“The janitor’s asleep?” I said.
Ghost nodded. “He’s got a cot set up in the basement where he sneaks off and naps.”
“Why’s he so tired?”
“He drinks too much.”
“He never looks drunk—I mean, when I’ve seen him.”
“He’s good at hiding it.”
This was very weird. I had a hundred more important things to ask him, but here we were, talking about the school custodian’s drinking problem. I guess it was because things suddenly had all the awkwardness of a first date, with neither of us quite sure what to say.
But I couldn’t leave it at that.
I cleared my throat.
“So ... why’ve you been following me around?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I just ... you know ... like you, I guess.”
“You like me.” Was that all this was, some horny ghost had the hots for me? Right. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know you’re pretty—”
“Oh, yeah. Real runway material.”
“Well, you are. And I like the way you stand up for yourself.”
“Which is why people have been crapping on me all year.”
He shook his head. “I saw you stand up to Brent Calder your first week here. I heard what you said to Valerie. I think the only reason you let them rag on you is that you can’t be bothered caring about what they think.”
“I care,” I found myself saying, “but I’m trying to stay out of trouble.”
Now why had I told him that?
He smiled. “You see? You took the moral high ground— another commendable character trait.”
“Mmm.”
I’ve never been good at compliments, but it was especially weird getting them like this, when I was being hit on by a ghost. Or at least it felt like he was hitting on me. I wonder where he thought a relationship could go?
“You’re taking this all pretty well,” he said. “I mean, considering ...”
“What? You think other people don’t have nice things to say about me?”
“Of course not. I meant, me being dead and all.”
He put his hand toward the nearest wall, and it went right through so that it looked like his arm was cut off at the wrist. But when he pulled his arm back, his hand reappeared, inch by inch, good as new.
“You don’t seem at all scared,” he said.
Okay, that was a little freaky, but I already knew he was a ghost, so I could deal with it.
“Should I be?” I asked.
“Well, no ...”
“Because you have been stalking me for months, and I have to say, that’s not particularly endearing.”
“I wasn’t stalking you.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What do you call spying on someone from a distance and disappearing when the person tries to talk to you?”
“I just ... I don’t know. I didn’t know what I’d say to you. I didn’t know you’d be so easy to talk to.”
“Oh.”
Neither of us said anything for a few moments. I slid down and sat with my back against a locker. After a moment, he came over from the stretch of wall where he’d been standing and sat beside me.
“What’s it like to be dead?” I asked.
“I don’t know what it’s like for anybody else, but I’m always sort of scared.”
“Sounds just like life.”
“I guess.”
“So are there other ghosts around?”
He nodded. “All kinds.”
“That’s kind of creepy—from the perspective of someone who’s still alive, I mean. Knowing that there’s all these dead people around, checking out everything you’re doing, and you can’t see them. And when you think of how many people have died over the centuries ...” I looked around. “It must be really crowded in Ghostworld.”
“Most of us go on.”
“Go on where?”
“I don’t know. I just never went.”
“Did you ever think it might be better than here?”
“Yeah, but what if it’s worse?”
“So we get a choice?”
“I don’t know that either, but I guess I did.”
“Because you have unfinished business?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He sounded a little defensive.
“Well, isn’t that why ghosts usually don’t go on?” I asked. “They’ve got stuff they still have to deal with, here in the world of the living.”
“I never thought about it.”
“So what happened to you? I looked you up in the newspaper, but they didn’t have much to say.”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
I laughed. “It’s the middle of the summer and here I am, sitting in school—which is not my favorite place, as you can probably imagine—talking to a ghost. Don’t you think I’d be anywhere else if I had something better to do?”
“Then why are you here?”
“I wanted to figure you out. So give. Tell me what happened.”
He didn’t say anything for such a long time that I thought he wasn’t going to tell me anything. But then he sighed.
“When I was a kid,” he finally began, “I couldn’t wait to get into high school ...”
* * *
“... and so I’ve been hanging around here ever since.” We were still sitting in one of the school’s side halls, our backs against the lockers, legs splayed out in front of us. I knocked the toes of my sandals together and turned to look at him.
“That’s a pretty amazing story,” I said.
“It’s true.”
“Of course it is.”
“You don’t believe me. What part don’t you believe?”
“Well, c’mon ... fairies?”
“Says the girl talking to a ghost.”
“Okay, that’s a good point. But you being a ghost doesn’t automatically make fairies real.”
He looked across the hall.
“They think you’re rude,” he said.
“They’re here?”
“Oshtin and Sairs are.”
I studied the other side of the hall, but I couldn’t see anyone or anything. Not even when I squinted.
“I don’t see anybody,” I said.
“Not everybody can see them.”
“Not everybody can see you, either, but I do. So what’s the deal with that?”
“I don’t know.”
