by Nikki Godwin
Chapter Two
“You tried hooking up with a ghost?” Linzi’s voice is completely serious coming through the earpiece of my cell phone.
“No!” I fall back onto my bed, preparing to explain it to my best friend one more time.
“He was very much alive,” I assure her. “And I was not hooking up with him.”
But now the mystery around Spence Burks has spread outside of my little galaxy and into the universe.
I roll over so I’ll stop forming pictures of drumsticks and stars out of the texture on my ceiling. At this rate, I’ll end up drawing myself into a padded room, and I know I’m not crazy.
“Can you just come over? You’re the only one who actually believes me,” I say.
Linzi makes it to my house in record time and manages to get past my parents without discussing the undead. She grabs the book of corporate families as soon as she gets into my bedroom and flips it directly to page twenty-seven.
“He’s cute,” she says. She stretches out on my bed and looks at me with that same sympathetic face Mom gave me in the kitchen. “You’re positive it’s him?”
“For the millionth time, yes. I’m completely sure. It was him, and he’s not dead, and I’m tired of saying that,” I tell her again. My frustration is about to erupt like a massive volcano.
“No twin brother?” she asks.
“Only child,” I remind her.
“Damn. Guys that cute should come in twos,” Linzi says.
She traces his face on the page with her index finger.
It’s not about his looks, though. Yes, he was cute, and he was fun, and any girl my age would probably fall to pieces over him, but that’s not why I have to find him. He understood everything I’m feeling, everything I want in life that I can’t ever imagine being within my reach. And for once, I felt like it was there, that it was close enough to grab. I’m so sure he’s done it, and I need to know every secret of the trade from a mastermind like him.
“I know! Separated at birth! These things happen, you know. I’ve seen it on talk shows,” Linzi says.
She twists her hair around her finger while she thinks. Her eyes glow with excitement as the thoughts rush through her brain like paper stars realigning across a beautiful galaxy. I already dread hearing her next theory.
“What if,” she begins again. “He went somewhere and something bad happened to him? Like he has amnesia and doesn’t know who he is but somehow he found his way back here, like he’s trying to find his past?”
I shake my head. “He knew his past. He knows what it’s like to feel…”
I stop before I say the word ‘trapped.’
Linzi stares at me waiting for the rest of the sentence.
I inhale and attempt to come up with something other than how he totally came back here for a reason and understands me in a way that even my BFF doesn’t.
“He didn’t want to be found,” I say. “He was too secretive. He knows exactly who he is, and he didn’t want anyone else to know he’s alive.”
“So he faked his death! Ohmygosh, this is so exciting,” Linzi says, her voice changing from a CSI who just cracked the case to a squealing girl in .02 seconds. “So how do we find him?”
I rack my brain for any tiny piece of info he may have slipped last night, but his bases were covered well. He always had a comeback.
“I don’t know. Everything was so off about him. At least we know who he is now, even if he’s supposed to be dead. We can figure out who he was before he died, but I don’t know how to figure out who he is now. And all I have to go on is a stupid paper star,” I say.
“Let’s backtrack the present, not the past,” Linzi says. She stands up and grabs her keys. “C’mon. We’re reliving last night.”
Before we make it to Town Hall, I ask Linzi to stop at the library. It’s foreign land to us, but they have an archive of newspapers, and old newspapers reveal old news. We trace back three years, to the month of April. It’s not hard to find him. He’s all over the front page for a week and a half. SPENCER BURKS STILL MISSING AFTER THREE DAYS. This headline catches my eye first. I skim the details of the article.
Florida. Spring break vacation. Storm. Tides. Lost at sea. Possible drowning. Helicopters. Search crews. Body not found.
“This is unreal,” Linzi whispers.
She puts her newspaper down and scatters the others across the table. The headlines tell the story along the way, from notification that he was missing up to the day that the search and rescue mission became a recovery mission that was eventually called off.
Linzi snaps a few pictures of the newspapers with her cell phone then places them back into the archives. She waits until we’re back in her car before she says anything.
“So he went on vacation with his family, took a swim in the ocean against the weather channel’s warnings, and disappeared, pretending he drowned and was entombed in the ocean’s bottom for the rest of eternity,” she says to her steering wheel.
I close the curtain on all the questions screaming from the theater in my mind. I can’t even begin comprehending how someone who was about to graduate high school could pull off his own death and escape like that. It’d take months of planning and preparation.
“At least we know they never found his body,” I reason aloud.
That’s all the backup I need to convince Linzi that this guy was in the flesh. It’s the only concrete fact I have.
