Seven
I waited, as I said, had now become my custom. And again, as I said, I did not have a problem with it. In fact, I was happy to do it. My only concern was what Susannah would think of it when she found out.
At the moment, she was calmly putting her notes away (she took good notes, I noticed), utterly unfazed by the ruckus she was the cause of. The class had split into little globules of people, and what each one thought of her was easy to tell. Even for someone who couldn't supernaturally pick up vibrations or hear the whispering going on. I suppose you would expect me to be bored of the 'drama' (I think that's the word) of these high-school scholars, but I never agreed with that view of the 'younger generation' – whichever century it was in – in the first place. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I never left that generation, but I think all those years of observing count for something. Yes, young adults make everything and every emotion bigger and grander than they would ten years down the line, but that doesn't mean that they're all to be clubbed into a collective personality. Any one who tries to do that has no sense of the greatness of human beings.
Which included, apparently, these people who were acting very herd-like at the moment. Susannah cast her eyes over the most hostile group, and with no change in expression, carried on until the girl in front of her turned around and demanded, "Am I supposed to be grateful to you, or something, for what you said to Debbie?"
Clearly sensitive.
Susannah didn't even look taken aback. She got up and said, "You aren't supposed to be anything, as far as I'm concerned."
Dios. I'm going to stop stating the obvious now – I can only say how characteristic her every action was so many times. I am confident you know by now that Susannah rebuffed people when she first them, and not because she was a bad or crude person. I don't know why – probably a defense mechanism. Maybe it was also the Brooklyn factor. I went to New York frequently – materialization was excellent sometimes – and I could see why living there could make her that way.
The girl, meanwhile, blocked her way. "But that's why you did it, right? Defended the albino? Because you felt sorry for me?"
Susannah was as calm as the girl was angry. Unable to move past her, she reached for her coat with deliberate slowness. "I did it because Debbie is a troll." (I couldn't help wishing I could keep a notebook to write down all these words and phrases in. Troll. It was like hearing someone be called a gnome.)
The girl was as amused as I was. She wouldn't let herself show it, but her mouth betrayed her. Probably to hide it (as girls do, never understood that), she said with more indignant head movement than was probably necessary, "I can fight my own battles, you know. I don't need your help, New York."
"Fine with me, Carmel."
And then she was grinning. "It's Cee Cee."
Susannah looked pleasantly surprised. "What's Cee Cee?"
"My name. I'm Cee Cee. Welcome to the Mission Academy."
They shook hands, and then Cee Cee, without pausing, yanked Susannah by the hand out the door, immediately launching into something about an article for the school paper, or school literary review.
I let them go ahead, laughing at the bewildered look on Susannah's face. I wanted to get a feel of the place – not a ghost feel, a normal feel. It had been a while since I'd been inside a high school, and I was curious to see how it might have changed since the 1980's – which was the last time I'd visited.
"Are you or aren't you going to hook up with her, man?" was what I heard from the first group, all boys. I couldn't help rolling my eyes as I walked on – the only thing different there from 15 years ago was that the speaker was talking on a mobile phone. The few boys around him guffawed and exchanged high-fives – completely not different from what would have happened 15 years ago.
Past them, another group of boys were talking about something called 'Super Mario Bros'. I assumed it was something to do with the popular culture these days – a TV show or video game or song of some sort. From all the talk about coins and someone called Princess Peach, my bet would be on the video game.
The group of girls who'd been giving Susannah the dirty looks was talking about something called 90210, and not in the sense of the zip code.
Another group seemed to be talking about music – "I can't believe you still listen to Britney! And you haven't bought The Cure's new album? We can't be friends!"
Captain Planet, Moby, George Bush and Al Gore, clothes, parties, surfing…the list went on. I had no idea what most of it meant, except the Bush-Gore issue, which I'd been keenly following for weeks. I picked out a few of the things that caught my interest – names like Pink Floyd and Madonna and Captain Planet – to look into later.
What caught my interest right now, however, was something that hadn't changed for as long back as I could remember. Popular culture changed all the time, but the behavior of people who influenced it and were influenced by it didn't. I don't know what it was about high school, but teenagers always divided themselves up into groups - as if their different interests divided them as people too. I seriously thought that the entire schooling system needed to be revised. Putting a lot of people the same age together for 6 hours everyday was unnatural, and seemed to lead to many unhealthy results. They forgot that they were all human, living in the same place, going through the same things.
I looked over at Susannah, wondering if she thought the same as everyone else. It was impossible to tell. At the moment, her new friend Cee Cee had her engrossed in conversation as she talked and laughed about her paper. As I watched, Cee Cee laughed out, loud and infectiously, and was immediately shushed by a novice. I smiled. Susannah would be all right if she had someone with a sense of humor around.
Math, then Social Studies…by lunch, I'd come to the conclusion that if Heather Chambers had somehow grown up somewhere else, home-schooled, on a movie set, anywhere, she might not have died. Anywhere she might have had adults around more often to tell her that whatever it was that had seemed so big, wouldn't matter to her even three weeks from the day. I still didn't know what it was that had caused her to kill herself; but judging by the way her group (the group that kept talking about her memorial service) behaved, it didn't matter. They obsessed about everything – from said memorial service to nail colors, sometimes in the same sentence. That kind of mentality could easily push someone prone to mental illness over the edge.
