Give Up The Ghost

by Megan Crewe

  The door thudded closed, and there was only silence behind me. Not a peep from Tim.

  I dug my fingernails into my palms and forced myself to keep walking.

  CHAPTER

  15

  All day, between running to classes and trying to clean up my locker, I kept an eye out for that fair head. I didn’t see it once. He must have gone home, I told myself. I hoped he was taking the time off to actually recover, and not . . . I didn’t want to think about what else he might be doing.

  It wasn’t as if I had a shortage of things to distract myself with. When I saw Matti, my hands balled into fists, but I kept my cool and simply ignored him. In a couple weeks he would graduate and I’d never have to see him again, anyway. I watched Danielle and Paul in the cafeteria, sitting at opposite ends of the table—Danielle giggling with Jordana, Paul wedged between Matti and Flo and darting looks around the column where he must have been able to see the glint of her hair—and I didn’t feel remotely victorious. Paul had been cheating. I’d let Danielle know. Now they were broken up. It probably would have happened the same way without me, just a little later on. It hadn’t changed what she’d done, way back when. It hadn’t changed anything.

  The next morning, I walked through the parking lot to check for the baby-blue Oldsmobile. It wasn’t there. I bit my lip and went into the school.

  Norris was waiting by the math office, as usual. I sat down with my back to my open locker, and he squatted down beside me. There was enough time before class that I’d have shot the breeze with him for a bit, but every time I opened my mouth, I saw the parking lot and the empty spot where Tim’s car should have been.

  “Norris,” I said, “could you do me a favor?”

  Norris wiggled his eyebrows. “Will I regret it if I say yes?”

  “Well, I—” My face got hot.

  “Come on, Cass,” Norris said. “Like I’ve got something better to do? What d’ya need?”

  “It’s going to sound stupid,” I said. He shrugged. “I don’t know if you remember, but I helped Tim, the VP, out a little, and now—If you could go over to his house, check in on him, just for a couple minutes, so I know . . .” I trailed off. What exactly did I want to know? What would he think, if he knew I was spying on him?

  But I had to. If I didn’t, not knowing how he was doing was going to drive me crazy.

  “You got something on him? Must be good.”

  “No. It’s a long story. He’s been kind of messed up, and he hasn’t been in school. I just want to know he’s all right. Can you do it? You don’t have to.”

  Norris snorted. “Don’t worry about it. I’m on it.”

  I told him the address as the bell rang. He slipped away through the lockers before I’d even closed mine. Watching him go, my stomach twisted. I wished I hadn’t eaten quite so many pieces of bacon at breakfast.

  In chemistry class, Miss Taisley had us watch this crazy video about chemical bonding, where all the elements were cartoon people and they chummed up together to form complex substances. I kept expecting it to turn into a giant periodic-table orgy. The lights were off, so when Norris seeped through the door, glowing faintly, I noticed him right away.

  He glided over beside my desk, rubbing his hands together. “Mission completed. You want to hear about it now?”

  I nodded, pretending to be absorbed by the video.

  “Found the guy in the living room,” Norris said. “He was lying on the couch. I thought he was asleep at first. And then he called for his mom, but no one came. I didn’t see anyone else home. Guess he’s sick.”

  I motioned to my notebook, which had more doodles than notes in it, and wrote, Was he drinking?

  “You mean booze? I didn’t see any. I guess he could have been quiet drunk. Most of the guys I knew, they got wild when they were pissed.”

  It sounded like Tim wasn’t much worse than he’d been on the weekend. Anytime now, his dad would get home, and even if he was a loser he’d have to see something was wrong with Tim and do something about it. I exhaled slowly.

  Thank you, I wrote.

  “Anytime,” Norris said. He hunkered down on the edge of the desk and watched the rest of the video with me, giving his running commentary about how ridiculous it was.

  Walking home that afternoon, I spotted a car in our driveway. Mom had driven to her latest assignment, but she wasn’t due back until tomorrow. Coming up the walk, I peered through the side window. That was her pleather makeup bag lying on the passenger seat.

