Stacey Kade - The Ghost and the Goth

I cracked one eyelid open to check and sure enough, I was back on the ground instead of in it. Unfortunately, my shoes and socks did not make the transition. My toenails, painted in Very Berry, sparkled up at me, under a light layer of dust. Great.

Whatever. At least I’d learned something.

“The ground is solid but the door is not. The ground is solid but the door is not.” I stepped forward, prepared to feel like an idiot when my head smacked the glass. Instead, the cold tingling sensation I’d felt in my hand when it passed through the handle spread through my whole body.

Then suddenly, I was on the other side of the door in the overheated little vestibule between the outer doors and the inner ones, standing on the rubber-backed mat they’d left out from the last rainy day. Yes! Finally something was going my way.

Following the same technique, I walked toward the second set of doors, and in seconds, I found myself barefoot on the cold linoleum in the main hall.

“All right!” I took a second to dance around like an idiot, tossing my hair the way a certain traitorous former friend of mine and I used to when it was just us and we were being stupid and watching videos on MTV2. In some respects, being able to do what you want without worrying about someone seeing you was kind of refreshing.

“Glad to see someone’s having a good day,” a morose voice said somewhere to my left.

I jumped and turned to see a janitor, dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit, approaching me slowly as he pushed one of those buckets on wheels. The school was set up like a giant H . The main hallway, where I stood, was the crossbar in the H . He was coming from the first left branch of the H , where the library and the English classrooms were.

“You can see me?” I whispered, hardly daring to believe it.

“Of course I can see you.” He paused, lifting the mop into the wringer thing at the top of the bucket and squeezing it. Dirty nasty water flowed out. “You’re tracking prints all over my nice clean floor.”

I turned around to look at the ground behind me and saw nothing but gleaming tile. “Uh, okay. Whatever.” I shook my head. “If you can see me, too, that means I must not be dead. At least, not completely, right?” I bounced on my toes in excitement. Forget the fact I was talking to the janitor — a thirty-year-old guy with bad skin who never left high school? Hello, his picture was the definition of loser — I finally had proof that things weren’t as bad as I thought.

He let out a bellowing laugh, revealing snaggly teeth and a serious need for whitening strips. “Honey, you’re definitely dead. You just ain’t the only one here.”

He pulled the mop from the bucket and plopped it on the floor, the carpeted floor. Only the main hall was tile. All the branches of the H , including the one where he still stood, had that gross, government surplus, every-color-and-no-color-at-the-same-time carpeting.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He ignored me, shoving the mop back and forth across the floor. “Damn kids, always leaving a mess.”

The carpet didn’t get wet, though, at least not that I could see, and then he was pushing past me with his mop.

“Watch it.” I jumped back, expecting a cascade of cold yucky water to reach my toes, but the water seemed to puddle only directly under his mop. Weird.

“Never thinking about what they do, what kind of work it makes for the rest of us,” he muttered, rolling his bucket past me.

“Wait.” I turned to follow him. “What did you mean I’m not the only one? I mean, yeah, clearly I’m not the only person who’s ever died but … Oh, my God.” Even as I watched, the janitor walked right through the trophy cases in the main hall, still mopping and mumbling to himself. Why would he do that? There was nothing behind that wall except the courtyard and …

I inhaled sharply. The old gym. The entrance had once been there. Before they built the new addition…way back in, like, 1992. It was soooo before my time, but Maura Sedgwick, suck-up that she was, once did this big history project on the school. Total snoozefest, but the old pictures were kind of cool. You should have seen the way people ratted their hair back then. Totally gross. My mom … I mean, someone once told me that back in the sixties women used to use sugar water to make their hair stiff, and they’d wake up to find cockroaches nesting in there. Ewww .

Tragic hairstyles and bugs aside … did that mean the janitor guy was dead, too? He could walk through walls and stuff, just like me. But he could see me and hear me, just like Killian. Killian wasn’t dead. He just dressed like it.

I frowned. Answers would be good here. Unfortunately, none of the ones I came up with made any sense. That left me only with my original plan. Find Killian and make him tell me what was going on.

Before I could even pick a direction to start walking, though, the PA system speaker on the wall gave a preemptive staticky buzz. Cranky old Mrs. Piaget — she was, like, forty and totally hated me for looking like I do; I mean, hello, a little moisturizer wouldn’t kill her — was coming on to make announcements. Crap. That meant I only had a few minutes before second hour ended and everyone filled the halls. Given how cold and shaky it made me feel when one or two people passed through me, I had no interest in being trapped in the hallway with four hundred milling human bodies.

“Attention, attention.” Mrs. Piaget’s voice boomed into the main hall. “Mark Jacobsen and Tony Briggs, please report to the office before the start of third hour.”

Panicking, I ran toward the gym, the second right branch of the H . The auto body shop, a small outbuilding, was attached to the far side of the gym through a temporary walkway that they’d never gotten around to making permanent. It reportedly flooded every time it rained, not that I had much occasion to be over there, anyway. The auto body shop was where all the weirdos, outcasts, and burners lived, always getting a pass from the shop teacher, Mr. Buddy — no really, that was his name — for permission to leave the regular classes to finish up some “project.”

As I bolted past the office, also part of the main hall, I heard the sounds of a commotion nearby. People crying, yelling, even what sounded like begging. Oooh, a fight, maybe? Ask me when I was alive, and I would have totally denied it, but there was nothing more fun to watch than a girl fight.

Intrigued in spite of myself, I slowed to a stop, my feet slipping a bit on the tile, and peered down into the second left branch of the H , where all the noise seemed to be coming from. There, looking like the latest hip-hop star to be pulled into court, was Will Killian, staggering down the hallway, his head tucked under his sweatshirt hood and his shoulders hunched. Joonie Travis, the weird psycho goth girl with the dyed black hair from my psychology class, stood under his arm, helping him walk.

A crowd surrounded Killian, people I’d never seen before. A man in an old-timey military uniform, some chick in a (gag) pink polka-dot prom dress, a young guy in a baby blue tuxedo with a ruffled front (maybe polka-dot’s date?), some dude dressed as a basketball player, only his shorts were waaay too short and his socks were pulled up all the way to his knees, two girls in poodle skirts (no lie!) and those black-and-white shoes … and those were just the ones I could see. The mass just kept shifting and moving around him, making it impossible to see all of them, and the racket was unbelievable.

“Tell my granddaughter that—”

“—My parents need to know it was an accident.”

“I’m sorry, kid. I didn’t know this would happen. Listen, though, if you can tell my boy—”