Giving Up the Ghost (27 page)

“It really isn’t that bad,” she said. “I keep the tissues stocked and make change. Then I just read the rest of the night.”

I asked if the patrons ever tried to hit on her.

She laughed and waved. “Yeah, I really don’t think I’m what they’re looking for, if you know what I mean.”

When Vikki wasn’t laughing at everything Jamie said, she spent most of her time talking with a rather stern androgynous woman named Val who she sat with during the movie showings. Val seemed to take her
Rocky Horror
very seriously, acting out routines, doing dances, and singing with almost military precision. She would almost crack a smile every time Vikki burst out in laughter but otherwise sat there looking rather drill-sergeant-ish.

Throughout the diner, people would periodically switch places around the big table to converse with different others. Since we were new, many people came to sit with us and learn who we were. Even though we’d only just met these people, they immediately welcomed us as family. They were a collection of eccentrics, outcasts, homosexuals, degenerates, dramaclub officers, attention whores, and oddballs. All were square pegs wrapped in some flamboyant combination of leather, fishnet, sequins, odd hats, and tons of makeup. Laura and I never dressed up for any of our
Rocky Horror
excursions but still fit in pretty well, mostly because our everyday attire wasn’t that far off of what they wore on Saturday nights. Compared with the normal clientele in a late-night diner, our group seemed as if it had been beamed down from some futuristic other planet (one with a considerable investment in hairspray and eyeliner). They had nasty mouths and were funny and alive. They all seemed to have a chip on their shoulder or some baggage from
years of trying to find a home in the real world. Here were the only people in Ohio who were weirder than I was.

So started a kind of ritual. Almost every Saturday night Laura and I would figure out who could get a car, then we’d drive up to Cuyahoga Falls and get to the theater for the midnight show. Afterward, we’d all head down the street to the all-night diner for breakfast.

We’d sit and drink coffee and order just enough bad food to keep from getting kicked out. The diner staff seemed to genuinely dislike us, always giving us reminders that we were the reason they hated their jobs. We talked about deep stuff and silly stuff. It was a venue to entertain one another and a forum to discuss things the rest of the world wouldn’t understand. None of us seemed particularly concerned about what went on in the others’ lives the rest of the week, but on early Sunday mornings, we would become best friends, chatting until near dawn. At some point the whole culture around the movie became almost trivial. Eventually I’d find myself kinda bored and antsy during the movie. The real attraction was hanging out at the diner afterward.

I’d been up late listening to music and reading when I heard a
click
come from the hallway. I looked up to see the attic door slowly open halfway and stop. After a few seconds, my stomach started to heave.

This is it, I thought to myself. At any moment, She is going to walk out beyond that doorway and corner me in this room. You’d think by now, years after this started and after my hospital stay, that I could feel fairly certain that She wasn’t coming. That, of course, is how rational people would think. But every time I’d get it in my head that She was coming—perhaps I’d
just woken from a dream or heard a strange noise—it seemed imminent and unstoppable.

I tried calling out. “I’m going to close my eyes,” I said. “And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again.”

Nothing.

It happened again the next day while I was getting ready to go to work. Just a subtle
click
from the door latch. The door opened about a foot, then stopped. This time I rushed toward the door and swung it wide.

There was nothing there.

“If you have something to say, say it!” I yelled up the stairs. “If there is something you need to do to me, then do it. Quit fucking around!”

It happened a third time, in the middle of the night. I was lying in bed half awake when I heard the
click
again, then a quiet creak of the door. I sat up in my bed and looked around the corner through the doorway. The door was open about a foot. I quickly got up, closed it, then ran back to my bed and spent the next hour staring at the door to my room, waiting for Her to walk through.

Since I’d left Timken Mercy, I hadn’t told Laura or anyone else about seeing Little Girl again in my dreams. I think Laura, along with everyone who knew about Her, assumed that I had hallucinated Her or made Her up. To them, Little Girl was something left in the past. Admitting I was seeing Her was admitting that I had not left the hospital magically transformed. It was admitting that my troubles were far from over.

One night Laura and I headed out to the gas well. I was bitching about my parents and T.J. Maxx and rules and prescription drugs and anything else that I felt was oppressing me.

“Why are you so concerned with bending yourself in knots to please all these people?” she blurted out in the middle of one of my tirades.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just want to do the right thing. Right? Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?”

“Fuck the right thing,” she said. “You need to spend less time worrying about what’s right and start thinking more about what’s true.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“It means be true to yourself and you can’t go wrong,” she said. “If you worry about doing the right thing all the time, you’ll just try to make everyone happy, and that’s impossible. Just find out what is true and real; then you’ll know what to do.”

“Oh, come on. From you, that is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how can you be so pious about truth when you never give anybody the truth? I mean, what do you do when we aren’t hanging out? What is your life like? Who are your friends? What is the fucking deal with you and college for this fall? We’ve spent half our free nights together for the past year and a half, and I couldn’t answer one of those questions. Why? Because you keep everything hidden.”

Pause
.

“You aren’t truthful,” I continued. “All you are is evasive and vague.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said.

“Try me,” I said.

“Actually, I wanted to let you know … I’m leaving in a few weeks.”

