reason. “You’re not sick, Killian. You’re troubled, maybe, and desperate for attention anyway you can get it, including manipulating your mother and digging through my trash to find out about my personal life. But you are not sick.”
I rolled my eyes. Why did people always think it was the garbage? Like they wouldn’t have noticed someone headfirst in one of their trash cans at the curb. I couldn’t remember how many times I’d had this argument. “What could you have possibly thrown away that would tell me your father is gay and—”
“You think you’re so clever. It’s my job to teach you that you aren’t, prepare you for the real world.” He chucked my now full backpack at me, but I caught it before it slammed into my gut.
“What if I’m telling the truth? Did you ever consider that?”
“It’s just a bunch of nonsense you’ve sold to that quack your mother takes you to.”
Actually, Dr. Miller had diagnosed me as schizophrenic — a real disease that was in the medical books and everything — but that wasn’t what was wrong with me. The voices I heard and the things I saw … they were real, even though no one else could see them. As far as I knew, medicine didn’t recognize that condition. Popular culture did, thanks to TV shows like
“We’re done here.” Brewster stepped out from behind his desk and jerked his door open. “Get to class.”
As much as I hated being in his office, it was safer here than the hallway or even the classrooms. The fewer living people in the room, the fewer dead follow. In here I only had Grandpa B. to deal with, but out there, I’d be surrounded, engulfed, drowning in a sea of people dying to be heard. One of them in particular also seemed willing to kill me to get his point, whatever it was, across.
The thought of confronting him without Marcie or anything else to serve as a distraction made my palms damp with sweat. If he found me here and now, exposed like this, I’d be lucky if I ended up in the psych ward.
“Look, I only have a few weeks left here.” Focusing on a splotch of white on the nubbly carpeting where someone had obviously tried to bleach out a stain, I forced the words out, keeping my gaze down. I couldn’t stand to see him gloating. “I want to be out of here as much as you want me gone. Just let me have my music back. Please.”
“Means that much to you, hmm?” His highly polished black shoes, within my range of vision, rocked back on their heels and then forward again.
“Yes—” I grimaced and forced the next word out “—sir.”
“Good. Then the consequences of going without will hold some significance for you.”
I jerked my gaze up from the floor to stare at him in shock. “Bastard.”
“Watch it, kid,” Grandpa Brewster muttered next to my ear.
An arrogant smile spread across Brewster’s face. Without taking his gaze from me, he called to the outer office again. “Mrs. Piaget, set Mr. Killian up with an after-school detention as well.”
“Oh … okay,” came the distant and faintly dismayed reply.
He gestured to the open doorway. “Time to collect your winnings, sport.”
In the process of hitching my backpack over my shoulders again, I stopped dead. Of all the stupid little names he could have chosen … “Don’t call me that.”
“What?” Brewster looked confused for a second before understanding dawned, along with an evil gleam in his eye. Never give a bully more ammunition, I know, but I couldn’t let that one go. I just couldn’t.
“What’s wrong with sport, sport?” Triumph rang in his voice. He’d found a weapon to get under my skin, and he wielded it with glee.
“Don’t.”
“Why not … sport?”
I could have told him the truth — that had been my father’s nickname for me, and hearing it from him with such disdain and condescension made me want to beat his face in. But that would have only given him more to work with. I could also have gone the human rights way — I’m a person with a name, use it — but he wouldn’t care about that. So, instead I went for the more direct route.
“Don’t call me that, or I’ll tell you things that’ll make you wish to God you’d turned your service weapon on yourself that night instead of chucking it in the Sangamon River.”
His mouth worked helplessly, but no words emerged.
Brewster had nearly offed himself thirty-some years ago, a few years after he’d come back from Vietnam, a young man who’d seen and done too much in a jungle half a world away. He eventually chucked his gun into the river instead, embarrassed about the fact that he’d even thought about suicide — a quitter’s way out. His grandfather — dead only a couple of years at that point — had been right beside him the whole time. The dead see everything, man, whether you want them to or not, and they tell a lot of it to me, even if they don’t know I’m listening.
“That’s nothing you should be talking about, kid.” Grandpa B. sounded alarmed.
I ignored him and pushed past Brewster to collect my pass, detention slip, and a sympathetic smile from Mrs. Piaget in the outer office.
I was opening the door to the main hall before Brewster recovered enough to emerge from his office, eyes wild, hands clenched at his sides.
“Let’s see how you survive the rest of the year without your special privileges, you little freak,” he spat at me, but he didn’t come any closer. Good enough for me.
“Bob!” Mrs. Piaget turned to stare at him.
Ha. It would be a miracle if I could make it an hour. But at least, when they carried me out, he wouldn’t be calling me sport. I nodded. “You’re on.”
3
Alona
The surface beneath me felt way harder than my bed and nowhere near soft enough to be a cloud. I reached out a hand without opening my eyes, and my fingers brushed over … was that gravel?
Opening my eyes, I found myself — where else? — just to the left of the yellow line on Henderson. Not a dream, not heaven, just right back where I’d started from. Dead in the middle of the road.
I sat up, swallowing the urge to start crying again. I mean, clearly I was trapped in hell, right? Doomed to live on, unseen and unheard, while my best friend makes out, goes to college with, and eventually marries my boyfriend. Just the thought of it made me want to curl up in a ball right there in the road.
So I did, resting my cheek against the warming asphalt. What, like I had somewhere else to be? Like someone would see me? Then I remembered how many times I’d seen hick guys spitting tobacco out the car window on their way to school — gross! — and I moved to the curb.
Behind me, the tennis courts filled with the sounds of life, people laughing, tennis balls bouncing, and the chain-link fence clanking. I turned around, startled. It was Mrs. Higgins’s first-hour gym class — I used to see them trooping across the softball field to the courts when I was in government and staring out the window in utter boredom, wishing I was anywhere but there.
It was halfway through first hour, already? This was not the way things usually worked. For the last three days, whenever I’d gotten tired — yeah, that still happened — I’d made my way home, curled up on the couch in my dad’s study, and closed my eyes. Then, presto. When I’d opened my eyes it was 7:00 a.m. again — I could tell by the buses going by — and I was on the road. Literally. It was like some giant reset button got pressed every day.
But this time … I didn’t know what to think. I’d never been “reset” in the middle of the morning before. Of course, I’d never disappeared before, either. I shivered. Where exactly had I gone? I couldn’t remember. Did it matter? Not really. I was still stuck here, that much was clear. Stuck here and helpless.
I stared past the tennis courts to the window where my government class went on without me. Now I would have killed for the chance to be bored by Mr. Klopinski. To be alive. To take Misty down in front of the entire caf.
