Sara

by Greg Herren

  That got me moving. I walked around the corner.

  Zack spent the summers working on his father’s farm, so his face, neck, and forearms were tan, but the rest of him was white as a ghost. Like me, all he was wearing a towel. His face was red, and cords stood out in his neck.

  Glenn was putting his shoes on, not even looking up at him. “Don’t flatter yourself, Zack. Trust me, you’ve got nothing I want. And if I ever look at you, it’s by mistake.” He finished tying his shoes and stood up. “And you’re the one standing there in front of me in just a towel. Seems to me like you want me to look at you.” He stepped over the bench and took a few steps closer to Zack. “That what you want, Zack? You want to be with me but you’re too afraid to make the first move?”

  This isn’t going to end well, I thought. “Guys—”

  Zack’s face flushed. “You calling me a fag?” He took another step closer to Glenn. Now they were in reach of each other.

  I looked over at Coach’s office door, which was closed. Where the hell is he?

  Glenn laughed. “No, you’re a real man, right? What’s the matter, Zack, did your favorite sheep die?”

  “You motherfucker!” Zack swung at Glenn. His swing was wild.

  Glenn ducked the punch easily and before I could say anything or move, he swung back. His fist caught Zack square in the nose, and I heard the crack of cartilage shattering as Zack fell backward. A fountain of blood erupted from his nostrils, and he fell flat on his back. The towel untied as he fell, so he lay there on the tiled floor naked, his hands clutching his nose, blood erupting over his fingers.

  “Stay away from me, or I’ll fucking kill you, do you understand me?” Glenn hissed. He picked up his gym bag and walked out.

  I don’t know how long I stood there. I guess I was in shock. I’d never seen Glenn throw a punch at anyone before.

  Zack moaned, and that snapped me out of it.

  I knelt down next to him. “You okay, man?” I pulled on his arm. “We’ve gotta get some ice on your nose before it starts to swell.”

  “Thun of a bitch,” Zack moaned.

  I wound up going to the hospital in Kahola with him and Coach. While Zack was getting his nose set—he refused to let Coach call his parents—Coach looked at me long and hard. “Are you going to tell me what really happened, Martin?”

  Zack’s story—which was kind of lame—was that he had slipped and hit his nose on a bench. I was pissed that Zack didn’t tell the truth. Not that I wanted Glenn to get in trouble, but now I was stuck having to cover for him and his stupid story. That was the unspoken code of teenagers—never tell the adults the truth. No matter how pissed off you are at the other person, nothing would be worse than telling an adult what happened. “He fell, I guess. I heard him yell and when I came around the corner he was lying on the floor, his nose bleeding all over the place. I guess he fell.”

  “I don’t buy that story at all, Martin.” Coach sighed. “I guess you kids don’t trust me. I don’t know why that surprises me. I remember what it was like when I was your age.” He laughed, a little sadly. “Believe it or not, I was your age once, and nobody ever told the adults anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure this out,” he went on. “Zimmer probably called him a fag, right? Maybe that’s not how it started, but that’s how it ended, and Lockhart hauled off and slugged him.” I started, and he smiled at me mirthlessly. “Pegged it, didn’t I? You kids think that we teachers are oblivious to everything, but we notice things. You think I don’t know what kids are okay with Lockhart’s being gay and what kids aren’t? I’ve heard Green and Zimmer and Froelich go on about Lockhart—I was at the school board meeting when the good Brother Zimmer was going on about how letting Glenn stay in school would result in the decline and fall of civilization as we know it.” He rolled his eyes. “And it’s not like Zimmer and Lockhart ever liked each other much to begin with. I was afraid there was going to be trouble, but I never expected Greene to go and get himself killed.” His shoulders dropped, and he suddenly looked a lot older. I realized Noah’s death had hit Coach pretty hard. “It’s all such a waste, and we teachers sit around hoping you kids will come to us, open up, let us help. We’ve all been there before, you know? That’s why we become teachers, because we want to help you kids through it all. But the joke is on us, because you kids don’t want no part of us. So we just get to sit back and watch it all happen.”

