As a senior, Jamie had a second floor room, away from the boys' R.A.. Girls wouldn't be allowed on the boys' hall at all past nine o'clock, but until then, I could hang out in his room without penalty so long as he left the door open.
He didn't.
I honestly had no idea what to expect from the so-called Bishop's room. Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed was the stark, empty half that had once been Aaron's.
The extra-long twin mattress had been stripped. There was nothing decorating the walls or chest of drawers, no plastic bins under the bed, no laundry basket shoved into the space beside the dresser. My throat closed, and I felt Jamie's shoulder against my back as he pulled the door shut. I didn't move.
"They took most of it," he said, and the un-filed edges of his voice caught against my heart.
"His parents?"
"Yeah." Jamie pulled his phone and wallet from his pockets and chucked them at his bed with his keys. The covers were pulled up, but where I'd expected hospital corners, the actual corners were more on the mom-made-me-wrap-this-Christmas-present level. It was comforting.
It still felt weird to sit on a guy's bed, so I stepped over toward Aaron's. I paused, peering at something dark on the bedside table. Pooled in front of the lamp sat a string of familiar tiger's eye beads.
The last time I'd seen them, they'd been in the shape of a rosary. Now, however, they'd reclaimed their original form as a set of buddhist prayer beads. My brain conjured up the image of Jamie, sitting on this stripped down bed, carefully counting ten small, one large, ten small, one large. I sat on the bed, feeling rather rude and untethered.
While he filled the water heater, I let my nosy side distract me from the fact that I was in a room with the boy I liked, sitting on his dead roommate's bed. The expected Star Trek poster was on the wall, though he'd attempted to make it less conspicuously fanboy by framing it. A stack of books sat on his bedside table, some fiction, some non, some I recognized from next year's English reading list. Next to those, a glasses case and a prodigious amount of loose change in a pewter stein. He also had a small wastebasket, but I knew better than to look in there. Some things, even my journalist-side doesn't want to know.
"So, something about Hermes?" I prompted, analyzing the various bathroom products lined up on the room's little sink. Toothpaste, deodorant, razor, stuff I couldn't read from this distance...
"Yeah," he said, sounding distracted.
I glanced over. He stood in front of his dresser, staring at the french press, a cheap spoon in one hand and a bag of ground coffee in the other.
"Want me to do it?"
"Yeah." He set the coffee and spoon on the dresser and stepped back, as if mere proximity might cause it to burst into flame. He'd already pulled out two mugs, one of which had the string of a teabag wrapped around the handle.
"You talk Greek, I'll make caffeinated beverages," I said, peering at the creaking electric kettle.
"Mênin áeide theà Pēlēïádeō Akhilêos."
"Do I need to make a bad joke about it being Greek to me?"
He grimaced. "Please don't. I'm in midterm mode. Weird shit seems funny." He cleared his throat. "Hermes. Right. So, one of Hermes's epithets is psychopompos--literally, leader of souls."
I nodded, dumping a few scoops of grounds into the french press.
"A lot of religions have a member of the pantheon or religious hierarchy whose job it is to convey souls to the afterlife. The technical name for it is psychopomp, though I've also seen psychogogue, which is a little different, but-"
"Focus," I interrupted.
"Right. So, in Egyptian myth, Anubis is a psychopomp, and in other religions it's a shaman's job to send souls on after death."
"But that's death. Like, death-death, not ghost-making death."
He quirked an eyebrow at me. "Death-death?"
"Official Exorcist's lingo. Hiroki told me."
"Ah-huh."
The water heater clicked and he beat me to it, pouring boiling water first into his mug, then over the grounds in the french press. The reach put him close enough for a wrinkle in his shirt to brush my arm.
"You have to take a step back from the literal mythology," he said. "Look at what it's trying to explain."
I shook my head. "People want to know where they go after they die. That explains it pretty easily."
"Yes, but what about the ones who can't get there?" He pulled open his drawer again, extracted a box of sugar packets, and brandished it at me. "What happens to them?"
"They...become...ghosts?"