  As I straightened up, Mom whisked out the door. The collar of her blouse stuck up on one side and her part was uneven. When she strode down the steps, the hems of her slacks fluttered to reveal one gray sock, one denim blue. All was not well in the world of Mom.

  “Inside, Cassie,” she said flatly, brushing past me on her way to the trunk. “Sit yourself down at the dining room table and stay there. We’re going to talk.”

  That didn’t sound promising. She’d only just gotten home—what could she possibly have to bug me about? Sighing under my breath, I trudged inside.

  She made me wait. I slouched in the chair twiddling my thumbs while she lugged her wheeled suitcase upstairs: thump thump thump thump thump. Water ran in the bathroom. She swept by the doorway, her hair fixed, and rattled ice cubes in the kitchen. A key clicked in the liquor cabinet door.

  Mom never drank before dinner. We hadn’t even started talking and this was already shaping up to be a catastrophic conversation.

  I started weighing the consequences of making a dash for the door. Before I got very far, she breezed into the dining room with all the grace of a hurricane. She set down her drink—her favorite, a Long Island iced tea—and sat with her elbows on the table, her hands clasped in front of her. I watched the ice drift in her glass. It made me think of Tim, Tim and his freezer gin and his stupid juice bottle.

  I looked up at Mom and scowled. “You came home early just to talk to me?” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

  Her mouth tightened, the skin creasing at the corners. “I came home early because the magazine cut my assignment short,” she said. “It just happens that the phone was ringing when I came in the door. Your guidance counselor had a few things to say.”

  Mr. Gerry—that weasel.

  “He was particularly concerned about your attendance and your academics,” Mom continued. “Apparently you’ve been skipping a lot of classes.”

  “That’s not true. I haven’t missed any since”—since he talked to me about it last week, I was going to say, and then it hit me. I’d missed half of biology yesterday to have that chat with Tim. I slumped back in the chair.

  “Mm-hm,” Mom said, as if I’d given everything away. “I don’t want to hear any excuses. The year’s almost over. You’ve got exams coming up. You’ll have the whole summer to avoid school—so do it then.”

  I threw out the words without thinking. “And you’re a good one to talk about avoiding things.”

  Mom’s shoulders stiffened. “What did you say?”

  I’d gone too far. I knew it. Even with the frustration she’d stirred up simmering inside me, I knew it wasn’t worth a fight. So I said, “I’m sorry, never mind,” and shoved back my chair to stand up. If Mom hadn’t pushed it, not another word would have come out.

  “Hold it right there,” she said, pointing a finger at me. Her hand shook. “I wasn’t done yet. To begin with, this attitude of yours. It’s disrespectful and spiteful and I want it to stop now.”

  If she knew, if she had any idea what I’d been going through. . . . I got up anyway, holding it in. I pushed the chair in and stood behind it, gripping the back as if I needed it to keep me on the ground. “Attitude?”

  “Yes. This, right now. Playing dumb. Sneaking off. Ignoring us. Don’t think your father hasn’t noticed, too. You may be sixteen, but I’m still your mother, and I’d like a hello when I get home and a civil response when I ask you something.”

  How convenient for her to forget that half
the time she skipped right over hello and went straight to harassing me. My jaw clenched.

  “Maybe if you did more than pick on me, I’d want to talk to you.”

  “Pick on you?” Her hands leapt into the air and started waving around. “This isn’t picking on you, Cassie. This is discussion and discipline. That’s my job.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So it’s also your job to point out everything that’s wrong with me and bug me all the time because I’m not exactly the way you want, I guess.”

  “Cassie.” Her breath hissed coming out. “I’m trying to look out for you. If you go around acting like this your whole life, you’ll never make any friends. The colleges won’t want you. No one will hire you for a job. You’re painting yourself into a horrible, lonely corner. Look at you. You went to school in those grungy clothes, your hair a mess, always frowning. You’ve got to get out there, put your best face forward, give things a try. Live.”

