“It’s weird,” she said, sitting across the lunch table from me. She had to raise her voice a bit, because the lunchroom was so noisy.
“What’s that?” I asked, trying to eat what they school passed off as food
“Mary Jo,” she said, getting exasperated.
“Are we still talking about her?”
“What else is there? I can’t believe you. This is big—maybe the biggest—and it’s weird. How can you not be interested?”
I shrugged. Sometimes it was hard to talk to Melody. She knew my secrets. She knew my problems. Yet she was not bright enough to connect the dots. If she could have, she would have understood my lack of interest in what had happen to Mary Jo. Okay, the girl went missing. That was her problem, but one way or another, sooner or later, she would be found. Her problem would be over, and she would be fine. I understood that even if she turned up dead, she would be fine. On the other hand, my problems never ended, and I doubted I would ever be fine. It may sound cold and heartless of me to feel this way, but I couldn’t help myself.
“I just don’t see the big deal,” I said. “And what’s so weird about it anyway? People disappear, right? Happens every day.”
“Not like this.” she assured me. She leaned forward so that she could lower her voice. “She vanished in the bathroom.”
“Yeah?” I said, like So what?
“You don’t get it. I don’t mean she vanished from the bathroom. You see the difference.”
“She’s missing either way.”
Melody sighed. “They found her purse and book bag in the bathroom stall, and the stall door was still locked from the inside.”
I was about to take a sip of milk, but stopped. That was sort of interesting, I had to admit.
“Not only that,” Melody continued. “They questioned her best friend—you know the one they call Coco?”
“Yeah, I know who you mean. Short, dark hair. I think she’s on one of the teams. Track or something.”
“Right, that’s her. Well, she was the one who reported Mary Jo missing. She told the cops she was in the bathroom with Mary Jo. She was talking to her, while Mary Jo was in the stall. Are you following me? Then she left to go to class. Only she forgot to tell Mary Jo something. So she went right back to the bathroom, and Mary Jo wasn’t in the stall anymore. Her book bag and purse were there but it was like, poof, no Mary Jo.”
Melody tossed back her long dark hair, and looked at me with wide eyes that awaited some response.
“Okay, it’s weird,” I said.
Melody was disappointed. “That’s all?”
“Well, you’re right—it’s weird.”
“I thought you’d have more to say than that.”
“Like what?”
“Some kind of insight or something. Oh, you know. You know things—weird things.”
“I don’t know anything about people vanishing from bathrooms,” I said. I knew weird things, true, but I didn’t know all weird things.
Just then Mrs. Halsted walked up the aisle, nearing our table. She had been the head lunchroom monitor, walking through the aisles every day, year after year, until her back assumed a slight sideways bend from craning her neck to see if anybody was throwing food on the floor under the tables. She had passed away when I was a freshman, and yet here she was still looking for food on the floor. It made me wonder, What exactly is the purpose of death?
As Mrs. Halsted passed our table, she gave me a sly smile but kept walking.
“Jules?”
I looked at Melody. To her it must have seemed I drifted off. I did that a lot. In my school file it was noted that I often seemed distracted. My counselor, Mrs. Stock, had insisted my parents have me tested for attention deficit disorder. The tests had come back negative, of course.
“Mrs. Halsted?” Melody asked.
“Yeah.”
“She say anything this time?”
“She never says anything.”
“I wonder why. You think she knows you can see her?”
“Oh, she knows.”
“Then why not say something?”
“She’s one of the good ones,” I said.
I slid my tray aside. I couldn’t eat anymore. I felt agitated. Melody was talking too much. If she’d been talking about some guy or a handbag that she coveted but couldn’t afford, I could have handled it. Her talking about strange stuff always got to me; it make me think about things I always tried to put out of my mind. Sometimes I wished I had never told Melody anything, but some secrets are impossible to keep. They gnaw at your insides until you can’t bear it anymore. Sooner or later you have a weak moment and you tell somebody. I hated myself for the weak moments I had; they always ended up leading me into some trouble or other.
The walls of the crowded lunchroom seemed to edge inward, making the room smaller, more crowded, louder. I felt a panic attack coming on. I was prone to panic attacks, especially when I was around a lot of people.
I stood up. “I have to go.”
“You okay?” Melody asked.
“I just need to get outside for a bit,” I said, and she knew enough not to ask to go with me. “And I wouldn’t worry too much about this whole Mary Jo thing,” I added. “I don’t know where she is, but I’m sure she’s not dead…. Well, at least I haven’t seen her yet.”
Then I rushed out of the lunchroom, escaped the building, and wandered around the school grounds, until the bell sounded and I headed for my next class.
2
The next morning my mom and dad were at work. My mom returned to nursing as soon as I was old enough to have a house key, and worked the graveyard shift at a local hospital. She wouldn’t get home until after I left for school. Dad was a fireman for the Chicago Fire Department. He worked two days straight, and got four off, during which he usually moonlighted at his friend’s body shop.
So most mornings I had the house to myself.
