The Locker

by Richie Tankersley Cusick

  “Hey”—Tyler turned toward me and walked backward, nodding his head emphatically—“I believe in everything.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I went on, following him, not even sure he was listening anymore because now he had his back to me again. “You’re thinking I have bad eyes or—or—maybe somebody came up behind me in the hall and I didn’t hear them, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all. This thing—this person in my mirror—it was—she was—”

  “She?” Tyler glanced back but kept moving. “You said ‘she.’ How come?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I don’t know why I said ‘she’—it just seemed like a she—”

  “And you also said,” Tyler scolded, walking backward again, shaking his finger at me, “that you weren’t crazy like old lady Turley. Were you lying to me?”

  “I said I might be,” I threw back at him, not really appreciating the teasing. “But the truth is, I’m not.”

  He opened his eyes wide and gave a slow, solemn nod. “Um-hmmm … and I believe you—”

  “Will you stop it and just listen a minute?” I burst out. “She wasn’t real! I—I can’t explain it exactly, but the face in the mirror was all wavy and blurry, and it was like her face was superimposed on mine! Like a dream—only I was wide awake! It was horrible—I couldn’t stand the way she was looking at me!”

  “Well, you’ve got everyone else looking at you now,” Tyler mumbled out one side of his mouth. “Keep your voice down.” He took my arm and hustled me quickly through the hall, greeting each curious stare with a smile and a nod. “Hello there. Hello … hello …”

  “I’m not crazy,” I said furiously as we rounded a corner and I broke free of his grasp. Tyler stepped back and threw his hands in the air.

  “Would I know the difference?”

  I stared at him. My mind was going in circles so fast that I couldn’t think … couldn’t focus … couldn’t make sense of anything. After a long while I finally nodded. “You’re right,” I said, trying to be calm. “I don’t know what’s been happening to me, but there has to be a logical explanation for it.” When Tyler didn’t say anything, my voice rose again. “Do you have any idea how upsetting this all is? How embarrassing?”

  I ducked my head, suddenly afraid I might start to cry. I felt Tyler’s arm slip gently around my shoulders … felt his lips move close to my ear.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  I didn’t want anyone to see us like that, and yet part of me wanted to just stand there and have him close to me forever. I felt scared and all mixed up, and it was a relief to finally get ta class, though I can’t tell you a single thing that went on the rest of the morning.

  At least … not till lunchtime.

  I left the building fast, pretty sure that everyone had heard about my second big locker fiasco by now. I couldn’t stand the thought of being stared at and laughed at, so I took off down the sidewalk to the kindergarten, suddenly wanting more than anything to see Dobkin. Funny how his and my minds have always worked together at times of great crisis—no sooner had I left the campus and gotten halfway down the block than I saw his blond head bobbing toward me from the opposite direction.

  “How did you get out?” I greeted him. “I thought it was against the rules.”

  “What can they do—expell me?” He shrugged. “And who’s gonna miss me with a hundred other kids taking naps?” He thought a minute, cocked his head at me, and added, “I stuffed my sleeping bag with some teddy bears. They’ll never know.”

  “Genius.” I ruffled his hair, and though he grimaced, deep down I knew he was pleased.

  “So what prompted this great meeting of the minds?” I asked casually.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” he countered.

  I could see a sheaf of papers under his arm, and as each of us waited for the other to start, I spotted an empty bench at the corner bus stop, and we sat down.

  “Here,” Dobkin said proudly, “is all the information I could find on Suellen Downing.”

  My mouth fell open. Even though I tell myself that Dobkin can never do another thing to amaze me, still he always manages to do it.

  “Where on earth did you get these?” I demanded, opening the folder he handed me, flipping quickly through a stack of photocopies.

  He shrugged. “Library.”

  “But how—”

  “They took us there on a field trip this morning.” The look on his face clearly showed what he thought about that. “And so I told the librarian my sister was doing a paper on unsolved mysteries. She brought up the subject of Suellen Downing, and the rest was easy.”

  “In other words, you charmed her,” I said, and he gave a modest nod.

  “Those are all the articles from local papers,” Dobkin went on. “Maybe something will seem familiar.”

  But something already had.

  As I stared down at the first streaked copy, I could feel my blood chilling in my veins.

  “That’s her,” I croaked.

  Dobkin leaned across me to see. “Her picture, yeah. So what?”

  My shoulders sagged, and my breath came out in a shallow rush.

  “That’s the girl in my mirror,” I whispered.

  11

  Of course Dobkin didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. We sat there side by side on the bench while I told him what had happened at my locker that morning, and the whole time I talked, he just stared down at his sneakers, his hands clasped together on his stomach, nodding his head like some wise little Buddha who was biting his tongue to keep from saying “I told you so.”

  “That’s the girl,” I said again when my story was finished. I felt drained. Worse than drained.

  “You’re sure?”

  Slowly I nodded. “The image—whatever it was—was blurry and faded, but I’d know the face anywhere.” I put my hands over my eyes and moaned. “Oh, God …”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Dobkin murmured, and I glanced at him sadly.

  “Yes. She is.”

