Sara (9 page)

She started to cry again. What could I do? I walked over to her and put my arms around her and held her tight. She put her arms around me, and she cried. I didn't know what to say to her. I'm lousy in those kinds of situations. I am always so afraid that I will say the wrong thing, so I just stood there and made little sympathetic noises that did absolutely no good whatsoever.

Finally she stopped crying. “I'm sorry, Tony.”

“It's okay.”

“Maybe I should tell you about it.” She stopped herself. “No, maybe I won't. I think this is something I need to deal with myself. I'm not ready to talk about it, though.” She pulled herself away from me. “I need to go get ready. We're going over to the Greenes'.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks for coming, Tony. Where's Glenn anyway?”

“He's um—”
Oh, the hell with it
, I thought. “He's out with Sara.”

Her face darkened. “Tell Glenn to be careful, Tony. He needs to be very careful.” Without another word she turned and walked into the house.

The screen door slammed behind her.

*

I dreamed about Sara again that night. This time, I was driving down a dark road, and someone was singing loudly along with the stereo. I looked over to see who was driving, and it was Noah. He had a beer in his hand, and the way his head was bobbing he was obviously drunk. “Slow down, man!” I shouted at him.

He turned and looked at me, and his face was covered in blood. “What do I care, man? I'm dead already.”

And I could hear that laughter again, that horrible laughter.

“She's going to kill us all, man,” Noah said. “She ain't gonna rest until it's all over and we're all dead.”

“Who?”

“Sara. Who did you think? She hates us all, and she's going to kill us all. She hates, man. She really hates.”

“Why, Noah?”

He just looked at me like I was an idiot.

The laughter got louder.

He winced. “Make her stop, man, make her stop!”

It grew louder.

He covered his ears with his hands.

“Noah!” I screamed and grabbed for the wheel.

“Make her stop laughing!”

The truck went out of control.

It flipped, and my door came open, and I was flying through the air, rising higher and higher, and I opened my eyes and I could see the truck rolling over and over, and then Noah's screaming, and then the truck exploded, and I was falling, and the ground was rushing up to meet me, and then I stopped falling a few feet from the ground.

“I saved you.”

I looked to my left, and she was standing there, dressed in black, her long hair blowing in the wind. She was beautiful, even more beautiful than I remembered.

I put my feet down and walked over to her. She didn't move. She reached out to me and pulled me to her, and then she kissed me. She was cold, so cold, and when I pulled back away from her, her face was a skull.

I started to scream.

I could hear her laughing.

I sat up in bed, drenched in sweat and shivering. The moon was streaming in through the window…

“Tony—”

I turned my head and backed into the corner of my bed. “Stay away from me!”

Noah was standing there, and I knew I was still in my dream because I could see through him to the posters on the wall behind him. That didn't make it any less real, though.

“Tony, be careful.” His voice sounded hollow, like what the wind would sound like if it could form words.

“Careful?”

“Of
her
.” He shuddered. “She hates, Tony, she hates.”

And then he was gone.

I sat up in my bed and took several deep breaths. I had had nightmares before, but never any so vivid as this. I got out of bed and noticed something shining on the floor in the moonlight. I bent over and picked it up.

It was a key ring, with the initials
NG
on the engraved silver circle that hung from it.

A chill went through me.

The key ring fell through my hand.

I stood in the darkness for a long time.

I couldn't fall back asleep the rest of the night. I just lay there in my bed, holding on to the key chain, staring at the ceiling, terrified that Noah's ghost was going to come back—and not knowing what I would do if it did.

I'd been pretty sure it was a dream—until I found the key chain.

As a nightmare, the whole thing was bad enough.

But as the darkness began to lift and the sun started coming up in the east, the terror of the night began to fade away.

It had been a nightmare, nothing more—what else could it have been? I didn't believe in ghosts—and even if I did, why the hell would Noah's ghost come to me of all people? We weren't friends before he died.

If his spirit was restless, wouldn't it make more sense for it to go see Laney, or Randy Froelich, or one of his actual friends? Maybe even his parents, or his brother?

With the sunlight coming through my window in the morning, it was a lot easier to be calm and rationalize the whole thing away as a bad dream. It was just the shock of Noah's death—I probably wasn't the only kid in town who'd had some kind of nightmare, right?

As for the key chain, well—it's not like I was an expert on ghosts or anything, but from what I remembered from movies, I didn't think a ghost could actually carry something real around with him.

So there had to be another explanation for the key chain ending up in my room, even if I couldn't figure it out for myself.

I debated mentioning it to my mother after I showered and ate breakfast. I had the key chain in my jeans pocket, but she looked more tired than usual. She looked at me after I washed out my cereal bowl.

“You doing okay?” she asked, her eyebrows up. “If you want to talk about your friend—”

“I'm fine, Mom,” I cut her off. “Noah wasn't really my friend.” As I said the words, I realized I sounded like Glenn had.

Maybe I had been a little harsher on him than I should have been.

By the time Glenn picked me up Monday morning, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that the whole thing had been a dream. And maybe I'd picked up the key chain over at Laney's and didn't remember doing it. Hell, I couldn't even be certain it was Noah's in the first place.

There was no such thing as ghosts, and so it had to have all been a dream. I just woke up in the middle of the night freaked out from the nightmare and found the key chain. My tired imagination did the rest.

*

“Hey,” Glenn said as he backed out of our driveway. “Did you talk to Laney?”

I nodded. “Yeah. She was pretty freaked out yesterday.”

