The Girl in Acid Park (6 page)

At last, I looked up. "About me?"

He returned my gaze, gray eyes cool behind heavy plastic frames, and shrugged. "After the appalling lack of research in that
Daily Times
article?" He gave a pompous snort, and leaned one shoulder into the shelf beside us.

Even in a graceful slump, he was taller than me. Though most students had already changed into their weekend clothes, he'd only removed his blazer. The Bishop, as most people still called him, remained buttoned up to the throat and tied with a double windsor. He hadn't even rolled up his sleeves.

I wanted to do it for him. I could help him with his tie too. And the rest of it, if he'd let me. The full effect of James Marion Grant was, at least to me, spine-melting.

I imagine my poor little heart was thinking, "Fuck you, Collins--I just stopped hammering your ribs and now you're going to look at the runway model for Prada's Starfleet collection? What's next, stairs? I quit." But it was nice to feel something besides anxiety, so I didn't berate myself for perving out this time.

My lips twitched, though they didn't quite make it to full smile status. "Thanks, Marion."

He rolled his eyes and pushed himself off the shelf.

"I'm going to give you a pass this time," he said.

I was beginning to get my bearings back, though it still felt like there was static electricity crackling around my head. I fell into step next to him and headed back toward the study tables. "How far does that pass extend?"

"Not far. You're...what's wrong with your knee?"

I shrugged one shoulder. "Just a little brick through my window this evening. No big."

He drew up short. "Pass extended," he said. Then he turned toward me, passed his eyes over my face, my hands, my bloody knee. I'd have called that look clinical but for the slight frown that tugged down the corner of his mouth. My cheeks went hot. He shook his head.

"Want a coffee?"

That brought out a slight smile. Maybe I was predictable, but it didn't matter. "You know what I like," I teased.

His lips twitched, and he paced over to grab his things.

I should have guessed the books were his. If I'd looked close enough to see the Ionic Greek Dictionary, I'd have figured it out. I helped him cart the tomes to the book drop and followed him out the door. I was surprised when we skirted the stairs down to the central corridor, where our school coffeeshop was.

He correctly interpreted my look. "Would you rather wade through the Friday night crowd?"

"Nope," I said. "I'm trying this new thing called 'Avoiding Everyone'. It's, like, a twelve-step-program."

"Step one, go to the library."

"Yeah. Only eggheads hang out there on Fridays."

"Step two, use outdated insults like 'egghead' to convince others you're ignorant of current social conventions."

"Step three, tell the egghead to shut the fuck up and explain how we're getting coffee without going to Higher Grounds."

"I have a..." he paused for a second, just long enough for me to start wondering why, but then continued. "...a french press. It's a little battered, but-"

"I didn't think you drank coffee," I interrupted, struggling to rearrange that perception in my head.

"I don't."

It took me half a second to want to kick myself. I was a moron. I knew Jamie didn't drink coffee. Aaron had. And as his best friend and roommate, Jamie had inherited a bunch of his things after he died.

"Step four. Be an asshole," I said.

Jamie clapped a hand on my back, just over my shoulder blade. It was a quick gesture, and the warmth of his palm disappeared at once. But I knew what it meant, and I was grateful.

#

Walking into a boy's room always felt like passing the threshold into another country--a country that smells funny, has weird customs, and might not have a working waste disposal system. Hiroki's room was neat, but only because he'd propped his bed up on cinderblocks and shoved everything into laundry baskets underneath. The walls on his half were papered in graphite sketches and indie band stickers, and by now I think I've seen every pair of boxers the boy owns.

As a senior, Jamie had a second floor room, away from the boys' R.A.. Girls wouldn't be allowed on the boys' hall at all past nine o'clock, but until then, I could hang out in his room without penalty so long as he left the door open.

He didn't.

I honestly had no idea what to expect from the so-called Bishop's room. Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed was the stark, empty half that had once been Aaron's.

The extra-long twin mattress had been stripped. There was nothing decorating the walls or chest of drawers, no plastic bins under the bed, no laundry basket shoved into the space beside the dresser. My throat closed, and I felt Jamie's shoulder against my back as he pulled the door shut. I didn't move.

