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.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com
and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work
of this author.

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.”