Stacey Kade - The Ghost and the Goth

“Who said you could sit?” he demanded.

I shrugged and didn’t move. He’d be far too interested in catching me with something in my backpack than to force the sitting issue right away. I’d been through this routine enough times to know that.

Brewster unzipped the bag and dumped its contents on the immaculate and polished surface of his wooden desk. From the shine on that sucker, Brewster had been working off some serious sexual frustration.

I leaned back in my chair, tilting it back up on two legs. “Do you polish it yourself? That must take a lot of wrist action.”

His gaze jerked up from the now untidy pile of folders, papers, and books to gauge my expression.

I opened my eyes wide, the very picture of innocence. “What?” I’d long ago mastered the art of keeping my true feelings to myself. Trust me, you see the dead walking around, you learn not to scream, laugh, or piss yourself pretty quickly.

“You think you’re clever, Mr. Killian?”

I shrugged. “Not particularly.” I knew it irked him, though, because he’d seen my test scores. Thirty-two out of thirty-six on the ACT last year, and I’d totally blown the curve on all the standardized tests they could offer. I couldn’t help it — just one of the few, very few, benefits of my gift. After all, it wasn’t hard to remember history when I was surrounded by people who’d lived it, and the ghosts who hung around the school all the time were often bored enough to read over your shoulder and do the homework aloud with you, even if no one could hear them. No one, except me, of course.

“You’ve only got a month left here, and then you’re out in the world, far beyond my reach.” He began shuffling through my stuff, like he was looking for something. Dude, there’s nothing to find, I could have told him. “And yet, Mr. Killian, I’ll feel like a failure as an educator—”

“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself, Mr. B., everybody fails sometimes.” I couldn’t believe he was handing this to me. “Some people more than others, though, I guess.”

He gritted his teeth, and the knuckles on the hand gripping my physics book turned white. “I’ll feel like a failure if you don’t leave here without at least one lesson learned.” He dropped the book back on his desk and dug into my backpack again, this time the small pocket in the front. “Ah, here we are.”

He dropped my iPod nano on the desk with a careless clatter, the tiny headphones trailing after it.

“Hey, watch it!” I set my chair on all four legs again with a thump. The nano (I’d nicknamed her Marcie after the logical and brainy chick in the Peanuts cartoons) was my lifeline these days.

“The lesson being,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken, “that you can’t always have your way.” He scooped up Marcie, wrapped the earphones around her, and dumped her into his top desk drawer. “No music for a week.”

“You can’t do that,” I said immediately. My palms began sweating, itching for the cool comfort of Marcie in my hand. “I have a medical condition that—”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Killian, I know all about your ‘illness.’” He smiled, all too pleased at having gotten a reaction from me. “Twice-a-week visits with your shrink, during school hours, no less. Permission to leave class as needed. Music allowed during your lessons so the ‘voices’”—he waggled his hands near his head—“don’t bother you.

“But do you know what I think?” He closed the drawer with a snap and pulled a key ring from his inside suit-coat pocket. “You’re a bad seed. Somewhere along the line, you figured out how easy it was to fool everyone and coast through life with a ‘disability.’” He separated a small silver key from the jumble on the key ring and locked the drawer. “But you don’t fool me.”

Without Marcie, I was toast. The dead talk all the time, even when they think no one is listening. The noise is overwhelming, not to mention the effort it takes not to respond.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Going to class, walking the halls without my music … I’d be curled up in a corner somewhere before first hour was even finished. The week Marcie had been gone, getting her battery replaced, my mother had nearly signed the commitment papers then and there.

I couldn’t let that happen again. I’d have to take the risk with Brewster.

Brewster shook his head, tsking. “Too much coddling at home and self-indulgence in these flights of fancy. If your mother had sent you to military school as I—”

“Like your grandfather sent your father to military school, hoping they’d beat the fairy out of him?” I asked, unable to believe that the words were slipping out despite everything I’d vowed. He really should have left Marcie out of this.

Brewster’s face turned white and then red.

I tensed in my seat but kept my voice steady. “It worked for a while too,” I continued. “Till your mom died and he retired to Florida where he met this nice neighbor guy, Charlie—”

Brewster didn’t even bother to come around the desk. He shot out of his chair, his hand stretching out to close around my throat.

I shoved the chair back in the same instant, and his fingers caught nothing but air.

“You can hear me.” Brewster’s dead grandfather — young again and dressed in his World War II uniform — gaped at me from his seat on the highly polished wooden credenza next to the desk. His unfiltered cigarette, still burning, fell from his mouth to the floor and rolled to a stop next to my foot.

I ignored Grandpa Brewster and the cigarette with the practice of many visits to this office. Brewster’s grandfather hung out here most of the time, talking to his favorite grandson, willing him to mend fences with his father while there was still time for them to have a decent relationship, something he’d never managed while he was alive.

That was the key with the dead. Ignore them long enough, and they’ll give up. Oh, they won’t stop talking … ever, but they’ll stop expecting you to respond, figuring what they took for awareness was just a fluke.

“You retarded little pervert,” Brewster spat. “You don’t know anything. My father is a good man.” He charged around the desk toward me.

I tensed, ready to move, and faked an easy shrug. “I’m sure he is. He’d probably be horribly disappointed to hear his son got fired for trying to choke a student.”

Brewster froze.

“What do you think you’re up to, kid?” Grandpa Brewster demanded. He’d recovered enough from his shock to slide off the edge of the credenza and stand over me. “Messing with my Sonny like that?”

I met Brewster’s glare without flinching. “Give me my music back, and none of this happened.” It was a gamble, but he’d backed me into a corner.

His jaw clenched furiously, and I could see him working through the alternatives. “No one else saw anything. There are no marks on you. It’ll be my word against yours.”

“True,” I said, pretending to consider the possibility. “But at this point, I wonder if it’d take much more than words to convince the school board? I heard it was a really close vote last time.”

Brewster stared me down, but I refused to look away. Then, the pungent stench of something burning reached my nose.

Automatically, I glanced to the floor, searching for Grandpa Brewster’s cigarette, and found the rubber edge of my Converse high-top smoldering, a tiny blue flame lapping at the side. “Shit.” I jumped up, twisting my foot against the carpet to put the fire out.

“Will you look at that?” Brewster’s grandfather said with a note of awe in his voice. “I’ll be damned.”

“No kidding,” I muttered. With the smoke from my shoe lessening, I paused long enough from my extinguishing efforts to grind out the cigarette beneath my heel. A cigarette Principal Brewster couldn’t see.