Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

Whatever misery I had caused by my previous question, it was wiped out with this one. They all laughed. Even Stephen, who I didn’t know could laugh.

“Don’t be stupid,” Callum said.

24

GHOSTS, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET:

Souls, spooks, shades, poltergeists, revenants. Generally regarded to be people returned from the dead, though there are also ghost animals, and ghost ships, and even ghost trains and planes and articles of furniture and plants. Often known to linger around places they lived in or died in, looking sad. Both can and cannot be photographed, though when photographed, may appear as a blob or orb of light. Science rejects and confirms their existence. Can be contacted through mediums, who are all fakes.

In other words, the Internet was useless at teaching me anything, except that a lot of people had strong feelings about ghosts, and every culture in the world had something to say about them, through all of history. Also, a lot of people online who claimed to be ghost experts were clearly much crazier than anyone from my town, which was saying something.

What was reassuring, I guess, was the sheer number of people who believed in ghosts and who claimed to have seen them. I certainly would never be lonely. And they couldn’t all be crazy.

There were about a half-dozen television shows devoted to the subject of ghost-hunting. I watched a few of these. What I saw were crews of people sneaking around houses with night vision cameras, jumping at every noise and saying, “Did you hear that?” Replaying said noise over and over—and the noise was always a little bump or a door closing. Or they’d have some piece of machinery that they’d hold over a spot in the room and they’d say, “Yup, a ghost was here.”

Not very impressive. Not one of them was seeing an actual, talking person. The shows, I concluded, were all bull, designed to entertain people who really liked to see things about ghosts, no matter how lame they were.

This little research project of mine, however fruitless, was good at keeping my mind level. I was doing something, and doing something was better than doing nothing. And here’s an amazing fact about the human mind: it can cope with a lot. When something new enters your reality that you don’t think you can deal with, your mind deals. It does everything it can to accommodate the new information. When the information is so big and so difficult to process, sometimes your brain skips stress and confusion and goes right to a happy island, a little sweet spot.

My new ability didn’t interfere with my life. I got used to seeing Alistair—and after all, aside from his haircut, there was nothing odd about him. He was just a grumpy dude in the library. Though he was slightly less grumpy now that he had a bunch of albums and something to play them on. He secreted the iPod Boo had given him with his albums somewhere in the library and he made it clear that he was willing to trade homework for more music. We had found a currency that he accepted.

And I saw Boo every day—someone with the same ability that I had—and she wasn’t even remotely bothered by it.

I didn’t forget, exactly, but this new knowledge slipped to the back of my mind . . . and I adapted. I was able to move on to more pressing matters, like the upcoming fancy dress party. After several nights of discussion in our room, we had decided to go to the party as the Zombie Spice Girls. Boo was a natural for Sporty, since she could have thrown either one of us over a wall without breaking a nail. Jazza was going to be Ginger, because she had a red wig and a strong desire to make a dress out of a Union Jack flag. (Although it had been explained to me several times, since Jaz’s uncle was in the navy, that it was called a Union Jack only when it was flown at sea. Otherwise it was just a Union flag. I was learning all kinds of things in London, mostly about ghosts and flags and disbanded girl groups, but still. Learning is good.) I, apparently, was a natural for Scary. I asked them if this was because my hair was dark, and they both just laughed, so I had no idea what that was about. Mostly, our costumes involved putting on some zombie makeup, tight clothes, and high platform shoes that Boo bought in a secondhand store. We had a plastic bone to represent Posh, and if anyone asked about Baby, we were just going to say we ate her.

Boo was down the hall getting some fake tattoos drawn on by Gaenor. Jazza was squeezing herself into her Union Jack dress, which she had made out of a decorative pillowcase. I was trying to tease out my hair as big as it could go.

“You never showed me your essay,” she said, out of the blue. “The one on Pepys. You said you wanted me to read it over.”

“Oh . . .” I rubbed the gray makeup hard into my face. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

“What did you end up writing?”

I had no idea what I’d ended up writing. I’d typed it, but I’d barely read it. It had something to do with the concept of a diary kept for both public and private reading and how that affected the tone of the narrative. So I lied.

“I compared it to modern accounts of major events,” I said. “Like Hurricane Katrina. He was writing about the Great Fire of London, which was where he lived. I wrote about how you talk about things that affect you personally.”

That was actually a genius idea. I only ever have genius ideas after the fact. I should have just written the damn paper.

“You and Boo have been getting along a lot better this week,” she said, doing a chest check. Her dress was really tight. This was a whole new Jazza coming out—almost literally. Normally, I would have started joking about this, but I smelled trouble. Those words meant, “You haven’t told me anything about Boo this week, and now I am convinced you like her better than me.”

“I’ve accepted her,” I said as breezily as I could. “She’s our pet.”

Jazza gave me a slight sideways look as she pulled the dress up a little higher over her girlish assets. It was wrong to refer to Boo as a pet. That was normally the kind of thing Jazza would censure, but she said nothing.

“It could be worse,” I said.

“Of course,” Jazza said, going over to her bureau. “I’m not saying, you know, that I . . . but . . . I’ve . . .”

Boo returned, dressed in a shiny tracksuit with a lopsided ponytail. I was pretty sure those were just some of her actual clothes, and not something she had gotten as a costume.

“Watch this, yeah?” she said, immediately going into a handstand and walking a few steps. Then she tumbled over and crashed into Jazza’s desk, almost knocking over her photos. “Haven’t done that since I was fourteen.”

Jazza looked at me through the mirror as she attached her false eyelashes.

There was a look on her face that suggested a rapidly dwindling patience level.

We had decided to stick together for at least a half hour, so that everyone could comprehend our group costume. We would share custody of Posh the Bone. The prefects had done a really good job transforming the refectory into a Halloween-ish party venue. Eating in here every day, I had forgotten that it was an old church. These decorations really brought that out—the candles in the stained-glass windows, the fake cobwebs strung everywhere, the low lighting. Charlotte, dressed in a very shortskirted policewoman’s outfit, was leading the dancing brigade, jumping around at the front of the room, her long red hair flapping up and down like a matador’s cape. She was head girl, and she would show us how to party if she had to.

I wasn’t really sure why Charlotte had decided to come to the party as a stripper. I found myself at a loss for words as she complimented us on our costumes.