The The Name of the Star (23 page)

“That's what we concluded from your description,” Stephen said, sounding somewhat impressed. “So we stopped pursuing that angle.”

“So how do you figure out who he is?”

That made Callum laugh and turn away, clasping his hands behind his head.

“Well,” Stephen said, “we're using his choices of location, combined with your E-fit image . . .”

“But how do you find some random dead guy from whenever?”

Even Boo turned away now. “We have ways,” Stephen said. The bright look in his eye had gone out, and he stared at the people sitting on the lions. I had asked something they didn't want to be asked. I got the sense that the more I pressed this, the more unhappy and possibly unhinged I would become. I had to embrace the daylight, the sanity I had at this moment.

“Fine,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

“We just wanted to give you some experience with your new ability,” Stephen said. “But we have to get back to work. Boo will take you back.”

“Wait,” I said as Stephen and Callum turned to go, “one more question. If there are ghosts, does that mean there are . . . vampires? And werewolves?”

Whatever misery I had caused by my previous question, it was wiped out with this one. They all laughed. Even Stephen, who I didn't know could laugh.

“Don't be stupid,” Callum said.

24

G
HOSTS, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET:

Souls, spooks, shades, poltergeists, revenants. Generally regarded to be people returned from the dead, though there are also ghost animals, and ghost ships, and even ghost trains and planes and articles of furniture and plants. Often known to linger around places they lived in or died in, looking sad. Both can and cannot be photographed, though when photographed, may appear as a blob or orb of light. Science rejects and confirms their existence. Can be contacted through mediums, who are all fakes.

In other words, the Internet was useless at teaching me anything, except that a lot of people had strong feelings about ghosts, and every culture in the world had something to say about them, through all of history. Also, a lot of people online who claimed to be ghost experts were clearly much crazier than anyone from my town, which was saying something.

 

 

 

 

What was reassuring, I guess, was the sheer
number
of people who believed in ghosts and who claimed to have seen them. I certainly would never be lonely. And they couldn't
all
be crazy.

There were about a half-dozen television shows devoted to the subject of ghost-hunting. I watched a few of these. What I saw were crews of people sneaking around houses with night vision cameras, jumping at every noise and saying, “Did you hear that?” Replaying said noise over and over—and the noise was always a little bump or a door closing. Or they'd have some piece of machinery that they'd hold over a spot in the room and they'd say, “Yup, a ghost was here.”

Not very impressive. Not one of them was seeing an actual, talking person. The shows, I concluded, were all bull, designed to entertain people who really liked to see things about ghosts, no matter how lame they were.

This little research project of mine, however fruitless, was good at keeping my mind level. I was doing something, and doing something was better than doing nothing. And here's an amazing fact about the human mind: it can cope with a lot. When something new enters your reality that you don't think you can deal with, your mind deals. It does everything it can to accommodate the new information. When the information is so big and so difficult to process, sometimes your brain skips stress and confusion and goes right to a happy island, a little sweet spot.

My new ability didn't interfere with my life. I got used to seeing Alistair—and after all, aside from his haircut, there was nothing odd about him. He was just a grumpy dude in the library. Though he was slightly less grumpy now that he had a bunch of albums and something to play them on. He secreted the iPod Boo had given him with his albums somewhere in the library and he made it clear that he was willing to trade homework for more music. We had found a currency that he accepted.

And I saw Boo every day—someone with the same ability that I had—and she wasn't even remotely bothered by it.

I didn't forget, exactly, but this new knowledge slipped to the back of my mind . . . and I adapted. I was able to move on to more pressing matters, like the upcoming fancy dress party. After several nights of discussion in our room, we had decided to go to the party as the Zombie Spice Girls. Boo was a natural for Sporty, since she could have thrown either one of us over a wall without breaking a nail. Jazza was going to be Ginger, because she had a red wig and a strong desire to make a dress out of a Union Jack flag. (Although it had been explained to me several times, since Jaz's uncle was in the navy, that it was called a Union Jack only when it was flown at sea. Otherwise it was just a Union flag. I was learning all kinds of things in London, mostly about ghosts and flags and disbanded girl groups, but still. Learning is good.) I, apparently, was a natural for Scary. I asked them if this was because my hair was dark, and they both just laughed, so I had no idea what that was about. Mostly, our costumes involved putting on some zombie makeup, tight clothes, and high platform shoes that Boo bought in a secondhand store. We had a plastic bone to represent Posh, and if anyone asked about Baby, we were just going to say we ate her.

Boo was down the hall getting some fake tattoos drawn on by Gaenor. Jazza was squeezing herself into her Union Jack dress, which she had made out of a decorative pillowcase. I was trying to tease out my hair as big as it could go.

“You never showed me your essay,” she said, out of the blue. “The one on Pepys. You said you wanted me to read it over.”

“Oh . . .” I rubbed the gray makeup hard into my face. “It wasn't as bad as I thought.”

“What did you end up writing?”

I had no idea what I'd ended up writing. I'd typed it, but I'd barely read it. It had something to do with the concept of a diary kept for both public and private reading and how that affected the tone of the narrative. So I lied.

“I compared it to modern accounts of major events,” I said. “Like Hurricane Katrina. He was writing about the Great Fire of London, which was where he lived. I wrote about how you talk about things that affect you personally.”

That was actually a genius idea. I only ever have genius ideas after the fact. I should have just written the damn paper.

“You and Boo have been getting along a lot better this week,” she said, doing a chest check. Her dress was really tight. This was a whole new Jazza coming out—almost literally. Normally, I would have started joking about this, but I smelled trouble. Those words meant, “You haven't told me anything about Boo this week, and now I am convinced you like her better than me.”

