The Ghost and the Goth

11Alona

“Ready?” Killian asked under his breath as we reached the sidewalk leading to the main doors.

“Sure.” I rolled my eyes. He was acting like we were going to war, or something. Whatever. Unless Killian’s dad showed up all dark, twisted, and shadowy again, in which case all bets were off, they were just people. Dead people, but still. I am a people person. Let’s face it, you can’t win popularity contests — which is pretty much what high school is from orientation to graduation — if you don’t know how to work the crowd.

Speaking of which, the crowd was now headed this way, swarming through the doors — literally walking through the glass and metal, of course — shouting and clamoring for Killian.

“Here we go,” he said under his breath.

The spirits surrounded him, elbowing and shouldering me back out of their way.

“Watch it,” I protested, but I doubted anyone even heard me. The noise was unbelievable. All these voices, yelling and pleading, at once.

“You came back. I told you he would—”

“Never said he wouldn’t.”

“One small favor. Please you have to—”

“My granddaughter needs to know that her mother—”

I realized I could no longer see Killian in the middle of all of them. They’d swallowed him up.

“Hey,” I tried. Shouting at them had worked yesterday. “Hey, dead people.” The girl in the fugly pink polka-dot prom dress tossed me a dirty look over her shoulder, but no one else even seemed to notice me.

This could be a problem.

I must confess, I’m not exactly used to being ignored. So, I may have gone a little overboard.

Ducking my head, I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring all the grunts of pain and shouts of protest as I stepped on feet and my elbows connected with rib cages. Killian stood dead center, his shoulders hunched and his eyes closed, looking like he was praying for someone to save him. Well, I didn’t know anything about that, but I knew that I would not stand for these loser-y types pushing me around. Killian shouldn’t have either, not when he had something they wanted. He should have been the one in control, for God’s sake, but whatever. He couldn’t take care of himself, so that left me room to do it for him while he helped me. Everybody wins, I guess.

I spun around to face most of them, putting my back against Killian’s. He stiffened for a second before evidently figuring out it was me. “All right, listen up, freaks.”

“Freaks? What does she mean by—”

“—Suffering from delusions of grandeur.”

“Just ignore her. She doesn’t have any say here.”

This last bit was from my friend, the creepy janitor, who actually tried to shove me away from Killian while he was talking.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” I slapped at his hands. “Killian is mine. Mine, mine, mine. You want something from him, you come to me, first.”

Then the weirdest thing happened. As soon as the words left my mouth, all the ghosts…er, spirits, froze up. They just went totally stiff, no pun intended. Then this blast of wind came out of nowhere and knocked them all back, like they were dresses on a rack. They hovered, wobbling in the wind, about three feet back from us.

I shivered, but the wind didn’t move me. “What is going on?”

Killian didn’t answer.

I elbowed him in the back, and he grunted. “Ouch!”

“I asked you a question. Open your eyes and tell me what’s going on.”

His back moved against mine as he straightened up and looked around. He drew in a sharp breath. “That is so …”

“Weird? Freaky? Utterly random?” I tossed adjectives at him, hoping to keep him talking and explain what we were looking at.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. Except …” He paused.

“Oh, my God,” I snapped, “talking to you is like pulling a backflip into the splits.”

“What?”

“Awkward, painful, and not particularly useful in a routine.” I spun around to face him. “Except what?”

“Yesterday,” he said slowly. “In the hallway. When you got them to back off …”

I frowned, trying to remember. “Yeah, you’re right. This weird breeze totally kicked up from nowhere, but it wasn’t anything like this.” I waved my hand at the stiffened stiffs.

“What did you say?”

I stared at him. “I said, what happened yesterday wasn’t anything like—”

“No, I mean, what did you say yesterday when it happened?” Killian looked like a man with an idea.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. ‘Hey, you dead people, back off ’?”

He looked around as if expecting a wind, but nothing happened. He sighed. “What did you say today? Do you remember that?” he asked with some sarcasm.

I made a face at him. “Bite me.”

“I’m serious. What did you say?”

I rolled my eyes. “Nothing special. You were right there. You heard me.”

