

Fading Away

By Tom Upton

~~~

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 Tom Upton. All rights are reserved.

All characters in this book are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.

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"Cold, Cold Water"

The old man was a creepy feature in our house that summer. Each morning, after breakfast, my mother would wheel him out onto the landing outside our kitchen door, and there he remained for most of the day.

His eyes were sunk deep into their sockets. He was nearly blind; supposedly he could see only shadows. His nose was bony and hawkish, jutting out from a face that was just a mass of wrinkles. His pale skin appeared paler under the early morning sun, and no matter how warm it was, a heavy afghan lay across his lap and over the arms of his wheelchair. His lips were always parted, and sometimes you could catch a glimpse of his two remaining front teeth. The only time he ever spoke now was to ask for water. "Cold, cold water," he rasped softly whenever he was thirsty. It never sounded like a request, but an observation, as though he was seeing in his mind some mountain stream whose crystal clear water was babbling through a formation of rocks. He would repeat the words at almost exact intervals, never certain anybody was close enough to hear.

I was fourteen then, and every time I had to pass him to enter through the kitchen door, my scrotum shrunk slightly, as if the temperature on the landing was hovering just above zero. "Cold, cold water." His eyelids drooped a bit, so you could see only a sliver of green and white. I knew he couldn't see me, but the way his eyes appeared made me feel that he wasn't blind, but that I was invisible.

That was the summer my brother, Ricky, decided to kill the Greek. I never for a moment believed he would actually do it. He had changed quite a bit in the last year; he had developed opinions-- on just about everything, it seemed-- started to pass judgment on everything and everybody. But he had not changed that much. So when he told me his plans, I was sure that it was all talk.

We sat on out on the back stairs of our house. He was sitting on one of the higher stairs, as though that somehow reflected that he was older than me and therefore ought to be elevated. On the landing the old man loomed over us, a silent sentinel.

"Why would you want to kill him anyway?" I asked.

He took a moment to answer. He looked over the railing at our small backyard, which, no matter how our mother tried to dress up with annuals each year, still managed to appear sad and pitiful.

"It's just the way it has to be," he said. "There's an order to things, and the Greek is out of order."

I considered this, but it just didn't make any sense to me. The Greek had bought the neighborhood candy store last year. It was true that he was not as likeable as Mr. Bellini, the old owner who had dispensed candy to the kids and milk and bread to their parents for about a hundred years. He always seemed sullen, walking around in a dirty t-shirt. His black hair was receding and slicked back and his dark eyes were somewhat protuberant, as though he was always on the verge of losing his temper. He was not the nicest human being, but I couldn't see that he was worthy of being killed, and I told Ricky as much.

"He beats his wife and daughter, you know," he said curtly.

"Oh, his daughter..." I said knowingly. Ricky had had a crush on the Greek's daughter, Lori, since he first laid eyes on her. I couldn't blame him, really; she was quite pretty, with long wavy dark hair and the kind of face you'd see on a cameo-- and her body wasn't bad, either. For some reason, though, Ricky, lately, had lost interest in her.

"Don't give me 'Oh, her daughter' like you know everything," he chided me. "She's aside from the point."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," he said in a brooding tone.

"You don't like her anymore?"

"I like her just fine," he said, but the way he said it led me to believe that what he was saying wasn't quite the truth.

"But you're not interested in her anymore," I pointed out.

"No."

"Then you don't mind if I took a try at her."

"Yeah, I mind," he snapped.

"What?"

"You just stay away from her."

"Why?"

"Just stay away from her-- that's all," he said. He stared over the railing again. In the yard birds were swooping down, landing in the lawn and pecking at the grass seed our mother had spread yesterday. It was no wonder why the lawn always had the scruffy look, with tiny bare spots here and there. You just couldn't put down enough grass seed-- there were just too many birds. On the landing the old man started to murmur, "Cold, cold water," but neither one of us took much notice.

"You know I nearly got her," Ricky said in a mischievous way.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he swore.

"What happened?"

A look of disdain passed over his face. "I'm not sure I should say."

"Well, I'm not going to beg you," I told him.

"Cold, cold water," came from the landing above.

Ricky glanced up at the old man, and seemed disgusted.

"We were alone in the Greek's apartment, right above the store while the Greek was working," he said.

"And, what, the Greek caught you trying to do his daughter? That why you want to kill him?"

Ricky snorted. "You don't know nothing," he said, and sounded just the way adults sound when they're talking to kids sometimes. "No, he didn't catch anything."

"Then what happened?" I asked.

"I'll tell you, if you just shut up and let me tell you."

"All right, all right," I said.

"She started taking off her clothes," he said slowly, too slowly.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, and her body was-- perfect-- I mean, perfect. You know? She got down to her underwear and then she takes me into her bedroom. So I'm getting excited, you know, like we were really going to do it and somehow that seemed so unreal-- like it was a dream. We were going to do it while the Greek was down stairs, right under us, putting price tags on the canned food. So I start getting undressed. She took off his panties, and that was that-- I'll tell you," he said with great disdain. "She had this-- I never seen anything like it. You know, it wasn't anything like the girls you'd see in the Playboys dad keeps hidden from mom in the back of the closet." He leaned down closer, and lowered his voice, as though afraid the old man on the landing might hear. "She had this bush-- it wasn't a bush; it was the whole freaking forest, you know. It was totally gross. The hair went almost up to her navel-- I'm not kidding. Well, I just couldn't deal with that. I could never be that horny-- no way. It was disgusting. I was totally pissed. It could have been perfect, but she ruined it." He shook his head, as if he still couldn't believe it. "You know, I went through a lot of trouble to talk her out of her clothes. You'd think she'd have the decency not to show me something like that, you know. I mean, her old man sells razor blades downstairs. How much trouble would it have been-- you know?"

I was confused. "So that's why you want to kill the Greek?"

"No, no, no, I told you she was aside from the point. I was just telling you what happened, because you asked. Can't you remember anything?"

"Oh," I said. "Then why do you want to kill him?

"Cold, cold water..."

Ricky paused to look up at the look up at the old man.

"Why is he living with us, again?"

"I guess nobody else would take him. Grandma and grandpa are getting too old to take care of him anymore."

"So we get stuck with him?"

"I guess."

"See, that's what I mean about people being out of order. Nobody ought to live that long. A person's great-grandfather ought to be underground somewhere-- not put out on the landing every day, like... like a potted plant or something. The same thing with the Greek; he's out of order. Old Mr. Bellini was fine; he really liked the kids. The Greek just pretends. He actually hates the kids. He just takes their money-- that's all. He doesn't care. He gloms money, and beats his wife and daughter. He doesn't fit."

"A lot of people like him," I pointed out.

"A lot of people have eyes but how many of them see? It's funny. When you're a little kid, you accept everything you see, whether it's good or bad. But you get to a point where you see that some things just aren't right and that something ought to be done about it. So, yeah, the Greek should die. He should die and his wife should get everything. That would restore order--"

"Cold, cold water--"

Ricky finally lost it. He jumped to his feet, and bellowed toward the kitchen window.

"Ma! Ma! Get out here and water your plant, will you please?"

A moment later, our mother walked out onto the landing with a glass of water. She gave Ricky a sour look-- I could hardly blame her-- and then she held the glass up to the old man's wrinkled lips. He slurped the water, which started to run off at the corners of his mouth, and dripped down onto the afghan. When the glass was empty, our mother paused to give Ricky another look of disapproval before going back into the kitchen.

He became moody, then-- it seemed he was always getting moody these days. He didn't say anything more about the Greek.

I wondered why he thought he had to do something about the Greek. I was sure other people saw things that they didn't think were right, but few people ever did anything about it.

I was sure that it was all just talk, and remained convinced of that, until he actually got a gun.

************

He showed it to me only once. It was an automatic-- a 9mm-- and the handle and barrel were covered with tiny scratches, as though it had been dropped many times. After he showed it to me, he hid it somewhere in his bedroom. After that, I didn't have to see it again; it was enough to know that it was in the house.

I should have told my parents then, but I just couldn't bring myself to do that. I really still didn't think he would go through with it. His reasoning for wanting to shoot the Greek didn't seem sound to me, and I was sure that he would see that, too, and forget about the whole thing. So I just kept my mouth shut.

A few days passed, and nothing happened, and then a few weeks, and still nothing happened. Ricky never said another word about the Greek, and I knew that I had been right-- he wasn't going to do anything, after all.

One day my mother took the old man down the stairs, so that he could spend the day on the small patio in the yard. She wheeled him out onto the landing, and then awkwardly turned the wheelchair so that it faced the stairs. She tipped the chair back slightly, which was easily because the old man was so light, and then slowly lowered the chair down the stairs. Every time the large, rubber rimmed wheels hit a stair, there was a low thump and the wood of the stair would creak, as though it was some kind of warning that something unnatural was occurring. She got him out to the patio, and arranged the wheelchair so that it was facing the yard. She seemed irrationally particular about how the wheelchair was positioned as though she was unaware the old man was blind and was concerned about him having a good view of her flower garden. At lunchtime, she brought him a bowl of apple sauce and spooned it into his mouth. Whenever some of the apple sauce escaped his mouth and slid down his chin, which was often, she scrape it off it the spoon and fed it to him. After she had finished she retreated to the house, and settled herself in the living room to watch soap operas, as she did every day.

Later, with my father home from work, we all sat down at the kitchen table to have dinner. This was always an oddly quiet time for us; nobody ever spoke, and all you could hear was the soft scraping of folks on our plates. Nobody much looked at each other, either, but I noticed, now and then, my parents pause and frown slightly, as if wondering whether all the windows were closed because it had started raining pretty hard outside. All of a sudden my mother shot up from her chair and said something. It came out garbled, but sounded like "Oh, my God!" She raced toward the back door, and I followed her.

The old man was still sitting out on the patio. He was soaking wet by now. His head-- so remindful of a baby bird's, for some reason-- was slightly tilted up toward the gray sky as the rain struck his face. His mouth was slightly opened as though he was trying to catch the raindrops.

My mother tugged him back up the stairs. As she wheeled him through the kitchen, I could hear him murmur, "Cold, cold water." It was hard to tell if he was thirsty or complaining about the rain.

"I can't do this anymore," my mother said in dismay.

"He belongs in a nursing home," my father said, chewing his food, having never left the table.

My mother took the old man into the small bedroom to change his wet clothes, still moaning that she couldn't take it anymore.

After all the ruckus had died down, I sat down to finish eating. Ricky looked at me. Like our father, he had not left his seat. He said one word: "Soon."

Ricky was spending a lot of time in his room. There were some days I didn't even see him. I could hear music playing from his stereo, and sometimes he was watching the small black-and-white television that was atop his dresser. It seemed unhealthy. He barely ever went outside. During previous summers he would seldom be at home; he would go to the park to get into a pick-out baseball game, or hang around the street corner with friends, or just go for a walk-- anything to be outside. Now he was content to be holed up in his room, with the door always shut. I could picture him lying there on his unmade bed. He never made his bed. His room was always a mess, with dirty clothes strewn on the floor. Once, my mother swore, she found a pair of sweat socks under his bed that were nearly as stiff as a board, they were so dirty. Sometimes, I could hear the springs of his bed squeaking, and I know he was doing push-ups; he always did push-ups off the floor with his feet atop his bed, lowering his face toward the dirty laundry. Other times, there was no sound at all. Then I'd wonder what he was doing. Was he sleeping or did he have the gun out of its hiding place, looking it over, removing and replacing the clip, thinking about his plan? I could never bring myself to knock on his door. To him that seemed to be the ultimate affront. If somebody did that, he would start screaming at them through the door-- even if it was my father, who didn't like that kind of disrespect and wasn't shy about telling him that.

One evening I noticed his bedroom door was opened. His dirty clothes almost spilled out into the living room. He was nowhere in the house. My mother told me he'd gone for a walk. I felt like searching the room to see if he'd taken the gun with him. But I wouldn't have known where to start; his room was such a mess, it might take hours for me to determine if the gun was there.

When I looked at the kitchen clock and saw the time, I knew he had the gun with him. It was almost seven o'clock, the time the Greek closed up for the night. I was struck with the buzzy feeling people get when confronted with something otherworldly. He was actually going to do it. It seemed so unreal, but I knew it was true.

***********

The next day the news was all over the neighbor. Even people who didn't like the Greek were horrified that he'd been shot dead while closing up the store. Nobody saw who shot the Greek, but there were police cars cruising throughout the area all day long just the same.

The old man sat in his wheelchair in the living room all that day. My mother was afraid that he would catch a chill and develop pneumonia if she put him outside. She fed him his lunch, and then took the car to the store to buy groceries.

I sat on the sofa, and watched cable shows. I tried my best to ignore the old man, but sometimes I couldn't help looking at him. His sightless eyes seemed to be staring at me. I couldn't concentrate on what was on the television. I kept wondering what the old man knew, how much he heard and understood-- if anything. I was sure he didn't know that the Greek was dead and that his great-grandson had killed him and that his other great-grandson had known that he was going to do it but didn't do or say anything to stop him. Beyond that, the old man could have been thinking anything, or nothing.

Ricky wandered out of his room just then. It was almost noon-- he was sleeping later every day, it seemed. He was wearing sleeveless shirt that showed off his well-muscles shoulders. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his pants, and he seemed to be in one of his broody moods. He looked at me briefly, and then turned to stare at the old man.

"Somebody ought to put a pillow over his face, really," Ricky said.

I must have given him a look of disapproval-- either that or a look of panic at the idea he might actually do it. I just didn't know what to expect from him anymore.

He shrugged his thick shoulders. "There's definitely a quality of life issue here."

"Don't even," I said, disgusted. I felt that he had betrayed a trust by actually killing the Greek. He knew I hadn't believed he'd do it, and when he actually did do it, he made me his accomplice. I couldn't say anything now, and he knew that-- he wasn't stupid. I didn't much like the feeling of being put in that situation.

"The guy had it coming," he said, as if reading my mind. "Don't sweat it."

"I didn't have anything against the guy," I said glumly.

"Only because you're ignorant. You don't see things right."

"Yeah, he was out of order, but now he isn't, huh? I think he just told you to stay away from his daughter-- that's all."

He snorted. "Think what you want. I explained to you how things were. I can't do anything if you don't understand. Some people are just out of line. Nobody does anything about it, and that's what causes the world to go wrong. You think it's right for that old man to still be living and breathing? What's the point of it?"

"Cold, cold water," the old man croaked just then.

Ricky smirked. "You hear that?" he said to me, then turned to the old man. "Dry up and die, you old fart."

"Cold, cold water," the old man repeated.

Ricky gave me a crooked look.

"Don't," I warned him.

"Old people go to sleep, and never wake up. It happens. It's normal," he said, and seemed to enjoy my discomfort.

"What happened to you?" I asked sincerely, and would regret even asking.

He shrugged. "I started to understand things, I guess. You know, they try to teach you right from wrong, but they don't really want you to know. They want to keep you stupid. And you know why? Because they don't want you to know that half the things they do are wrong. Like last year, when I had to go to summer school. Remember? They were all concerned about my falling behind, and, oh, they were going to help, and they were going to take care of me. Yeah, right. Then when you go, they treat you like you're stupid. They even call you stupid. What?-- is that supposed to help? They just don't know what they do to kids. Not me, of course-- I understand what's going on; I see their faults. But you take your average kid. He's trusting and all, and listens to everything he's told, and believes it, and they end up making him feel he's not even good enough to go to school. It's not worth their precious efforts. That's what they do, every one of those teachers who teach during the summer at school. They tell the parents one thing, and then turn round and treat their kids a whole different way-- as though they're burdens the teachers have to endure. Well, that's what they get paid for, right? It's their job. But they can't just do it; they have to mess with peoples' minds. I wonder how many kids they ruin every summer, how many kids never get to go where they're meant to go, because they've been discouraged, because they've been led to believe they're hopeless. It's not right, I'm telling you, it's not right. If I walked into that school tomorrow morning I shot every one of them in the head, I'd be doing everybody a big favor."

Long before he finished, I had begun to get a sick feeling in my gut. It wasn't that he was getting excited as he spoke; he showed no passion at all, in fact, but just spoke in a steady, calm drone. That was the creepiest thing about it, really, the way he said the words as though he was reading off the batting averages of his favorite baseball players.

I knew he meant every word he said. The threat was real. He'd already killed the Greek. He was like a tame animal that tastes blood for the first time, and now he was ruined forever. Every time he passed judgment on somebody now, it would not be enough; he would actually want to do something about it. It was madness. I couldn't understand how this had happened to him, how he'd had turned into himself and got so twisted up. He wasn't even like my brother anymore, but some stranger that had invaded the house.

Before he walked back into his room, and shut out the rest of the world, he paused to look at the old man.

"You're on the list, too, Methuselah," he said coolly, and then closed the door.

I listened to the hush in the house, then, and wondered what to do.

"Cold, cold water," I heard the old man say. At the moment they seemed like the saddest words in the world. For a change, I went to the kitchen to get him a glass.

************

During the following few days, Ricky didn't mention anything about the school or the teachers or about shooting anybody. He seemed pretty cheery, actually, and whether or not it was all an act; I had no doubts that he was still dwelling on some new plan.

At night I had dreams about him. I couldn't rightfully call them nightmares, because they lacked the terror that true nightmares evoked in me. The content of the dreams were disturbing enough, but it presented itself in such a matter-of-fact way that I barely found the dreams disturbing. In one of the dreams Ricky had been wounded by the cops. He was holed up in one of the abandoned factories that were plentiful in our lower-middle class neighborhood. It was bringing him food in a large open room that had once been filled with machinery used in the manufacturing of bicycle parts. Everything appeared in black and white. He was wearing a sleeveless white tee shirt and the large splotch of blood that showed at the side of his stomach appeared in dark gray and not red. The beat-up 9mm poked out from the top of his jeans. He paced around slowly, but not as though in pain, eating a tuna salad sandwich that looked dull and tasteless. Between bits, he droned on how the world was filled with wrong that he planned to make right. He would give his life if he must. He painted himself as some heroic figure on a noble quest. Then, just as the last crumbs fell from his lips, he pulled the 9mm from the front of his pants, aimed at me, and fired. The 9mm bucked in his hand, but made no noise. That was when I'd wake up. I wouldn't be soaked in sweat. I wouldn't feel fear or even dread. I wouldn't feel anything, in fact, as though it all had been of little importance. Maybe I felt this way, I thought, because it all seemed so unreal to me. Maybe Ricky had been right to suggest that I was blind to things that he could see. I suspected I would be better off to go through life so unenlightened.

Life Along The Okie-Dokie Highway

June 24

Dear Winny Girl,

How is your summer vacation going so far? I hope I am not disrupting your fun with this unsolicited letter.

First, forgive me for the shakiness of my writing. We are currently on the road, headed hell-bent for nowhere, and the family car is obviously in bad need of new struts. As I write this, I am hunkered down in the corner of the backseat, trying to get as far away from Mike as possible without having to open my door and hang out over the road. I can never tell which of his bodily odors is worse, but all of them combine to create an aroma that at once waters the eyes, congests the nose, and makes me crave badly fried fish. The wonder of it all is that, through his own reek, he can still sit there, head tossed back and snoring like a tornado ripping through an apple orchard.

My parents, on the other hand, sit quietly-- too quietly, if you ask me-- in the front seat. I honest to God have no idea where we are headed. These family summer outings are so spontaneous and so cloaked in secrecy you'd swear that they were military operations. All I know so far is that we stopped once, somewhere in Indiana, to gaze briefly at an enormous quarry. It is just like my father to think this a fun sort of thing to do-- drive out of the way to stop and look at a big hole in the ground. I don't know, maybe he thinks it's the same as stopping to look down into the Grand Canyon, only better because it was all man-made. Really, it's impossible to know what he thinks, because he says so little. And my mother never does anything to straighten him out; she just sits up there, in the passenger seat, with her crossword book, trying to do puzzles she never, but never, finishes. If my father does say something, all she does is look up briefly, lets out a bored hmmmm, and goes right back to the book. It's all so bizarre, really, as if I've been abducted by a bunch of weird kidnappers who can't quite make up their mind where they want to take me.

I really don't think I could feel any more lonely than I do now--not even if I woke one morning to find that everyone in the world was gone, and I was the last living human on the planet.

Maybe it all wouldn't be so horrible if Mr. Stinky-Snorey would stay awake to share this nightmare with me. But, then again, he might just make it worse. He has developed a gift for doing that; he seems to suck the very life force of those around him. Maybe that's why my parents are the way they are. Frankly I still cannot understand whatever attracted you to him last year. Was it just a phase you were going through, or some kind of temporary insanity? The guy never takes a shower, and since he has started growing whiskers, he chooses not to shave. My God, he doesn't change his sweat socks until they are good and stiff. And-- when he's awake-- he constantly complains how he's so tired, even though he never really does anything. I really can't see the attraction. You'll have to tell me sometime. I really need to know, because

Ohmigod, now what?

Okay, we had a technical problem there, which is a gross understatement, because what apparently happened was that our transmission dropped out of the car. There was this huge bang, and then dad lost control of the car, which ended up in a ditch. Everyone's all right, though; my mom, riding in the death seat, still seems pretty bored, Mike finally woke up, and my dad is all pissed off, but at least there was no blood or gore or broken bones.

About four hours has passed since I broke off this letter, and now I am stretched out on a bed in a hotel room that I am sharing with Mike, who is already fast asleep. We are in some tiny town. I think it's called John Junction. Somebody should have named it Generic, because of all that businesses that line the town's main street-- which, by the way, is named Main Street-- the hotel is named The Hotel, the café is named The Café, the barbershop is named The Barber Shop.... Really imaginative thinking, right?

Anyway, dad talked to the guy at The Auto Repair Shop, and it seems it will take six days to get the parts needed to fix the car, and then another two days to actually fix the car. So I'm pretty much stuck here, in this hotel, whose rooms haven't been redone since the 1960s. I can imagine the place filled with hippies crashing all over the places, jammed into the beds, sprawled out on the floor, sleeping in the bathtub whose faucet will not stop drip-drip-dripping. The place does have cable, remarkably, but only eight channels, the channels you usually flip past while looking for something interesting, like the Sci-fi channel or HBO. Well, at least, if I'm at all interested, I can always turn on the television to see what the weather is like in Los Angeles or Guam or wherever.

I am going to sign off for now. I am feeling pretty tired, since we had to walk about six miles to get to this godforsaken place. Tomorrow morning I will walk over to The Bank, and drop this letter in The Mail Box.

Hoping you're having more fun than me, and not seeing how you couldn't be.

Darlene.

June 26

Winny girl,

Well, I've had a couple days to check out this town. Actually it took only an hour or so; the rest of the time I spent shaking my head in wonder. It seems that the town is literally neither here nor there. Half the town, it turns out, is in Illinois and other half is in Iowa. I'm not sure how that came about, but I fail to see the difference anyway. The town is completely surrounded by cornfields, which spread out in all directions so that it appears they never end. I took a long walk out of town yesterday. The sun set before I returned, and for a while I had to walk in the pitch dark, in which all you could hear were crickets and the warm breeze whispering through the young corn stalks. All I had to tell me I was heading in the right direction were the distant dim lights that ran along Main St. It was really quite creepy, and I promised myself I wouldn't do it again.

I discovered that the only true action that occurs in the town is when the truckers come into The Truck Stop each evening. They come in one by one, like people coming into a church Sunday morning. They pull their semis in to fill them with diesel, and afterward they park them in an uneven line in the open field out back. Then the drivers stroll over to The Tavern, and don't return to sleep in the backs of their cabs until they are rip-roaring drunk and can just barely walk down the street without falling on their faces.

During the day, my parents never leave their room. All they have been doing is fighting. Of course, whenever I see them, they pretend that they haven't been fighting; they carry on in their usual way, with him silent and distant and her always detracted by small, irrelevant, things, like the stack of business cards on the front desk of the motel or whether or not it looks as though it will rain. But I know the truth; I can hear them through the wall, which is none too thick. They are actually fighting, and though I cannot quite make out the words, it is almost certainly about money. It will always fall back on the old argument, with my father insisting that he can't afford to send me to private school, not without falling short on cash for other things, like keeping the car properly maintained, and with my mother saying she would be damned if I was going to go to public school-- it might be good enough for Mike, but not for me. So, naturally, when anything comes up, like our car breaking down in the middle of nowhere on one of our stupid family outings, it is entirely my fault. My father will always give me these icy looks, as though he wants to kill me, and sometimes I think he really does. Even those times when I try to talk to him about where I'd like to go to college, all he'll do is grunt and mutter "Whatever," and make an excuse to leave the room. Most of the time, he treats me as though I had the plague, probably always suspecting I am going to bring something up that will somehow cost him money. On the other hand, he can be quite warm and pleasant to Mike. Sure, why not? Mike is destined to forego college for a career stacking shelves at Walmart or slinging hash at some greasy-spoon diner. Wherever Mike ends up, my father can rest assured it won't cost him a dime. Sometimes it's impossible for me to believe that my father is a high-school guidance counselor. Really, I wonder how many young minds he messes up each year, or does he save that treatment only for his own daughter?

The day is growing old now. Through the window I can see that it is dark. The dim streetlights have flickered on, and I can hear the loud grinding gears of the first semi pulling into The Truck Stop for the night. I think I'll turn in early. Maybe Mike has the right idea; maybe sleeping all the time helps you to forget that you have a truly lousy life.

XOXOXO

Darlene.

June 27

Winny girl,

Miracles of miracles, the parts for our car came in early. I have been told we might be able to flee this town the day after tomorrow.

