I pictured the scene. The blood. The horror of it. People screaming.
The police officer stood towering over me and asked again, “Are you Galactic Shade Griffin?”
I kept my voice steady. “Yes.”
“Come with me.”
He and his partner led me into Principal Lafferty’s office.
The Principal smiled at me which seemed odd, considering how much trouble I must be in. “Would you like a soda, Shade?”
Huh? What? OK, that made up my mind. Lafferty was just plain weird. He flirted with my mom. He offered me soda when the police showed up to arrest me.
Well, no sense in wasting a rare opportunity. Either the amulet or the red tights had given me superhero control over fate. That might not last forever. “Can I have a Coke?”
Principal Lafferty replied, “Diet or regular?”
“Regular?” It came out as a question. I suppose I was testing fate.
Principal Lafferty buzzed his secretary on the phone. “Sophia, please bring me a Coca-Cola, regular, poured over a glass of ice.”
When he hung up, he turned to me and said, “These police officers have some questions for you.”
Mrs. Sophia Nelson knocked on the door. The Principal handed me a cold fizzing glass of Coke.
The police officer said, “Anne Marie Green is missing. Her parents and several witnesses report that she was last seen trick-or-treating with you.”
“Annie! She went missing? No, no, no!” I started to cry and shake. This was totally out of character for me. I never cried. I rarely showed emotion. I bottled it up and released it in the blood of cutting. Emotion was in my blood; it was never on display. The release of emotion through blood allowed me control, not the willy-nilly nature of tears.
I felt a stream of liquid run down my cheeks. I tasted salt on my lips. I looked up at the muscled officer. His facial expression blurred a bit in my vision. I couldn’t read him.
I was completely vulnerable. I hated it.
The second policeman—a shorter, less muscled guy with red hair, freckles, the palest skin and light blue eyes—placed a hand on my shoulder. “We just want to know the details of last night, to see if we can find her.”
I gave them all the details I knew. I left out the part about my abuse of Leotard Girl’s laser beam light, as that had nothing to do with Annie’s disappearance. Well, not unless the group of kids I had pissed off beat up Annie on her way home.
I put that thought right out of my mind. I had to stay focused, not let my imagination run away with itself. What was that thing I learned in science class? Oh yeah, Occam’s Razor. When you have two competing theories, it’s best to use the more simple one, not the most outlandish one.
The more simple ... and, in this case, the most horrifying ... one was that Annie got kidnapped on her way home.
I told the police officer, “It was so dark when she left my house to go home. I should have stopped her. I should have offered to let her stay overnight at my house. I get so embarrassed by my mom, I didn’t want her to see nights at my house or my mom the next morning.”
I didn’t realize it as I volunteered information, but I had probably said too much about my mother. Police officers make notes about everything, not just the issue at hand. And Principal Lafferty started looking at me real funny. Then I realized: my mom had a job at his school. Or used to have. Who knew what would happen after I opened my big fat mouth.
Well, the important thing was getting Annie back. “Do you think you can find her?”
The muscular police officer answered, “We’re going to put everything we’ve got into solving her case. Her father’s an influential member of our community, a civil-minded businessman who’s contributed a great deal to our police force, our local hospital and fire department. You don’t get people like that in your community every day.”
So, that’s how it is. Her family was rich, so people cared about Annie. My family was poor and on the periphery of the community, so I wondered if anyone other than my mom would care enough to search, should I go missing. And if she had been on a bender, would my mom sober up in time for my trace to still be warm? Probably not.
Thank God for my amulet. I felt it grow warm against my chest.
The policemen ended their interrogation. After they told the Principal they’d keep in touch and left his office, Principal Lafferty gave me time to finish my soda. He told me how sorry he was about Annie. He asked me to report to him anything I might hear that might possibly be related to her disappearance. “Don’t hold back if any new information seems insignificant. We should let the police decide what’s relevant and what’s not. That’s their job. They’re the professionals in this case. We’re all just amateurs. OK?”
“OK.” I finished my Coke, just to stall as long as possible before heading off to class.
As I walked down the hallway, I got tons of weird looks, stares, people pointing and whispering, like I couldn’t guess what they were saying.
Just when I had started to blend in, to be recognized as one of the successful students, Art Director for The Tiger’s Den, artist for The Tiger’s Tale.
Oh, no. My heart leapt into my throat. No one would ever trust me again in The Tiger’s Den. No one would confide anything there ever again. At least not as long as I worked there.
If I was asked to leave, my life was over. I seriously could not go back to being marginalized, to sitting on the sidelines once again while everyone else had actual roles in the school I was attending. I could not go back to being a loser, to being invisible at best, a joke at worst. I’d come so far.
Thanks to Annie.
Tears welled up in my eyes. I wiped them away with the sleeve of my sweater.
