Give Up The Ghost

by Megan Crewe

  Why shouldn’t he shut them out, if he wanted to? It didn’t mean there was anything wrong with him.

  “Maybe he’s just not interested in talking to you,” I said. “Ever think of that?”

  “But . . . we’re his friends. Why would he want us to be freaking out—unless—” Her voice hardened. “It’s because of you, isn’t it? This is your idea.”

  I started to laugh, but it choked on the way out. “Right. This has to be my fault. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the bunch of you being rotten people who go around backstabbing each other and ripping people up and tarring people’s lockers just for being friendly with someone. He’s not blind.”

  There was a pause. “What do you mean, tarring people’s lockers?”

  “Oh, come on. Yesterday morning. Matti had to show I couldn’t just push him around, and I’m sure the rest of you were cheering him on.”

  “I don’t know anything about that!” Danielle protested. “So that’s why—I thought he looked really smug, but I didn’t know why, and if Jordana had, she’d have told me, and Leon and Flo didn’t seem to know what was going on. Whatever he did, it was just Matti, not the rest of us.”

  “Sure, whatever,” I said. “Even if that’s true, it’s just one example. Tim doesn’t even know about that—I didn’t tell him. He was already fed up with you guys the first time he talked to me. I’m not surprised he’s decided to cut you off. I’m surprised it took him this long.”

  “What? Why? I mean, I know things have been kind of awkward since his mom died, but what do you expect, it’s not like—”

  “You’ll have to ask him when he’s willing to talk to you,” I said. “It’s got nothing to do with me. So, now that we’ve figured that out, can I go?”

  “Wait.” She sighed. “I’m sorry Matti pulled whatever crap he did on you. I’m sorry I assumed this was your fault. Can you look past that stuff for a second?”

  “What do you want me to see?”

  “I called mostly because we—well, some of us—wanted you to try to talk to Tim. To see what’s going on. Nothing’s changed that.”

  “Hold on,” I said, frowning at the bedspread. “You all hate me, but now you want me to go be friends with Tim? What the hell is that?”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Danielle said, but there was no anger in her voice, only a terse weariness. “I don’t know what’s been going on exactly, but there’s obviously something with you and him. Something big enough that all of a sudden he’s spending more time with you than the rest of us combined. Even if he won’t talk to us, we thought he might talk to you. Say whatever you want to him. Just make sure he’s okay. That’s all we want to know.”

  Believe me, I thought, remembering how fragile he’d looked yesterday morning, I’d like to know that, too.

  “I can’t promise anything,” I said.

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  The phone clicked, and the dial tone beeped in my ear. She’d hung up on me. I should have done that to her in the first place. I slammed the receiver down and shoved the phone to the back of the desk. It figured. Tim had been falling apart since his mom died, and it was only when he shut down completely that his “friends” finally noticed.

  “Who was that?” Paige asked from above, and I almost flinched off the bed. I’d forgotten she was there.

  “What are you doing up there?” I said, craning my neck. She floated past me and sat on the desk with her legs crossed.

  “Listening,” she said. “I didn’t want to distract you. It sounded pretty intense. So who was it?”

  “Danielle. It was Danielle.” Now that her voice wasn’t in my ear, the conversation seemed unreal. But here was Paige interrogating me about it, so obviously I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. It might have taken them a long time, but Tim’s crowd must be awfully worried now, if they were resorting to calling me. What if something really had happened to him?

  “Danielle?” Paige said, jerking me back to the present. She frowned. “You sounded so mad. I mean, I know you don’t really hang out with her anymore, but . . . weren’t you two friends? What’s going on?”

  I stared at her. Of course. We’d never talked about Danielle. She didn’t know. Because Danielle had shut me out of her life well before Paige had started taking this new interest in mine, and it wasn’t exactly a topic I was going to bring up of my own accord.

  “We’re not friends anymore,” I said. “That’s why we don’t hang out. It’s been a long time; it’s not a big deal now.”