I kept checking out the area around us, but there was just me and the ghost. Otherwise, the hall was deserted. Just like you’d expect on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of the summer.
“So why don’t they show themselves?” I asked.
For a few moments, he seemed to be listening to someone. Then he said, “They say it’s either a gift you’re born with or something you have to earn.”
“How convenient.”
“You shouldn’t make them angry.”
“Whatever. I don’t really care what invisible people think of me.”
“Now they’re leaving.” I watched his eyes track something that I couldn’t see. “And now they’re gone.”
“And the difference is?”
He shook his head. “You really shouldn’t be like that. They can be mean, if you get on the wrong side of them.”
“Like saying they can teach you how to fly.”
“I suppose. But I don’t think that they meant for that to happen.”
I shrugged. “So where did they go?”
“Into one of those elf bolts I told you about earlier. Do you want to see one? They’d be really useful for you in the new school year if you want to get away from someone.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe another time.”
He gave me a goofy grin. “So there’s going to be another time?”
I laughed. “Well, I’m not going to marry you or anything, but yeah, I’ll drop by again.”
I stood up and brushed some nonexistent dirt from my legs. He scrambled soundlessly to his feet be
side me. “When are you coming back?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Next week, I guess. When the school’s empty again.”
“There’s no one here after around nine or so most evenings—except for the janitor, and he just heads down to his cot after he’s checked the doors.”
“We’ll see.”
I started walking toward the door at the end of the hall. “So can you and your fairies leave this place?” I asked when we got to the door.
It had one of those bars across it that let you open it from the inside and would then automatically lock when it closed behind you.
“They’re not ‘my’ fairies,” he said.
“Whatever. Can you?”
He nodded. “But I don’t like to go out much.”
“Why not? People can’t see you if you don’t want them to, right? Or at least most people can’t.”
“Most people can’t,” he agreed. “But there are ... other things out there that I’d just as soon avoid.”
Now he had my curiosity piqued.
“What kinds of things?” I asked.
“Well, there’s the ... I don’t know what you’d call them, actually. Angels, I suppose.”
“Like with wings and harps?”
Why not? If he was going to try to convince me that there were fairies running around, he might as well throw in angels. But he shook his head.
“They’re just these people,” he said, “who try to coax ghosts like me to move on. They can be very persistent.”
“They don’t sound very scary.”
“They’re not. But there’s also the darkness.”
“So go out during the day.”
“No, not that kind of darkness. This is something else. I don’t know what they look like, but I’ve felt them.” He turned to look at me with an earnest expression. “You know that feeling of helplessness you get when a bunch of guys grab you in the boys’ room, and the next thing you know you’re being pushed out into the hall wearing your own underwear over your head?”
I couldn’t believe he was asking me this, but I guess it had happened to him, so I cut him some slack.
“Not really,” I said.
“No, of course you wouldn’t. You’d put up too big a fight for them to be able to do that.”
I shrugged. He seemed to think I was a lot braver that I thought I was. Who was I to disillusion him?
“Anyway, trust me. It’s an awful feeling. It’s like you don’t have any control over your life and anybody can come along and just do whatever the hell they want to you, any time they want.”
“Okay, that I can understand.”
“Well,” he said, “whatever lives in the darkness leaves you feeling like that, only a hundred times worse.”
“But what do they do?”
“I don’t know for sure. Tommery says they eat souls.”
“Anybody’s?”
“No, just those that are ghosts. And sometimes those of people ...”
“Who talk to ghosts,” I finished for him when his voice trailed off.
He shook his head. “No. I was going to say, those of people who walk at the edges of how the world’s supposed to be. You know, people who don’t take what they see around them at face value. Tommery says they carry a kind of shine that attracts the darkness.”
“Well, that lets me off the hook,” I said, “because the only impossible thing I can see is you.”
He got kind of an annoyed look. “Why are you so insistent on the world being just the way you’ve decided it is?”
I shrugged. “Because it’s never shown me to be any different?”
Before he could reply, I pushed on the bar and stepped out into the July heat. I half expected him to follow me, but when I turned around, there was no one there.
* * *
But that wasn’t the strangest thing to happen to me over the summer.
Because Maxine was away for a whole month, and I knew I wouldn’t be seeing her mother, I took the opportunity to dye my hair a nice dark blue. I used to love playing with hair dyes, back in Tyson. Some weeks I had a different color for each day, like my underwear. I got a new tat as well: a blue-black crow in flight on the nape of my neck that I could hide with a shirt collar if I had to. But I was wearing a tank top and a pair of low-rise cutoffs when I ran into Ms. Tattrie the next day.
So not only could you see my new tat, you could also see the one on my shoulder, the one on my thigh, the ones on each ankle, and half of the knotwork design at the small of my back. I had all my earrings in—six to an ear—my eyebrow piercing, and a little bell hanging from the one in my navel. In other words, I was definitely not her daughter s straight little study partner.
