wanted to say more to Andrea but decided to wait for privacy. I moved on down the hall oblivious to the usual rattle and chant of students changing classes. I was further oblivious as to where I was headed. Which classroom? What subject? What to do about Andrea? Suddenly there was a tug on my arm.
“You’re going the wrong way,” she said. “English is upstairs.”
The hallway was thinning. I held my hand over my mouth when I spoke in hopes that no one would notice. “I could feel that. When you touched me.”
“I seem to be corporeal in some respects.”
“Seem to be what?”
“You felt my hand on your arm.”
“I did.”
The hallway was now empty. A very bright light was coming in through the glass doors at the end of the hall. It suddenly seemed like we were in a tunnel. I didn’t like those implications at all.
“Oh crap.”
“You keep saying that.”
“This time I really mean it. I’m not ...?”
Andrea tugged at my arm again. Her smile was different this time — softer, sadder. “No, you’re not. You are here in high school. You really are.
“I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between death and school. In fact, it’s one of my fears — that I’ll die and wake up wherever you go to and I’ll still be in school. Still listening to Mr. Holman drone on about the Sumerians.”
“When the Sumerians died, they expected to need all their belongings in the next world.” Andrea seemed inexplicably knowledgeable about ancient cultures. “They knew it was going to be a gloomy place under the earth with roots and dirt and worms, I guess. So they took along what they could. This included oxen and servants.”
“How did they do that?”
“Those left behind killed them and piled up the bodies by the burial chamber.”
“It must have been messy. How do you know this stuff, anyway?”
“I have no idea. But I do know they were wrong. The Sumerians didn’t know squat about the afterlife.”
“You’re still freaking me out, you know.”
“You need to get to English.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be there, but if there are no empty seats, I might just hover.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Try to keep an open mind. No labels. No judgments. First impressions are not always right.”
“I know that,” I said to the door and then turned the handle, apologized to Mrs. Dalway about being late, and went to take a seat in the back of the room.
Mrs. Dalway was launching an animated discussion about the witches in Macbeth. All the desks were filled with student bodies. Andrea walked to the side of the room and sat at one of the computers. She was typing on the keyboard, and I was sure others would notice. The computer’s sound was off, but I saw images on the screen. I leaned hard backwards to see what she was doing, and it seemed that she was checking her email.
Mrs. Dalway picked up her voluminous volume of Shakespeare and, with great authority, read the lines of a character she called “Witch Number Two”:
Fillet of fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s string,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For charm of pow’rful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
CHAPTER THREE
When I was twelve I had a skateboarding accident. My father had this assessment of my skateboarding style: “Simon, you are reckless and lacking any semblance of good judgment.” He probably said this because I was reckless and lacking any semblance of good judgment. But I had not yet learned to practise astral projection, so I was using a skateboard to expand my boundaries of possibilities.
My parents were already busy professional people at this point in my life — heck, they had been like that since I was in diapers. In fact, I think, my birth was an accident, I was an accident, and perhaps that accident-mode was following me as I grew up. Most of us do not like to admit that there are parents in the world who probably should not have been parents, but I think you could apply this to mine. They were born for real estate and corporate bonds. They had no great commitment to perpetuate the species or to raise me. They lavished money on babysitters, and as a result I had some of the best and some of the worst.
It was a babysitting wonderland until about eleven, and by then I was good and pissed off at my parents for trying so hard to ignore my existence. I don’t know what form of wisdom had kicked in, but they were wise enough not to have a second child. I expect they believed, by this point, that their first one was a bit of a failure or at least a freak (with his fart bombs, his comic books, his interest in the paranormal, and his pitiful grades at school).
The skateboard was a fantasy tool for me. Ozzie (short for Osmond) was still part of my life in those days and as good as it got when it came to having a loyal but weird friend for a weird kid. My parents never said much to Oz because they didn’t like him. They said he had a funny smell — it was the foreign cheeses he ate with much gusto. They said he was a bad influence — he had introduced me to cracking my knuckles and skateboarding. They said I should get other friends.
Pretty much all of my friends up to that point had been imaginary. Or as I explained it, they existed on an alternate plane of existence. Which didn’t mean they weren’t real; they just weren’t here.
Oz showed me videos of young, fearless kids not much older than us doing death-defying feats, and I knew I could do those things. I wanted to fly on my skateboard. It was inconceivable that I could be injured.
We started out on steep streets racing straight down the white line towards ill-placed stop signs. No slalom, no turns at all, just straight cowabunga-screaming gravity-fed speed. I liked the way the wind felt in my hair and the sound it made in my ears. I used my mental powers (the ones I refused to activate in school) to will traffic to let me slide across the intersection and up the driveway of the house situated there. Sometimes there were car horns heralding my triumph, sometimes skidding tires and shouts of appreciation or rage.
I always found a lawn or at least a flowerbed to end my spree. I was that good. I was gold.
By the age of twelve, I had the baggy clothing and an array of scars. I had experienced road rash on nearly every inch of my body. I had a nasty attitude towards anyone who looked at me funny when I was in skater mode. Oz had somehow sobered himself up into being more cautious, but I was an adrenalin junkie who didn’t mind
