Spree (YA Paranormal) (3 page)

“What’d you say?” Alex asked him.

He grabbed Zipper’s backpack—the one that had the gun in it—and gave it a shove. Zipper went circling towards the wall. I wanted to make the gun go off, to get people to notice, but I couldn’t do a thing. I didn’t yet know how.

No one laughed. Everyone knew the tenor of the day.

Zipper murmured, but Alex didn’t follow up. He just went up to the paper mural Mrs. Cowell had just finished putting up and picked up one of the markers she’d attached to a string.

I stood over his shoulder, looking on as he wrote:

Hello, Mrs. DeSoto:

I’m sorry your daughter was such a whore and a drunk
.

Kids who’d seen him write it stood back as he walked away.

The teachers were too busy congregating with the students, huddling and crying with them, to notice.

Even though my mom would never see the comment, I felt so pissed I could slap Alex. He cheated on me too, though after, I admit, I’d cheated on him. Just last Monday we were all lovey- dovey, throwing chalk at each other in Mr. Higgins’s class. I thought we were moving on.

Today, this.

I saw Alex scamper off, towards a bathroom stall. He locked himself in, pounded on the stall a few times, and then broke down and cried like the kids he made fun of.

I wanted to hold him, but I couldn’t.

I just knelt by him and said: “I wish I could undo it all, but I can’t. Just know that I love you too.”

Just then I felt myself pulled elsewhere, up and floating, above the crowds of crying kids huddling off the buses and into the gym, away from the anger, the grief, the accusations.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Looks like someone’s made her Death Day wish,” Crazy T said.

His voice sounded uneven. His black hole eyes sparkled in this reddish light of insanity.

“It’s no matter,” he said. “I want you to see something before we go.”

He pointed to the image of Zipper holding my picture.

At that moment I remembered. Zipper had cried when we broke up in eighth grade. I laughed before heading off to have my first beer in Preggers’s basement.

Yeah, I was a bitch.

“He liked me too much,” I said.

“He loved you,” Crazy T said, mockingly.

I watched as Zipper stalled himself up in another bathroom, then took the gun out of his backpack.

“Maybe today’s the day,” he said to himself.

I could tell Alex had humiliated him. I could feel how sensitive he was, could see it in the pink orbs that floated around him. If they only knew how alike they were, they could grieve together.

But a world of status and condescension separated them: the world of high school.

“You wanna help?” Crazy T asked me. “You wanna undo it all? Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you got behind the wheel.”

I watched as Crazy T transformed himself into a cloud of blackish mist, like the Takers hovering around Zipper, urging him on.

“Don’t do it,” I whispered to Zipper. “Forget me. Live. Just live.”

I could see Zipper jump up a bit, then calm down and put the gun back into his backpack.

He zipped it up and busted out of the stall, off to his first period class.

* * *

Faint whispers of light surrounded me, and I knew I was somewhere else, somewhere that looked a little like the smoky haze of a never-ending party. Around me was music blaring in colors along with silver shadows dancing, spilling into each other, and the smallest hints of gold that framed the whole place in infinite metallic fire. I felt I was in a field, surrounded by creatures I couldn’t even make out. Their presence felt unsettling, but familiar.

“Is this hell?” I asked.

I searched around for Crazy T, but I heard no answer.

“The Spree,” I heard an unfamiliar voice say. “Land of lost souls.”

“I can’t quite make it out,” I said.

“You will—in time,” the voice said. “Every teen does.”

“Why have I been called here?”

“It was you who called us.”

A girl stepped forward, dressed in gothic attire, with painted black eyebrows, empty eyes, nose rings, and burnt black skin. She stepped forth from the song, the music circling around her.

“We lost our names when we lost our lives, but you can call me Burn Girl,” she told me. “I’m the oldest of the lost souls, after Crazy T. I like to burn things. Hence the name.”

“How nice.”

Several more shadows materialized. One looked like a preppy girl with hair-sprayed red curls, ripped jeans, and scabs all around her body. Casting a larger shadow still was a thin male figure hanging from a tree, its neck disjointed.

“This is the land of killers, isn’t it?” I asked.

