Just Kill Me (22 page)

Nothing happens, though, and thinking that the site of the Wind Blew Inn is just a place selling sporting goods and stuff now starts to get depressing. There are no ghosts here. No quiet echo of the “syncopated ‘blues' music” that neighbors used to complain about. No soft sound of laughter and secret make-out parties. No faint smell of spiked tea and chocolate eclairs.

Just a lot of people buying moisture-wicking underwear.

With no traces of Lillian at her old stomping grounds, I go to the McDonald's, order a coffee, and just sit there, watching the city go by.  Terrence the caricature guy gives me a nod through the window.

After a minute I hear a voice beside me.

“Rolling with the rotters?”

Aaron Saltis, the other DarkSide tour guide, takes a seat next to me.

“Cruising with the corpses,” I say.

He smells like gin. Or vodka, maybe. I don't really know. Embalming fluid, for sure.

“How's business?” he asks.

“We're getting by.”

“October is coming.”

“Yeah.”

“Sixty-five percent of the business is in October, you know. Bunch of October-only tour companies are gonna sprout up.
The Segway Tours start running ghost tours. Trolley company, too. Even the fucking food tours. Death Alley's gonna be a battle zone every night. Four, five big groups crowding in at once.”

“Well, we'll just have to have a rumble,” I say. “We're the Sharks, you're the Jets. You have to be the racist ones.”

He laughs a gross, throaty, “just crawled out of the grave” laugh.

“I assumed you must be funny if you got a gig with Rick,” he says. “You know Rick tried to get me to go into business with him when he left DarkSide?”

I shrug. “I don't know all the history between you two.”

“He did. I didn't think ‘Mysterious Chicago' would last, though. Edward's safer. And I don't trust that Cynthia girl.”

I take some offense at this.

“At least she isn't going around telling people their flash bouncing off a window in a photo is a ghost.”

Aaron chuckles and grunts in a single sound, then looks off into the distance. “People just come on these things for thrills and chills,” he says. “Most of them assume the stories are all fake anyway.”

“They don't have to be,” I say. “The real stories are good enough. We don't need to make up shit about devil babies and Indian burial grounds.”

“Or people hanging themselves from the ceiling,” he adds. “Ninety percent of the ghost stories that start with a suicide,
it's someone hanging themselves from the ceiling. You ever notice that? Heh.”

I wonder for a second if maybe getting hanged from the ceiling is similar to getting punched in the brain, physically, which would explain why there are so many ghost stories like that. Like, if you die while doing auto-erotic asphyxiation, it leaves something behind. It seems logical, in a pseudoscience sort of way. But it's probably just a folklore thing—hanging oneself from the ceiling sounds good in a ghost story. That's all.

I decide to take advantage of the fact that Aaron is admitting the stories are mostly BS.

“Yeah,” I say. “And how many Indian burial grounds can there be?”

He chortles again. “And how many kids got killed in a bus on railroad tracks so their ghosts can push cars over them? Half the small towns in the world have that story.”

“Pregnant nuns getting walled up inside a former nunnery.”

“Ever hear of a former insane asylum that
wasn't
supposed to be haunted?”

He pulls a flask from his pocket and offers me a sip. I turn him down. If it was after the tour I might take it, but I don't want to be lightheaded at work.

“I don't really traffic much in those kinds of stories,” I say. “I'm afraid I'm gonna get fact-checked.”

“Look,” he says as he unscrews his flask. “I know our stories
are shit. But Edward's got a fan base. And when they come on a DarkSide tour, they want the Edward stories.”

“Fair enough.”

“And keep this on the down low, but I'm in talks with Ghostly Journeys, the company down in New Orleans, to bring them up here.”

This is interesting news.

“I heard someone was.”

“Sooner or later someone's gonna do like Vince McMahon did to pro wrestling in the '80s. Gather up all the best talent from the rinky-dink local markets and build an empire. You want a job? You could get more tours with me, and they're talking to that TV fucker, too. If we get you, we get the show. I'm sure that'd clinch it.”

“I'm pretty loyal to Rick and Cyn.”

“Yeah, but how many tours do you get to run?”

“Couple a week, usually. Sometimes three.”

“What if I got you three or four more, and paid you double? Because one day Rick's gonna get a part in some B-list sitcom pilot and leave you out to dry.”

I'm about to tell Aaron off when I hear a voice behind me that makes me forget all about him.

“Hey.”

I turn to see a vision in black, with red hair and a giant, unbelievable smile.

Morticia.

Our vanishing hitchhiker.

I try to smile back half as alluringly as she smiles, and forget all about Aaron Saltis and Ghostly Journeys.

“Hi, you,” I say. “We were starting to think you were a ghost the whole time.”

She laughs. “Well, who says I'm not?”

“No one,” I say. “In fact, I sort of like to imagine that you are.”

Aaron breaks in and says, “I can't see through you,” but she doesn't take any notice of him. She keeps looking at me as she wiggles her fingers in front of her face and says, “Boo.”

Then she smiles.

Oh God. She's flirting with me.

Outrageously, even.

“I'm Megan,” I say.

