I didn’t know if she was home or not, but the long walk guaranteed me some time before I had to face her.
When I reached my house, I found it empty. I had a reprieve. I made myself a quick snack and then raced upstairs to my room.
No evidence of Brandon. I tried calling to him, but he didn’t answer. I called his name directly into the amulet, but he didn’t answer that either.
Craving some kind of connection with technology, I sat down at my desk and turned on my laptop. I signed into The Tiger’s Den. New discussions had been started. A few caught my eye. I scanned the topics.
Then my heart thudded against my chest and nearly stopped.
A student named Walter Jenkins had opened up a topic called: The Location of Anne Marie Green (Annie).
For a second or two, I felt so terrified, I couldn’t think. I sat with frozen fingers, just staring at the title. All kinds of things went through my mind. Walter was kind of weird. Had he kidnapped Annie?
I finally snapped out of my complete state of panic enough to click on the discussion title.
According to the time stamp, Walter had just posted the topic half an hour earlier. School had just let out. Lots of kids were still in clubs and sports practices. He had only posted a brief message: “Does anyone know the location of Anne Marie Green, better known around our school as Annie? I heard she’s missing. I mean officially missing—her parents and the police have been looking for her. The police interviewed me and my parents last night. My parents are friends with her parents. They go golfing together sometimes. If you’ve heard anything, how about you post it here in this discussion section? And to The Tiger’s Den administrators: Can you make this discussion sticky, so that it stays at the top of the discussions here? Thanks.”
There were only a handful of responses so far, mostly along the lines of: “Oh my God, I had no idea!” or “Yeah, I’ve been a complete mess since I found out.” There were also a few people who responded, “Yeah, this is really frightening. The police talked to me, too. I miss Annie so much.”
I started to type my own response. I had to keep deleting letters to fix typos from my hands trembling so much. Then I realized that I was an administrator. My low self esteem and years of being an outsider and failing at practically everything always kept me from remembering that.
I deleted the sentences I had typed so far. I changed the topic from The Location of Anne Marie Green (Annie) to Anne Marie Green (Annie) Is Missing. Walter’s title sounded lame, like someone already knew where Annie was or like she was just playing around, announcing her location through Google Earth or something. I wanted everyone’s eyeballs to see the discussion title, to be drawn to it like flies on shit and let us know anything they knew. The more discussion, the better.
After I changed the title, I made it sticky. Then I replied to Walter in the forum discussion. “Walter, thanks so much for starting this discussion. Annie’s my best friend. As you can imagine, I’m a complete wreck over this. I changed the title of the discussion because I was afraid that The Location of Anne Marie Green (Annie) might lead people to think that someone was reporting her location, that she had been found. I want this discussion to be an extremely active one. I want lots of people to talk about any and all of the last places they saw Annie, places they know Annie likes to go, any possible clues in her disappearance, any of it. I made the discussion sticky. Great idea! I think this discussion needs to stay at the top of the forum. Thanks!”
Two seconds later, I swear, my computer pinged.
Walter had answered: “I’m so glad you agree with my suggestions. Thanks for making the discussion sticky. Nice job you guys are doing on The Tiger’s Den ... and The Tiger’s Tale, too, by the way. I love your artwork!” This was followed by three emoticons, two smiley faces surrounding an animated smiley face with eyes popping in and out in surprise.
That was weird. Not very emotional about Annie. Was Walter just trying to become popular by having his name at the top of the forum? Was this just all fun and games to him?
I pulled together my administrator parts and just typed “Thanks!” with one smiley face.
A few seconds later, someone named Phoenix Yarbrough signed on. “Hey, just wanted to say I’m real sorry about Annie. We worked on some projects together in Social Studies. She was a really cool, really nice person. I’ll keep checking back here to see if I can help in any way. If you go looking for her, I’d be happy to help out. I was in Boy Scouts until I got too busy to keep up with it this year. I know a little bit about tracking, at least in the woods. When was she last seen?”
I sat at my keyboard and had a complete meltdown. I cried so hard, tears fell onto the keys.
I had a distant memory of fluid falling. Oh yeah, I remembered the blood from cutting and how I never cried.
My fingers trembled. My heart raced. I typed an answer: “I was with her the night she disappeared.” It sounded like an admission of guilt. I was so afraid that everyone would blame me. If the police read this statement on the forum, they’d arrest me, even though they already knew I had been with Annie the night she disappeared. If other students read the statement, they’d all blame me and shun me. I’d lose all my positions on the forum and the newspaper.
I banished these thoughts from my mind. I had to tell what I knew. I had to do everything I could to find her. If everyone shared all the information they knew, maybe we’d come up with enough clues to find her.
Oh, Annie, please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. I started sobbing all over again.
