Liv, Forever

by Amy Talkington

  Gabe didn’t buy it. “And then what?”

  “I paused at the well, to catch my breath. And I guess I was hit from behind.”

  “By Malcolm.”

  “No. It wasn’t him.” I wanted to tell him what Malcolm had said—that he loved me—but I couldn’t. It was too private. I scrolled through my memory trying to think about who might want to kill me and why. Suddenly I saw flashes of a face—glowering at me as I arrived on the steps late to the tour, a look of disgust as I danced with Malcolm, laughing at me in Old Homestead, hiding in the shadows as Malcolm and I arrived back at my dorm or ate in the Tuck Shop. It was so obvious.

  “Abigail Steers!” I knew it was her. “She’s hated me since the moment I interrupted her tour. And then Malcolm’s interest just made it worse. There’s something seriously wrong with her. I knew it.”

  Gabe waved a hand dismissively. “She doesn’t have it in her. Getting her hands dirty like …” He stopped abruptly when he saw something past me. I looked over. It was Headmaster Thorton, leading a team of police officers with sniffing dogs.

  The headmaster scowled. He’d just seen Gabe talking—talking to nobody. “Mr. Nichols, do you not have a shift you should be working at present?” he called.

  “I do, but …” He shook his head, dangling his long hair over his face.

  One of the dogs started to growl, perhaps sensing me. Sensing something.

  “Tell them to check Abigail! Tell them!” I yelled.

  Gabe ignored me, but I needed them to know. At that moment, I didn’t care if they all thought he was crazy. They had to know. “Tell them to look in the well and that it was Abigail Steers! You have to tell them! Now!”

  Then I turned and saw a girl had appeared, standing on a gravestone silently beside me. It was the same girl I’d seen here that Headmaster Holiday night, the one like Warhol’s Jackie O. I was certain of it. Only now she didn’t look alive at all. She looked faint and translucent like the others. But her wrists were still cut open, and her skirt and jacket were now covered in dried blood. She recognized me.

  “You,” she said as she started toward me. I screamed and lurched away.

  Gabe shouted, “Stop!”

  “To whom are you speaking, Mr. Nichols?”

  “No one,” Gabe snarled.

  The headmaster exchanged a look with the police. “I’d like for you to go to the infirmary, Mr. Nichols. Immediately. I’ll inform Nurse Cobbs of your pending arrival.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gabe stood and shuffled away.

  “I’ll meet you there, but first I want to go with these guys and see what they find,” I said. His lips tightened in anger. All eyes were still on him, including the police dogs. “I’m sorry, Gabe. I won’t do that again.”

  THE DOGS BARKED DOWN the well as if a cat were in there. But it wasn’t a cat. It was my dead body. While crime scene investigators dusted the roughhewn stone, other officers designed a contraption to hoist my corpse up the deep, narrow hole.

  My body was cold and dull. Plump with death. My eyes were clouded, but I looked almost serene. My dark hair spread around my head, kind of like that famous painting of Ophelia floating in the river. Funny, I’d made so many self-portraits and yet I’d never really looked at myself and realized I was actually kind of pretty.

  A female officer inspected me and quickly ascertained I’d been hit from behind, knocked out, and I’d died from the fall. She jotted a note that read “blunt trauma to the head.”

  The dusters found some fingerprints. They were delighted. I jumped up, also excited, until I realized they were probably Gabe’s. I had to do something. I pushed their makeshift table with all my might, but it did nothing except gently shake as if from wind. I recoiled, palms stinging as if I’d touched a hot stove, and collapsed on the ground, sapped from the effort, powerless as they sealed up evidence.

  As I sat there with my head slumped, recovering, I looked down and noticed my body—my ghost body—looked different. It was slightly less opaque than it had been before. The fall wind stirred around me. I heard a gentle murmur from the trees nearby. “Preserve your strength, girl,” a female voice warned.

  I looked up, trying to locate the voice, then heard feet approaching through the pines behind me, leaves crunching. That same crunch I’d heard last night. I feared it might be the bloody girl, so I backed away from the well and hid behind a tree.