Linzi turns into the parking lot across from Town Hall.
“Why’d he come back?” she asks. She kills the engine.
We sit in silence for a minute before she opens her door, and the car beeps repeatedly until she removes her keys from the ignition. I wish I had an answer. No one goes through that much trouble to die unless he wants to be dead.
“Maybe he wanted to see his parents again,” I say. I slam the car door shut behind me and glance up at Town Hall. “Or to see a glimpse into his old life…or just for old time’s sake.”
“Or maybe his new life isn’t all he thought it’d be,” Linzi says.
I bite my tongue to keep from denying that statement. His life has to be all he wanted it to be. He came back here just to encourage me to chase my forever down, to escape this life that I don’t want for myself. If his life wasn’t all he thought it’d be, he would’ve told me to get that business degree and become a CEO’s slave. He’d have warned me about the sharks and piranhas of the real world and how they’d rip me to shreds.
We climb the large concrete steps leading to the building. Twelve hours ago, an undead guy was with me, and we were breaking out of corporate jail while my flip flops kissed the pavement. Now it feels like years ago.
“Lead the way,” Linzi says.
I step ahead of her and open the door. I secretly hope he’s hiding out inside talking to Solomon Worthington’s portrait. The hallway feels longer than it did last night. The lights interrogate me with every step closer to the party room. The chandelier still hangs, all golden and sparkly, just how Solomon wanted it. I feel his eyes follow me from his portrait as I retrace my steps around the room.
“He was there, right under Solomon,” I say, pointing across the room.
I use my finger as a guide to show Linzi the path he walked from the wall to me. I turn to face her.
“And then he used that opening line about the noose,” I say.
“Charming one, isn’t he?” she says.
She pulls her cell phone from her purse and traces his steps backward. She stops beneath the portrait and snaps a picture of it.
I wish that portrait could speak now. He’d tell me that I’m not crazy and that Spence Burks was here last night. He’d tell me about all the parties before when Spence’s parents dragged him here in a suit and tie and forced him to smile for a great first impression. If anyone could validate what happened last night, it’s Solomon Worthington, and he’s been dead for a century.
Linzi is disappointed when The Lyric d
oesn’t turn up any remnant of last night’s adventure either. No one remembers him…or me for that matter. Linzi pretends she wants to book the cover band for a party, but they refuse to give us their information due to “privacy regulations.” I think it’s really more so due to the fact that Linzi is obviously lying and terrible at it.
I stare at the bricks as we walk back toward Town Hall, envisioning the drumstick click-popping against the surface. Maybe Spence Burks really did come back from the dead for one night. And maybe I really was the only one who could see him. Maybe I am crazy because the only two people who could vouch for me – Spence and Solomon – are dead. I grab my wrist and feel for my pulse just to make sure I’m still alive.
“Where’d you go after this?” Linzi asks.
“Bristow Park,” I say.
I’ve told her this story about twenty times in the last twelve hours, but she acts like my telling her again may help trigger some big chunk of the story I had to have somehow forgotten.
I repeat every sentence from our conversation, as much as I can verbatim anyway, while I twist the little green star in between my fingers. The sun beams down on us while we lie back on the slide, and I attempt to recreate his talk of wishing on stars and good luck.
Linzi sits up and interrupts. “Remind me again why this guy was so damn awesome. He sounds boring. Talking about the stars and luck? Seriously, Haley?”
The truth is that I don’t even know why he was so damn awesome. He was just fearless, open to whatever the world threw at him. He wasn’t worried about his future and college and taking over his parents’ business. He was free, and it’s so rare to ever see someone so free in Fallen Elk Grove. He wasn’t afraid to walk through the night with no destination in mind, just ending up wherever he did, chasing forever down and breathing in ocean air and littering on my childhood dreamland.
“Oh God,” I say, not answering Linzi’s question anywhere other than in my own mind.
I push off the slide and dash toward the trash can. I drop to my knees and run my hand over the grass hoping to find that little wad of paper.
Linzi’s shadow towers over me, erasing the sunlight on the ground like a tidal wave preparing to blast away a kingdom of sandcastles.
“What are you doing? We’re supposed to be retracing step by step,” she says.
I grab the white paper from the shadows. “This!”
Linzi kneels down next to me, asking a million questions with her eyes that I can’t answer because I don’t even know the answers yet.
“He put his gum in it and threw it away last night. But he missed the garbage can and I accused him of littering and he asked if I was going to arrest him because he could post bail,” I say.