I typed out a description of how Annie and I had spent the night on which she disappeared. I told Phoenix about the haunted house, about the jerky boys who had tried to rough us up there. I mulled that over. I realized I should probably start thinking like a detective. Everyone should be a suspect. What about the guys who had roughed us up, especially the scary one who Annie had kicked in the groin after he tried to grab her? Did he go after her later on that night?
Then, oh my God. Damn. Once again, I remembered how mean I had been to the little boy trick-or-treating at my house. Did someone in his group go after Annie, thinking she had been the one who shined a light in his eyes? I typed about our run-in with the trick-or-treaters. I edited my comment a whole bunch of times until it just said: “We ran into some trick-or-treaters at my house that night, too. Some kid was being really annoying, so I shined a flashlight I was wearing on my forehead right in his eyes. Annie made me stop. She’s always so nice.”
When I was done, I pressed Send. Almost instantaneously, my comment showed up on the forum. Before it appeared, though, another comment from a student named Sahara Clark showed up. It said, “Oh my God, how terrible! I just saw her a couple of nights ago. I saw her on Halloween night. She was dressed up like a witch. I passed her while I was out supervising my little sister going door-to-door trick-or-treating. I tried to chat with her, but she said she was in a hurry to meet up with a friend to go to a haunted house. Her costume was amazing.”
I replied to that comment, too: “Sahara—Yeah, Annie was on her way to meet up with me. She didn’t go missing until much later on Halloween night. We did a little bit of trick-or-treating. Then we went to the haunted house. Later, we hung out at my house for awhile. She decided to walk home after that. It was late and completely dark outside. But I figured it would probably be OK because there’d be trick-or-treaters hanging around outside, you know the stragglers who don’t go home right away. The next morning, two cops talked to me at school ... That’s when I first found out Annie was missing. I’ve been beside myself, worrying about her.”
A few seconds later, I saw a bunch more comments pop up, including offers from everyone to help look for her if anyone decided to organize a search.
I read every comment very carefully, twice. There didn’t seem to be any clues in any of the comments. I was the only one with information regarding Annie’s whereabouts right before she disappeared. Obviously. Duh. She left my h
ouse; then she disappeared. So, unless someone else chatting in The Tiger’s Den saw her between that time and the moment she went missing, I would be the only one with information.
Maybe Annie ran away from home. She was goth, so she was probably depressed deep inside herself. And she had said that her family wasn’t as perfect as they seemed on the outside. Maybe there were some serious family problems? Although that seemed a stretch. The cookies. The perfect Stepford Wife Mom. Of course, the Stepford Wives had some serious problems.
I decided to give it a rest. My brain hurt and my emotions felt at the brink of despair. I thought about cutting. I pulled open the nightstand drawer. I yanked out the bowl and fondled it.
While I sat with the bowl cradled in my lap, Brandon appeared, as always out of thin air.
He started off by interrogating me. “So, what do you have there?”
“A bowl. What does it look like?” I slipped the bowl back into the drawer and closed it. I changed the subject, with what I hoped was an accusing look in my eye. “Hey, I’ve been trying to get you to answer me. We don’t exactly have a fair arrangement, you know? When you want to contact me, you make the amulet glow and get hot and feel like it’s burning me. But when I want to get ahold of you, good luck with that, I can’t get ahold of you unless you want me to. I’m kind of assuming we’re working together. You need to help someone in order to get out of Purgatory ... which is a pretty big deal, I’m guessing. But I’m not really feeling the help here when I can’t contact you in an emergency. You said that making words appear on the amulet doesn’t work both ways like a cell phone. Can we make it work both ways between you and me? Or can we at least put a spell on something else that we can use to send messages to each other?”
Brandon’s face looked sad. “I don’t know. Like I told you before, I’m too new to the afterlife. I don’t really know how it works. I’m sorry. And what do you mean, you’ve been trying to get me to answer you? Wasn’t I just here about a half an hour ago?”
I studied him. Man, for a ghost, he was really stupid. I always pictured ghosts as a lot more informed about stuff going on and a lot more powerful. “Half an hour ago? You’ve got to be kidding me. I desperately wanted to contact you earlier today, but had no way of doing that. When I told Mr. Lafferty about my call to Annie’s cell phone and the man’s voice in the background, he called the police and the police took my phone as evidence. I was so upset, Mr. Lafferty let me go home early. But tonight I have to tell my mom that the police have my cell phone.”
Brandon looked at my computer. Completely ignoring everything I just said, he pointed to my screen and asked, “Shouldn’t you change that?”
I felt incredibly annoyed. “Change what? My mom? Are you even listening to me?”
“The Welcome to Our Haunted House theme on your school forum. I mean, Annie went missing after going to a haunted house with you. Isn’t that kind of in poor taste right now?”
I felt even more terrible than I had before Brandon showed up. He certainly didn’t sugarcoat anything. But he was right. I should have thought of that myself. I decided to create a new forum design that night, to just stay up until I finished it. The next theme would be Thanksgiving. Lots of ideas popped into my head for that one. I could design that pretty quickly.