  It wasn’t her. It was Malcolm. His face was drawn and haggard. Dark circles under red eyes. He exchanged a few words with the headmaster then pushed past into the crime scene. And that’s when he saw me—my body, at least—stretched out on the damp ground next to the well.

  He recoiled, shocked. He’d had no idea I was dead. Perhaps he’d heard I was missing and had gone to look for me. But this was clearly not what he’d expected to find. He made a sound that wasn’t quite human and gathered his strength to look at me again. His eyes searched my body as if looking for a sign of life or a clue of some kind. When he realized there was none—no breath, no life, no clues to anything—sadness set in. But his eyes weren’t just sad, they were guilty.

  “It wasn’t your fault!” I yelled at him, pointlessly.

  He kneeled on the ground next to my body and kissed my cheek. I felt my cheeks—my ghost cheeks—start to quiver as they always did when I was about to cry. But, again, there were no tears.

  The crime scene people were all over him of course, telling him to move away from the body. But he resisted and quickly whispered some words to the dead me that I couldn’t hear. I felt sick. What a lousy ghost, not even close enough to hear what her first love, her only love, tells her dead body.

  The crime people gently picked him up. One of the officers approached him, notepad in hand, and asked his name (“Malcolm Astor”). His relation to me (“friend”). Where he was last night (“in my dorm”). A lie. Obviously. So he wouldn’t get in trouble, right? Of course that was why.

  Then they sent him away. They had work to do, they said. And, as desperately as I wanted to go with Malcolm, I had work to do, too. As I walked away, I glanced back toward Old Homestead. In one of the second-story windows, I saw the red-headed girl from the weeping willow tree—the one with pin curls and severed neck—standing with a dark figure. But when they saw me looking, they quickly shifted out of view.

  I WAITED OUTSIDE THE entrance to the infirmary, but nobody came. I knew from my visit there on that first day of school that it wasn’t a popular destination. Unless somebody opened the door, I wasn’t going anywhere.

  Stuck outside, I thought about my capabilities, reviewing everything that had happened. If someone was able to walk through me, surely I could walk through something, too. It might hurt, but I was fairly certain it was possible if I used some force.

  I tried to push myself through the thick metal doors but immediately fell back. The pain, that all-encompassing burning—it was unlike anything I’d experienced while alive. I collapsed on the steps. My energy and capabilities were clearly limited, but I didn’t quite understand in what way. I waited until a student with a nasty cough arrived and followed her through the doors as she was buzzed in.

  Over the years, plenty of kids must have died there, so I assumed it’d be chock full of people like me. As I wandered down the hall looking for Gabe, I braced myself for an apparition. But there were none. It was oddly quiet. I found Gabe in an examination room. Alone. Door open. He sat up suddenly, so I knew he saw me. It proved my theory that he could see me wherever someone had died—there had certainly been death here.

  “Gabe, I’m so sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, you lost it. You just died, so you have a pretty decent excuse.”

  I smiled, noticing he was hooked up to some monitor. “What are they doing to you?”

  “Psych profile. Don’t worry. I’ll pass. But you need to go. If they hear this, I’m toast.”

  Right then, Nurse Cobbs entered, startling me. I withdrew to the corner of the room. “Yes, Mr. Nichols? Something abou
t toast?”

  Gabe was unfazed. “Oh, yeah, I’m starving. Desperately need toast.”

  “Saltines should suffice, I think.”

  “Sure, salt me up, corn on the Cobbs.”

  She was so obviously annoyed with him that it was clear she thought he was sane. So I suspected he’d be okay and get out of there soon enough. He’d had experience with this, after all.

  Luckily, the door to Skellenger was propped open. I entered and found a swarm of police officers interviewing students in the common room. Abigail’s door was closed, so I stopped to listen to what Sloan, Abigail’s best friend, was saying.

  “She just seemed really depressed. She had no friends. She didn’t fit in. She was clearly, you know, struggling.”

  “I never even spoke to you! What are you talking about?” I snapped.

  They let her go as another officer knocked on Abigail’s door. After a long pause, Abigail shambled out, looking a mess, like she’d been crying. While the officers walked her across the common room, she exchanged a surreptitious glance and nod with Sloan.

