Forever Freaky (16 page)

I grunted. I had learned long ago not to
comment on anything a spirit says to you; if you do, they just keep
talking more and more.

“So the facts in evidence,” he continued. “It
is a school day. It is raining. And you are home sitting on your
roof. Hmmm. This can’t be good.”

“I just wanted to be alone,” I said, hoping
he would take the hint.

“Trust me: it’s not way to go through life…or
death. What’s the matter?”

“Same old thing,” I said. “I’m always
surrounded by weirdness. Sometimes I wonder if I attract it. I
wonder if it will always be this way, forever weird.”

“Some people are born to weirdness,” Jerry
said, “and others have weirdness thrust upon them.”

I stared at him “That’s an awful saying.”

“Whatever the case, I’m sure you’ll figure it
all out,” he said.

“What makes you say that?”

“I know you,” he said.

“No, you don’t—nobody does.”

“It’s easier to believe that, isn’t it?” he
said. “Just like it’s easier to pretend you don’t have
feelings.”

“I don’t. Really. And stop reading my mom’s
books over her shoulder.”

As if he hadn’t heard me, he forged on, “And
then something happens to remind you that you do have feelings, and
the next thing you know you’re sitting up on the roof in the rain
and thinking about running away, as though that ever solved
anything.”

I glared at him.

He shrugged his thick shoulders. “It’s hard
to hide things from a spirit. Now, you want to talk about it?”

“It’s Jack,” I grumbled.

“That kid? What about him?”

“He’s an idiot,” I said. “He just won’t leave
things alone.” Jerry sat there, waiting for more, so, as briefly as
possible, I told him what had been happening.

“Pyrokinesis? You’re kidding.”

“No,” I said.

“What will they think up next?”

“Jack needs to leave this alone. I know how
he is. Even if he says he’ll stay out of it, he’ll keep digging
around. He’s stubborn. He’ll end up getting hurt.”

“And you wouldn’t want that.”

“Of course not.”

“Because you care about him.”

“Duh,” I said glumly.

“It’s not the end of the world, you know. You
can pretend all you want that you don’t care about anybody, but
that doesn’t stop the truth from being the truth.” Jerry paused to
look over the street; a squad car was cruising past. I thought I
heard him sigh. “As much as I hate to admit it,” he continued,
“your Jack is right. Nobody can be allowed to go around setting
people on fire.”

“And how do you stop somebody like that,
exactly?” I asked.

“That is the problem,” Jerry said gravely.
“The authorities would never believe it—no physical evidence of
arson. If you knew who’s doing it, you could try reasoning with
them, although a person who would set people on fire isn’t likely
to be the reasonable type. So what are you planning to do?”

“Running away to join some freak show,” I
said.

“You won’t. You’re not the running type.”

“Isn’t that a shame?” I asked.

“You’ll work your way through the problem.
You always do. Well, I have to get going.”

“Hey? Where have you been lately, anyway?” I
asked, before he faded out on me. “I haven’t seen you around the
house.”

“I’ve been spending more time with Sarge,” he
said. “They had to retire him, you know. A couple years after I
died, he got hit by a car while running down a suspect. He has bad
arthritis in his hips now. Some days he can barely walk. It’s sad….
Actually I might need your help with him one day.”

“Sure,” I said, wondering what good I could
possibly do for an aging German Shepherd.

“Good luck with that problem,” he said,
beginning to fade away. “I have faith in you, kid.”

“Why was that, again?” I asked.

But he was already gone and I was once more
sitting alone out in the rain.

**************

Later I went down to the kitchen and made
myself a salad. I choked down most of it, as the room grew darker
and darker.

Outside the window black clouds rolled in,
until it was dark as night, and the drizzle turned to hard rain
that pattered heavily on the glass. I could hear the sound of
thunder starting in the distance.

I dug my cell phone out of my pocket a moment
before it rang.

“Speak,” I said to Jack.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Sitting in a dark house, listening to
thunder.”

“Sounds like fun. Feeling any better?”

“Yeah, yeah, I think I am,” I said, and,
oddly, it was true. “Look, Jack, I have to say something to you.
I’m not sure how.”