“We’ve all killed. I set fire to a party I wasn’t invited to, killing seven girls,” Burn Girl said. “I was never caught until I set a fire so big I couldn’t even escape from it.”

“And I cut and cut and cut until there was nothing left to cut,” the red-haired girl said. “They call me Cut Girl.”

“Naturally.”

“And I was a bully, sentenced to die the way my victim did,” the hanging shadow called out. “I don’t have a name.”

“We’re what you can see and feel of The Spree right now,” Burn Girl said.

“You’re Takers,” I insisted.

“We’re the Takers who surrounded you when you got into the car, when you drove it, when you crashed, when you were beheaded,” Burn Girl told me.

She pointed her singed finger at another apparition. It was me, a corpse with its bloody head in its hands, its eyes staring out into the metallic fire.

“You will join us soon enough,” the hanging shadow said. “Every Taker does.”

“What exactly is a Taker?”

“Keepers preserve life; we take it,” Cut Girl said. “We’re drawn to the thrill of killing, of blood,” she said. “I can taste your blood—even now.”

“Once you see what you’ve done, you’ll join us,” the hanging shadow told me. “A Taker must be with other Takers, must feed off of them.”

“But first,” Burn Girl said, “you made a Death Day wish.”

“I have to save the people I’ve hurt,” I replied. “I have to save my friends from ending up dead. I have to stop the school shooting.”

“You won’t succeed,” Burn Girl told me.

“Let me try.”

“Your wish will be granted,” Burn Girl told me, “but know that we’ll be there, watching, and that we’ll pick our own Taker to go against you.”

“Crazy T,” I said.

“It’s his special project,” Burn Girl told me. “He died killing just two of his classmates. Zipper could be the first school shooter to kill them all.”

“Not if I can reason with him.”

“You can’t.”

“Let’s wager, then. I lose—I’m all yours.”

“You can’t barter with what we already have,” the hanging shadow told me. “But if you lose, you take whoever Spree tells you to, whenever Spree tells you to. You take Crazy T’s place until hell calls you.”

“Agreed.”

“You have a school week until the shooting,” Burn Girl told me. “Five days.”

I felt myself pulled away from the parties, from the endless fires of color. I could see the school in the background and right in front of it, the hanging shadow, or Rope Man, as I called him, twisting in the air. Flies swarmed around him, and a smile took his lips as the lunch bell rang and kids with senior lunch privilege leaped through him on their way to their cars.

* * *

Later that day I wandered the halls of the school I couldn’t believe I wanted to save. Crowds of kids huddled and cried, while others were walking and talking, without a care in the world, but too afraid to even smile. Half of these kids spread rumors when I was alive. Now they all bawled like they were my friends. Not one ever said I had a problem drinking. Not a one ever really cared. Yet they set up a Facebook page in my honor, as if I’d died a saint and not a drunk. Special texts of “Remember Fay” circulated with funny comments I supposedly said. I was never that funny. And then there were the banners. I walked up, right through a couple of kids planning out how they’d cheat on Chemistry homework.

“Fay:

I remember that time I held you on the river by Sue’s house. We laughed and talked and nearly fell off the boat. You were my first kiss. I’ll treasure you always. Kade.”

I honestly was too drunk at that phase of my life to remember who Kade even was, let alone whether or not we’d ever kissed.

Another note triggered a memory I’d nearly forgotten:

“You used to call me names, but I forgive you. May we make up in heaven one day Dora.”

It was true. Dora had dyed her hair blond one year, and it looked horrible. The roots were drenched in black. I laughed, made fun of her, even put my friends up to wearing wigs from the dollar store that looked just like her hairdo. The thought that the moment stayed with her, long after I’d forgotten all about it, saddened me. From where I stood, it seemed like everyone forgets people and remembers moments. A single thought, feeling, impression stands out and that’s all you are to them. I wonder if anyone knew the real Fay at all.