In celebration, dad took us to The Café for dinner. Although the food didn't turn out as bad as I'd imagined, the company was most definitely lacking. Sitting next to me, Mike shoveled his food in his mouth. He makes slurpy sounds even when he isn't eating anything wet. He doesn't even hold his fork like somebody civilized, but grabs it with his fist, the way you'd imagine an ape or an orangutan would if it sat down at a table to eat.

It didn't take long for my parents to start arguing. They pretended it wasn't really arguing, but instead a playful exchange, which didn't sound the least bit playful to me.

"Well," dad said, and you could hear his exasperation, "you could at least consider going back to work."

"You know I have to take care of the children," she said.

"The children! They're sixteen and seventeen-- what's to take care of anymore?"

Then they went back and forth, with Mike and I the topic of conversation, even though they both spoke as though we weren't sitting at the same table as them.

Finally the discussion played itself out, and they fell into a deep silence. Now and then, I caught my father looking at me coldly, as if he were about to blurt out, "And she does not need to go to private school."

I made the mistake, then, of muttering, "I never said I wanted to go to private school. I could care less either way."

Dad looked at me, all surprised and innocent.

"I didn't say a word."

"You didn't have to," I said.

"Oh, stop picking on the girl," mom waded in.

"I'm not picking on her," he said, and then looked at me. "Am I picking on you?" he asked, and before I could say anything, he turned back to mom, and said, "See?"

"Oh, really," mom snorted.

We finished eating. As the busboy cleared the table, he cast sly, knowing looks at us, as though he understand that we were the most dysfunctional family on the planet.

After dad paid the bill at the front counter, we herded through the door. As soon as the warm dusty air struck me, I strayed away from my family, who made a beeline toward The Hotel. Not surprisingly, none of them noticed that I had chosen a different direction, heading toward the edge of town. The Truck Stop looked sickly somehow, in the waning light of day, with the distant skies purple-pink over the endless cornfields. The building was shabby and the pumps were dusty and rust-stained at their bases and the lumpy blacktop was strewn with candy wrappers and flattened aluminum beers and soda cans and other debris that was unrecognizable. Next to the building, there was a Coke machine, and I bought a can and sipped it as I gazed across the cornfields, thinking I could probably walk and walk and walk and never really get anywhere. There would always be more stretches of road, and on either side, more fields of knee-high stalks. Even if you could walk forever, there was no escape....

The Truck Stop door opened with a loud squeak and tiny tingles of a bell. An old man wandered outside as though he'd been entombed in the building for a thousand years. His jeans and boots were dusty, and his checkered shirt looked about three sizes too big. He might have been Asian, or part Asian, with a sparse beard that was growing gray, and slicked back black hair.

"You new to town?" he called over to me.

I told him yeah.

"You stay awhile, maybe?" he asked.

Not any longer than I had to, I said.

"The truckers come through pretty soon." If he said it to make small talk, it didn't sound that way. "They make good money, those truckers, you know?"

I didn't say anything to that.

"Maybe you make money, too, huh?" he asked.

I didn't know what he was driving at. "Make money?"

"Yeah, we split fifty-fifty."

"Make money doing what?"

"You know," he said, and made a gesture like somebody brushing his teeth.

It took me a moment to get it, and when I did, I felt my dinner churning around in my stomach. I started walking away, and the guy called after me, "Hey where you go? You stay. We make money." But I never looked back, just headed toward the hotel, wondering if I'd finally been missed.

************

The car is fixed, and we are again flying down the road. Two days have passed since I wrote the first part of this letter, and I have had a lot of time to think. I still don't know exactly where we are going, but then maybe that isn't so bad after all. I think I'm finally getting the hang of how to survive these outings. I just fly down the Okie-Dokie highway-- that is what I have come to call this road, or any road for that matter. We stop to see a big hole in the earth, and I think, "okie-dokie, then," and we pile back into the car until the next stop, where we will see who knows what? But no matter what it is-- a formidable reservoir, a vast junk yard, a dry riverbed, or whatever-- after seeing it, it's "okie-dokie, then," and onward, until one day you run across something that makes sense to you, maybe even something that you can attach yourself to and call your own. Am I making any sense? I think I am, but I'm not quite sure. You'll have to tell me what you think in the fall, when I see you at school, assuming I ever make it back.

For now

XOXOXO

Darlene

SOUND TRAVELS

He was standing at the end of the pier, and I snuck up in the dark behind him. I was totally shameless. I had no problem tormenting somebody, and tormenting a friend can be especially fun.

When I was right behind him, I yelled out "Hey" and grabbed the back of his shirt. He teetered, his arms wobbling wildly to keep him from falling in the water.

He spun round to face me. I was laughing hard, holding my stomach.

"That's not funny!" he screeched.

"Yeah, it is," I said.

He glowered at me, as I sat at the end of the pier, dangling my legs over the water.

A moment later, he sat next to me. He never could stay mad of long.

Even in the dim light of the moon, I could see how different we had become. When we were little, people had mistaken us for brothers, or even for the same kid. Once his mother smacked me upside the head for something he did, and never did realize her mistake. But as we grew things changed. We were both tall and rail-thin, but his hair had remained blond while mine darkened to almost black. He had grown so quiet, so quiet and serious. You could never tell what was going on in his mind. Deep thoughts, deeps fears-- it was hard to say. Whatever, he didn't seem to be capable of having fun anymore, so I never felt bad about tormenting him or having a good laugh at his expense.

"Your old man's a con artist," I said.

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"You never noticed?" I asked.

"Noticed what?"

"Every time he says let's go up to the lake, let's do some fishing-- every time there's, like, all this work that has to be done up here. Like, uh, by the way, we really should finish the yard work before we go fishing. Or today: three hours to move a humongous pile of gravel. What's that all about? Why does he need so much gravel?"

"He wants to put a patio behind the house," he said.

"A patio? What?-- is that next week's project?"

"It's just chores"

"Chores?" I said. "Anything that involves a wheel barrow is more than a chore. Besides, if it was just chores, he'd say straight up that there are a few chores to be done. And he'd say that before we get into the car to come up here. That's what makes it all a scam-- he sneaks it in at the last minute."

"Well, whatever," he said, starting to brood.

We sat there on the pier, neither of us saying anything. I listened to the half-hearted chirruping of crickets. There were no flies or mosquitoes. Most of the insects were probably dead, and those that weren't sensed the coming chill of winter.

Then we both heard it, the faraway scream. It ran through the night silence the way a broken thread runs through a piece of fabric, fuzzy and desperate, trying to escape the harsh sameness of the other threads.

"What the hell was that?" he asked, gazing over the lake, over the water whose surface was inky black except for a ribbon of moonlight.

"Sounds like somebody saw a mouse," I said.

"Sounds like more than that," he countered.

There were a few pinpricks of light on the opposite shore, from summer homes hidden in the velvety darkness.

"People are still awake over there," he said.

"It probably didn't ever come from there," I said. It was nearly half a mile across the lake, but out there at night sound travels. Sometimes, you could even hear the electronic bops and beeps of video games at the arcade attached to the nearest gas station, and that was over a mile away.

"It came from across the lake," he said, certain.

"Okay, it came from there," I said. Wherever it had come from, it didn't seem to have anything to do with us.

"We should do something," he said.

"Do what? It's nothing."

"People don't scream for nothing. Didn't you hear it? It sounded-- scared."

"Yeah, probably from a field mouse-- it probably got into somebody's house."

"What if it's more than that? What if somebody's hurt. What if somebody's hurting somebody else?"

"You think that's what it is," I said, curious that he was so grave. It didn't have anything to do with us, so why worry?

"Yeah, maybe."

"So call the cops," I said, but he wasn't listening.

He stood and pulled off his shirt.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm going to check it out."

"You're nuts."

"No, come on, we'll swim across."

"Uh-uh. No way."

"It's not that far. We did it before."

"Not at night, we didn't."

"It's no farther at night," he said.

"What about water moccasins?"

"What about them?"

I looked up, studying him. For a second, I thought he might be kidding. But he wasn't. He had stripped down to his shorts, and was waiting for me to do the same.

"Hey, I'm not going anywhere," I said.

"Don't you want to know what it's all about?" he asked, looking down at me as though I were the crazy one.

"No, not really."

"Fine. Stay," he said curtly.

He turned away and dived off the pier. The splash he made shattered the hush of night. I heard him swimming away. He would never make it across, I was sure. The water must have been almost freezing. He would change his mind and come back. Just a single scream. It wasn't worth such a long swim in the cold water in the black of night. Sure, he'd turn back. He would realize it had been nothing, just somebody who'd seen a mouse.

************

I sat on the pier and waited. I heard a splash in the water, and I thought it was him returning. But it must have been a fish, flapping its tail near the surface.

The night grew quiet again. Even the last few crickets stopped singing. All I heard was the soft sucking sound of the water lapping against the pier pilings.

A long time passed, the bright full moon shifted in the sky, but he didn't return. I wished he'd come back, so I could make fun of him for going in the first place. He'd be freezing, pulling himself out of the water. He'd be tired and beaten. He end up telling me it had just been some woman, or little kid, who had been spooked by a mouse in the house or a raccoon in the garbage can. It would be a fine joke on him. I would have a good laugh, and he would brood over how stupid he'd been.

But he was not returning. I started to feel panicky. What if he drowned himself? He was a good swimmer, as good as me, but even good swimmers drown, especially at night, in cold water.

I got up and paced the pier. I thought about swimming out into the lake, but how would I ever find him out there? I cursed him. What was I supposed to do? Should I keep on waiting? Should I go back to his parents' cottage, wake them, tell them their moron son went for a midnight swim and never returned. And exactly how was I supposed to explain that to them?

Then I heard the faraway plashing of water. It must be him. I should have been relieved, but I was more mad than anything else. He shouldn't have left. He should have stayed simply because I didn't want to go.

He pulled himself up onto the pier. His hair, plastered to his head, looked very dark. He was shivering, the way I had known he would, but he didn't seem beaten. I stood and watched him get dressed.

"Well?" I demanded.

"Well, what?" he asked.

"You didn't make it across, did you?" I asked, though I knew darned well he must have; he hadn't been out there threading water for so long.

"I did," he said.

"And?"

"And what?"

"Did you find out what it was about?"

"Yeah."

"Well?"

But he wouldn't say anything.

"Well?" I said again.

He stared at me in the pale moonlight. "If you wanted to know, you should have come with," he said coldly.

I couldn't believe it. "You're not going to tell me?"

But he was already turning away. He started walking up the pier, heading toward his parents' place-- a small white cottage, with a large pile of gravel behind it.

"It was just a mouse, I bet," I called after him.

But he didn't say anything, didn't even turn to look back.

After he was gone, I sat alone at the end of the pier. The night was silent again, somehow more silent than it had been before. The pinpricks of light across the lake were gone. Darkness blended into darkness, like a strange creature trying to devour itself.

I gazed out over the black water, thinking, wondering when my friend had become such a bastard.

TINY VOICES

I hear tiny voices. I've been hearing them since I was a little kid. They don't buzz in my head twenty-four hours a day. They don't tell me to do crazy things, either. They don't tell me to whack the mailman over the head with a pickax and slit his throat and cut him into tiny pieces. Nothing like that at all. They seem to come to me at given moments and tell me things I need to know. For instance, once I wasn't watching as I started to cross a street, and a panicky voice shrieked in my head, Watch out, stupid! I froze in place as I was about to step off the curb, and a newspaper delivery truck sped past, narrowly missing me. If it hadn't been for that tiny voice, I would have ended up squashed under the truck tires.

Over the years I have discerned four distinct voices. The first, the one that saved me from the newspaper truck, I named Angel. I really thought she was my guardian angel, too, because she always seemed to speak to me whenever my well-being was at issue. The second voice I noticed I named Joker, because she would always tell me to do silly things, like little practical jokes to play on my parents and friends. Joker has been the voice that always cracked me up in school, making fun of the teacher or the other students, funny little remarks that nearly had me rolling around on the floor. Joker has been responsible for my getting sent down to the main office quite a few times. Then there is Grumpy, who seems to hate everybody and everything. Often I have the impression she resents being stuck in my head. She certainly has got into many arguments with the other voices, especially Joker, usually keeping me awake all night, forced to listen to the two insult each other, while Angel will try in vain to calm them down. The last voice, the one that really scares me, I call Lurker. It is the only male voice in my head. He doesn't say much, but I always know he is there, listening. When he does speak, he tells me creepy things. I try not to listen to him, but I can't help myself. Maybe this is why he has always scared me; I fear he may actually gain some control over me and force me to do things I don't want to do.

So now I am sixteen years old and I have four people in my head. I have got so used to them, I probably wouldn't be able to bear the silence if they were suddenly gone. Sometimes, I wonder if other people hear tiny voices, too. It is impossible to tell for sure. Who wants to admit that kind of thing?

************

Other than the voices in my head, I think I'm pretty normal. I have friends-- well, a few friends, anyhow. I attend school, a small country high school, and I get good grades. I am not altogether sure I deserve my grades; I do get help from four other people, after all. Angel is very good in English and History, while Joker seems to have a talent for Math and Algebra. Whenever I take test, they whisper answers in my head-- as though somebody else might actually hear them. It is all so sneaky, I usually feel guilty of cheating. Sometimes, I feel like confessing to my teachers, but what am I supposed to say? It isn't me but tiny voices in my head that keep giving me all the answers?

My best friend in all the world is Jackie McCord. We have been BFF since first grade. I am her only friend. Though she is pretty and looks meek and mild, she always manages to get into fights. She has never got any good at fighting, though, and has the scars to prove it. They are not horrible scars, just a little nick on the chin and on her forehead there are a couple slightly larger ones, shaped like half-moons, which she covers with her brown bangs. I suppose she has other scars, too, on her back and other places covered by clothing, but none of the scars remind her that she is no good at fighting. So still, now and then, she gets into a fight she ends up losing.

I think her combative nature stems from her home life. She has a mother but no father. She never talks about her father, who has been absent forever. I once asked her about him, but she wouldn't give me any answers. I thought for sure she was about to start a fight with me just because I asked. So I let it go; I didn't want to be the next in a long line of girls who have kicked her ass.

Jackie is the only person in the world I told about the tiny voices in my head, but I don't know if she believes me. I think she does, or maybe she wants to believe me. When you get down to it, Jackie, not me, seems much more like the type of person to hear voices in her head. I wonder if she does. It sure would explain all those fights over the years; the voices told her to start them. Yeah, sure-- it made perfect sense. So maybe she does really believe me-- only she doesn't want to admit she hears voices, too.

Spring has come early this year, and at school every day after lunch, Jackie and I wander outside. We sit on the stairs at the side entrance of the school. We finish our drinks-- which we are not supposed to take out of the cafeteria because the lack of garbage containers outside leads to littering-- and look out across the school grounds. The grass is still a sickly shade of green, with big yellowish brown patches. In the distance, a traitor is chugging along slowly, kicking up dust. It is not the grandest scenery in the world, but a lot better than the view from the other side entrance, from where you can see cows lowing in the distance.

It is not easy being trapped in a school that is caught between cornfields and cows.

"We need to do something," Jackie says. She says it abruptly, as though it's an emergency. I guess the older you get, the more urgent it is to do something-- anything-- if you live in a place where there is nothing to do.

"Like what?" I ask.

"Oh, I don't know," she whines. "Think of something, will you?"

I thought a moment, and said, "I got nothing."

"There has to be something."

Yeah, sure, there are things to do. You can go to ice cream socials or while away hours at the roadside arcade just out of town. You can walk down the road a couple miles to the apple orchard, and just go wild.... But that isn't what Jackie means. She means something that will let off the steam that builds up inside you until you can no longer bear the pressure inside and you think your guts are about to split wide open as everything inside you spews out. That is what she means. It has to be something crazy and fulfilling, something that may hurt you and start trouble that never sees an end. If it isn't dangerous in some way, why bother even doing it?

"I don't know," I say.

"You must have some idea," she says.

"I got nothing."

I can't look at her. I can't stand to see anybody look at me in certain ways, like when they expect something from me, especially something I can't give.

"Then ask them," she says.

I have to look at her now. Her eyes are large and desperate.

"Ask who?"

"You know who," she says.

"No," I say dully.

"Come on," she moans. "I'm bored-- I am soooo bored!" She stands long enough to chuck her empty soda bottle out onto the lawn. When she sits, she edges closer to me, as though she is about to make some shocking confession. "Are they saying anything now? Can they give you some kind of idea?"

I can't answer. I still find it hard to talk about the voices, speak of them out loud to another human.

I sigh. "They've been quiet." This is a partial lie; although the voices are silent now, they were jabbering among themselves during lunch. Joker said something so funny I nearly choked on my corn bread.

"Well, can't you just ask them? Can't you get them to start talking?"

"I don't know if that's a good thing," I say.

"Come on," she coaxes.

"They wouldn't come up good with anything, anyway. I may be a little crazy, but the voices in my head are pretty sensible."

"That's not what you told me before," she says. Her eyes burn briefly. For a second I think she may take a swing at me. That is how fast she can lose control. I'm surprised she hasn't taken somebody by surprise and won at least one fight. "That's not what you told me at all. You said sometimes they tell you to do crazy things-- that's what you said. The one you call Joker is always telling you things."

"Yeah, she does," I confess.

"What kind of things? Does she tell you to get up in the middle of the night, take a butcher knife from the kitchen, and then go visiting your parents' room?" she asks in a low, creepy voice, but she's just kidding-- I think she is, anyway.

"No," I whisper. "Nothing like that."

"Then what?" she demands.

"Just little things-- harmless things. That's all Joker ever tells me."

"Like what?"

I am reluctant to tell her the last suggestion Joker made to me. It was rather grand compared with her other ideas.

She leans toward me, whispers in my ear, "Tell me-- what is it?"

Just then the voices come alive. They sound as though they are in my head, but they also sound as though they are coming from everywhere, from inside the school, from across the open field where the traitor is chugging along in perfectly straight lines.

What's the harm in telling her, Joker says. It's all in good fun, so tell her.

And Angel chimes in, Of course, it's not harmless. Any of these things we tell you are just for you and nobody else. It is like giving away dreams.

Grumpy grumbles, Bored? Bored! Why are teenaged girls always so damned bored? Build a bridge, and get over it. All life is boring. What did you expect?-- to be entertained every second of the day.

Tell her, Joker says sweetly.

Don't, Angel warns.

Grumpy groans.

I turn my head to look at Jackie. Her face is right there. Her large brown eyes seem to be staring right through me, and then, as though they have just spotted something joyous, they brighten.

"It's a good one, isn't it?" she says. She is all smiles now, though she doesn't yet know why she is so happy. She is my friend, and seeing her so happy, makes me happy. When Jackie is smiling you never see her scars. She looks perfect.

Then the voice that scares me speaks. Jackie is such a pretty girl, much prettier than you, Lurker says. Look at those eyes! And that mouth-- her lips all soft and luscious. Why don't you lean forward and kiss her? You know you want to do it. Nothing wrong with that. Girls kiss girls all the time--

"Shut up," I hiss

Jackie shifts away, and stares at me.

"Are they talking to you now?" she asks. "What are they saying?"

"Never mind," I tell her.

She looks hurt, but only for a second, and then her scowl returns and she stares at me hard.

"It's crazy," I say.

"That's what I want. The crazier, the better."

"You know the church?" I ask.

"The church? Which church? There are only about fourteen churches around here. I always wonder why the town needs so many."

"The church down the road from my house," I say, and I can hear Joker snicker in my head. "The white one, with the tall steeple."

"Yeah, yeah," Jackie says impatiently. "What about it? We burn it down?"

"No, no, we don't burn it down."

"You sure?" she asks. "There hasn't been a good church burning in years."

"Just listen, hunh?" I say, getting annoyed. It is my idea, after all-- after Joker gave it to me, that is. I hate when somebody horns in on my fun, and now I am beginning to regret saying anything to Jackie. "You know how people are when they leave a church?"

She looks at me dully, and shrugs. She is sort of a heathen.

"They are all dressed up and-- I don't know --and something else. I can't quite explain it. It's like that are happy and don't think anything bad will ever happen to them. You know what I mean?"

She shrugs again.

"Well, that's the way they are," I assure her.

"So?"

"So that's the exact moment to surprise them."

"With what?"

"Something shocking," I say. "Something outrageous."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Like what?"

"Like somebody running down the street buck-naked," I say, and allow it to sink in.

She mulls over the plan, and then says, "Who were you going to get to run naked down the street?"

"Me," I said, thinking how dense Jackie can be sometimes. What?-- do I have to draw her a picture? Can't she imagine the shocked expressions on everybody's face? Eyes will pop out, and jaws will drop. Little kids will hide their faces behind adults, and they will never forget the sight. They will talk about the episode for years.

"But that's stupid. You'll get caught. You live right down the road from that church." Jackie says, and I can't believe how ignorant she is.

"Duh! Nobody's going to recognize me. You think they're actually going to look at my face?"

Jackie thinks about that. An impish grin spreads across her face.

"It's the perfect crime," she says.

"Not quite," I say. "There's a problem with the get-away."

"What? You keep running, right?"

"Everybody will be shocked at first. Then the shock will wear off. They have cars, the police have cars, and somebody will end up catching me. Even if I manage to make it home before they come looking for me, how many other people will see me along the way. No, I'd need a car to get away fast, a car parked round the corner, out of sight. It has to be, like, naked girl running, shock, and then poof she's gone. You know what I mean-- it has to leave them wondering whether it ever really happened at all," I explained, the way Joker explained it to me when she first came up with the idea. "But I don't have a car," I say. "I don't even have my driver's license yet."

"I have a license," Jackie offers.

"Oh, yeah, that's right," I say, as though it's news to me.

"And I can get my mom's van, especially on a Sunday morning-- she usually stays in bed until noon."

"Really?" I ask. I try not to sound too bright and bubbly. "Then we can do it-- the perfect crime."

"The perfect crime," she echoes, finally sounding satisfied, finally not too bored.

The class bell rings just then, and we get up to go back inside to our next class.

As I follow Jackie through the door, Joker says warningly, You can't trust her. It's perfect only if it involves one person.

You told me to tell her, I think.

But she seems too interested.

Of course, you can't trust her, Grumpy says. People will stab you in the back every time.

Oddly Angel remains quiet. I wonder what she is thinking.

And all Lurker can say is, You should have kissed her. Why didn't you? You know you wanted to....

I tell them all to shut up, and start heading toward my next class.

************

Over the next couple days, Jackie and I work out the details of the plan. It is our plan now, not just my plan, and at moments that rankles me. One of Jackie's failings as a human being is that since she has so little she can call her own, she tends to cling to things that belong to other people. I figure she is a born boyfriend-thief, which is why I never even tell her who my crushes are. If I did, I am certain that I will eventually catch her behind the school as she's sticking her tongue down the throat of some guy I am madly in love with. I mean, really, who needs that? Still I allow her to be my friend. I don't know why. She really is a horrible human being, but, for some reason, I forget that whenever I talk to her.

We have lunch together every day. We are like two comrades at war with the rest of the world. The food is lousy, and the lunchroom is filled with enemies. Some genius decided that it would be a good idea to put a mural on the lunchroom wall, but it is a mural of a pasture-- a red barn and a silo in the distance and cows grazing in the foreground. Why would anybody want that on the wall? I mean, you can go outside and see the real thing.

"Did you decide yet?" Jackie asks, through a mouthful of food. She is a pig, the way she eats. She talks with her mouth full, and now and then a bit of something flies through the air. Even when she swallows her apple juice, she makes weird, gurgling sounds.

At first I don't know what she means. Then I realize it is about the shoes. Will I wear shoes when I run naked past the church?

"Probably?"

"It doesn't seem right," she says. "You won't be completely naked."

"You think somebody's going to be looking at my feet?" I say.

"I'm just saying..."

"I have to wear my gym shoes. There's a lot of rocks and stuff along the roadside. What if I cut my foot on a piece of broken glass. That would be perfect, wouldn't it? Me rolling around naked on the ground, with blood spurting out of my foot. The idea is to do it, do it fast, and get away. I need the shoes," I say, resentful that I have to explain it all to her.

"Okay, okay, chill," she says, and then resumes rooting through her food like a wild boar.

"We doing it this Sunday?" she asks.

"Not this Sunday, no."

"Why not?" she demands.

"You see the weather report?" I immediately regret asking that; Jackie never watches the news or reads the papers. "It's going to be cold, with freezing rain."

"Wouldn't it be better that way?"

"Better how? I just want to shock some people who look like they need to be shocked. I don't want to end up getting pneumonia," I say, getting thoroughly aggravated. Why did Joker encourage me to tell her? I wonder if he's playing a separate joke on me. She knows how Jackie can be. She knows that Jackie is going to be nothing but a pest until it is all done. "Just--" I start, now fuming. "I don't want to talk about it anymore. I'll let you know what Sunday, all right?"

Jackie stares across the lunch table at me. Although I snapped at her, she isn't mad. She looks more hurt than anything else.

I hear Tsk, tsk, tsk in my head. I can't tell which voice did it-- probably Angel; she is the only voice who can make me feel guilty about something.

"Sorry," I mutter, but it doesn't sound sincere. I wish I never told her about the plan or the tiny voices or anything; it was like giving away a piece of myself that I will never be able to get back.

Days come and go. The warm spring days descend back into cold wintry days. A layer of powdery snow covers my world, making it seem the more depressing. You can get used to the fact that you live in a small "there's nothing to do" town, but somehow it's all worse when everything is covered in icy white.