  “You sure?” He wanted me to be wrong, but I knew deep in my heart that I wasn’t.

  “Then you’ll have to find out where she is,” Dobkin said. “And what happened to her.”

  “Are you out of your—”

  “You have to, Marlee. You have to so her family will know. So they can go get her and … and bring her home again.”

  And suddenly he wasn’t the philosopher anymore, but only a very little boy, trying desperately not to cry, and I put my arms around him and held him because there was no Mom and Dad to do it in my place.

  We know about losing people, Dobkin and I.

  “You better get back to school.” I made my voice stern because I knew he’d bristle at that, and it would take his mind off being sad. At that moment we both saw Aunt Celia’s van flying past us in the street on its way to the kindergarten, and we looked at each other and sighed.

  “Trouble big time, Bud,” I said sympathetically, and he nodded. “Want me to go with you?”

  His glance was scathing. “I’ll tell them I was trying to find the bathroom and got lost.”

  “Give me the look,” I said, and his face collapsed into such a pitiful, scared expression, that it was all I could do to keep from laughing. “That should do it,” I agreed, and I stood there and waited till he turned in through his schoolyard gate.

  Back at my own school I found a nice tree behind the main building and sat down underneath it to think. I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid people forever—or their comments—or their questions—and that terrified me. Here I was, the new kid—the outsider—coming in and having weird experiences over some girl who’d mysteriously disappeared. And all because I’d been lucky enough to get her stupid locker.

  Remembering the face in the mirror, I felt a deep, cold tremor go through me. Snellen … can you hear me? That was blood, wasn’t it? Which means … you either killed yourself … had a tragic accident … or wer
e—

  “Marlee, are you okay?”

  The voice was so close to me that I jumped and gave a little scream. Noreen stepped quickly away, then dropped to her knees beside me.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you! Oh, gosh, are you all right?”

  “Sorry,” I breathed. “I didn’t even hear you.”

  “Would you rather be by yourself?” Her face wrinkled up in concern. “You know … I’m here if you want to talk.”

  Of course I wanted to talk. But what could I possibly say that wouldn’t sound absolutely insane? I had to go to school here … I had to see these kids every day as long as we stayed in Edison.…

  “No,” I said finally and sighed. “But thanks for offering. That means a lot.”

  “I was talking to Tyler, and he told me what happened,” she went on, dropping her eyes like she didn’t want to embarrass me.

  “I’m sure everyone knows about it,” I said glumly, feeling even worse when she gave a hesitant nod. “I’ll be avoided like the plague.”

  “No, you won’t.” She moved over and put her arm around my shoulder, giving me a reassuring squeeze. “Of course that won’t happen. Once people get to know you, they won’t even remember this locker stuff. And anyway, you have me. And Tyler,” she added, grinning. “Speaking of plagues.”

  I smiled a little, but it didn’t last long.

  “What are people saying?” I confronted her, noticing how she drew back a little at my question.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. About my locker. The things going on. What are people saying about it? I know you’ve heard something.”

  She looked like she really didn’t want to get into it, and she tried to laugh it off.

  “You know what they’re saying.” She rolled her eyes and gave a high-pitched laugh. “Just what you’d expect them to say. That the locker’s haunted. You know. Stupid things like that.”

  I stared at her. “Did they say that before I got here? Or just since I’ve been here?”

  Now she looked really uncomfortable.

  “Well … you know how kids are … how stuff like that gets started when there’s some kind of unexplained tragedy.”

  “So you knew I was getting a haunted locker, and you didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to say?” Noreen defended herself. “It’s just stupid stuff kids make up! Nobody really believes it! And how would you have taken it if I had told you? You’d have laughed yourself silly and thought I was crazy!”

  I stared at her a minute. She bit her lip and looked away, and then she looked straight back at me.

  “Well, you would have! You know you would have!”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. So instead I burst out laughing, and after a few seconds Noreen laughed, too. In fact we laughed and laughed so hard that my sides hurt by the time we finally stopped.

  “Welcome to Edison High.” Noreen sighed, wiping her eyes. “Oh, and by the way, here’s your locker, and I hope you don’t mind if it’s haunted. Geez …”

  “Why do kids say it’s haunted?” I wanted to know.

  “Well, maybe haunted isn’t the right word,” she tried to explain to me. “Maybe it’s just more—you know—superstition. I mean, the girl who had it disappeared. So of course nobody wants to use her locker. Like you could catch bad luck from touching anything that belonged to her.”

  She thought a minute, then laughed again.

  “And the jokes. Sick ones, you know the type. ‘Oh, sorry I don’t have that homework assignment—I walked by Suellen’s locker and it disappeared!’ Dumb stuff like that.”

  I mulled all this over, casting her a sidelong glance. “And you really think it’s all stupid? You don’t believe the locker’s really haunted?”

  “Of course not! I don’t believe in any of that stuff. And anyway”—she glanced down, concentrating on some grass she was twisting around her fingers— “why would it suddenly start being really and truly haunted now when it’s been sitting there empty all this time?”

  “Maybe because the right person came along to use it,” a voice said, and we both gasped and looked up.

