Just Kill Me (23 page)

“ ‘Bittersweet'?”

“Something like that.”

She smiles again, then says, “Good-bye, snuggle-puppy,” gives me a very quick kiss, and slips into the crowd of Michigan Avenue tourists.

I didn't even get her last name. Or probably even her real first one.

She'll always be Morticia to me.

My name and info are up on the Mysterious Chicago website now. She can find me if she wants to. Maybe I'll see her again sometime.

I make my way back onto the bus and go through the motions of saying that we're on the grounds of an 1830s cemetery, so maybe she was a vanishing hitchhiker, but my knees are shaking, and no one thinks it was seriously a ghost sighting this time. They can tell I'm just kidding about it.

But I decide that I prefer to think of her as just a ghost. A real ghost. Who somehow had a couple of weeks to come back to life and have one more chance to kiss someone, because she never did when she was alive. Now she can go back to her grave, satisfied.

And I swept her off her feet.

She was owlblasted (first recorded in 1603). Elf-stricken (1699). Puckfoisted (1890).

By me.

I look up more words on the train home, trying to find a word for what I'm feeling, a word for feeling elated that something happened, even though it can never happen again. A word for being glad Morticia disappeared but also wishing she'd stayed. The only good historical synonym for “bittersweet” is “glycipricon,” first recorded in 1599. And the only time it was recorded after that was once in 1621, in
Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton. “He saith our whole life is a glycipricon, a bitter sweet passion.”

It was just a kiss with a girl I'll almost certainly never see again.

And the kiss wasn't even
us
, it was us standing in as proxies for Mary and Jane (or, anyway, that was the excuse I used).

But it's good to know that I'm not going to die without knowing how it feels to kiss someone properly. That I am capable of making people want to kiss me.

A couple across from me on the train make out like they're going for the gold.

The rumble of the train sounds like a round of applause.

T
he next morning I wake up to my phone buzzing again and again. Even more than it did the day the maniac shot up Crystal Lake. I roll over and check it to see a long list of messages.

ZOEY BABY:

There's a review about your tour last night. On a blog.

ZOEY BABY:

Wake up! LOL

ZOEY BABY:

ALARM CLOCK!

She's texting so fast that more messages come while I'm trying to write out a reply.

MEGAN:

You know I don't read reviews! It's like playing chicken with my self-esteem.

ZOEY BABY

Relax. This one's good. Really good. They loved it.

ZOEY BABY:

Why did they think your girlfriend was on the bus, though?

Shit.

I don't normally read reviews, but I follow the link Zoey sent, since I already know it's a good one.

And it is a good one. But right in the middle of it, there's a random line about “our tour guide's girlfriend” disappearing from the tour toward the end. They thought I was just joking about her being a ghost, and thought it was very cute.

I open the
OED
online and look up some quick words to send Zoey.

MEGAN

Puzzling.

MEGAN:

Knurry (1615).

MEGAN:

Snaggled (1896).

A minute goes by, and then she sends one of her own:

ZOEY BABY

Sussy.

I have to look that one up. It means “suspicious.”

I read through the whole review, trying to figure out what I should tell Zoey, exactly, and whether it might be better just to tell the truth and lay it on the line.

But ten minutes later she sends more texts.

ZOEY BABY:

FUCK YOU. I HATE YOU. DIE.

Then she sends me a link, and it brings me to a photo-sharing page with all of the blogger's pictures from the night before. Ones that weren't on the blog post.

There is a picture in the courtyard at Hull House, and in the background you can see me kissing Morticia, with a caption saying,
Our guide and her girlfriend sneak a kiss when they think no one is looking. Awwwww.

My vision goes blurry for a second, and I try to send Zoey a message saying we weren't kissing as ourselves, but as Mary
Rozet Smith and Jane Addams (even though I know it sounds like a stupid excuse).

There is no response.

She has signed out of every online account we use to chat. When I try to send her offline messages, I get notifications back saying the accounts have been deactivated.

The only new thing I see from her in the next hour is an anonymous comment on that blog post, saying I am a fucking two-timing lying bitch and I suck.

I read it over and over again.

My stomach ties itself in knots. The blood drains from my face. My head swims, and I nearly throw up a couple of times.

She's completely right about me.

What I did was completely unacceptable. And I hate myself for making Zoey feel the way she must feel right now.

After over an hour of trying to get in touch with her, I spend some time just looking up names for myself in the
OED
, words like “hayne,” “hinderling,” “whelp,” and “pilgarlic.”

cittern-head (1598)

pode (1528)

ketterel (1572)

scabship (as in “her royal scabship”) (1589)

There aren't enough words for what I am.

There is no blood in my heart, just some goopy black crud chugging along through my arteries.

I finally post a comment of my own on the blog post.

Please text me, Zoey. I can explain.

She never does.

And I stare at my phone all day, waiting.

The Blue Line is full of old women in raincoats.

And scab-scalped men with jowls down to about their collar bones.

Scruffy winos wearing winter coats in August.

Sinister looking jag-offs whose body spray infects the train car.

