But seeing the dead lady wasn't the worst of it.
When I took the glasses off, the person standing next to Shelley disappeared. I don't mean,
disappeared
as in "became too fuzzy to make out."
Shelley
had become fuzzy, but I could still see her well enough to be able to know it was her. I could even make out the movement of the paramedics putting the stretcher that held the body of the dead woman into the ambulance. But there was no trace of the person who'd been standing right next to Shelley.
I couldn't help myself. Scared as I was, I put the glasses back on. Looking, when my better sense warned me not to. Like poking at a zit that you just know is only going to get worse for the poking, but you stupidly can't resist.
Yep, someone was definitely there who wasn't there when I wasn't wearing the glasses.
He was dressed in a suit and carried a briefcase—a youngish business executive or lawyer is what he looked like. While I had the glasses on, he was just one of the many walking to work who had paused to rubberneck an accident.
He turned, slowly, as though he'd become aware that I was staring at him. He kind of leaned in and gave a little wave at me, the way you do when you're trying to get the attention of someone you suspect is too distracted to notice you.
I backed away.
"You can see me!" he said, sounding delighted.
I must have looked scared because he asked, "What, am I beginning to leak or something?"
He'd been fine a moment before, but as soon as he asked, the left side of his head caved in, and the front of his shirt grew bloody.
My breath escaped in an involuntary hiss.
He set the briefcase down and readjusted his head. The blood faded and disappeared. "Sometimes," he explained, "when I forget to concentrate—"
I took the glasses off again, and he disappeared and I could no longer hear his voice.
Which was no good, because I knew he was there, whether or not I could see him. You can't undo knowledge.
I put the glasses back on.
"...fast cars," the man was saying to me, "
vroom, vroom.
Everybody in a hurry. That's what happened to me. Except, of course, in my case I was the one doing the hurrying. A bit of advice for you: Never get into an argument with an SUV. Just the same," he went on, "it's fascinating. As they say: Like not being able to take your eyes off a car wreck." Then, sounding just like Shelley, he asked, "What?" and patted himself on the chest area. "Is the steering wheel column sticking out again?"
I was having trouble breathing. If it hadn't been for all the now-you-see-it/now-you-don't nonsense with the glasses, I would have assumed that the reason I was able to see dead people was because I, myself, was currently on the boundary of life and death, dying of a heart attack. Not, of course, that I would be having a heart attack except for what I was seeing. I managed to squeak out, "Why are you still here?" since the lady had walked into the light only moments after dying.
While the dead lawyer or accountant or whatever he was paused to consider, Shelley assumed that I was speaking to her. "You're right," she said with a heavy sigh. "We should be heading off to school. I wish we'd gone without seeing that, so we'd still think that poor lady had survived."
But the dead guy hadn't been considering: He'd been concentrating. "Listen!" he told me. "A siren. I bet there's been another accident. I'm going to go take a look." He picked up his briefcase and took off at a fast pace, not quite running, as though mindful of keeping a dignified appearance despite his excitement.
"Wait!" I said.
The dead guy ignored me, and Shelley said, "What is it, Wendy? You're acting weird, you know that?"
Yet again I took the glasses off. I tried handing them to her. "See that guy?" I asked.
"Which?"
Of course she wouldn't be able to see him until she put the glasses on, and in the time it would take me to explain, he'd be lost in the crowd. Then Shelley would look at me like I was crazy instead of just weird.
Maybe there were more dead people in the crowd, which I could find out by looking around
with,
then
without,
my glasses. That was assuming that dead people as a class were curious about car accidents, and that it wasn't just this one guy because that was how he'd died.
Or maybe there weren't any dead people at all. Maybe my mind had taken a sharp turn into a different time zone, the way my grandmother's had.
There are some things you can't tell, even to a best friend.
I wiped the sunglasses on the hem of my shirt, as though that was why I'd taken them off.
"Never mind," I said.
