Just Kill Me (29 page)

On the drive back, I get some texts from Edward Tweed. He texts like an old person—the way people always
think
teenagers do.

TWEED:

Have an idea. Good 4 all of us. Even Rick.

TWEED:

I want u 2 join my company. Tell whatever stories u want. Say I'm an idiot n a fraud. It's fine.

TWEED:

But I need some1 fast 2 run the tours Aaron was supposed 2 run.

TWEED:

(Hear me out here)

TWEED:

I want 2 pitch an idea 4 the TV show: it follows both companies. U and I r da villains everyone will love 2 hate. Makes it a better show. Makes u more valuable alive than dead. Rick and Cyn r the good guys. U can switch maybe in season 2.

TWEED:

Can we meet n discuss? I can show u the inside of the Couch tomb.

I don't reply to any of them, but I find myself thinking about the plan.

I did always like the villains best.

Sleep comes in fits and starts, and each fit and start brings a new dream full of horrors that I'm glad to wake up from.

I type a few responses to Tweed, but I never send them. Maybe I don't want a TV show. I'm scared to death that if I get famous enough that anyone knows who I am, the stories I sent Zoey might leak. Maybe she'll post them. Maybe Tweed will, if he has them and I don't do what he says.

If I'm not on TV, there's not much to gain from spreading my stories around. It's safer to be anonymous. No one. A face in the grocery store.

But even right now, I suppose it could reflect really, really badly on Mom and the business if Edward made them known just around Forest Park.

He could make me do anything if he has those stupid stories.

Why do I have to be this way?

While I stir my Cocoa Puffs around, I decide not to make any decisions today. There's no tour tonight, no reason for me
to run into Tweed or Cyn or anyone. I'll go downtown and do more Lillian research. It's the only thing I can think of that might distract me enough.

Mom comes into the kitchen with a cup of coffee just as I'm rinsing out my bowl. She doesn't mince words.

“You look like shit, Megan.”

“Thanks, Mother, I'll tell that to my body-image therapist.”

“Not funny.”

I grab a cup from the dish rack and pour myself some coffee from the pot, leaving it black instead of adding creamer, like I usually do, then sit at the table, trying to look distracted by my phone.

“What's up lately, Megan?” Mom asks.

“Nothing.”

“You got into one of the caskets the other day. You haven't done that since you were little.”

“I've grown up around them,” I say. “They're not, like, any more unsettling to me than a calculator would be to an insurance agent's kid.”

“No one's so well adjusted that they just hang around in coffins when everything's fine, Megan.”

I try to ignore her.

What could I tell her?

That I cheated on a girl who knows all my secrets?

That some old guy with a seven-dwarves beard might
be ready to tell the whole world that the girl who lives at Raskin's Funeral Home is a way bigger freak than you ever imagined?

That this job in the ghost-tour business involves a lot of killing?

That I might be next on the list, and she was totally right that me taking this job was a bad idea?

I stare at my coffee and act like I'm just too tired to converse, but she holds a thing of lipstick in my face and says, “Clarice is out sick.”

If I turn down the chance to help with mortuary makeup, she'll
know
something is wrong.

I get up, force a smile, and follow her down to the basement, where an older woman is lying on the table. Her face seems familiar, and it takes a minute for me to realize why: she used to come to the grocery store. The lips I'm about to make up have personally told me I was bad at my job before.

I don't remember specifically, but I probably imagined her choking to death on her fiber cereal.

And now, well, here she is. Just like I wanted.

I didn't really want it.

Not really.

Fuck.

My hand is shaking, so I work very slowly to get the lipstick right, examining the valleys and cracks of her lips and making a plan of action. I let myself get so completely wrapped
up in making sure I get everything perfect that I forget Mom has brought me down here to interrogate me.

“So, Megan,” she says. “Cyn told me something about you having girlfriend troubles.”

I jump and smear lipstick all down the dead woman's face before I look up at Mom.

“When did you talk to Cyn?”

“She called to arrange another funeral for one of the residents.”

“And she said I had a girlfriend?”

“I was already pretty sure you did.”

I try to get back to the lipstick, but I mis-aim and instead of her lips, I put the stick down on her cheek.

“Oh, fuck.”

I take a step back, and Mom looks hurt. “Did you think I'd be mad, Megan? You're allowed to have a girlfriend. I'm not some, like, conservative person who's going to get upset about it.”

Some noises I can't identify float through the room. Sure. Sure I'm old enough to have a girlfriend. But who in the HELL is old enough to have a mystery girlfriend who probably isn't who she says but knows all sorts of embarrassing secrets about me? To talk to someone without being able to see where she keeps her brain. I wasn't afraid she'd be mad about me having a girlfriend. I was afraid she'd be mad that I'm an idiot.
And surely she wouldn't support me being a cheater.

And this is just what I'm afraid of
without
her finding out any more details about me.

“I shouldn't be down here,” I say. “This isn't legal.  You need a license to do this stuff.”

“You're changing the subject.”