  As usual, I didn’t know what to say. Teachers weren’t human beings after all, they were teachers. They were them, the untouchables. The thought of talking to a teacher about a personal problem was as unthinkable as walking into first period stark naked. Coach was reaching out to me, and I just sat there, not knowing what to say.

  “Glenn’s doing okay, Coach.” I finally said. “You don’t have to worry about him.”

  Coach sighed. “Yeah, like I don’t have to worry about Greene anymore, either.”

  I felt the key chain in my jeans pocket, and in that moment, I was tempted.

  I was tempted to tell him about the weird dreams I had been having, unburden myself completely. Maybe Coach could make head or tail of it. I wanted to tell the whole weird freaky story.

  But before I could say anything else, Zack came out with his nose bandaged up, and the opportunity was lost.

  After Coach dropped me off at home, I called Glenn’s cell phone but he didn’t pick up. I left a message and did my homework, waiting for him to call me back.

  He never did, and it took all my willpower not to call him again.

  I finally told myself he’d call if he wanted to talk. I watched television for a while with my kid brother and went to bed early.

  I don’t know how long I was asleep before she came to me again.

  She was in my bedroom this time, not at the window, and once again she was naked, her pale skin glowing like marble in the moonlight. “Tony, I need you.”

  “Leave me alone, just go away.”

  “I cannot go away. I need you.”

  She pulled the covers off me and slipped my underwear off. “I need you, Tony,” she purred, climbing on top of me, kissing me with those oh-so-cold lips, stroking my chest with her fingernails, which were sharp as razors, and I saw furrows of blood where she had drawn her fingernails across the skin. She licked the blood, and her tongue was rough, like a cat’s.

  “She hates, Tony, how she hates.”

  I looked up, and Zack was standing there, his nose still bandaged up.

  “Don’t listen to him, Tony, he’s just jealous.”

  “She wants to kill you, Tony, she wants to kill us all.”

  I tried to pull away from her, and she had me in her grip, like a vise, so that I could not get away from her, and I could smell her breath, and it was foul—

  Like death.

  “She hates, Tony, how she hates, she hates us all, and she will kill you, like she killed Noah, and she killed me.”

  “You’re not dead, Zack.”

  “She hates.”

  “You aren’t dead!”

  She began to laugh and climbed out of my bed, and she grabbed something that was hanging from Zack’s neck, and I saw that it was a rope.

  “No one will stand between me and what I want, Tony.” And her face was again a skull, and she was laughing, and I wanted to scream, but somehow I couldn’t get the sound out, and my throat was working but there was no sound, except her laughter and the laughter was evil, and I could hear Zack screaming and screaming and screaming, and then I woke up.

  I sat up in the bed, breathing hard. Why was I dreaming about her? Why was she haunting my dreams? I rubbed my chest and felt something wet. I turned on the lamp beside my bed.

  There was blood on my hands.

  I got up and looked in the mirror.

  There were four streaks of blood across my chest, exactly where she had scratched me in the dream.

  Breathing hard, I kept telling myself, over and over
again, that I must have done it myself.

  It wasn’t until I got to school the next day that I found out that Zack Zimmer had hanged himself.

  Chapter Six

  Why would Zack hang himself?

  I couldn’t believe it—it didn’t make the least bit of sense to me.

  You should have known, that annoying little voice in my head kept whispering as I walked down the hall to my locker. Candy was walking next to me, talking in a shaking whisper, occasionally wiping at her eyes. I didn’t hear anything she was saying. I just kept nodding and saying uh-huh every once in a while she paused to take a breath or stifle a sob.

  Walking down the hallway was awful. Girls were crying almost everywhere I looked—and the guys weren’t much better. The ones who weren’t crying looked like they’d been sucker-punched in the crotch.

  I knew exactly how they felt.

