Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,43

the familiar softness of a boiled egg, things I had not eaten in 130 years until I sat under this tree with James.

“Do you get any hits off this place?” Billy asked.

“Hits?” Jenny smiled out from under the black hood. “I’m not a medium.”

“You told me a ghost was trying to talk to you,” said Billy. “Can you try saying something to them right now?”

I bristled at this childish game. I am not a Halloween party prank, I snapped at him, but he was oblivious.

A woman in kitchen whites came out of the cafeteria and frowned at Billy and Jenny. “Why aren’t you in class?” she called.

“We’re going,” Billy called back. He pulled the notebook pages from his back pocket and waved them at her in a blur. “We got hall passes.”

The woman propped the door open with a wooden wedge and left them alone again.

They gave up trying to conjure a spirit at the tree and moved on to the phone booth beside the gymnasium. My soul fluttered with nerves at this place. It was where I first learned James’s name and where we shared our secrets, my bondage to hosts, his imprisonment to the land where his childhood home had once stood.

Billy opened the squeaking door and stepped inside. He looked for clues, but all the scratched and painted messages were from others and in a quite different tone than any note James or I might have left behind. Jenny stepped up to the opening and looked up and around through the cracked glass.

“Maybe one of them called the other from here,” Billy suggested.

Jenny shrugged. “Does it even work anymore?”

Billy lifted the receiver and clicked the button hidden underneath.

I had the odd idea, just then, that only Billy’s fingerprints would be found on the phone, if a detective were working to piece together the mystery of my days with James. For our conversation in this tiny booth was before I had fingers.

They paused at the school library window, but Jenny grabbed Billy’s sleeve, holding him back. “There are too many people,” she said. “The librarian knows me too well.”

For a moment I thought, I have spent more hours here than either of you. Remembering how I had helped James compose an essay as if he were Billy, sitting at a table in this little library, made me miss James again. But as I tried to recall the last time I had seen him, heaven did not come into focus in my mind. I wanted to remember the last thing he said to me before I left heaven to find Jenny, but there was only silence. This bothered me so much that as I dragged behind Billy and Jenny toward the auditorium it felt as if I were wading through a drift of snow.

The double doors had been left propped open even though there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. The house was dark, but there was a pool of light on the stage and a can of paint and two wooden chairs nearby sitting on a tarp. Nothing else.

Billy paused at the back of the house, perhaps listening to hear if there was anyone about. Jenny let the hood of the jacket drop off the back of her head.

“Your ghost didn’t draw this,” she pointed out.

Billy motioned her to come and I walked behind them as slow as smoke might, though I was not even that substantial. I was melancholy and thinking in dreary metaphors. I was the moon by day, displaced and faded.

We followed Billy, watched him explore the stage right wings until he found what he was looking for. He grinned at Jenny and started up a built-in ladder beside the stage crew’s work table, just as it appeared in the drawing. It was dark—Jenny came to the foot of the ladder and gazed up at the shape of Billy climbing into the blackness, ten, twenty feet up, then disappearing.

She had begun to ascend when his voice made her hurry.

“Wow.”

I remembered the feeling of the hard wooden rungs through the soles of my shoes, but this time I floated up to the loft. When Jenny got to the top, Billy put a hand on the back of her head to make sure she didn’t hit the slanted wooden beams. They had discovered the platform, no bigger than a bed, which would’ve been plain wood except for the thick black cloth that James and I had left there, a faded pile of curtain, spread across the surface.