As I walked along with Shelley, pretending my world hadn't suddenly taken a detour into the bizarre, I tried to look attentive while she chattered about how we'd better hurry up because we were going to be significantly later than the other late kids. I was only half listening, thinking.
What I was thinking was that I had two questions: Who in the world had made these glasses? And why?
They had to be some kind of brand-new high-tech scientific breakthrough, I decided. Probably part of a secret government project, because there certainly hadn't been anything in the news about such a discovery. I knew that for a fact because Bill, my mother's current husband, thought world events made a suitable topic for supper-table conversation. He knew I never watched anything but movies and MTV, and Gia, the wicked stepsister, got her news from afternoon TV. Bill wanted us to be well-informed members of society. And he certainly hadn't mentioned anything about glasses that let you see dead people.
And wherever the glasses were originally from, how had they ended up on my front lawn?
Okay, okay, that's three questions—math isn't my best subject.
Whatever. The more I thought about that last question, the more I doubted my previous conclusion.
Those glasses didn't look like the kind of thing you would expect a bunch of scientists to make in their first attempt to peek into the afterlife.
I
would expect such a device to look like heavy-duty goggles, not like the kind of cheesy fashion attire you could find at the dollar store. Even as I saw Shelley looking in my direction to make sure I was paying attention, even as we passed other people on the street who didn't glance at me, I thought:
These glasses were meant to avoid attracting attention.
I, of course, did not want to attract attention, either—and I most certainly didn't want to see dead
people. I simply wanted to be able to make it through the school day without walking into walls or falling down stairs, neither of which was a sure thing with my own unaided vision. My mother would be mad enough about the broken frames if we had to go get a new pair after dinner; I did
not
want to call her at work and ask her to drop everything to come pick me up now because I couldn't tell which way faced front in my classrooms.
At the office, Mrs. Pincelli, the secretary, gave us late passes—after giving us her fishy eye for straggling in after all the other kids on our bus had managed to come in within a couple minutes of one another. But Mrs. Pincelli isn't happy unless she's able to give the fishy eye to
some
body about
some
thing, so I didn't take it to heart.
"You going to be okay?" Shelley asked as we left our backpacks in our lockers and got out the books we'd need for morning classes. She had English lit first period; I had to go to biology on the second floor.
"I'll be fine," I told her. "Actually, these lenses let me see just as well as my regular glasses." I still didn't mention the bonus special effects.
Shelley asked, "Even indoors?"
That was another question, now that she pointed
it out: Why didn't the sunglasses darken the indoors the way normal sunglasses would have?
"I'll be okay," I assured her.
"Even with Mrs. Robellard?" Shelley pressed, though now she was grinning.
Mrs. Robellard, we had figured out long ago, must have inhaled the fumes of too many embalmed frogs over her thirty or forty years as biology teacher at James Fenimore Cooper High. There was speculation that the jar that sat on the back shelf and was labeled
PICKLED PIG'S HEART
really contained her own.
"See you at lunch," I said, and started toward the stairs. At least the halls were deserted, just in case I had to take the glasses off. Of course, I wouldn't be inclined to take them off unless I started seeing dead people again; and I assumed there wouldn't be too many of those hanging around the school halls.
Even on the second floor, where—with most of the classroom doors closed—it's creepily dim, I could see perfectly well.
Then I opened the door to room 237.
The windows were open because it was such a warm day, and my late pass fluttered on top of my books like it was seriously toying with the idea of flying away and sending me running off to chase it all across the classroom.
When I looked up after slapping down that skittish late pass so it couldn't get away, I saw the ugliest person in the world straightening up from leaning over the desk at the front of the room. I thought,
Either something truly bizarre has happened to Mrs. Robellard or we have the Wicked Witch of the West as a substitute teacher today.
This woman had gray and stringy hair that hung down to her shoulders. Her nose was crooked. And could it possibly be? Yes, definitely: a wart at the tip. The eyes were red rimmed, with the whites more yellow than white. And malevolent as she glared at me.
