The The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  “It’s all just . . . a lot of bad luck.”

  Jazza slumped a bit. I wasn’t sure if it was relief or disappointment. Luckily, we didn’t have to talk about this anymore, because there was a knock and pretty much everyone from the hall came in to get the news.

  When I closed my eyes that night, two things ran through my mind: the image of Boo on the street, and the Ripper himself.

  No one understood. Not my classmates. Not my teachers. Not the police.

  Jazza slept. I didn’t.

  They probably would have let me skip class the next morning, but there was no point. I’d been in my bed for hours, doing nothing but staring at the ceiling and listening to Jazza breathe and trying to distract myself from the endless, terrifying thoughts. At six, I got up and showered. I was sticky with sweat, a sweat that had nothing to do with being hot and everything to do with being awake so long. I yanked my uniform from the end of the bed, pulled a shirt from a hanger. I couldn’t bother putting my hair up, or even brushing it. I just smacked it down with my hands.

  I skipped breakfast and went right to art history. No one hid their interest when I walked into the room. I’m not sure if it was the news about Boo or my general appearance. At home, people would have asked. People would have been crawling all over me for information. At Wexford, they seemed to extract what they wanted to know by covert staring.

  Mark, a Wexford outsider, was oblivious to the drama of the night before. “Today,” he said cheerfully, “I thought we’d cover something topical. We’re going to talk about depictions of violence in art. And where I’d like to start is by taking a look at an artist called Walter Sickert. Sickert was an English impressionist who painted urban scenes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sickert is often brought up when discussing Jack the Ripper. There are a number of reasons for this . . .”

  I rubbed my head. There was no escaping the Ripper. He was everywhere.

  “Sickert was obsessed with the Jack the Ripper crimes. He believed he had rented a room formerly occupied by Jack the Ripper, and he made a painting of it entitled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Some people even believe that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, but I’m not sure those claims have much to do with reality.”

  A painting appeared on the screen. It was a dark room, a bed in the middle. Plain, brooding, dark.

  “Another reason,” Mark said, “was the fact that in 1908, Sickert painted a series of paintings based on a real-life murder, the Camden Town Murder. The murder had taken place the year before, and the scene was similar to that of the last murder victim in the Jack the Ripper murders, Mary Kelly—certainly in the setting.”

  A click. A new painting. A woman lying on a bed, naked, her head turned away. A man sitting on the edge of the bed, mourning over what he had done.

  “Art of a murder scene,” Mark said. “Death is a common theme in painting. The Crucifixion has been painted thousands of times. The executions of kings. The killings of saints. But this painting is more about the murderer than the victim. It even encourages us to feel mercy for him. This painting from the series is called What Shall We Do for the Rent ?”

  Mark went on, telling us all about English impressionists and the brushstrokes and the light. I just kept staring straight ahead at the still figure on the bed—the shaded, almost forgotten figure of the woman.

  I didn’t have any mercy for the killer.

  An hour and a half into class, we had a bathroom break. I was the first one out the door.

  “I’m not going back in there,” I said to Jerome. “I don’t know if you can . . . prefect-arrest me or something. But I’m not going back.”

  “I’m not going to prefect-arrest you,” he said. “But I should walk you back to your building. I’ll tell Mark you were ill.”

  So Jerome walked me the thirty or so feet back to Hawthorne. We had just about reached the door when he stopped.

  “Only a few more days,” he said. “It’s almost over.”

  Jerome hesitated, then put his hand on the side of my head, leaned down, and kissed me.

  When I looked up, I just caught sight of Stephen. He was sitting on a bench in the square, pretending to read. He wore a sweater and jeans and a scarf, no uniform. He immediately removed and played with his glasses, turning away from the sight of the kissing. But he had seen it, and that felt weird. I stepped away from Jerome.

  “Thanks,” I said. I meant for the walk back to the building, but it sounded like I meant the kiss.

  “Did you see the thing on the news?” Jerome asked. “About the message? How everyone thinks it’s from the Bible, and it might be about terrorism? I don’t think it is—neither do any of the people on the Ripper boards. The name of the star . . . it’s not from the Bible—he means the name Jack the Ripper. That’s the name of the Star.”

  “What?”

  “Jack the Ripper never called himself Jack the Ripper. The name came from a letter sent to the Central News Agency. It was a hoax, and almost definitely written by a reporter from the Star newspaper. That was the paper that made the Ripper famous. The whole thing was kind of a media creation. When he says ‘the name of the star is what you fear,’ he means it—everyone’s afraid of this idea of the Ripper, this thing that gets bigger and bigger because of the news. And he’s the star of the show, right? It’s a joke. It’s a sick one, but it’s a joke. It’s bad, but . . . it’s not terrorism or anything. At least, I don’t think so. If that helps.”

  He raised his hand and walked back toward the classroom building. I had nowhere to be. I’d just ditched my only Saturday obligation, and everyone else was in class. All was quiet in Wexford’s little square of London. I could hear various instruments being played in the music rooms. Jazza’s cello was certainly among them, but I couldn’t pick it out of the general noise.