None of them are smiling. Today everyone on the train looks like they're heading out to rob a grave, or going back to their home in the sewer tunnels. And I feel like I belong with them. Like one of the raincoats should open like a cocoon so I can just fold myself in, hibernate all the way to the end of the line, and crawl out as one of them when the train gets to the airport, revealed at last as a a hideous slimy old hag.

This is real villainy. Being a villain is not singing and cackling in castles and holding your arms in the air as your minions fly above you. It's hurting people. Even people you care about.

When I get to the McDonald's, Cyn is waiting with the bus.

“You okay?” she asks. “You look like shit.”

I shake my head, then break down and start crying into her shoulder.

She gives me a hug without making me tell her what's wrong first, then leads me onto the bus and shuts the door, so I can spill my guts in peace. She nods along, and when I'm done she hugs me and tells me I'm not a bad person.

“Listen,” she says. “You didn't do anything you didn't have every right to do.”

“I didn't have any right to cheat on Zoey,” I say. “I never told her she had to send a picture of herself or I'd think of myself as a free agent.”

“No one would blame you if you had, though,” says Cyn. “You should have. I was afraid you were gonna go through life and never kiss anyone, all for someone who's actually a sixty-two-year-old man.”

I exhale and wipe my eyes. My eyeliner is a mess. Right before the tour.

“But she understood me,” I say. “I told her everything about me, and she didn't get freaked out. I may never find anyone like that again. If Morticia had read my stories, she never, ever would have kissed me.”

Cyn leans back in her chair a little. She looks like she's about to say something comforting, then she stops.

“Wait,” she says. “You say you told Zoey everything?”

“Yeah.”

“Even about . . . our charities?”

I shake my head. “I classified that next to nude pictures that showed my face. Even she didn't have that level of clearance.”

Cyn relaxes, gives me a big hug, says, “Ah, bless your twisted little heart,” and lets me cry a bit more.

“Can you still go on with the tour tonight?” she asks. “I mean, I could do the tour and drive at the same time if I have to.”

“I can manage,” I say. “I need to think about something else for a while.”

While we wait on the last party of two to arrive, a drunk college-age guy in a backward baseball cap hobbles up to me.

“Whuz this?” he slurs.

“Ghost tour,” I say. “We take people around to murder sites, disaster sites, body dumps, and places like that.”

“For real?”

“Uh-huh.”

He looks at the bus. I can look at his eyeballs and practically see the booze sloshing around.

“Fucking awesome,” he says. “Do you know the guy on
Ghost Encounters
?”

“Not that well,” I say, lying to imply I'd ever met him, or wanted to meet him, at all. “But we have a lot of mutual friends.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure, man.”

When he asks how much the tour costs, I tell him “fifty bucks.”  That is more than it actually is, but it's the price of how much I'm willing to take to put up with a drunk in a backward baseball cap. He fishes two wadded up twenties and two fives out of his pocket and gets on board.

I start to regret it when I start warming up the crowd.

“All right,” I say. “What do you guys want to see?”

“Ghosts!” someone says.

“You taking your top off!” says the drunk.

I ignore him as well as I can and say, “Ghosts! Perfect! Did anyone bring someone we can murder?”

“The trick,” says Cyn, turning around and looking right at Drunky McLoserbro, “is for us to find someone who's traveling alone, paying in cash, so no one knows where he is and no one can trace him to the tour, and who doesn't know how to behave himself with a basic amount of propriety, so no one cares if he disappears.”

Most people look over at the drunk guy, but he doesn't seem to notice that Cyn is talking about plotting his murder.

I look at her with a bit of a smirk. Obviously, this guy isn't a volunteer. But just knowing that she could punch him in the brain . . . I hate to say it feels good, but it does.

I tell myself that dealing with him gives me someone to hate besides myself for a while, but before we've gone two blocks on the tour, I wish I hadn't taken him on at any price,
and I wish we could seriously punch him in the brain right where we are. He's one of those guys who just has to shout out an inappropriate response to everything I say. I point out the spot where Tillie Wolf was stabbed with an umbrella stick, and he shouts, “Awwww shit!”

“Look, man,” I say, interrupting my opening talk. “There are kids on the tour tonight. Please conduct yourself accordingly.”

I realize that a person getting stabbed in the face should be more disturbing than the word “shit,” but still.

He says he'll behave, but he's drunk enough that he sort of forgets after a minute. He cheers when I say how long it took people who were hanged in Chicago to die. When I talk about the owner of the Iroquois Theatre cutting all the corners that made the fire so deadly, he keeps shouting, “Was he retarded?”

God.

Even when he's not shouting anything particularly problematic, it's distracting, disrespectful, and infuriating. Getting interrupted in the first couple of minutes throws the whole tour out of rhythm. Even Rick says he has trouble getting the atmosphere and feeling back if someone interrupts him in the opening monologue. It's where you set the mood for the whole thing.

When I get people off the bus to check out the Alley of Death and Mutilation, he stumbles along with a stupid, shit-eating grin.