“Just …”

“All right, all right. I said that they’d have to come through me to get to you.”

A light wind kicked up again, blowing Killian’s hair back from his face. I held my breath, waiting for it to toss me away like the others, but the air simply flowed around me.

“That is so cool,” he murmured. He looked at me, his pale eyes lit with delight.

I folded my arms across my chest, taking in the frozen faces with a shiver. “Don’t thank me yet. What does it mean?”

He shook his head, turning in a circle to see them all. “I don’t know. I think it might—”

“Second thoughts, Mr. Killian?”

We both spun around to find Brewster striding up the sidewalk, a sullen Jesse McGovern in tow.

“Shit,” Killian muttered. Then in a louder voice, “No, sir, Mr. Brewster.” He looked over at me with a questioning glance.

“What?” I shrugged. “My work here is done. They aren’t going to bother you. Ever again, it looks like.” I frowned. “So, go to class or suspension or whatever. Find me when you’re done, and you can teach me more stuff.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. At the same time, Brewster, now a few feet from us, asked, “Sure of what, Mr. Killian?”

Killian gritted his teeth and started toward the building.

Oddly enough, I felt a little … sad to see him go. Now that he wasn’t being quite so annoying and trying to run away from me, it was kind of nice to have him around, a relief to be not so alone anymore. Even if it was with weird Will Killian. He hadn’t even made me feel bad about what he’d seen at my house.

I edged around the frozen spirits to park myself on one of the wooden benches in the Circle. There was something just a little creepy about standing there by myself in the middle of all of them. Like they were just waiting for something to happen and …

The doors clanked shut behind Killian, and a ripple spread across the spirit crowd. One by one, they broke free of whatever had been holding them … and they all turned toward me. Some of them seemed, perhaps, a little angry. The creepy janitor guy was actually cracking his knuckles in anticipation.

I stood up, surprised to find my knees shaking. Hmmm. “You have to come through me to get to him,” I said quickly.

But … no strange wind, no freezing in place.

“Gladly,” the janitor said, advancing toward me.

I threw my hands up to cover my face and gave a much too girlie shriek. Though, if I’d had a chance to think about it, I would have wondered what they could do to me. I mean, I was already dead.

“What,” a disgusted female voice spoke up, “are you doing?”

I lowered my hands slowly and found them all forming a line, some of them pushing and shoving, but nonetheless, a line with me at the head of it. The polka-dot princess was second behind the janitor and leaning out around him to stare at me.

“Well … what are you doing?” This seemed a reasonable question to ask.

She frowned at me. “Would you rather we take numbers?”

“Huh?”

“No question,” the janitor said, “this one is as stupid as she looks.”

“Hey!”

“Look, honey …” The young man I’d seen in the hallway yesterday with Will, the one in the old-fashioned blue military uniform, stepped out of line. “Save my spot,” he said over his shoulder to a young guy wearing a short stubby tie over his white dress shirt, before he walked toward me. A few boos emanated from the back of the line, but he waved them away. “I ain’t cutting. I’m just trying to help her. All of you shut up.”

He turned to me. “Sweetheart, we all heard you. We have to come through you to get to him.” His voice held tinges of a New York accent, but he looked familiar….

He must have seen me trying to place him, because he offered his hand for a handshake. “Robert Brewster the first.”

I shook his hand automatically. “Brewster as in Principal Brewster?” If the principal was being haunted, that would go a long way in explaining his pissy mood.

He beamed. “That’s my boy.”

“Your son?”

He frowned at me. “My grandson.” He waved a hand at his uniform. “This is World War II. Can’t you tell how old … Oh, forget it. You young people have no sense of history.” He shook his head.

I shrugged.

“None of that’s my point anyway. This is. You volunteered to be his guide, so you tell us how you want to hear from us.”

I stared at him. “I don’t … I don’t understand.”

“Told you. Stupid,” the janitor muttered.

“That’s enough out of you,” Grandpa Brewster said over his shoulder, and the janitor shut up immediately. Then he turned back to me. “Look, I’m sure you’re a real nice girl and you got no idea what you got yourself into back there, but you’re not leaving us any choices or helping us out at all.”

