Fading Away

by Tom Upton

  “Please,” I begged.

  “They found Mary Jo Mason.”

  “Yeah, I saw it on the news.”

  “But the news didn’t give all the details,” she insisted.

  “No?” I was more than mildly interested in what had happened after Jack and I fled the school. How exactly had the cops found Mary Jo? What happened after they found her? Was she questioned, and if so, what did she say? All day I had been half-expecting the cops to knock on my door.

  “I got it all from my mom,” Melody said.

  “Give it up, bitch,” I told her.

  “All right,” she said. “The burglar alarm goes off last night at the school, right? So when the cops respond to the call, they find an open door. I think it was propped with an office chair or something. Anyway, they search the entire school for intruders, and they find Mary Jo.”

  “Really?” I said, faking surprise better than I thought I could.

  “Straight up,” Melody said.

  “See. I told you—there was nothing to worry about.”

  “Wait. Wait. There’s more.”

  “What?”

  “They found her in the bathroom, the bathroom she disappeared from.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She was sleeping on the counter.”

  “Really,” I said. “Isn’t that something?”

  “But this is the best part, the part you’re going to love. You know what the cops did after they found her?—Really, you’re going love this.”

  “Why? What did they do?” I asked.

  “They arrested her.”

  I sat bolt upright in bed. “They didn’t.”

  “No kidding. Slapped hand-cuffs on her and dragged her away.”

  “Wow,” I said. I felt a little like laughing, but then, instantly, I felt sorry for Mary Jo. She had been through an ordeal, whether or not she realized it.

  “Well, she didn’t have any identification with her, and she didn’t look much like the picture her parents gave the cops when she went missing,” Melody explained. “So, yeah, I guess they had to arrest her for trespassing. But after they found out who she was, they dropped the whole thing.”

  “You know what she told the cops?—I mean, about where she was for those three days.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and I could picture Melody rolling her eyes. “She told the cops some crazy stuff. It sounds like she’s in for some counseling.”

  “Well, at least they found her,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s the most important thing.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  After I got off the phone with Melody, I lay there thinking for a long while. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole thing. I’d found Mary Jo and brought her back and now she was safe at home with her family. Anybody else might have felt pride or satisfaction, but I didn’t feel those things at all. Mainly I felt selfish. I didn’t do anything for Mary Jo. I didn’t do anything because I was a caring, concerned person. Whatever I did, I did for myself. That was how I was, and I really didn’t believe I would ever change.

  The one thing that kept returning to my mind was what it had been like in that other reality. There I could not read people. I could not see the future. I had no flashes of freaky insight. For a brief time, I knew what it would be like to be normal, and having experienced that, I decided I could never be that way. It didn’t feel right, because it wasn’t me. I was Freaky Jules, that was who I was meant to be, and for the first time I started to see that that was all right. After all, a lot of people are different, in some way and to some degree. There are a lot of freaks in this world, and one day, sooner or later, we are going to take over everything.

  Epilogue

  All the excitement surrounding Mary Jo died down in the following weeks.

  Things went by to the same old routine, except now there was Jack. He started to join Melody and me for lunch every day. I didn’t really need another friend, but I didn’t mind. Some friendships begin with a secret, and once they begin they almost have to last—or else. I believed that Jack would always keep my secrets. Maybe someday I would finally break down and date him, but probably not.

  One day I felt an anxiety attack coming on in the lunchroom again. I had to go outside. The days were getting sunnier and warmer. The grass was dark green and the breeze was soft and the air smelled sweet. Everything outside calmed me down. I sat on one of the benches and relaxed.

  Awhile later, Jack sat on the opposite end of the bench. We sat there and didn’t say anything to each other for a long time. It felt good to share silence with him.

  Then he said, “I have three words for you.”

  “Jack, cut it out. We’ve already talked about this.”

  He looked confused at first, but then he got it. “Oh, no, not those three words. I wasn’t thinking anything like that.”

  “What three words are you talking about?”

  “Can you keep an open mind?” he asked.

  “It’s impossible for me not to.”

  “Okay, here it is,” he said: “Spontaneous Human Combustion.”

  “What?” I stared at him in horror.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “There are some weird things going on.”

  “No.”

  “Jules, really, you need to hear this….”

  I was already on my feet walking away. I didn’t look back. I walked faster and faster, but knowing Jack Kilgore, I realized I would never be able to walk away fast enough.

  END

  From Freaky Jules #2 (Pants on Fire)

  I didn’t like baseball, or any sport for that matter. Sports, unlike me, belong to the normal world. Only normal people can gather enjoyment out of watching one guy trying to throw a ball past another guy who is trying to hit the ball with a piece of wood while all the other players wait around to see if the guy with the piece of wood actually hits the ball. That seemed to make sense to people, while I believed that baseball was the dumbest of activities.

  I was never frustrated that I didn’t understand normal things. I was not obsessed with trying to become normal. I knew that would never be possible. I would always be a vision-seeing, future-predicting, mind-reading freak. About the best I could hope for was to learn how to live with myself.