"They took most of it," he said, and the un-filed edges of his voice caught against my heart.

"His parents?"

"Yeah." Jamie pulled his phone and wallet from his pockets and chucked them at his bed with his keys. The covers were pulled up, but where I'd expected hospital corners, the actual corners were more on the mom-made-me-wrap-this-Christmas-present level. It was comforting.

It still felt weird to sit on a guy's bed, so I stepped over toward Aaron's. I paused, peering at something dark on the bedside table. Pooled in front of the lamp sat a string of familiar tiger's eye beads.

The last time I'd seen them, they'd been in the shape of a rosary. Now, however, they'd reclaimed their original form as a set of buddhist prayer beads. My brain conjured up the image of Jamie, sitting on this stripped down bed, carefully counting ten small, one large, ten small, one large. I sat on the bed, feeling rather rude and untethered.

While he filled the water heater, I let my nosy side distract me from the fact that I was in a room with the boy I liked, sitting on his dead roommate's bed. The expected Star Trek poster was on the wall, though he'd attempted to make it less conspicuously fanboy by framing it. A stack of books sat on his bedside table, some fiction, some non, some I recognized from next year's English reading list. Next to those, a glasses case and a prodigious amount of loose change in a pewter stein. He also had a small wastebasket, but I knew better than to look in there. Some things, even my journalist-side doesn't want to know.

"So, something about Hermes?" I prompted, analyzing the various bathroom products lined up on the room's little sink. Toothpaste, deodorant, razor, stuff I couldn't read from this distance...

"Yeah," he said, sounding distracted.

I glanced over. He stood in front of his dresser, staring at the french press, a cheap spoon in one hand and a bag of ground coffee in the other.

"Want me to do it?"

"Yeah." He set the coffee and spoon on the dresser and stepped back, as if mere proximity might cause it to burst into flame. He'd already pulled out two mugs, one of which had the string of a teabag wrapped around the handle.

"You talk Greek, I'll make caffeinated beverages," I said, peering at the creaking electric kettle.

"
Mênin áeide theà Pēlēïádeō Akhilêos.
"

"Do I need to make a bad joke about it being Greek to me?"

He grimaced. "Please don't. I'm in midterm mode. Weird shit seems funny." He cleared his throat. "Hermes. Right. So, one of Hermes's epithets is
psychopompos
--literally, leader of souls."

I nodded, dumping a few scoops of grounds into the french press.

"A lot of religions have a member of the pantheon or religious hierarchy whose job it is to convey souls to the afterlife. The technical name for it is psychopomp, though I've also seen psychogogue, which is a little different, but-"

"Focus," I interrupted.

"Right. So, in Egyptian myth, Anubis is a psychopomp, and in other religions it's a shaman's job to send souls on after death."

"But that's death. Like,
death
-death, not ghost-making death."

He quirked an eyebrow at me. "Death-death?"

"Official Exorcist's lingo. Hiroki told me."

"Ah-huh."

The water heater clicked and he beat me to it, pouring boiling water first into his mug, then over the grounds in the french press. The reach put him close enough for a wrinkle in his shirt to brush my arm.

"You have to take a step back from the literal mythology," he said. "Look at what it's trying to explain."

I shook my head. "People want to know where they go after they die. That explains it pretty easily."

"Yes, but what about the ones who can't get there?" He pulled open his drawer again, extracted a box of sugar packets, and brandished it at me. "What happens to them?"

"They...become...ghosts?"

"They become ghosts." He dumped a sugar packet into his mug and stared at it. "I just realized I haven't got any milk left."

"You gonna survive?"

"I'm ninety-percent certain it won't end in death-death. Anyway, my theory is that the role of the psychopomp explains people like you. Lots of religions have rites on exorcisms in terms of ghostly or demonic possession. That's what most of the world focuses on, so that's what people know about, but it's not what
you
do. A a psychopomp is something different. Their role is literally to guide spirits to the afterlife."

I hummed, depressing the plunger and pouring myself a cup of black coffee. Without milk, I didn't want sugar, so I nodded my satisfaction and we retreated to opposite beds, cradling our beverages.