I would shower and dress and go down to the kitchen to make myself breakfast. I would make fruit and toast, or sometimes I’d risk having an omelet, with a couple pieces of lightly butter toast on the side. At some point, while I was at the stove cooking, Jerry would wander into the kitchen. Jerry was our house’s previous owner. He had been a police officer, up until the time he was killed in the line of duty. Strangely, when I was home alone making my breakfast, Jerry would help by making my toast. Most of the time, he wouldn’t say a word. He’d get two slices of bread, put them in the toaster, and push the lever down. I never saw bread floating through the air or anything like that; I always saw him perform the task as though he were still alive. The way he appeared to me was the way he looked at the time of his death. He was wearing his uniform. He had been a stocky guy, with a handsome broad face, droopy eyes and short dark hair that was showing a little gray. The only disconcerting thing about the way he looked was the bullet hole in his forehead and the stream of blood that ran down one side of his face. He was stuck with that, apparently forever.
Over the past five years, I’d spoken with him a few times. He never pestered me to deliver a message to his relatives or anything like that. He never made the lights flicker or caused the walls creak. Basically, he was a really decent guy. He’d died saving the life of his partner, who was a two-year-old German shepherd named Sarge. How much more decent do you get than giving your life for a dog?
Today he made my toast, and then wandered away, presumably to do whatever it is dead people do when live people aren’t round.
I sat at the table, and while I was eating, Jerry came back into the kitchen. He sat at the table across from me, which he had never before done. He looked at me with an expression of concern or mild confusion.
My hand froze halfway to my mouth, and I stared at him over the folk.
“What?” I asked.
“I was just thinking,” he said. “You know what being dead and being alive have in common?”
“Not a clue,” I said.
“In either case, it’s impossible
to figure out who’s in charge. Always remember that.”
“You know I’m trying to eat,” I said.
“Go right ahead,” he said pleasantly. I stared at him, at the hole in his head, until he finally caught on. “Oh, sometimes I forget. I’m grossing you out, right? Sorry.” He put his hand over his forehead to cover the bullet hole. “That better?”
“I still know it’s there, plus your brain is oozing out of the back of your head.”
“I guess I picked a bad way to die,” he said, lowering his hand.
I grunted. I wondered if there was a good way to die.
“Something has come up,” Jerry continued. “Something you should know about.”
“Yeah?” I said, trying to eat some scrambled egg, which was hard because I kept thinking about Jerry’s scrambled brain.
“There’s an issue,” he announced.
“An issue? What kind of issue can you have? You’re dead, right?”
“The issue involves you.”
I pushed my plate aside, my appetite now totally gone.
“Really, the last thing I need is to have a dead guy tell me I have issues. I get enough of that from my parents.”
“It’s about this missing girl from your school,” he persisted, and, trust me, there is nothing more annoying than a persistent spirit. “Well—I think—you need to find her,” he said.
“I do?” I asked, surprised; it was the last thing I expected to hear from him. “That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“But it does, in a way. In a way, it involves you, everybody at your school—potentially it involves a lot of people.”
“I don’t see it.”
“You want to know what really happened to her?” he asked.
“Can I stop you from telling me?”
He thought about it for a second, and then said, “Probably not.”
I tossed up my hand, and leaned back in my chair, like, Okay, let’s hear it.
“There are separate realities,” he started carefully, as though he didn’t quite know how to explain.
“You mean like being dead and being alive.”
“Not exactly. I’m talking about physical realities.”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“These realities are parallel to each other, and they are separated by—well, I guess you could call it a membrane.”
“A membrane?”
“It’s easier to think of it that way. You have taken biology, right?
I rolled my eyes. “I know what a membrane is.”
“Sometimes, in certain places, at certain times, this membrane, for some reason, can become thin, so thin that a solid object can pass through it from one physical reality to another.”
“How interesting,” I said, thinking Not. Then I realized, “You mean Mary Jo…?”
“Exactly,” he said.
I thought about that for a minute, and then I burst out laughing.
“This is not funny,” Jerry said gravely.
But I found the entire thing more hilarious than horrifying. “You’re telling me that Mary Jo was in the girl’s room, in one of the stalls, sitting on the can and doing her business, and she slipped into another reality. And you don’t find that funny?”
“Not at all.”
“I wonder… when she landed in the other reality, do you think she peed all over herself?”
He smirked. “Okay, maybe it’s a little funny. But, on the serious side, you need to do something.”
“What? Tell the cops? I could just see that. ‘Oh, yeah, officer. I know what happened to Mary Jo. She didn’t run away or anything. She just slipped through a membrane into another reality.’ Oh, yeah, that would sound great! You know, my main goal in life is trying not to end up in a strait jacket. I don’t see the big deal. Tough luck that something weird happened to her, but, you know, that’s life.”
“She doesn’t know where she is. She’s alone. She’s probably scared out of her wits. Don’t you have any compassion at all?”
“No,” I said. “Why should I?”
He sighed, frustrated.
“Well, it’s more than just Mary Jo,” he continued. “When she slipped into another reality, something else slipped into yours. To balance things out. I guess you could call it a kind of displacement.”