  Maybe he wasn’t in his right mind kept running through my head, trying to drown out that feeling that somehow I should have known. They’d given him some pain pills at the emergency room. I kept picturing him with the splint on his nose, the dark, swollen purple patches underneath his eyes. Maybe getting his nose broken by the gay kid pushed him over the edge.

  You know what happened to him.

  Somehow I’d managed to make it to my locker, and fortunately the turning the lock to its combination was automatic. I got out my sociology textbook. Candy was still talking in a hushed whisper, but I couldn’t understand anything she was saying. It was just noise, sounds that my mind couldn’t decipher and translate into something that made sense to me.

  The warning bell rang, and Candy unexpectedly hugged me, pressing her tearstained face against my chest.

  I put my arms around her.

  Zack came to see you, remember?

  It was a dream, my rational mind said, trying to push that thought away.

  Like Noah coming to see you the night after he died? What about the key ring?

  Candy broke free and smiled at me. She wiped at her eyes again. “I better get going to class.”

  I nodded, and she stood up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to my cheek.

  “Thanks, Tony,” she whispered, and hurried away, leaving me staring after her.

  This was even worse than the day before. The teachers all looked like the rug had been pulled out from under them. Noah’s death had been an accident with alcohol involved; a tragedy, but one with an object lesson for the rest of us. Zack’s suicide (you know it wasn’t a suicide) was a whole different animal—one that none of them seemed either prepared for or able to handle.

  Mrs. Drury was barely able to speak. Her eyes were red, her face pale, and she kept starting to talk but would lose her train of thought in mid-sentence. Finally, after a few minutes, she cleared her throat and sat down on the end of the desk. “Kids, I hope you all know—” and apparently got overwhelmed again as she struggled to keep control of herself. One of the girls in the back of the class sobbed, and that was it. All the girls started crying, and it was hard for me not to.

  Even though he was a year behind me, Zack and I had been friends for a long time. We used to have a lot of fun together. I’d always felt sorry for him, having that crazy Jesus-freak preacher for a dad. When my dad had left, the only thing that made me feel better was knowing I’d rather not have a dad than have one like Zack’s. Zack hadn’t liked me being friends with Glenn, and we’d started drifting apart then, long before Glenn came out. Glenn and Zack had gotten along at first, but something happened and they barely tolerated each other.

  When Glenn came out, it wasn’t possible for me to stay friends with Zack anymore. He was so nasty to Glenn—the things he posted on Glenn’s Facebook page were so cruel and hateful, there wasn’t any way I could overlook it. I felt pretty sure that a lot of it came from his asshole dad, but that didn’t excuse it.

  But suicide?

  Something was wrong, terribly wrong. It didn’t take a nuclear physicist to figure that out. I couldn’t even remember the last time someone at Southern Heights High School had died. Now two kids were dead in less than four days.

  Things were getting weird.

  And it couldn’t be a coincidence that it all started right after Sara showed up.

  But that’s crazy.

  Everyone at school was walking around in a daze, ready to break down into tears at any moment.

  Except, of course, for Glenn and Sara.

  And even though Noah’s death hadn’t bothered him, I still expected Zack’s suicide to affect him on some level.

  Clearly, it hadn’t.

  Glenn was different, too.

  Ever since she’d shown up.

  What was she?

  I’d dreamed about her. I’d dreamed about Noah and Zack after they’d died, and she was involved in all of the dreams. I’d found Noah’s key ring (I was sure, deep inside, that it was his) in my bedroom right after the “dream.” Was I crazy, or had Noah’s ghost been there? There were the scratch marks on my chest. Had I somehow done that to myself in my dream, or had Sara really been there, and scratched me?

  What the hell was going on?

  They had to be dreams. That was the only explanation that made any sort of sense.

  But if it had just been a dream, how did Noah’s key ring get into my bedroom? That was the one piece of conclusive proof that things weren’t what they seemed. They had to have been in the truck’s ignition when the truck crashed. It’s not like I could call Noah’s parents and ask about his truck keys—not now, at any rate.