There's old. There's ugly. There's mean. But this went beyond that. The woman standing by the desk gave new meaning to the expression "made my skin crawl."
"Well, Wendy. How nice of you to grace us with your presence."
There was the scrape of a chair, and I saw Mrs. Robellard get up from behind the desk and step around the witchy-looking person to confront me.
Well, for good or ill, at least the newcomer hadn't shoved her into an oven and eaten her.
"I, I, I..." I couldn't get any further than that, so I just handed her the note.
While the hideous stranger glowered at the interruption, Mrs. Robellard gave a suspicious "Hmph!" then said, "Do you have a late pass for your homework, too?"
"No," I managed to mumble, and I got my homework out from between the pages of the biology book. Because the book is a bit shorter than a sheet of paper, the bottom edge was crumpled.
Mrs. Robellard eyed the page dubiously. "You may take your seat," she told me because I was just standing there, gawking at the other woman, at the way her dry, wrinkled skin, dotted with nasty age spots, hung loose from her arms. I thought,
If I was that old, I'd wear long sleeves, regardless of the weather.
But this woman had on a little spaghetti-strap top as though she was the age of the students and not about a hundred years old. Beneath the top, her boobs—
She isn't wearing a bra!
I realized in horror—drooped nearly to her waist.
"Wendy." Mrs. Robellard's voice was sharp. "Sit down. Read chapter twelve. Quiz starts at a quarter after. And take off those sunglasses. We are not in Hollywood."
"Ahm," I said, "I broke my other pair. These are prescription lenses."
"If you say so." She'd seen me wearing glasses from September to May, but she curled her lip
suspiciously. Then she waved me to my seat, and sat back down at her desk to resume her conversation with the old witch woman.
I took my seat, but I couldn't stop staring at the class visitor. I leaned to my right, to Franklin Yeager, since Tiffanie Mills, who normally sits in front of me, apparently wasn't in today.
"Who's that?" I hissed to Franklin.
"Who?" Franklin whispered back as though there was more than one new person in the class.
"With Mrs. Robellard."
Franklin gave me his version of Mrs. Pincelli's fishy look. "You mean Tiffanie?" he asked.
"No," I said in disgust and inclined my head toward the front of the room, toward the desk. I know Mrs. Robellard is old herself and not exactly on the attractive side, but how could she stand to have her face so close to that other woman's?
Franklin just shrugged and shook his head and went back to the reading.
Tiffanie?
What in the world was he talking about, Tiffanie? Tiffanie wasn't even in today. He must have misunderstood my question. I wondered what he thought I'd asked:
Who's the best-looking person in the school? Who's the most popular? Who do all the girls wish they were, and all the boys wish they could date?
Something, however, made me push my glasses down my nose a bit, to squint over the top.
Sure enough, heading back to the desk in front of mine after finishing her talk with Mrs. Robellard, wearing that same spaghetti-strapped little red top, was Tiffanie Mills.
Tiffanie Mills is the most popular girl at James Fenimore Cooper High, so she isn't what I'd call a personal friend. That was probably the only thing that saved me from screaming "Tiffanie! What happened to you?" and making a total moron of myself. Which is good, because my status at school is already semimoron, and I wouldn't have liked to have committed myself completely to the camp that includes those kids who are most likely to end up working at fast-food franchises or being featured on
America's Most Wanted.
I checked out the other kids. Nobody else seemed affected by my glasses, just Tiffanie.
I only dropped my biology book once before I got it opened in front of me on the desk. I had no idea which chapter Mrs. Robellard had said to read, and probably was incapable of finding it, anyway, so I just flipped the pages till I was about halfway into the book, and then pretended to read.
What in the world was going on with Tiffanie?
I glanced up once more, first over the tops of my glasses, then through the lenses. Tiffanie was just flouncing into her seat in front of me.
Believe me, flouncing takes on a whole new meaning when it's done by someone who looks like your great-grandmother wearing strappy sandals, a skimpy skirt, and no bra.