“Where?”

“Baruch College … City University of New York.”

“New York?
You
are going to New York City?”

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t tell if I was shocked or angry or both. Deciding to go to college in New York City was not something you did on a few days’ notice. It was apparent to me that she had been planning this for months yet had chosen to keep it a secret. Whether she’d kept quiet because she was unsure what she wanted to do or because she was afraid to tell me didn’t matter. It was lame. I wanted her to know that.

“Really? Who do you know in New York City?”

“I don’t know anyone in New York City.”

I decided to fill her in on New York City (a place that I had not been to either). I talked about crime and grit and danger and the loneliness of being in a city with millions of strangers. She never said a word. She didn’t argue back. She just sat there and took it from me.

“I’m sorry you are so disappointed” was the only thing she said.

Laura gathered her things and started back toward the car, silently informing me that it was time to take her home.

We spent most of the drive not saying anything. As we turned off Route 62 toward her house, I said softly, “I guess I’m hurt that you’re leaving. But I’m more upset that you didn’t tell me.”

“Um, less than a month ago you were hanging out with a guy who thought he was Jesus,” she said. “I figured this could wait.”

I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t brought it up the month before that—or the month before that—but let it go. I was tired. I needed to get back to my parents’ house. I didn’t want to make it into a fight or act like an asshole. Saving the conversation
for another night meant another day or two of pretending like I’d heard her wrong. Another day or two of pretending it wasn’t real.

A few days later Laura showed up at my front door unannounced in the middle of the afternoon. No mention of where she had been, why she was stopping by, or how she’d gotten there. No car, no friend dropping her off. No reason to be anywhere near my house.

“What are you up to?” she asked when I answered the door.

“Just stuff,” I answered.

“Can stuff wait for a bit while we go do something?”

Since neither of us had a car, we just walked to the park up the street from my house and sat on the swings.

The day after Laura’s announcement, I had had a talk with my parents. Moving to Kent was no longer an aspiration; it had to be a reality. I didn’t care what I had to do to make it happen. Cut my hair, go to church, wash the cars every day, wear a tie, sing hymns around the house—done. I would do it. If she was leaving, I figured, then I was, too. It’s harder to be left behind when you’re running away as well.

Sitting on the swing, I told her about my Kent plans, still slipping in occasional but regular passive-aggressive snipes at New York and the idea of her moving there for school. Taking the subway was dangerous. You couldn’t trust anyone. In New York there were cockroaches the size of your foot. She really never had much to say in response. She just didn’t let it bother her; she let me get it off my chest.

“I have a gift for you,” she said with a coy smile.

“A gift?”

“Yeah, something from me to you,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out one of her notebooks. Inside the front
cover was a torn piece of paper, which she picked up, looked at for a moment, then handed to me.

It was a piece of blue-lined graph paper, probably three inches square. On it she’d written in thin pencil:

I looked at it for a moment.

I asked her where it came from. She just stared with a slight smile emerging at the corners of her mouth.

“You don’t know?” I asked.

She puckered her lips slightly.

I continued with more questions: Did she write it? Who else wrote it? What was it called? What does it mean? Who was the Teacher? Who was taking whom to heaven? What did that part mean? I dissected the poem with questions, but Laura just stood there staring back at me, giving no indication that she planned to answer anything. She just let her smile grow slightly larger with each question.

“I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are you giving me some mysterious poem, yet not telling me what it is or who wrote it or what it means?”

“Just think about it for a while,” she said. “You’ll eventually figure it out.”

“But what’s it about?”

Laura seemed to struggle a bit, not wanting to give anything away.

“It could be about us, I guess,” she finally blurted out. “Well,” she quickly continued, as if to pedal back. “It’s from me to you. Let’s leave it at that.”

I read it over again.

“How is this about us?” I asked. “I mean, who is who in this, and who is doing what, with what, where?”

“Just think about it for a while,” she repeated.

“Is this some kind of joke or something?” I asked. “Are you serious about this?”

She paused.

“No, it isn’t a joke,” she said.

As we sat on the swing set talking for another hour or so, I was doing exactly as she suggested. In fact, I did little else but think about the Mystery Poem. As Laura talked about some book she had just finished, I was trying to decipher what she was trying to tell me, and why now.

After she went home, I pulled out the Mystery Poem and read it again.

Part of me wondered if the protagonist’s asking to “bring me to heaven” was her way of telling me that she cared about me—or wanted to. Part of me wondered if “or leave me alone” was her way of telling me that she was giving up, tired of waiting for me to become something I wasn’t. Part of me wondered if “why make me work so hard” was her way of telling me she believed in me, but waiting for me to get my shit together was hard. Part of me wondered if this was her way of telling me she was frustrated. Perhaps the reference to empty sleeping bags on a dead branch indicated what she felt the future held for her—or me—if either of us stayed here in Canton.
Maybe she was using the poem to say she loved me. Maybe she didn’t want to be friends anymore. Maybe she was trying to tell me all these things. As I pondered each, I ran through our entire history together, trying to find a way to make connections. The words of the Mystery Poem seemed like they could potentially express any or all or none of these.

I folded up the Mystery Poem and put it into my pocket.