lobe up to where her ear touched her scalp. One of those earrings was a small silver hoop that matched the three in my left ear in virtually the same position — we got them at the same time. We’d been friends since freshman year — back when her name was April, her hair was blond, and she was the better student — so she knew the score with Brewster even if she didn’t know why.
I kept my gaze pointed down at my backpack while I pulled out the Brit lit textbook and my folder. We’d learned, the hard way, that Mrs. Pederson wasn’t as likely to catch you talking in class if she didn’t see you looking at each other. “Same old,” I said.
That wasn’t exactly true. Grandpa Brewster stood about a foot and a half off my right elbow, glowering at me, and the other dead in the room were taking notice.
In every room full of humans, you have about half as many dead. Some are associated with particular people, some are associated with a particular place, and some are just wanderers. In Brit lit, there were only about seven or eight on a regular basis. Most of them stayed tucked back out of the way — they hated the sensation of being walked through — and they didn’t usually cause a ruckus. That would change, rather quickly, though, if they found out someone could hear and see them.
In class today, we had a few grandfathers and grandmothers — I could only tell because of the clothing styles: out-of-date military uniforms, June Cleaver wide-and-puffy skirts with stiletto heels, and really short and wide ties on the men wearing suits. When people die naturally — of old age or whatever — and their energy stays here, that energy usually appears in the form of how the people thought of themselves. No one ever thinks of themselves as old, so they usually revert back to their early twenties, and the clothing changes, too.
At the front of the room, you had Liesel Marks, Mrs. Pederson’s high school best friend, and Liesel’s boyfriend, Eric. I hadn’t yet managed to catch Eric’s last name. Liesel did most of the talking. I wasn’t even quite sure why Eric was still hanging around. He seemed bored most of the time. Liesel and Eric had died in a car accident sometime in the late seventies while on their way home from the prom, hence her long polka-dot dress and his blue tuxedo. The ghosts of people who’d died violently and/or unexpectedly were essentially stuck in their moment of death.
From what I’d gathered during Liesel’s incessant rambling, Liesel had ditched plans with Claire, Mrs. Pederson, to go to the prom with Eric, a boy Claire had liked herself. Now, she was convinced that those two things, along with the sex she’d had with him in the backseat, had damned her to this in-between place until Claire forgave her.
Jackson Montgomery, however, was tied to the school rather than any particular person. He’d died unexpectedly on the basketball court here at school in the early eighties, thanks to one of those hidden heart defects you sometimes hear about on the news. He’d been a star forward, leading the team to the state finals when he fell to the floor in the middle of the deciding game. No defibrillators on-site back in those days. He’d died and the team lost, but Jackson, or Jay, didn’t seem to be aware of either of those things. Today, like every other day, he occupied an empty desk, his feet tapping against the floor in his eagerness to be called to the gym for the pep rally before that last game.
And, of course, we had Grandpa Brewster. “You can’t ignore me forever. I saw what you can do with my own eyes,” he said far too loudly.
I did my best not to wince. Damn Brewster for taking away Marcie.
One of the young-looking grandfathers fired a glare at Grandpa. “Hey, buddy, you mind keeping it down over there? My granddaughter’s trying to learn here.”
“She can’t hear me. Hellooooo?” Grandpa B. cupped his hands and shouted at the girl — Jennifer Meyer, one of Alona Dare’s cheerleading cronies, as a matter of fact. Of course, she didn’t even blink. If anything, she looked like she was about to doze off.
“Stop that,” Jennifer’s grandfather ordered. He was wearing a suit and one of those goofy-looking short ties — he looked like a mobster out of an old movie.
Grandpa B.ignored him and turned back to face me. “Do you see what I have to put up with, kid? Just do this one favor for me, and I can leave this way station to hell.” He glared over his shoulder at Jennifer’s grandfather, who, surprisingly, responded by flipping him the bird.
It sounded good, easy even, but experience had taught me otherwise. Half the time, the dead didn’t even know why they were still hanging around. Just because he was eager to deliver messages to his son and grandson was no guarantee that he’d be free afterward. Actually, it might be the opposite. The few times I’d witnessed people “moving on,” it had only been after doing or admitting something they’d put off as long as possible. Even in death, people were in denial.
I stared resolutely toward the front of the room, trying to concentrate on Mrs. Pederson.
“Some say that Shakespeare didn’t write all of these plays,” she droned on.
“You want to go visit Lil this afternoon?” Joonie whispered from the corner of her mouth.
“It’s only Thursday,” I said without thinking. For the last eight months, we’d gone to the hospital on Friday — the only day my mom worked the afternoon shift at the diner and therefore wouldn’t freak when I didn’t come home right away.
Joonie twisted around in her seat, her bright blue eyes flashing with anger. “You have a problem with going more than once a week?”
“Don’t take none of that attitude from her,” Grandpa advised over my shoulder.
I caught myself shaking my head at him and forced myself to stop. “Of course not,” I told Joonie, taken aback a little by her sudden fury. “It’s just—”
“… Isn’t that right, Ms. Travis?” Mrs. Pederson came to stand at the head of our aisle, glaring down at us.
“Yeah,” Joonie answered sullenly.
“Yes, what?” Mrs. Pederson taunted.
“
A few people snickered.
Mrs. Pederson’s mouth pursed, and she twirled her finger in the air — the sign most of us would associate with saying “big deal” in a sarcastic manner. Only in here it meant “turn around.”
Once, Joonie would have rolled her eyes at me and we would have laughed about it, but now she just turned away from me in disgust and flopped back in her seat.
I waited until Mrs. Pederson moved on, her eyes focused on some other part of the room. “Joon,” I whispered.
She ignored me, fumbling to pull her battered book bag onto her lap.
“Come on …” I pleaded.
She ducked her head and dug around in her bag, resolutely pretending I didn’t exist.
“She won’t talk to you, but I will,” Grandpa B. offered.
Great. At the rate things were going with the few friends I had left, basically Joonie, I might have to take him up on that.
Before Joonie had morphed into the mass of black clothes and bad attitude she was currently, she’d been the weird girl who refused to shower after gym class, whose clothes didn’t quite match, and whose hair stuck up in odd places, like she’d never bothered to brush it before leaving the house in the morning. She had two older sisters — one a doctor and one with a full scholarship to some snooty women’s college on the East Coast — who could do no wrong. Joonie never measured up, and her father, an ultraconservative Baptist minister in town, always made that very clear.
Back then, I’d been pretty much the same guy I was now — the weirdo often caught muttering to himself or flopping on the floor in some kind of bizarre seizure. Then, at the end of my freshman year, when my dad … did what he did, that only made things worse, in every way imaginable.
In the beginning, Joonie and I had eaten together, walked to class, and partnered on projects together, because that meant we weren’t alone. Now we were friends. We still didn’t have that much in common, but our friendship worked. At least, it used to.
That changed when Lily moved here. Lily Turner had lived in some little town in southern Indiana until halfway through her sophomore year when her mom got a job transfer here. She’s a line manager for one of the