Brandon turned back to me. “Can you get two cell phones?”
“What?” He was getting on my last nerve.
“I don’t know how to create an amulet with communication properties for you, but I’m thinking that we should be able to communicate by cell phone if we both have one. What do you think?”
I started laughing, then got the giggles and couldn’t stop. Communicating with ghosts in Purgatory using a cell phone? The cell phone as an updated Ouija Board? Oh my God, that was surreal.
Brandon stared at me.
Then the front door slammed. My mom was home.
I wiped the grin off my face. I said to Brandon, “I don’t have time to discuss this now. Gotta go.”
I went downstairs cautiously, hoping to gauge my mom’s mood before talking to her. She was humming. She hardly ever did that. I assumed she was happy. I followed the humming sound to the kitchen, walked through the kitchen doorway and flashed my mom a smile.
She was wearing a new suit, a bright yellow suit. I wouldn’t have chosen bright yellow, but it worked. It looked nicely tailored. My mom had it on with black leather pumps, a black-and-white checkered blouse and a yellow scarf. She looked ... normal.
I complimented her without having to force it, “Hey, Mom, you look really nice.”
She answered me with a smile. Her lipstick looked normal—light pink gloss. She wasn’t wearing eye shadow. Holy cow. “Hey, Shade. How’s it going? Would you like some tea?”
I would have preferred a butler and some milk and cookies, but tea would do. “Sure, I’d love some. Are you having tea?”
“Yeah, I was just thinking about it. Does green tea sound good?” As she asked, she picked up the kettle and filled it with water.
Ahh, so this was another health-conscious phase. “Sure, green tea sounds good. Can I have some honey in it?”
My mom opened the refrigerator and looked around. “Here it is. Yup, we have honey.”
I waited until my mother had made the tea and sat down at the kitchen table with her cup to talk to her about my cell phone problem.
“Hey, Mom, can I ask you something?”
My mom set her cup down and played the attentive role. If I was going to have my cell phone confiscated by the police, there could not have been a better time.
She said, “Sure, honey, you can ask me anything.”
Honey in my tea. I was honey, too. No, I was Shade, a shady character interrogated by the police. My mind was falling apart into puzzle pieces of the me I used to be. I felt a giggle attack coming on. To prevent that, I just blurted out: “The police took away my cell phone.”
My mom’s tea went down the wrong way. She launched into a full-blown coughing fit. I slapped her on the back until it stopped. Looked alarmed and upset, she asked in a voice that cracked the entire time, “Wh-a-a-t?” She coughed a few more times.
I looked down at my cup. Oddly, it had a smiley face on it. I looked back up at my mom. “I’m not in trouble or anything. Do you remember my friend, Annie?”
My mom answered my question with another question. “Did she come over here?” That was kind of vague. I couldn’t tell if she remembered Annie being over at our house or if she was throwing me a noncommittal reply.
I answered as though I believed my mother definitely remembered her. “Yeah, that’s the girl. She’s actually my best friend at school.”
My mom played along. “She’s your best friend? I thought so. So, what happened?”
I explained all about Halloween night—except for the part where I played Leotard Girl Gone Bad, shining a light in that little kid’s eyes—and about how Annie went missing after leaving our house.
My mom stared at me, picked up her tea and took a sip. She put it down. She stared at me again. She took another sip.
I thought I’d die.
Then she just said, very calmly, “You can have another cell phone. If someone kidnapped your friend ... what’s her name again?”
“Annie ... Well, her full name is Anne Marie Green.”
“OK. If someone kidnapped Annie, it could be personal. Or there could be kidnappers on the loose around here. I want you to be safe. You can get another cell phone. We ought to order a replacement today.”
I decided to test my luck. “Mom, could I get two cell phones?”
I saw a flash of anger in her eyes. “Two? Why on Earth would you need two cell phones?”
“Another friend. I want them to have a way to contact me. They don’t have money. They can’t afford one on their own.”
“Money doesn’t...”
I finished her sentence, “...grow on trees. I know. I just thought I should have a way to be in touch with all my friends right now.�
�
That very afternoon, my mom took me to the cell phone store and got me two phones with two different numbers. Boy, did I ever pick the right day to talk to my mother about the police.
When I got back home, I gave Brandon a cell phone. It was a pink one with purple flowers because my mother assumed my friend without a phone was a girl. I found that kind of funny.
Brandon figured out how to type on his phone using a stylus. He floated the stylus in the air and tapped the touch screen that way. Magic plus technology equals perfection, I guess.
Brandon discovered that he loved a cell phone trivia game based on facts about the 1970s. He also found Angry Birds seriously addicting. After twenty games of snorting piggies, I made him turn the sound down. Then I taught him how to mute the phone. He unmuted it, said the game wasn’t the same without the sounds. Well, he got that right. It definitely wasn’t.
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