  A few months ago, I discovered that there was a new addition to my paranormal abilities: telekinesis. I could turn light switches on and off with my mind. I could move around small objects. At first I was despondent that there was yet another weird thing for me to endure. I tried to ignore this latest ability, but during bored moments—and I had quite a few of those in the course of a day—I would amuse myself by twirling a pencil or levitating an eraser. I soon discovered that moving objects around with my mind required a great deal of focus, and while I focused on, say, arranging kitchen utensils neatly on a tabletop, my other freaky abilities became inert. I could not see random visions, most of which were dark and gory. I could not read minds and the sick thoughts people keep to themselves. It was a good trade-off, really; if I began to see or hear something disturbing, I just concentrated on moving something and all the bad things in my head went away—at least for a while. It was a great way to deal with stress.

  One Saturday afternoon in early May, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table at home. I was balancing a pencil on the tip of my finger. I made the pencil slowly turn, which made a tickling feeling on my skin.

  My mom sat across from me. She was still alarmed at my latest “gift.” She was aware of my other abilities, of course, but really those she couldn’t actually see. This was much more visual, and therefore much more disturbing.

  “Do you have to do that?” she asked.

  “It’s very relaxing.”

  “I’m trying to talk to you.”

  “I’m listening,” I said. “Just because I’m not looking at you, don’t think I’m not hearing you.”

  Mom was trying to have one of her heart to he
art talks with me. Every now and then she felt compelled to sit me down and encourage me to try to blend in better with my peers. It was her way of being supportive; she knew that my having strange abilities isolated me from other people. She was always afraid that I would end up being some kind of weirdo old lady who scared all the neighborhood kids—in other words, she didn’t want me to turn into my grandmother. But even now, as she attempted to convince me I could be pretty much like everybody else if only I applied myself, she didn’t see the irony.

  “Mom, I’m moving a pencil with my mind,” I said. “Exactly how much do you think I can blend?”

  She sighed. “Julie, you’re impossible, really.”

  “And yet here I am.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “We are talking,” I said.

  “I mean, without the—whatever you call that.”

  “Telekinesis.”

  “Whatever. Can you put your hand down?”

  I lowered my hand. The pencil remained suspended in the air, still turning slowly around.

  She gawked at the pencil for a moment.

  “Julie, really!”

  I snatched the pencil from the air, and slapped it down on the tabletop.

  “There! Better?” I asked, feeling a little hostile.

  “Thank you.” She took a couple seconds to compose herself, to pick up her train of thought. “Look, maybe I haven’t been expressing myself so well. I understand that you will always be different from other people. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you are still a human being.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “You are,” she said. “Your dad and I have been talking.”

  “You need to stop that. The marriage will last longer.”

  “Julie, please.”

  I didn’t stay anything. I figured it was best to let her say what she was going to say, and have it over with.

  “We’ve been concerned with a few things about you. And this has nothing to do with your gifts. Your abilities,” she amended after I’d rolled my eyes.

  “Then what?”

  “It’s just that you’re so—I don’t know—emotionally detached.”

  “Yeah?” I said dully.

  “I mean, look, I’m a nurse, right? I got into the field because, basically, I care about people. I have sympathy and understanding. Your dad, too. He’s a fireman and, sure, that’s a good job but you can’t want to become a fireman without caring, without wanting to keep people safe. You see where I’m going with this.”

  “No, really, I don’t,” I said. “You and dad like your jobs?”

  She sighed. She seemed uncertain what to say. Then she blurted out, “Julie, your dad wants you to see a psychiatrist.”

  I was horrified. “Uh-uh. No way.”

  “He thinks you may be sociopathic.”

  “What! No, I’m not…. What’s sociopathic, anyway?”

  “That’s when a person has no feelings for others—no feelings at all. Some sociopaths end up, you know, killing people.”

  I stared at her. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I honestly didn’t know what to say. My parents weren’t really concerned that I wasn’t quite normal; they actually feared I’d turn into a mass murderer or something.

  “It’s just that you never show us anything,” she continued, uncomfortably. “You know, like kids usually show their parents.”

  “Oh, I see,” I murmured. “Well, you know me: I’m not going to go around hugging everybody.”

  “I understand that,” she said.

  “I do love you guys,” I said. “I just do it in my own way.”

  “Well, Dad doesn’t understand why you are the way you are.”

  “Maybe you should explain it to him,” I suggested.

  She looked aghast. We had never told my dad about my abilities, so he couldn’t possibly understand the affects that possessing them had on me.

  “You can’t be serious. He’d have you in a mental hospital in about two seconds. And I’d be right there with you. He’d never accept it—not in a million years. The guy doesn’t even believe in ghosts,” she added wryly.

  I grinned. “I could prove it to him.”

  “Uh, no,” she said. “No, we’re not doing that.”

  “Well, then talk to him,” I said. “Tell him something he will understand. Make him see that I can’t be fixed. This is the way I am. I’m never going to be the perky, loving daughter that other people have. He got stuck with a freak.”