I go through my classes in a daze. Teachers lecture, and their words are like the plinking of water dripping far away. I don't have the mental endurance to listen. I don't have the emotional endurance to care. Who gives a damn that somebody shot whom two hundred years ago? Is anybody ever going to stop me on the street and ask about the square root of pi?...My mind drifts, drifts through the window and into the cold white world. I know that nothing good is ever going to happen to me. I will languish and perish in the waste lands between cornfields and cows pastures.

I can barely listen to the tiny voices. They seem to want to cheer me. Even Grumpy makes a half-hearted attempt at humor. But nothing works.

I think about the plan. I try to play it all through my mind, as though it is an event that has already been captured on video and uploaded onto YouTube. I try to imagine millions of people seeing the video and sharing in its hilarity. But now it doesn't seem so funny. The idea has lost its edge since I disclosed it to Jackie-- that idea-glomming, boyfriend-stealing heifer!

Suddenly I know what will happen. It all flashes through my mind, as if it is history, like who shot whom two hundred years ago.

She will completely steal the idea. She has the car and driver's license. She doesn't need me, like I would need her, to accomplish the feat.

It feels as though I have lost everything, somehow, and really I didn't have the strength to care much about that, either.

************

Sundays come and go, but the conditions never seem right to me.

Jackie has turned hostile. She accuses me of being a coward. I figure let her think what she wants. I am definitely not a coward. I have no problem at all running around naked in public, and as long as I know that, it doesn't matter what she thinks.

Every day at school, she harps at me. "Does this Sunday look good?"

"No," I always say, and give her a different excuse. The real reason I keep to myself. The real reason is now, since I told her everything, it doesn't seem as much fun as when nobody knew.

Every Sunday, I leave my house and wander down to the church. I watch the people pour out of the large double-doors after service. They mill around outside the church. They loiter in the parking lot. They all look so clean, so chipper, so... normal. They pray and they feel better. Whenever I pray, I still feel like shit. Maybe this is why I hate them so; even prayer cannot make me forget that the world is an awfully gray place.

Sometimes, I wish I was born utterly stupid.

Each Sunday I expect to catch Jackie as she steals my plan. I know she will do it, sooner or later. One of the troubles with this world is that there are too many Jackies, too many thieves, too many sappers of life. They end up taking little bits and pieces of life that belong to somebody else, and they don't care-- they never even think about it.

Then one Sunday it happens.

I have watched all the good people left the church. Some gather in small cozy groups in front of the church. They speak in a neighborly way. Others are drifting toward the parking lot, where their cars are waxed so shiny that the glare from the sun bouncing off windshield and chrome is nearly blinding.

I turn away, to go back home, when I hear the first screams. Gooseflesh rises on my arms. Suddenly I am a raging fan, craning my neck to see the game. Although Jackie has stolen the idea from me, although I hate her for that, I still wish her well. That is the thing about friends: sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, and the rest of the time you wonder why you ever bother with them.

At first, I can't see her; she must have appeared coming round the other side of the stodgy white building. But then she comes wheeling round to corner to the side I can see. I start to laugh, along with all the tiny voices in my head, at the sight of her just then. She is running faster than I thought she could and, boy, does she ever need a sun-tan. I can see the contorted faces of all the good people as she passes them, and even though I am not the one causing their shock, I feel somewhat gratified. She bolts along the side of the church, over the long narrow patch of grass, heading more or less in my direction. Her eyes look wide and rounded, filled with terror, as though she has realized too late this was an awful idea. She looks white as a sheet that has flown off a clothesline, except for-- Damn, girl, I think, didn't you ever hear of a Brazilian?...

And then I see why she looks so scared. Two church guys, dressed in somber gray suits, come running round the corner of the church. They are actually chasing her! I can't believe my eyes. I watch in horror as they slowly catch up, and then one of them, like a former football hero, makes a driving tackle, grabbing her around her ankles and bringing her down on the grass. The other guy is already pulling off his suit coat to throw over her, while several of the women walk quickly toward the bizarre scene. Once they get Jackie on her feet, they all huddle around her and slowly lead her back toward the front of the church.

I jog over to them, yelling, "Hey, leave her alone! Leave her alone!"

But they don't hear me. They have formed a protective ring around her.

I get close enough to hear a couple people saying sympathetic things, like, "Are you all right, dear," or "Has somebody hurt you" or "Don't cry. You'll be fine now."

And she really is crying. She's crying and trying to explain why she did it. "I get these tiny voices I my head... they tell me to do things... I can't help it..."

Outraged, I watch as they lead her into the church, all safe and cared-for and loved.

I am left standing outside, looking up at the closed church door, my mind screaming, But they're my tiny voices! They're mine! She stole them from me!

And then Joker says meekly, Well, that didn't work out so well.

You didn't like her anyway, Grumpy says.

It's probably for the best, Angel finally says.

You should have kissed her while you had the chance, Lurker says in disgust.

I tell them all to shut up, and then start walking home.

THE GREAT SQUIRREL

HUNT OF 1977

I wanted to tell this story that took place in Oland Township, Oland County, Texas, when I was a kid.

The story is about Billy Bob Dupree. Saying that he was a mean kid doesn't seem enough; many people believed he was borderline evil. In the third grade, for instance, he shot a spitball at our teacher, Sister Margaret Olive, and hit her in the eye. He did it on purpose, too-- it wasn't even an accident. He wouldn't apologize, either, not even after getting a good whupping by Sister Margaret and one of the other nuns. (Of course, it was already known, then, that they weren't supposed to be whupping the students, but because it was Billy Bob, nobody really complained, not even his parents.) Anyway, what showed how mean he was wasn't that he hit Sister Margaret in the eye; it was that afterward, she had to start wearing glasses, and Billy started calling her Sister Four-Eyes, without a pinch of guilt that he was the one responsible for it in the first place. That was how mean Billy Bob was.

Anyway, I was walking through Beauchamp Park one summer day, bored and looking for something to do, when I ran across Billy Bob. He was standing at the base of one of the old oak trees that graced the rolling green expanses of the park, and he was sneering up at the tree and apparently talking to himself.

Most kids would avoid Billy Bob at all costs, but I didn't care much. I'd had a run-in with him last year, and survived. I hadn't won, though; it was a short grabbling match that ended with me losing my balance and falling on my face and Billy Bob losing his balance and falling, with his considerable bulk, on my back. I had blacked out for a moment, and had-- or, anyway, I think I had-- what people call a near-death experience. It had been as though I was floating over the scene; I could see the two of us on the ground, and after Billy Bob struggled to his feet, he gave me a good kick in the ribs while I was unconscious.

After that, I never found Billy Bob that scary.

So I just stood there and watched as he spouted off at the tree. It was a curious sight, really; Billy Bob was a lot of things, but never talking-to-hisself crazy.

Finally my curiosity got the best of me, and I called over to him, "Hey, Billy Bob, what are you doing?"

He looked away from the tree long enough to snarl, "Mind your own business, Fireplug."

He always called me Fireplug, and I could never figure why. I was tall and pretty skinny and it never made any sense to call me Fireplug. Bean-pole would certainly be more fitting.

I edged my way toward Billy Bob, until I could finally see the squirrel he had apparently run up the tree. It was just like him to torment tiny, defenseless creatures.

The squirrel was sitting on one of the lower branches. It was gazing down at Billy Bob as he cussed at it, and otherwise tried to intimidate it into coming out of the tree.

The squirrel wouldn't budge, though, but it began to chatter down at Billy Bob rather angrily.

The chattering sound a lot like laughing, and Billy Bob became irate. His chubby cheeks grew a dark shade of pink, and he started to sputter his words so that you couldn't understand them. Finally he was so enraged he lunged at the tree trunk, grabbed it with his fat hands, and tried to shake the entire tree. Now, Billy Bob was big, but nobody was big enough to shake that old oak tree. He just looked ridiculous in the attempt, and as though the squirrel recognized what a big dummy Billy Bob was, it chattered even louder.

Billy Bob, then, gave up on the tree, and started looking for rocks to hurl at the squirrel.

"Hey, why don't you just leave it alone?" I called out to him.

He just looked up to glare at me, and then resumed scanning the ground for good throwing stones.

When he had a good supply of ammo piled at his feet, he started to chuck the stones at the squirrel, which ran to and fro on the branch, evading the rocks, stopping now and then to chatter fiercely.

I called out to Billy Bob that he would never hit the squirrel, and he spun round and threw a stone that hit me right in the kneecap before he returned his attention to the squirrel.

In the end the squirrel seemed to become bored with Billy Bob, so it scampered down the opposite side of the tree trunk, and started to bolt across an open grassy area of the park.

Surprisingly Billy Bob took after it, running a lot faster than I would have thought somebody his size could run.

I just had to chase after them, because I had this feeling something was going to happen. Either Billy Bob was going to catch that squirrel, or he would fall flat on his face, or something. What ended up happening, I would never have guessed.

The squirrel was zigzagging out in front of Billy Bob, who little by little closed the gap. Just when it seemed Billy Bob had a shot at grabbing the squirrel, it stopped dead in its tracks, spun round, and lunged at Billy Bob. There was a horrifying squeal as the squirrel sunk its teeth into Billy Bob's hand, and then Billy Bob was spinning around and around, like a dust devil dancing across a desert floor, trying to get the squirrel to let go, and the squirrel holding on for dear life.

When the squirrel finally let go, it flew off, hit the ground running, and took off for parts unknown.

Billy Bob ended up sitting on the ground, wailing like a baby. He was holding his hand close to his chest, and blood was fairly gushing out of the wound that was in the meaty part between his thumb and pointing finger. I couldn't say that I felt the least bit of sympathy for him. It served him right.

I walked up to him, thinking that that squirrel had left him much the same way Billy Bob left the many little kids he had tormented.

"Wow, Billy Bob," I said, savoring the moment, "that squirrel sure did have long teeth, hunh?"

When he looked up, I could see that his fat cheeks were shiny with tears. All he could say was "I'm bleeding...I'm bleeding..." repeating it in a panicky pathetic way. I almost hated myself, then, because I actually started to feel sorry for him. I couldn't have said why. I was certain he had never felt anything at all after he'd torment some little kid, leaving him scraped and banged-up in the school yard.

"Don't worry," I said. "I'm sure they can stitch that up all right. You might hafta get rabies shots, though."

His eyes bugged out in terror. "R-rabies...?"

"You know that squirrels carry rabies, don't you?"

He gasped, seeing the truth of what I'd said, struggled frantically to his feet, and fled from the park, calling for his mother long before he was even near his home.

I walked after him. There was no way I was going to miss any part of his comeuppance.

~

By the time I reached his house Billy Bob was already gone. His father had run him over to the Oland County Bariatric Center, which was the only nearby medical facility that had anything that remotely resembled an emergency room. I thought it was ironic-- and potentially practical-- that he was taken to the Bariatric Center. Maybe after they fixed his hand, they could also staple his stomach-- maybe he could get some kind of two-for deal.

Billy Bob's mother was standing on the rickety old porch that hadn't been painted in years. She was a formidable woman-- meaning that Billy Bob had inherited his disposition from her-- and the spitting image of her son. Appearance-wise, the only things that separated the two were thirty years of wear and midnight snacks and a sex-change operation.

She was talking down to a sheriff's deputy, who had apparently just arrived and who seemed reluctant to get too close to the house.

As I approached, Billy Bob's mother spotted me, and pointed an accusing finger in my direction.

"I betcha he had something to do with it," she said to the deputy, who was pretty young and looked way too serious.

"You know what this is all about?" the deputy asked. "Billy Bob was so frantic he couldn't speak."

"Oh, he did something, all right," she said, certain. "He even looks guilty."

It always struck me as strange that the parents of the kids who were doing the worst things always believed that it was other folks' kids who were at fault.

"Hey, I didn't do nothing," I said to them both. "He was squirrel-bit."

At that they both gasped, as though getting squirrel-bit was the worst thing that could befall a human being.

"Aw, that ain't good," the deputy said gravely, and looked to have a shiver running through him. "We're gonna need to find that squirrel. If not, Billy Bob is gonna hafta go through a mess of painful shots. Thirteen injections right in the solar plexus.... Did you see this happen?"

"Uh-huh," I said.

He took a small notepad and a pen from his shirt pocket, and got ready to write.

"Gimme a description of the squirrel," he almost demanded.

"What?"

"What did it look like?"

"Well...it looked like-- a squirrel." I thought it was a really stupid question; Oland County only had one type of squirrel, and they were reddish-brown and all looked alike. It sounded as though young deputy was expecting the squirrel to have a moustache or walk with a limp-- I concluded that he was not detective material. But then I remembered, "It did have a messed up tail." The tip of its tail had been sparse of fur, remindful of the quality of Christmas trees you might find at six o'clock on Christmas Eve evening at a cut-rate tree lot.

I described the squirrel tail to him, and he seemed happy to have something to jot down.

The whole while Billy Bob's mother glared down at me as though I did something wrong.

************

It didn't take long before every deputy on duty, and sheriff himself, along with a few file clerks from the County Building, were all combing the park for a small reddish-brown squirrel with a ratty tail.

They checked up trees, behind bushes, around the river where it squiggled through a south corner of the park. They checked around the softball diamonds, the park house, and the two small bathroom buildings whose doors were always open in the summer months. And though many squirrels were spotted, and there were a few false alarms, the offending squirrel remained at large.

The deputies then fanned out into the downtown area on one side of the park, and into the residential neighborhood on the other side of the park.

They checked every tree and bush. They checked tool sheds and garages. They checked all the roofs of any structure. They even checked inside the small downtown stores and offices, as though the squirrel had actually pushed open one of the doors to let itself into the genuine air-conditioning that was advertised in faded letters on the front window.

I was requested to make myself available to identify the culprit once it was captured, since Billy Bob was still at the emergency room and way too distraught to be of much use.

I wandered around watching the hunt, and I noticed how deeply concerned everybody was. You'd think they were doing it all for some kind of saint, and not for Billy Bob, who, it was generally known, was a "bad seed." I wondered what they could possibly be thinking. It really was an awful message I was picking up from their actions: that it didn't matter how bad, even evil, a person might be, he was still deserving of their sympathy and concern if he was bitten by a rabid, or might-be rabid, squirrel. They were basically saying that when push came to shove, it didn't matter how you have comported yourself in life, everybody would look after you. And though this was a comforting idea, it seemed to make meaningless every good, kind, and decent thing I'd ever done.

Then, as if that weren't a hard enough pill to swallow, I spied Sister Margaret Olive, who had joined in the search.

~

But it was Wordell Jackson who ultimately found the squirrel.

As I strolled down a road not far from my house, I noticed Wordell had pulled his squad car over, and was now standing before a small house that had a large front yard. He was peering into the yard, and when I got closer, I saw the squirrel just as it jump onto the top of the white picket fence.

Wordell noticed me, and slowly raised his hand, warning me not to come any further.

The squirrel, perched on the fence, stopped, and looked more like a ceramic squirrel than a real one. When it finally moved, it stood on its hind legs, turning to face Wordell, who seemed uncertain what to do at first.

Then he looked toward me, and moved his eyes between the squirrel and me, as though asking whether this was the right squirrel. When I nodded my head, he carefully reached down for his service revolver, and pulled it from his holster. Now he appeared more uncertain than ever, and with good reason. You see, Wordell was, without a doubt, the worse shot the Oland County Sheriff's Department had ever employed. Each year, all the deputies had to qualify on the shooting range, and were expected to get at least the minimal passing score of eighty. In the ten plus years he had been a deputy, Wordell was hard-pressed to break fifty. He would always end up getting a pass until the following year, though; it would have been much too hard to replace him, simply because nobody wanted to be a deputy, what with all the more desirable jobs available in the county, like digging graves, greasing pump jacks, and hunting rattlesnakes whose meat was shipped to fine-to-do restaurants out east to be served as gourmet food to people with lots of money and very little common sense.

So, Wordell, knowing his limitations, slowly re-holstered his revolver, as the squirrel continued to look at him, not the least bit concerned, as though it could sense Wordell was no real threat.

Wordell eased back toward the squad car, and returned with a shotgun. He probably figured he had a better chance to wing the squirrel with a shotgun.

The squirrel, though, didn't seem the least impressed with the change of hardware. It looked more curious than anything. It watched as Wordell drew a bead on it, and then waited.

When Wordell pulled the trigger, three things happened at the same time. There was a deafening roar from the shotgun. Wordell flew backward, and landed flat on his backside. And the squirrel disappeared.

At first I thought the squirrel made a miraculous escape, somehow jumping off the fence and running to hide in the nearby lilac tree. But then I saw that it hadn't gotten away at all; just above where it had been standing, there was a pink squirrelly mist lingering in the air.

~

Everybody heard the sound of the shotgun blast, and came running. Soon the front yard was crawling with deputies, looking everywhere, but not finding a piece of the squirrel big enough to test to see whether it had had rabies.

The sheriff, disgusted, sent a deputy over to the emergency room to tell the doctors Billy Bob would be needing the rabies shots.

Wordell was sent over to the emergency room, too. He hadn't been holding the shotgun right, and had apparently dislocated his shoulder.

Soon everybody was gone, and it seemed like just any other lazy summer day in Oland, where there was plenty of time and not a whole lot to do.

~

Ernest Hemingway once said a true story ends only in death.

But Billy Bob survived. His wound healed, and he got over the rabies shots. Within a week or so, he was back to his old ways, tormenting little kids and tiny creatures. None of it changed him at all. Everybody wants, even expects, bad people to change. I don't think it ever really happens. If you're born good, you stay good. If you're born bad, you stay bad. If you can learn to live with this, you'll never be disappointed.

Wordell did suffer a dislocated shoulder, but he, too, survived-- although the sheriff, it was rumored, really wanted to kill him, because Wordell was rewarded for his stupidity by being able to stay home for six weeks at three-quarters pay on a duty injury.

The only one who died was the squirrel, who had to be the unluckiest creature on earth; first it'd been tormented by Billy Bob, and then shot and vaporized by somebody, who, it was widely known, couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a howitzer. You don't get much more unlucky than that.

As far as this story ending in a death, I wonder if the squirrel counts. I really hope it does.

Fading Away

My cousin Coralee started it all.

This was during my sophomore year, when Coralee still lived down the street from us and I still had to endure her presence in school each day. She really could be quite annoying.

She was always jumping into something or other. First, when she was younger, it was ballet. Then it was martial arts. Then rock collecting.... No sooner did she get involved in some interest or hobby than she grew bored and jumped to something new. I often suspected she had the attention span of a fruit fly.

Starting sophomore year, she was just recovering from her interest in skateboarding, when she became obsessed with nutrition and fitness.

I was sitting with her in the lunchroom one day, and it was poof, like magic, she was suddenly a health nut. All she had in front of her was a garden salad, with no dressing, and a carton of skim milk, and the attitude that anybody who ate anything more than that was violating the sacred temple of their body.

"What's that supposed to be?" I asked her.

"My lunch?"

"Yeah, is that what that is?"

"Yeah," she said.

"Where's the pizza?" I asked.

"No pizza."

"There's always pizza."

"Not anymore," she said.

"No? What happened?"

"I found out what was in it," she said. "I found out what was in a lot of things."

She ate her salad. I ate my enchiladas. I waiting for it, knowing it would come, and sure enough it did.

"You wanna know what's in those enchiladas?" she asked.

I thought about it for a microsecond, before I said, "No."

She stared at me, her eyes almost begging me to let her tell me.

"I don't want to know," I said, and continued eating.

Finally she couldn't hold it back. She blurted out, "MSG."

"What?"

"MSG."

"What's that?" I asked.

"That's what's in your enchiladas."

"Did I tell you I didn't want to know?"

"Oh, I thought you were just saying that, but secretly you really wanted to know."

"No," I said carefully, as though talking to a three-year-old, which wasn't far from the truth, "when I say I don't want to know something I always mean I don't want to know something."

"Well, I just had to tell you," she said.

"No, you did not."

"Yeah, I did," she insisted. "It was just too important. It was critical. If you were about to step on a land mine and blow yourself into bloody little bits, I'd have to warn you. I mean, I could never just sit there and say nothing."

"What land mine?" I asked.

"That enchilada is like a land mine."

"It is?"

"Sure."

I paused to look at my enchilada, and said, "It doesn't look like a land mine."

"That's not what I mean."

"Coralee I almost never do know what you mean. Can I please just eat my lunch?"

"No, no, you can't," she said, getting all pushy now. "They put MSG in so it tastes better. My point is, you really don't know what it tastes like, and the MSG is really bad for you."

"I don't feel bad," I said.

She rolled her eyes, as though she were the one talking to a moron and not the other way around. "Not now. But if you keep eating stuff with MSG in it-- you know, in the long run-- well, it's just not good for you."

"Yeah?"

"Lisa, trust me on this. I did the research."

I eyed my enchilada, maybe just a bit suspicious now.

"Why? What could happen?"

"Well..." she started, and got flustered. It was obvious that she didn't have a clue. "Well, nothing good."

"For example."

"I don't know. That's the scariest part; nobody knows for sure what could happen. Maybe your uterus will drop out one day. Who knows?"

"What happens to guys, then?" I asked.

"I'm just saying, why take a chance," she said, getting irritated. "Hey, if you wanna eat the junk, go ahead-- what do I care?"

She tried hard to ignore me, then, but I caught her taking sneaky looks at me now and then.

After she finished her salad, she started digging through her purse. She pulled out a small clear plastic pouch that was filled with different pills.

I lunged across the table, trying to cover the tiny pouch with my hand before anybody could see it.

She started at me, wide-eyed with shock.

"What?" she said.

"What are those?"

"Vitamins," she said. "What do they look like?"

"They look like a whole mess of pills you shouldn't be carrying around in school."

"They're just vitamins," she scoffed, shoving my hand away. "Nobody can say anything about my taking vitamins."

I looked around the lunchroom. Everybody was too busy eating or talking or playing with their cubes of green jello to notice Coralee. Really that was one of the good things about her: she was easily over-looked. She could probably strip naked and run up and down the lunch line and hardly anybody would realize what was happening.

Still I couldn't help being unnerved.

"Look," she said, and dug out a pill. "This is B-complex. It's good for infections and your skin." She set it on the tabletop and dug out another pill. "Vitamin C-- good for colds... Vitamin D-- good for bones...."

"You got anything that's good for insanity, because I think you need to pop a few of those. What that one there?" I asked, fascinated because one of the pills was incredibly large. "That humongous white," I said, pointing at it.

"Amino Acids," she said.

"You actually swallow that?"

"Yeah, sure, it'll make me feel better."

"Not if it gets caught in your throat, I won't."

I watched in amazement, as she swallowed the pills one by one.

"And those make you feel better?" I asked.

"Well, not yet, but they will," she said. "I'm still waiting for the accumulative effect. You wanna try some?" she asked eagerly, again digging to the bottom of her purse.

"Uh, no," I said.

"It's no problem. I always have extras."

"That's not the point," I said. The point was that I never involved myself in any of Coralee's interests, not after the last time. She'd been all enthused about hiking, and talked me into going with her once. It had seemed safe enough, but I ended up stepping in a gopher hole and breaking my ankle. Of course, it wasn't really her fault, but I'd always taken the experience as a warning. "I just hate taking pills," I lied, hoping she would accept the lame excuse.

But she just ignored me, as usual, and slid a packet of vitamins at me.

Before I could get her to take them back, she grabbed her lunch tray, muttered something about having to go somewhere before her next class, and left me sitting there, with a small extremely suspicious little baggie in front of me. I was forced to put it in my pocket before anybody noticed and I had to explain everything about how they were just vitamins, vitamins I had never wanted, and how my cousin Coralee was an incredible airhead who, for the most part, was harmless. I doubted that I could make it all sound very convincing.

************

So, yeah, in the end, I took the vitamins. I was even a little proud that I somehow managed to swallow the ginormous amino acid pill without choking to death on it.

The whole vitamin experience left me feeling rather stupid, though.

I took the pills after I got home that day. I'd completely forget I had them in the pocket of my jeans, when I pulled them out, I almost threw them out. But I was afraid my parents might discover them, and end of thinking that one of their kids was a turning into a pill-popping degenerate. Also, I was somewhat curious. Would these things actually make me feel better? And how? I really didn't think I needed them. I didn't think there was anything wrong with the way I felt normally. Still I wondered.

I figured it couldn't do any harm, so I took them.

And absolutely nothing happened.

I waited for a while. I couldn't say exactly what I expected, but I didn't feel any different.

So I did my homework, after which I paused for a long moment to try to detect some subtle change in my physical well-being. But nothing.

For the rest of the day, until I finally went to bed, I stopped to assess myself, only to determine that everything was normal.

I fell asleep feeling as stupid as I had ever felt in my life.

************

The next day, Fate itself seemed to be conspiring with Coralee against me.

I met her as I did every day outside the lunchroom.

As we took our places at the end of the lunch line, I told her straight out, "Look, I don't want to hear anything about vitamins today, okay?"

"Why, what happened?" she asked.

"Nothing-- unless you count me waking up in the middle of the night because I'm belching these nasty belches that smell like rotten eggs."

"That's from the B-complex," she said.

"I don't care what it's from. Just-- just not a word about vitamins."

She seemed vaguely hurt, and nodded meekly.

As we started to slide our lunch trays down the stainless steel bars before the lunch counter, Coralee said, "I read somewhere that certain imbalances can cause a person to be grumpy."