“I don't know, maybe you were right, maybe I should have called her.” He gave me a weak smile as he turned onto the main road. “I don't know. I mean, I know you think I was being an asshole about it, but you know what a dick Noah always was to me—and after I came out—”

“Yeah.” I didn't know what to say.

“So I felt pretty sure Laney would know I didn't mean it. I mean, I didn't want him to die or anything. I don't want anyone to die. But”—he pounded his hands on the steering wheel in anger—“people our age aren't supposed to die. I feel like I owed it to Laney—because of how close we used to be—to be supportive and instead I just hung out with Sara all day.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

He glanced at me as he pulled into the parking lot at school. “Yeah, and that's all the stuff you were trying to tell me yesterday, I know. You were right.”

“I had a nightmare last night,” I said as he pulled into a spot and turned the car off. I fingered the key chain through my jeans. “About Noah.”

“I slept like a baby.” He grinned at me. “But I'm sure a lot of kids did. Have nightmares, I mean. Do you think Laney'll be in school today?”

“I don't know.” I got out of the car. I spotted Candy's car parked a few rows closer to the school building.

“School's going to be weird today.” He made a face as we walked across the lot toward the front doors. “A kid died in my old school—they brought in grief counselors and everything.” He shook his head. “Totally stupid.”

He was right about that—Noah's death cast a pall over the entire student body. The whole school was weirdly quiet—people were talking in really hushed tones, when they were talking at all. As I walked down the hallway to my locker, I could hear snatches of what kids were saying to each other in whispers.

“I heard he was drunk…crushed, the truck rolled right over his body…they're going to have a closed casket, my mom said…the funeral's going to be Wednesday afternoon, do you think they'll excuse us from classes to go…poor Laney, I can't imagine what she's going through…well, you know it was just a matter of time until something like this happened after one of Linda Avery's parties…”

Linda Avery herself was nowhere to be seen. I looked around for Candy, but I didn't see her anywhere either.

I got my sociology textbook out of my locker and headed to my first class.

They didn't bring in grief counselors, like at Glenn's old school, but by the end of the day I almost wished they had.

Every one of my teachers apparently thought it was “important” for them to bring the subject up and discuss it in the class. They also felt the need to let every one of us know that they were there for us, if we needed someone to talk to about our feelings about Noah's tragic death. Some also took the opportunity to explain to us the dangers of teenage drinking—some even used that as an intro into talking about the dangers of premarital sex because “sometimes drinking results in that.”

It was pretty obvious that none of them were comfortable talking about any of it, and when no one responded to their offers, they seemed genuinely relieved to move on to their regularly scheduled programming.

The whole thing was really stupid. Noah had been at best an average student. He never participated in class but never disrupted it either. His death actually seemed to shake them up a lot more than it had any of us. Sure, Noah's friends were upset, but for everyone else, there was a morbid fascination with it. Between classes, as the rumors spread and grew, the details of the accident became more and more exaggerated and gory—the shop kids, the ones who spent every available minute sneaking cigarettes out behind the shop or chewing tobacco, were the most honest about it. They were fascinated by the mechanics of the accident, about the gore factor of him being crushed by the truck, and some of them reenacted the whole thing in the lunchroom with a pencil standing in for Noah and a salt shaker standing in for his truck.

The cheerleaders and pep club girls were the exact opposite. They cried at the drop of a hat, walked around all day with sad faces and their eyes red from their crying. They were Laney's main support base, whispering to themselves and anyone else who would listen about how brave Laney was to face coming to school after losing her boyfriend. They were turning her into the heroine of some tragic movie. The teachers, too, fussed over Laney. Several times I noticed her in the hall between classes, surrounded by a group of girls, her lower lip trembling as though she were about to burst into tears as they consoled her.

“It's almost like they want her to break down,” Glenn mumbled to me as we walked past them on our way to the weight room. “They want her to make a spectacle of herself, like Hecuba on the walls of Troy.”

I didn't know what he was talking about. “It sure seems like she likes the attention.” I said.

“The Widow Greene,” Glenn said, theatrically rolling his eyes as he opened his gym locker.

“Have you talked to Sara?” I asked casually as I put on my workout shorts. “How's she dealing with all this?”

“It takes some getting used to, coming to a small school after going to a big one, but she seems to be taking it all in stride.” Glenn grinned at me.

Taking it all in stride was an understatement.

Sara walked down the hall like she was on a runway somewhere, her head held high and her shoulders back. When she stopped to talk to someone, she held herself like she was posing for a camera. And honestly, I don't think Southern Heights had ever seen anyone like her before. She was effortlessly polite and friendly to everyone, but in a distant sort of way. Her perfect smile never really seemed to reach all the way to her eyes. Even when she laughed, she didn't seem to be really amused—just watching.

There was just something about her that seemed, I don't know, off somehow.

But she was beautiful—there was absolutely no question about that. Every guy in school noticed, and couldn't take his eyes off her whenever she was around. She was wearing a black tube dress that hugged every curve and shape of her body, and she did have an amazing figure. The dress was cut a little low in the front, so deep cleavage showed, and a single pearl hung there from a gold chain around her neck. She was also wearing heels—something none of the other girls did very often. Her legs were long and shapely, and the heels of her boots clicked as she stalked her way from class to class. I sometimes saw freshmen and sophomore boys just staring at her as she walked past, their mouths open in wonder. Her long silky white-blond hair was parted in the center, framing her face, and it somehow stayed perfectly styled, bouncing when she walked and swinging back into place when she stopped.