Just Kill Me (26 page)

Rick and Aaron Saltis are singing a song together outside of the DarkSide bus:

Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay!

We have no tour today!

Our riders passed away!

Don't look at me that way!

It doesn't seem as funny to me as it normally would.

As soon as Rick sees me, he pats Aaron on the back, tells
him to have a good tour, then puts his arm around me, leading me over toward our bus.

“How you holding up?” asks Rick. “I heard you got in some hot water with Zoey.”

“You could say that.”

This almost seems like ancient history today. Yesterday's problem. But it's still a thing. And now it bubbles back up to the surface.

“But you need to dish, sis.  You kissed Morticia?”

I nod. “At Hull House.”

“Were her lips super cold? Did her breath smell like the grave?”

I shake my head. “Super warm, and mint.”

“Mint,” he says. “She
planned
to kiss you.”

“You think?”

“No one smells like mint unless they're planning to kiss someone.”

“Maybe she just likes gum.”

“Ghosts don't chew gum. Normally.”

Rick gets distracted talking to Pierre the necklace guy, and I climb onto the bus and start looking over the dashboard, down in the Rubbermaid bin where we keep tools and extra mic cables and things, and everywhere else, thinking maybe I can find some gadget Ed is using to bug the bus.

But I don't find anything.

I manage to keep my shit together and put on a pretty
decent show for two tours that night. In fact, they're very good tours. I'm energetic. I'm yelling, “She splattered to a messy death right where that guy is standing!” at passersby. I'm milking every joke and every gasp line, trying to push the darkness away. They're maybe my best tours ever.

It always helps when we get cool pictures or have a spooky time at one of the stops, though. And that happens tonight. I get a real boost from several really creepy photos at Hull House. Vaguely human forms on people's pictures, better than anything we've gotten after charity work.

Cyn and I never took any volunteers to Hull House.

But it's the last place I saw Drunky alive.

That night, after trying to fall asleep in bed for hours, I sneak downstairs and sleep, or try to sleep, in one of the caskets, thinking that maybe I'll feel more at home in one of those. I used to get in them when I was a kid. They're surprisingly comfortable. Roomy, too. Even now that I'm much older than I was the last time I got in one, there's plenty of space to move around and mess with my phone.

I look online to see if there's anything about a young white guy who's gone missing in Chicago. Nothing.

She couldn't have killed him. What would she have done with the body?

Still, the last place I saw that drunken guy she “got rid of” seemed haunted tonight. Much more than it usually does.

If Cyn got rid of him, that makes it seem a lot more likely that she'd be plotting to do away with me, too. Maybe she was testing the waters, seeing if a younger person who didn't volunteer does leave a stronger imprint.

Even thinking about Zoey is better than thinking about this.

While I lay there, I send a handful of texts to Zoey, hoping she'll answer.

MEGAN:

I'm sorry.

MEGAN:

It wasn't what it looked like. You've got to at LEAST let me explain.

MEGAN:

Please, at least come fight with me.

MEGAN:

I did some bad things this summer. Not really bad, but . . . not legal. Some people would think they were really bad. Like, really, really bad.

MEGAN:

I am a real fucking villain. But nothing makes me feel as bad as what I did to you.

MEGAN:

I'm in a coffin right now and I feel like it's where people like me belong.

MEGAN:

Please answer.

MEGAN:

I need you to say you don't hate me.

She never replies.

At three a.m., I wake up when my phone buzzes, thinking it might be her.

It's Cyn.

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

You still wanna do the hair bob? Come by around noon.

W
hen you have reason to believe that someone may be plotting to murder you, it's probably not wise to go to their place, alone, for the sole purpose of having them come at your head with sharp objects.

But killing me at her apartment while bobbing my hair wouldn't do Cynthia much good in the long run. If she's going to ghost me, she'll want to do it in Bughouse Square or someplace where anything I leave behind could function as Lillian Collier's ghost. I'm probably safe anywhere as far off the tour route as Rick and Cyn's apartment in Humboldt Park.

And anyway, being at their place could be a good chance to do some detective work. Look for clues, ask her subtle questions, see if she lets anything slip.

So I decide to let Cyn cut my hair.

I take the Blue Line from Forest Park through the city, past the Loop, and into Humboldt Park, which is one of those
neighborhoods that's supposed to be getting safer and fancier (gentrified), but still turns up on the news a lot for shootings and stuff. Cyn and Rick say they're in the “demilitarized zone,” but nothing between the train stop and the three-flat where they live seems rough to me at all; it's full of dog walkers, old men pushing churro carts, and kids playing on scooters.

Cyn is sitting on her stoop, reading and smoking, when I walk up the sidewalk. I haven't seen her in person since Edward told me that she told him about Zoey, and it's awkward to actually have her right there in front of me.

She's smiling. Clueless about how much I've been thinking about her, obviously.

“You ready for this?” she asks.

“Ready as I'll ever be.”

She leads me through the front door and up the steps to their apartment, which is the third floor of the three-flat. The stairway is made of rotting wood covered in chipped orange paint; the boards bend below Cyn's feet as she walks up. Inside, you can tell it was a nice place once upon a time—like, the crown molding is made with actual plaster, not some prefab stuff from Home Depot. But now the paint is peeling, the floor is warped, and there are a couple of spots where duct tape is covering holes in the drywall. Everything is drowning in piles of dirty laundry. I see stains I wish I hadn't.