"Yeah," I snarled, "and so can having an idiot for a cousin."

I peered through the glass of the counter to see what was being served today. We always had the choice of three entrees. The first large stainless steel tub in the steam table contained some kind of creamy chicken casserole dish that look a lot like vomit. The next tub...a creamy beef dish that looked like vomit. The third tub... charred pieces of some type of meat that actually made the stuff in the first two tubs look good.

I paused for too long as I tried to figure with entrée looked the least gross, because somebody down the line started carping about the detail-- some hungry person who didn't have a clue they were about to lose their appetite.

"That's all you have?" I asked the white-clad woman behind the counter.

She shrugged and nodded as though she couldn't care less.

"Pass," I mumbled, and continued down the line.

"First sensible choice you've made," Coralee said.

"Shut up," I told her, and grabbed a salad, a piece of corn bread, and a cube of green jello that probably would have bounced like a rubber ball if I dropped it.

I sat across from her at our usual table, and ate my salad. Everything I looked up at her, she appeared satisfied, which I found very annoying.

"Don't say a word," I warned her.

"Hey, I didn't say anything," she said.

"Keep it that way."

But in the end she couldn't. "It's not a bad thing, you know. Did you really wanna eat any of that-- stuff?"

"What was it, anyway?" I had to ask.

"It's the end of the month. Probably whatever they had left over. No doubt saturated with MSG."

"Hey, you know, I checked on that," I said. "The school district forbids the use of MSG in school meals."

"You think they know?" she asked. "You just don't understand how the world works."

"Okay, tell me-- tell me how you think the world works."

"You really wanna know?"

"You're going to tell me anyway, no matter what I want. So, go ahead, get it over with."

"Well," she said, and leaned forward as though about to tell me some dark secret. "The school district gives a contract to a company to provide all the meals. It's all business. The district doesn't have actual control over what goes into the food-- the company does."

"And they're the ones breaking the rules, and putting MSG in all the meals?"

"Sure, so everything tastes better," Coralee said. "If everything tasted as bad as it looked, nobody would eat anything, and the company would lose its contract."

"And you know this how?"

"It's all common sense," she said. "It's all about money and cutting cost. Of course the food is going to be bad; the contract went to the lowest bidder."

For once I though Coralee might actually have a point.

"Believe me," she went on. "You're better off with a salad. There's no reason to put anything in salads, because nobody's expecting anybody to like them anyway."

I thought I might be losing my mind, because what she was saying actually seemed to make sense to me.

"Besides," she said, in an off-hand way, "you could stand to lose a few pounds."

"Huh?" I wasn't offended; I was genuinely surprised at her remark. My weight wasn't something I thought about much.

"I'm not saying your fat-- exactly," she said. "But you're not slim, either."

"'Slim' doesn't run on my side of the family, if you haven't noticed," I said stiffly. Everyone in my immediate family was not slender. My older brother was stocky, my younger two sisters with chubby, and my parents were-- well, I had to admit they were downright fat. I always liked to think of myself as a little chucky, not horribly so, just an little extra weight that really didn't matter; after all, guys still looked at me in an interested kind of way-- well, some guys, anyway.

"How much do you weigh?" Coralee asked. She had always been pole thin.

"I don't know," I said. "I never weight myself."

She looked at me as though she couldn't believe it. "Never?"

"Mom threw out our scale. I get weighed at the doctor's."

"The same doctor who probably told you it all runs in the family, and you can't do anything about it."

"No, he never said that-- oh, he might have said that, too."

"What else did he say?"

"He told me, maybe, if I drink more water."

"More water!" she snorted. "Just like a doctor. You know what doctors know about nutrition?"

"No."

She made a circle with her thumb and finger. "That much-- zero, nada. They don't even teach it in medical school. And, by the way, when a doctor says anything is because of genetics, that means he doesn't know the real reason."

"Really?"

"Really," she promised. "Doctors aren't as smart as they lead everybody to believe. If they were, nobody would ever get sick. Why do you think they call it a 'medical practice.'? Doctors practice medicine. They never perform medicine."

"Yeah," I said with awe, realizing she was absolutely right.

"How much do you think you weigh?"

"One twenty...five...maybe."

"And you're what?-- five foot three?" She shook her head. "Too much. And you have to fix that now. If you wait, it'll just get worse. One day you'll have to butter your hips to fit through doorways."

That was a horrifying thought, and in that instant, before I even realized it, I committed myself to one of Coralee's interests. I promised myself that I would eat better, that I would exercise, and that I would drink more water. It would all be so simple, and how could it ever be a bad thing?

************

Two weeks later:

I was always tired, from exercising.

I was always hungry, from not eating enough.

I was always running to the bathroom, from all the water I was drinking.

And as far as I could tell, I hadn't lost a single ounce of weight.

"Well, you know, it might take a little longer," Coralee suggested.

"I don't that I have much time," I said. "Today I fell asleep during an English test, and last week I nearly got run down by a truck while I was jogging. You know, it was a lot safer when I didn't care what I weighed."

But Coralee wasn't listening. She seemed lost in thought, as we sat at the lunch table.

"I wonder if you have an inhibited metabolism," she said.

"Is that something I'm likely to have?" I asked.

"I read somewhere that some people are overweight because they don't eat enough."

"You're kidding."

"No, really."

"So I can eat again?"

"Well, I wouldn't pig out. Just eat a lot more vegetables. See what happens."

"With my luck, I still won't lose weight, and I'll start looking like the Green Giant."

************

But it turned out to be good advice. As soon as I started stuffing my face with vegetables, my weight started to ease down. I had discovered I actually weighed 142 pounds-- much higher than I had believed-- but within a month I was down to 125. Everything from my waist down slimmed out so much I needed new jeans. And I did feel better, which was the main reason I'd started to watch my diet.

It was all good.

Of course, my parents were a bit mystified. They weren't used to someone in our house losing weight. But they figured that my new, healthy life-style agreed with me, and that it was for the better.

Coralee, by now, didn't even care much. Like her previous interests, nutrition and fitness had already given way to a new hobby, rock-climbing.

"We're in Illinois," I pointed out to her one day at lunch. "We're do you go rock climbing in Illinois?-- it's all flat."

"You'd be surprised," she said, and rattled off about a dozen nearby locations, before wolfing down a couple beef tacos and a non-diet soda.

"What happened to the nutrition thing?" I asked.

"Didn't work for me," she said, chewing her food. "I'm naturally skinny, anyway. But you-- wow! Guys are actually looking at you."

"Guys looked at me before," I said, somewhat defensive.

"Yeah, the guys nobody wants. Now it's, like, the hot guys are looking."

"Go on," I scoffed.

"No, really, girl. Just keep up whatever you're doing-- seriously. By spring, you're gonna be smoking. You should get one of those teeny bikinis and started going to the tanning salon. You're gonna have guys drooling over you."

"Please, that's not why I started this," I said. "I just wanted to feel better, really."

"Oh, I'm sure you'll feel a lot better with a bunch a guy chasing you around."

I found the thought embarrassing, but kind of nice, too. Everybody wants to be wanted, maybe that more than anything else in life.

"Actually," I said, "I was thinking, maybe, of going out for a team."

She stopped eating and stared at me.

"A team?" she said dully. "You're kidding."

"Maybe soccer or volleyball or maybe even cross-country. I kind of like running. It makes me feel good."

"You're sick, you know that," she said. "I send you on the path to gain these new powers, and you're gonna waste them on sports? You don't even care about the guys and whether your favorite cousin picks up your leftovers? That's gratitude for you," she said, and stood and grabbed her tray. Before she left, she said, "You know, I don't even know you."

I couldn't believe that she was getting all snarky on me. She was actually mad at me. What was with that? It was bizarre. She never got mad at me.

Well, let her be mad, then, I figured. It didn't make any sense, anyway; she'd been the one who encouraged me. What did she had to be mad about?

************

Over the following weeks, my weight slowly decreased. As I physically faded away, so did my old life, only to be replaced by a strange new life that I could never feel was really mine.

Half the time when I awoke in the morning, I didn't feel like myself, the good old Lisa Beaumont, but some stranger into whose skin I had somehow slipped.

Coralee avoided me like the plague. At first, it didn't seem like a terrible thing, but after a while it didn't seem natural for her not to be around, jabbering on and on about this or that. I missed her babbling. She could be annoying, sure, but annoying in a comforting way. Now I sit alone in the lunchroom every day, left to realized how few friends I had always had.

Guys who had never before noticed me now began to drift in my direction, sitting at the opposite end of the lunch table. Lose a few pounds and all of a sudden you are visible to people who had never really seen you. How incredibly shallow! Inside I was exactly the same person I had always been, but it seemed people, especially guys, were interested in outsides. I just ignored them and their hedging attempts to talk to me. They probably thought I was stuck-up, but I didn't care what they thought. Oddly they more I ignored them, the more they tried to talk to me, which annoyed me in a much more annoying way than Coralee had ever been, and that made me miss her even more.

By Christmas vacation, I was down to 109 pounds. The clothes I had worn were all now baggy. My waist was so slim I could see the abdominal muscles I never knew I had. My wrists and ankles seemed too bony, and veins looked like tiny blue worms under the skin of my hands and feet. To me it was pretty gross, but everybody seemed to like the way I looked now-- as though before there had been something wrong with me, and nobody had had the heart to mention it.

On Christmas Eve, my aunt and uncle visited my house, as they always did. For them it was a short walk down the street. They brought gifts, but they also brought Coralee. I had no doubt she had made a fuss about even being in the same house with me. It appeared as though she would rather be anywhere else on earth, maybe even in the simmering cone of some active volcano.

After all the food was eaten and the gifts opened, I found myself sitting alone in the living room. The Christmas tree was lit up, with some strings of lights pulsing. The television was showing some sappy old Christmas movie, but thankfully somebody had turned off the sound.

Then Coralee wandered in from the kitchen, where the adults sat drinking coffee and exchanging family gossip.

She flopped down at the opposite end of the sofa. She didn't say anything. She just sat there, pretending to be interested in the movie, which she couldn't even hear.

Finally she said, "Hey."

"Hey," I said.

"You still mad at me?" she asked.

I looked over at her. "I never was mad at you. You were mad at me."

"No, I wasn't."

"Were so," I said.

And we ended up almost getting into an argument over who had been mad at whom. We stopped and looked at each other, and then broke out laughing. It was so ridiculous.

After our laughter died down, Coralee sat close to me.

"Girl, you're looking good," she said.

"I never started it to look good," I said. "I just wanted to feel better."

"Whatever, you still look great. I always thought you just had a fat face, but you actually have high cheek bones."

"Yeah," I said. "Who knew?"

After a thoughtful pause, she muttered, "I hate you, bitch," and gave me a playful shove, and we cracked up all over again.

"But, seriously," Coralee said, then, "I don't think you should push it too far."

"Oh, I'm not," I said.

"Because-- now don't get me wrong; i think you're smoking'-- but you look a bit pale."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but just a bit."

"I'm not even down to my ideal weight," I pointed out.

"Ideal weight? Listen to you," she said, and sighed. "I shouldn't have pushed you into all of it. I think I ruined you somehow. Ideal weight. You wouldn't have ever said anything like that before."

"It's all right," I told her. "It feels great. That's all I ever wanted."

"You were happier before I opened my big mouth."

"I'm still happy."

"Are you? You seemed pretty miserable."

"Only because you weren't talking to me," I said.

"Really?"

"Sure."

"And that was the only reason."

"Yeah, why else?"

She seemed satisfied, but still wouldn't explain why she had got all snarky on me to begin with. "You should just eat regular now, the way you did before, you know? Even if you gain back a couple pounds."

"I always planned on doing that," I said.

"You sure?-- you sure you're not, like, obsessing."

"Yeah," I said, and to prove it, I made her follow me into the dining room, where the two of us pigged out on leftover cake and homemade Christmas cookies.

All in all, it was the best Christmas I had ever had, despite the fact that the cake and cookies didn't sit right on my stomach and later I had to go to the bathroom to throw up-- yeah, other than that it would have been so perfect.

************

Some things take on a life of their own. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's bad. Whatever the case, you have no control over what is happening, and that can get pretty scary.

By the time I returned to school, I had been on my old diet for over a week. It didn't seem, though, that I was gaining back any weight. At first I thought this was a good thing, but then one day, after gym, I weighed myself on the scale in the locker room. I was astonished to discover I'd lost another two pounds! How was that even possible? I'd eaten like this before and never lost an ounce.

Coralee suggested that maybe the scale was wrong, but I didn't think so.

"I actually feel it," I said.

She scoffed at me "How can you feel it? That's impossible. It's only two pounds."

"Two pounds on top of thirty-three pounds," I said.

But she just shook her head. "No way. Everything will go back to normal. Just keep eating like that," she said, nodding at my lunch tray; I had two chili dogs, French fries, a piece of chocolate cake, and a non-diet soda.

"I've been eating like this," I said. "Shouldn't it be making a difference already?"

She shrugged. "Maybe your metabolism is all jacked up into high gear. Maybe you should cut back on the running."

"I already did that. I was up to three miles a day. Now I'm down to one. I don't want to stop completely, because I sort of like it."

"Like running? You're sick, you know that," she said. "Well, I wouldn't worry about it. It's just gonna take some time to get back to nor--" she stopped, as though struck by a troubling thought. "All the food you're eating-- it is staying down, right?"

"Well..."

"Lisa!"

"Well, most of it," I said.

She groaned.

"I've been eating nothing but vegetables and fruit.... My stomach just doesn't seem used to junk anymore."

"So you're not... doing it on purpose."

"No," I said. "That's gross. Why would I do that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Some people do, you know."

"Well, not me. It's doing it all on its own. My stomach's just a little messed up-- it's getting better."

"Promise?"

"Sure."

"Then I'm sure it'll be all right," she said, but didn't sound too sure.

************

According to the ideal weight calculator I used, my ideal weight was 103.5 pounds.

When I finally hit that weight, I decided that the calculator had to be wrong. If it was right, my ideal physical condition was freakishly thin.

My cheeks seemed a bit to hollow, and on some days I woke with dark circles under my eyes. Worse than how I looked, I started to feel bad. I felt drained all the time, and so I had to give up running.

The last few lost pounds changed a lot of things. Guys who had been hovering around, looking for an opening to talk to me, slowly shied away. Everybody gave me odd looks now. At home my parents grew fretful. I probably didn't even look like their child, but rather some kid they had had pity on and adopted. They insisted I see a doctor, but after he examined me and reviewed my blood tests, he claimed that I was in excellent condition.

Which was hard for me to believe. I didn't feel in excellent condition; most of the time I felt like a wrung-out wash rag. I couldn't stop thinking about how Coralee said doctors only practice medicine.

Coralee stopped talking about my weight or vitamins or anything like that. I wasn't sure whether that was because she felt guilty or because her interest was already waning, giving way to another interest. She was talking an awful lot about needlepoint.

One weekend she rented some movies, and brought them over to my house, so that we could watch them on the big-screen television that was in the basement of our house. She ordered pizza, too, and paid for everything, which told me she was feeling some guilt, because she was extremely cheap and almost never parted with any of her baby-sitting money.

We pigged out on deep-dish pizza, and watched movies. It was a good time, and for a while, I forgot about how I was slowly fading away.

Then she put on the last movie, which was called Thinner, which was based on a Stephen King book. It was about a fat guy who gets cursed by a gypsy and keeps losing weight until he looks like a skeleton.

When I realized what the movie was about, I was horrified.

"Coralee! How could you?" I thought it was a cruel joke.

"Honestly, I didn't know," she said, and went on the claim she had believed the movie was about a dog.

"A dog?"

"I thought that was the name of the dog."

"Thinner? Who would name their dog Thinner?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "People name their dogs all kinds of weird things."

"Don't you read the boxes when you rent a movie?"

"Sure...sometimes."

"Just turn it off-- turn it off," I said. I had my eyes half-covered with my hand; I couldn't bear to look at the screen. I certainly didn't want to know how the movie ends.

After she turned off the big screen, we sat on the floor and finished the pizza. It was could and lay on my stomach like a brick.

When Coralee spoke again, she asked if I wanted to turn on the stereo. I could tell that she felt pretty bad about the movie. You knew? Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe out there somewhere somebody would name their dog Thinner.

"No," I said about the stereo. I didn't run the risk of hearing some song about bulimia. That just would have been too much.

So we sat in silence and ate.

Our basement was always chilly during the winter, but I still felt warm. I was wearing just an old tee shirt and a pair of cut-off jeans. My legs looked like sticks, and my knees look like large knobs in the branch of an old tree. Beneath my skin you could see the roadmap of blue veins that ran everywhere.

When she thought I didn't notice, Coralee sneaked looks at me. I caught the pained expression on her face.

I wanted to make her feel better. None of it was her fault; there was no way she could have known what kind of reaction I'd have to a simple change of eating habits. Suddenly my stomach started to churn and make a gurgly sound, and I knew what was about to happen-- something I noticed a couple weeks before, something that I thought would cheer her up.

"Hey," I said. "You want to see something trippy?"

"What?"

"Watch this." I lifted my shirt so that she could see my stomach. She winced, and I told her, "No, just keep watching." And then it happened.

A small ripple ran under my skin from one side of my upper stomach to the other.

I thought it was hilarious, but Coralee's eyes bugged out in horror.

"What-- what was that?" she stammered.

"I'm not sure," I said "I think it's the pizza getting digested. Pretty weird, huh?"

"Girl, you need to see a doctor," she said.

"I did. He said I was perfect now."

"Well, he never saw that, that's for sure. No way is that normal."

"It's funny, though, isn't it?" I said.

"No, it's not funny. Nothing about it is funny," she cried. She jumped to her feet and began pacing the way she always did whenever she was upset. "I should have kept my big mouth shut. I can't believe I did this to you--"

"You? You didn't do anything--" I tried to tell her, but she wasn't listening.

"Stupid-- stupid-- stupid--" she hissed, and with each word she cuffed herself in the side of her head so hard that I was afraid she might actually knock herself out.

I tried to stop her, but couldn't. Everything must have built up inside her over the weeks, and now she just had to get it all out. Finally she flopped down to the floor like a rag doll, and sat their softly crying and sniffling.

I knelt down next to her.

"Coralee, it's all right," I said.

"Don't say that," she said gravely, too gravely for the situation as I saw it.

"Don't say what?" I asked.

"Don't say it's all right," she said, and sniffled as though she needed to blow her nose. "That's an awful thing to say."

"It's all right?"

"There, you did it again. I swear," she said, and balled her hand into a fist, "if you say it again, I'll punch you right in the head." And she looked about ready to do it, too.

"I don't understand what the problem is," I said, and really didn't.

"It's it obvious?" she asked.

"No."

"You're dying," she said, "and it's all because of me-- me and my big mouth."

"Dying?" That was ridiculous. Of course, I wasn't dying. "Coralee, I'm not dying. What would put that in your head?"

She stopped sniffling. "I know what you're doing," she said. "And don't tell me you're not."

"Not what?"

"You're making yourself sick."

"No, I'm not," I said, astounded that she would accuse me of such a thing. "I told you before-- it's just that my stomach bothers me sometimes-- that's all. Trust me. I'm not doing that, and I'm not dying."

"How much do you weigh now, anyway," she asked, and seemed to dread the answer

"I'm not sure," I lied. "I haven't weighed myself in a week."

"How much?" she asked, totally not believing me.

"It's not that bad."

"How much?"

I hedged before I told her, "A hundred even."

"A hundred!"

"But it'll be all right."

"How? How's it gonna be all right?"

"I've been watching it really close. It took a lot longer to lose the last couple pounds. My stomach is feeling better. It's about to stop."

"Sure, it has to stop," she said. "You don't have anything else to lose."

"It's been all right," I promised.

Then she said the strangest thing. "I loved you when you were fat."

"Uh, I though you said I wasn't fat."

"Oh, you were fat," she assured me. "But that was you. I don't know why I even had to mention it."

"It never had anything to do with my weight, anyway. I just wanted to feel better, and I do-- even now," I said.

"Really? You're not just saying that?"

"No, so stop worrying, because there's nothing to worry about.

~

My weight finally bottomed out at 97 pounds, before I slowly regained some of the lost pounds.

By summer I was back to 111 pounds, and it seemed as though that was where my weight would settle. I resumed running, which, even today, I still enjoy. It makes me feel good. Of course, there is always that little letdown after I run, but that only makes me look forward to the next day, when I can run again. I am up to six miles a day, and I am sure that in the fall I will have no trouble making the cross-country team.

Coralee went through three or four more hobbies. Sometimes, I lose track. By summer she was into archery. She tried to get me interested, too, but I begged off; I couldn't shake off the image of an arrow zipping straight for my forehead as she tried to shoot an apple off my head. This even caused a couple nightmares.

Her family moved away at the beginning of summer. In the fall she will be attending a different school. As annoying as she can be, I will still miss her. If nothing else, she has always been well- meaning. And she really does care, in her own demented sort of way. Sometimes I still laugh to myself at how she actually believed I was sticking my finger down my throat to make myself vomit. I mean... as if.... I still wonder where she got the idea; even I couldn't picture myself doing something like that. Oh, sure, there were a couple times I did do it. But it was never a habit. My stomach was bothering me and I was going to throw up anyway. I figured I'd just save the time, and get it over with. Also, I felt a little stupid standing and leaning over the toilet, and waiting. So, why not?

All that is behind me now, anyway. My weight is fine. My stomach is fine. I'm running six miles a day, and by the fall, I will be up to seven or eight, or maybe even ten. Who knows? All I know is that everything is fine and it's going to stay that way-- really.

For sure.

Freaky Jules

Vanished

1

It would have been a typical day at Adler High, except that Mary Jo Mason disappeared yesterday.

Cops came and went all day. All the classrooms and lockers had been searched yesterday, along with every nook and cranny of the basement that was the haunt of the school's creepy janitor. There were two squad cars parked at the front of the student parking lot at all times. It was hard to tell if they were always the same two cars. Every now and then, the school secretary came on the public address system and requested that some student or other report down at the main office.

I didn't have to worry about being summoned. Mary Jo wasn't a friend of mine—not many people were. I knew who she was; I'd seen her around. She was one of the Green clique, an annoying group of tree-huggers who constantly complained about how the school, and the school district, could be more environmentally friendly. But I had as much in common with them as I had with any of the other cliques at school. Tree-huggers, jocks, nerds, artsy-fartsy types—forget all of them; I was a clique of one, without much chance of adding on more members.

School gossip was running thick and fast today. Somebody had sneaked into the school and kidnapped Mary Jo. Or she decided to run away and marry some old dude from Greenpeace. Or Carl Brunner, the creepy school janitor, had done something awful to her.... Gossip never ends. It's a cozy constant that helps you get through the day in high school.

Whether or not I wanted it, I got the lowdown on Mary Jo from Melody Hansen, who was my best friend because she was my only friend. You could say she was my best friend by default. She was hopelessly shallow. She would talk, talk, talk, mostly about paltry things, and it was easy for me to tune her out. She was probably the perfect friend for me.

Without a doubt we were the two most unpopular girls in school. I never spoke with anybody, and if anybody tried to strike up a conversation with me, I just ignored them. I didn't want anybody to get to know me, because I was sure nobody would like me anyway. I figured it is always better to be unpopular by your own choice.

Melody was a social outcast for an entirely different reason. The mere fact that her mother was the assistant principal in charge of discipline drove a stake through the heart of possible popularity. Without even trying, she was condemned to be as popular as me, and I was only slightly more popular than vaginal warts.

"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 left 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.

I stopped in front of the occult bookstore and peered through the window. I was always a little paranoid about places I'd never gone to before. I couldn't see much; the lighting inside seemed dim. I took a chance and pushed open the front door. Chimes tinkled overhead as I walked inside. It seemed like a cozy little shop, with rows of bookshelves on one side and a line of glass counters on the other. I wasn't assailed by a hoard of spirits. The place seemed deserted of people, both the living and the dead. Then some guy wandered out from behind one of the rows of shelves. He had spiked hair, white make-up on his face, and was carrying a small silver tray on which burned a cone of incense. He wore a long black robe. He strolled past me, as though I wasn't even there, turned round at the front of the store and then started toward the back, leaving in his wake a strong smell of jasmine. I figured the guy must work here, but I couldn't figure what his job might be—maybe he was in charge of ambiance or something.

While I stared after the guy, a woman appeared behind the glass counters. She was middle-aged, and wore a lot of wooden beads around her neck and a long colorful dress. Huge gaudy hoop earrings dangled from her earlobes. She looked at me placidly but said nothing. During the silence I allowed myself to read her, which involved releasing that thing inside me that I fought so hard to control. Two or three seconds of freaky insight told me that the woman owned the store, that she was a total fake that didn't believe in any of the books of other items she sold, that she thought people were stupid for spending so much money on such utter garbage, that she had a pet boxer named Howard and a urinary tract infection for which she had a doctor's appointment tomorrow... . I blinked my eyes, and reeled in the freak senses; they always seemed to enter the realms of TMI (too much info), like did I really need to know about her urinary tract?

"Can I help you find anything?" she asked, pleasantly enough but she harbored nothing but disgust at the sight of me. Young punk. Street trash. Baggy clothes. Probably a shop-lifter... She would be of absolutely not help to me.

"No...no," I muttered, looking around, scanning the inside of store. I spotted a guy that was rearranging the books near the back of the store. He was tall and slim, and had a weird pale purplish light around him that I recognized. "No, thanks, but he can," I said, pointing at the guy.