“I've accepted her,” I said as breezily as I could. “She's our pet.”

Jazza gave me a slight sideways look as she pulled the dress up a little higher over her girlish assets. It was wrong to refer to Boo as a pet. That was normally the kind of thing Jazza would censure, but she said nothing.

“It could be worse,” I said.

“Of course,” Jazza said, going over to her bureau. “I'm not saying, you know, that I . . . but . . . I've . . .”

Boo returned, dressed in a shiny tracksuit with a lopsided ponytail. I was pretty sure those were just some of her actual clothes, and not something she had gotten as a costume.

“Watch this, yeah?” she said, immediately going into a handstand and walking a few steps. Then she tumbled over and crashed into Jazza's desk, almost knocking over her photos. “Haven't done that since I was fourteen.”

Jazza looked at me through the mirror as she attached her false eyelashes.

There was a look on her face that suggested a rapidly dwindling patience level.

 

We had decided to stick together for at least a half hour, so that everyone could comprehend our group costume. We would share custody of Posh the Bone. The prefects had done a really good job transforming the refectory into a Halloween-ish party venue. Eating in here every day, I had forgotten that it was an old church. These decorations really brought that out—the candles in the stained-glass windows, the fake cobwebs strung everywhere, the low lighting. Charlotte, dressed in a very shortskirted policewoman's outfit, was leading the dancing brigade, jumping around at the front of the room, her long red hair flapping up and down like a matador's cape. She was head girl, and she would show us how to party if she had to.

I wasn't really sure why Charlotte had decided to come to the party as a stripper. I found myself at a loss for words as she complimented us on our costumes.

“You're a . . .” I tried to find the right thing to say. “Really . . . hot cop?”

“I'm
Amy Pond
,” she said. “From
Doctor Who.
This is her kissogram outfit.”

It was a good moment to catch sight of Jerome. He was wearing normal clothes with loads of scribbled-on pieces of paper stuck all over them, and his hair sticking up, a coffee mug in his hand.

“Tell me what you want, what you really, really want,” he said.

We had been planning for someone to ask us that.

“Braiiinnnnssss,” we said in unison.

“It's both sad and incredibly impressive that you were all ready with that one.”

“What are you?” I asked.

“I'm the Ghost of the Night Before Exams.”

“And how long did it take you to come up with that?” Jazza asked.

“I'm a busy man,” he replied.

We formed a group on the side of the dance floor—me, Jazza, Jerome, and occasionally Andrew, Paul and Gaenor. Boo, we quickly discovered, was very serious about her dancing. She was right up front, by the DJ stand, doing complicated moves and the occasional surprise handstand.

The room was hot—we were all sopping wet in no time. The stained-glass windows had a veneer of steam. And unlike American dances, they didn't screw things up with that awkward slow dance every five or six songs. This was all dance, with lots of remixes, like an actual club. My Scary Spice outfit, which consisted of a sports bra and oversized pants, was actually a blessing. I would have sweat through a shirt.

Jerome and I didn't dance together, exactly, but we did remain side by side. Every once in a while, he would (seemingly accidentally) touch my waist or my arm. Anything more than that would have been too much of a statement, but I felt I got the message. He also had prefect jobs to do, so he would regularly disappear to refill bowls of food or tend the bar. That was another strange thing—the bar. An actual bar, with actual beer. We had tickets that allowed us two pints each. I have absolutely no idea how this was managed. Jerome had tried to explain it to me—how even though the law was that you had to be eighteen to drink in a pub, the circumstances varied, and at a closed event with teachers somehow this was legal. I got one of my beers, but I was jumping around and sweating too much to drink it. I would have vomited instantly. But two beers seemed to be nothing to the average English student. Everyone else gulped them down, and I was pretty sure that the two-ticket rule was not being very strictly enforced.

As the night wore on, there was a not-unpleasant funk in the air, the scent of beer and dancing. I started to forget any time I wasn't at this place, with the lights strobing against the stained glass and the stone walls, the teachers in the shadows, checking their phones out of sheer boredom.

In fact, at first I thought he was a teacher. He came up behind Jazza. The suit, the bald head.

“What's the matter?” Jaz yelled happily.

Of course, she couldn't see him, even though he was right at her back, standing right up against her. He stroked her shoulder lightly with the tips of his fingers. I saw her twitch a bit and flick at her wig. He stepped around and placed himself between Jazza and me.

“Come outside,” he said. “Do it now.”

I began to back away, very slowly.

“Where are you going?” she yelled.

“Bathroom,” I said quickly.

“Are you ill? You look—”

“No,” I yelled back, shaking my head.

Leaving that room was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I felt the heat of everyone at my back. Outside, it was cold—bright cold, a lifting cold. Every single streetlight was on. Every light in every window. Everything to battle against the dark of the sky, the dark that went up and up and up forever. This thin little halo so low to the ground. The wind was kicking up a fury, spinning leaves and trash around us, and I remember thinking,
This is it. I am walking into forever.
It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

Our footsteps were so loud on the pavement. Well, mine were. I don't think he had any. And his voice didn't echo between the buildings. He walked me up to the road, and we walked along beside all the closed shops.

“Just fancied a chat,” he said. “There aren't many people I can talk to. I'm not sure if you remember where we first met. It was at the Flowers and Archers. The night of the second murder.”

I had no memory of this at all.

“It's quite an unusual ability, what you have,” he said. “Part genetics, part dumb luck, something you can never talk about to any rational person. I remember the feeling.”

“You were—”

“Oh, yes. I was like you. It's hard, I know. Upsetting. The dead aren't supposed to be among the living. It offends the natural order of things. All I ever wanted to do in life was make sense of it. And now, here I am . . . part of the puzzle.”