I used the boys’ room first because all at once I really had to pee, but when I was standing at the urinal, I couldn’t squeeze out even a single drop. So I went out, holding my backpack by the strap instead of wearing it. I had never been touched by a dead person, not once, I didn’t know if they could touch, but if Therriault tried to touch me—or grab me—I intended to hit him with a sackful of books.

Only he was gone.

A week went by, then two. I relaxed, figuring he had to be past his sell-by date.

I was on the YMCA junior swim team, and on a Saturday in late May we had our final practice for an upcoming meet in Brooklyn, which would take place the following weekend. Mom gave me ten dollars for something to eat afterwards and told me—as she always did—to make sure I locked my locker so no one would steal the money or my watch (although why anyone would want to steal a lousy Timex I have no idea). I asked her if she was coming to the meet. She looked up from the manuscript she was reading and said, “For the fourth time, Jamie, yes. I’m coming to the meet. It’s on my calendar.”

It was only the second time I’d asked (or maybe the third), but I didn’t tell her that, only kissed her on the cheek and headed down the hall to the elevator. When the doors opened, Therriault was in there, grinning his grin and staring at me from his good eye and the stretched-out one. There was a piece of paper pinned to his shirt. The suicide note was on it. The note was always on it and the blood spattered across it was always fresh.

“Your mother has cancer, Champ. From the cigarettes. She’ll be dead in six months.”

I was frozen in place with my mouth hanging open.

The elevator doors rolled shut. I made some kind of sound —a squeak, a moan, I don’t know—and leaned back against the wall so I wouldn’t fall down.

They have to tell you the truth, I thought. My mother is going to die.

But then my head cleared a little and a better thought came. I grasped it like a drowning man clutching at a floating piece of wood. But maybe they only have to tell the truth if you ask them questions. Otherwise, maybe they can tell you any kind of fake shit they want.

I didn’t want to go to swim practice after that, but if I didn’t Coach might call Mom to ask where I’d been. Then she would want to know where I had been, and what was I going to tell her? That I was afraid that Thumper would be waiting for me on the corner? Or in the lobby of the Y? Or (somehow this was the most horrible) in the shower room, unseen by naked boys rinsing off the chlorine?

Was I going to tell her she had fucking cancer?

So I went, and as you might guess, I swam for shit. Coach told me to get my head on straight, and I had to pinch my armpit to keep from bursting into tears. I had to pinch it really hard.

When I got home, Mom was still deep in her manuscript. I hadn’t seen her smoking since Liz left, but I knew she sometimes drank when I wasn’t there—with her authors and various editors—so I sniffed at her when I kissed her, and didn’t smell anything but a little perfume. Or maybe face cream, since it was Saturday. Some kind of lady stuff, anyway.

“Are you coming down with a cold, Jamie? You dried off well after swimming, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Mom, you’re not smoking anymore, are you?”

“So that’s it.” She put aside the manuscript and stretched. “No, I haven’t had one since Liz left.”

Since you kicked her out, I thought.

“Have you been to the doctor lately? To get a checkup?”

She looked at me quizzically. “What’s this about? You’ve got that crease between your brows.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re the only parent I’ve got. If something happened to you, I couldn’t exactly go live with Uncle Harry, could I?”

She made a funny face at that, then laughed and hugged me. “I’m fine, kiddo. Had the old annual checkup two months ago, as a matter of fact. Passed with flying colors.”

And she looked okay. In the pink, as the saying goes. Hadn’t lost any more weight that I could see, and wasn’t coughing her brains out. Although cancer didn’t just have to be in a person’s throat or lungs, I knew that.

“Well…that’s good. I’m glad.”

“That makes two of us. Now make your mom a cup of coffee and let me finish this manuscript.”

“Is it a good one?”

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

“Better than Mr. Thomas’s Roanoke books?”

“Much better, but not as commercial, alas.”

“Can I have a cup of coffee?”

She sighed. “Half a cup. Now let me read.”

32

During my last test in math that year, I looked out the window and saw Kenneth Therriault standing on the basketball court. He did his grinning-and-beckoning thing. I looked back at my paper, then looked up again. Still there, and closer. He turned his head so I could get a good look at the purple-black crater, plus the bone-fangs sticking up all around it. I looked down at my paper again, and when I looked up the third time, he was gone. But I knew he’d be back. He wasn’t like the others. He was nothing like the others.

By the time Mr. Laghari told us to turn in our papers, I still hadn’t solved the last five problems. I got a D- on the test, and there was a note at the top: This is disappointing, Jamie. You must do better. What do I say at least once in every class? What he said was that if you fell behind in math, you could never catch up.

Math wasn’t so special that way, although Mr. Laghari might think so. It was true for most classes. As if to underline the point, I bricked a history test later that day. Not because Therriault was standing at the blackboard or anything, but because I couldn’t stop thinking he might be standing at the blackboard.

I got the idea he wanted me to do badly in my courses. You could laugh at that, but there’s another old saying that goes it’s not paranoid if it’s true. A few lousy tests weren’t going to stop me from passing everything, not that late in the year, and then it would be summer vacation, but what about next year, if he was still hanging around?

Also, what if he was getting stronger? I didn’t want to believe that, but just the fact that he was still there suggested it might be true. That it probably was true.

Telling somebody might help, and Mom was the logical choice, she’d believe me, but I didn’t want to scare her. She’d already been scared enough, when she thought the agency was going to go under and she wouldn’t be able to take care of me and her brother. That I’d helped her out of that pickle might make her blame herself for the one I was in now. That made no sense to me, but it might to her. Besides, she wanted to put the whole seeing-dead-folks stuff behind her. And here’s the thing: what could she do, even if I did tell her? Blame Liz for putting me with Therriault in the first place, but that was all.

I thought briefly of talking to Ms. Peterson, who was the school’s guidance counselor, but she’d assume I was having hallucinations, maybe a nervous breakdown. She’d tell my mother. I even thought of going to Liz, but what could Liz do? Pull out her gun and shoot him? Good luck there, since he was already dead. Besides, I was done with Liz, or so I thought. I was on my own, and that was a lonely, scary place to be.