Just Kill Me (9 page)

“No thanks.”

“Seriously. I'll have her come on the tour. She's about your age. Big into ghosts. And you can see what she looks like and be sure she's not twelve and all.”

I lean back in the chair. “The reason Zoey won't send a picture is an anxiety disorder. What kind of asshole would I be if I broke things off because of her mental health?”

“You're not being unreasonable. There are safety issues. Not to mention physical ones.”

I shrug. “I can deal.”

“Have you ever at least kissed anyone in person?”

I don't answer for a second, then say, “I almost kissed the girl who played the other old lady in
Arsenic and Old Lace,
but she got freaked out when I tried.”

“Not into girls?”

“I thought she was.”

“Were you both still dressed as old ladies at the time?”

I pause, then nod. Cyn can't help but chuckle. I don't blame her. I chuckle too.

I was still sort of reeling from that particular misadventure when I first starting e-mailing back and forth with Zoey. If I hadn't had Zoey, I'd probably still be seeing that girl's heavily
made-up face looking horrified every time I closed my eyes.

“You don't have to die a virgin for someone who won't even meet up with you,” says Cyn.

“I don't feel like I am one.”

“Just from cybersex?”

I shrug. “I think it counts. Virginity's a social construct anyway.”

I sort of wish I really thought that more than I do.

And I do at least want to kiss someone. Soon.

Maybe I can be in another play where I get to kiss a costar.

We watch a few students stumble their way through stand-up routines, then Rick comes up and absolutely blows the others off the stage with a routine about an uncle of his whose hobby was buying new insurance plans.

“Seriously, folks,” he says. “Every time I see the guy, he's got some new policy that he's all amped up about. He'll show up to Thanksgiving and be like, ‘All I got to do is pay ten bucks a month, and they'll give me fifty grand if I lose one lousy limb!' Then at Christmas he'll have some new plan that costs fifteen bucks a month, but they'll give him half a million for a severed arm. I learned long division by him making me figure out how many months he'd have to pay before he lost money by losing a leg!”

He milks certain words perfectly, wringing all the laughs he can out of them. The class roars with laughter.

“See?” Cyn whispers. “Star.”

She's right. Rick is head and shoulders above everyone else we've seen in the class.

“I'm totally serious,” he goes on. “One day Uncle Carlos is going to be a very rich man. With no arms and no legs. We can hang him on the wall and call him Art. Throw him in front of the door, call him Matt.”

It's a third-grade joke, but even the teacher is cracking up.

“Or toss him in the pool, and BOOM! Bob's your uncle!”

Now the class explodes.

Cyn has heard the routine a million times, but she smiles proudly when the class laughs. “That's my crazy bathroom,” she whispers.

Between the teacher's notes and what Rick tells me on the way home, I can see that it's all in the delivery. It isn't just that the things he's saying are funny (they only sort of
are
), it's how he says them. Waiting until just the right second, when the laughter from one joke is just dying down, to throw out the next line. One change in word choice can make or break a joke. An extra syllable can screw up the rhythm.

And the same goes for ghost stories—one word, one pause, can be the difference in a gasp line working or falling flat.

Back home, I spend all night practicing in front of the mirror, just quietly enough that Mom can't hear me. I refine my stories a word at a time.

And I forget all about how Rick had said something back at the cemetery about an “initiation” after my next tour.

T
wo days later, when I next come on a tour, I am a Resurrection Mary expert. I've learned my way around genealogy sites and found death records for lots of girls named Mary who ended up at Resurrection. I've pulled their obits from the
Tribune
. I've found academic articles about the urban myth of the vanishing hitchhiker from the 1940s. I am totally ready to tell the story on a tour.

On the Blue Line train into the city I sit across from a guy who seems to think he's a werewolf or something. He writhes and grunts and howls and licks his fingers as though they were claws, and he rambles something about cross-breeding gorillas with hippos. Everyone just goes about their business reading their books like nothing unusual is going on, because it's the Blue Line, after all, and he's not biting anyone or anything.

When I get to Clark Street, the necklace guy and the portrait guy are plying their trades again. A costumed guide from
Al Capone Tours lets a little kid pretend to shoot him for a
charming
photo his family can take home.

Edward Tweed is running two buses for DarkSide Chicago tours tonight. He's standing in front of one of them, and next to him is a scruffy red-haired guy in a threadbare brown sport coat that must be sweaty as hell in the heat, plus a fedora that has seen better days. He looks like the kind of guy who gets kicked out of pool halls.

Tweed tips his cowboy hat at me, and the other guy gives me a two-finger salute.

I meet up with Rick and Cyn by their bus, and Rick tells me the other guy is Aaron Saltis, Tweed's protégé. “He's younger than he looks,” says Rick. “Actor. Nice guy, but he really needs to fact-check Tweed. Now and then we bump into him in the alley, and he's always saying a serial killer in the 1970s used to pick people up there. Pure BS.”

The pure BS is clearly popular; Tweed's thirty-seven-passenger buses both look full, and our one smaller one is only half full. It feels half empty.

The customers we have are mostly tourists with kids, including a woman who shows up with a tiny accessory dog and insists that she has to take it along. I think that pets are officially against the rules, but she's with a party of five, and Rick and Cyn aren't doing well enough to turn away a party that large. And anyway, it fits in her purse.