On the couch beside the laundry there's a lanky rat-faced guy with a hairstyle that I guess would be a mohawk if it was
sticking up, only it isn't. It's just lying down across his scalp. He's topless and filthy and appears to be stoned.

“This is Punk Rock James,” says Cyn. “Old friend from college. Fellow archaeology student.”

“Hi,” I say to him, as he gives me a silent nod.

“Rick's working at the home today,” Cyn says, leading me past James and into her bedroom. “Grab a seat on the desk chair; I'll get some newspapers to throw down.”

Her bedroom is so small that it was probably a closet originally. Or maybe the place was actually a one-bedroom but some landlord made it into a two-bedroom by putting up a wall in the middle of the original one. There's just barely room for a desk, a mirror, and a twin-size bed, which looks too small for her and Rick to do it on. Maybe his is bigger.

To get to the desk chair, I have to wade through a regular pool of dirty laundry, cigarette ashes, junk mail, books, old fliers, and empty bottles. The walls are covered with band posters, and a bunch of headless dolls sit among the cosmetics and hygiene products on the desk. The necks on the decapitated dolls are about the only empty spaces in the whole room. They don't seem as cool to me today as they would have a week ago.

Cyn sets her phone to play some punk band, disappears for a second, then comes back with a pair of scissors, singing along with the song coming from the phone, which is about Sherlock Holmes taking drugs.

“This is Stiffs, Incorporated,” she says. “Nineties punk.
Their songs were about Jack the Ripper and Edgar Allan Poe and stuff. We'd probably call them ‘steampunk' now.”

“Nice,” I say.

“Only about six people bought their second album, but the guy from My Chemical Romance says it was their biggest influence.”

“I can kind of hear the connection.”

“You hear it a lot more on the second album than this one. I'll send you a link.”

Cyn spins the desk chair around a couple of times, making me a bit dizzy, then runs her fingers through my hair.

“How long did it take you to grow it this long?”

“A while.”

She grabs two handfuls of hair from the bottom, the red half, and starts to hold the locks up, sculpting my hair to simulate various styles.

“So what kind of bob are we talking?” she asks. She raises it up and says “Irene Castle?” Then she manipulates it around and says, “Clara Bow?” Then she moves it more. “Mary Pickford?”

“I think the first one,” I say. “That's the most like Lillian. Irene Castle.”

“Got it.” She runs her fingers through it a few more times, petting me like a cat.

Then she snips off the first red lock in one move and goes
to work as the guy from Stiffs, Inc. shouts out, “Quick, Watson, bring the needle!” on the speakers.

“The other day Rick was asking me what you were like when you were a kid,” she says.

“What did you tell him?”

“That you were pretty much the same, really. Didn't you even make up stories about villains winning and taking the princesses into their dungeons back then, too?”

Snip, snip, snip.

“Uh-huh.”

“I imagine what goes on in the dungeons now is a little different, though.”

“Maybe not as much as you'd think.”

The Sherlock Holmes song ends, another guitar riff starts, and Cynthia keeps working. I look into her face in the mirror, looking for a hint of guilt or something, some sort of clue. She seems totally collected, as always.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Should I trust that face at all?

Snip, snip, snip.

All the red that made up the lower part of my hair is gone now. I'm no longer two-toned.

“Know what would be really crazy?” she asks. “If Lillian Collier were actually still alive and living at the home and wanted to die.”

“There's no way she's still alive,” I say. “If she was nineteen
or twenty in 1922, she'd be about the oldest woman in the country by now.”

“Yeah, we don't have anyone quite that old. I think our oldest person is a hundred and two.”

“She'd be older than that.”

“Shame,” she says. “She'd be a perfect ghost to have on the tour, wouldn't she?”

I shudder involuntarily, and she screws up a snip because my head moves, clipping a part she didn't mean to.

“You shuddered.”

“Sorry.”

“There's an old superstition that when you shudder involuntarily, it means someone just stepped on the place that will be your grave someday.”

“Yeah, I've heard that.”

Punk Rock James is walking around in the living room now.

Fuck, is she going to bury me under the floor?

If so, isn't Cyn worried that she'll hear the beating of my hideous heart, interrupting right while she and Rick are doing it? Or at least that I'll stink the place up?

She snips around the mistake and covers it up.

The next Stiffs, Inc. song turns out to be a song about marrying Mary Pickford, the silent-film star. One line goes “It doesn't really matter that you're dead. . . .”

Cyn grabs the sides of my head and I nearly panic, thinking
maybe she's going to break my neck or punch my brain, but instead she just runs her fingers through my hair and shakes it out, sending strands flying.

Sitting still is hard.

She picks the scissors back up.

“How old was Marjorie Kay Stone when she died?” I ask.

“I think two hundred and thirty-six.”

“Ho ho ho.”

Snip, snip, snip.

“Why do you ask?”

“You didn't punch
her
in the brain, did you?”

Cyn laughs out loud, but doesn't quite deny it. Instead she says, “Everyone has secrets. That's why they call them secrets.”

Then she laughs again and says that bit of nonsense was something Marjorie used to say.

Snip, snip, snip.

“Rick and I got rid of a drunk at Death Corner the other night,” she says.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Way rid of him.”

Snip, snip, snip.

For a second I actually feel better. Rick's not in on the brain-punching, as far as I know. I'd decided that maybe she could have hid Drunky in the bushes at Hull House, but there'd be nowhere to put a body at Death Corner.

Then I think of Punk Rock James, sitting out in the living
room. A guy with an archaeology degree, covered in dirt.