The woman looked stunned, as though I'd just insulted her.

I turned away from her and headed toward the back of the store. I came up behind the guy who was straightening the books on the shelves against the rear wall.

"Hey, I need some help," I said, stepping up behind him.

He turned around. His face was thin but not unpleasant. His light brown hair was messy but in a good way. He gave me a look, a look that asked, What now?

"Just ask Helen at the desk," he droned, looking back at the books he was shifting around. "She knows everything about everything in the store."

"No, I think I need to ask you," I said.

He looked back at me. Maybe he saw me for the first time. Interest registered in his pale blue eyes.

"Hey, you go to Adler, don't you?" he asked, finally giving me more attention than the books.

"Yeah," I said. I didn't recognize him, which didn't surprise me; I spent most of my time at school trying to ignore just about everybody.

"I thought I knew you," he said. "What are you looking for?"

"I need a book on some weird stuff," I said.

He looked at the books that lined the shelves around us. "You think you can be a tad more specific?"

"I need something on reality."

"I'll save you some money. Reality sucks," he said, and seemed pleased with the joke.

"I mean parallel realities."

He sighed. "I see," he said. "Follow me."

He led me down one of the rows of shelves, and stopped at a section.

"You might want to check in through here," he said, pointing to a certain shelf.

Before I could examine any of the books, I caught a drift from him: he totally thought I was just another crackpot customer. I found that deeply offensive. I was, after all, the real deal, not just some wannabe. This ought to be one of the few places on earth where being me was a good thing.

"I am so not," I said.

"So not what?" he asked, staring at me, uneasy.

"I've never been in a place like this."

"What?"

"Oh, never mind," I said. I turned my attention to the books. "So which one is the best."

He gave me a strange look, but said, "Well, honestly, they're all pretty much crap." He reached up and pulled down a thick leather-bound volume and handed it to me. "This is the only one that's pretty much real, and that depends on what you believe is real."

I looked the book, which had no title. Then I glanced at him. He seemed absorbed in my interest. I could still see that pale purple glow around him; I'd seen that unusual shade of aura in people who were open, who were at least a little like me. I figured he had seen a few things, spiritual flashes or whatever, which he didn't quite understand. He knew that there is more going on in the world than everybody thinks, but he didn't know exactly what. He was curious about freaky things. This was why he had taken a job here, rather than at a local Kmart. He believed this place would satisfy his curiosity, but he was wrong. His name was Jack Kilgore....Actually, I was catching a good vibe from him. It was unusual; most of the impressions I got from people, especially guys, convinced me that you couldn't trust anybody—ever—with anything.

"If you don't mind my asking," he said now, "why do you need to know this?"

"I just do," I said, and then, against my paranoid nature, I added, "I need to figure out how to retrieve somebody who slipped into a parallel reality."

He frowned. "You're not in Mr. Hammerstone's physics class, are you?"

"No, why?"

"I heard he strays into metaphysics, sometimes."

"Nothing like that," I said. "And, by the way, Mr. Hammerstone strays into a lot of liquor stores."

Just then I became aware of an old man, withered and pale, his white hair wild. He was using a walker, edging down the aisle, nearing us. That he was wearing slippers and a hospital gown was a tip off he was no longer with us.

Looking at the old guy, I had one of my distracted moments. When I looked back at Jack, he was eyeing me curiously. He glanced over to where I could see the old man, but obviously he saw nothing.

"You okay?" Jack asked.

I shrugged. "A.D.D.," I lied.

The old man now stood near us. He stared at Jack and wagged his head. Sometimes, the boy's as dumb as a brick, he said to me. But he's got a good heart....

I blinked my eyes, and the old man was gone. Jack stood there looking at me, clearly concerned.

"You're sure you're okay?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. "So, how much is this thing?"

Jack took the book from me, and looked at the inside of the back cover. "Eighty-nine ninety-five."

I nearly choked. "Dude, I got, like, about thirty bucks."

He shrugged. "That's Helen. She does all the pricing—she thinks everything's worth ninety bucks. Hey, look, I'll tell you what," he said, lowering his voice. "Before I leave today, I'll sneak it into the back room and make copies of the important parts."

"Yeah?" I said. I couldn't help being suspicious; I knew how sneaky people could be—nobody does something for nothing. But I didn't pick anything that suggested Jack had an ulterior motive. He was just trying to be helpful. Maybe the old man had been right....He's got a good heart. "Okay, thanks," I said.

"I'll bring the copies to school tomorrow. Where do you sit during lunch?"

"Just about any table near an exit," I said.

That seemed to amuse him. "Okay, I'll find you."

I thanked him again, and left the store, passing the creepy guy wearing a black robe and carrying burning incense.

I headed back toward my car, but didn't make it half a block down the street before Jack came running up behind me.

What now? I wondered.

"Hey," he said, a little winded.

"What?"

"I had to ask you something," he said, falling into step next to me.

"You couldn't wait until tomorrow?"

"They'll be a lot of people around," he said.

"Oh." I understood that; crowds of people were always a bummer.

"Can I buy you some coffee?" he asked.

"That was what you wanted to ask? It hardly seems that important."

"Uh, no, no," he stammered. He took a deep breath. "What I meant was, there's a coffee shop up ahead. Can I buy you a cup of coffee, so that I can ask you something—you know, while you're drinking coffee."

"I can't have coffee," I said. "The caffeine doesn't agree with me." Actually, caffeine, or any type of stimulate, caused me to experience an onrush of psychic images. Two or three sips and I started seeing all kinds of weird things.

"Oh," he said, disappointed, and didn't know what to say next. I almost felt sorry for him. I didn't have to be a freak to see he liked me. Up until this moment that had been aside from the point—all I needed, or wanted, was some information on parallel realities. Now that his attraction to me grabbed my attention, my first thought was that he had terrible taste in girls. Really, I was no prize. I didn't even weigh a hundred pounds. My bones stuck out everywhere. My clothes, though they were the right size, always looked baggy hanging on my body. I was pale, as though I had some awful disease, and always had little pouches under my eyes. If how I looked wasn't bad enough, I had the personality of a cactus.

"Look—" I started, intending to tell him I wasn't his type—I wasn't anybody's type.

He blurted out, "You have it, don't you?"

I was surprised, which seldom happened. I thought he was about to ask me on a date or something.

"Have what?" I asked.

"Oh, you know," he said.

"What? Do I have—a song in my heart? No, I haven't had one of those yet. I don't expect to, either."

"You know what I'm talking about," he insisted.

"A viral infection of some kind?"

"Come on."

"A plan to stop world hunger?"

"Stop."

"Really, I don't understand the question."

"You see things."

"I see a lot of things," I said. I pointed around as we walked down the sidewalk. "I see cars. I see the sky. I see a poodle taking on poop. I see the owner of the poodle not picking up the poop."

He looked down at the sidewalk. He didn't say anything, just walked next to me for a while.

I started to feel bad. I couldn't understand why. Maybe it was because he was a decent guy. Maybe because it seemed so important for him to know. I was sure he had some personal reason to know. It would be easy enough to find out what. All I had to do was unleash the freak probe and see what was going through his mind. But I didn't want to do that; it was like peeping through somebody's bedroom window: you never know what you're going to see, but it always ends up being something personal.

"Why is it so important for you to know?" I asked.

He shrugged, and looked moody.

"Just stupid, I guess," he mumbled.

We walked along slowly now, as if one, or both, of us wanted the walk to last as long as possible.

Finally, I confessed, "All right. I see things." Although I knew it was bad for me to confess this to somebody, especially a complete stranger, I felt some relief to put it in words.

"I thought you did," he said, pumping his fist, way too joyous. "I do, too, sometimes—not a lot, just enough to know something is there."

"Trust me. You don't want to see more than that," I said.

"I would like to know if my grandfather is all right. I think he is, but I'm not sure."

"Your grandfather?"

"He died a couple years ago."

"Was he about five-foot-seven, thin, crazy white hair, probably died in a hospital?"

Jack's eyes grew wider and wider.

"Yeah," he said, clearly in awe.

"He's all right," I assured him.

"You saw him?"

"Just now—back in the store."

"That's what you saw? I thought you might be seeing something."

"He walked up to us, said something, and then just vanished," I said. "But he seemed all right—as all right as somebody can be when they're dead."

"What did he say?"

I couldn't help laughing. "He said you're dumb as a brick but you have a good heart."

"That sounds like Gramps," he said, bobbing his head. He was satisfied, probably relieved. "So, aside from seeing and hearing dead people, what else can you do?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"I supposed," he said. "Listen—"

"No," I said.

"No?"

"I'm not the dating kind, so no, I won't go somewhere with you sometime."

"You read my mind," he said, more amazed that I did that then dejected that I turned him down.

"I did," I said, "which makes dating a big problem for me. As much as I try not to hear what guys think, enough slips through to ruin the whole thing. Honestly, would you want to date somebody who could know everything that went through your head?"

He turned round and started walking backward out in front of me, so that he could see me better. "I could deal with that," he said.

I shook my head. "Trust me—you couldn't. You're a guy. You got guy things going through your head. Take now, for instance. We're having a nice little chat, right? You're attracted to me—I don't know why, but you are. And right in the middle of this nice little chat, you're wondering how I look naked."

His face turned a couple shades of red. "I see what you mean," he said, and still walking backwards, not looking where he was going, began drifting close to the curb, as we neared the cross street.

"Look, you're a nice guy, Jack. You need to date normal girls, with normal problems."

"What if that's not what I want?" he asked. "It's my choice, right?"

"No, definitely not."

"I don't want somebody normal," he brooded.

"If that's true, then you are dumb as a brick."

Then, as if to prove my point, he backed into the light post on the corner of the cross street, whacking the back of his head so hard against the steel post that there was a loud vibrating thunk. He grabbed his head, muttering something I couldn't understand, thinking something I got loud and clear.

I stood there and looked up at him as he massaged the back of his head. He leaned back up against the light post, and said simply, "Ouch." He was so pitiful, so likeable, I wanted to keep him for a pet. I decided I had to get out of there quickly, before I did something stupid, like agreeing to go out with him.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yeah, sure—"

It happened fantastically fast. Something snapped inside my head, making me act though I didn't know why I was acting. I lunged at Jack and grabbed the front of his shirt. I pulled him forward and to the side, away from the light pole. I caught a glimpse of the shocked look on his face. I heard the grinding bang of something nearby. Then we were falling to the ground, landing hard on the sidewalk. The first thing I saw when I looked up was the small faded red pick-up truck. It had been coming out of the cross street. It had already jumped the curb. And now it slammed into the light pole, just where Jack had been standing, a few feet away from where we lay on the sidewalk.

We got up slowly. Jack was gaping at the wrecked pick-up, its hood tented up, its radiator hissing steam. He turned to look at me with wide eyes.

"I—I got to go," I said, feeling a desperate need to escape, before the cops came, before people started asking questions, before anybody could realize I wasn't quite human.

I rushed past him, round the rear of the pick-up, across the cross street, toward where my car was parked.

I started running.

I heard Jack calling from behind me to wait up. I ran faster and faster.

I heard him yell, "I don't know your name."

But just then, I had no name. I am Freak, I thought.

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak

4

As soon as I got home, I went straight into the kitchen. I grabbed a glass from one of the cabinets, and then got a carton of orange juice from the fridge. I sat at the table and started chugging down the juice. I never understood why, but every time I had a major weird experience, I would get badly dehydrated. My mouth would be so dry. I would be so thirsty. I would feel weak in the knees. Sometimes I would feel dizzy until I got a couple glasses of liquid into me. The orange juice, going down, never seemed to make it to my stomach, as though it was being absorbed directly into my body.

After three glasses, I looked up and saw my mom standing in the doorway, watching me.

"Hey," I said.

She said Hey back, and then went to freezer. She took out a package of meat to thaw out for dinner. She put the meat in the microwave and set the dial, and then she sat across the table from me. She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and her long hair hung loose on her shoulders. Mom always dressed young when she was not working. She was afraid of getting old, but, really, I didn't think she had anything to worry about.

She was studying me, as I poured yet another glass of juice. I never read either of my parents, but I knew the look on her face: she wanted to ask, but she didn't want to ask. Finally she couldn't help herself.

"So what happened?"

"You don't want to know," I said.

"Yeah, you're probably right about that," she said, and let the issue drop. She was good that way; she knew that whatever I told her she could never understand, so why bother asking? She had learned that a long time ago, from my grandmother, who used to freak her out all the time. For instance, my mom would mention seeing somebody, an old acquaintance, and grandma would say Oh, I thought he died. And then a couple days later mom would hear that the person actually died. Things like that happened all the time. After a while my mom started to wonder if, maybe, my grandmother had actually caused the person to die. Really, it was impossible to tell for sure. So mom decided that the less she knew, the better off she was—and she was right.

"You feeling better?" she asked.

"A little," I said.

"You know your father is worried about you."

I didn't know what there was for him to worry about. My dad had no clue about my problems. Neither my mom nor I ever told him. How could we? He was a very well-grounded guy. Some people just don't believe in spirits and other weird things, no matter how much you try to convince them. If he knew half the things that went on in my head on any given day, he'd have me under a 72-hour psychiatric hold or worse. "Why is he worried about me?" I asked. "Tell him to worry about himself."

She shrugged. "It's just your weight."

"I have a high metabolism."

"Well..."

"I know. He's thinks I'm anorexic or bulimic or something."

"He thinks you're not getting enough protein. He thinks you need to start eating meat again."

"I can't do that," I said.

"I know, not eating meat is supposed to be healthy, but you don't really seem that healthy."

"It doesn't have anything to do with being healthy."

"Then what?"

"Do I have to explain?"

"I wish you would," she said.

"I can't eat meat, because every time I touch it, every time I try to eat it, I have these flashes."

She frowned. "Flashes? What flashes?"

"I see the animal it came from. I see how they killed it.... I just can't eat meat, all right? If Dad is worried about me not getting enough protein, tell him to get me some protein powder or something."

"I didn't know that," she said somberly. "Your grandmother never had that problem."

"Well, I'm a bigger freak that she was," I said.

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," she said.

"I'm just telling the truth."

I needed to lie down for a while. I got up and left my mom sitting there in the kitchen. If I let myself think of it, I started to feel sorry for her. It must not be easy to be the mother of a freak. She wanted to make things better, but couldn't. How could she? She couldn't control what I saw, what I knew, what I felt. Nobody could, not even me.

5

The next morning I almost didn't go to school. There was more than usual I didn't want to face. Jack would be looking for me at lunch. He would want to give me copies of information to help me retrieve Mary Jo Mason, which, honestly, I'd never wanted to do in the first place. He would ask me a million annoying questions. I'd have to fully explain yesterday's freaky event. Then, worse of all, he would probably thank me for saving his life. What an awful thing to do!—thanking me for saving his life. As though I had had any choice in the matter. Something had simply snapped in my head, and I had acted. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. As far as I was concerned, he could have ended up a crushed piece of meat pinned to the light post.

When it was time for lunch, I didn't go to the lunchroom. Melody would be looking for me, but I didn't care. I went straight outside. It was a warm early spring day. The sun was bright and the sky was a pale blue. There was plenty of fresh air to breathe. I sat on one of the wooden benches along the walkway that snaked through the campus. I had a good view of the student parking lot. There was only one cop car parked near the front now. Nobody was around, although people might start straying outside after they finished eating, to kill time before going to their next class. It all should have been peaceful, but I sensed a low hum of anxiety. It had been there, slowly growing, since Mary Jo Mason vanished. It was a generalized anxiety, not the kind of anxiety I felt in a single person sometimes. I sensed it the way you sense an annoying background noise, a tiny persistent buzz you hear sometimes on a cordless phone. People were concerned and uncertain. What exactly happened to Mary Jo? Could it happen again? I realized, then, that maybe I had no choice but than to find Mary Jo. I had hardly any tranquil moments as it was, but with her missing, and everybody all nervous, I would never have another peaceful second. The buzz would probably grow and grow, too, and maybe, finally, I would pop my cork and end up in Strait Jacket City.

Then I sensed him, Jack. What a stubborn tool! He had searched the lunchroom for me—twice. He had passed by the table I usually shared with Melody, and she—you have to be kidding me—checked out his butt as he walked away. I couldn't figure out what irked me more, that he was so intent on finding me, or that she actually sneaked a peek at his man cheeks. It was probably a tie.

Now he decided to wander outside. It wouldn't be long now. I waited with dread, counting down... thirty-seven...thirty-six... thirty-five...thirty-four...thirty-three...thirty-two... By the time I got down to one, he was sitting at the other end of the bench.

At first everything was going fine; he didn't say I word, and I didn't have to look over at him and acknowledge his presence. I looked out at the parking lot, and watched as nothing happened.

Then he said, "Hey," which I ignored; whenever anybody said "Hey" to me, or even "Hi" or "Hello," I treated it like a rhetorical question—really, I saw no reason to respond.

Then he asked, "What are you doing?" which I found extremely annoying.

"What does it look like?" I asked. "What? I always have to be doing something more than what it seems I'm doing?"

He shrugged. "Sorry," he said. "I brought those copies."

He handed me about twenty sheets of paper, and I didn't feel compelled to thank him. I scanned several of the pages.

"This all looks—theoretical," I said, more to myself than to him.

"What else is there?" he asked.

"I need something practical—you know, like practical applications."

"Practical applications in alternate realities? I doubt that you'll find anything like that."

"Well, that's what I need," I said.

"Why?"

I sighed. I felt like biting his head off, but that didn't seem enough of a punishment. Instead I considered doing something much worse: telling him the truth. Sometimes, especially with me, the truth is a horrible weapon.

"You wouldn't understand," I said.

"Try me," he said, and sounded a bit cocky.

"All right," I said. "Mary Jo Mason slipped into an alternate reality, and if I don't figure out of way of getting her back, I'm never again going to have another breakfast that isn't heinously haunted by a dead cop."

"What?" He stared at me, and I savored his confusion. "I don't understand," he finally said.

"I told you."

"Maybe if you explained it a little more," he suggested.

"No," I told him "You're curious—I get that. You like me—I don't really get that. But here's the thing: you really need to leave me alone, okay? I have never been reduced to begging somebody to leave me alone, but in your case I'll make an exception. So, please, please, go away."

He didn't give it a second's thought. "I don't think I can."

"Why?" I asked.

"I just have this feeling I'm not supposed to," he said. He was completely sincere, too; I was certain he wasn't joking or anything.

I didn't know what to say. I understood gut feelings all too well.

"Maybe I can help you," he offered.

"Help me? Help me what?"

"Find Mary Jo. Maybe that's what I'm meant to do."

"Help how?"

"I've read a lot," he said.

"Ah-hah."

"I know some spells."

"Spells? Are you kidding?" I asked.

"They might help."

"I need to find Mary Jo. I don't want to turn her into a frog."

"Maybe, it's just time for you to stop being so alone," he said.

"I don't think that's it," I sighed. "But for the time being, we'll go with that—until I can figure out a way to get you to leave me alone without having to maim or cripple you."

"That sounds fair—Julia Dundee."

I had never told him my name. He had me for a second, but only for a second.

"You looked up my yearbook picture, didn't you?"

He nodded.

"Nice try," I said.

He shrugged.

"By the way, don't call me Julia," I said. "I've never been fond of the name. I hate Julie even more—probably because that's what my parents call me. My friends call me Jules."

"Jules, then."

"We're not there yet."

"Then what should I call you?" he asked.

"Call me 'Hey you.' I don't care. We're probably not going to know each other for long anyway."

I got up and started walking away. He followed—big surprise; I figured he would linger like a bad rash.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Please, don't be shy," I said dismally.

"I've studied a lot about, you know, unusual phenomena. So far I know you can see dead people, read minds, see the future. What else can you do?"

"If you must know—and I suppose you must—sometimes, if I concentrate really hard, I can turn on and off light switches."

"That's telekinesis. Anything else?"

"If somebody asks me too many questions, they tend to burst into flames."

"That's pyrokinesis," he said, and then, finally getting it, "That was a hint, wasn't it?"

"Duh."

"Sorry, you're just so interesting."

"There is something seriously wrong with you, Jack," I said. "Just leave me alone, okay?"

I got up and walked away down the path that curved past the parking lot. He followed, of course, a step or two behind me.

I didn't know what to do with him. I was not a violent person. Other girls would have turned on their heel and clocked him in the head. I couldn't do that; it wasn't in my nature—besides, I probably only would have hurt my hand; Jack would have remained a persistent dunderhead.

"Most people can't even do one of the things you can do," he said.

I ignored him, and kept walking.

"I figure you have to be pretty rare."

I kept walking.

"I don't see why you don't think it's a good thing."

I kept walking.

"You're special," he said.

It was starting to get to me. It was as though he was rubbing my nose in how different I was from everybody else. That was supposed to be a good thing. He was so clue-less it was actually sad.

I stopped to sit on another bench, where the walkway ran near the parking lot, where landscapers had recently planted new trees to border the lawn. I put my elbows on my knees, and rested my head in my hands. I felt a sick burning in my chest. You never truly realize how much of a freak you are until somebody points it out to you. I felt like crying, but I couldn't cry—I never cried, not even when I'd been a little kid and hurt myself. Something inside me prevented me from letting go, prevented my emotions from blooming to normalcy.

"Have I ever done anything to you?" I asked, not looking up at him, the burning in my chest growing hotter and hotter. My closed eyes saw globs of faded orange that whirled around and as they whirl darkened to blood red.

"No," he said innocently.

"Then why are you tormenting me?" I asked, my voice starting to crack.

"I didn't think I was doing that."

"Just—just stop talking about me."

"But you have gifts."

"Don't call them gifts."

"That's what they are."

"Stop."

"I don't understand."

"Just stop."

"I'm just trying—"

"Stop!" I screamed, jumping to my feet.

And something invisible erupted from me, like heat shimmers over desert, erupting outward, away from me in all directions, knocking Jack to the ground, bending two of the newly-planted tree at strange angles, setting off the alarms of just about every car in the parking lot.

Jack looked dazed as he got back to his feet. Car alarms were honking and hooting and whistling.

I grabbed him by the arm, and we ran.

We didn't stop running until we reached the street that was buzzing with midday traffic. Then we walked at a fast pace down the sidewalk, away from the parking lot.

"What the hell was that?" Jack asked.

"I don't know. Nothing like that ever happened before."

I was scared. The only time I got truly scared was when I experienced some new weird experience. It's like, Well, what's that all about? Why did that happen? What next?

I ran my finger under my eye, and it came up wet. It was probably just a couple tears, not much, but more than ever before. I realized I wasn't just a freak, but that I could be a dangerous freak if I didn't control my emotions. It was frightening, more frightening still that I felt so good after I'd released just a little bit of everything that had always been pent-up inside me.

I stopped and turned on Jack.

"You can't do that," I told him. "You can't press me like that. I don't know what could happen."

"Sorry," I said.

"Stop being sorry," I snapped. "If somebody tells you to stop, then—you know—stop."

"I was just trying—"

"I know what you were trying. You think I don't know? You're trying to say I should embrace my weirdness. I should be who I am. You think I never tried that. I gave up on that when I was ten years old. I knew it would never work. How can anybody embrace what they hate? And what I hate most is what I am. You think you know me? Well, you don't."

I turned and walked away, leaving him standing there in the street. I must have given him something to think about, because he didn't run after me—not right away, anyway.

6

I was laughing so hard my side hurt. It felt strange. I wasn't used to laughing—not much in my life seemed funny.

"Let me get this straight," I said, after I caught my breath. "You think I should use my powers for the benefit of mankind. Am I getting this right?"

We were sitting at a table in a greasy-spoon diner a couple blocks off campus. I didn't know what class Jack was cutting. I was cutting English. After what had happened, how could I go to English class and listen to people reciting creepy poems by Edger Allen Poe. To me, creepy wasn't only fiction.

"I'm just saying," Jack said carefully, "that you seem to lack focus. Maybe if you could focus on some purpose..."

"Wait a second," I said gravely. I reached out one hand and waggled my fingers in the air. "I'm looking at you, and I'm getting a message. I see an M. I see an O. I see an R... O...N. I see a MORON."

I burst out laughing again, as Jack gave me a sour look.

"Oh, come on," I said. "That was funny. You got me laughing—I'll give you that much. At the moment everything is not so bad. I'm cutting class. I'm sitting in this diner." I paused to look around at the place, at the scattering of customers sitting at other tables. "There isn't a single spirit in here. Wow, the food here must be awful—even the dead people won't come in." I pulled one of the menus out from behind the condiment holder, and started scanning the meals.

"I was being serious," Jack said.

"I know. That's what makes it so funny. Hey, are you buying?"

He nodded. He looked pretty glum.

"You should, really—since you made me cry. I think that should be a law: whenever somebody makes somebody else cry, they owe that person a free lunch. The world would be a better place."

I studied the menu. It seemed all the meals had meat. Dead cow. Slaughtered chicken. Mutilated pig.

"You find anything?" Jack asked.

"Everything has meat in it," I said, and explained to him briefly why I couldn't eat meat.

When the waitress came, I ordered a cheese omelet. Jack asked for just coffee.

He looked puzzled. "I don't get something. You can't eat meat, I understand that, but you can eat eggs. Eggs are future chickens, so how can you eat eggs?"