  “Oh, Julie,” she murmured, but that was all she could say. She could never find the words to make things better for me, because there were no such words in any language.

  I pushed away from the table. Before I left the room, I paused at the doorway for a long time. “Mom… I love you,” I said, but the words didn’t sound very convincing, not even to me.

  From Freaky Jules #3 (Hellhounds)

  “I may be a lot of things,” I said, pacing the floor of my kitchen, highly agitated, “but I am not A DOG CATCHER!”

  I felt a tirade coming on, and considering how weird my life was, I thought I was entitled to an occasional violent outbreak. It was understandable—at least, to me. Still I always did my best to fight back the anger, which, at times, became quite a battle. Sometimes I won, and sometimes I lost. Right now I felt the hot red haze in my head starting to fade; it turned into something blue, something solid and shot through with cool reason.

  “Look,” I said, calmer, but still pacing the floor. “I’m just not a dog person, all right. How could I be? I barely relate to human beings. Dogs?—to me, they’re just smelly, drooling things. They’re big furry cockroaches. So, really, I don’t think I would be much help with your problem. You understand, right?”

  “But you promised,” Jerry insisted.

  “Really, take a good look at me. Do I look like a person whose promises are any good?”

  “You said you would,” he said. He actually sounded like a whining five-year-old, as though I had guaranteed him cotton candy and a ride on the Ferris wheel, and now I was reneging.

  I stopped pacing, and sighed heavily. This was absurd, but this was my life. It was a sunny August day. Little kids were outside running through sprinklers, or playing t-ball, or chasing butterflies. Kids my age were at the beach or water parks, or in the cool basements of their homes making out with boyfriends while their parents were at work. All I wanted to do was eat breakfast, go back up to my room, pull shut the curtains, and enjoy the gloom. For me this passed as entertainment—this was the best I could do. But I couldn’t even do that, because I was having an argument with a ghost.

  I looked down at Jerry. He was sitting at the kitchen table. He appeared to have his elbows on the tabletop, and rested his chin in his cupped hands. He still wore the CPD uniform in which he died. The bullet hole in his forehead still seemed to pour out blood, which curved round his eye and ran down side of his face like a gruesome little river. He looked extremely distraught, not because part of his brain was scrambled with blood and hair and oozing from the back of his head, not because he was dead, but because of a dog. It just didn’t make any sense to me.

  I shook my head, and sat across the table from him.

  “It’s just a dog,” I pointed out.

  “He was more than that,” he murmured. “He was all that I had.”

  “How was that?” I wondered.

  He shrugged his thick shoulders. “Never had much of a family. I was an only child. My parents died pretty young. I never got married, so no kids of my own. All I really had was work. I handled a lot of dogs over the years, and Sarge was the best. He was special. He had something the other dogs didn’t. You could see it in his eyes. We connected somehow. I don’t know, I guess you could say we shared an affinity—we formed a kinship. But you could never understand something like that. You don’t have much feeling for people, so how much could you know about dogs?”

  I wanted to say that my attitude had nothing to do with my being a
freak; a lot of people, normal people, didn’t care much about dogs. I didn’t want everything to always be about me, and yet, somehow, everything ended up being about me just the same.

  “Well, I just don’t see what the problem is, anyway,” I said. “The dog is dying, right?”

  “Sarge is going to die soon,” Jerry said. “Any day.”

  “It happens, right? It’s sad… I suppose. But it happens. I’m a little unclear what you want me to do, anyway. I can’t make him not die.”

  “It’s not that. I just need you to rescue him.”

  “Rescue him?” I wondered.

  “After he dies,” Jerry said.

  “You mean like a doggie ghost rescue?” I wondered.

  “Yeah, something like that.” Jerry straightened, leaning back in his seat. “It’s not that big of a deal, really,” he said, as though sensing he was starting to get his way.

  But I was suspicious. “So all I would have to do is—what? Be there when he dies and retrieve his spirit.”

  “Yeah. Simple, right?”

  “Why can’t you do that?” I asked.

  “Oh, well…” He paused, pursing his lips, thinking. “I’d have to leave the house for an extended period of time. I’m at my strongest in the house. Outside I’m weak. Outside I can’t even manifest myself. I seriously doubt that I could do what needs to be done.”

  I considered everything he had said, and decided that there was definitely something wrong here. I was usually paranoid, sure, but that seemed aside from the point at the moment.

  “Okay, what am I missing?” I asked.

  He gave me an innocent look, but didn’t respond. I wished I could read his mind, but I could never read the minds of spirits.

  “It sounds simple,” I said, more to myself than to him.

  “It is,” he assured me, and then added solemnly, “In all the years since your family moved into my house, have I ever asked anything of you?”

  “No,” I had to admit. “And it’s not your house anymore, by the way. The dead can’t hold deeds.”

  “It still feels like home to me,” he said, “and you’re like the daughter I never had.”

  Now I knew something was wrong. Seriously, who in their right mind would ever think of me as the daughter they never had?