. Even the senior guys kept out of Mr. Sweeney’s way.
But I think Mr. Pete is worse. Jasmine disagrees; she thinks he’s gorgeous. And he is good-looking, sort of, with slicked-back black hair and big eyes, and he’s probably just middle-aged or so, but there’s just something gross about him. He gives off bad vibes. I think it’s telling that the ghost girl never, ever sticks around when she sees him. She oozes right out of this dimension like butter melting. And now I’ve worked myself up and I get all sweaty again between my nervousness about Mr. Pete and my nervousness about the hiding ax murderers. I run-walk the rest of the way downstairs and practically bang on the office door.
Hello, I mean to say, but instead I think I say Help. Omg. What a total loser I am.
Luckily, Mr. Pete is busy opening the door so I don’t think he hears me anyway.
He smiles at me and asks me to sit. Then he reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a book. I thought you might like to read this, he says, handing it to me. You being a fan of the Bard and all. It’s a copy of the Sonnets. This is not what I was expecting, and “the Bard”? God, what an asshole. But it’s a thoughtful gesture, and I know you’re supposed to be polite to authority figures or whatever, so I smile and take the book.
Thanks, I say, and get up to go. Mr. Pete reaches over the desk and grabs the strap of my bag, sort of playfully yanking me back with it.
Now bring that back in one piece, he says, and when I put my hand on his desk to steady myself, he puts his hand over mine and smiles again, a big white wide smile straight from a toothpaste commercial. I am really nervous now. And not in a good way.
Uh, thanks for the, uh—thanks for the book, and I’ll bring it back—thanks—I have to go to class, I say, and sort of back out of the office. I run all the way up the rickety old steps. It’s not like Mr. Pete is an ax murderer or anything—but I can picture him hiding in that basement just the same.
Maybe he’s just lonely. Maybe he wishes he taught Engl
ish? Maybe he never knew anybody else who liked Shakespeare. But how did he know I liked Shakespeare? Maybe the librarian told him? But Ms. Lisa just wouldn’t, I can’t imagine. Maybe Maggie did?
I’m too riled up to go to class, so instead I walk home and sit at the picnic table in the park. Someone has carved a big crude heart into the top of the wooden table. I run my finger over it again, and again, until I get a splinter and I have to go inside and dig Maggie’s tweezers out of her top dresser drawer. Luckily, she’s all passed out in front of the TV so she doesn’t even notice.
It makes me sad when I think of Maggie, and how she probably should have married somebody like Ted Tyler. Ted Tyler owns Tyler Tires, which recently expanded into a regional chain, and he makes a shitload of money. He always whistles when Maggie walks by with Christmas in her stroller.
Maggie used to be pretty. I’ve seen her old photos, from way back when her hair was like forty feet high. She probably could have been a model back when big hair was a thing. But I think she just wore all the pretty right off. Before she hurt her back, she worked the overnight shift at Cub Foods, stocking shelves. She’d come home, sleep for a few hours, and go to her other job cashiering at Walgreens. She had to work two jobs, because Cal could never even hold down one. He would work construction sometimes, or fix cars for his friends, but he always got fired for stealing or fighting or drinking on the job. The worst was when he got a job parking cars at a used car lot, and he got so drunk he ended up driving a beat-up little Chevy Nova all the way home and parking it in our lot instead. Maggie managed to convince them that it was all a misunderstanding, so the car lot agreed not to press charges, but Cal still got charged with drunk driving. And fired, duh.