Chapter 10: As if Being a Teenager Wasn't Hard Enough

Murder is wrong.

My Mom, despite all her other faults, has managed to pound this basic truth into my head over the course of my childhood. And it has stuck - despite countless video game examples to the contrary. So the fact that I had ended the existence of Mr. Hickey was slightly unnerving. In fact, left to itself, the guilt could very easily have overwhelmed me and turned me into a shaking mass of anguish and remorse.

However, the fact that Mr. Hickey had already been dead for some time sort of took the edge off, you know? I hadn’t actually killed him. I’d just... re-killed him. Which made it OK.

Still, even though I was more or less OK with it didn’t mean anyone else would see it the same way. Which meant I had to get out of there, fast, before the twice-dead body of Mr. Hickey was discovered.

I made for the door, then stopped, an instant of insight sparking in my brain. Reluctantly, I crept back to the body and yanked the pencil out of his nose. It seemed the smart thing to do.

After that, I slipped out and just blended in with my fellow high school students who were spending their lunch period chatting, texting, and even eating. It was actually kinda weird for me, having just rammed a pencil up a dead guy’s nose, to try and act normal. I wanted to scream at all these kids. Warn them. Educate them. Hey! There are dead people walking around! One of them has been teaching us American history! What’s the matter with you people?

But, of course, I didn't. Instead, I went and joined Gary, who was sitting with a couple of girls in the main courtyard. In half a minute I was laughing and gossiping with them as if I’d been sitting there all period.

The rest of the school day was a predictable blur. Well, predictable to me, in any case. Decidedly unpredictable to everyone else. The bell rang for fifth period. Students herded themselves into the building like cattle, with some even mooing for added effect. I had Biology with Gary, and sure enough about five minutes later the announcement came over the loudspeaker for everyone to go home. Rumors ran rampant as kids raced away from school as fast as their feet would carry them. Someone had called in a bomb threat. Someone had started a fire. Someone had found a dead teacher waiting for them when they got to class.

I kept my mouth shut and played the role of the clueless one who’s just happy to be skipping fifth and sixth period. It was a role I was born to play. Gary was more than happy to do most of the talking for the both of us as we walked home.

“Justin Badillo said that he heard from Sarah Middleton that her friend Magda, I forget her last name, the perky one, found a poisonous snake in one of the girls' bathrooms. I texted Rachel to go in there and check, but she never got back to me.”

Rachel was Gary’s most recent girlfriend (he tended to go through them pretty quickly). I let Gary drone on, nodding or grunting when appropriate, but I wasn’t really paying any attention to him. My earlier cavalier attitude over Mr. Hickey’s demise was starting to give way to a more forceful and determined sense of paranoia. I’d left Mr. Hickey lying on the floor next to where I’d been sitting. Sure I’d removed the incriminating pencil from his brain, but he’d had a tight hold of my neck for some time, and there were sure to be microscopic patches of my DNA under his fingernails. Also, I’d been the last one to leave the room, which was another fact that wouldn’t be too hard to uncover. Add it all up, and it was as if I’d left a big neon sign over the body blinking my name and number for all to see.

I parted ways with Gary and dashed into my sweet-smelling house. Sweet-smelling because nobody who lived there was dead, a fact I no longer took for granted. Mom looked up from her loom when I entered, both surprised to find me home so soon and embarrassed to be caught at her loom. We all knew she weaved, but she took great pains to never actually allow any of us to see her at work - as if the shame of weaving was one tribulation she simply couldn’t stand to share with her family.

“Why are you home early?” She asked.

“Because I killed a teacher,” I didn’t say. It wouldn’t even have been 100% true if I had said it, but was about as honest an answer as I could have come up with. Instead, I played dumb. “I dunno. They just told us to go home.”

She eyed me suspiciously. Not that I blame her. The few times my older brother had ever come home from high school early had generally been followed up by a call from the Assistant Principal. But a part of her realized that if I were lying, it was such a dumb lie that she had bigger problems to worry about.

“OK. Well I hope everything’s alright.”

I grunted in the affirmative and headed for my room when her next sentence stopped me cold.

“Oh, someone came by to see you today.”

Why would anyone come to see me? During school hours? And think I’d be home? Warning lights flashed in my head. “Oh?” I said, trying to sound as if I didn’t care. “Who?”

“Some strange man. I told him you were at school.”

Warning lights continued to flash. “What did he look like?”

“Strange. I assumed it was a Jehovah’s Witness, you know how they constantly canvas our neighborhood. Though I didn’t know they’d started recruiting pirates.”

The warning lights were positively blinding. “Pirates?”

“Well he was wearing an eye-patch.”

There was an explosion in my head. A man with an eye-patch had come looking for me. Today, of all days. People only wear an eye-patch when they are pretending to be pirates or have a reason to hide their eye - say because instead of an eye they had a big hole in their head.

Gus had come looking for me. That could not be good.

I scurried wordlessly to my room. That Gus had knocked on my door meant two things. One, he knew who I was and how to find me. Not good. Two, someone had gone into the tomb and released him from his booby trap. Also not good.