"If I eat eggs, I get visions of fluffy little chicks. That's not so bad. I figure what the hell? Somebody's going to eat them, right?"

"I want to suggest something to you," he said.

"Go ahead," I sighed.

"I have to ask you first: are you reading my mind now? Because if you are, I'd be wasting my breath."

"No, I'm blocking you out—boy, am I blocking you out. And you'll probably be wasting your breath anyway. But go ahead. Suggest away."

"Maybe there's a reason that Mary Jo vanished," he said.

"Sure, she fell into an alternate reality."

"I mean a greater reason."

"Like?"

"You ever hear that saying: everything happens for a reason?"

"Yeah, but I never believed it. How could I? I constantly see things that make absolutely no sense. What reason could there be for that?"

"Well, what if Mary Jo vanished so that you could find her, so that you discover a practical use for your abilities."

I stared at him for a moment. "Now you're thinking there's a cosmic conspiracy to lead me to do what? Find missing persons?"

"You could do worse things in life," he said.

"Sorry, I just don't buy that," I said. "I guarantee you, if I find Mary Jo, it's going to be for purely selfish reasons. And I suppose I have to find her," I added dismally. Already that morning, Jerry had been harping that I didn't seem to be doing anything to retrieve Mary Jo.

"The girls' bathroom is still sealed off," Jack pointed out.

"I know."

"No way of getting in there during school hours. That's the bad part."

"The whole thing is the bad part," I said. "I don't want to go looking for this miserable tree-hugging bitch. By the way, what do you think is the good part?"

"Well, the cops have been going in and out of the bathroom, but none of them have disappeared."

"That's the good part?" I wondered; I loathed the police, especially detectives, anybody in an official capacity who might discover what I was. The idea of one or two cops going poof was a happy thought.

"Sure," Jack said. "If a couple cops vanished, it would be a real mess. The school would be overrun with federal authorities—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and who knows who else? It would be Men-in-Black City if it looked like something really weird was going on. We would never stand a chance to get into the bathroom and check it out ourselves."

"And there's a chance now?" I asked.

"If we do it after school hours," he said.

"You're suggesting we break into the school at night."

"Too risky," he said. "The school has an alarm with perimeter sensors. All the windows and doors are wired. But it doesn't have interior motion detectors. So the best way to do it is to get locked in the school, find some hiding place and let the school shut down around us. That way we'd have the whole building to ourselves, after Carl the janitor leaves, which is no later than ten o'clock."

I stared at him. "You just figured all this out?"

"I think fast."

"And you're serious?"

"Yeah, definitely."

"Did you figure out exactly how we're supposed to get Mary Jo back?"

"I have some ideas," he said.

"Meaning, no."

"I figured we have to play that part by ear."

After thinking it all over for a moment, I said, "This sounds like a really bad idea."

"So you want to try it?"

"Yeah, for sure," I said, concluding that a bad idea is better than no idea at all.

"Tomorrow is Friday," he said. "I figure it would be good to do it tomorrow. When they lock down the school, everybody will be in a hurry to get home. There will be less of a chance of anybody catching us hiding. I'll tell my parents I'm staying over at a friend's house. What about your parents?"

"What Dad doesn't know won't hurt him. Mom pretty much lets me do whatever I want—she understands that I can see trouble coming from a long way off."

"So we're good?"

"Sounds like a plan," I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

The waitress brought my omelet. As I ate it, I had flashes of fluffy yellow and white chicks. I tried to feel a sense of loss for them, but I couldn't feel anything.

7

"The girl's been missing for nearly three days."

"I know, I know, I know," I said.

It was Friday morning, and I was eating breakfast alone—except for Jerry, of course.

Jerry was being wretched. I hadn't thought it was possible for a ghost to be so impatient. He'd burned my toast three times, before I finally had to make it myself.

Now I tried to eat my scrambled eggs and toast, while Jerry sat across from me, complaining that I was taking too long to find Mary Jo. He sat there in his uniform, looking like he belonged on a ghastly police-recruiting poster. Join the police force. Serve and protect. Get your brains blown out by an armed felon.

"Three days is a long time to be lost in an alternate reality. No telling how much damage might be done to the girl. In the meantime, there have been three more accidents here that should never have happened. Two more car accidents—minor fender benders—and a senior citizen fell off a stepladder and broke his leg while changing a light bulb," he said.

"I'm working on it. It's not that easy, you know?"

"What's the hold up?" he demanded.

"There are cops at the school every day. The bathroom is still off limits to students. But there is a plan," I said, and told him about Jack and about what we had planned for that evening.

He thought for a long time, and then he said, "You know, technically, you'd still be breaking and entering, and trespassing. Those are some very serious charges."

"You said I needed to find her. You didn't say anything about having to find her legally."

"I'm just saying, you'd be breaking the law."

"And how could I do it without breaking the law. I mean, I figure I have to get into the bathroom. I need to check it out. If I can't even check it out, there's no way I can find her. And how can I do that legally if it's still a crime scene? You can't make an omelet without cracking a couple eggs, you know."

He shrugged a thick shoulder. "I guess you're right. I just don't like the idea of you breaking the law."

"Think of it as the lesser of two evils. Maybe that will help."

"It doesn't. I feel that I am turning you into a juvenile delinquent."

"Jerry, please, just—just stop talking about it, okay?" I said. "You keep talking, and I'll forget the whole thing, I swear. I didn't want to do it from the beginning, anyway."

"All right," he said glumly.

He still sat there, but kept his mouth shut. I was able to eat in relative peace for a few minutes.

"So what about this guy? Jack—is that his name?" he asked.

"Jack Kilgore, yeah."

"You like him?"

"No, not at all," I said.

"But you told him about yourself, about what you can do."

"Everybody has a weak moment now and then."

"And you're letting him help you with finding Mary Jo."

"Jack is an idiot," I said. "He actually wants to help me. If he wants to be stupid, who am I to stop him?"

"And that's all?"

"Yeah."

"I don't believe you," he said.

"Can't you talk about the weather or something?" I asked.

"You have to like somebody."

"Who says?"

"Life must be so lonely for you."

"Lonely? What are you, kidding? I have annoying ghosts pestering me all the time."

He gave me a sad look, and shook his head. He stood up and drifted into the next room, finally leaving me to finish my breakfast in peace.

8

I got to school early, and sat in my car parked in the student lot. It was a gray day. The school looked like a castle beneath the sky of heavy dark clouds. The zero-period crowd was arriving by ones and twos, straying into the building. I could never understand why anybody would sign up for pre- and post-class activities. Weren't regular classes enough? Does the world real need over-achievers? People whose sole purpose in life seems to be to remind the rest of us that we are total losers? I would have been content to stay in bed under my blankets. I could have done that every day, but especially today.

It wasn't long before Jack arrived and was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. He was the first living being to ever get into the car with me. My parents wouldn't even ride with me; my driving was so bad because I was constantly distracted by some weird thing or other.

Jack started going over his master plan with me again. He'd brought a gym bag that contained a large flashlight, a hundred feet of rope, and a notebook filled with hand-written spells.

"I have to tell you," I said. "I've been thinking things over, and I'm pretty sure this is the stupidest plan anybody ever dreamed up."

Jack was irked. "So you don't want to go through with it?"

"I'm not sure."

"But I brought rope and everything," he whined.

"That's what I mean. Why do we need rope? So if the plan doesn't work, you can go and hang yourself?"

"Rope is a good idea," he said. "Rope always comes in handy."

"So does duct tape. You bring that with, too?"

"I can't believe you're telling me this now," he said, clearly disappointed. He was so dull he'd probably been looking forward to the whole event. He believed it would be fun. "Well, what do you want to do?"

"I was thinking that maybe I could slip into the bathroom between classes."

But he was already shaking his head.

"Too risky. Too many people around. If you get caught trying to get in during the day, that's it. We won't get another chance. Right now, they don't suspect there might be a reason for anybody to want to get into the bathroom. But if they ever thought there might be some reason, they'd probably leave somebody to guard the room at night."

"So this incredibly lame plan is all we have?"

"It's not that lame," he said. "It'll get us into the bathroom without anybody else around. Now, have you figured out a hiding place?"

I looked down at myself, and snorted. "Are you kidding? I can hide just about anywhere. I could probably stand in the middle of the hallway and turn sideways, and nobody would notice me."

He gave me a sour look. Obviously he didn't think I was taking this seriously—and in many ways I wasn't.

"All right," I sighed. "I was thinking the girls' locker room. There are about a million places to hide there. The lockers are too small, but there's a closet and air shafts, and other nooks and crannies."

"Good, that wouldn't be too far from my hiding place."

"Which is?"

"Under the bleachers in the main gym," he said.

"Uh, don't they roll those in at night?" I asked. They were the type of bleachers that collapse toward the wall when you press a button.

"No, the only time they do that is after a basketball game, so that they can clean the floor better."

"You're sure about that?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. I'm not going to climb under the bleachers if there's a chance of me getting crushed."

I thought about that for a second. "Maybe I just ought to hide under the bleachers with you," I suggested.

"No, it's better if we separate. If one of us gets caught, then the other can still get into the bathroom."

"Yeah, I suppose," I said, but still wondered. What if I was the one to get caught? Exactly what would Jack do once he got into the girls' room? I didn't even know what I'd do.

"Look, it's almost over," he said. "After tonight, no matter what happens, it's over. You find Mary Jo, or you try and can't find her. In either case, you're off the hook, right?"

It seemed right to agree with him. Still I had a nagging feeling this wasn't going to be so simple. I couldn't envision anything bad happening tonight. But my foresight wasn't always perfectly clear. Sometimes, the future was so clear it seemed like the past. At other times, the future was a vast muddle of possibilities. Right now all I was getting was muddle, and a bad feeling.

9

Later that day, after lunch and before English, I wandered up to the second floor so that I could pass the sealed girls' room. I was not a curious person by nature. How could I be? I already saw and knew way more than I ever wanted to know. But, now, briefly, curiosity caught hold of me.

I slowed as I approached the girls' room. Three strips of bright yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the doorjamb. The solid wooden door itself wasn't locked, because none of the bathroom doors in school had a lock. I had always supposed this was for safety reasons, so that nobody would accidentally get locked in the bathroom.

It would be an easy matter to get inside. Just turn the door handle, push the door inward, and then slip between the lower and middle strips of crime-scene tape, much as a wrestler steps through the ropes to enter a ring.

As I inched down the hallway, looking at the door out of the corner of my eye, I tried to probe the bathroom with my freak senses. I did this kind of thing all the time—especially when one or another of my classes was getting particularly boring and I wanted to see what was happening in the next classroom over. Now, I was stunned to discover that I couldn't read the interior of the girls' room. It was strange. At first I thought there was something wrong with me. I'd been doing this since I was six-years-old, and I had never, not even once, had a problem. But the inside of the girls' room remained as much a mystery to me as to any of the other kids walking down the hallway. In a very small way, I, for once, didn't feel like such a freak. I stopped in front of the door, and eyed it in wonder. My mind could see just behind the door— the pale tiles of small entrance hall, the doorway to the left leading into the bathroom—but that was all. I concentrated harder—which I never had to do—trying to see inside the bathroom itself, but it was as though somehow my senses were being prevented from seeing any further. Something was there, like a shield, and my mind probed it, like the fingers of a blind man, trying to feel its shape, its texture, its temperature. The harder I tried to probe it, the denser the shield became, and colder, finally becoming cold enough to give me a case of brain freeze, as though I had just gulped down a slushie on a hot summer day. And just as I had to reel in my senses, I heard the sound, a low rumbling noise that reminded me of the challenging growl of some wild animal.

Okay, that's new, I thought, and continued quickly down the hallway.

The idea that there might be some living thing in the bathroom freaked me out but also fascinated me. What exactly could it be? Jerry had said that some entity had slipped into our reality, but it didn't seem logical that the entity, once here, would choose to loiter in a bathroom. Jack, on the other hand, had not mentioned any entities; in his clue-less way, he talked of an aperture between realities, and seemed to believe rescuing Mary Jo was akin to rescuing somebody who had fallen down an old well. Now I was certain that both of them were wrong.

I wanted to find Jack, and fill him in on this new development. Maybe he would change his mind about proceeding with the plan. But, really, I barely knew the guy; I didn't know his class schedule, or where he might be found at the moment. So it would have to wait until the next time I would see him, tonight in the darkened interior of the school.

10

I wasn't afraid of the unknown. So the idea of entering a dark bathroom in which there might be some dangerous otherworldly creature didn't trouble me. I figured what was the worst that could happen? Some monster could kill me, but so what? I knew that only my body could be killed, while my spirit, the thing that was really me, would continue to live. The worse that could happen would be that I end up a spirit and have the chance to haunt somebody else the way spirits had haunted me since I was born.

After my last class, I stopped at my locker and dumped off my books. Usually I was fast to leave school, but today I lingered, waiting for the other kids to go home. It was maddening. I wasn't used to killing time, and a lot of kids didn't seem to want to leave. They loitered in the hallways, standing in twos or threes, talking as though they had all the time in the world. When they headed toward the exits, they moved slower than snails. I stood in front of my opened locker, pretending to straighten the things inside, until finally there were just a couple stragglers in the hallway.

I slammed shut my locker, and headed toward the gym.

I looked through the window of one of the gym doors. Inside half the overhead lights were off, and the basketball court lay silent in the dimness.

I pushed open the door and walked inside. The coaches' office was dark and seemed locked for the weekend. The soles of my shoes squeaked softly as I slowly made my way toward the locker rooms. I figured if anybody caught me now, I'd tell them I needed to check in the locker room, that I'd lost a ring or something. I could be a very convincing liar. Lying is easy if you know what is going through peoples' minds. You know what mood they are in. You know pretty much what they are willing to believe. But, now, lies were not needed; there was nobody around. All the coaches and gym teachers had fled the school for the weekend, as Jack had guessed.

I glanced at the bleachers. I didn't wonder if he was already hidden beneath them; I sensed he wasn't here yet. Probably he was somewhere in the school, still killing time.

I entered the locker room. The lights had been turned off, but still there was enough light so that I could see without bumping into lockers or tripping over benches. I wandered around, looking for a hiding place. I had thought I might be able to hide atop one of the sections of lockers, but now I saw that the lockers were not high enough; I would have been easily spotted up there. I found the mop closet locked. And all the vent covers were screwed tightly in place. I felt like an idiot. Here I was, a freak that could see into the future, and yet I had not thought to bring a screwdriver.

I sat on one of the benches that were bolted to the floor between the rows of lockers. I waited, but nobody wandered into the room. After a while, I figured I was safe where I was—I didn't have to squeeze into some tight place to hide. I relaxed, stretching out on the bench, my hands crossed on my stomach. I shut my eyes and listened. The only thing I could hear was the distant dripping of a single faucet in the shower room. Soon I fell asleep, so much more easily than I did when I was at home and lying in a soft warm bed.

When I awoke, the room was almost completely dark. I panicked. I wasn't sure how long I had sleep—maybe too long.

I jumped off the bench, and, feeling along the lockers and walls, I made my way back to the gym.

The lights were all off, and the gym was lost in darkness. I walked carefully along the length of the basketball court. When I reached the end of the bleachers, I peered under them, but I couldn't see Jack—everything under the bleachers was inky dark. I made a couple pssst sounds, just in case he, too, had fallen asleep. But I got no response. It didn't make sense. He must be under there. I wasn't sure of the exact time, but it should have been more than enough for him to get to his hiding place.

Unless something went wrong.

"Jack," I called out, keeping my voice low.

But there was no answer. Great, I thought, sure that he wasn't there. I should have been relieved, but instead I resented the hell out of him. He'd talked me into this harebrained scheme and for one reason or another he bailed out on me. That should have been a good thing, except, alone or not, I didn't want to be doing this anyway. What was I? The guardian of all tree-hugging bitches?

I stooped over and started to duck-walk under the bleachers. I made it halfway down the length of the bleachers, but never stumbled across any sleeping idiot. I found a spot where I could sit, resting my back against the wall, and wonder what to do. I had no watch, so I wasn't exactly sure of the time. It was late, but how late? Had everybody left the building? Was Carl the janitor still lurking around?

While I was trying to figure things out, I heard the gym door open and shut. The lights didn't go on, and a moment later, I heard stirring under the bleachers as Jack crawled toward me. He stopped about four or five feet away and then seemed to settle down to wait, completely unaware that I was nearby.

At first I sat there quietly, listening to his excited breathing and the rustling noise his gym bag made as he shifted it around. Who is this dude? I wondered, for about the thousandth time in the past two days. I avoided reading him, so he remained something of a mystery to me. Was he just some guy obsessed with the paranormal? Did he really have the hots for me? Or was it some combination of both? I wasn't sure I really wanted to know. In any case, he would lead to problems and/or disappointments.

Finally I said, "You're late."

Though I didn't speak loudly, he issued a startled yelp—a rather girlie-sounding startled yelp— and there was sudden movement followed by the loud thunk of skull hitting thick bleacher wood.

He seemed to settle back down again, uttering a low "Ouch." He was probably holding his head in the dark. For a second I genuinely felt sorry for him.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Why am I hitting my head whenever you're around?" he asked.

"You should take a hint—associating with me will only lead to pain."

"No, seriously, lie to me."

"Oh, in that case, it's probably because of my scintillating personality and the allure of my curve-less body."

He chuckled in a pained way.

"I thought you'd be in the locker room," he said.

"Yeah, that didn't work for me. What time is it, anyway?"

"A little before ten," he said.

"Where were you?"

"Drama club rehearsal ran a little long."

I rolled my eyes. "Drama club? Figures."

"What? You have something against drama?"

"Just about everything," I said. "Listen, can we do this thing, and then get out of here?"

"Not yet," he said. "Carl is still in the building. I saw him in the auditorium before I sneaked over here."

"Well, how long is he going stay?"

"I figure another half hour or so."

I sighed. "I feel like an idiot, sitting here."

"Hey, I'm sitting here, too."

"But it must be normal for you to feel like an idiot," I said, and instantly regretted it. "Sorry," I muttered.

We sat in the darkness, under the bleachers in the gym of a closed school. It was a stupid place to find myself. But it was sort of peaceful. Nobody was around, except for Jack, and, really, it was as though he wasn't even there, because he was keeping quiet and I was blocking out his thoughts.

I folded my arms in front of me, and shut my eyes. With any luck, I would doze off and the waiting wouldn't seem so long.

I heard Jack stir as he shifted his gym bag on the floor. He settled down right next to me, his shoulder bumping mine.

"Hey, don't touch me, seriously," I warned him.

"It was an accident."

"Then be careful. It's not a good thing to touch me."

"Why?"

"Because," I said, trying to be patient, "physical contact with anybody causes me to see things about them."

"I don't mind," he said dully.

"I know you don't mind. You ever think that maybe I do mind?" I thought I sounded a bit harsh, so I lightened my tone and said, "Look, touching is bad for me. I can block out people to a certain extent. Actually, I'm getting quite good at that— I have a fair degree of control. But if I have physical contact with another person, I have no control at all. I'm, like, forced to see things about them. Sometimes, it actually hurts."

"Hurts? You mean you feel pain?"

"Not physical pain. That wouldn't be so bad—that I could handle."

"So you can never touch anybody?" he asked, and I thought he finally might be realizing that having paranormal abilities wasn't such a great thing.

"No, never," I said.

"That doesn't seem fair."

"I'm used to the idea. I've known for some time that I'll never get married or have kids or any of the things other people take for granted."

"No kids? You serious?"

"Yeah, totally. I'm horrified at what happens if somebody brushes against me in a store. Sex?—my head would probably explode. So, no, no kids in my future."

Jack was quiet for a while, probably trying to process what I had told him.

"Well..." he said. "Exactly what happens?"

To me, this was a highly personal question. I should have been offended, but, really, this was just Jack, right? It seemed all right for him to ask, and for me to answer. "Nothing good," I said. "I pick up on peoples' memories mostly, their most intense memories, which are usually traumatic. I feel extreme grief or sorrow or fear. One time I was walking down the street and I bumped into this woman. She wasn't watching where she was going. Just that one brief contact... The woman's four-year-old son got hit by a car and killed a week earlier. I couldn't stop feeling the agony she felt. It wouldn't go away. I didn't know how to stop it. I almost..."

"Almost what?"

"Never mind," I said. "Just be careful not to touch me."

"What if somebody didn't have terrible memories?" Jack asked.

"Everybody has terrible memories."

"I don't."

"Believe me, you do—buried somewhere. What time is it, by the way?"

There was a flash of green light as he checked his wristwatch.

"Ten-fifteen."

"That's all."

"Yeah," he said, and was quiet for a long moment, before asking, "I was wondering..."

"Go ahead," I said. I wasn't reading his mind, and yet I knew what he was about to say. You couldn't explain something to him: you had to show him.

"What?"

"Take my hand," I said impatiently, "before I change my mind."

I held my hand out toward him, and he groped around in the dark until he found it.

"Are your hands always this cold?" he asked.

"I'm like walking death. Haven't you noticed? Now shut up," I said. His memories were already flashing through my mind. They seemed pretty harmless. Falling and skinning his knee... followed by crying. Six stitches on the inside of his upper right arm, after he'd tripped and put his arm through the window of his basement door. "I see that you've always been a klutz," I commented, and the images kept coming. His parents fighting over something, which caused him a moderate degree of anxiety, which I could now feel. "You stole money out of your mom's purse to buy a CD?"

"It was the new Avril," he said. "I had to have it."

"Hmmm. You weren't even that guilty."

"It was Avril," he said, as though that justified stealing.

"Okay, here we go—who is Caroline?"

"Freshman crush," he said with disdain.

"Boy, did she do a number on you! I feel like strangling her myself. She actually said you reminded her or her father? That is so cold!"

"But all in all, it's not so bad, is it?" he asked.

"Wait. Wait. Your grandfather died—that's getting pretty bad. You were very sad. You were close to your grandfather. He took you fishing. He took you to the Cubs game... a lot. And—Oh My God!" I cried, feeling a sick surge of adrenaline. My head buzzed. I could barely breathe, the panic I felt was so extreme. I jerked my hand out of his.

"What? What is it?" he asked.

"You saw your dog get hit by a car?"

"Yeah, but he was okay."

"But you didn't think he was okay when it happened."

"No, but the vet operated on him, and—"

"—cut off his leg!" I finished for him.

"He's alive," Jack offered. "He hops around pretty good, too."

"You don't get the point, do you? You think your memories aren't so bad, but still you have a dead grandfather and a three-legged dog. That's enough to make my skin crawl."

He fell quiet for a moment, and then asked carefully, "You see anything else?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You know."

"Yeah, I know," I said mildly. "I'm causing you a lot of angst. Right now, my hands are shaking because of your angst. I know you're not making it up or exaggerating, but I still find it hard to believe."

"I think maybe it was one of those love-at-first-sight things," he mumbled. It sounded like an apology.

"I don't believe in love-at-first-sight. I think you just have terrible taste in girls, or some kind of unusual mental condition. Just try to put it out of your mind. If it persists maybe your doctor can give you some kind of medication. It's never going to be possible," I said, and then added, as sort of an offering, "After we find this tree-hugger, we can be friends. I'm down with that. We can have lunch together, and hang out."

"What if I can't be your friend?" he asked.

"Then we have a problem. It's either friend or enemy. I've told you way too much. That's my fault, not yours, and I'm sorry for being so—weak."

"You just need somebody to talk to," he said.

"I don't need anybody," I said. "I just made a mistake by blabbing everything to you."

Just then the gym door creaked open, and the lights came on. Light filtered through the bleachers and cast stripes of shadows across us.

Jack appeared puzzled and panicky. He looked over at me, and I shrugged my shoulders.

I got on my knees, and peered over a length of thick wood. What I saw was grosser than most of the things that flashed through my mind. Carl, the janitor, was plodding across the basketball court. The guy weighed a good 350 pounds, and all he wore were white boxer shorts and a pair of flip-flops. His huge stomach hanged over the waistband of his shorts, and white curly hair covered the expanse of his chest. He waddled over to the sideline, grabbed a basketball off the rack, and started dribbling it out onto the court.

I sat back down next to Jack.

"Marvelous," I said in a vicious whisper.

We both listened to the lonely thud-thud-thud of Carl dribbling.

"You got to be kidding," Jack whispered.

The basketball thunked as it bounced off the rim.

"Can't you do something?"

"Like what?" I asked.

"I don't know—like plant a suggestion in his mind to go home."

"I can't do that. I can only read what's already there. I'm not Obi Wan Kenobi, you know."

"Well, can you tell how long he's planning on staying?"

I concentrated for a few seconds, and then snorted softly. "The dude thinks in German."

"Figures."

"Well, he won't be too long. Did you ever take a good look at him? He'll get tired, right?"

"I sure hope so," Jack said.

We waited, and then mercifully, after about fifteen minutes, Carl called it quits. He returned the basketball to the rack, and headed for the door. The lights in the gym went out.

We were in the dark again, but something was wrong. There was a soft groaning all around us. The bleachers were slowly rolling in on us.

"He hit the switch!" Jack cried.

There wasn't enough time for us to scuttle along the wall to the end of the bleachers to escape.

For once my pitiful thinness came in handy. I was able to squeeze under one of the bleachers as they began to collapse. I rolled and bounced off a couple lower bleachers and landed hard on the floor. I got up, and I called out to Jack, "Where's the button?" Before he could respond, I picked the answer out of his mind, and started running through the darkness toward the door.