“I know.” She laughs. “It's my last night in town, and I wanted to tell you how much fun I had on the tour. Thought you might be here.”

“You want to come again tonight?” I ask. “On the house?”

She smiles, then nods. “Sure.”

I excuse myself from Aaron, and Morticia and I walk out to the Ronald McDonald statue and chat a little bit.

I'd thought she was in town for the comic convention before, but she says she's been in town for the summer, working some sort of marketing internship. She says her name is Enid. No one's name is Enid. But I don't care if she's lying,
really. It's better if she is, in a way. Obviously I'm not trying to cheat on Zoey with her if I don't even try to get her real name, right?

Right?

I tell her all about Lillian Collier, and all the research I'm doing, and the word “snuggle-pupping,” which she thinks is the best word she's ever heard, too.

“How would you like to be known as one who snuggle-pups?” I ask.

She laughs. “I'd like it fine.”

Then she demurely sips from a water bottle and looks out at the city.

“There aren't many people like me back home,” she says. “If you know what I mean. I was sort of hoping I'd meet someone here. Have a little fling. Get some snuggle-pupping in.”

“Yeah?”

“Hasn't happened yet, though.”

And she bats her eyelashes.

At me.

Me.

I don't give my very best tour that night. I'm usually not as good when Cyn drives as I am when Rick does, and anyway, I can't focus because I'm too busy checking to see if Morticia (I still call her that in my head, not Enid) is looking at me. She usually is. I'm the tour guide, after all.

Every time she catches me looking, she smiles. Her teeth are perfect. I wish any part of me was as perfect as her teeth. I pretend not to notice when she brushes her shoulder against mine in the Alley of Death and Mutilation.

At Hull House, as customers roam through the courtyard and peer into the front windows, I walk around to the back of the house. Morticia comes around behind me. We're alone.

I know I shouldn't be doing this blatant flirting.

Not with Zoey and all.

But I'm like a moth and Morticia's like a flame.

“You know,” she says, “you're really good at this job.”

“Thanks.”

“Lillian Collier would be proud of you, cuddle cootie.”

I smile, and she moves an inch closer. I can feel her breath on my face. She is totally coming on to me.

“So this is your last night in town?” I ask.

She nods. “Going home tomorrow.”

Her toes bump into mine.

I feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and for the first time ever, I really, really feel like there's something supernatural about Hull House.

But it probably isn't ghosts making me freak out.

“Are you going to disappear outside of the Water Tower again?” I ask.

“Do you want me to?”

“I sort of like the illusion,” I say. “There was a cemetery
there once, so it's like you're our own beautiful vanishing hitchhiker.”

“I can disappear again and make it part of the show,” she says.

“When you go back home, you'll leave a ghost story behind in Chicago.”

I feel her breath on my nose, and she wiggles her fingers in front of her face and says, “Are you scared of me?” with a teasing smile.

Every sign I can pick up tells me she wouldn't stop me from kissing her.

And I want to.

I have really been wanting to find a way to kiss someone (without technically cheating on Zoey, of course). I'm really starting to feel like I'm missing out on something as a human being by never getting a real kiss. Cyn is making too many good points. If I can get it out of the way and see that it's no big deal, not a necessary part of life, I can get her off my back. A harmless kiss with a girl who, for all practical purposes, functions as a ghost wouldn't count as cheating, right? It would just be a way to cross something off my bucket list.

Then I hit on another idea.

“So, Jane Addams and her partner shared a bed for years,” I say. “But Victorians had these, like, romantic friendships. They might have been partners and girlfriends and all of that without ever getting physical. Poor unfortunate souls.”

She giggles a tiny bit, then says, “Let's pretend we're them and make up for lost time,” and then I feel her lips on mine.

She's kissing me.

Oh, sweet holy Christmas hell. She is kissing me. I am being kissed.

And I am kissing her back.

Kissing! I am
kissing
!

It isn't
us
kissing. As far as I'm concerned, we're acting as proxies for Jane and Mary. It's like a whole century of their romantic tension is being released in one beautiful kiss. But it feels incredible for me, too. It's perfect and I feel like I'm going to leave an imprint behind on Hull House with my brain waves.

We're still kissing a few seconds later when I hear the sound of Cyn starting the bus back up. Morticia gives me one more smile, then heads back for the bus. A DarkSide bus has pulled up, which is our cue to get going.

I feel like I could float to the body dump as the sun sets, hitting the skyline just right, so the city looks like a matte painting in an old movie, glowing and golden and beautiful against a red cloud sky.

I rely on muscle memory to get through the rest of the tour, because my brain is too busy thinking,
I've been kissed. I've been kissed. I did it. I won't die unkissed!
It makes it a bit hard to think about what I'm doing.

Like we planned, Morticia asks to be let out near the Water
Tower, and when Cyn opens the door for her, she steps off into the crowd.

This time I run off and try to follow, half-expecting her to leave a shoe behind and sort of hoping she won't, because I know I'd follow her, and then, well, things could get complicated. But I can't just let her go without a good-bye.

“Wait!”

“Didn't you want me to just disappear?” she asks.

“I don't think ‘want' is the right word,” I say. “Is there a word for when you want something, but you also don't?”