“Just say it,” he said.

“You were right; these guys starting on fire
was no fluke.”

“I never thought it was.”

“But you can’t get involved,” I said.

“Why not? Somebody has to stop it,
right?”

“Maybe, but not you. Let’s just say that this
is a freak issue, and you’re not a freak.”

There was a long pause at the other end of
the line. “What are you saying?” he asked. “You telling me you know
what’s going on?”

“I don’t know, because I choose not to know.
But I do suspect,” I said. It was one of those moments I wondered
whether telling the truth was a good or bad thing. “All right,” I
blurted out. “I’m a big fat liar, okay? Maybe my pants should be on
fire. I think I know what’s going on. There was another name on
your short list. Amy Nicci.”

“Yeah, I saw. Who is she anyway? I couldn’t
place her.”

“Amy—Mean Jessica’s friend Amy.”

“Oh, her? Short dark hair, dark eyes.”

“I went to middle school with her,” I
confessed.

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“You were friends,” he concluded.

“I wouldn’t say that. It wasn’t that simple.
Let’s say that I realized she was different and she realized I was
different. That was the basis for something that was like
friendship, but, trust me, it wasn’t really friendship.”

“This didn’t end well, did it?” Jack asked
carefully.

I snorted. “Not at all.”

“What happened?”

“I stabbed her in the neck with a pencil. A
number two pencil, if I remember right.”

“Any particularly reason?”

“She gave me the creeps.”

“She gave you the creeps?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, but what’s her deal exactly?”

“She thinks she’s a witch.”

“A witch? Really?”

“Oh, she’s not—that’s just what she always
thought,” I explained. “You know how I hate all these things I can
do? Well, she wasn’t like that. She has abilities, too. She loved
it, all of it. She totally embraced what she was, and still wanted
to be more.”

I heard him sigh. “Now she can set people on
fire.”

“Apparently,” I said. I listened to the
silence; I thought that maybe we had got disconnected. “You see why
I never wanted to experiment with my abilities?”

“But you’re different,” he insisted.
“Something like this could never happen to you.”

“And you know this how?” I asked.

“I just know. You could never hurt
anybody.”

I chuckled darkly. “Never count on
that—never. Sometimes my mind drifts. I think crazy things, and
sometimes those things don’t seem so crazy.”

“Jules, you’re all right,” Jack said through
the static of our connection.

“If you say so…”

“But what about Amy?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing? That’s it? Just let her do whatever
she wants, no matter who gets hurt?”

“How would you stop her anyway? Are you
fireproof or something?” I asked. “No, you have to stop poking
around. You’re asking questions at school, too, aren’t you? That
definitely has to stop. It’s a big school, but sooner or later,
that’s going to get back to her. Right now she thinks she can get
away with anything. It’s safer to let her go on thinking that.”

“So, we do nothing?” he said, his voice
sounding lost. He was one of those people who think there isn’t
anything that can’t be fixed. He never learned that some things,
and some people, are broken and there is nothing anybody can do to
repair them.

“For now, until I can figure out what to do
with her.”

“And what if she attacks somebody else in the
meantime?”

“We can’t do anything about that,” I said. “I
don’t think that’s the real problem, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole targeting jocks—I doesn’t quite
make sense. Oh, sure, maybe these three guys lied to her, or did
something else to piss her off. But, really, it’s not her
style—it’s not how her mind works. If anything, this was more like
practice.”

“Practice?” He sounded alarmed. “Practice for
what?”

“Amy was more into—what would you call
it?—mass destruction.”

“Mass destruction?” he said dully.

“You know, killing a lot of people.”

“I know what mass destruction is. Are you
kidding me? Is this just something you’re making up so that I’ll
leave it alone?”

“No, really, I’m not, Jack. She used to tell
me her fantasies: throwing hand grenades in the lunchroom,
poisoning the school’s water supply, fire-bombing the main
office—that kind of thing. Like I said, she gave me the
creeps.”

“You think she was serious? A lot of people
just talk.”

“I thought she meant every word of it ” I
said. “I even stopped using the drinking fountains at school.”