“Imogene,” she said as pleasantly as always. “I’ve missed seeing you since Maxine s been away.”
The first thing I thought is, that’s some strong medication she must be on.
“Umm,” was all I could manage, my brain whirling as I tried to come up with some explanation for my looking the way I did. It wasn’t close enough for Halloween and—
“I was hoping you might call,” she went on, “but I understand how it can be. It’s not like you didn’t work hard enough all year to deserve some downtime that doesn’t include the stodgy old parents of your friends.”
“You’re not that old,” I said.
Whoops. Maybe I should have lied, and said she wasn’t stodgy either.
“Do you have time to go for a coffee or a cup of tea?” she asked.
Everything about this chance meeting had caught me so off-guard that I found myself agreeing, and let her lead me into a nearby cafe. She got herself chai tea and a plain black coffee for me, smiling the whole time. It wasn’t until we were finally sitting at a window table that I took a deep breath.
“I just want to say,” I began, “that if you’re going to be mad at anybody, be mad at me, because this is all my doing. Maxine’s just as good a kid as you want her to be.”
“Why should I be mad?”
“Well ... c’mon.”
She shook her head. “Did you really think I didn’t know?”
“You ... but ...”
Okay, it’s not often I’m left speechless, but this was too much.
“As soon as I saw that you and Maxine were becoming friends,” she said, “I called the school’s guidance counselor, and she put me in touch with the counselor at your old school. I’ll admit that what I learned didn’t exactly thrill me.”
“They can tell you personal stuff like that?”
“When you’re determined, and you know the right people, anything is possible.”
Well, duh. What was I thinking? Like old Mr. Ford back at Willingham wouldn’t jump at the chance to dis me.
“But ... I know the stuff they would’ve told you,” I said. “Why would you still let Maxine hang with me?”
“My therapist suggested that I give it a few weeks before making any decisions.”
“Your therapist.”
She nodded. “I know I have issues, particularly when it comes to Maxine. I want the best for my daughter, but I also know that I have to give her some freedom or all I’ll do is push her even further away from me. But ... it’s just very hard for me.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“And then an interesting thing happened,” Ms. Tattrie said. “This hellion that I’d been told I shouldn’t let my daughter associate with turned out to be a rather charming young lady She didn’t skip school. She didn’t run with a bad crowd. Her marks were very good on her final exams. When I spoke again to Ms. Kluge at the end of the school year, she told me that while your sense of fashion was certainly eccentric, none of the behavioral problems on your permanent record appeared to have carried over from your old school to the new one.”
I still didn’t have anything to say, so I just shrugged.
“So it appears,” she went on, “that, in some ways, Maxine has been as much of an influence upon you as you’ve been on her.”
“She’s never done anything wrong,” I said, ready to defend Maxine where I couldn’t—or at least wouldn’t— defend myself.
“I know. Your influence has been positive, as well. Before you came into our lives, Maxine barely spoke to me. She went to school; she did homework. She read her books. She watched TV. And that was all she did.”
“And now?” I had to ask.
“Now she’s more outgoing. We have actual conversations rather than my having to pull monosyllabic responses from her. She ... she glows.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, she does, doesn’t she.”
“And that, I know, is your doing.”
I started to shake my head, but Ms. Tattrie would have nothing of it.
“I’m not saying you’ve transformed her,” she told me. “You’ve simply allowed her to be more herself. She was a very unhappy girl before you came along, but she wasn’t always that way.”
I was good and didn’t say anything about how maybe Maxine’s unhappiness could have, in a large part, come from how Ms. Tattrie had been treating her.
We fell silent for a moment, and she looked me over.
“So this is the real you,” she finally said. I could have said the same to her.
“Well, sort of. It’s hot today, and I’m kind of slumming.”
“I meant more ... all the tattoos and piercings. And that hair.”
I shrugged. “I just like to play with how I look. You’ll be happy to know that Maxine doesn’t go for this kind of thing at all.”
“Thankfully,” she said, but she smiled to take the sting out of it.
I knew what she meant. And the funny thing is, when she smiled, she got this whole other look about her—more like Maxine. She got that same glow.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“Nothing. I’m glad we had this chance to talk—to get it all out in the open.”
I guess.
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to keep this from Maxine?”
I shook my head. “Not and be a friend. But I’ll figure out a way to tell her so that you don’t come out looking bad. I’m good at that kind of thing.”
“Yes, you are, aren’t you?” She finished her tea. “Thank you for that, Imogene. Thank you for everything.”
We stayed a little longer, but then she went off, back into her life, and I was left sitting at the table just trying to figure it all out. I mean, was this weird or what? Maxine’s mother was actually kind of cool.