Giving Up the Ghost (14 page)

I’d stopped telling Laura about my dreams with the Little Girl in the Blue Dress, and the same with the feelings I’d get in the attic. She treated my Little Girl revelations as if I was relating a metaphor. She would always ask me lots of questions
about what I experienced and how it felt, but it ended there. No concern, no advice. It was just something I experienced. To her, it was just a story.

As much time as we spent together, she would rarely, if ever, be open to discussing the rest of her life. Ask about her other friends, family, or what she did when we weren’t together, and she’d become wildly evasive. Sometimes I’d imagine that the rest of her life was dull and uninteresting, with our friendship the only breath of fresh air. Other times I thought that
she
was the breath of fresh air, and probably had a lot of similar relationships with others she’d allow relatively close to her. I even wondered if, perhaps, she had many intimate friendships and I was the only one she kept at arm’s length.

Though she refused to talk about such things, I’m pretty sure Laura saw a number of other guys during this time. I’m sure some of them had the same reaction to learning about me that girls like Annette did when they learned about Laura. Or maybe they didn’t have the opportunity to. Given how cagey Laura was with me when it came to revealing any detail about her life outside of our friendship, I can only imagine she was cagey with others as well.

At some point after I’d lost interest in her, Annette changed her mind about
Purple Rain
and, apparently, about spending time with me as well, and became almost obsessed with impressing me with her love of the movie.
Purple Rain
maintained a run as the Saturday midnight movie at the Mellett Mall Cinema for almost a year, and Annette was going almost every weekend.

When Annette finished her
Purple Rain
recitation, she stood motionless, staring at me as if waiting for me to do or say something.

I stared back, unsure what I was supposed to do or say.

“Yeah, right,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Prince … awesome.”

I liked working in the Receiving Department. As long as I met the low, predefined expectations of me, I was pretty much left alone. I mopped, wiped, swept, and dusted. I broke down boxes and took out the trash. I had a set list of things I had to hobble through in the course of an evening, and if I played my cards right, besides the occasional cinematic reenactment from Annette, I could go through my entire shift with only minimal interaction with my co-workers and even less with customers.

One day I was notified that I’d received a promotion—one that I hadn’t sought and didn’t want—at the request of the regional manager. A few weeks earlier one of the store’s delivery trucks had overturned on a highway outside of Akron. The regional manager showed up and carted off a handful of the guys working, including me, to help clean up and salvage stock—piles of argyle sweaters, white tube socks, and designer jeans with the wrong color top stitching on the seams were all wet from rain, as well as splattered with mud and diesel fuel.

The next day the regional manager came back into the stockroom to thank me again for my help with the truck and to tell me how impressed he was with my tenacity. Obviously his definition of tenacity revolved around not puking at the overwhelming diesel fumes, as I was the only one of the cleanup crew who didn’t have to stop a few times to vomit. I didn’t want to tell him that my extensive mastery of drinking and pill taking had taught me tremendous control over my gag reflexes.

“I told Jennifer that we need to find something new for you to do,” he said. “Something with a bit more responsibility.”
He winked and gave me a light punch on the shoulder, very proud of himself for boosting my career opportunities with T.J. Maxx.

The following week the schedule said I’d start training for the Layaway Department.

Layaway is a concept that seems better in theory than it was in practice. At T.J. Maxx, most items put on layaway were never picked up. I think the only real value of the service for the store was pocketing leftover deposits from those too lazy or embarrassed to come retrieve them.

Plus, at our T.J. Maxx, the customers who
really
wanted something they couldn’t afford just stole it. One of the few benefits of working as a janitor is that no one, including those about to swipe something, paid any attention to the untouchable mopping up a spilled soda at the end of the aisle. I saw everything. Most would come back thirty minutes later and return the item for cash. At that time, T.J. Maxx had the most ridiculous exchange policy in the history of retail. They’d take back any merchandise, regardless of when you purchased it, what condition it was in, or whether or not you had a receipt. People would bring back dress clothes after wearing them to a wedding, a pair of trousers that had been worn regularly since they were bought four months earlier, or a dress their girlfriend had just lifted from the Juniors Department earlier that morning, right in front of the dude sweeping the floor.

At first, the shoplifting bothered me. But after a while, I, like almost every other employee in our store, stopped caring. I mean, I was getting paid less than four dollars an hour to do this; there was no call for heroics.

My friend Todd had recently received a promotion as well. Todd and I had become friends shortly after he started at the store, when I started buying drugs from him and his roommate.
They sold dry, crumbly pot and whatever pills they could find. In addition to being the drug dealer of choice for half the store’s employees, Todd had recently been made assistant lead of the Housewares Department. I think it went to his head, as for the previous several weeks he had decided that it was hilarious that I had to clean the employee restrooms, including whatever he did in there.

One day, a few weeks before I started in Layaway, Todd came into the break room and informed me he’d just left an upper decker in the restroom. I had no idea what an upper decker was, so I stopped by the men’s room to try to figure it out. I looked in the toilet—nothing. In the trash can—nothing. I searched the entire men’s room, nothing. I figured Todd was just pulling my leg and went back to work.

The next morning I came into work to find a note taped to the supply closet. Apparently there was a very strong odor coming from the men’s room. The note asked me to investigate first thing and then clean up whatever was causing the smell.

I stopped by the Housewares Department on my way to the men’s room, found Todd, and insisted he tell me what an upper decker was.

“Just look under the lid,” he replied.

“I did,” I said. “There was nothing there.”

“Not that lid,” Todd said. “The other lid.”

