Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“I suppose,” he said. “Wait . . . I also want The Queen Is Dead. Also by the Smiths.”

“Four albums,” she said, holding up her palm to show him. “One paper. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said.

“See that?” Boo asked when we were outside. “Not scary, is he? And your paper is sorted.”

There was something in what she was saying. Alistair hadn’t scared me. There was really nothing weird about the conversation at all, if you discounted the fact that we had discussed an article about his death.

“Are there any other ghosts around here?” I asked.

“Not that I’ve seen, but sometimes they’re shy. A lot of them love attics, basements, underground areas. People scare them. Funny, isn’t it? People are scared of ghosts, ghosts are scared of people, when there’s no reason for any of it.”

“Except that the Ripper is a ghost,” I said. “There is no humanly possible way for me not to worry about that. And Jerome thinks I’m insane.”

“Oh.” Boo waved her hand dismissively. “He’ll forget.”

“I don’t think he will.”

“Course he will. And it’s only Jerome.”

My silence intrigued her.

“You?” she said. “And Jerome?”

I remained silent.

“Seriously? You and Jerome?”

“It’s not . . . It’s not a—”

“Oh,” she said, smiling hugely. “Then don’t worry. I’ll fix it.”

22

JEROME DIDN’T FORGET. OF COURSE HE DIDN’T FORGET. I saw an invisible woman and ran away from class. No one forgets that. And then I’d hidden myself away for the rest of the day, which didn’t help.

When I walked into breakfast the next morning, I saw him sitting with Andrew. He raised his head when he saw me come in and nodded. Boo and I got into line. She filled up a plate with a full English—eggs, bacon, fried bread, mushrooms, tomatoes. Like me, she could put it away. That morning, though, I had no appetite. I took some toast.

“No sausage?” the lady behind the counter said. “Feeling ill?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Don’t worry so much,” Boo said.

We took our seats, sitting on the opposite side of the table from Jerome and Andrew. They’d left space for us, as normal.

“Hi,” I said.

Jerome looked over at me from the remains of his breakfast.

“No sausage?” he asked.

Apparently my pork consumption habits were a matter of public record. Boo dropped down next to me, her spoon bouncing off her tray and clanking to the floor.

“Rory here,” she said. “Sick all night. Crazy fever. Babbling her head off about ponies.”

“Fever?” This caught Jerome’s attention. “You were ill yesterday?”

“Mmmm,” I said, glancing over at Boo.

“Babbling and babbling, like a babbling thing,” Boo went on. “Madness. Wouldn’t shut up.”

“Have you been to the nurse?” Jerome asked.

“Mmmm?” I said.

“She’s really fine,” Boo said. “Probably some period thing. I go completely mental too. Period fever. It’s the worst.”

This effectively killed all conversation for a while. Boo charged right on, telling us a very long story about how her friend Angela was getting cheated on by her boyfriend, Dave. No one tried to interrupt her. I just got through my toast as quickly as I could and excused myself. Boo was right behind me.

“Fixed that,” she said.

“You told him I had period fever, ” I replied. “There’s no such thing as period fever.”

“No such thing as ghosts either.”

“No, there is really no such thing as period fever. There’s a difference between being a guy and being an idiot. ”

“Let’s get your essay,” she said, looping her arm through mine.

Boo waltzed me into the library, and I allowed myself to be waltzed. Alistair was tucked into a deep corner in the extremely unpopular microfilm section, behind a machine. Boo had provided him with a tiny iPod, and he was listening to something, eyes closed. I guess the earphones didn’t stay in his ears because he didn’t really have ears, but he managed to hold them up. The music flowed out of them into the air. As we came up, he opened his eyes slowly.

“On the shelf,” he said. “Between the bound copies of The Economist, 1995 and 1996.”

I went to the spot he directed us to. There, between the books, were fifteen handwritten pages, with footnotes and comments scribbled in the margins. I had just pulled these out when Jerome approached us. Boo grabbed them from me.

“Sorry,” he said, “but . . . can we talk?”

“Mmmm?” I replied. No guy had ever asked me if I wanted to talk, not like that. Not like a talk, talk kind of talk—if this was, in fact, a talk, talk “can we talk?” Or whatever.

“You go,” Boo said, shoving the papers into her bag. “I’ll see you later.”

I walked toward Jerome slowly, afraid to look at him. I no longer knew how to behave. I had been assured that I wasn’t insane, but that wasn’t very helpful. There was a ghost ten feet away from us who had done my homework, and Jerome couldn’t see him.

“You’re welcome,” Alistair called after me.

We stepped outside into the steel gray morning. I didn’t care that I was cold.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked. There was something nervous about the way he was standing, his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets, his arms locked to his sides.

Lacking any better idea, I suggested Spitalfields Market. It was big, it was busy, it was cheerful, and it would distract me a little. It used to be a market for fruits and vegetables. Now it was a ring of boutiques and salons. In the middle was a loosely enclosed space, one half devoted to restaurants, the other to stalls full of everything from tourist junk to handmade jewelry. Shoppers buzzed all around us. The racks were heavy with Jack the Ripper merchandise—top hats, rubber knives, I AM JACK THE RIPPER and JACK IS BACK shirts.

“What’s going on with you?” he finally asked.

What was going on with me? Nothing I could tell Jerome. I’d never be able to tell anyone what was going on with me, with the possible exception of Cousin Diane.

We had passed all the way through the market and were in the small courtyard on the side. We sat down on a bench. Jerome sat close, his leg almost against mine. I got the feeling he was keeping just a little space in case I turned out to be irredeemably insane. But he was giving me this chance now to explain. And explain I would, somehow. I would say something .

“Since the night, with the . . . with the Ripper . . . I’ve been . . . freaked out? A little?”

“That’s understandable,” he said, nodding. He was willing to try this out as an excuse for my behavior. I had to keep him talking about this topic—his favorite.

“Who is Jack the Ripper?” I said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, you read everything about Jack the Ripper—who is he? I think I’d feel better if I . . . understood what he was. What it was all about.”

He moved a millimeter or two closer.

“Well, I suppose the first thing is that Jack the Ripper is kind of a myth,” he said.

“How can he be a myth?”

“What’s known for sure is this: there was a string of murders in the Whitechapel area of London in the autumn of 1888. Someone was killing prostitutes, in more or less the same way. There were five murders that seemed to have the same signature—slash to the neck, mutilations to the body, and in some cases, removal and arrangement of the internal organs. So those are known as the Jack the Ripper murders, but some people think there were four murders, some six, some more than that. The best guess is that there were five victims, and that’s what the legend is built around. But that could be completely wrong. If you go to the Ten Bells Pub, for instance, they have a plaque on the wall commemorating six victims. So the facts of the whole thing are unclear, which is part of the reason it’s almost impossible to solve.”