Disgusted, I broke away from observing them once I'd heard enough, in time to see Susannah throw out a fried chip. I laughed, walking over as the matron scolded her about the gulls that immediately flocked to her. The moment I entered their consciousness, they took off with the food in their mouths. Susannah, who'd been flapping at them, looked relieved. She bore her chastisement quietly, and then rolled her eyes the moment the nun's back was turned. Then she returned to watching her brothers as the people around her talked. I followed her gaze to David, who caught my attention. I listened. "So I chart Max's heart-rate with the assistance of the electrodes and the heart rate monitor on the treadmill acts like an ECG…"
"Oh, that's Bryce Martinson. No he's not on drugs. He's just sad, you know, 'cause his girlfriend died over break." The ear that I'd been keeping out for the conversation surrounding Susannah perked up. I tuned David out and followed their gaze (they really needed to be less obvious) to a boy who was sitting next to the (dozing, as usual) oldest brother, staring out at the sea a bit like an idiot. Forget about the gazes of Susannah's group, he barely noticed, much less acknowledged the people, mostly young ladies, greeting him.
"Really? How'd she die?"
"Poof a booye in ha bway," said the boy from earlier, McTavish, around a mouthful of chips. I was quite sure he meant that she put a bullet in her brain. I was also quite sure I knew whom they were talking about. He swallowed and said more clearly, "Blew the back of her head away."
You could practically hear the gears whirring in Susannah's mind, but she was doing an excellent job schooling her expression, playing the curious listener and nothing more. Good thing too, because people were still observing her like they would a celebrity.
"God, Adam. How cold can you get?" said a girl in the group.
"Hey. I didn't like her when she was alive. I'm not gonna say I liked her now just because she's dead. In fact, if anything, I hate her more. I heard we're all going to have to do the Stations of the Cross for her on Wednesday."
I know it sounds terrible, but if you consider everything known about the girl so far, not to mention McTavish's age, you really could not blame him.
The girl, Cee Cee answered in disgust, and then explained to Susannah why the Stations of the Cross was necessary, and then she and Adam had a tiny banter over the fate of suicides. She called him 'stupid', and it didn't sound like an insult. It was all more amusing than morbid, really.
'Why'd she kill herself?' Susannah asked, still sounding only mildly curious. We hung on the words that followed.
"Because of Bryce, of course. He broke up with her."
"I heard he did it at the mall. Can you believe it?"
"Yeah, on Christmas Eve. They were Christmas shopping with each other, and she pointed to this diamond ring in the window at Bergdof's, and was like, 'I want that.' And I guess he freaked – you know, it was clearly an engagement ring – and broke up with her on the spot."
"And so she went home and shot herself?" Susannah asked flatly, an eyebrow raised. I was cynical too, but more disgusted that the details were known to everybody – rumored or not. That group Chambers had belonged to had clearly put themselves under some kind of social microscope. I wondered if the Mission Academy had a school counselor. Probably not.
"Not then," Cee Cee answered. "She tried to get back together with him for a while. She called him every ten minutes until finally his mother told her not to call anymore."
The story went on, but I don't think it necessary to go into the details. I was beginning to feel increasingly sorry for everyone involved. Chambers had clearly been severely disturbed, and no one around her had had enough knowledge to diagnose the problem and get help for her. Instead, this boy, Martinson, and his family had pulled away – quite understandably, because they did not know what they were doing, and had just accelerated the decline. It was a textbook case, and tragic because this kind had been prevalent decades ago, and shouldn't have been then.
The terrifying thing was, the girl's ghost couldn't possibly be helped now. As I said, ghosts tend to preserve the state we were in when we died. She had been at the worst stage possible, and it hadn't been enough. No Stations of the Cross was going to help her, or the people she was going to target. I felt the vibrations humming around me and kept a tight hold on them.
"Yeah, well," McTavish was saying. "That was a gross error on the part of the Martinsons. As soon as she heard Bryce was out of the country, she pulled the trigger, and blew out the back of her skull, and bits of her brain and stuff stuck to the Christmas lights the Martinsons had strung up."
All right. That was probably not part of the broadcasting done by Chambers' group. That was probably not even true, and just an embellishment inspired by a video game or a film.
"The empty chair in homeroom," Susannah said suddenly. "The one by whats-her-name…" Everyone looked very amused at this, but she didn't notice. "…Kelly. That was the dead girl's seat, wasn't it?"
"Yeah," responded one of the girls, the one who'd found it so unbelievable that the Martinson boy had 'broken up' with Heather Chambers at the mall. That's why we thought it was so weird when you walked past it. It was like you knew that was where Heather had sat. We all thought maybe you were psychic or something –"
This was so ironic, I couldn't help laughing a little. Susannah simply smiled and shook her head. I couldn't tell whether that was because she felt the irony or not. I could not guess at what she was thinking until she turned her gaze to the Martinson boy. Then I could guess, because we were probably thinking the same thing. Except for the fact that my concern included her.
