The Blue Girl (27 page)

I look up and see her closing her window.

Even with her skin all blue, she’s gorgeous.

I turn away and start down the alley, wondering how it happened. For all I know, she did it on purpose. Tomorrow is Halloween, after all. She could be planning to go as Mystique from
X-Men ...

I stop dead in my tracks.

Halloween.

How could I have forgotten?

It’s the one night when the dead can walk freely in the world, and supposedly sometimes even make physical contact. I don’t know the details—-it’s nothing that ever interested me before—but I know where I can find out.

So instead of heading back to the school, I go the other way, through a few blocks of old run-down tenements until I get to the crumbling stone walls of All Souls Cemetery. If I was alive, I’d have to use the old rusted gates of the entrance, or climb up the thick vines that almost cover the walls, but being a ghost, I can just walk through those old stone walls. And I do.

It’s a funny place—a scary place, if you want to know the truth, even in the daylight. Or at least it is to me. I’d never have gone there when I was alive and I don’t like going even now, when I’m dead and I know nothing can hurt me. It’s not like a normal graveyard—more like something out of a Southern Gothic novel, full of dead and dying trees, old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts, with paths of uneven cobblestones winding narrowly between them. There are regular gravestones, too, but mostly the place is one of those architectural follies, out of place in this time and age.

It’s probably been fifty years since anybody was buried here, and the only reason it still exists the way it does is that the Crowsea Heritage Society has stymied any potential developers with a wall of paperwork up at City Hall.

I’m here because this is where Bobby Novak was buried—the first ghost I met after I died. Bobby’s what they used to call a juvenile delinquent. These days a twelve-year-old gangbanger would make Bobby look like a pacifist, but that doesn’t stop him from channeling this James Dean attitude with his greased-back hair, white T-shirt and jeans, the pointy-toed black boots, and the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips.

When we first met, I asked him why he still smoked, because he couldn’t get anything out of it. He just laughed.

“I died with this pack of smokes,” he said, pulling them out to show me. “I had seven left the day I wrapped my Mustang around that tree, and there’s still seven here; doesn’t matter how many I smoke.”

“But what’s the point?”

“Well, I’m not going to get lung cancer.”

“But you can’t taste them.”

“Sure, I can,” he said. “They were with me when I died, so they’re part of what I am now. And besides, they give me something to do.”

And I guess it’s true. Whenever I see him, he’ll be leaning against some building, or sitting at a bus stop, smoking his cigarettes and watching people, this small, knowing smile lifting one corner of his mouth. Everything’s got a funny side in his view of the world.

I guess he was considered a hard case, and maybe he would be still, but it doesn’t matter. Alive, he’s not the kind of guy who’d ever have been my friend, and that isn’t changed by the fact that we’re both dead. But he tolerates me when we happen to run into each other.

There aren’t a lot of us hanging on to whatever echoes of life we can, because most people who die don’t stick around.

He doesn’t have a crypt or a building, just a stone in a far corner of the graveyard where this old rose bush has gone wild and turned into a thorny thicket that gives up a few flowers every so often—reluctantly, I always think. His stone has his name—Robert Novak—and his dates of birth and death. Lower on the stone, someone’s scratched “My Angel” inside a heart.

“Ellen Sue did that,” he told me. “She was my steady, and I suppose my dying broke her heart.”

Bobby’s sitting on the steps of a nearby mausoleum when I reach his gravestone.

“Hey, four eyes,” he says.

Yeah, we definitely would never have been friends.

“I was wondering if you could help me with something,” I ask.

He shrugs. “You never know, so try me.”

So I ask him if it’s true that we can actually interact physically with the world of the living on Halloween, and if it is, how do you do it.

“You’re just checking into this
now
?” he says. “Christ, kid. It’s the only day of the year we can go out to get drunk and laid.” Then he laughs. “But I guess those aren’t exactly going concerns for you, are they?”

“Funny.”

“I thought so.”

He lights a cigarette from the one he was smoking and flicks the butt into the dry grass, but it disappears before it touches the ground.

“So it is true,” I say.

“Oh, yeah. Just make sure you’re at the exact place you died when the moon comes over the horizon tomorrow. That’ll be at two fifteen in the afternoon this year.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugs. “How do you not?”

“What if there’s no moon?”

I’m thinking of nights when the sky’s dark except for stars. He laughs again. “There’s always a moon, kid. You just can’t see it some of the time.”

“So when it sets, we go back to being ghosts?” I ask. “Nope. We’re good until the dawn. Moonrise to sunrise.”

“Which this year ...?”

“Is seven fifteen, sharp. Nice tidy numbers. Though I’d show up early anyway, just to be on the safe side. Something like this you don’t want to miss because your watch is running late. Do that and you’re screwed. You’ll have to wait for another whole year.”

“Right.”

“So what are you planning on?” he asks.

“Maybe I’m going to get laid.”

He breaks out laughing. “Yeah, right.”

I want to tell him off, but even though I know he can’t hurt me, I’m still too chicken. Instead I just thank him for his help and try to leave before he thinks up some new witty put-down. But with Bobby, that’s never going to happen.

