Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“You’re a . . .” I tried to find the right thing to say. “Really . . . hot cop?”

“I’m Amy Pond ,” she said. “From Doctor Who. This is her kissogram outfit.”

It was a good moment to catch sight of Jerome. He was wearing normal clothes with loads of scribbled-on pieces of paper stuck all over them, and his hair sticking up, a coffee mug in his hand.

“Tell me what you want, what you really, really want,” he said.

We had been planning for someone to ask us that.

“Braiiinnnnssss,” we said in unison.

“It’s both sad and incredibly impressive that you were all ready with that one.”

“What are you?” I asked.

“I’m the Ghost of the Night Before Exams.”

“And how long did it take you to come up with that?” Jazza asked.

“I’m a busy man,” he replied.

We formed a group on the side of the dance floor—me, Jazza, Jerome, and occasionally Andrew, Paul and Gaenor. Boo, we quickly discovered, was very serious about her dancing. She was right up front, by the DJ stand, doing complicated moves and the occasional surprise handstand.

The room was hot—we were all sopping wet in no time. The stained-glass windows had a veneer of steam. And unlike American dances, they didn’t screw things up with that awkward slow dance every five or six songs. This was all dance, with lots of remixes, like an actual club. My Scary Spice outfit, which consisted of a sports bra and oversized pants, was actually a blessing. I would have sweat through a shirt.

Jerome and I didn’t dance together, exactly, but we did remain side by side. Every once in a while, he would (seemingly accidentally) touch my waist or my arm. Anything more than that would have been too much of a statement, but I felt I got the message. He also had prefect jobs to do, so he would regularly disappear to refill bowls of food or tend the bar. That was another strange thing—the bar. An actual bar, with actual beer. We had tickets that allowed us two pints each. I have absolutely no idea how this was managed. Jerome had tried to explain it to me—how even though the law was that you had to be eighteen to drink in a pub, the circumstances varied, and at a closed event with teachers somehow this was legal. I got one of my beers, but I was jumping around and sweating too much to drink it. I would have vomited instantly. But two beers seemed to be nothing to the average English student. Everyone else gulped them down, and I was pretty sure that the two-ticket rule was not being very strictly enforced.

As the night wore on, there was a not-unpleasant funk in the air, the scent of beer and dancing. I started to forget any time I wasn’t at this place, with the lights strobing against the stained glass and the stone walls, the teachers in the shadows, checking their phones out of sheer boredom.

In fact, at first I thought he was a teacher. He came up behind Jazza. The suit, the bald head.

“What’s the matter?” Jaz yelled happily.

Of course, she couldn’t see him, even though he was right at her back, standing right up against her. He stroked her shoulder lightly with the tips of his fingers. I saw her twitch a bit and flick at her wig. He stepped around and placed himself between Jazza and me.

“Come outside,” he said. “Do it now.”

I began to back away, very slowly.

“Where are you going?” she yelled.

“Bathroom,” I said quickly.

“Are you ill? You look—”

“No,” I yelled back, shaking my head.

Leaving that room was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I felt the heat of everyone at my back. Outside, it was cold—bright cold, a lifting cold. Every single streetlight was on. Every light in every window. Everything to battle against the dark of the sky, the dark that went up and up and up forever. This thin little halo so low to the ground. The wind was kicking up a fury, spinning leaves and trash around us, and I remember thinking, This is it. I am walking into forever. It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

Our footsteps were so loud on the pavement. Well, mine were. I don’t think he had any. And his voice didn’t echo between the buildings. He walked me up to the road, and we walked along beside all the closed shops.

“Just fancied a chat,” he said. “There aren’t many people I can talk to. I’m not sure if you remember where we first met. It was at the Flowers and Archers. The night of the second murder.”

I had no memory of this at all.

“It’s quite an unusual ability, what you have,” he said. “Part genetics, part dumb luck, something you can never talk about to any rational person. I remember the feeling.”

“You were—”

“Oh, yes. I was like you. It’s hard, I know. Upsetting. The dead aren’t supposed to be among the living. It offends the natural order of things. All I ever wanted to do in life was make sense of it. And now, here I am . . . part of the puzzle.”

He smiled at me.

I was cold from the inside out. My hair was cold. My thoughts were cold. It was as if every cell in my body stopped doing its cellular duty and stiffened in place. My blood became still and had no life-giving power, and my breath crystallized and pierced my lungs like shards of glass.

“Have you ever met any more like us?” he asked. “Or are you all alone in the world?”

Some impulse told me to lie to him. Telling him that I did meet some people and that they were the ghost police . . . It seemed like I was asking for more trouble than I was already in.

“Just some weirdos,” I said. “Back home.”

“Ah,” he said. “Some weirdos back home.”

A leaf drifted down from a tree and started to pass slowly through his shoulder on its way to the ground. He flinched a bit and brushed it away.

“Your name—Aurora. It’s very unusual. A family name?”

“My great-grandmother,” I said.

“It’s a name full of meaning. It’s the name of the Roman goddess of dawn and of the polar lights.”

I had Googled my own name before. I knew all this. But I decided not to interrupt him to tell him that I was aware.

“Also,” he added, “of a collection of diamonds right here in London, the Aurora Pyramid of Hope. Lovely name. It’s the largest collection of color diamonds in the world. You should see them under a UV light. Marvelous. Do you have any interest in diamonds?”

That’s when I saw Boo. She was walking toward us very casually, like she didn’t even see him, talking away loudly into her phone in what sounded like a pretend conversation. She must have seen me leave, or seen him. Whatever the case, she was here.

“That girl,” he said. “I’ve seen you with her. I get the sense she annoys you.”

“She’s my new roommate.”

Boo was doing a really good job at pretending she couldn’t see him. She was waving at me and talking really loudly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Boo was saying into the phone. “She’s right here. You talk to her . . .”

“She’s very loud,” the man said. “That’s something I find quite annoying, how everyone speaks so loudly all the time into their mobile phones. Those weren’t around when I was alive. They make people so rude.”

Boo reached out to me, both hands on her phone. She was gripping it strangely, fingers on the keypad.

He lurched forward and grabbed her by the wrists. In one fluid motion, he swung her into the road, directly into the front of a passing car. It was so fast—two seconds, three seconds. I watched her hit the car. I watched her break the front headlight and slide up over the hood and smack into the windshield. Then I watched her roll down as the driver skidded to a stop.