I floated by the wall for a while before I felt another emotion calling to me. I could see fountains, waves of blue just pouring out from the classroom. The aura was spilling over into other auras, contaminating them with grief. I floated into the room only to see Mrs. Walters, my English teacher, the one who looked a little bit like Tinkerbelle. She was staring out at my former desk. I’d left a book there without knowing it. She placed it aside in a pile, with my name facing away from the rest of the class. She was rearranging desks, pushing and pulling, trying to get rid of the desk the dead girl sat at. She’d given this thought over the weekend, considered even making a small shrine to my memory, but instead she opted to switch the room around and to take one flower and put it in a vase with a card next to it, a card dedicated to my memory. Given how many detentions she gave me, most of which I’d earned, I was shocked. I was even more shocked to see her breaking down, to see another, older male teacher, come up to her, give her a hug.

“I never lost a student before, not like this,” Mrs. Walters said. “The last time I saw her I was writing her a detention.”

It was true. I was late to school that day. I was too consumed with drinking the night before. It’s a wonder NHS didn’t kick me out ages ago, by I always managed to get my service hours done.

“I know it hurts,” Mr. Higgins, my science teacher, told her. “What hurts more is that she won’t be the last.”

“I don’t know if I can take teaching,” Mrs. Walters said plainly. “It hurts so much. I felt I should after…well, I felt I could help kids through. Now I’m not so sure. I can’t get what happened to Fay out of my mind.”

“I had Fay in homeroom,” Mr. Higgins told her. “Kids liked her. She was a cute little girl.”

That was a lie. I was anything but little.

“But she was only one of my students,” Mr. Higgins went on. “Right now we have to think about the rest. They’ll be looking to you for leadership. Be strong.”

Mrs. Walters nodded up and down, drying her eyes as Mr. Higgins went back to his room.

Right on cue, the bell rang, and poor Mrs. Walters—she was a newer teacher, so I gave her a hard time—did all she could to maintain her composure. The first student walked in, Jessica Hanson, another one of my early childhood friends who I grew away from. Jessica noticed that Mrs. Walters had been crying. Jessica awkwardly put her books on a desk, not sure which was hers in the new arrangement, no doubt, and came up to Mrs. Walters. She gave Mrs. Walters a hug. More and more kids came in, Tom, Sue, Alex, and they did the same.

Looking on, I was prouder of each of my former friends than I ever was of myself.

And it’s not like I hadn’t seen them at their worst.

Half those kids bullied each other by text. More than half had bullied me the moment I became known as the local tramp. More than one was a drunk.

But look at what they were capable of.

Look at what this school could do.

This was something real. This was something worth fighting for.

* * *

Zipper sat commiserating with the band kids.

The kids were all gathered in the cafeteria for a special lunch paid for by the school.

Zipper talked about how he remembered me from my middle school days, about how we dated. He looked almost like he belonged as part of the group. I could see his aura—all red and black—intensely hateful, intensely angry. How well he covered it up with smiles as he went on about the one teacher who still gave homework on a day like this. You always heard about school shooters being freaks, outsiders in trench coats, victims of severe bullying and abuse. But Zipper acted just like a normal kid, looked like a normal kid, but wasn’t at all as right in the head as the other kids were—if there is such a thing as a teen who isn’t crazy.

As the kids talked on, his aura darkened even more. He was contemplating what it would be like to go home and kill the small squirrel he’d caught and tortured in his basement. He wanted to know what another life’s blood felt like on his hands. As preparation. He’d planned to do this right after his Pre-Calc. homework each night until the shooting and hoped the formulas wouldn’t take too long. And no one noticed. Just from the intensity of his aura I could tell he was thinking about it over and over, to the point of obsessing. Yet he sat there, not missing a beat in the conversation.

Minutes later he politely dismissed himself, went outside, ostensibly to throw out his lunch and take in the crisp fall air. He looked in every direction. No one else was around. He took out his gun from his bag, looked into the cafeteria. No one was looking. There was a rush, a thrilling red vibe that took over the colors around him.

“Not just yet,” he told himself, fantasizing.

He called out a name, maybe Alex’s, and shot the gun at a small rock. He smiled. Kids came rushing out. By that time the gun and the smile were away.

“What the hell was that?” Tom, who’d just comforted Mrs. Walters earlier in the day, asked.