Forever Freaky

  Forever Freaky

  By Tom Upton

  ~~~

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 2011 Tom Upton. All rights are reserved.

  All characters in this book are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual person is purely coincidental.

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  Freaky Jules

  Vanished

  It would have been a typical day at Adler High, except that Mary Jo Mason disappeared yesterday.

  Cops came and went all day. All the classrooms and lockers had been searched yesterday, along with every nook and cranny of the basement that was the haunt of the school’s creepy janitor. There were two squad cars parked at the front of the student parking lot at all times. It was hard to tell if they were always the same two cars. Every now and then, the school secretary came on the public address system and requested that some student or other report down at the main office.

  I didn’t have to worry about being summoned. Mary Jo wasn’t a friend of mine—not many people were. I knew who she was; I’d seen her around. She was in the Green clique, an annoying group of tree-huggers who constantly complained about how the school, and the school district, could be more environmentally friendly. But I had as much in common with them as I had with any of the other cliques at school. Tree-huggers, jocks, nerds, artsy-fartsy types—forget all of them; I was a clique of one, without much chance of adding on more members.

  School gossip was running thick and fast today. Somebody had sneaked into the school and kidnapped Mary Jo. Or she decided to run away and marry some old dude from Greenpeace. Or Carl Brunner, the creepy school janitor, had done something awful to her…. Gossip never ends. It’s a cozy constant that helps you get through the day in high school.

  Whether or not I wanted, I got the lowdown on Mary Jo from Melody Hansen, who was my best friend because she was my only friend. You could say she was my best friend by default. She was hopelessly shallow. She would talk, talk, talk, mostly about paltry things, and it was easy for me to tune her out. She was probably the perfect friend for me. Without a doubt we were the two most unpopular girls in school. I never spoke with anybody, and if anybody tried to strike up a conversation with me, I just ignored them. I didn’t want anybody to get to know me, because I was sure nobody would like me anyway. I figured it is always better to be unpopular by your own choice.

  Melody was a social outcast for an entirely different reason. The mere fact that her mother was the assistant principal in charge of discipline drove a stake through the heart of possible popularity. Without even trying, she was condemned to be as popular as me, and I was only slightly more popular than vaginal warts.

  “It’s weird,” she said, sitting across the lunch table from me. She had to raise her voice a bit, because the lunchroom was so noisy.

  “What’s that?” I asked, trying to eat what they school passed off as food

  “Mary Jo,” she said, getting exasperated.

  “Are we still talking about her?”

  “What else is there? I can’t believe you. This is big—maybe the biggest—and it’s weird. How can you not be interested?”

  I shrugged. Sometimes it was hard to talk to Melody. She knew my secrets. She knew my problems. Yet she was not bright enough to connect the dots. If she could have, she would have understood my lack of interest in what had happen to Mary Jo. Okay, the girl went missing. That was her problem, but one way or another, sooner or later, she would be found. Her problem would be over, and she would be fine. I understood that even if she turned up dead, she would be fine. On the other hand, my problems never ended, and I doubted I would ever be fine. It may sound cold and heartless of me to feel this way, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “I just don’t see the big deal,” I said. “And what’s so weird about it anyway? People disappear, right? Happens every day.”

  “Not like this.” she assured me. She leaned forward so that she could lower her voice. “She vanished in the bathroom.”

  “Yeah?” I said, like So what?

  “You don’t get it. I don’t mean she vanished from the bathroom. You see the difference.”

  “She’s missing either way.”

  Melody sighed. “They found her purse and book bag in the bathroom stall, and the stall door was still locked from the inside.”

  I was about to take a sip of milk, but stopped. That was sort of interesting, I had to admit.

  “Not only that,” Melody continued. “They questioned her best friend—you know the one they call Coco?”

  “Yeah, I know who you mean. Short, dark hair. I think she’s on one of the teams. Track or something.”

  “Right, that’s her. Well, she was the one who reported Mary Jo missing. She told the cops she was in the bathroom with Mary Jo. She was talking to her, while Mary Jo was in the stall. Are you following me? Then she left to go to class. Only she forgot to tell Mary Jo something. So she went right back to the bathroom, and Mary Jo wasn’t in the stall anymore. Her book bag and purse were there but it was like, poof, no Mary Jo.”

  Melody tossed back her long dark hair, and looked at me with wide eyes that awaited some response.

  “Okay, it’s weird,” I said.

  Melody was disappointed. “That’s all?”

  “Well, you’re right—it’s weird.”

  “I thought you’d have more to say than that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some kind of insight or something. Oh, you know. You know things—weird things.”

  “I don’t know anything about people vanishing from bathrooms,” I said. I knew weird things, true, but I didn’t know all weird things.

  Just then Mrs. Halsted walked up the aisle, nearing our table. She had been the head lunchroom monitor, walking through the aisles every day, year after year, until her back assumed a slight sideways bend from craning her neck to see if anybody was throwing food on the floor under the tables. She had passed away when I was a freshman, and yet here she was still looking for food on the floor. It made me wonder, What exactly is the purpose of death?