  I walked away from school and to the main shopping road, which was crowded with people out doing Saturday errands. I went into our local coffee shop, for lack of any better destination, and stood in the stupidly long line and ordered myself the first drink that came to mind. There were no tables to sit at, so I leaned at the bar by the window. Stephen came in and stood next to me.

  “I heard what your friend said.”

  “Hi,” I replied.

  “It makes quite a bit of sense, actually. I should have thought of that. The Star newspaper. He’s right. The name of the star is what you fear . . . People are scared of the name Jack the Ripper. He’s not talking about the Bible at all. He’s laughing at everyone for all the attention he’s getting. He’s laughing at the Ripperologists, the police, the media . . .”

  I looked out at the street—what I’d come to know as a typical one in London. Most of the buildings very low, colorful shop fronts, lots of advertisements for cheap phones and good deals on drinks. The occasional red double-decker bus going by. The more than occasional tourist with a map, a camera, and one of those Jack the Ripper top hats they were selling at the souvenir stalls.

  “But Callum had a good point last night,” Stephen added. “We’re the only people who know Richard Eakles didn’t write that message on the board. I feel like . . . I feel like I’m being played with. Personally.”

  “What about Jo?” I asked. “Someone should tell her what happened.”

  The change in topic threw him.

  “What?”

  “Jo,” I said again, “is Boo’s best friend.”

  “Oh. Of course.” He scratched his head. “Yes. Of course.”

  “So I want to go and talk to her.”

  “I suppose that’s fine,” he said. “Though I don’t have the car with me. I don’t drive it when I’m not in uniform.”

  We took the Tube together. Stephen didn’t say much, and the trip wasn’t long from Wexford. We found Jo down the street from the playground where I’d first seen her. She was wandering along, picking up trash.

  “I’ll let you . . . ,” Stephen said. “Perhaps you should . . .”

  It was the first time I
’d seen him unsure of what to do.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “I’ll wait right here.”

  I came up behind Jo. She didn’t turn. I guess she was used to people being close to her, or just going through her.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s me. Rory. You remember . . . from the other day?”

  She turned in surprise.

  “Of course!” Jo said. “Feeling better? That must have been a right old shock.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, “but Boo . . .”

  I stopped talking for a moment as a woman went by, pushing a stroller. She was so unbearably slow. I wanted to come up behind her and shove her along so I could continue talking. Jo stopped and let her get some distance on us.

  “She was hit by a car,” I said.

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s alive,” I said. “Hurt. She’s in the hospital. The Ripper did this to her. He came after me, and Boo protected me. That’s how she got hit. He threw her in front of a car. I just thought . . . someone should tell you.”

  A lot of people, when they hear bad news, they take a deep breath, or they hyperventilate. Jo didn’t do any of these things, because Jo didn’t breathe. She bent down and picked up a used coffee cup. It seemed to take all her strength, so I took it from her and carried it the three feet to the trash can.

  “You needn’t do that,” she said. “I can carry those. Sandwich wrappers, coffee cups, aluminum cans. I can lift them. One day, I saw a girl sitting at the café just up the road. She set her purse down next to her. A man came by and took it. She had no idea. I happened to be walking past, and I reached over and snatched it back from him and set it next to her. Now, that was hard, but I did it. She was never the wiser, but it gave him a good fright. This is my street. I keep it clean and safe.”

  She didn’t show much emotion, but I got the sense that she dealt with her shock by keeping busy or talking. She needed someone to talk to.

  “Did you live here?” I asked.

  “No. I died right over there. Do you see that block of flats?” She pointed at a modern apartment building. “Those are quite new. Back in my day, this was a row of houses. That’s where it happened. I didn’t live here in my life, but after that, it became my home. Strange impulse, to stay where you died. I don’t quite know why I do it . . .”

  “What happened?” I asked. “If that’s okay to ask.”

  “Oh, that’s no bother,” she said almost cheerfully. “Luftwaffe raid. Tenth of May, 1941. That was the last big night of the Blitz. That was the night the Germans hit St. James’s Palace and the Houses of Parliament. I worked in communications, sending coded messages and reports on what was going on in London. We had a small telegraph office located quite near here. A bomb hit the end of the road and destroyed everything along this street, including most of these houses. I came out after the bombs fell. You could hear survivors under the rubble. I was helping get a little girl out from under a pile of the stuff when the rest of her house fell on us both. And that was it, really. Thirteen hundred people died that night. I was just one of them.”

  It was all very matter-of-fact.

  “When did you know you were a ghost?”

  “Oh, immediately,” she said. “One moment I was helping the girl out of the rubble—the next, I was looking down at the rubble and watching someone lift me out of it, and it was abundantly clear that I was dead. It was a shock, of course. The bombing raids had stopped for a while, but there was so much destruction all around . . . there was so much to do. I would sometimes find someone who had been gravely injured, and they could see me, and I would sit and talk to them. I’d pick little things out of the rubble—photographs, things like that. I was still useful. I just refused to slip away. At first, it was difficult. For the longest time, weeks, I was too weak to do anything except linger on the spot where I died. I had no form that I could see. But I managed to pull myself away from the rubble. I suppose I made myself, really. You mustn’t let these kinds of things get in your way. It’s as Prime Minister Churchill said: ‘Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty.’ A wonderful speech. He gave it after my death, but it was quoted all over. I’ve always gone by those words. They’ve gotten me through many years.”

