Just Kill Me (15 page)

“Are there seriously people who know the difference between a Colorado lamb and one who came from Delaware?” Rick asks. “I sure as hell don't.”

I turn to Mom. “We should start telling people that we use pure Massachusetts embalming fluid.”

“I like it,” she says. “Artisan funerals, with locally handcrafted glues to keep the eyes shut.”

“This!” says Brandon. “This is what I want. People love this stuff. Behind the scenes of the death industry. That's gonna pop.”

“You're not filming at our house,” says Mom. “That kind of publicity is bad for business in the long run.”

“Yeah,” I say. “We don't want anything in the show about me being a black-diaper baby.”

“Black-diaper baby!” he says. “You can't give me a term like that and say I can't use it!”

“It'd be sort of insulting to my customers if we made a big deal of it,” says Mom.

“We can obfuscate things like that pretty well, so they won't connect her to your place,” says Brandon. “You wouldn't believe some of what we get away with on these things.”

Ricardo fixes Brandon with a harsh look. “Sounds to me like you're pretty eager to fudge the facts.”

“Aw, nothing like that, man,” says Brandon. “But sometimes
we have to bend the story to tell the story. Like, I look at this group, your group, and I think: what's the story? What's the narrative, the hook? It's a ragtag group of ghost-hunting rebels trying to clean up the industry. Sweep out the bullshit. And part of what makes the story pop is that you recruited a funeral-home girl. Black-diaper baby.
Love
that. If we have to get her a day job at some other funeral home to get to tell that story, we'll do what we have to. But that is her story. It'd be bullshitting if we left it out.”

He's got us there.

Brandon doesn't seem like a big-shot Hollywood producer to me. He seems like a guy whose parents gave him a production company as a graduation present or something. Still, the company has deep enough pockets to pick up a check for five people at a restaurant where the cheapest entree costs more than I earn in three hours at the grocery store. He doesn't even flinch when everyone but me orders cocktails that don't even have a price listed on the menu. One of those “If you have to ask, you can't afford it” deals. I wish I could get one; it's sort of humiliating to have to order a Shirley Temple, even one made with Washington cherries and small-batch meyer-lemon and Persian lime soda.

While Brandon talks, Mom shoots me a quick look that tells me I'm going to have a hard time getting her behind the TV show if the company decides to move forward, but I can't help being swept into the excitement. Someone thinks I am interesting enough to be on television. In fact, from the way Brandon
talks, having
me
is the part that makes the Mysterious Chicago team most viable for TV. What gives them the edge over Edward Tweed.

Who wouldn't get excited by that?

And I'm eighteen; Mom can't stop me. She can just get mad.

While we eat, Brandon passes out some “ghost” photographs he's found online and printed up as eight-by-ten color glossies. Most of them aren't high enough quality to blow up well, though. They're pixelated as hell.

“Look at the leaves,” he says as he passes a shot of a graveyard tree around. “If you look closely, you can see an Indian chief.”

“Maybe if you look really hard and use your imagination,” I say.

“That's called a simulacrum,” says Rick. “Our brains are trained to look for faces and patterns in random visual noise.”

“Maybe that's how ghosts choose to manifest,” says Brandon. “Random visual noise.”

“Why not just say they manifest as condiments and this black sea salt shaker is one of them?” I ask.

Mom looks at the picture and just laughs. “This is like the ‘find the hidden pictures' in the
Highlights
magazines we keep in the office for kids.”

“You keep copies of
Highlights
at the funeral home?” asks Rick.

“Yeah, sometimes people bring their kids along when they're pre-arranging and stuff.”

“I always thought we should have our own special issue of it,” I say. “Like how dentists' offices have their own Charlie Brown cartoons.”

Mom chortles into her Israeli couscous.
“Gallant walks solemnly past the corpse, contemplating his favorite Bible verse,”
she says.
“Goofus pulls down the corpse's pants to see if it's true that they stuff the bodies' butts with cotton.”

“Do you really do that?” asks Brandon.

“Not with cotton,” says Mom. “Big plastic plugs.”

“They look like Nerf torpedoes,” I say.

“Or really big-ass drywall anchors,” says Mom.

“ ‘Ass' being the operative word,” says Rick.

“See,
this
!” says Brandon. “This is what people want to see! This kind of angle pops like a bottle rocket.”

“Believe me, you do not want those plugs to pop,” Mom laughs.

I'm glad to be in company where this kind of talk doesn't spoil the meal. And the meal is great. I order a bowl of Louisiana turtle soup, which is like no other food I've ever tasted, then wood oven–seared Puget Sound mussels with some kind of aioli, and fancy french fries that taste like bacon. I send pictures of every course to Zoey, hoping maybe this will lure her out to meet up in person.

I can imagine getting used to being a TV star and living like this. Buying myself an apartment in one of these Armitage Avenue townhouses, eating like royalty every night . . . How could Zoey say no to that sort of lifestyle?

Brandon tells us, again and again, that he wouldn't have us make fools of ourselves on the show, but then he shows us orb pictures and acts all disappointed when we say they aren't ghosts. I can tell Rick is unimpressed with him, and ready to chuck the whole thing and wait for another offer to come along.

Then, toward the end of the meal, Brandon mentions that he's meeting with Edward Tweed too, which we already knew, and with some group from Ghostly Journeys Inc, which I guess we didn't.

“What?” asks Rick. “Ghostly Journeys aren't even operating in town.”

“Not yet,” says Brandon. “But they've been looking to move into the Chicago market. I wouldn't worry about it, though. You guys are terrific. Only thing I like better about Tweed is that people really, seriously see ghosts on his tours.”