Rick introduces me to the passengers as “part of the team,”
and I feel like people are giving me skeptical looks, like I'm too young to have this job and have no business being here. Maybe they think I'm Cyn's sister or something. I'll have to make myself look a bit older. I don't usually wear much makeup—I sort of associate it with dead people—but I know some tricks.

As we start, Rick says, “Now, this neighborhood isn't all that spooky these days, except that occasionally we do have this guy in a frog suit standing outside of Rainforest Cafe, and that guy scares the bajeezus out of me.” When people chuckle, he says, “Yeah, you guys laugh, but I have to go through life without a bajeezus now.” He pauses for another chuckle, waits until just the right time, then adds “Boom! You all just got privilege-checked.”

While he points out all the murder sites, hanging sites, and disaster sites between the Rock and Roll McDonald's and the Alley of Death and Mutilation, I'm obsessively going over the Resurrection Mary story in my head, thinking of all the ways I can change it if I have to, like if there's some miracle and all the lights are green and I have to leave out a lot. I am nervous as hell. I've done a few plays and all, but I've always been in a zombie outfit, or an old lady costume. I've never just been, like, myself.

But I can do this.

After the alley stop, as we cruise onto Wacker Drive, Rick says, “Now, to tell you about a girl who died here in 1934, here's our
own Miss Megan Henske, Mistress of Darkness and Shadows.”

Mistress of Darkness and Shadows. That's me. Hell yeah.

I feel a surge of confidence for a second as I take the mic, but just as I'm about to talk, I hear some lady a few rows back saying, “Is she supposed to be scary?” to the guy she's with, like she'd expected me to show up in costume or something.

I try to ignore her or picture her in her underwear. Neither helps. I swear that even the dog is giving me a skeptical look as I take my place at the front of the bus, like even a chihuahua knows I have no right to be working this job. I forget just about everything I was planning to say and try to improvise.

Badly.

“So, uh, here at the ‘L' tracks,” I say, “this girl Mary Bregovy died in 1934. Some people say she's Resurrection Mary, a famous Chicago ghost. But there's an academic article that lists a sighting from three years before that, so . . .”

And then I freeze. For what seems like an hour. In grocery-store-hell time, which is infinitely slower than normal time. My knees start to shake, my vision goes blurry. I'm a trembling mess.

The silence sounds like a vacuum about to suck me back to Forest Park.

But just as the bus is getting to the spot where Mary Bregovy died, and I'm half-wishing I were her, a miracle happens.

Outside of the bus, a rail-thin woman is standing on the corner wearing a fur coat that's probably six sizes too big for
her frame, and orders of magnitude too warm for the weather.

“Hey, look!” I say. “Special bonus tonight. On your right, it's Cruella De Vil, from
101 Dalmations
!”

All twelve passengers burst out laughing, and Rick nearly chokes on his Red Bull. When he swallows and opens his mouth, he's cracking up.

“That's got to be a ghost, right, folks?” I ask. “Why would a living person be wearing fur in this weather?”

“Why would ghosts wear clothes at all?” asks a guy in the third row. “Your pants don't have a soul.”

“Well, maybe yours don't, sir,” I say. “They must not have any good vintage stores where you live.”

Rick laughs and says, “Just because you're dead doesn't mean you want your bits and pieces showing, man.” Then he pats me on the back, retrieves the mic, and says, “A lot of people don't really think ghosts are peoples' souls or spirits, exactly. Some people think it's more scientific, like some sort of leftover energy. Some people call it a ‘psychic imprint.' ”

“Or a ‘residual haunting,' ” says Cyn.

“Right. As opposed to an ‘intelligent haunting' that floats around and knows where it's going. And they're not always even from dead people—just something left over from a really intense emotion. Theoretically.”

For a moment I think back to the Summer I spent living in my dad's apartment, back when I was nine. I thought it was haunted because of the moaning noises I heard in the next
apartment over on the other side of my bedroom wall at night. I knew “the facts of life,” but I hadn't yet figured out that sometimes people had sex when they weren't trying to have a baby, so it didn't occur to me that the eighty-year-old couple next door, the Weyhers, might have been doing it.

And the last time I stayed there, over spring break, I heard those sounds again. Even though the apartment has been empty for months, since Mrs. Weyher died. Maybe I was hearing some sort of psychic echo of her getting it on. I guess I could get behind that sort of ghost.

Go, ghost of Mrs. Weyher, go.

From there on, I relax a bit. Disney villains have saved my ass. I never do finish the Mary story, but Rick lets me tell some of the Hull House story myself, and then a bit about H. H. Holmes at the body dump.

There's a little parking area and a “senior living” apartment complex on the site of the old garage where the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre happened. The old people don't like buses to stop there, so it's usually just a drive-by, but tonight Cyn slows the bus to a stop as Rick finishes the story.

“Okay,” Rick says. “Remember what I was saying earlier about psychic imprints?”

We all nod.

“Well, there's supposedly one right here at the massacre site. There was a German Shepherd named Highball who
was tied to the axle of one of the trucks in the garage during the massacre. Even though he wasn't shot, he was apparently so scared that he left some sort of energy behind. For years, people said that dogs would freak out if they walked by this fence. Wanna try an experiment, since we have a dog with us tonight?”