“Don’t forget a rubber!” he calls after me.

I pretend I didn’t hear.

I wait until lunch hour before I go to the thrift store to look for doll and children’s clothes like Imogene asked me to. I don’t have much luck with doll clothes—mostly what they have is much too frilly and girly, more suitable for Mom’s doll collection that she pretends she bought for me—but there are lots of choices in the baby and toddler clothes section. I’m not sure how many fairies we’re outfitting, so I get enough for ten of them: T-shirts, regular shirts, vests, jeans, and two of the cutest little pairs of overalls.

Back at the school, I stuff my buys into my locker and look at my watch. I have just enough time to check my e-mail. The good thing about never being tardy, never really missing any school—when I get sick it’s almost always on a holiday or the weekend, which is totally unfair—is that I didn’t get in trouble for coming in late this morning. And I’d probably be okay if I was late getting to my first afternoon class, too, but why push it?

There’s a machine free when I go into the computer lab, so I quickly log on.

Yes, there’s a message from Esmeralda:

Date: Thurs, 30 Oct 2003 12:23:16 -0800 From:
[email protected]
Subject: Re: The dark side of Faerie To:
[email protected]

Hello Maxine,

I’ve had some luck tracking down more information on the anamithim for you. It appears that they aren’t fairies—or at least not exactly fairies. Apparently they can appear in many forms and have been here since the dawn of time—though I think I already mentioned that this morning, when I explained the enmity between them and the first people and their descendants.

The most recent information I uncovered is that they’re also known as the Adversary—and not simply the way Christians refer to Lucifer. They were the snake in Eden, the Titans banished by Zeus and the other young gods, the unseen terrors that waited just beyond primitive man’s campfires ... .Well, you get the idea.

The only useful thing I’ve found so far is that the shine or light that attracts them to people such as your friend Imogene can also be used to repel them, although how that’s accomplished I’ve yet to discover.

I shall continue my research and hopefully, if we can chat tonight, I’ll have more concrete information to share with you.

Yours,

Esmeralda

I hear a bell and realize I’m going to be late for my next class, so I respond with a quick “Thanks, I’ll talk to you tonight,” and sign off, gather my books, and hurry down the hall.

Jerry Fielder appears out of nowhere near my math class—flying solo, without his ever-present hero Brent at his side. He tries to trip me, but I do a deft sidestep that surprises both of us and make it to my class in time and in one piece.

I don’t catch my breath until we’re five minutes in— boring math, though only boring because I’m about ten chapters ahead of the rest of the class. I haven’t run into any of the problems that some of the other students obviously have, because most of our time is taken up with Ms. Rice explaining stuff that I figured out a couple of weeks ago.

So I tune them out and sit there with my textbook open on my desk. I think about Imogene with her blue skin and the weird creatures that live in her closet. I think about the
anamithim
and how the shine might be used to repel them. I also think about Jerry Fielder and wish I was big enough and strong enough, not to mention brave enough, to give him a taste of his own medicine.

Pelly and I spend the afternoon working on the stories he owes the shopkeeper for the vervain pollen. I thought making them up wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as having them told to me, but I was surprised. And really, 90 percent of what we did was Pelly telling me the stories, anyway. I’d read him bits out of the newspaper, or show him pictures from magazines, and he’d figure out the narrative, or expand on what was already there. Whenever he got stuck, I’d offer up a suggestion, and off he’d go again.

We’re still at it when Mom comes home.

I’m so used to having Pelly around again that I think Mom’s wide eyes are because she forgot about my blue skin. But then I get it.

“Oh, my,” she says, and feels her way along the back of a chair until she can lower herself into it. “I think I need to catch my breath.”

I turn to look at Pelly, trying to see him for the first time the way she is, and yeah, I can see her point. He’s not even
remotely
normal, remember? Weird, skinny cross between a hedgehog and a boy, the floppy rabbit ears, the monkey’s prehensile tail. Kind of furry and spiny at the same time, dressed in a baggy pair of brown pants and a sleeveless shirt of brightly colored cotton. Fingers are too long and have that extra joint. And then there are those eyes of his. I’ve gotten used to them by now, but they’re so dark and they really look like they know too damn much, with a lot of what they know not being good.

“So this is ...?”

“Pelly,” I say. “Pell-mell, actually, but I’ve always called him Pelly.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Pelly says.

Mom gives him a weak smile. “I thought he’d  ...” She looks embarrassed, then changes that to, “I mean, I thought you’d be  ... jollier somehow.”

“Because he was some kid’s imaginary friend?” I ask. She nods.

“It’s the eyes,” I explain. “They’ve gotten too knowing.” Pelly gives me a puzzled look and gets up to look at himself in the hall mirror.

“I see,” he says, his voice soft. He returns to sit beside me on the couch. “It’s a look we get when we’ve  ...”

He seems reluctant to go on.

“When you’ve what?” I ask.

“Been abandoned.”

“Oh.”

That makes me feel small, and an uncomfortable silence falls over us until, after a few moments, Mom clears her throat.