"They become ghosts." He dumped a sugar packet into his mug and stared at it. "I just realized I haven't got any milk left."
"You gonna survive?"
"I'm ninety-percent certain it won't end in death-death. Anyway, my theory is that the role of the psychopomp explains people like you. Lots of religions have rites on exorcisms in terms of ghostly or demonic possession. That's what most of the world focuses on, so that's what people know about, but it's not what you do. A a psychopomp is something different. Their role is literally to guide spirits to the afterlife."
I hummed, depressing the plunger and pouring myself a cup of black coffee. Without milk, I didn't want sugar, so I nodded my satisfaction and we retreated to opposite beds, cradling our beverages.
"Okay," I said. "So let's say I'm a psycho-thing."
"You are a psycho-thing. But also, a conveyor of souls." He gave a one-shouldered shrug and a half smile over the rim of his mug. The steam fogged his glasses. "It's something to think about. Hermes was also the patron of orators and literature, and a messenger god--sort of the Ancient Greek equivalent of a news anchor. That can't be such a bad thought, can it?"
"You're such a nerd." I said it with love.
"You're welcome."
I swallowed a sip of coffee and looked toward the window, trying to discern whether there were still police cruisers in the parking lot. Jamie glanced as well, but he couldn't know what I was looking for. He seemed not to mind silence, so we sat there, gazing out the window for a while, until he finally lowered his mug.
"Can I ask about the brick?"
I sighed, and as I dragged the toes of my shoes along the floor, explained. He listened attentively, only looking away once when he reached a long arm all the way to his sink and grabbed a bottle from it. By the time he stretched across to hand it to me, I was done.
The bottle was an analgesic spray. "For your knee," he said. "So, you think the brick was the stick monkeys?"
I shrugged, squirting spray onto my cuts. "It could have been lacrosse. Or anyone else at the school. I had to disable comments forever ago, and even deleting the backlog doesn't work because mirror sites just keep popping up. And social media is a nightmare." The sting in my knee abated, and I set the spray next to Aaron's rosary. The movement caused my shorts to ride up and I adjusted them self-consciously. "At this point, anyone on my blog has motive."
When I looked at Jamie, his gaze flicked suddenly away from my legs, and I swear I saw the tops of his ears turn pink. "I'm on your blog," he said.
"But I didn't know you then. And you liked the Bond villain comparison. Besides it wasn't a picture of your pregnancy test in the bathroom trash Crystal took."
Crystal had been one of the other three girls who co-wrote The Toilet Paper until her parents found her stash of gay erotic fan fiction and sent her to military school. (Which is a real shame, too, because her Harry/Draco stuff was genius; I will never thing of an engorgement charm the same way.)
"I should have made my pregnancy test more conspicuous, then," he said.
"Slut."
Jamie choked on his tea. I leaned back, surprised to see him actually laugh. I wasn't aware he ever did that. I stared, both confused and proud, laughing more at him than at my joke. He had a funny grin, one that looked too big for his mouth and crinkled his cheeks like whiskers. He covered it with a hand, though that might have been his attempt to catch the Earl Gray dripping onto his school ti
e.
"Shit," he said. He set down his cup and crossed to his laundry basket. I giggled fiendishly as he fished out a towel, wiped his hands and face, and grabbed his tie.
And then my brain turned off. Honestly, I'm not into suit porn. I'm not really even all that excited by the idea of strippers. But there is something about a guy slipping the knot of a tie loose, something about the sound of it pulling through the collar, that silences any girl with a preference for holders of the y-chromosome.
My mouth went dry at the sound and there was a traitorous tingle somewhere South of the Border. Jamie chucked his tie in the basket, though I'm pretty sure those don't go in the washing machine. He tilted his chin and squinted, thumbing open the top button of his shirt.
I'd stopped giggling and commenced staring. The second I realized it, I was desperate for something else to look at. Bed--no. Sink--no. Star Trek poster. Yes, good.
"So, what does Satou think?" Jamie asked, dropping himself back into place on the navy bedspread.