  “Wait! Didn’t you guys see that?! She’s covering for her!” Obviously there was no point, but it made me feel better to speak.

  Abigail sat down for her interview and proceeded to give a tearful, Academy Award–worthy speech that detailed our nascent friendship, my desperation (which she continually tried to counsel), and her heartbreak over my loss. When pressed, she confessed that, yes, I had given warning signs. “I’ll live the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t pick up on them and do something.” At that point she began sobbing so hard they had to help her back to her room.

  I watched with a strange mix of horror, amusement, and disbelief. She was so convincing I practically believed her. It wasn’t until her door closed that I realized I’d meant to follow her. Instead, I was stuck in the common room.

  Another officer, a woman, appeared in the hallway, carrying my most recent sketchbook. “I think you guys need to see this.”

  She opened it up to my most recent drawing—an angel, falling—and underneath it read, I cannot take it anymore. Goodbye.

  I had made the sketch, but I hadn’t written those words.

  “A suicide note,” the main guy said.

  “Another Wicky suicide.” She raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s been a while. What, ten years, maybe?”

  The other guy nodded. “Give or take.”

  “No!” I screamed. “I didn’t write that! Look at the other pages! It’s not my handwriting!”

  The female officer closed the book. I rushed over and tried to grab it. I could feel the cover, but I couldn’t move it. I tried to harness all my energy. But this time the tips of my fingers went right through it, and I fell backward, fingertips searing. I had to stop doing that. The agony wasn’t worth it.

  From the floor, I watched as they labeled the book, wrapped it in plastic, and whisked it away.

  I WENT TO GABE’S dorm, unsure of what to do next. I followed a lacrosse player through the main entrance and waited outside his room until he returned. I began to understand why that dead girl used the word “lingering.” That’s what it felt like, hanging around in a place where you no longer belonged, if you ever belonged at all. As I lingered, I heard the chatter about me. The “strange” girl, the “dirty” girl, the “weirdo” Astor was “slumming with,” his “charity case.” That last one stung only because I had wondered that myself. Of all the girls at Wickham Hall, why would he pick me? Was he just trying to make a point and defy his parents, or did he really like me? I had wondered all that constantly. But whenever I saw him, all that paranoid chatter evaporated. Nobody was that good a faker. Well, except maybe Abigail.

  I also learned a new Wicky term no one had shared with me yet: “Scolly,” for scholarship student. How original. Apparently everyone knew exactly who was on scholarship. We were the minority, the lower class—the 1 percent. Pretty ironic because in the rest of the world—the real world—we were the 99 percent. But everyone knows, majority or not, it’s the real-world 1 percent that rules. Here at Wickham Hall and everywhere else.

  Gabe finally came along and opened his door. I slipped in with him and followed him to his bed, where he collapsed, head slumped over the side.

  “I’m here. Just so you know, before you do something weird or embarrassing.”

  “Figured.” His voice was monotone.

  “Are you okay?”

  “They gave me some electroshock. And some medicine.”

  “Oh no!” I was desperate. I felt my lifeline swinging out of my grasp.

  Then he cackled. “Just kidding. I mean, they gave me something, but I didn’t take it.” He pulled two pills from his pocket and tossed them in the garbage.

  “Don’t do that,” I snapped.

  “Oh, come on. This is the first time I’ve been able to joke about this … whatever it is I have, whatever’s wrong with me. Consider it progress.”

  “Well, we have work to do. Abigail lied to the cops, told them I was suicidal and I’d told her so. And she doctored my journal.”

  “No shit,” he said, with a touch of awe.

  “Don’t be impressed.”

  He looked up, toward the sound of my voice. “I truly didn’t think she had it in her. What about Astor? What’d he say?”

  I didn’t want to send Gabe off on a tangent, so I ignored the question. “You need to go to Headmaster Thorton about Abigail. Now!”

  “They think I’m crazy!” he shouted back. “They gave me fifty milligrams of Olanzapine, not messing around. They won’t listen to me.”

  “Well, you have to.”

  His shoulders sagged, and he sighed. “I know.”