“Sorry?” I offered, still having no idea what he was talking about.

He let out a deep sigh. “Okay, look, let’s just start at the beginning.”

Someone in line groaned.

“Just shut up,” he shouted at them. He rolled his eyes at me. “So impatient, you wouldn’t think they was already dead, right?”

I nodded. It seemed the best thing to do.

“So here it is … We’re all dead and we all have last requests. You with me so far?”

I nodded again.

“There are things that maybe are holding us here, keeping us from moving into the light.”

“Maybe?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We don’t really know. We’re guessing.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. Seemed like kind of a bad thing to guess about, but whatever. I wasn’t doing much better.

“Anyway, it’s pretty rare to find one among the living who can hear and see us, like your boy Will.”

“He’s not my boy,” I protested, and immediately sensed a sudden rise in tension. I looked and found all of them staring at me, as if I were on the verge of denying something important. Shoot. “Okay, he’s mine, like in the ‘he helps me, I help him’ way, but not in the boyfriend/girlfriend way.”

Grandpa Brewster shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Whatever. Point is, you claimed him. He’s yours. So, if we want him to do something for us, we got to go through you. Plain and simple.”

“Go through as in …”

“The line, sweetheart.” He gestured impatiently to the spirits standing behind him. “We’ll all wait for our turn to tell you what we need him to do for us, and then you tell him.” He shook his head. “God almighty, I’m beginning to think that bus scrambled your brains into eternity.”

“Told you,” the janitor muttered.

“Wait, wait.” I held up my hand. “I don’t understand.”

“What a shock,” the janitor said, a little louder.

I switched my attention to him. “You, move to the back of the line.”

His mouth fell open in protest. “You can’t do that.”

“She can and she just did,” Grandpa Brewster pointed out. “Move it.”

Muttering under his breath, the janitor stuffed his hands in his pockets and slouched his way toward the end of the line.

“No calling me bad names,” I yelled after him. Then I turned back to Grandpa Brewster. “So if I have all of this power just because I said Killian is mine, how come one of you didn’t just claim him or whatever before I did?”

A low murmur rose from the line, the spirits whispering and talking among themselves suddenly.

“What?” I asked. “What did I say?”

“None of us knew about him until yesterday,” Grandpa Brewster said, glaring at the people in line over his shoulder. “He was real good at hiding among the others.”

“Okay, but you still had plenty of time to—”

“She deserves to know the truth, Bob,” the pink-polka-dot girl spoke up. Then she gave me an evil gleeful grin. “Nobody claimed him because nobody wants to be what you are.”

“Liesel,” Grandpa Brewster said in a warning voice.

I frowned at her. “Everyone always wants to be what I am. What are you talking about?”

“You’re a spirit guide now. You’re at everyone’s beck and call, but especially his, the medium’s.”

Suddenly, I felt cold all over. I shook my head. “No.”

She sighed impatiently. “Been waking up in strange places lately?”

I stared at her. I hadn’t woken up on the road since yesterday morning. It had been close this morning, but no … I’d found myself inside Killian’s car.

“Wherever he is, that’s where you are, right?” she prodded.

“That doesn’t mean—”

“You tied yourself to him. You’re his guide.” She eyed me with a nasty gleam of amusement. “Has he started calling you yet?”

“What?”

“If he thinks hard enough about you, concentrates on you long enough, poof! You’re dragged away from whatever you were doing, wherever you were, to wherever he is.”

I felt a little sick. Could that be true?

Liesel stared up at the sky, her hand tapping her chin. “What is that phrase the kids use today? Oh, yeah. You’re his bitch, his spirit-world bitch.” She laughed delightedly at her own cleverness.

“Hey, Liesel, you’re looking a little thin today, don’t you think?” I asked. “A little more see-through than usual?”

Her laughter immediately ceased, and she stared down at herself. “No, I’m not … am I? Oh, God. Eric? Eric, where are you?” She wandered out of her place in line, looking for someone else to verify her state of existence.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Grandpa Brewster admonished.

I thought about that for a second. “Your hair looks …great, very healthy,” I called after her.

Grandpa Brewster stared at me.