I felt over the wall next to the door. When I caught the light switch I flipped it and the light fixtures above flickered on.

I saw the two buttons, one red and the other black, just beneath the light switch. I quickly pressed the red button, and the bleachers creaked to a halt. They were almost completely closed. I pictured Jack behind them, crushed like a bug. I saw blood gushing out of his mouth and ears. I saw his head flattened like a pumpkin under a car tire. I pressed the black button, and the bleachers started to inch forward and expand until they were fully opened again.

For a moment everything froze. I couldn't read Jack, and thought for sure he was dead. I couldn't move my feet, to go and check if I was all right.

Then he emerged from the far end of the bleachers. He was slightly hunched over, carrying his gym bag with one hand and holding his head with the other.

As he walked toward me I was furious. I wanted to punch and kick him. I hated so much that I had felt scared for him. I didn't want to feel anything for him.

When he stopped before me, he was still holding his head.

"Don't say it," he said.

"Hiding under the bleachers," I hissed. "What a dumb-ass idea."

"Can't we just get this over with," he said meekly.

"Yeah, definitely," I seethed, wishing my heart would stop hammering again the inside of my ribcage. "And after this we're finished, I don't even know you. Got it?"

I turn round and stormed out of the gym and into the dark hallway.

11

We made our way up the dark stairwell to the second floor. Jack was behind me with the flashlight, and as we jogged up the stairs, the beam of light made creepy jiggling shadows all around us.

We came out on the main second floor hallway. Before we headed for the girls' room, we turned the other way and went to the end of the hall, where a large window overlooked the parking lot. We had to make sure Carl had left the building. We didn't need any more surprises.

When we reached the window, we saw Carl's beat-up red pick-up truck just as it started to rumble out of the dark lot. At least now we had the entire building to ourselves—just me, love-puppy Jack, and whatever creature lurked in the girls' room.

***********

Jack wanted to enter the room first. How gallant! Maybe he was trying to make up for being such a nitwit. I found the gesture more annoying than endearing. I wondered if he would be so eager if I had told him that I heard something growling in there earlier.

"Go right ahead," I said. I took the flashlight from him, so that he could open the door and slip between the two lengths of police tape. I really wanted something to be inside, something hideous and festering, to scare the beans out of him. Maybe that way he would finally get the message that this paranormal stuff wasn't as cool as he believed—that it could be downright dangerous. Maybe, then, too, he would think of me differently, and leave me alone. But all this was wishful thinking; Jack was, at best, a very slow learner.

Once inside, he stood with his back to the door, holding it open for me.

I rolled my eyes, and gave the flashlight back to him. I slipped through the police tape easily.

It was only after the door shut behind us that I noticed how chilly the air was in the bathroom. Jack was moving the flashlight back and forth. The beam of light swept over the sinks and stalls and pretty pink tiled walls. I felt dizzy as I watched the light playing over everything. Finally I reached over and flipped the light switch next to the interior doorway.

Jack shrieked and squinted when the bright light filled the room.

"Somebody will see," he complained.

"Nobody's here," I said.

"Somebody will see from outside."

"If they do, they'll just think somebody forgot to turn off the light."

Reluctantly, he turned off the flashlight, and returned it to his bag.

We both wandered around the room, checking things out. Everything looked pretty normal to me.

"Hey, why's the girls' room so much nicer than the guys' room?" Jack asked.

"Duh."

"What? I really want to know."

"If I have to explain that to you, then you are hopeless."

"Well, I guess I'm hopeless."

"My point exactly," I said, and then asked, "Does it seem cold in here to you?"

He considered it a second or two. "Maybe a little. It must be chilly outside by now."

"I think it's a bit more than that."

"Drops in room temperatures usually accompany the presence of a ghost," he stated.

I stopped in front of him. "You read that in a book."

He shrugged. "I heard that from a lot of sources."

"Well, it doesn't always work that way. Jerry shows up at home every single morning, and never once did I feel the slightest draft when he was around. Besides, this is different," I said, "This isn't cold spots. It's the whole room. The coldness seems evenly distributed from wall to wall. Do we know which stall Mary Jo was in when she vanished?"

"No," he said.

I crossed over to the first of the three stalls. I eyed it carefully. Everything looked safe, so I stepped inside. I felt the floor round the toilet base with the toe of my gym shoe, and the floor seemed solid enough. I leaned over and ran my hand over the wall behind the toilet. Other that feeling abnormally cool, the wall seemed all right. I repeated this process with the other two stalls, but discovered nothing that suggested it was possible a person could slip through to an alternate dimension or, for that matter, to any place else.

I stepped out of the third stall, and saw that Jack had been watching me closely the entire time.

"I don't get it," I said.

"Maybe the timing isn't right," he suggested. "It's not midnight yet."

I gave him a look. "Midnight? The witching hour? You're kidding me, right?"

"There is some truth to every myth."

I sighed. "Jack, really––"

"No, listen," he said, and seemed agitated. "I know you think I'm stupid, but I'm right about this. When did Mary Jo disappear?"

"Not at midnight—that's for sure."

"No, at lunch-time," he said. "Noon and midnight—different sides of the same coin."

I wagged my head. "I don't know about that."

"Did any of the cops go missing in here?" he asked, with greater confidence.

"No."

"When did the cops take their lunch breaks?"

"I see what you mean," I said, yet still I wasn't convinced.

Jack looked at his wristwatch, and said, "It's almost eleven-fifteen. So we wait an hour, and see what happens."

"Sure, why not," I said, but I couldn't shake the feeling this might end up being one huge waste of time.

Jack sat down on the hard floor, and tried to get comfortable, while I slowly paced the length of the room. A couple times I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that stretched across the wall above the sinks. My hair looked stringier than usual, my face...paler, my eyes... wearier. I looked like a 98-pound corpse that had somehow crawled her way out of a grave. How could anybody possibly find me attractive? I hopped onto the counter, so that I didn't have to look at the mirror, sitting there with my feet dangling above the floor.

We waited, with neither of us saying a word. Since I'd met him, this was the longest I witnessed Jack not running his mouth. One part of me wanted to read his mind, but the other part didn't want to know anything. What if he was thinking something weird? What if that weird something had to do with me? What if I just got static, like you get when you tune into an open radio signal? No, I decided, it was best not to know. You must never let yourself believe that somebody is thinking something that will make you happy.

The room was getting colder. At first I thought it was my imagination, but then goose-bumps started to rise on my bare arms. I hadn't been anticipating an Arctic blast. All I wore were jeans, gym shoes, and a light t-shirt. I never wore socks or a bra, because to me neither seemed to serve much of a purpose.

I hugged myself to try to stay warm, but it did no good. And my feet felt like two pieces of ice. So I slid off the counter and paced the floor again, hoping that would help keep me warm.

Jack watched me walk back and forth, sitting placidly on the floor with his legs crossed before him. He didn't seem the least bit bothered by the chill.

"Aren't you cold?" I asked.

"I have warm blood," he said.

"Lucky you."

I checked the stalls again. Everything was the same, except that a thin layer of ice had formed on the water in the toilet in the second stall. The wall in there felt somewhat colder than the walls in the other two stalls.

"I think she vanished from the middle stall," I said, and told him about the ice. "Do you know if anybody complained about it being cold in here?"

"No," he said. "I heard some of the girls said that it seemed too warm, but, you know, that was during the day."

I supposed that made sense, in a way. "What time is it?"

"Eleven-fifty," he said, after glancing at his watch.

If he was right about the whole midnight thing, something should happen soon.

I sat on the floor across from him. We stared at each other for a moment. He really wasn't such a bad guy. If I weren't such a freak, I might even consider dating him. I realized that every time I'd got mad at him, it was because of my issues, not his. He had only been trying to treat me as a normal human being. His mistake had simply been in not understanding how truly abnormal I was. As I thought about all this, I started to experience an unpleasant irritating feeling that I was pretty sure was guilt. It was not a feeling with which I was familiar, because, frankly, I was not a caring person. You have to care first to end up feeling guilty later.

"I have to be honest with you," I said.

"You're really madly in love with me, too, but afraid to admit it?"

"Uh—no, not even close. What I didn't tell you—and should have—was that earlier today I passed by and tried to get a read on the room, and, well, I heard something growling in here."

"Growling?"

"Yeah, like some kind of—I don't know—wild animal."

He blinked his eyes, and then stared at the floor thinking for a moment, before looking back up at me.

"And you're telling me this now?"

"To be fair to you, so you can leave before it's too late, just in case—" I shrugged—"Mary Jo actually got eaten by something."

He frowned. "You're making this up, right?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"Growling, really?" he asked.

"Feral growling," I said.

"And so," he said, still trying to figure things out, "you're telling me this and expecting me to run away."

"I'm not expecting anything. I'm just telling you, to be fair. So if you want to stay, stay. If you want to go, go. It doesn't matter to me either way."

"It doesn't matter if I leave you here alone?"

"No, why would it? I mean, I'm stuck with this weird stuff. I don't really have a choice. You do."

"I couldn't leave you here," he said. "What if you need my help?"

I laughed. "That's doubtful."

"Well, I'm staying," he said stubbornly.

"Then stay."

He glowered at me, as though I'd just played some practical joke on him.

A few minutes later I noticed that something was happening in the middle stall. The wall behind the toilet looked strange, shimmering as though invisible heat waves were coming off it.

Jack noticed it at the same time I did.

"It looks like a mirage," he said.

"Yeah, doesn't it?"

We both rose to our feet and stepped toward the stall to examine the phenomenon more closely.

An invisible layer of something that looked like clear gelatin was swirling and shimmering and slowly growing thicker, edging forward, enveloping the entire toilet and filling half the stall. The patterns of motion within the clear substance were mesmerizing. The shimmers, which had been yellowish, now became many colors—red, blue, pink, and purple, and a hundred other colors, some of which I had never imagined. The colors swirled around a small depression that was forming, growing wider and deeper. Then, little by little, as the depression grew, the colors faded to black and so did the clear substance that quickly started to resemble molten tar. Suddenly the depression flexed and transformed into a huge gaping mouth that twisted and emitted a loud wail.

Jack and I jumped back at the same time.

"You seeing what I'm seeing?" I asked, not looking at Jack, not tearing my eyes away from what was in the stall.

"A huge ugly mouth?" I heard him ask.

"Oh, good. It's not just me, then."

I looked over at Jack. His eyes seemed twice their normal size, and his skin was about as pale as mine.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"Uh, I don't know. Honestly, I'm fighting off the urge to run."

"Big help," I snorted. I studied the large dark maw. There were no visible teeth, which, I supposed, was a positive sign. "It doesn't look like it's going to come out of the stall."

"Not yet," he said.

"So any ideas, because I have nothing here."

Jack shrugged weakly. "It looks like a mouth, but really it's just a portal connecting one place to another. Why don't you try call to Mary Jo? Maybe she'll hear you?"

So I tried that, stepping up as close as I dared, calling out Mary Jo's name several times.

Nothing happened at first. Then the mouth became animated, looking as though it might be chewing an enormous wad of gum, and then, like somebody about to make a bubble, puckered up and blew an icy breath.

An object shot out of the mouth and clattered to the floor between Jack and me. We jumped to the side, not recognizing the object at first. When we did realize what it was, we gave each other a look that cried, What's with that?

On the floor at our feet, a tiny wind-up plastic duck waddled about aimlessly.

"I don't get it," Jack said dully.

I stooped down to pick up the duck. Its little legs were still pumping up and down, slowly losing strength until they stopped.

"A little kid's toy," I murmured.

"Probably fell through another aperture, some other place, some other time."

I squinted at him. "You mean this kind of thing might happen at the time?"

"Who knows?"

"Well, it would sure explain why I keep losing hair brushes."

Jack seemed emboldened at the harmlessness of the toy.

"Maybe I should try a spell," he said.

"Really, I don't think that's a good idea."

"Why not?"

"Because we don't know what we're dealing with here. I don't think trial-and-error is the way to go with this thing."

"Then what? Years of research?" he said. "This thing—whatever it is—isn't going to be here forever. One day it's going to stop appearing, and then there goes Mary Jo—forever. Look at that toy—you do know they were big in the 1970s."

I sighed. "All right—try a spell."

He retrieved the notebook from his gym bag. He flipped through the pages until he settled on something. Before he started to read, I came up from behind him and pushed him into position directly in front of the stall.

"There, perfect," I said. "Now when you read whatever it is you're going to read, don't even look over at me. I don't want there to be the chance of an accident. I have enough problems already, and I really don't need green skin and warts."

Jack recited something that sounded like a combination of Latin and gibberish. When he was finished, I leaned in to get a good look into the stall. The large mouth hovered there completely unchanged.

"Maybe try it again," I suggested. "This time try to sound a bit more in charge."

I gave him a good-luck slap on the shoulder, and stepped aside.

Jack started to repeat the spell. He lowered his voice, and did managed to sound commanding.

I noticed that pink light was flaring around the mouth. The flares looked tiny bursts of aural light, and as Jack read, the color slowly changed from pink to a deep bloody red.

"Uh... Jack," I said. "I think you should stop."

But he was on a roll. He waved me off with his free hand.

"Seriously, I don't think it likes whatever you're saying."

But he wasn't listening.

The mouth began to twist and contort wildly, and then seemed to suck inward.

"Jack, stop! I'm not kidding. Something's wrong."

Just then the mouth expelled a large greenish glob of matter that struck Jack in the chest. It looked exactly as though he'd been hit by a huge slimy booger. Green goo covered the front of his shirt and dangled off his chin. He held his arms out to the side, like a scarecrow, and uttered a yelp of disgust.

"Why don't you ever listen to me?" I asked, but he didn't hear me. He raced over to the paper towel dispenser on the wall, and started cleaning off the gross gunk. All I could do was shake my head.

I went up to the stall and faced the mouth. It seemed calm again. By now I was sure that this was much more than just a portal to another place. It had to be a living thing; only living things give off an aura or aural lights. I wasn't sure, though, whether it was dangerous. I didn't think so. I figured if it was truly dangerous, it would have done more than just hock a loogy at Jack.

I tried to read it, but I got nothing. I stepped into the stall, and didn't feel at all unsafe. So I reached out to touch it.

It felt soft, doughy, and not quite as cold as the air around it. It didn't seem agitated by my touch, and so I let my hand linger there. I allowed my mind to drift, to reach out and make contact with whatever was in there or behind there or through there.

"What are you doing?" Jack screeched behind me.

I shushed him. I let my mind drift further than I had ever before allowed it to drift. I had always been afraid that it if I let go too much, I might never be able to reel my senses in and get them back under control. But now it seemed necessary reach out far with my senses. This wasn't like reading a human being, who occupies a small space in the here and now. This thing was spread out over a vast distance, over space and time and dimension. Little by little, I felt I was contacting it, encompassing the enormity of it, with my freak senses. When I realized what it was, I couldn't help grinning. It was so delightful and pure and logical.

I withdrew my hand, and turned round to face Jack.

"I understand now," I said.

"What?"

"It's a little kid."

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the room seemed to swirl around.

The next thing I knew I was laying on the cold floor. Jack was kneeling over me, holding a bloody wad of paper towel.

"You okay?" he asked anxiously.

My head was clear now, but I felt completely drained. I pushed myself up into sitting position, and it felt as though I weighed a thousand pounds.

"What happened?" I asked.

"You fainted."

"Did not. Only wimps faint."

Jack looked at me gravely.

"I think I should take you to the emergency room," he said.

"No, no emergency rooms," I said. "Are you kidding? Too much for me to see in emergency rooms—people who got decapitated in car accidents ten years ago, and such."

"You had a bad nose bleed," he said.

"It's all right. It happens sometimes," I told him.

"You looked like you were dead."

"You still think what I have is a gift?" I asked. "Hey, help me up, huh? I'll feel better once I'm on my feet."

"You're sure about that?" he asked, but put his arm round my back and helped me to stand.

I leaned against the metal frame of the door. My legs were rubbery, and I was short of breath.

I noticed that Jack was looking at me with great concern, and I told him to shut up before he had the chance to say something stupid.

"It's like a child, a bored little child," I said. "All it's doing is playing—well, that's what it thinks it's doing."

"Did you sense Mary Jo?" he asked.

"No, nothing. But I'm sure she's there...somewhere. It has her. It tried to play with her, the way it's playing with us now. It really doesn't mean any harm."

"Yeah, right," he snorted.

"It wants us to take her back," I said. "The best I can tell, it's playing Keep Away."

"Keep Away?" he asked, his voice rising an octave or so. "You got to be kidding."

I was starting to feel a little better. I walked across the room to the sinks, and checked myself out in the mirror. I looked worse than usual. There was some drying blood under my nose. "Hey, hand me a couple of those towels," I said.

I wet the towels with cool water and wiped my face.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Sure, but make it fast. I don't think we have much time."

"Do you really like me?"

"You read my mind. You know."

"Just double-checking."

"Why?"

I glanced at him and grinned. He looked puzzled, but figured it out pretty fast.

"No!" he yelled.

Before he could stop me, I spun round, raced toward open stall, and made a flying leap into the huge gaping mouth that seemed content to swallow me.

12

I was lost in inky darkness, and there was a loud humming in my ears. I was falling, and the feeling of falling was curious; it felt as though I was falling very fast, and yet, because of the absolute darkness around me, it appeared that I was hovering in space and not moving at all.

Then there were flashes of pale blue light all around, like claws of lightening, defining a tunnel that was invisible because everything was so black. The humming in my ears grew so loud I thought my eardrums might rupture. The pain was unbearable. I screamed but couldn't hear my screams because of the humming. Just as I thought for sure that I would pass out from the pain, I exploded into another place.

I landed with a sickening slap on a floor, and slid forward and my head struck a wall. I rolled onto my back, holding my head, my eyes shut tight in agony. Intense pain pulsed behind my eyes, but then slowly receded. After a moment I was able to sit up and look around. My eyes were blurry and I wasn't sure I was seeing right, because I found myself sitting on the floor in another bathroom. It looked exactly like the bathroom I had just left except for one thing: there were absolutely no colors. Everything was black and white and shades of gray. It was like suddenly finding yourself in an old movie. I shuddered to discover that I, too, was colorless. I looked down and saw that my blue jeans were dark gray, my arms and hands were so white that they nearly glowed. My hair looked like strings of ash. I wondered if maybe something was wrong with my eyesight, but then decided that, no, this was just the way it was here.

Well, this must be the place, I decided.

I staggered to my feet. I went over to the mirror. I was stunned to see that I looked even worse in black-and-white than I did in color.

Okay, now where would a tree-hugger like Mary Jo go? I wondered. Three days had passed. It was too much to expect her to stay here in the bathroom.

I walked out into the hallway, which stretched gray and deserted in both directions. Everything was filled with a dim light, although none of the lights were on. Strangely, it did not seem like the middle of the night here, but nor did it seem like day.

I called out Mary Jo's name, loudly, but there was nothing. My voice did not even echo, but sounded flat and confined, as though it didn't carry more than a couple feet.

I walked down the hallway. The rubber soles of my shoes did not make their usual short squeaky sounds.

I searched the school for a while, the empty classrooms, the deserted gym, the abandoned main office.... It didn't take long before I started to kick myself mentally. Some plan, right? Just jump into the thing that looked like a big mouth, get spit into another reality, and then what? Search for weeks, months, or years to find a single lost girl? Brilliant, utterly brilliant!

I walked through an exit door and discovered that everything outside was just as gray and forsaken as inside the school. The parking lot was empty, and no cars moved down the street. The grass was a medium shade of gray. The leaves on the trees were a slightly lighter shade of gray. The sky was milky white and there didn't appear to be a sun. There didn't seem to be birds or squirrels, and the world was as silent as the inside of a locked closet. Man, I didn't know exactly where this place was, but they must not have got jack in the way of tourism.

I sat on one of the benches and tried to think things out. Mary Jo had been here for three days. So exactly where would a tree-hugger go in a place like this? Maybe she would try going home. That was what I would do—go home and try to find somebody. But what if she couldn't find anybody at home, or anyplace else? Where would she go, then? Really, she could be anywhere in the city by now, wandering around, looking for help that wasn't there.

Suddenly there was a low rumbling noise. At first I thought it was thunder, but then I felt the bench vibrating. The tremor grew stronger and stronger, until it nearly tossed me off the bench. Then it stopped just as abruptly as it had begun.

An earthquake? In Chicago? That would be rare, but then again this wasn't my Chicago.

I went back into the school with a sense of urgency. I needed to find out Mary Jo's home address, so I went to the main office. I sat at one of the desks, and tried to get into the computer system. But, maddeningly, I couldn't get the computer to power up. Everything was plugged in—there just wasn't any electric. On a hunch I checked all the desk drawers. They were empty—no forms, no staplers, no paper clips, nothing. Everything was a fake, as though it was never meant to be used.

I wandered out of the office, not sure what to do next. When I saw the drinking fountain in the hallway, I realized how thirsty I was. But the fountain probably didn't work. Nothing here seemed to work. Still I tried the fountain, and was surprised when an arc of water rose from the faucet. It sampled the water; it was cold and tasted normal, and I drank some more. When I finished, I was struck with a thought. Basic needs. Water is a basic need. Mary Jo would need water. She would need shelter, too, but here that would be no problem; this city, this entire world, seemed uninhibited, but there were thousands, maybe millions, of buildings. That left only food. The lunchroom, I thought, and started running down the hallway.

The large room was silent and sad. Row after row of tables at which nobody would ever sit to eat. Absent was the low hum of gossip, punctuated by the occasional catcall. There was no lunch line of kids jostling each other to see what was in the glass cases. There were no white-uniformed lunch ladies wearing hair-nets and doling out dubious dishes from the steam trays. But there was something, I noticed; the lingering aroma of food. Was it just my imagination? After I sniffed the air some more, I determined that it wasn't my imagination at all. I could smell—what?—buffalo wings, pasta sauce, maybe enchiladas. The smell of food was real, the realest thing I discovered so far in this place.

As I approached the lunch counter, I heard the clang of a folk or spoon hitting the floor. I stopped in my tracks, startled because I couldn't see anybody. But then Mary Jo popped up behind the steam tables.

She didn't notice me, but went about her business, which seemed to be searching through the shelves under the counter. She had that all-American look that lot of people like, but that tended to make me want to vomit. The bright blue eyes. High cheekbones. Toothy smiles. Pert nose. A light dusting of freckles across her face. Now as she stood there, looking down at the low shelves, she frowned—in an adorable sort of way, of course – and I wondered why did I want to rescue her again? This was a person who in a million years would never be my friend. She had as much reason to like me as I had to like her. Yet I could never leave her here, like this, all alone in a gray world.

I stepped up to the counter.

"Mary Jo?" I said.

She looked up at me. "Oh," she said, but wasn't startled; she seemed to take my sudden presence in stride. "You don't happen to know where they keep those little wet towel thingies, do you?"

"Uh, no," I said.

She shrugged in a perky way. "Oh, well, I guess they ran out."

She had a plate, which she started to pile up with food from the steam trays. There were chicken wings that looked charred black, and gray enchiladas covered with a light gray sauce. There was a tray that was filled with some kind of soup that looked like a mud puddle.

"I thought you were supposed to be a vegan or something," I said.

"I am," she said pleasantly. "But this doesn't count. How could it?" She looked up from her plate at me. It was as though she saw me for the first time. "Hey, I know you. You're that spooky girl, right?"

"I suppose," I said. I was wondering whether she had hit her head even harder than me when she slipped into this reality.

"Strange that you're here."

"I think so," I said. "But, really, we need to get out of here."

"But why?" she asked. "It seems that I've been running around all day, looking for people, and now I'm starved," she said, rolling her eyes. "Well, you know how it is. What are you anyway?—a starver or a barfer?"

"What?"

"Anorexia or bulimia. Or maybe both. Let me check out your teeth."

"My teeth?"

"Look, nothing counts here, right? So why don't you grab a plate and pig out? Might as well."

She took her plate and walked out from behind the counter. I followed her to one of the tables, where she sat and started to eat.

"We don't have time for this," I said, looking down at her.

"Sure we do," she said. She took a chicken wing and shoved it up toward my face. She tried to put it in my mouth, but I blocked her hand and grabbed it from her.

I wondered what was wrong with her. I was pretty sure this wasn't the way she normally acted. I remembered what Jerry had said about no telling what kind of damage might be caused to a person who stayed too long in an alternate reality.

Then the floor started to shake, as it had done when I was outside. A couple dishes fell somewhere and shattered. I decided to sit across from her before I was knocked off my feet. Through it all, Mary Jo kept eating, completely untroubled. When the earthquake stopped, she smiled at me, and said in a playful way, "Rumble, rumble."

"Let me ask you something," I said.

"You going to eat that chicken wing?"

"No."

"Then you can't ask."

"I don't eat meat," I said.

"Admirable. But I told you: it doesn't count here. It tastes like real food, but it isn't."

I looked at the chicken wing in my hand. I decided what the heck, and took a bit. Although it was black, it tasted like a regular hot wing. Not only that, I didn't get any flashes of the chicken as its head had been cut off, or any other grisly images that usually flashed through my mind whenever I ate meat.

I stared at Mary Jo, and, still chewing her food, she smiled.

"Good, isn't it?" she asked, and a fleck of meat flew from her mouth.