  Jimmy Frank was standing over us, his face set and hard. I could see his hands at his sides, clenched into fists, and as his eyes moved slowly over us, his mouth moved in a kind of sneer.

  “What do you mean, the right person?” Noreen came to my defense, chattering on like a magpie. “She’s the only person to come here and use it. What a dumb thing to say.”

  “It’s not dumb at all,” he said, and to my surprise, he squatted down on his heels beside us and looked right into my eyes. “It’s sort of like … psychometry. Isn’t it, Marlee?”

  I knew what he was talking about, all right.

  As he said it out loud and continued to look at me, I felt my stomach churn, and I prayed I wouldn’t get sick all over myself and them, too.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Noreen asked, glaring into Jimmy Frank’s face. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about—that big word you just used. Get out of here. Can’t you see we’re having a private talk?”

  “About what?” he persisted. “Suellen?”

  “Come on.” Noreen reached out and gave him a swat on his arm, sort of like a fly trying to intimidate an elephant. “Leave us alone.”

  “It’s a form of ESP, isn’t it?” Jimmy Frank went on conversationally, but there was no pleasantness in his eyes. “Only you use it to read particular objects.”

  “Hey, Tyler,” Noreen called, exasperated. “Will you guys please just get out of here and leave us alone?”

  I hadn’t noticed Tyler standing off a little ways, but now he sauntered up, hands in pockets, eyes wide with interest.

  “Psycho—what?” he asked, and Noreen groaned.

  “Psychometry,” Jimmy Frank stated. “A person can hold something in his hands, and it gives off information.”

  “What kind?” Tyler prodded him with the toe of one shoe.

  “All kinds.” Jimmy Frank was answering Tyler, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Like certain people … and certain circumstances connected with the object.”

  Beside me Noreen gave a noticeable shudder. “Ooh, that’s creepy. You’re making Marlee sound like some kind of fortune-teller. Or witch.”

  “How do you know so much about it anyway?” Tyler demanded. “You hold a cowpie out on your farm, you can tell which cow did it?”

  Noreen shrieked with laughter, and Tyler looked immensely pleased with himself. Any other time I might have found it funny, too, but not now—not with the way Jimmy Frank was pinning me with his eyes.

  “It’s true.” He shrugged his broad shoulders and stood up again. “Just ’cause you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

  “Here, Marlee, read this.” Noreen giggled, digging in her purse and shoving her pen into my hand. “I used it to write the answers to my history test—do you think I got an A?”

  “Put your hand on Noreen’s head,” Tyler dead-panned. “You won’t know anything.” He grabbed an overhead branch with both hands and swung gracefully back and forth till Noreen dived at him and tickled him, making him drop.

  “You know, Jimmy Frank, with people like you around here, no wonder Marlee feels sick all the time,” Noreen said shortly, pulling Tyler back onto his feet. She brushed fiercely at the back of his jeans, but when Tyler gave her a deliberately suggestive smile, she stopped and shoved him. “It’s hard enough coming into a strange new place where you don’t know anybody, without people accusing you of dumb things. And anyway, Marlee didn’t hold the locker in her hands—a locker’s too big to hold in your hands—so she can’t even use this psycho-whatever it is if she can’t hold something in her hands. She’s probably just coming down with the flu or something, and you’re gonna have everyone treating her like she’s some kind of weirdo.”

  It was loyal of Noreen, and I appreciated it. Yet as she sat back down again and rested on
e hand on the file folder Dobkin had given me, it was all I could do not to scream and push her away.

  “I’m not accusing her,” Jimmy Frank said smoothly. He shook his head at Noreen and folded his arms across his chest. “Did I say she was doing anything weird? Sometimes people don’t even know they’re psychic. I just wondered if she’d ever heard of it, that’s all.”

  Noreen patted the folder impatiently. She picked it up and waved it at him, shooing him away. I had to use every ounce of self-control to keep myself sitting there on the ground.

  “No.” I shook my head and frowned and shrugged my shoulders all at the same time. “I’ve never heard of it. What’s it called again?”

  Jimmy Frank’s eyes shifted calmly to mine.

  His lips moved in a mocking smile.

  “See?” Noreen slammed the folder back down, and I casually picked it up and tucked it under my arm. “She doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He didn’t believe her, of course.

  I knew it, and Jimmy Frank knew that I knew it.

  I caught the last backward glance he threw over his shoulder at me as he and Tyler walked away, and I saw that I hadn’t fooled him for a second.

  That scared me.

  I wasn’t sure why, exactly.…

  But knowing that Jimmy Frank was on to me scared me a thousand times more than any haunted locker.

  12

  I could hardly wait for school to be over.

  When Aunt Celia asked us if we wanted to take in a movie that night, Dobkin said he’d be bored, and I said I had too much homework. It was nice having the house to ourselves. That way we could spread everything out on the kitchen table and not have to worry about what we said. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust Aunt Celia. It’s just that we both agreed she had a lot on her mind right now, with the move and getting settled and all, and there was no use upsetting her till we really knew ourselves what was going on.

  “That’s her, I’m sure of it,” I said again, looking down at the girl’s photo in the article.