  “But what happened?” She leaned toward me, tipped so far she’d have fallen off the desk if gravity applied to her. “You guys had a fight? Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. The day’s frustration, from worrying about Tim, from fighting with Mom, from trying to keep ahead of Danielle, it all started to swell inside me. But it wasn’t really at Paige, I knew that. I clamped down on it and tried to shove it away. “Look, I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  But Paige had to go into big sister mode. “You get so angry at people, Cassie,” she said. “I bet if you talked to her, told her you were sorry, she’d want to be friends again.”

  “Why are you so sure it was my fault?” I mashed my hands into the pillow. What was with the world today? “She ditched me, Paige. She was horrible. You have no idea. I wouldn’t want to be friends again, even if she by some miracle got down on her knees and begged me to forgive her.”

  “She always seemed nice when she came over,” Paige said doubtfully. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a misunderstanding?”

  “There’s not much room to misunderstand things when your best friend starts treating you like dirt,” I said. “I don’t care how nice she seemed. She’s awful. She made the whole school hate me.”

  “Why didn’t I know that?”

  My voice cracked. “Because you were too busy with your own stuff. You made it seem like the most boring chore ever when Mom asked you to spend time with me. I wanted to tell you about Danielle. I wanted to talk to you about everything.”

  I broke off and closed my eyes, pressing the cool back of my hand against my eyelids. I was not going to cry again.

  “You know that for something really important I’d have listened,” Paige said. “You should have told me. I’d have tried to help. I know I would have.”

  I shrugged. It didn’t matter anymore. If Paige now was anything like Paige then, maybe she really would have listened. It was too late to find out. “You never really gave me a chance,” I said lamely.

  “Maybe you didn’t give me a chance. You can’t expect people just to know things if you don’t try to tell them.”

  “I know,” I said. I knew I shouldn’t have hated her back then. I knew I’d shut her out in the end, as much as she’d done to me. “I should have talked to you. And I know you’d rather it was Mom you could talk to now.” A wave of emotion washed over me. My stomach felt like it was full of nails, heavy and prickling and hard. I stood up, wavering before I caught my balance. Here I was, moping over four-year-old misjudgments, when Tim was fading away somewhere out there.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I just—I need to get out of here for a while.”

  “Cassie,” Paige said, but I turned away and stumbled out the door. Down the stairs, plunging my feet into my sneakers, then through the kitchen and out the back door. The first thing I saw was my bike. I grabbed it and jumped on.

  CHAPTER

  17

  I didn’t stop pedaling until I reached the corner of Conway and Nassau, what seemed like a million years later. My head was throbbing. Braking by the corner, I pressed the heels of my hands into my forehead, waiting while my breath slowed. It wouldn’t help Tim if I showed up looking like the world was ending.

  A nervous twinge fluttered in my chest, but I ignored it. In the midst of her ranting, Danielle had made a good point. Tim had come to me over everyone else. Even if I wasn’t quite what he needed, even if I couldn’t make up for hi
s mom disappearing—I had to think maybe he’d want to see me. To know I at least wanted him to be all right.

  Pushing off again, I rode the last few blocks to Tim’s house at a slightly less panicked pace. When I got there, I rode up on the sidewalk and dropped the bike on his lawn. My heart sank. The Oldsmobile was gone. The space on the street in front of his house was vacant, and the driveway, too. I snuck around back to check the garage. The squat brown building hardly looked big enough for the Olds to fit. Peering through one of the dirty windows, I saw dust floating in a streak of sunlight, a couple of paint cans, a rusty tool box, a rake, and the bare cement floor.

  The chances of Tim’s car being gone without Tim in it, I figured, were about as slim as the chances of Danielle falling passionately in love with Mr. Minopoplis.