My hands are too shaky to unwrap the gum-covered mystery, so Linzi does the honors. Every hope I have of ever seeing him again lies in this little piece of paper. It’s like the key to the universe, and my heart jumps in hopes of it being worth something.
It’s a receipt.
“Stella’s Salon…722 Hawkins Road…Murfreesboro, Tennessee,” Linzi says. “I can’t tell what he bought through the gum.”
“Spence Burks was a blonde. Last night he wasn’t,” I tell her.
It’s another concrete fact that he was disguising himself, that he didn’t want to be found or seen. But why not?
“What the hell was he doing in Tennessee? What’s the deal with this guy?” Linzi asks the questions like I actually know the answers. I add them to my long mental list of things to ask him when I find him.
“We know where he was before he came here,” I say. I don’t know what that means really, but it’s more than I knew last night.
“Too bad life isn’t like TV, where you can find used gum and then hot guys from the crime lab solve all of your problems between five or six commercial breaks,” Linzi says.
“Yeah, really,” I say. “They’d just trace his steps backward then bring him into the station for questioning.”
Linzi crumples the receipt back into a wad and jumps up from the grass. “That’s it, Haley! We’ll trace his steps backward. We know he was at a salon in Tennessee, so maybe the salon can tell us where he was before that. We’ll just rewind the last few days of his life.”
I push off the grass to stand. “We can’t just go to Tennessee,” I remind her.
Asking my parents if we can take a road trip to God-knows-where chasing after an undead college-aged member of the male gender would be on the same level as asking them to cancel my cell phone plan and sell my car.
“Don’t they want you to look into that business program in Nashville?” Linzi asks.
She’s already planning this trip in her head, and it’s too late to stop her.
“Looking into colleges?” I ask.
“Totally,” she says as we leave the park. “This is the only chance you’ll have. Senior year is coming up, and you’ll need to send off applications, so you need to make up your mind. And I’m the friend who so desperately wants to see other parts of the country. They’ll buy it.”
We spend the next two hours scouting colleges online and requesting brochures and welcome packets to be sent to Linzi’s aunt’s post office box.
“We’ll pick them up on our way back into town so our parents will see how much info we collected,” Linzi says.
We print out driving directions from college to college and prepare our coinciding stories for all parental units. Two hours and a few phone calls later, my dad lectures me about financial responsibility and says something about getting a few prepaid debit cards and having the oil changed first. Even when Mom pulls out her extra luggage, it doesn’t fully register that we’ve pulled this off.
“So how are we packing?” Linzi asks from behind me.
I don’t break my stare from the closet. I was actually asking myself the same thing. We have no clue where we’re headed, so weather reports won’t do us any good.
“Pack for summer but take jeans and a jacket just in case,” I say.
As soon as Linzi’s headlights fade from my driveway, I sign online again to dig deeper into Spence and the meaning behind origami stars. Apparently giving someone a jar of these stars is a good luck token, like a four-leaf clover or a rabbit’s foot. I wonder what it means if you just give someone one star. Maybe it was his way of laughing in my face, like “Haley, here’s one star, just to tease you because I know you’ll have zero luck ever finding me again.”
I twirl the star around between my fingertips. He left it behind. He talked about the stars and wishes and good luck. This stupid paper star means something to someone somewhere out there on this crazy place they call planet Earth. I tuck the star into the hidden zipper in my purse. It’s going with me on this forever chasing mission. And one day, I’ll make Spence Burks explain it to me…whenever we find him.
I open a new window in the browser and key in his name. Enough with paper stars. I need to know who he was. There are some things I just can’t say in front of Linzi. To her, this guy is just another “dream kid” – her term for kids who have it all and could have anything they wanted in life but dream of something ridiculous…like being a supermodel or playing professional sports.
Sometimes I wonder what she says about me when I’m not around, if she calls me a dream kid and complains about my ungratefulness that my parents can afford to send me to any college of my choice. What she doesn’t know about dream kids is that we don’t have choices. Spence Burks knew this, and he made the ultimate choice: life or death.
The internet articles still don’t tell me about the dream-kid-turned-forever-chaser I met last night. They tell me about his death, the memorial service two towns over, and the candlelight vigil held on the Florida beach when the recovery mission was finally called off. I read all the nostalgic remarks made by his classmates about how he died just short of graduating high school and starting his life. He’d already received acceptance letters to three colleges and planned to pursue a career a
s a lawyer. I almost wish they could see him now. Lawyers don’t walk around with paper stars, and they definitely don’t wear Converse.