  As Mrs. Halsted passed our table, she gave me a sly smile but kept walking.

  “Jules?”

  I looked at Melody. To her it must have seemed I drifted off. I did that a lot. In my school file it was noted that I often seemed distracted. My counselor, Mrs. Stock, had insisted my parents have me tested for attention deficit disorder. The tests had come back negative, of course.

  “Mrs. Halsted?” Melody asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “She say anything this time?”

  “She never says anything.”

  “I wonder why. You think she knows you can see her?”

  “Oh, she knows.”

  “Then why not say something?”

  “She’s one of the good ones,” I said.

  I slid my tray aside. I couldn’t eat anymore. I felt agitated. Melody was talking too much. If she’d been talking about some guy or a handbag that she coveted but couldn’t afford, I could have handled it. Her talking about strange stuff always got to me; it make me think about things I always tried to put out of my mind. Sometimes I wished I had never told Melody anything, but some secrets are impossible to keep. They gnaw at your insides until you can’t bear it anymore. Sooner or later you have a weak moment and you tell somebody. I hated myself
for the weak moments I had; they always ended up leading me into some trouble or other.

  The walls of the crowded lunchroom seemed to edge inward, making the room smaller, more crowded, louder. I felt a panic attack coming on. I was prone to panic attacks, especially when I was around a lot of people.

  I stood up. “I have to go.”

  “You okay?” Melody asked.

  “I just need to get outside for a bit,” I said, and she knew enough not to ask to go with me. “And I wouldn’t worry too much about this whole Mary Jo thing,” I added. “I don’t know where she is, but I’m sure she’s not dead…. Well, at least I haven’t seen her yet.”

  Then I rushed out of the lunchroom, escaped the building, and wandered around the school grounds, until the bell sounded and I headed for my next class.

  The next morning my mom and dad were at work. My mom returned to nursing as soon as I was old enough to have a house key, and worked the graveyard shift at a local hospital. She wouldn’t get home until after I left for school. Dad was a fireman for the Chicago Fire Department. He worked two days straight and got four off, during which he usually moonlighted at his friend’s body shop.

  So most mornings I had the house to myself. I would shower and dress and go down to the kitchen to make myself breakfast. I would make fruit and toast, or sometimes I’d risk having an omelet, with a couple pieces of lightly buttered toast on the side. At some point, while I was at the stove cooking, Jerry would wander into the kitchen. Jerry was our house’s previous owner. He had been a police officer, up until the time he was killed in the line of duty. Strangely, when I was home alone making my breakfast, Jerry would help by making my toast. Most of the time he wouldn’t say a word. He’d get two slices of bread, put them in the toaster, and push the lever down. I never saw bread floating through the air or anything like that; I always saw him perform the task as though he were still alive. The way he appeared to me was the way he looked at the time of his death. He was wearing his uniform. He had been a stocky guy, with a handsome broad face, droopy eyes and short dark hair that was showing a little gray. The only disconcerting thing about the way he looked was the bullet hole in his forehead and the stream of blood that ran down one side of his face. He was stuck with that, apparently forever.

  Over the past five years, I’d spoken with him a few times. He never pestered me to deliver a message to his relatives or anything like that. He never made the lights flicker or caused the walls creak. Basically, he was a really decent guy. He’d died saving the life of his partner, who was a two-year-old German shepherd named Sarge. How much more decent do you get than giving your life for a dog?

  Today he made my toast, and then wandered away, presumably to do whatever it is dead people do when live people aren’t round.

  I sat at the table, and while I was eating, Jerry came back into the kitchen. He sat at the table across from me, which he had never before done. He looked at me with an expression of concern or mild confusion.

  My hand froze halfway to my mouth, and I stared at him over the folk.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was just thinking,” he said. “You know what being dead and being alive have in common?”

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  “In either case, it’s impossible to figure out who’s in charge. Always remember that.”

  “You know I’m trying to eat,” I said.

  “Go right ahead,” he said pleasantly. I stared at him, at the hole in his head, until he finally caught on. “Oh, sometimes I forget. I’m grossing you out, right? Sorry.” He put his hand over his forehead to cover the bullet hole. “That better?”

  “I still know it’s there, plus your brain is oozing out of the back of your head.”

  “I guess I picked a bad way to die,” he said, lowering his hand.

  I grunted. I wondered if there was a good way to die.

  “Something has come up,” Jerry continued. “Something you should know about.”

  “Yeah?” I said, trying to eat some scrambled egg, which was hard because I kept thinking about Jerry’s scrambled brain.

  “There’s an issue,” he announced.

  “An issue? What kind of issue can you have? You’re dead, right?”

  “The issue involves you.”

  I pushed my plate aside, my appetite now totally gone.

  “Really, the last thing I need is to have a dead guy tell me I have issues. I get enough of that from my parents.”