Two minutes later, I discovered what an upper decker was.

The next day, Todd stopped by the Layaway counter.

“Sorry about dropping that mysterious turd worm on your watch, man,” he said. “That was a really fucked thing to do.”

He reached into his pocket and then slid something small across the counter. A little blue pill with a heart shape cut out of the middle.

“This should make us even,” he stage-whispered. “Make the day a little shorter.”

He raised his hand toward his face and popped two pills into his mouth, swallowed them dry, winked, and walked back to the Housewares Department.

By the time the first customer showed up, I was in a blissful fog. However, I couldn’t remember any of the codes for the register and just slowly pounded in different number combinations.

“I think the register is broken,” I said as the person scooped up her pile of khaki pants and headed to the front of the store. I stumbled over toward Housewares and found Todd standing in front of a shelf of bud vases, mouth hanging open, staring blankly, motionless feather duster in hand.

“Dude, I need your help,” I said. “I can’t remember any of the codes I learned today.”

I wasn’t sure what I expected Todd to do, but I repeated my plea three times before he shook his head a few times, reached in the front of his smock, and pulled out a cheat sheet of register codes from his own failed attempt at the Layaway Department.

I found my khaki customer up by the service desk and lured her back to the layaway counter. With one hand over one eye, I read Todd’s notes, typed in all the item codes, took a ten-dollar deposit, and stuffed the pants into cardboard box number 316.

Later, Annette stopped by to perform her choreography routine.

Soon afterward, Todd walked up to the counter.

“Dude, did I piss myself?” he asked, looking at his crotch.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Man, I feel like I’m pissing my pants … right now.”

We both stood staring at the crotch of his pants, waiting for a wet spot to surface, for the next minute or two.

Eventually, I reached out to hand him his cheat sheet back, lightly knocking him on the shoulder to get his attention. He stared at it for a moment, briefly returned his attention to the crotch of his pants, wished me a pleasant evening, and walked away.

When the store-closing announcement came over the PA at 8:55, I realized that I hadn’t really moved or done anything since staring at Todd’s crotch almost two hours earlier. I had a list of things I had to do to close out Layaway. The first was to take all the day’s new layaway boxes upstairs to the storage room, a long windowless aisle of identical boxes lit by a single fluorescent bulb. I walked all the way to the end and halfway back before I realized I’d passed box 316 about four hundred boxes earlier.

After expending a considerable amount of mental energy determining that 316 should come directly after 315, I started hearing some soft taps—the sound of someone slowly walking up the stairs to the storage room. It was probably Todd, looking to score an unsellable pair of pants to wear instead of his pee-stained pair. Or perhaps it was Annette, now forward enough to suggest we do it on top of a stack of layaway boxes.

But as I heard the footsteps reach the top of the stairs, I felt a wave of cold hit my back.

At first, I was confused. Did someone open a door? How was cold air making it all the way up here?

Just as I was about to turn around toward the stairs, it dawned on me what was happening.

I could feel my stomach fill with adrenaline. I couldn’t move.

It was Her.

I was sure the Little Girl in a Blue Dress was standing directly behind me, no less certain than if I was standing in the hallway of my parents’ attic. It was almost as if I could hear Her gibberish—like it had somehow bypassed my ears and was penetrating directly into my head. I felt like I could hear Her mumble out Her nonsense, taking hard breaths between each sentence. I envisioned Her standing there behind me, dripping wet, mouth running in a silent fury of gibberish.

I’m going to close my eyes
, I said to myself.
And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again
.

I couldn’t open my eyes.

I fought every impulse I had to turn around and confront her. I was frozen, with every muscle in my body fighting to turn toward and away at the same time. I could feel all the air and energy in the room sucked into a void behind me. My back just kept getting colder and colder. Just as I could imagine Her about to reach out and touch my back, it was all gone.

In an instant, the cold, the feeling of presence, Her—everything just switched back to normal. I didn’t want to know what had happened. I also didn’t want to hang around to see if it would happen again.

I just turned—nothing was there—and ran.

I jumped down three steps at a time, raced through the store, and bolted out to my car. I took off down the road and drove for hours.

In the morning I got a phone call from the store manager reaming me for the condition of the Layaway Department. The boxes weren’t put away properly, the register was an indecipherable mess of transactions. I had really blown it, she told me, really disappointed her after she’d gone out on a limb for me. I apologized, saying that I had no excuse for what happened
and didn’t know why I had made so many mistakes. But I did have an excuse. I did have a very clear reason.

In the few years since she’d come into my life, I’d never felt Her outside my parents’ house. But now the equation had changed. She had followed me into the real world. The boundary was broken. If She could reach me in the layaway storage room, that means she could reach me anywhere.

“Okay, this is how we operate,” Steve said, speaking slowly, like he was already exhausted six words into our conversation. “WKSC has been blessed with … how do I describe it … ‘working’ equipment.”

As of a week earlier, I was a student at a local eight-hundred-student Kent State University satellite campus. As I made clear to Laura, I had very little interest in attending college. Funny enough, colleges had very little interest in having me attend them. You’d think the thing to do would be to simply not go to college. But I felt suddenly compelled to find a college that would take me—for two reasons.

First, since I’d stumbled through my final months of high school that spring, every awkward conversation I had with anyone I ran into—former friends from school, people from my church, distant relatives, and so on—always started with the same question: “Where are you going to college?” I really wanted to answer by saying, “I hate college. I hate the idea of college. And now I hate you, probably for several reasons, but mostly because you asked me about college.”