Well, there was a mood-killer. If he'd been doing the whole prep-school strip-tease on purpose, he'd just ruined it.
"Uh-oh," he said, pausing mid-reach for his tea. "From that expression-"
I sighed, tucking one foot under me. "I guess it's good all the gossip isn't going around school like herpes."
"Your descriptions of things are so pleasant."
"Hiroki and I are taking a break."
He leaned forward. "From..." His voice had dropped in pitch.
"From being friends? From hanging out? I don't know. He's mad at me for not being able to stop thinking about ghosts. I'm mad at him for abandoning me when I needed him to, well, help me look like I'm not just making up my--ugh, powers sounds so X-men..."
"Ability," Jamie supplied. "So he doesn't know about the brick?"
"No."
"And you're just sort of...waiting out the storm?"
I twisted the cup in my hands. "Also no."
His mouth flattened. "I'm almost afraid to ask."
My half-empty cup had lost most of its warmth. I set it down, fingers still playing with the handle. "I've been trying to figure out how to see ghosts again. Preferably without giving myself another concussion."
"Oh!" A tone of pleasant surprise.
I cocked my head at him. That had been a chipper 'oh' for someone as dispassionate as the Bishop. Next moment, though, he was reaching for the laptop purring at the end of his bed. "I--actually--did some research on that last month. You know," he waved a hand toward Aaron's side of the room. I nodded and stood up.
"And you found something?"
"Well," he bobbed his head to the side to waylay my expectations. "If you don't mind at least one of them being slightly illegal."
CHAPTER SIX
A Joint Effort
"This was a stupid idea," I said, staring at the plume of smoke Jamie blew into the wet darkness in front of us. I'd tried pot once before and it hadn't done anything for me besides encourage an extended trip to find fro-yo. Now, all I could feel was a slight tingling in my fingers, but that could have been caused by proximity to Jamie. Still, as we leaned back against the tailgate of his truck, staring up the gravel-strewn ruts of Acid Park, I found I didn't really care whether this worked.
I'd texted, even called Hiroki, convinced some good, old-fashioned rule-breaking would get us over the tift, but he'd never answered. By the time Jamie and I had rolled off the main road, past the crashed VW, I was ready to do something reckless.
The driveway back to the artist's farmhouse was long, with bends enough of its own to easily conceal a dark gray truck from both the road and the house at its end. Neither of us actually knew whether Bill's bro lived in the farmhouse now that the artist was gone, but that's not the sort of thing you care too much about when you're getting high at 2 a.m.
Jamie handed me the rolled cigarette and I took it from him, pulled the smoke into my lungs. Pulled maybe too much in, because suddenly, my esophagus burned.
"Maybe it won't help us see ghosts," he said. "But at least you've relaxed."
"S-hort of," I coughed, waving a hand to clear away my graceless puffs. "This shit smells like sage. I'm craving Italian food."
He chuckled, then tilted his head back and let the smoke curl from barely-parted lips. I think he might have been more relaxed than I was.
It had been my idea to go to Acid Park, even though most of the whirligigs were gone. I guess I'd read enough about the place to be curious, whether the reflective splendor of its original design was gone or not. Part of me was also convinced by the claims of haunting, which made it the perfect testing ground for our experiment. And any opportunity to get out of school was attractive to me right now, especially if it involved Jamie.
"How do we know if it works," he said, using his middle finger to push his glasses back up his nose. Back toward the road, a soft rumble heralded the approach of a car. "I still think we should have stayed where we know for sure there's a ghost."
Headlighs filtered through the trees, then swung sharply away again as the car arrived at that fateful bend in the road. For just a second, they flashed off the rusted VW van's bumper.
"You didn't see Amy Barnes," I said. "If you had, you wouldn't be asking. I'd rather watch Fox News than look at her."
"Gross." He smiled as he said it, following the passage of the car with his eyes.
"You begin to see my point."
He breathed out through his nose, sending two streams of fog into the chill air. "Yes. I don't know how Satou does it."