“Something from the other reality?”
“From another reality,” he said, “not necessarily the reality Mary Jo went to. Some of these realities are pretty dark. Whatever came through—a spirit, a demon, whatever—has already disrupted things.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“You remember when you left school yesterday? There was a bad car accident outside on the street.”
“Yeah, so?”
“It should have never happened,” he said.
I couldn’t help laughing. “Okay, you’re trying to tell me that because Mary Jo disappeared there was a car accident? This thing that replaced her is an evil spirit or something?”
“It doesn’t have to be evil, really. It’s just something that shouldn’t be here; it’s disrupting the natural flow of events in this reality. Now there are two people in the hospital—a seventy-two-year-old woman with a broken hip and her forty-five-year-old daughter who sustained a serious head injury. And, I should add,” he said, holding up a finger, “the daughter would not have been so seriously injured if she had been wearing her seat belt. That’s why you must always buckle up.”
“Great,” I said. “Just what I always wanted to hear: a public service announcement from a dead cop.”
“Jules, this thing—whatever it is—needs to go back where it came from. For that to happen, Mary Jo has to be brought back here.”
“I understand that,” I said. “The part that is a little fuzzy is why me?”
“Because you have a gift?” he said.
“A gift? Please, don’t make me vomit. I see things in my head that would gag a medical examiner. My mother always calls it a gift, but then she never had it, so what does she know? I got it from my grandmother, who never thought it was much of a gift either.”
“I’m just saying: this has all got to be put right, or else people are going to keep getting hurt. But then maybe you don’t care about that, either.”
He got up from the table and drifted out of the room.
I couldn’t believe it. I was getting guilt-tripped by a ghost. What next?
3
I had only a half-day of school today, and yet I barely made it through. During my last class, English, I kept nodding off at my desk.
I had awful sleeping habits. I’d had insomnia forever. Sometimes, I thought I was born with insomnia. I’d lie in bed at night and stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom. Everything was dark and quiet and peaceful, but still I couldn’t fall asleep. It was always as though something was there, at the periphery of my senses. I was just aware of it enough for it to keep me awake, waiting to see something freaky. But usually nothing happened. I waited and waited, until finally I was so exhausted I drifted away. It wasn’t so much falling asleep as it was sliding into unconsciousness. Other nights, the freak show began almost as soon as I turned off the lights. I’d look at the ceiling, and suddenly some strange face was staring down at me. Sometimes there were a lot of faces. Sometimes there were just sets of staring eyes. I had to pull the covers over my head to hide from them. When I did that, there were still times when I could see eyes looking at me from the underside of my blanket. I had no idea who they belonged to or what they wanted, but at times they were impossible to escape.
So, no, I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I always looked pale and had tiny pouches under my eyes. This, too, was in my school file: always appears tire, along with, often distracted, anti-social attitude, emotionally detached, possibly anorexic. All of it was true, too, except for the anorexic part. Actually I ate like a horse most of the time, but still I remained on the thin side, as though my metabolism was all jacked up.
After my last class, I l
eft the building. It was a sunny early-spring day. I walked round to the student parking lot, passed the two squad cars that were still parked near the front, and worked my way back to my car, which was an ancient Chevy Nova that still ran great. I climbed in behind the wheel, put on my seat belt (so Jerry wouldn’t haunt me any more than he already had), but didn’t turn on the engine. I was just so wiped out. The ride home wasn’t far, but still I didn’t want to chance falling asleep at the wheel. I was debating taking a little catnap, when my body decided for me and I drifted away.
I woke up with the side of my face pressed against the door window. I had a nasty crick in my neck, but otherwise I felt a lot better. I looked around to see that the parking lot was almost completely empty. Even the two squad cars were gone.
Since I felt better, I decided to check out an occult bookstore. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of involving myself in the whole Mary Jo thing. But, I had started thinking, if Jerry was right that this other entity might cause problems around the school and around people connected to the school, maybe I ought to see what I could do. After all, I attended the school, and my father was a fireman, whose job could be pretty dangerous; if he ended up falling through the roof of a burning building, I’d always wonder if that were something that I could have prevented.
So I headed for the bookstore. It was located in one of those congested north-side neighbors in which you had to fight tooth and nail to find a parking space. I passed the store about ten times, driving around in circles, until I finally found an open space about three blocks away.
I could have checked the school library, but that would have been taking a chance; I knew for a fact that the librarians reported if a student inquired about books on something weird. Librarians are notorious snitches—don’t let anybody convince you otherwise. It would have gone straight back to my counselor, who would have jotted new notes in my file. Searching for unusual literature—the occult, demonology, or a possible interest in devil-worship?
I couldn’t go to the public library, either. Public libraries, like hospitals and churches and, strangely, bowling alleys, attracted large numbers of earthbound spirits. I avoided any place that might be filled with ghosts. In my most horrifying dreams, I am in a place that is crowded with spirits, and then, suddenly, all at once, they realize I can see and hear them. I am stampeded and end up drowning in a small lake of ectoplasm.