After school, I went straight home. I told everyone at the newspaper and forum that I didn’t feel well, that I’d work on November and December artwork from home. They seemed pleased enough with that. I suppose I looked motivated, getting a jump on holiday artwork and all. Technically, it was November 1; but we had decided to keep up the Welcome to Our Haunted House theme until the first full week before Thanksgiving vacation, since it was drawing in so many kids talking about serious issues as well as silly stuff. The haunted house theme had been a kind of watershed moment in making the forum a popular part of the school.
I was fooling myself. Everyone knew about Annie and the police officers. I’m pretty sure they knew I wasn’t physically ill, although Kailee seemed to understand how devastated I felt and everyone seemed genuinely impressed that I planned to get started on the artwork right after Halloween and after everything that had happened.
When I got home, I went straight up to my attic bedroom.
I didn’t care how far I’d come. I got out the bowl and knife from their hiding place in my nightstand. I pushed up the sleeve of my sweater. I took the knife and cut a nice straight line across the inside of my arm.
Blood, sweet blood, dripped down my arm. I held my arm out over the bowl, watched droplets fall into it. Ping. Ping. Ping. I imagined such sound accompanying their descent, like rain upon a window. The bloodletting. The letting out of strong emotion, the letting go, release of all that threatened my sanity.
“Owwwww!”
I flung the knife down and tore off my sweater. I grabbed the necklace and pulled the amulet away from my skin. It was glowing red-hot.
A voice came from my cell phone. “I cannot let you harm yourself.”
Brandon! That was Brandon’s voice!
I screamed at him, “You are not the boss of me! Get out of my room!”
He started to laugh. “Actually, it’s my room. You’ve taken over my room. I could haunt you and scare you to death until you finally leave, if I wanted to. It’s not like that’s never been done before.”
I started laughing despite myself.
Then I gave him the cold shoulder.
I washed off my arm and stuck a piece of gauze over the cut with tape, so that I wouldn’t get blood on my sweater. I cleaned up
the bowl and knife. I cursed the blood mark on my quilt from where I had thrown the knife. I scrubbed it out with a washcloth and cold water. I put my sweater back on. I took off the amulet, even though it had cooled, because I resented being controlled like that.
Brandon tried to speak to me a couple of times, but gave up when I refused to answer him.
When I sat back down on my bed, holding the amulet in my hands and gazing down at it, trying to decide what to do with it, Brandon started the gemstone to pulsing and sent the following message scrolled across it in black letters: “I’m sorry. Can we talk now?”
God. He was like every other boy I knew: inept in relationships with girls, then calling them up or texting them to make amends.
I smiled in spite of myself. This was ridiculous. Brandon the Ghost was using the amulet like a cell phone. I wondered if I could “text” back on the gemstone and decided to ask him. I spoke into the air, “Yes, we can talk now. I have some questions for you.”
Almost instantaneously, Brandon’s foggy shape appeared. He walked over to my window seat ... his window seat, our window seat, whatever. He walked over to the window seat, sat down on one of the gray cushions and folded his legs underneath him. He looked comfortable.
I spoke first, “Do you know what a cell phone is?”
“Kind of. I’ve seen you use yours a lot, so I researched them a bit. You communicate with them, right?”
I answered, “Yeah. And it seems you can do the same with the amulet.”
“I can. It’s limited, though, in the number of ways you can communicate with it.”
I glowered at him. “One way in which I want you to stop communicating is by making that amulet get hot. What are you trying to do? Scar me?”
“It won’t scar you. It doesn’t work like that. I can make it get hot when you’re harming yourself or when I want to get your attention to tell you something.” Brandon paused. “And, by the way, since when do you have a thing against scars? When I first met you, you had quite a few scars on your body ... which I removed by healing methods from my side of the afterlife, just to let you know.”
I didn’t know whether to be furious or thankful. “Well, I was glad to see those scars go away. Tattooing my body with self-inflicted injuries isn’t my goal in cutting. But you have no right to do stuff like that to me without my permission. It’s still my body. Understand?”
“I suppose. Can I tell you a story?”
I stared at him. Something was up. He seemed upset, intense. “Sure. Go ahead.”
Brandon stretched his legs out in front of him. I made a mental note to ask him later why he did that. Did his legs need stretching? Was that just an old habit from when he was alive? Or was it for some other reason that helped his ghost form?
Brandon launched into his story, “I’m not immune to suffering, you know.”
That’s how he began.
From there, he went on to tell me things that were difficult to hear. “I was addicted to drugs when I was alive. From what I’ve seen of your mother, I was far more lost to addiction than she ever was.” He looked around the attic. “This place holds painful memories for me. I died here. In the small bed you saw in that vision the other day. I died with a rubber hose tied around my arm, heroin coursing through my veins. My last experience as a living human being on Earth ended up being an overdose of heroin.”