  Just in case, I climbed up the porch steps and pressed the doorbell. As I waited for the response I didn’t think would come, I glanced in through the door’s window. Nothing moved inside. The house was empty. But there was something standing in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  I squinted through the shadows. It was a wine bottle. Its base was ringed with dark liquid. Otherwise it was as empty as the house.

  My breath stuck in my throat. The image formed in my mind, as clear as if I was seeing it: Tim sitting there on the floor just a couple hours ago, while I was sitting in my chair in class, the level of the wine dropping gradually from neck to base with every gulp. And then he’d headed out for a drive. The way he drove even when he was sober, he’d be lucky if he wasn’t bent around a tree, or crushed into the side of another car, or trapped at the bottom of the lake.

  Maybe he was.

  My stomach turned over as if I’d been the one drinking too much. I sank down on the top step and covered my eyes. He was such an idiot. What was I supposed to do now? Bike around the city looking for him? He could be anywhere.

  Did it matter? I was too worried not to try.

  I swung onto my bike and headed down Nassau. When I reached the end of the street, I looked both ways and decided to work my way down toward the lake. I’d been through a lot of the area to the north already.

  Little kids were racing along the sidewalks on scooters and tricycles, shouting to each other over the rattling wheels. The sun beamed through the deep green leaves of late spring. It was one of those days that’s supposed to feel like nothing bad could possibly happen. My pulse was all over the place, one second racing, the next almost stopping as I turned the corner, bracing myself to see a blue car crumpled in the street. Just another line of SUVs—not an Olds in sight. My heart started thudding again.

  No one could say I wasn’t thorough. I wove carefully up and down the streets, and it was past dinnertime when I caught my first whiff of the beach breeze. People were barbecuing on the park grills, and the air tasted like charcoal and freshly seared burgers. My stomach grumbled. The sun was dipping down, almost touching the roofs of the two-story houses, and my calves were starting to ache from pedaling.

  Just a few more streets, and I’d hit the lake. I had no idea where I’d go after that.

  I’d almost reached it when I heard the honking. A stretched-out beeeeeeeep screeched through the rows of houses, and I flinched in my seat. Somewhere down near the beach, tires squealed as they jerked off course. Then another beep-beep-beeeeeeeep. A man bellowed, “Get out of the road, buddy!”

  Veering around the next corner, I headed straight for the lake. The back of my neck prickled as I scanned the streets. The honking got louder. Abruptly, the road ended and I found myself on Lakeside Avenue, the last road between the city and the park. I braked, half standing on the pedals to see over the tops of the parked cars.

  A guy was standing in the middle of the road with his back to me, just up Lakeside. I didn’t see the Olds anywhere, but the guy was too tall, too pale, and too skinny to be anyone but Tim. He waved at the cars as they beeped and swerved around him, stumbled to the side, caught himself, and swayed to the other. “Piss off, you maniac!” someone yelled from a sports car as it whipped past him. Tim’s hair rippled.

  The traffic lulled for a second, and I dashed to the other side of the street, where the curb was clear. Dumping the bike, I ran up the sidewalk.

  “Tim!” I shouted. “Tim!” Over and over. I didn’t know what else to say. If I’d stopped, I think my throat would have burst and I’d have just screamed.

  The fifth or sixth time I called his name, he swiveled around. I stopped on the sidewalk across from him, hovering on the edge. He looked at me, and his mouth slid into a crooked smile. “Well, here’s Cass,” he said. Then, to the ancient sedan puttering around him, “That’s Cass.” The woman driver gave him a frightened look and sped away. “Why doesn’t anyone want to play?” he said, throwing his arms in the air.

  “Tim,” I said. My breath rasped between my words. “Could you . . . come over here? For a second?”

  Miraculously, he came. At the curb, he staggered and I caught his arm. His palms were scratched and flecked with gravel. Sometime earlier, there hadn’t been anyone to catch him. He looked at me sideways, his head drifting.

  “What are you doing?” I said, my voice shrill. “Are you crazy? You could have gotten killed.”