Knowing who I was meant there was a reason to care about who I was which meant he wasn’t going to leave me alone until that reason, whatever it was, had been removed. Someone having released him from the trap meant he wasn’t working alone.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

Meanwhile, over the course of the evening, a school-wide texting frenzy spilled over to the parents, who started calling each other looking for news, trading rumors, and making wild accusations. By the end of the night, everyone in town knew without a doubt that Brian Curry, a junior with serious discipline problems, had brought a gun to school and threatened to unload on his fellow students if he wasn’t made captain of the tennis team.

Everyone, that is, except Brian Curry, who was home with Mono.

The next morning, we all assumed that school would be cancelled, but it wasn’t. Instead, school opened with an assembly in the gym. I took my seat with trepidation, scanning the room for any signs of a man with a hole in his head - and, by now, holes in much of the rest of his body. The gag-inducing stench of death that still clung to the school was especially ripe in the gym as hundreds of people filed into the room. I had come prepared and tried to mask the smell by clandestinely dabbing cologne along the side of my index finger from a bottle I’d swiped from Larry’s bureau; nonchalantly sniffing it every few seconds.

In between whiffs, I looked around at the mass of humanity and searched for a dead man. I wondered if Gus had known Mr. Hickey. Then I wondered who else here was dead. I knew someone in the office was a corpse, of course, but were there more? What about kids? I tried to think of any students I’d come across who hadn’t seemed to age in the last year or so. You had to think that being a dead teenager would be difficult to hide. You certainly couldn’t stay at the same school for all four years without people openly wondering why you weren’t growing. You’d have to keep moving from school to school, always the new kid. I imagined it would be an incredibly lonely life.

My very deep, mature thoughts about life as a teenaged corpse were swept aside when I caught Zoe’s eyes a few rows in front of me. She smiled and waved, and I waved back. For an instant everything was normal again. She had smiled at me. I wondered if it meant anything. Maybe she was worried about me after yesterday. Maybe by waving at me, she was telling me that she was interested in going out, and that I should hurry up and make my move. Maybe her smile was meant to ease my obvious anxiety over breaking the friend barrier. She was ready, holding the door open, and she wanted me to know, by smiling and waving at me, that I would be welcome in the Boyfriend Box. But then I realized that though she'd smiled and waved, she hadn’t actually done the thumb/texting motion, and I wondered if that meant that she had, in fact, moved on and was letting me know that she had no need to communicate any unspoken desires to me. But then I wondered if the fact that she hadn't done the thumb/texting thing actually meant she was confident in our relationship and felt we didn't need little signals between us. Or maybe not having a signal was, itself, a signal that it was too late for signals and there was no hope for a relationship.

Then I wondered if I wasn’t reading too much into it.

When everyone was as settled down as they were ever going to be, Principal Bob took to the microphone and calmly told everyone in a fuzzy, reverberating voice that uhm... Mr. Hickey had uhm... suffered a uhm... heart attack yesterday uhm... during lunch period, and that uhm... Brian Curry had nothing to uhm... do with it, especially uhm... since he was uhm... out with Mono, so would uhm... everyone please take down the uhm... inflammatory messages from his uhm... Snapchat page?

Principal Bob wasn’t the best public speaker.

Most of those assembled gasped and murmured with both shock and awe, but seemed to buy what Principal Bob was selling. Not me. I found his story suspect, both because of the strange way he rubbed his fingers through his goatee when he announced the news and the fact that I knew it wasn’t true. Sure, maybe Mr. Hickey had died from a heart attack some time ago. You know, the first time. But how would a heart attack explain the black goo that had sprayed all over the classroom from when I killed him the second time? They had to have noticed the black goo. Someone had to have cleaned it up if they expected to use the classroom today.

Principal Bob was covering it up. For some reason, that seemed important.

The day proceeded as normally as one could expect a day to proceed when all anyone did in every class was gossip about Mr. Hickey. Even with the mystery of the early dismissal solved and poor Brian Curry off the hook, it was the hot topic of the day and even Mr. Hickey’s fellow teachers found themselves drawn into class-wide discussions. A few of the more noble teachers used the opportunity to talk about the advantages of a healthy diet in reducing the chance of heart disease. A few of the less noble ones hinted that they wanted his room, because it was along the south side of the school and got a lot of sunlight during the day.

I spent the first three periods seeing Gus’s Swiss cheese-like body behind every door and inside every open locker. Even with my secret smelling finger, the overall odor of death was still too strong for me to handle, so I continued to sit by the windows, which continued to annoy the rest of my classmates. I almost convinced myself to give it up and sit in my usual perfect-Zoe-stalking spot in third period, especially since she was wearing her mother’s vintage leather jacket and looked absolutely stunning, but I just couldn’t take the chance that she’d try to talk to me and I’d be unable to do anything but vomit in return.

The class I was truly dreading, of course, was fourth period American History. I didn’t want to go back into that room. You know, the room where I’d re-killed Mr. Hickey. I knew they had cleaned it up and all, but after experiencing the full brunt of my newfound super-smelling ability, I wondered if there were any other surprises in store.

There was one.

We had a substitute.