"Okay," I said. "So let's say I'm a psycho-thing."

"You are a psycho-thing. But also, a conveyor of souls." He gave a one-shouldered shrug and a half smile over the rim of his mug. The steam fogged his glasses. "It's something to think about. Hermes was also the patron of orators and literature, and a messenger god--sort of the Ancient Greek equivalent of a news anchor. That can't be such a bad thought, can it?"

"You're such a nerd." I said it with love.

"You're welcome."

I swallowed a sip of coffee and looked toward the window, trying to discern whether there were still police cruisers in the parking lot. Jamie glanced as well, but he couldn't know what I was looking for. He seemed not to mind silence, so we sat there, gazing out the window for a while, until he finally lowered his mug.

"Can I ask about the brick?"

I sighed, and as I dragged the toes of my shoes along the floor, explained. He listened attentively, only looking away once when he reached a long arm all the way to his sink and grabbed a bottle from it. By the time he stretched across to hand it to me, I was done.

The bottle was an analgesic spray. "For your knee," he said. "So, you think the brick was the stick monkeys?"

I shrugged, squirting spray onto my cuts. "It could have been lacrosse. Or anyone else at the school. I had to disable comments forever ago, and even deleting the backlog doesn't work because mirror sites just keep popping up. And social media is a nightmare." The sting in my knee abated, and I set the spray next to Aaron's rosary. The movement caused my shorts to ride up and I adjusted them self-consciously. "At this point, anyone on my blog has motive."

When I looked at Jamie, his gaze flicked suddenly away from my legs, and I swear I saw the tops of his ears turn pink. "
I'm
on your blog," he said.

"But I didn't know you then. And you liked the Bond villain comparison. Besides it wasn't a picture of
your
pregnancy test in the bathroom trash Crystal took."

Crystal had been one of the other three girls who co-wrote The Toilet Paper until her parents found her stash of gay erotic fan fiction and sent her to military school. (Which is a real shame, too, because her Harry/Draco stuff was genius; I will never thing of an engorgement charm the same way.)

"I should have made my pregnancy test more conspicuous, then," he said.

"Slut."

Jamie choked on his tea. I leaned back, surprised to see him actually laugh. I wasn't aware he ever did that. I stared, both confused and proud, laughing more at him than at my joke. He had a funny grin, one that looked too big for his mouth and crinkled his cheeks like whiskers. He covered it with a hand, though that might have been his attempt to catch the Earl Gray dripping onto his school tie.

"Shit," he said. He set down his cup and crossed to his laundry basket. I giggled fiendishly as he fished out a towel, wiped his hands and face, and grabbed his tie.

And then my brain turned off. Honestly, I'm not into suit porn. I'm not really even all that excited by the idea of strippers. But there is something about a guy slipping the knot of a tie loose, something about the sound of it pulling through the collar, that silences any girl with a preference for holders of the y-chromosome.

My mouth went dry at the sound and there was a traitorous tingle somewhere South of the Border. Jamie chucked his tie in the basket, though I'm pretty sure those don't go in the washing machine. He tilted his chin and squinted, thumbing open the top button of his shirt.

I'd stopped giggling and commenced staring. The second I realized it, I was desperate for something else to look at. Bed--no. Sink--no. Star Trek poster. Yes, good.

"So, what does Satou think?" Jamie asked, dropping himself back into place on the navy bedspread.

Well,
there
was a mood-killer. If he'd been doing the whole prep-school strip-tease on purpose, he'd just ruined it.

"Uh-oh," he said, pausing mid-reach for his tea. "From that expression-"

I sighed, tucking one foot under me. "I guess it's good all the gossip isn't going around school like herpes."

"Your descriptions of things are
so
pleasant."

"Hiroki and I are taking a break."

He leaned forward. "From..." His voice had dropped in pitch.

"From being friends? From hanging out? I don't know. He's mad at me for not being able to stop thinking about ghosts. I'm mad at him for abandoning me when I needed him to, well, help me look like I'm not just making up my--ugh, powers sounds so X-men..."