I reached over and grabbed her arm, much tighter than I intended. She yelped a complaint, but I held on. I wasn't getting anything from her, not a single thought or errant feeling. It freaked me out. I always got something from people, but now Mary Jo seemed as empty as a zombie.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

I shook my head, eyeing her warily.

"Then you think I could have my arm back?"

I let go and she resumed eating.

"Mary Jo," I said. "What do you think is happening?"

"Right now?—I'm eating."

"I mean, where do you think you are?"

"That's obvious," she chortled.

"Tell me."

She shrugged her shoulder. "In a dream, of course."

"This isn't a dream."

"Of course, it is," she said, looking at me as though I were an imbecile. "Look around. Everything is in black-and-white. I dream in black-and-white. Most people do, you know. Dreaming in color is pretty rare—or so I've heard."

"And why would I be in your dream?" I asked.

She wagged a half-eaten chicken wing at me. "You know, I've been wondering that. I don't even know you, right? You'd think that my friends would be in a dream. But aside from you I haven't seen anybody—not a soul. It's sort of strange."

"Because it's not a dream."

"Then what is it? You tell me," she said, starting to lose patience.

"I don't know—not a dream, though." I wasn't about to tell her that we had ended up in an alternate reality. She'd never believe that.

"It has to be a dream. If it wasn't a dream, I'd be running around in a panic tearing my hair out."

"Why?" I asked cautiously.

"When I first found myself here, I went looking for somebody. Who wouldn't, right? A dream is a lonely place. But I looked and looked, but couldn't find anybody. What a dumb dream, right?

"So I walked home. It's not far—six, seven blocks. I found the house unlocked. My mom, who is almost always home, wasn't there. My grandpa, who has a small apartment in the basement, wasn't there, either. That was really strange; he's confined to a wheelchair, and never goes anywhere.

"So I decided to grab my bike and ride around. I could cover a lot more ground that way, right? I didn't see anybody anywhere. The whole city is, like, a ghost town. Then a tremor hit. It knocked me right off the bike. Well, I knew this is a dream. So I figured I was lying in bed sleeping at home and maybe my kid brother decided to jump on my bed. He does things like that—the little nuisance. Anyway, I didn't think much about the earthquake until I reached the lake. Boy, that was weird! The lake wasn't there. No kidding. Nothing was there. There was the beach, and then a drop-off to nothingness. Then when another tremor hit, I saw what was happening; the beach crumbled away and fell into the nothingness."

"Was that the first day you were here?" I asked, starting to feel a bit panicky myself.

"The first day?" she asked, frowning. "What are you talking about? I've only been here for, maybe, seven, eight hours."

So, on top of everything else, time didn't work the same here as I did in the real world. That plus the fact that this reality seemed to be collapsing into oblivion gave me a greater sense of urgency. I jumped up from my seat.

"We really need to go—now," I said.

Mary Jo seemed amused.

"Go? Go where?"

"Look, this 'dream' is vanishing."

"Yeah, I know, but so what? I figure when it's gone, that's when I'll wake up. Until then, I plan to finish lunch."

I grabbed her by her arm, and started pulling her out of her chair. She whined and shrieked, but finally allowed herself to be dragged away from the table. I started towing her toward the exit.

"I don't get it," she said, still chewing on food. "This is the weirdest damned dream I have ever had."

I kept pulling her, and didn't stop until we were back where she'd started, in the girls' bathroom.

"What are we doing here?" she demanded. "Ohmigod, this isn't getting creepy now, is it?"

"Just shut up, and do what I tell you."

"I knew it, I knew it," she moaned, in dread. "Don't touch me. I'm warning you—do not touch me."

I pushed in the door to the middle stall, and sure enough, the inside was half-filled with the black gelatinous substance.

Mary Jo stared into the stall. She no longer feared for her virtue, or whatever she had thought she was about to lose.

"What is that?" she asked, wrinkling her nose.

"It's hard to explain."

"It wasn't there before."

"It is now," I said, "and you need to jump into it."

"Jump in it?" she screeched.

"It's a dream. Who cares, right?"

"No way am I jumping in that. Not even in a dream."

Then the floor and walls started quaking, this time with greater intensity than before. It lasted longer, too, and didn't cease until the large mirror over the sinks shattered.

"We don't have time for this," I said. I grabbed her by the shoulder, spun her so that she faced the stall, and, as hard as I could, booted her in the butt.

She flew forward, and ended up sticking half in, half out of the black goo. She looked back at me, and cried, "This is so gross!" And then she was suddenly sucked in all the way, presumably heading back where she belonged.

I lingered there alone, in a world that wouldn't exist much longer. Except that it was vanishing, it might not have been a bad place for me; there were no ghosts to trouble me, no people with strange thoughts going through their heads, no future to see, no gory visions whenever I ate meat. It was a world where I could have been normal, only there was nobody with whom to share it. I suspected that maybe I had always been wrong; everybody needs people, even me.

When I looked back into the stall, I saw that there was about eight feet of rope coming out of the wall of black stuff. The roped wiggled impatiently on the floor, like some crazy snake.

"Pathetic," I murmured, shaking my head. "Truly pathetic."

Still I bent down and seized the end of the rope. I wrapped it around my waist and a moment later, a sharp jerk pulled me into the soft black wall and I was heading home.

13

"What took you so long?" Jack demanded, standing over me.

I was lying on the floor again, holding my achy head, but at least this floor, and the wall that had just hit headfirst, was in my world.

"Just habitually tardy, I guess," I said, and got to my feet. My skull felt like an enormous throbbing balloon. I had matching lumps on the crown of my head. If I didn't watch it, I'd have to change my nickname from Freaky Jules to Knotty Cranium.

I saw that Mary Jo was laid out across the sinks on the counter. She looked dead.

"What did she do? Get knocked out?"

"She came through unconscious," Jack informed me. "She flew out of the aperture like a rag doll. She's breathing and everything—just totally out of it."

I stood there studying Mary Jo. "She's much less annoying when she's unconscious."

"So what happened?"

I shrugged. "I found her." I gave him a bare-bones account of what had happened, what it had been like. I saw no reason to give him every last detail; he was altogether too obsessed with weird stuff.

In return Jack informed me that it was now Saturday night, that, although it seemed to me only about an hour passed, I had been missing for nearly a full day. "It took more than an hour between the time Mary Jo returned and the time you popped back in," he said.

I grunted. "So time didn't work the same there."

"Apparently not," he said.

I studied him from head to foot. He looked like a wreck. He looked like how I felt.

"And you waited here?"

"What was I supposed to do? I couldn't leave you," he said. "I spent most of this morning ducking Creepy Carl. I guess Saturday is when he buffs the hallway floors," he added wryly.

"I can't believe you waited."

"You would have done the same for me," he said.

"You sure about that?" I really didn't think I would have, but it was nice to know he thought better of me.

We both stood there and looked at Mary Jo. She seemed so peaceful. Probably now she was actually dreaming.

"So what do we do?" Jack asked.

"We go home."

"We leave her here—like this."

"Sure. As soon as we open an exit door, the alarm will go off. So we prop the door open with something. The cops will check out the building, and, poof, they find her. A miracle, right?"

"But what if she tells the cops what happened?"

"Well, for one thing," I said patiently, "you don't have a thing to worry about. She never saw you, right? And what is she going to tell them about me? That I came to her in a dream and rescued her?"

He shook his head. "They'll send her to a shrink."

"Better her than me," I said.

Jack gathered up his rope, and stuffed it into his gym bag with his other things.

Before we left, we checked the bathroom again. The black matter in the toilet stall was gone, and everything looked normal, except for the sleeping girl lying on the sink counter and the remnants of a huge slimy booger splashed across the floor.

14

"You're going to love this!" Melody roared.

This was the first thing she said when I answered my cell phone. It was Sunday night, and I was still lying in my bed. I had slept on and off since I returned home in the small hours of the morning. My head ached. My knees hurt. My lower back was killing me. And I had had another nasty nosebleed that didn't quite want to stop. So I was in no mood for Melody's perkiness.

"Mel, can't it wait until tomorrow?" I asked.

"No, no, you have to hear this."

"Please," I begged.

"They found Mary Jo Mason."

"Yeah, I saw it on the news."

"But the news didn't give all the details," she insisted.

"No?" I was more than mildly interested in what had happened after Jack and I fled the school. How exactly had the cops found Mary Jo? What happened after they found her? Was she questioned, and if so, what did she say? All day I had been half-expecting the cops to knock on my door.

"I got it all from my mom," Melody said.

"Give it up, bitch," I told her.

"All right," she said. "The burglar alarm goes off last night at the school, right? So when the cops respond to the call, they find an open door. I think it was propped with an office chair or something. Anyway, they search the entire school for intruders, and they find Mary Jo."

"Really?" I said, faking surprise better than I thought I could.

"Straight up," Melody said.

"See. I told you—there was nothing to worry about."

"Wait. Wait. There's more."

"What?"

"They found her in the bathroom, the bathroom she disappeared from."

"Yeah?"

"She was sleeping on the counter."

"Really," I said. "Isn't that something?"

"But this is the best part, the part you're going to love. You know what the cops did after they found her?—Really, you're going love this."

"Why? What did they do?" I asked.

"They arrested her."

I sat bolt upright in bed. "They didn't."

"No kidding. Slapped hand-cuffs on her and dragged her away."

"Wow," I said. I felt a little like laughing, but then, instantly, I felt sorry for Mary Jo. She had been through an ordeal, whether or not she realized it.

"Well, she didn't have any identification with her, and she didn't look much like the picture her parents gave the cops when she went missing," Melody explained. "So, yeah, I guess they had to arrest her for trespassing. But after they found out who she was, they dropped the whole thing."

"You know what she told the cops?—I mean, about where she was for those three days."

"Oh, I don't know," she said, and I could picture Melody rolling her eyes. "She told the cops some crazy stuff. It sounds like she's in for some counseling."

"Well, at least they found her," I said.

"I suppose that's the most important thing."

"Yeah," I murmured, and couldn't think of anything else to say.

After I got off the phone with Melody, I lay there thinking for a long while. I wasn't sure how I felt about the whole thing. I'd found Mary Jo and brought her back and now she was safe at home with her family. Anybody else might have felt pride or satisfaction, but I didn't feel those things at all. Mainly I felt selfish. I didn't do anything for Mary Jo. I didn't do anything because I was a caring, concerned person. Whatever I did, I did for myself. That was how I was, and I really didn't believe I would ever change.

The one thing that kept returning to my mind was what it had been like in that other reality. There I could not read people. I could not see the future. I had no flashes of freaky insight. For a brief time, I knew what it would be like to be normal, and having experienced that, I decided I could never be that way. It didn't feel right, because it wasn't me. I was Freaky Jules, that was who I was meant to be, and for the first time I started to see that that was all right. After all, a lot of people are different, in some way and to some degree. There are a lot of freaks in this world, and one day, sooner or later, we are going to take over everything.

Epilogue

All the excitement surrounding Mary Jo died down in the following weeks.

Things went by to the same old routine, except now there was Jack. He started to join Melody and me for lunch every day. I didn't really need another friend, but I didn't mind. Some friendships begin with a secret, and once they begin they almost have to last—or else. I believed that Jack would always keep my secrets. Maybe someday I would finally break down and date him, but probably not.

One day I felt an anxiety attack coming on in the lunchroom again. I had to go outside. The days were getting sunnier and warmer. The grass was dark green and the breeze was soft and the air smelled sweet. Everything outside calmed me down. I sat on one of the benches and relaxed.

Awhile later, Jack sat on the opposite end of the bench. We sat there and didn't say anything to each other for a long time. It felt good to share silence with him.

Then he said, "I have three words for you."

"Jack, cut it out. We've already talked about this."

He looked confused at first, but then he got it. "Oh, no, not those three words. I wasn't thinking anything like that."

"What three words are you talking about?"

"Can you keep an open mind?" he asked.

"It's impossible for me not to."

"Okay, here it is," he said: "Spontaneous Human Combustion."

"What?" I stared at him in horror.

"I'm serious," he said. "There are some weird things going on."

"No."

"Jules, really, you need to hear this...."

I was already on my feet walking away. I didn't look back. I walked faster and faster, but knowing Jack Kilgore, I realized I would never be able to walk away fast enough.

END

From Freaky Jules #2 (Pants on Fire)

I didn't like baseball, or any sport for that matter. Sports, unlike me, belong to the normal world. Only normal people can gather enjoyment out of watching one guy trying to throw a ball past another guy who is trying to hit the ball with a piece of wood while all the other players wait around to see if the guy with the piece of wood actually hits the ball. That seemed to make sense to people, while I believed that baseball was the dumbest of activities.

I was never frustrated that I didn't understand normal things. I was not obsessed with trying to become normal. I knew that would never be possible. I would always be a vision-seeing, future-predicting, mind-reading freak. About the best I could hope for was to learn how to live with myself.

A few months ago, I discovered that there was a new addition to my paranormal abilities: telekinesis. I could turn light switches on and off with my mind. I could move around small objects. At first I was despondent that there was yet another weird thing for me to endure. I tried to ignore this latest ability, but during bored moments—and I had quite a few of those in the course of a day—I would amuse myself by twirling a pencil or levitating an eraser. I soon discovered that moving objects around with my mind required a great deal of focus, and while I focused on, say, arranging kitchen utensils neatly on a tabletop, my other freaky abilities became inert. I could not see random visions, most of which were dark and gory. I could not read minds and the sick thoughts people keep to themselves. It was a good trade-off, really; if I began to see or hear something disturbing, I just concentrated on moving something and all the bad things in my head went away—at least for a while. It was a great way to deal with stress.

One Saturday afternoon in early May, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table at home. I was balancing a pencil on the tip of my finger. I made the pencil slowly turn, which made a tickling feeling on my skin.

My mom sat across from me. She was still alarmed at my latest "gift." She was aware of my other abilities, of course, but really those she couldn't actually see. This was much more visual, and therefore much more disturbing.

"Do you have to do that?" she asked.

"It's very relaxing."

"I'm trying to talk to you."

"I'm listening," I said. "Just because I'm not looking at you, don't think I'm not hearing you."

Mom was trying to have one of her heart to heart talks with me. Every now and then she felt compelled to sit me down and encourage me to try to blend in better with my peers. It was her way of being supportive; she knew that my having strange abilities isolated me from other people. She was always afraid that I would end up being some kind of weirdo old lady who scared all the neighborhood kids—in other words, she didn't want me to turn into my grandmother. But even now, as she attempted to convince me I could be pretty much like everybody else if only I applied myself, she didn't see the irony.

"Mom, I'm moving a pencil with my mind," I said. "Exactly how much do you think I can blend?"

She sighed. "Julie, you're impossible, really."

"And yet here I am."

"Can we talk?"

"We are talking," I said.

"I mean, without the—whatever you call that."

"Telekinesis."

"Whatever. Can you put your hand down?"

I lowered my hand. The pencil remained suspended in the air, still turning slowly around.

She gawked at the pencil for a moment.

"Julie, really!"

I snatched the pencil from the air, and slapped it down on the tabletop.

"There! Better?" I asked, feeling a little hostile.

"Thank you." She took a couple seconds to compose herself, to pick up her train of thought. "Look, maybe I haven't been expressing myself so well. I understand that you will always be different from other people. There's nothing you can do about that. But you are still a human being."

"If you say so," I said.

"You are," she said. "Your dad and I have been talking."

"You need to stop that. The marriage will last longer."

"Julie, please."

I didn't stay anything. I figured it was best to let her say what she was going to say, and have it over with.

"We've been concerned with a few things about you. And this has nothing to do with your gifts. Your abilities," she amended after I'd rolled my eyes.

"Then what?"

"It's just that you're so—I don't know—emotionally detached."

"Yeah?" I said dully.

"I mean, look, I'm a nurse, right? I got into the field because, basically, I care about people. I have sympathy and understanding. Your dad, too. He's a fireman and, sure, that's a good job but you can't want to become a fireman without caring, without wanting to keep people safe. You see where I'm going with this."

"No, really, I don't," I said. "You and dad like your jobs?"

She sighed. She seemed uncertain what to say. Then she blurted out, "Julie, your dad wants you to see a psychiatrist."

I was horrified. "Uh-uh. No way."

"He thinks you may be sociopathic."

"What! No, I'm not.... What's sociopathic, anyway?"

"That's when a person has no feelings for others—no feelings at all. Some sociopaths end up, you know, killing people."

I stared at her. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I honestly didn't know what to say. My parents weren't really concerned that I wasn't quite normal; they actually feared I'd turn into a mass murderer or something.

"It's just that you never show us anything," she continued, uncomfortably. "You know, like kids usually show their parents."

"Oh, I see," I murmured. "Well, you know me: I'm not going to go around hugging everybody."

"I understand that," she said.

"I do love you guys," I said. "I just do it in my own way."

"Well, Dad doesn't understand why you are the way you are."

"Maybe you should explain it to him," I suggested.

She looked aghast. We had never told my dad about my abilities, so he couldn't possibly understand the affects that possessing them had on me.

"You can't be serious. He'd have you in a mental hospital in about two seconds. And I'd be right there with you. He'd never accept it—not in a million years. The guy doesn't even believe in ghosts," she added wryly.

I grinned. "I could prove it to him."

"Uh, no," she said. "No, we're not doing that."

"Well, then talk to him," I said. "Tell him something he will understand. Make him see that I can't be fixed. This is the way I am. I'm never going to be the perky, loving daughter that other people have. He got stuck with a freak."

"Oh, Julie," she murmured, but that was all she could say. She could never find the words to make things better for me, because there were no such words in any language.

I pushed away from the table. Before I left the room, I paused at the doorway for a long time. "Mom... I love you," I said, but the words didn't sound very convincing, not even to me.

From Freaky Jules #3 (Hellhounds)

"I may be a lot of things," I said, pacing the floor of my kitchen, highly agitated, "but I am not A DOG CATCHER!"

I felt a tirade coming on, and considering how weird my life was, I thought I was entitled to an occasional violent outbreak. It was understandable—at least, to me. Still I always did my best to fight back the anger, which, at times, became quite a battle. Sometimes I won, and sometimes I lost. Right now I felt the hot red haze in my head starting to fade; it turned into something blue, something solid and shot through with cool reason.

"Look," I said, calmer, but still pacing the floor. "I'm just not a dog person, all right. How could I be? I barely relate to human beings. Dogs?—to me, they're just smelly, drooling things. They're big furry cockroaches. So, really, I don't think I would be much help with your problem. You understand, right?"

"But you promised," Jerry insisted.

"Really, take a good look at me. Do I look like a person whose promises are any good?"

"You said you would," he said. He actually sounded like a whining five-year-old, as though I had guaranteed him cotton candy and a ride on the Ferris wheel, and now I was reneging.

I stopped pacing, and sighed heavily. This was absurd, but this was my life. It was a sunny August day. Little kids were outside running through sprinklers, or playing t-ball, or chasing butterflies. Kids my age were at the beach or water parks, or in the cool basements of their homes making out with boyfriends while their parents were at work. All I wanted to do was eat breakfast, go back up to my room, pull shut the curtains, and enjoy the gloom. For me this passed as entertainment—this was the best I could do. But I couldn't even do that, because I was having an argument with a ghost.

I looked down at Jerry. He was sitting at the kitchen table. He appeared to have his elbows on the tabletop, and rested his chin in his cupped hands. He still wore the CPD uniform in which he died. The bullet hole in his forehead still seemed to pour out blood, which curved round his eye and ran down side of his face like a gruesome little river. He looked extremely distraught, not because part of his brain was scrambled with blood and hair and oozing from the back of his head, not because he was dead, but because of a dog. It just didn't make any sense to me.

I shook my head, and sat across the table from him.

"It's just a dog," I pointed out.

"He was more than that," he murmured. "He was all that I had."

"How was that?" I wondered.

He shrugged his thick shoulders. "Never had much of a family. I was an only child. My parents died pretty young. I never got married, so no kids of my own. All I really had was work. I handled a lot of dogs over the years, and Sarge was the best. He was special. He had something the other dogs didn't. You could see it in his eyes. We connected somehow. I don't know, I guess you could say we shared an affinity—we formed a kinship. But you could never understand something like that. You don't have much feeling for people, so how much could you know about dogs?"

I wanted to say that my attitude had nothing to do with my being a freak; a lot of people, normal people, didn't care much about dogs. I didn't want everything to always be about me, and yet, somehow, everything ended up being about me just the same.

"Well, I just don't see what the problem is, anyway," I said. "The dog is dying, right?"

"Sarge is going to die soon," Jerry said. "Any day."

"It happens, right? It's sad... I suppose. But it happens. I'm a little unclear what you want me to do, anyway. I can't make him not die."

"It's not that. I just need you to rescue him."

"Rescue him?" I wondered.

"After he dies," Jerry said.

"You mean like a doggie ghost rescue?" I wondered.

"Yeah, something like that." Jerry straightened, leaning back in his seat. "It's not that big of a deal, really," he said, as though sensing he was starting to get his way.

But I was suspicious. "So all I would have to do is—what? Be there when he dies and retrieve his spirit."

"Yeah. Simple, right?"

"Why can't you do that?" I asked.

"Oh, well..." He paused, pursing his lips, thinking. "I'd have to leave the house for an extended period of time. I'm at my strongest in the house. Outside I'm weak. Outside I can't even manifest myself. I seriously doubt that I could do what needs to be done."

I considered everything he had said, and decided that there was definitely something wrong here. I was usually paranoid, sure, but that seemed aside from the point at the moment.

"Okay, what am I missing?" I asked.

He gave me an innocent look, but didn't respond. I wished I could read his mind, but I could never read the minds of spirits.

"It sounds simple," I said, more to myself than to him.

"It is," he assured me, and then added solemnly, "In all the years since your family moved into my house, have I ever asked anything of you?"

"No," I had to admit. "And it's not your house anymore, by the way. The dead can't hold deeds."

"It still feels like home to me," he said, "and you're like the daughter I never had."

Now I knew something was wrong. Seriously, who in their right mind would ever think of me as the daughter they never had?

"Jerry, you're full of shit," I said.

"What? Jules, this is not big deal for you. I'm just asking you a small favor."

"Yeah, but what aren't you telling me?"

He sighed. "Look, it's simple," he said. "All you have to do is be nearby when Sarge dies. You make contact with his spirit, you protect him, and you bring him back here. That's all."

"Ah-hah!" I jumped all over that one. "You want me to bring him back here."

"Yeah, what did you think? I want you to grab his spirit and drop it over at Animal Control?"

"So he'll be here, in the house, with you?"

"Yeah, that's the idea," he said, as though this was perfectly reasonable.

It took me a moment to realize that, really, there wasn't anything wrong with this. Sure, there would be another spirit in the house, but it would only be a dog.

"Well, I guess that would be okay," I said, grudgingly, still feeling that somehow I was being tricked. "It's a ghost dog, right? There's no chance he'll poop and pee all over the place."

"He won't actually haunt you, either," Jerry added. "He's very well behaved. Most of the time, you wouldn't even know he's here."

"I suppose I could live with that. What's a little more weirdness in my life?"

"Then you'll do it?" he asked.

But he seemed too eager. I noticed the way he was leaning forward in his seat, like a businessman about to seal a deal that would net him a load of cash. Again, I wondered if I was missing something. I ran through everything in my head, and finally it hit me.

"Wait a second. Wait just a second," I said. "Protect him from what?"

"What?" Jerry said, playing dumb.

"You said you said you needed me to contact his spirit, and protect him. Protect him against what?"

Jerry stared at me for a moment, and then he seemed to sag in his chair.

"Well..." he murmured, but didn't go on.

"Against what?" I demanded, starting to lose my temper again. I hated the idea of a deceptive spirit—if you can't trust a spirit, especially a spirit who in life had been a cop, who can you trust? "Jerry?"

"Okay, there might be a tiny problem," he confessed, holding up his hand, with thumb and index finger almost touching. I would have believed the problem might indeed be tiny, if it weren't for the grimace on his face.

"Jerry, I have my own problems."

"Oh, I know, I know," he said. "And I really wouldn't want to pile my problem on yours. But Sarge means a lot to me, and you're the only... uhm..." He struggled for the right word.

"Freak?" I suggested.

"I wouldn't have said freak. I meant, you're the only—special person I know. You're the only one I know who can do what needs to be done—"

"Lucky me. So protect him from what?" I asked.

But Jerry was going on. "You see the future. You can read peoples' thoughts—"

"Protect him from what, Jerry?" I squeezed in, though he wasn't listening a bit.

"—You move things around with your mind—"

"Jerry."

"—You can control the weather, for crying out loud," he finally finished, having run out of steam. He looked at me with baleful eyes for a moment, and then mumbled, "This won't be something you can't do."

I was baffled. I'd first encountered Jerry when we moved into the house, seven years ago, when I was ten years old. He'd never been troublesome. For the most part, he kept to himself. He never made the walls creak, or caused things to fall off shelves, or rattled windows. He never actually haunted the house, but I sensed that might change.

I studied him closely. He seemed unsettled, lost in a cloud of desperation.

"If I can't do this," I asked, "you're going to be miserable, aren't you?"

"I wouldn't want to be miserable, but yeah, I'd be pretty miserable," he said.

Which meant he would make my life even more miserable than it already was. As much as I hated the idea, I guessed I would have to become—on top of everything else—a dogcatcher, a dead dogcatcher.