I winced. That had been exactly Hiroki's point--he couldn't choose which ghosts he saw and when. I couldn't imagine getting used to something like Amy Barnes. That heavy, swinging form. The tap of her blood pooling below. The outstretched hand.
I shuddered, glancing around the trees for any hint of hanging girls. Tall pines lining the highway between school and Acid Park extended down the quarter mile of driveway. Though some of the trees had been cut down to aid in removing the whirligigs, enough remained to preserve the place's isolation. They stretched overhead, branches extending across the driveway like fingers weaving a roof. It was peaceful. It was away. It felt good.
I took another drag off the joint and shifted my weight against the tailgate.
"Hey." I kicked Jamie's shoe in case he was too high to realize I was talking to him. He glanced at me. "Thanks," I said. He reached for the joint. It was down to a twist of paper, but his fingers grazed mine, and he took it. Dropped it into the gravel.
The silence stretched out, but I must have been a little high myself because I didn't worry that he didn't respond. His leaned his head back and stared through the branches.
I wasn't one hundred percent certain why he was helping me. Part of my reason for thanking him was in the hope that he might tip his hand. Was it just to pay me back for helping Aaron move on? Was he being nice to me because everyone else wasn't?
He exhaled again, as if blowing out another stream of smoke. I thought he would say something, but he rocked forward, swinging himself around to the back tire, and climbed into the truck bed. I followed, but I must've been more high than I thought, because I couldn't tell how hard I was holding onto the truck. My fingers slipped free and only a majestic flail kept me upright.
When I finally joined Jamie in the truck bed, he'd stretched his arms out over the cab like a cat, long fingers tapping. I crossed my arms and leaned next to him, my chest pressing into the cold back window.
"Doth my gratitude offend?"
He shrugged. "No, I just don't feel like it's something you should thank me for, so saying you're welcome would be...weird."
"You're really high right now, aren't you?"
"I am really high right now. But I don't want you to thank me for--I don't know--not being an asshole. I mean. I usually am an asshole. It doesn't make one worthy of praise. That should be, like, baseline. The low bar."
I know what I would have said to Hiroki in response, but I wasn't sure what
to say to Jamie. I didn't know if he would appreciate a joke right then, to point out that we'd possibly just slipped to the serious side of being high--the part where everything seemed deep and meaningful and finger snapping was an acceptable method of agreement. Instead, I lifted my chin and looked at him, stretched forward across the gunmetal gray cab.
"My gratitude isn't up to you," I said. "You got me away from school. Whether this shit works or not," I waved my fingers to indicate the overgrown and rusting Acid Park around us, "it means something that you were willing to try. Thank you."
I lifted my eyebrows at him, leaning forward to indicate that, this time, I expected a fucking "you're welcome."
He noticed me looking and his mouth twitched toward a smile. He turned his head away like he was embarrassed to let me see it and goosebumps drew up on my skin. He shifted toward me, bumped my shoulder with his own. When he straightened back up again, he was little bit closer than he'd been before. That was good enough.
Cool night air bit at my arms, and I considered climbing down to get my jacket from the passenger's seat, but my head was starting to feel slightly balloonish. The low, oceanic rush of an oncoming car was a nice counterpart to the silence between Jamie and me, and as the breeze stirred up the bits of metal suspended from the air, the atonal ring of not-quite-wind-chimes made it all feel like a dream. I basked in the absence of anxiety and the presence of a contentment I hadn't known since before Aaron Nguyen's death.
Jamie stopped tapping his fingers. The oncoming car grew louder, followed by a squeak that might have been from the whirligig beside us. Jamie drew his hands back toward him and pushed himself to his full height, and the look on his face many my stomach drop--and not in a good way.
"What?"
"Do you... hear wind-chimes?" he asked.
"Yeah?" I said, and pointed at the neighboring tower. "There are..." I trailed off, because suddenly, I noticed the same thing he had. The rusting structures still standing among the trees were silent, unmoving sentinels, and though my arms were cold, no air moved across them.
The Girl in Acid Park Page 5