  “It’s about this missing girl from your school,” he persisted, and, trust me, there is nothing more annoying than a persistent spirit.

  “Well—I think—you need to find her,” he said.

  “I do?” he asked, surprised; it was the last thing I expected to hear from him.

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “But it does, in a way. In a way, it involves you, everybody at your school—potentially it involves a lot of people.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “You want to know what really happened to her?” he asked.

  “Can I stop you from telling me?”

  He thought about it for a second, and then said, “Probably not.”

  I tossed up my hand, and leaned back in my chair, like, Okay, let’s hear it.

  “There are separate realities,” he started carefully, as though he didn’t quite know how to explain.

  “You mean like being dead and being alive.”

  “Not exactly. I’m talking about physical realities.”

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  “These realities are parallel to each other, and they are separated by—well, I guess you could call it a membrane.”

  “A membrane?”

  “It’s easier to think of it that way. You have taken biology, right?

  I rolled my eyes. “I know what a membrane is.”

  “Sometimes, in certain places, at certain times, this membrane, for some reason, can become thin, so thin that a solid object can pass through it from one physical reality to another.”

  “How interesting,” I said, thinking Not. Then I realized, “You mean Mary Jo…?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  I thought about that for a minute, and then I burst out laughing.

  “This is not funny,” Jerry said gravely.

  But I found the entire thing more hilarious than horrifying. “You’re telling me that Mary Jo was in the girl’s room, in one of the stalls, sitting on the can and doing her business, and she slipped into another reality. And you don’t find that funny?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I wonder… when she landed in the other reality, do you think she peed all over herself?”

  He smirked. “Okay, maybe it’s a little funny. But, on the serious side, you need to do something.”

  “What? Tell the cops? I could just see that. ‘Oh, yeah, officer. I know what happened to Mary Jo. She didn’t run away or anything. She just slipped through a membrane into another reality.’ Oh, yeah, that would sound great! You know, my main goal in life is trying not to end up in a straightjacket. I don’t see the big deal. Tough luck that something weird happened to her, but, you know, that’s life.”

  “She doesn’t know where she is. She’s alone. She probably scared out of her wits. Don’t you have any compassion at all?”

  “No,” I said. “Why should I?”

  He sighed, frustrated.

  “Well, it’s more than just Mary Jo,” he continued. “When she slipped into another reality, something else slipped into yours. To balance things out. I guess you could call it a kind of displacement.”

  “Something from the other reality.”

  “From another reality,” he said, “not necessarily the reality Mary Jo went to. Some of these realities are pretty dark. Whatever came through—a spirit, a demon, whatever—has already disrupted things.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “You remember when you left school yesterday? There was a
bad car accident outside on the street.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It should have never happened,” he said.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Okay, you’re trying to tell me that because Mary Jo disappeared there was a car accident? This thing that replaced her is an evil spirit or something?”

  “It doesn’t have to be evil, really. It’s just something that shouldn’t be here; it’s disrupting the natural flow of events in this reality. Now there are two people in the hospital—a seventy-two-year-old woman with a broken hip and her forty-five-year-old daughter who sustained a serious head injury. And, I should add,” he said, holding up a finger, “the daughter would not have been so seriously injured if she had been wearing her seat belt. That’s why you must always buckle up.”

  “Great,” I said. “Just what I always wanted to hear: a public service announcement from a dead cop.”

  “Jules, this thing—whatever it is—needs to go back where it came from. For that to happen, Mary Jo has to be brought back here.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “The part that is a little fuzzy is why me?”

  “Because you have a gift?” he said.

  “A gift? Please, don’t make me vomit. I see things in my head that would gag a medical examiner. My mother always calls it a gift, but then she never had it, so what does she know? I got it from my grandmother, who never thought it was much of a gift either.”

  “I’m just saying: this has all got to be put right, or else people are going to keep getting hurt. But then maybe you don’t care about that, either.”

  He got up from the table and drifted out of the room.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was getting guilt-tripped by a ghost. What next?

  ***************

  I had only a half-day of school today, and yet I barely made it through. My last class, English, I kept nodding off at my desk.

  I had awful sleeping habits. I’d had insomnia forever. Sometimes, I thought I was born with insomnia. I’d lie in bed at night and stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom. Everything was dark and quiet and peaceful, but still I couldn’t fall asleep. It was always as though something was there, at the periphery of my senses. I was just aware of it enough for it to keep me awake, waiting to see something freaky. But usually nothing happened. I waited and waited, until finally I was so exhausted I drifted away. It wasn’t so much falling asleep as it was sliding into unconsciousness. Other nights, the freak show began almost as soon as I turned off the lights. I’d look at the ceiling, and suddenly some strange face was staring down at me. Sometimes there were a lot of faces. Sometimes there were just sets of staring eyes. I had to pull the covers over my head to hide from them. When I did that, there were still times when I could see eyes looking at me from the underside of my blanket. I had no idea who they belonged to or what they wanted, but at times they were impossible to escape.