“We've had more sightings lately,” says Rick. “Just the other day a kid told me he saw a woman with a white thing on her head at Hull House. And I hadn't even told the story about the ghost in the rustling dress that night.”

“Still not as many as Tweed gets. It's almost every tour for him.”

“That's because he's lying,” says Rick.

“Hard to prove.”

Brandon hops in a cab after the meal to meet up with us on Clark Street—he wants to mingle with the passengers and
blend in. The rest of us get on a CTA bus down Halsted to the bus lot.

“Well, that was a fucking bust,” says Rick.

“I think we could make the show work,” says Cyn.

“Yeah, we can do this,” I say.

“Are you kidding me?” asks Rick. “I wanna be on TV too. It's been my dream since I was a toddler. But I don't want to have to act like some jackass
Ghost Encounters
moron. It's gotta be on my terms.”

“Then you're never gonna get on TV,” says Cyn. “And they'll give the show to Tweed or Ghostly Journeys, and then we'll go out of business altogether.”

“What's Ghostly Journeys?” I ask.

“It's a big ghost-tour operation out of New Orleans,” says Rick, who looks miserable now. “They've got tours in Boston, Savannah, Gettysburg, and all the other big ghost cities.”

“If they move in here, we're screwed,” says Cyn. “As it is, we're mostly just booking people who come to us because Tweed is sold out. If Journeys comes here, they'll steal every customer we get.”

“Look,” says Rick. “Being on a ghost show isn't my ideal way to break out as a comic anyway. I don't want to be ‘the ghost guy' forever.”

“But it's your most likely way of getting noticed,” says Cyn. “And if you can be even halfway respectable, that could save lives.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. We're all killing people all the time,” says Rick, like a kid being nagged by his mom. “The only reason I can afford a candied bar down at the 7-Eleven is because people die to keep the price of cocoa beans down. You've mentioned that.”

“Dude, did you just say ‘candied bar'?” asks Cyn. “Doinkus.”

On Clark Street there's a big influx of people in town for a comic-book convention—you can spot them because they're in costume. We have a guy in full Ghostbusters regalia on the bus. Three guys in TRON outfits mill about by the Ronald McDonald statue, flirting with girls in fishnets and corsets.

There is eye candy everywhere tonight.

When I load up the passengers, there's a pale girl about my age with long red hair walking along by herself. Her mouth is just slightly too big for her small, angular face, and she's wearing a gothic-style dress with lace sides. It might be a costume, but if I were her, I'd dress like that every single day. She looks gorgeous. Like she could be one of those “Hollywood Sadcore” retro ballad singers, and all of her songs would be about murder and decay. A girl after my own heart.

She smiles at me from down the block when she sees me looking at her, and a few parts of me that don't normally beat start beating.

“Check it out,” says Cyn. “It's a red-haired Morticia Addams.”

“Please tell me she's with us,” I say.

I work my way through the handful of reservations that we've racked up, and “Morticia” lingers at the back, then comes up to me when the coast is clear.

“Hey,” she says. “Do you have any extra space tonight?”

“We sure do,” I say.

“How much does it cost?”

She has dimples an inch deep, and the most perfect teeth I have ever seen in my whole entire life, and she smells like Oregon blueberries.

“Five bucks,” I say.

“Really? I thought it was, like thirty or forty.”

“It is, but if you don't tell the others I can cut you a deal.”

We want as many people as possible on the bus with Brandon. Also, I want her on the bus. I would have paid
her
five dollars to come on the bus, probably.

Morticia pulls five impossibly crisp one-dollar bills from a little purse, then slips onto the bus, where she takes a seat in the back, three rows behind where everyone else is sitting.

Rick comes out to join me on the street as we wait for a missing party of four.

“Morticia's a step-on, right?”

“Yeah, but I only charged her a five spot.”

He laughs. “Little sister's got a crush?”

I blush about as red as Morticia's hair. “You don't think there's any chance that she's Zoey, do you?”

“Not a dandy's chance in Wal-Mart, sis,” he says. “But if
you're just looking for a one-night thing, she looks like she might be freaky enough for you.”

I look over my shoulder at the bus, seeing where she's sitting, partly to keep him from seeing how badly I'm blushing. Rick doesn't know exactly what goes on in my fan-fic stories, but he knows enough.

Throughout the tour, “Morticia” seems sort of aloof. She doesn't always look at what we're pointing at on the road. When we get off the bus at the alley, she stays separated from most of the group. While the rest of the people are wandering around, taking pictures of the stage door and the fire escapes and themselves, she's off staring at some random brick, like she's looking at something only she can see. The only time she reacts to anyone is when Brandon tries to hit on her. She gives him a look that I think means,
Yeah, very funny, dream on, dork,
and walks over to look at a different brick.

But she's smiling the whole time. When she catches me looking in her direction, she smiles bigger.

Off the bus at Hull House, Mom walks beside me.

“I have to admit,” she says, “I'm having a good time. Rick is really something.”

“I know,” I say. “He's gonna be a star someday.”

“Are all those stories true about this place?” she asks. “Jane Addams and her partner said they saw a ghost here?”

“Her partner was sleeping, but Jane said she did, according to one of her friends,” I say. “She never took it that seriously, though.”

Just then I hear a voice behind me say, “So, were she and her ‘partner,' like, partners?”

I turn back to see Morticia, smiling and staring up at the window of the room Jane and her staff half-jokingly called “The Haunted Room.”

“We think so,” I say. “I mean, she and Mary Rozet Smith were definitely, like, life partners, but we don't know for sure if they were . . . doing it.”