  THE NEXT MORNING—AT least I think it was the next morning, but it’s hard to say because time is as fractured as a Cubist painting when you’re lingering—Wickham Hall held a morning Chapel in my memory. Of course I went. Who would give up the chance to attend her own memorial? But I was unsure what to expect. How could this school possibly eulogize me? I’d only been here six weeks. I hardly knew anyone. It wasn’t exactly going to be the kind of cryfest one likes to imagine. I entered the silent, somber building, intending to wander through, find Abigail, do some research. But I didn’t get past Malcolm.

  Malcolm sat toward the back, away from everyone. Word had spread of our blooming romance. Several Third Formers kept glancing at him, whispering. Abigail and Kent approached together, Kent’s perma-smile tastefully subdued. They gave Malcolm big hugs and invited him to sit with them. But he wanted to be by himself. He was a faded being, slumped over in the hard pew. It would’ve made a beautiful painting—a Vermeer or Velasquez—but it was unbearable to see in person.

  As the dreary organ music began, Ms. Benson entered and swept over to Malcolm. She didn’t say a word but wrapped her tiny arms around him, enclosing him in her kaftan. I saw his chest heave from behind. I desperately wanted to tell him I was still there; I was okay. But I wasn’t okay. And I couldn’t tell him anything.

  I wasn’t really listening or paying attention to the service. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was my actual funeral. It only hit me when Headmaster Thorton mentioned my casket. I moved up to the front to see it, placed right at the pulpit. Closed, thank God. And there were my parents! They’d come all this way. They sat front row and center. My mother looked like a ghost herself—dark hollow eyes, pale skin. My father was even more stoic than usual, but my mother’s body shook with silent sobs. They looked so small and out of place.

  Being in front of everyone, I was instinctively uncomfortable, insecure. I had to remind myself I was invisible. No one could see me. No one.

  While the minister, whom I’d never laid eyes on, extolled on the goodness of my heart, my joy for living, my artistic spirit, I turned to take in the crowd. Most of the kids looked squirmy and bored. I couldn’t blame them. Only Malcolm looked devastated.

  When the service was over, my parents walked with the pallbearers, dour g
rown-ups I’d never seen before. Were they from the school? Or perhaps at Wickham Hall they got pallbearers for hire. The casket was loaded into a hearse, and my parents started to get into the limousine. Suddenly I realized I might never see them again. I hadn’t thought about that. There had been too many other things to think about. I wasn’t ready to never see them again. I hadn’t even said goodbye. On instinct, I jumped into the limousine with them.

  As I sat into the car, I heard a girl’s voice shriek, “Don’t go!” But before I could see who it was, that man in the black suit—the very man who’d driven me to Wickham Hall—slammed the door behind us.

  My best friend in the fifth grade had told me she sometimes cried herself to sleep thinking about how sad her parents would be if she died. I’d always wanted to say I cried myself to sleep thinking about how not sad my parents would be if I died. But I never told her. I’d never told anybody those feelings, because they were too true. Or so I’d believed. Now I saw my parents were far sadder than I ever would have imagined. My mother lost it when the door closed. She yelled to no one in particular, “I knew she shouldn’t have come to this place with you rich people!” My father put his arm around her shoulder, silently nodding in agreement, fighting back tears. I thought they’d wanted to get rid of me. Maybe I had meant more to them than I knew. Maybe our disconnection had all been my fault. Maybe they had loved me all along.

  And suddenly, for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the sadness of my own death. There were no tears, but I wept, feeling my parents’ pain. Feeling Malcolm’s pain. And most of all, regretting I’d never let myself love them or anyone. I’d spent all those years feeling sorry for myself, feeling unloved, when really it was my fault—at least partly. How stupid. What a waste.

  I started to feel weak and unusual, foggy almost. I fought to compose myself. Maybe ghosts weren’t supposed to cry. Obviously I needed to learn about what I could and couldn’t do now. I needed to start paying attention so I could figure out this new world. But then I looked down and saw my limbs were fading away. Rapidly. As we got closer to the school’s gate, parts of me actually started to disappear. Evaporate. Even my mind felt weak, as if I were alive but short on oxygen. And I realized what that girl had been trying to tell me: I was bound to Wickham Hall. I had to get out of that car.