Under the Light

Chapter 20





Jenny


THIS TIME BILLY WAS ALREADY WAITING for me just inside the library doors. Every time I saw him again I felt instantly happy: I didn’t imagine him—he is real.

“Where are we going today?” I asked him as we walked to the bus stop. We’d already found the places his ghost had drawn—tree, phone booth, backstage in the auditorium, all but the inside of the school library.

“My house.” He held my hand as if he was leading the way.

“Why?” I realized after I said the word that it sounded stupid.

“We know the ghosts went there together,” said Billy. “In that picture of us, they were in my bed.”

I was nervous—I liked him, more than he knew, but I didn’t know what to expect. Did boys go around having sex with girls they hardly knew? Not the ones at church. At least I didn’t think so. And we didn’t remember being lovers. We were just getting to know each other.

We took the bus west, then transferred and went south a few blocks past the high school. On foot it only took a couple of minutes. Billy’s house was small and old, with a scrawny tree in the front lawn. There were no cars parked outside, but still, after Billy took a key from the lip of the door frame and unlocked the house, he called, “Mitch?” And then, “Anybody?”

It seemed we were alone.

He motioned to me, put the key back, then closed the door, locking us in. I was startled by the living room. The furniture was beat-up and stained, magazines everywhere, a basket of unfolded laundry in front of the TV. It smelled like pine cleaner and wet newspapers.

When Billy swung the door of his room closed behind us, I couldn’t help noticing the gash in it, as if someone had struck it with a baseball bat.

Maybe the photo of us proved that I had been here, but it didn’t seem familiar. The narrow bed with a brown wool blanket, the bulletin board crammed with drawings, the posters and magazine pages corner to corner as if Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone had been in the same recycle bin that then exploded all over the walls. I didn’t remember any of it, but I liked the craziness.

Maybe he thought I was disgusted, because he said, “It’s okay. We don’t have to stay.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

“Nice?”

“I mean, it’s you.”

“Hey now,” he said. “I don’t have to take that kind of abuse.”

“No, really,” I told him. “It’s the kind of room where you could just kick off your shoes and leave them in the middle of the floor instead of having to put them back in the shoe box and put the box on the shelf in your closet and close the closet and wipe your fingerprints off the closet door—”

“I believe you,” he interrupted. “Feel free to kick off your shoes.”

I pushed off my Keds, toe to heel. He sat on the desk chair and I sat on the bed, the one I didn’t remember lying in naked.

On the board over his desk, one of the pinned-up sketches started to flap in a draft. It was the only one that wasn’t a dragon or a monster. It was a beautiful line drawing of eyes. Maybe my eyes.

“I have something for you.” Billy reached under the mattress, making the bed rock under me. He pulled out a piece of cardboard, the back of a tablet with all the pages used and torn off. It must not have been what he wanted, because he dropped it on the bed and reached under again.

I picked up the cardboard—one side was blank and the other had a long list of dates and numbers, 7/03 19 years, 6/08 6 weeks, 5/05 10 years, etc. The list was titled: C/PVS.

“What’s C slash PVS?” I asked.

Billy had a piece of notebook paper in his hand now and said, “Coma slash persistent vegetative state.”

“Why?” I asked. “What are these dates?”

He took the cardboard from me and slid it back under the mattress. “Stories I found about people who wake up after doctors say they never will. It happens all the time.” Billy unfolded the piece of paper, ready to present it to me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that list. The idea of him tracking miracles gave me a chill. It looked like he’d made a note of the dates they woke up and how long each person had been unconscious. His mother had been in a hospital and hadn’t spoken a word in how many years?

“I think this was written for you.” Billy smiled. He sat beside me on the bed.

I glanced over the single page of notebook paper he’d given me. “Is this a homework assignment?” I asked. It was labeled with Billy’s name, September 16, English. I started to read it out loud. “The library smells like old books—a thousand leather doorways into other worlds.”

“It’s from when I was him,” said Billy.

I kept reading. “I hear silence like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me . . .”

I stopped and Billy whispered, “I guess I should say, he wrote it for her.”

My heart took a shuddering surge forward. “Wow.” Then I read, “Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I’ll say this is just a place where you can’t play music or eat. She’s gone. The library sucks.”

The soul who looked out of Billy’s eyes in the photograph of us together had written this for the soul who had been looking out of me.

“And get this.” Billy held the paper so we could look through it using the light from the window. “See?” He pointed out where the misspelled word sacrid had letters underneath that had been erased. “He misspelled a word on purpose.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Because he was pretending to be you?”

“Looks like it.”

“Smart boy,” I whispered. That the ghosts had to pretend to be us, the way I pretended to be what my parents wanted me to be, made me sorry for them. First you’re alive, then you’re dead, then you get a chance to be alive again and you have to walk around in disguise.

Billy stretched out on the bed. “Here’s where that picture of us was taken.” He examined the room from this position. I lay down beside him, my head next to his on the pillow—he put his arm behind his head to make room.

“Think of the stuff they probably talked about,” he said. “How did you die? And why are you a ghost? Didn’t heaven or hell want you?”

I rolled on my side to see if he was joking. “You think heaven wouldn’t take them?”

“Well, how do you become a ghost?” He shrugged. “It’s not like everyone who dies ends up like that.”

That seemed sad, but at least they had each other. For a while. “I wonder when they first met,” I said. “She was haunting Mr. Brown.”

“I had Mr. Brown for English,” said Billy. “So they were in the same classroom every day for fifty minutes.”

He was lying on his side now, his head propped in one hand. A sheet of cold air came over me and I had a random thought that didn’t seem like my own: You have to step into a body if you want to smell grass again.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

I closed my eyes and hid my face on his chest. As he put his arm around me, the wintry feeling lifted off my skin and I breathed in the heat coming through his shirt. I wasn’t nervous anymore. I relaxed into him, safe and at home. I imagined we were lying under the stars, stretched out in a field of grass.

“I thought of a knock-knock joke,” he said.

I must have heard him wrong.

“You know,” he said. “Something you can’t do alone.”

I opened my eyes and used his arm as a pillow. “Okay.”

“You really remember me from junior high?” he asked.

“I do.”

“Will you remember me from now on?” he asked. “If you see me on the street someday, you won’t pretend you don’t know me?”

“I don’t go around sharing amnesia ghost possessions with just anyone,” I reassured him. “I will always remember you.”

“Good.” He sighed. “Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Billy.”

“Billy who?”

“I told you you’d forget me.”

I groaned. Sometimes he seemed like a twelve-year-old.

“Sorry,” said Billy.

I laughed, but then I explained. “I’m not laughing at the joke. Do not take this as encouragement.”

I jumped when the bedside table gave a shake. Nothing there but a clock. It was already almost eleven. Billy narrowed his eyes and pointed his hand at it like Darth Vader trying to strangle the clock to death.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m trying to stop time.”