  As Mrs. Drury talked about processing grief and so forth, I just sat there in my own little world.

  Okay then, suppose—just suppose—that ghosts are real and you’ve been visited by two.

  Why would they come see you?

  It made no sense at all for Noah’s ghost to come see me. We’d never been friends. We hadn’t hated each other but we didn’t like each other, either. It made more sense that he would have gone to see Laney, his girlfriend, or his best friend, Randy Froelich.

  Or his parents, or either his brother or sister—if ghosts were real, they had to make sense in some way.

  Zack, on the other hand, I could understand coming to see me. Even though we’d stopped being friends and hanging out, we’d been friends for a long time. He hadn’t started hanging out with Noah and Randy until all the Glenn-bashing shit had started.

  Randy was in my sociology class. I glanced over at him. He was sitting along the windows. He was looking out into the parking lot, tapping a pencil on his desk. I wondered if either Noah or Zack or both had shown up in his bedroom the nights they died.

  It wasn’t like I could ask him. If anyone at Southern Heights could be said to hate me, it was Randy Froelich. I’d never really thought about it much. It always had just kind of been. As long as I could remember, Randy and I had hated each other. Why, I couldn’t say.

  But I couldn’t just walk up to him after class and ask him if he’d been seeing ghosts, too.

  They were just dreams. That makes more sense. Maybe you’re a little psychic in some way and just never knew it before.

  And maybe somehow you’ve just stumbled into a bad episode of Supernatural.

  Randy turned and looked me right in the eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept well either. There were dark circles under his reddened eyes. He sneered at me.

  Yeah, asking him about any of this wasn’t really an option.

  I was tired myself. I had slept fitfully after the dream and woken up not feeling well at all. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the day, let alone football practice. When the bell rang, ending first period, I walked to my locker in a daze. I saw Glenn and Sara walking down the hall together, their arms entwined, their heads close to each other as they talked. She threw her head back and laughed.

  The sound made me wince.

  I wanted to scream at Glenn, somehow get him away from her.

  “How can they be laughing and acting like nothing’s hap
pened?” Laney said from behind me.

  “It’s not like Zack or Noah were particularly nice to him,” I replied as I put my sociology textbook away and got my government book down.

  “Yeah, and she didn’t know either one of them, but still.” Her face twisted. “It’s interesting, though—” She cut herself off and looked away.

  “What’s interesting?” I shut my locker and leaned back against it.

  She shrugged. “Nothing.” She sighed.

  “Come on, Laney, you were going to say something.” I prodded her. “It’s Tony, remember me?”

  She smiled faintly. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “I already do,” I teased, which got me a light punch in the arm from her.

  “Okay. I know it’s not possible…but it’s weird that Noah and Zack were assholes to Glenn, and now they’re dead. Don’t you think?”

  “You think maybe God’s out to get homophobes?” I replied, a little smile playing at the corners of my lips.

  “I told you you’d think I was crazy,” she said. “But it is a weird coincidence, isn’t it?” Sara laughed again somewhere down the hallway, and Laney’s face clouded again. “I just wish Glenn wasn’t hanging out with her so much, of all people.” She shivered.

  “Why not her?” I asked.

  “She’s bad.” She spat the words out, then laughed. “Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? There’s something about her that’s just not right. Don’t you feel it?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You think she’s okay?” She prodded. “It’s just me?”

  “Why do you think she’s bad?” I somehow managed to get the words out. I’m not the only one who feels it.

  “It’s just a feeling.” She shrugged, and her curls bounced. “I had that feeling the first time I saw her at Vista. I didn’t want to come over and talk to you guys that night. But Noah did. He wanted to talk to her.” Her eyes filled with tears. “And now he’s dead.”

  “Did Noah say why he wanted to talk to her?”

  “No.” She sighed. “He thought she looked familiar, that he knew her from somewhere. At least that’s what he said. But she’s from Boston, right? She just moved here, so he couldn’t have known her. I guess he just wanted to meet her. I guess if I was a guy I’d want to meet her, too.”