  Jo’s literal “never say die” attitude was somewhat overwhelming, but one thing was clear—she knew about fear. She knew what it felt like and how to deal with it.

  “I’m afraid,” I said. “I’m really afraid. The Ripper is . . . he wants me.”

  Now that I’d said it, it felt true and real. Jo faced me and looked me in the eye.

  “Jack the Ripper was just a man. He wasn’t magic. Even Hitler was just a man. This Ripper is nothing more than that.”

  “He’s a ghost,” I corrected her. “An incredibly powerful ghost.”

  “But ghosts are just people. We just seem more frightening, I suppose, because we represent something unknown. We can’t usually be seen. We’re not supposed to be here. And there are good people who can catch this Ripper.”

  “I know,” I said, “but . . . they’re all . . . really young. Like me.”

  “Who do you think goes into the army? Young people. This entire nation was defended by young people. Young people on the battlefield. Young people in airplanes. Young people in the headquarters, breaking codes. The number of people I knew who lied to sign up at fifteen and sixteen . . .”

  She trailed off, watching a guy lingering around a bike that was clearly not his. She smoothed out the jacket of her uniform, though it wasn’t wrinkled. It probably couldn’t wrinkle.

  “Thank you for letting me know,” she said. “Not everyone considers me—worth informing. You’re like Boo, very conscientious. She’s a good girl. A bit of an ongoing project, but a good girl. Now I should go and see to that bicycle.”

  Jo marched across the street, barely checking to see if cars were coming her way. Halfway across, in the path of a tiny sportscar, she turned back.

  “Fear can’t hurt you,” she said. “When it washes over you, give it no power. It’s a snake with no venom. Remember that. That knowledge can save you.”

  With just an inch or so to spare, she stepped out of the path of the car and continued on her way.

  27

  I CAN BARELY REMEMBER WHAT I DID FOR THE NEXT few days. Classes were canceled all week. Callum and Stephen took turns keeping watch. And the days ticked by. November 4, November 5, November 6 . . . The news kept track even if I didn’t.

  On Wednesday, the seventh of November, I woke around five in the morning. My brain had suddenly clicked back on, and my heart was racing. I sat up and looked around the dark room, examining every formation. That was my nightstand next to my bed. There was my bureau. There was the wardrobe door, slightly open, but not enough for someone to hide behind. There was Jazza, asleep in her bed. I grabbed my hockey stick and stabbed around under my bed, but felt nothing. Then I realized that that wasn’t a very good test for a ghost, so I stood up on the bed and jumped out as quietly as I could, then got down on the floor and looked underneath. No one was there. Jazza shifted, but she didn’t wake.

  I took my robe and bath basket and walked quietly down to the bathroom, where I examined every stall and every cubicle before taking my shower, and even then, I kept the curtain partway open. I didn’t care if anyone walked in.

  I went to breakfast as soon as it opened, long before Jazza was out of bed. I saw Callum standing on the corner, over by the refectory. He was wearing a dark blue London Underground suit with an orange Day-Glo vest over the jacket, and he had a clipboard. If he had planned on trying to blend in, that wasn’t really working.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Pretending to survey traffic patterns for a new bus route. I have a clipboard and everything.”

  “Did you guys make that up?”

  “Course we made it up,” he said. “It was the only thing we could think of to justify my standi
ng in front of a school all day, and the clipboard was the only prop we had. And you shouldn’t be seen talking to me, so keep moving.”

  He turned back to his clipboard, ending the conversation. I hurried away from him, feeling stupid.

  I was the only person at breakfast at that hour. I tried to eat my normal plate of sausages but could only get down some juice and the bitter, lava-hot coffee. For entertainment, I read the brass plaques on the wall—names of former students and their various achievements. I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.

  I had to know what they could do to stop the Ripper. I had to find out, or I would go insane. I got up, shoved my tray into the rack, and went back outside and right up to Callum.

  “I just said—”

  “I want to see what you do,” I said.

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “No, I mean . . . I want to see how you take care of them.”

  He kicked at the cobbles.

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “So how am I supposed to stay sane?” I asked. “Don’t you think I deserve to know what can be done? I’m defenseless. Show me.”

  “Do you have any idea how many forms I’ve had to sign saying that I’d never talk about this?”

  “So you’d rather stand around here with a clipboard all day? If you don’t show me, I will stand here and stare at you. I will follow you. I will do everything you don’t want me to do. I am giving you no choice.”

  The corner of Callum’s mouth twitched slightly. “No choice?” he said.

  “You have no idea how reckless I can be.”

  He looked around, up and down the street, toward the square. Then he walked away for a few moments and made a call.

  “Here’s the agreement,” he said when he walked back to me. “You don’t tell anyone. Not Stephen. Definitely not Boo. No one.”