  Be like Paige. Be the daughter she really wanted. If it were me dead and Paige standing here, she’d never have had to give a speech like this.

  My anger boiled over in a rush of words. “And this thing you’re doing, that’s living? You never stay anywhere for more than a week, not even here. All you do is complain about the places you went to, about the food that’s left in the fridge, about how I’m not good enough.”

  Her face turned sickly white and her mouth fell open, but I was blundering ahead too fast to stop. The momentum wouldn’t even let me slow down.

  “It’s Paige,” I said. “You think I don’t know? You pretend like it doesn’t bother you anymore, put on your hairspray and your makeup and your perfect clothes, but it’s so obvious. It bothers you so much you can’t stand to stay here with me and Dad. Where are your friends? Where’s your life? You’re so busy trying not to think about Paige being dead that you might as well be dead, too.”

  “Cassie—” she tried.

  “No. Shut up. You don’t know anything. Maybe the magazine will dump you. You run away from everything. Who wants to hire someone like that? At least I’m not pretending.”

  I ripped my hands off the chair, my face hot, my eyes hotter. I bolted out of the dining room and up the stairs, knowing that Mom would screech my name and haul me down to pound a lecture to end all lectures into me.

  Except she didn’t. Somehow, I made it to my room unsummoned. Sinking onto the bed, I wiped at my eyes and my cheeks. They just got wetter. My heartbeat was hitting my ribs like a hammer. I wondered if blood could break through bone. GIRL KILLED BY HER OWN PULSE. There was a headline Flo’d die for.

  I rolled over, staring at the ceiling as the tears streaked down the sides of my face and into my hair. I’d said too much. I shouldn’t have. . . . But it wouldn’t matter. Mom would just gloss over it like everything else. She’d leave on another trip, and when she came back, it’d be like I’d never said anything. Otherwise she might have to think about what I was saying. As if she’d even consider that

  1. I might have a good reason for missing those classes.

  2. I might have still had friends if everyone hadn’t decided, through no fault of my own, that they wanted nothing to do with me.

  3. I might be living better than Paige had. I mean, so far I’d managed not to drown myself. Didn’t that count for something?

  As I rolled over to bury my face in the pillow, Paige’s voice wisped from down the hall. “Cassie!” I wiped at my eyes and sat up just as she slipped through the door.

  “Cassie?” she said, gliding over to the edge of the bed. She was twisting her hair around all the fingers of her right hand. If she hadn’t been dead and exempt from certain cosmetic laws like roots growing in and nail polish chipping, she’d have ended up with a head full of knots.

  She sat very still, but the glow inside her trembled. Guilt rose in my throat. I hadn’t thought about her overhearing Mom and me fighting. I’d said those things about Paige. . . .

  I coughed, hoping I no longer had that I’ve-just-been-crying rasp in my voice. “What’s up?”

  Paige looked down at her hair and her fingers in it and pulled them free. The strands rained over her shoulder and veiled her face.

  “Mom’s crying,” she said. “What happened? Is she okay?”

  Mom crying? I couldn’t imagine it. I hadn’t seen a tear in her eye since Paige’s funeral.

  “I said some stuff to her,” I said, flopping down on my side. “She was laying into me, so I laid it on back.”

  “Oh, Cassie.” Paige sighed her big-sisterly sigh, as if she hadn’t shouted at Mom enough times, over boyfriends and which parties she could go to and how late she could stay up: I hate you! You don’t understand anything!

  The only difference was, I meant what I’d said.

  “You must have said something really awful,” Paige was saying. “I’ve never seen her this upset. Why don’t you apologize?”

  If Paige hadn’t heard the whole thing, I wasn’t going to explain. “I just told her she’s away too much,” I said. “And she complains too much. And that’s true, so why should I apologize? I was mad at her. People say stuff. It happens.”

  “I still think you’d better apologize. She looks really hurt.”

  Maybe Mom ought to feel a little hurt. How did she think I’d felt, left at home all those times, knowing that every time she came back it would only be to remind me how I wasn’t living up to her expectations?