He stopped. I thought I saw tears streaming down his face, but he had turned away from the light and I wasn’t sure that crying was even possible for someone in their spirit form.
“But, even that image doesn’t conjure up the worst pain for me. Something else haunts me much more than my final overdose...”
He lay down on the cushions and stared at the ceiling, as though prying into the vault of Heaven. His thoughts were far away. “Do you remember Neil?”
“Of course.”
“He’s very special to me, my younger brother.”
I interrupted with a memory of my own, “I had a dream about a little boy drinking something and falling down a flight of stairs.”
“Yes.” Brandon waited, as though pulling thoughts from the ceiling. “That was Neil. Up here, in what was then my attic bedroom, on a night when I was supposed to be babysitting him but was stoned clear out of my mind, he picked up a glass of whiskey and some pain pills scattered on a table. He chewed the pills. He drank the whiskey. God knows why. He was three years old. The stuff must have tasted horrible to him. I’ve tortured myself, trying to figure that out. I think he was trying to copy me, use me as a role model.
“After I passed out, he made his way out to the staircase and fell. My parents found him when they came home from their night out. He was unconscious and his neck was twisted at a frightening angle.
“I was so out of it when I woke up, everything happening around me seemed surreal. I was no help at all. An ambulance arrived, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Neil got placed on some kind of stiff board to protect his spine from further injury and the paramedics carried him out of the house, barely speaking to my parents, they were so concerned about Neil’s condition.
“I knew it was bad. I knew Neil was in trouble. But, what did I do? Ran back upstairs to clean up the drugs, so I wouldn’t get in trouble.
“Neil was on a ventilator for two months before he died. I overdosed before then. Soon after Neil was admitted to the hospital, a toxicology report said he had alcohol and pain pills in his system. I couldn’t deal with that. I tied a rubber hose around my arm, found a vein after quite a few tries, and let the horse gallop through my veins. Apparently, it was too much heroin. I died in my sleep.”
I felt overwhelmed by Brandon’s story. I wasn’t sure I had the strength to deal with it on top of Annie’s disappearance. I commented, “Your parents had two dead children then.”
Brandon’s voice became very quiet. “Yeah. It was horrible for me to do that to them. One minute, they’re enjoying a night out. The next minute, all their children are dead.”
“Wow.” I felt angry. He was more selfish than my mom. I had lived with an addict my whole life. Now I was stuck with a ghost addict in my new house? Nuh-uh, I could not deal with that. “OK. So you’re telling me all this. What do you want me to do about it?”
Brandon sat up and looked at me with his brilliant green eyes. “I need you to help me.”
I stood up and paced the room. “Oh, God, Brandon. Why? I can barely help myself. I’m already looking out for my mother. I’m trying to find Annie. My own life is falling apart into utter chaos.”
Brandon interrupted me. “But that’s the thing. We can help each other. My earthly life is over. I mourned that for a very long time. But I can never have it back. That part’s non-negotiable. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. You can’t have your life back. Whether you’re as innocent as Neil or as guilty as me, you can never have your life back once it’s completely snuffed out. But you do get to go on to some kind of meaningful afterlife if you’ve reconciled your life back on Earth. For me, I have to make amends to receive forgiveness for what I did to Neil, to my parents, to myself before I’m allowed to move on.
“Purgatory, what I’m in now, is horrible. It’s the essence of a complete void. And Neil, for reasons I don’t understand, is trapped here with me until I make amends.
“I thought that healing your scars might be enough. Then I thought helping you not to cut would be enough. Remember when Annie urged you to summon your version of faeries while she summoned hers, and then faeries actually appeared? That was me doing my kind of special effects from the afterlife. I thought it would help you to bond with Annie and make a close friend. But my deeds on Earth were bad, really bad, so I’m guessing I need to do more. I think I need to help you find Annie.”
I stopped pacing. I ran over to Brandon and tried to hug him. My arms went through him. Once again, I had that wonderful sensation of something mystical passing through me. I told Brandon, “I can do that. If you help me find Annie, I can help you with your problem. I
would be so incredibly grateful.”
Brandon smiled. “Shake hands?”
I smiled back. “How?”
Brandon had me run my hand over the surface of his hand, kind of like high-fiving a cloud.
We had a deal.
Over the next couple of weeks, Brandon and I shared a lot of information about our lives with each other. We weren’t that different from each other, it turned out.
So weird. I was friends with a ghost. Weirder still, other than Annie, that ghost was probably my best friend.
After we high-fived, Brandon explained more about the amulet. “Shade, I want you to keep the amulet. It’s a gift from me to you. You can keep it forever ... even if I manage to pass on to a place from where I can’t contact you anymore. I want you to know that the necklace is a gift from me to you.”
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