Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“You’ll adapt,” he said. “I promise. The initial shock wears off quickly. A few days, a week, and you’ll be fine. We’re all fine. Look at us.”

I looked at them—Stephen, so young and so serious. Boo, smiling away next to me. Callum, keeping suspiciously quiet and shoving food into his mouth. They did look pretty normal.

“I’ll be with you,” Boo said. “I’m staying until this is all over. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“So I just go back?” I said.

“Correct,” Stephen replied.

“And go to class, and play hockey, and talk to my parents—”

“Yes.”

“But what are you going to do ?”

“We can’t tell you that,” Stephen said. “I’m sorry. What we do is classified. You can’t tell anyone that we’ve met. You can never discuss this conversation. You just have to trust us. We are police. We are looking after you.”

“How many more of you are there?”

“The entire force is behind us,” Stephen said. “The security services. There are people working on this at every level of government. You have to trust us.”

I had never experienced this feeling before. My heart had been going fast all through this discussion, but now it slowed and I was almost sleepy. My system could take no more. I sat down on the sofa again and put my head back and stared at the ceiling.

“I need to go to bed now,” I said. “I just want to go home.”

“Right,” Stephen said. “I’ll take you two back.”

Boo walked me to the door and out into the hall while Stephen got his coat and keys.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure that was a good idea,” I heard Callum say.

21

AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR AT THE UNIVERSITY where my parents teach, you can see parakeets in the trees. This is because some students get pets during the year, and they think they’re temporary, because some people are just like that. When they leave campus, they open up the cages and let the birds fly right out of the window.

My uncle Bick has a soft spot in his heart for the birds left behind. During exam week, he drives around looking for them. He really means well, but Uncle Bick can be a little scary looking, with his bushy beard and his battered truck with the WANT TO SEE MY COCKATOO? sticker on the back, cruising around slow by the dorms. Eventually, someone freaks out, and campus security gets called, and Uncle Bick gets pulled over and has to explain that he’s just trying to rescue parakeets. Since they never believe him, he has them call my mom’s office, because she is his sister and his lawyer and a Distinguished Member of the Faculty. Then my mom sits Uncle Bick down and explains where the state of Louisiana stands on Peeping Toms (a fine of five hundred dollars and up to six months in jail), and how it really isn’t good for her career to have her brother repeatedly stopped on campus under suspicion of violating said Peeping Tom law—and then Uncle Bick rails on about the poor little parakeets and how something should be done. After about an hour of this, we all go out for pit barbecue at Big Jim’s Pit of Love because there’s just no point in talking about it anymore. This family ritual of ours signals the start of summer.

One year while out parakeet hunting, Uncle Bick caught a little green one he named Pipsie. Pipsie had clearly had a hard life. When Uncle Bick found her, she was sitting on a stop sign, tweeting her head off. She had a broken wing and was missing one foot. Other parakeets would have given up, but Pipsie was a survivor. She managed to get herself on top of that sign and get rescued. I don’t know how. She couldn’t fly.

Pipsie was undernourished and dehydrated, and her feathers were coming out. Uncle Bick nursed little Pipsie back to health with a care and devotion I couldn’t help but admire. He’d sit for hours, dripping water into her beak through an eyedropper. He fed her mashed food from the end of a coffee stirrer. He bound up her broken wing until it healed.

“Look at how she adapts,” he’d say whenever I came into the shop. “Look at her. She’s a lesson to us all. We can all adapt.”

Which is great, except . . . Pipsie didn’t really adapt. Her wing healed crooked, so she could only fly about six inches off the ground in semicircular patterns. She fell off the perch all the time, so Uncle Bick just kept her in a box on the counter. One day, Pipsie got it in her tiny bird mind that she could fly again. She got up to the edge of the box and surveyed the landscape and spread her crooked wings and went for it. She fell off the counter and landed on the floor, just as the delivery guy swung the door open and rolled in three hundred pounds of birdseed on a hand truck.

This is all I could think about after Stephen told me to “adapt.”

Stephen drove Boo and me back to school, dropping us off a few streets away so that no one would see us coming back to school grounds in a police car. It was only five o’clock. People were filing into the refectory for dinner. I was too nauseous to eat. Boo was starving, though, so we walked over to the local coffee place, where she could get a sandwich. I watched her devour a ham and brie.

“So,” I said, “it’s your job to hang around with me?”

“Pretty much,” she said.

“How does this work?”

“Well, Stephen’s an actual police officer with a uniform and everything. Callum works undercover on the Underground, because there’s loads of ghosts down there. And I’m new. My first assignment was to come and watch over you.”

“So you had something happen to you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re like this?”

“When I was eighteen, I was a bit of a club kid—”

“When you were eighteen? How old are you now?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?”

“I’m a fake student,” she said. “With a fake age. Anyway, my friend Violet and I were coming home from a club. She was driving. I knew she was drunk. I should never have gotten in the car. I should have stopped her. But I was kind of drunk myself, and I didn’t always make the best decisions back then. We ran smack into a bollard. There was smoke, we were bloody, Violet was unconscious. I heard this voice telling me to keep calm, to get out of the car. I looked over, and it was Jo. She was standing there. I was crying, completely freaking out, but she talked me through it. We’ve been best friends since then. Actually, I tried to get her a phone for Christmas. She can carry things—not big things, but she can lift things like phones. But it’s kind of hard owning things when you’re a ghost. You don’t have pockets or anything. And people would just see a phone floating around, which would be weird. She picks up trash because she likes to keep busy, and apparently people don’t notice trash moving. They think the wind’s blown it or someone’s thrown it. You have to think about these kinds of things when you’re a ghost.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“This thing . This thing that I am.”

“Course you can. There’s nothing to do , anyway. It’s just natural, yeah?”

“How am I supposed to do all this work?” I said, running my hands through my hair. “This essay. I have to write it this weekend. I have to write an essay on Samuel Pepys and his stupid frickin’ diary and I can see ghosts .”

I walked around the room, picking up my things, putting them back down again, trying to establish some baseline of reality. Everything seemed the same. Same room. Same Boo. Same ashtray. Same unwashed mug with red wine residue in it.

Boo ate her sandwich and watched me.

“I’ve got it,” she said, brushing the crumbs from her lap onto the floor. “The library.”