“And you never told anybody this?”

“Why? Everybody knew there was a problem with
Amy. It was no secret. She was sent down to her counselor more
times than I was.”

“And nobody did anything?” he asked.

“What could they do? She talked crazy, she
acted crazy, but she never actually did anything crazy.”

“Until now, until she knew that she could get
away with it.”

“That would be my guess,” I said. “She’s not
stupid, you know. Just stay away from her, all right?” I said,
getting tired of talking about Amy.

After I got off the phone, I sat in the
darkened kitchen for a long time, wondering why Amy was my problem
anyway, and deciding it was something with which I was stuck, like
a lot of other things in my life. It was, as I told Jack, a freak
issue, and I was the only other freak available.

***************

When my mom came home, she was soaking wet.
She went upstairs, changed into some dry clothes, and then returned
to the kitchen and asked me about twenty times if I wanted her to
make me something to eat. I really didn’t need this type of
harassment right now. She was nagging me about my diet, and I was
worried about figuring out how to stop a human flame-thrower from
going Carrie on everybody’s ass. Clearly we didn’t live in the same
world.

“I told you—I had a salad,” I said.

But it was, like, How big of a salad? What
kind of vegetables? Did I at least have some shredded cheese on it?
How about salad dressing?...

“Mom, please! I ate, all right?”

“It’s just that we had this teen-aged girl
admitted today. She weight only eighty-three pounds--”

“Oh, God, not again,” I said. Every time the
hospital got a patient with anorexia or bulimia, my mom got
frantic. “I told you about a million times—I’m not anorexic. I eat.
I eat. I eat. How many times do I have to say it? I don’t think I’m
too fat. I think I’m pitiful skinny. I don’t know why I can’t put
on weight.”

“Well, you better do something,” she howled,
“before it’s too late.”

“I don’t need this—I really don’t.”

I ran upstairs to my room, and locked myself
inside. I left the light off and paced the floor in the gloom. It
was bad enough that I constantly fought being that part of me that
was a freak. But why couldn’t I even be the rest of me, the
superficial part, the naturally scrawny kid? Was there no part of
me that was acceptable? To myself, I was a freak, and that wasn’t
all right with me. To my parents, I was too thin and cold, and that
wasn’t all right with them. To kids at school, I was too weird, and
that wasn’t all right with them. I just couldn’t make anybody
happy. What was I supposed to do? If I were a building with too
many defects, they could tear me down and rebuild. It was no wonder
that I had gravitated toward Amy Nicci at one time. We had much in
common; we belonged nowhere and we satisfied nobody.

I stopped at the window and looked outside.
The rain was falling hard, slanting down from the dark gray sky.
The branches of all the trees bent in the wind, and new leaves were
ripped away and flew around in a mad frenzy.

I turned on the light and changed my clothes.
I put on a pair of jeans and my Doc Martens boots. I threw on a
black hooded sweatshirt.

I went downstairs. When my mom saw how I was
dressed, she looked stunned.

“Where are you going?” she wondered.

“For a walk,” I muttered.

“In a storm?”

But I just walked past her through the
kitchen toward the back door.

“There’s a tornado warning!” she shrieked
after me.

“Tornadoes avoid me—like everything else,” I
said, before I went through the back door and stepped out into the
storm; I figured if she and my dad wanted to send me to a
psychiatrist, I’d give them a good reason. Other than that I wasn’t
thinking anything at all. There is no greater freedom than the
freedom you experience when you stop thinking. I had no idea what I
was doing but I was doing it, and that was good.

***************

I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my
head, and walked down the street through the cold rain. Now and
then, lightning flashed in large claws across the sky. Gusts of
wind rose and whipped me pretty hard, but I kept walking. I didn’t
care that I was cold. I didn’t care that soon I’d be soaking wet. I
didn’t care if I ended up dying of pneumonia. I just needed to be
alone out in the storm. Maybe I was always there, figuratively—the
storm that rages between totally normal and totally abnormal; I was
unable to reach normal and unwilling to commit to abnormal. Maybe
the storm was my home, the only home I could ever know.