“Can I have a cup of coffee?”
She sighed. “Half a cup. Now let me read.”
32
During my last test in math that year, I looked out the window and saw Kenneth Therriault standing on the basketball court. He did his grinning-and-beckoning thing. I looked back at my paper, then looked up again. Still there, and closer. He turned his head so I could get a good look at the purple-black crater, plus the bone-fangs sticking up all around it. I looked down at my paper again, and when I looked up the third time, he was gone. But I knew he’d be back. He wasn’t like the others. He was nothing like the others.
By the time Mr. Laghari told us to turn in our papers, I still hadn’t solved the last five problems. I got a D- on the test, and there was a note at the top: This is disappointing, Jamie. You must do better. What do I say at least once in every class? What he said was that if you fell behind in math, you could never catch up.
Math wasn’t so special that way, although Mr. Laghari might think so. It was true for most classes. As if to underline the point, I bricked a history test later that day. Not because Therriault was standing at the blackboard or anything, but because I couldn’t stop thinking he might be standing at the blackboard.
I got the idea he wanted me to do badly in my courses. You could laugh at that, but there’s another old saying that goes it’s not paranoid if it’s true. A few lousy tests weren’t going to stop me from passing everything, not that late in the year, and then it would be summer vacation, but what about next year, if he was still hanging around?
Also, what if he was getting stronger? I didn’t want to believe that, but just the fact that he was still there suggested it might be true. That it probably was true.
Telling somebody might help, and Mom was the logical choice, she’d believe me, but I didn’t want to scare her. She’d already been scared enough, when she thought the agency was going to go under and she wouldn’t be able to take care of me and her brother. That I’d helped her out of that pickle might make her blame herself for the one I was in now. That made no sense to me, but it might to her. Besides, she wanted to put the whole seeing-dead-folks stuff behind her. And here’s the thing: what could she do, even if I did tell her? Blame Liz for putting me with Therriault in the first place, but that was all.
I thought briefly of talking to Ms. Peterson, who was the school’s guidance counselor, but she’d assume I was having hallucinations, maybe a nervous breakdown. She’d tell my mother. I even thought of going to Liz, but what could Liz do? Pull out her gun and shoot him? Good luck there, since he was already dead. Besides, I was done with Liz, or so I thought. I was on my own, and that was a lonely, scary place to be.
My mother came to the swim meet where I swam like shit in every event. On the way home she gave me a hug and told me everyone had an off day and I’d do better next time. I almost blurted everything out right then, ending with my fear—which I now felt was reasonably justified—that Kenneth Therriault was trying to ruin my life for screwing up his last and biggest bomb. If we hadn’t been in a taxi, I really might have. Since we were, I just put my head on her shoulder as I had when I was small and thought my hand-turkey was the greatest work of art since the Mona Lisa. Tell you what, the worst part of growing up is how it shuts you up.
33
When I headed out of our apartment on the last day of school, Therriault was once again in the elevator. Grinning and beckoning. He probably expected me to cringe back like I had the first time I saw him in there, but I didn’t. I was scared, all right, but not as scared, because I was getting used to him, the way you might get used to a growth or a birthmark on your face, even if it was ugly. This time I was more angry than scared, because he wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone.
Instead of cringing, I lunged forward and put my arm out to stop the elevator doors. I wasn’t going to get in with him—Christ, no!—but I wasn’t going to let the doors close until I got a few answers.
“Does my mother really have cancer?”
Once again his face twisted like I was hurting him, and once again I hoped I was.
“Does my mother have cancer?”
“I don’t know.” The way he was staring at me… you know that old saying about if looks could kill?
“Then why did you say that?”
He was at the back of the car now, with his hands pressed to his chest, as if I was scaring him. He turned his head, showing me that enormous exit wound, but if he thought that was going to make me let go of the door and step back, he was wrong. Horrible as it was, I’d gotten used to it.
“Why did you say that?”
“Because I hate you,” Therriault said, and bared his teeth.
“Why are you still here? How can you be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go away.”
He said nothing.
“Go away!”
“I’m not going away. I’m never going away.”
That scared the hell out of me and my arm flopped down to my side as if it had gained weight.
“Be seeing you, Champ.”
The elevator doors rolled shut, but the car didn’t go anywhere because there was no one to push any of the inside buttons. When I pushed the one on my side, the doors rolled open on an empty car, but I took the stairs anyway.
I’ll get used to him, I thought. I got used to the hole in his head and I’ll get used to him. It’s not like he can hurt me.
But in some ways he’d hurt me already: the D- on my math test and screwing the pooch at the swim meet were just two examples. I was sleeping badly (Mom had already commented on the pouches under my eyes), and little noises, even a dropped book in study hall, made me jump. I kept thinking I’d open my closet to get a shirt and he’d be in there, my own personal boogeyman. Or under the bed, and what if he grabbed my wrist or my dangling foot while I was sleeping? I didn’t think he could grab, but I wasn’t sure of that, either, especially if he was getting stronger.
What if I woke up and he was lying in bed with me? Maybe even grabbing at my junk?
That was an idea that, once thought, couldn’t be unthought.
And something else, something even worse. What if he was still haunting me—because that’s what this was, all right—when I was twenty? Or forty? What if he was there when I died at eighty-nine, waiting to welcome me into the afterlife, where he would go on haunting me even after I was dead?
If this is what a good deed gets you, I thought one night, looking out my window and watching Thumper across the street under his streetlight, I never want to do another one.
34
In late June, Mom and I made our monthly visit to see Uncle Harry. He didn’t talk much anymore and hardly ever went into the common room. Although he still wasn’t fifty, his hair had gone snow white.
Mom said, “Jamie brought you rugelach from Zabar’s, Harry. Would you like some?”
I held the bag up from my place in the doorway (I didn’t really want to go all the way in), smiling and feeling a little like one of the models on The Price is Right.
Uncle Harry said yig.
“Does that mean yes?” Mom asked.
Uncle Harry said ng, and waved both hands at me. Which you didn’t have to be a mind reader to know meant no fucking cookies.