  Tim yanked his arm away. “What’s it to you?”

  “What are you talking about? Look, snap out of it, all right? This is just stupid.”

  “You said I could have gotten killed,” he said, slowly. “What would that matter to you?”

  As if I’d spent the last two hours looking for him so we could debate my right to speak to him.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped. “I don’t want you to die. You think I need more dead people in my life? Y’know, I bet someone’s called the police on you. Why don’t we go—”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  The guy chases me around the city all week, and now that I actually want to do something for him, I’ve got cooties. Perfect.

  He made like he was going to walk back onto the road, so I stepped in his way. “Sorry, I’m not giving you a choice.”

  For a long moment, he just stared at me like I had antennae poking out of my head. Then he blew out a breath. “This,” he said, “is very annoying. All I am trying to do is commune with the cars. Don’t know why you’re here. Never seemed to want to go anywhere I was before. I wanted . . . I thought we could be friends, or something, but you’ve made it perfectly clear you’ve got better things to do. Besides, you told me things can’t go back, she won’t come back—so I’m going to her. Why the hell are you stopping me? Trying to make my life even more miserable?”

  I sputtered before I could speak. “You’ll be a lot more miserable if one of those cars runs you over. And I never said I had ‘better things’—why would you even . . .”

  The words jumbled in my head as what he’d said sunk in. All right, so I’d given him a hard time about a lot of things. What did he expect? Did he not know that I was doing ten times more for him than I’d done for anyone alive in years? I wasn’t talking to anyone else at all. I wasn’t contacting anyone else’s dead relatives for them. I certainly wasn’t racing all over the city trying to save them. If I wasn’t avoiding them, I was ripping them to pieces. I could have had the whole school laughing at him, embarrassed him beyond belief, couldn’t I? But I hadn’t.

  So how could he seriously think I hated him?

  “You see?” Tim said. “I told you.” He turned away and slogged up the sidewalk like he was walking through mud. It wasn’t hard to catch up.

  What had Paige said? You can’t expect people to know things if you don’t tell them. Was that all this was about—I had to spell it out for him?

  Well, it was worth a try. My current tactics were getting me nowhere.

  “All right,” I said, keeping to the side as he wavered to and fro, “so I wasn’t the friendliest person ever. But what about everything else?”

  “What else?”

  “I helped you
find your mom and talk to her. Three times.”

  “So I’d stop bugging you,” Tim said. He lurched around a strolling couple and whacked his shoulder on a telephone pole. He didn’t even wince.

  “That’s not the only reason. And I didn’t tell anyone at school about the crazy stuff you were doing.”

  “Because you thought I’d tell them what you do.”

  And he accused me of being difficult. “What about this?” I said. “I’m here, aren’t I? I went by your house because I was worried about you. And when I saw your car was gone, I was worried enough that I went looking for you. Why would I do that if I wanted nothing to do with you?”

  He paused, leaning on the outer railing of the beach parking lot. On the far side, the Oldsmobile sprawled over three parking spots. I guessed it was lucky the car had made it into the lot at all.

  Tim swayed and sat down on the railing, his face damp with sweat. His skin looked translucent, traces of red and blue showing through where the blood vessels brushed close to the surface. His jaw clenched. He twisted, suddenly, and leaned over the corner of the lot. I glanced away, squeezing my eyes shut. His breath hitched, and vomit splattered the pavement.

  I didn’t look until I heard him straightening up. He slumped forward, his arms resting on his knees, but a light flush of color had come back to his cheeks. I stood there, awkward, as he stared at the sidewalk. When he finally glanced up, his gaze seemed steadier.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice rough. “Why are you here?”

  “I told you,” I said. “I was worried. Danielle called me saying everyone was freaking out and no one could find you. She asked me to try to get ahold of you. You know how I feel about Danielle—if I wasn’t worried enough on my own, there’s no way I’d have done something for her. But I was worried. I wanted to know you were okay.”