  I was about to say something like that when the phone started to ring.

  CHAPTER

  16

  A strange thing happened: I picked up the phone. It was probably the first time I’d answered a ring since back in junior high when kids started crank calling and then stopped calling altogether. My arm, without consulting my brain, assumed it was Tim and snatched up the receiver as if the fate of the world might depend on what he had to say.

  The last voice I expected to hear was Danielle’s.

  “Cassie?” she said, before the hello had finished leaving my mouth, and déjà vu washed over me, throwing me back through time to the beginning of seventh grade, before the sneers and the notes and everything else, when a call from Danielle was as ordinary as a pop quiz in math class. I couldn’t speak.

  “Cassie? That is you, isn’t it?” she said. I wrenched myself back to the present. The last time I’d spoken to Danielle, she’d been telling me how pathetic I was. It figured she’d have held on to my phone number all this time anyway, just in case she needed it.

  “Yes,” I snapped, more sharply than I meant to. I wrapped my free arm around my belly, holding myself steady.

  There was a faint, childish babbling as one of her younger brothers ran by. I wondered if she’d called just to give me the silent treatment.

  “Look,” she said finally, “I don’t want to talk to you either.”

  “There’s a real easy solution for that. Don’t dial the number.”

  “Well, some of us know there are more important things than how much you dislike somebody.”

  “Great.” I scooted back on the bed so I could lean against the headboard. “So tell me about this important thing already, and we can stop talking.”

  She paused, exhaling. “When was the last time you saw Tim?”

  What, was she trying to determine how many claws I’d stuck in him?

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “Yesterday,” she repeated. “So, that was, like, after school?”

  “No, first period. What does it matter?”

  She ignored my question. “But he didn’t come to school yesterday.”

  “I don’t hallucinate much,” I said. “That’s where I saw him.”

  “He wasn’t in class. No one saw him.” She stopped, and I think we both realized the same thing. Tim had come yesterday just to see me. To Danielle, probably, it was just another piece of evidence against me. It couldn’t possibly have happened unless I’d voodooed him into coming.

  “You haven’t seen him since then?” she asked.
r />   “You said the last time. That was it.” I figured secondhand seeing by way of dead people didn’t count.

  “You haven’t even talked to him? On the phone?”

  “You know,” I said, “maybe you could tell me when it became your business how and when I talk to anyone.”

  “When Tim disappeared off the face of the planet.” Her voice wavered. “So have you?”

  “No.” I frowned at the phone. “What do you mean, disappeared? He’s just skipping school, isn’t he?”

  “If that was it, you think I’d be calling you about it?”

  No. I was surprised she’d bothered with me, no matter what kind of trouble she thought he was in.

  “Isn’t he at home?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “Well, as far as I know, that’s where he’d be. Are we done?”

  “Cassie . . . you don’t get it, do you?” I could almost hear her nibbling on her lower lip, one of Danielle’s few bad habits. “We’ve been trying to get ahold of him since Sunday. His cell phone’s been turned off the whole time. No one’s picking up the home line. Jordana and Leon and I even went by and knocked on the door yesterday afternoon, and no one answered.”

  “He said his dad was away this week,” I offered. “Maybe he’s enjoying being alone.”

  “But he wouldn’t just ignore everything. Leon’s known him for years—he said he’s never seen him do anything like this. We left messages telling him we’re worried. It’s not like him. Something’s wrong.”

  Her panic crept in through my ear and infected my brain. A lot could have happened in the six hours since Norris had checked in on Tim. What if he’d tripped down the stairs and broken all his bones? What if he’d fallen asleep in the bathtub and started breathing water?

  Wait. A memory tugged at my thoughts, followed by a cool certainty. Tim had told me he’d turned off his cell because he didn’t want to talk—said he didn’t believe they really cared, muttered about what jerks his friends were being. Danielle was right, it wasn’t like him. Because Tim wasn’t like himself anymore. He’d started to see how his friends really were.