The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [73]
Jerome and I didn’t dance together, exactly, but we did remain side by side. Every once in a while, he would (seemingly accidentally) touch my waist or my arm. Anything more than that would have been too much of a statement, but I felt I got the message. He also had prefect jobs to do, so he would regularly disappear to refill bowls of food or tend the bar. That was another strange thing—the bar. An actual bar, with actual beer. We had tickets that allowed us two pints each. I have absolutely no idea how this was managed. Jerome had tried to explain it to me—how even though the law was that you had to be eighteen to drink in a pub, the circumstances varied, and at a closed event with teachers somehow this was legal. I got one of my beers, but I was jumping around and sweating too much to drink it. I would have vomited instantly. But two beers seemed to be nothing to the average English student. Everyone else gulped them down, and I was pretty sure that the two-ticket rule was not being very strictly enforced.
As the night wore on, there was a not-unpleasant funk in the air, the scent of beer and dancing. I started to forget any time I wasn’t at this place, with the lights strobing against the stained glass and the stone walls, the teachers in the shadows, checking their phones out of sheer boredom.
In fact, at first I thought he was a teacher. He came up behind Jazza. The suit, the bald head.
“What’s the matter?” Jaz yelled happily.
Of course, she couldn’t see him, even though he was right at her back, standing right up against her. He stroked her shoulder lightly with the tips of his fingers. I saw her twitch a bit and flick at her wig. He stepped around and placed himself between Jazza and me.
“Come outside,” he said. “Do it now.”
I began to back away, very slowly.
“Where are you going?” she yelled.
“Bathroom,” I said quickly.
“Are you ill? You look—”
“No,” I yelled back, shaking my head.
Leaving that room was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I felt the heat of everyone at my back. Outside, it was cold—bright cold, a lifting cold. Every single streetlight was on. Every light in every window. Everything to battle against the dark of the sky, the dark that went up and up and up forever. This thin little halo so low to the ground. The wind was kicking up a fury, spinning leaves and trash around us, and I remember thinking, This is it. I am walking into forever. It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.
Our footsteps were so loud on the pavement. Well, mine were. I don’t think he had any. And his voice didn’t echo between the buildings. He walked me up to the road, and we walked along beside all the closed shops.
“Just fancied a chat,” he said. “There aren’t many people I can talk to. I’m not sure if you remember where we first met. It was at the Flowers and Archers. The night of the second murder.”
I had no memory of this at all.
“It’s quite an unusual ability, what you have,” he said. “Part genetics, part dumb luck, something you can never talk about to any rational person. I remember the feeling.”
“You were—”
“Oh, yes. I was like you. It’s hard, I know. Upsetting. The dead aren’t supposed to be among the living. It offends the natural order of things. All I ever wanted to do in life was make sense of it. And now, here I am . . . part of the puzzle.”
He smiled at me.
I was cold from the inside out. My hair was cold. My thoughts were cold. It was as if every cell in my body stopped doing its cellular duty and stiffened in place. My blood became still and had no life-giving power, and my breath crystallized and pierced my lungs like shards of glass.
“Have you ever met any more like us?” he asked. “Or are you all alone in the world?”
Some impulse