I put down the lipstick and turn to run up the stairs.

Mom tries to follow me, but she's in heels.

“Megan, wait. If you're having problems, let me help you.”

“I'm fine, Mother.”

“So fine you're sleeping in coffins. I've been through breakups. Let's talk.”

I nearly trip over an armchair in the front reception area. I know Mom wouldn't be mad that I had a girlfriend, but a girlfriend I couldn't see? She'd be a shitty parent if she didn't lecture me about that. And now there's nothing she could say, nothing she would ever dream of telling me, that I haven't told myself.

If anything, I worry that she'd be too understanding. I want someone to tell me I was an idiot. I want someone to lock me in a crawl space with rats and skeletons.

Mom keeps following, but I lose her halfway down the block as I head for the Blue Line. I'm just getting to the station when it hits me that Cyn told Mom about Zoey.

Cyn told Mom.

If that's not a clue that she might have told
other
people, nothing is.

All the dread comes back, and now I feel just like I felt at nighttime again. In broad daylight. This crushing sense of fear overwhelms me to the point that I have to stop running and crouch down on the ground, curling up like a turtle retreating into its shell, right on the sidewalk of Oak Park Avenue. Cars hiss by and a dog walker steps right over me.

After a minute I force myself to stand and keep pressing on toward the train station. But the dread is still there. Maybe it will always be there, and I'll just have to live with it.

Everything
seems scary all of a sudden.

The Victorian houses I pass all make me wonder how many people had lived in them and died years ago.

The sign over the interstate beside the train says that there have been seven hundred traffic deaths on Illinois streets this year, and I think of how all roads are connected, really. The stretch of it beside me is part of one massive tangle of concrete and blacktop covering the whole damn continent, and tens of thousands of people have died on it this year.

Even the ads with elves baking cookies next to the train line maps by the benches freak me out today. Those ads have been going on for decades, and the elves didn't look young when they started. They have to be dead by now. Or they would be, if they were real to start with.

And the people who laid the tracks on which the train pulls up are probably all dead now.

As I step aboard I look around at all the other people. They are all going to die someday. How do they just go about their business? How do they get out of bed? Don't they know that someday they are going to
die
?

Maybe this is what all those other babysitters felt like when they first saw a funeral in my house.

I am going to die too.

Maybe soon.

And I brought it on myself.

It's like . . . all the things I did this summer . . . the things I called “charities” . . . they threw off the natural order of things. They made the summer turn into fall. Fair into foul. Unnatural deeds bred unnatural troubles.

The face of the grocery-store woman on the slab this morning, with the lipstick I smeared across her cheek, haunts my brain, sticks in my head like the chorus of a song. I wished her dead and now she is.

As the train moves, the noise it makes going over the rails sounds like “you're next you're next you're next you're next.”

When I see another train coming up the other side of the tracks, I keep thinking it's going to crash into us.

“Dread,” meaning “terror,” the feeling I can't
shake, was first recorded in print in the year 1200.

In 900 the word for it was “grure.”

Later on there was also “fearlac,” from 1225. Ferd, 1330.

Gastness, 1374.

Raddour, 1440.

Mom sends me texts begging me to let her help me, and I put my phone in airplane mode so I won't get any messages. The only way anyone can contact me now is if they come and find me. But it also cuts me off from the
OED
, my only reliable source of stress relief.

I think of all the people Cyn and I have taken care of. It was what they wanted but I wish we hadn't done it. All of the stock “villain at the end of her rope” lines rush through my head.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Only now, at the end, do I understand.

We are not so different, you and I.

I'll get you for this, if it's the last thing I do.

What a world. What a world.

There are things so much worse than death.

My beautiful wickedness.

Hell is murky.

When the train goes underground, the darkness is almost
more than I can take, even with the lights in the train on. It's a huge relief to climb the stairs onto Dearborn Street and see the sunlight.

In the microforms room I set up camp at a machine where I have to turn the reel manually, because the fast-forward knob isn't working right. There are better machines, but it's worth the hassle to be at one where I can see the doorway and keep an eye out for Tweed. Or Cyn. Even though I can see everyone coming in, I keep looking over my shoulder to see if one of them has materialized behind me.

Someone drops a book and I crouch down, thinking it was a gunshot.

When I read the old papers today, I feel painfully aware of the fact that everyone in them is dead. Maybe a few of the babies in the cute baby picture contests are still alive and in the nursing home. Or maybe they were until I ghosted them over the summer.

I turn the reader to maximum brightness so I can't see my reflection in the screen. I'm a little afraid it won't be my face looking back.

And almost as afraid that it will be. I can't look at myself right now.

In an issue of the
Chicago American
I find a photo of Lillian that I haven't seen before—one from the day the Wind Blew
Inn burned. She's sitting down, wearing a round hat, a sort of blazer, and a shirt. She does look like me. If Cyn showed people this picture, and then they saw some hazy, translucent version of me in Bughouse Square, they'd totally believe I was Lillian's ghost.