I shrugged. “It’s the best I could do and still be honest. Besides which, she was being mean first.”

He opened his mouth, as if to protest, and then lifted his shoulders. “Fair enough.”

“So, is what she said true?” I asked.

He hesitated long enough that I didn’t need to hear his answer.

“Forget it,” I said firmly. “I am nobody’s bitch, spirit world or not.”

“I certainly wouldn’t have put it that way,” Grandpa Brewster said. “It’s very disrespectful, but—”

“But nothing. I don’t belong to Killian.”

“You’re denying the connection?” Grandpa Brewster asked casually.

“I …” It dawned on me that if I said yes, they’d probably all sail right past me into the school and begin bugging Killian again. He’d get kicked out of school and then locked up in some nuthouse, and I’d be stuck here forever. Then again, if he liked having a spirit guide well enough, it sounded like I might be stuck here anyway. But he’d promised to help me. The question was, did I believe him?

“Well?” Grandpa Brewster’s impatience showed through.

Looking at it from a purely selfish perspective, if I didn’t help Killian out with these guys, he wouldn’t be able to help me, even if he wanted to. Of course, that didn’t mean he would help me, but he’d seemed pretty willing to do so before, and besides which, even if he changed his mind, I can be very persistent. It’s part of my charm.

“No,” I said finally. “I’m not denying it.”

Groans rose up from the line.

“Oh, just quiet down,” I snapped.

“All right then,” Grandpa Brewster said with a sigh. “Then how do you want us? In a line, first come, first serve? Alphabetically?”

“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head and holding my hands out in front of me in the classic “stop” position. “Just because I’m claiming Killian”—I refused to think of it the other way around—“doesn’t mean I’ve got anything to do with you.”

That shut them up for a second.

“You’d turn your back on your own kind?” Grandpa Brewster asked, astonished.

“None of you are my kind … except possibly her.” I tilted my head toward a pretty blond, pony-tailed girl in a poodle skirt, tapping her saddle shoe impatiently against the sidewalk, about halfway down the line. “If she dressed better.”

“Some of us have waited years, decades even, to say our piece,” Grandpa B.said. “You think we like being stuck here?”

I frowned. Now that he mentioned it … “No, probably not.”

“You’re going to deny us our one chance to make things right for ourselves?” he asked. “People like Will, the special ones, they don’t come along very often.”

I felt a twinge of guilt. No one had mentioned this part of the bodyguard job. “You don’t even know if he can help you. He said he doesn’t know what makes one person get stuck and another get pulled into the light.”

“But you won’t even let us try,” Grandpa Brewster pointed out.

“Why does it have to be me?” I tried to sound petulant instead of whiny. Trust me, there’s a very fine but important difference between the two.

“What are you going to do instead?” Grandpa demanded. “Spy on the living? That gets old real quick.”

“No, I have other things to do. I have a life. An afterlife.”

“Like what?” Grandpa asked, amused. “Knocking stuff down, making scary sounds to frighten the bejesus out of the living?”

“How did you know that?” I demanded.

“Trust me, honey, if anyone has that vindictive look, it’s you.”

“Oh. Thanks?”

“You know pulling those shenanigans will turn you into nothing faster than just about anything else,” Grandpa advised.

“I know that… now.” I plopped back down on the bench, not even taking care to cross my legs just right so the little fat dimple on the side of my left thigh wouldn’t show. I was too depressed. All of this was depressing.

“Help your boy help us,” Grandpa urged. “It’s better than sitting around staring at the living. Besides, it’ll count as a good deed. Maybe you just need a big one to catch their attention upstairs, so they’ll send the light for you.”

I looked up at him. “I thought Liesel said—”

He waved his hand impatiently. “Don’t listen to her. She meets one former spirit guide while she’s stuck with Claire on vacation in Puerto Rico, and she thinks she’s an expert. None of us had ever met one of the ghost-talkers before yesterday. Nobody knows how it works. Everything we know is based on rumors that keep circulating here on this side of things. Plus whatever we see on television.” He shrugged. “You may have a shot to help yourself out, kid. Don’t blow it.”

I sighed. “All right, all right. I’ll try. What do I have to do?”