Slow Dance in Purgatory

“I could have died, Johnny. At the very least, I might not have danced again. A fall like that would have broken my legs.”

She descended a set of stairs and walked down another short corridor, which opened up into the large rotunda that served as the impressive entrance to the stately old school. The lobby was pristine and quiet, defying the violence that had christened her floors. Descriptions from the articles Maggie had just read crowded in her head…a pool of blood, a missing body, Billy Kinross lying in a broken heap. Twin chills tiptoed up her arms and met at the base of her neck. This spot probably wasn’t the best place for their first conversation. She turned to retrace her steps.

“A fall like that broke Billy’s neck,” a low voice spoke behind her. Maggie gasped and spun around. The blood in her veins froze, and her heart faltered from the strain of trying to pump solid ice. Her legs wanted to buckle, and she clung to the wall, desperately willing them to hold her. Johnny Kinross stood in the center of the rotunda, his hands shoved in the pockets of his low-slung jeans, his head cocked to the side. He looked so normal. If normal was James Dean but even better looking.

Maggie stared at him, transfixed. Part of her wanted to run screaming, but her legs had succumbed to the ice water infusion in her blood, and she couldn’t feel them anymore. She couldn’t move if her life depended on it. When she had seen the picture of Johnny Kinross staring defiantly from the pages of the decades old paper, she had known that he was indeed the person who had pulled her from the dumbwaiter shaft – she had known it was him…but knowing he existed was a totally different matter than having him standing before her, larger than life, stranger than fiction.

For the life of her she couldn’t think of what to say next. All the things you would usually say to a cute boy didn’t quite work in the current situation…and she had no experience talking to dead people. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat and echoing in her ears; her vocal chords were now frozen as well. Johnny seemed to sense that she’d been stricken dumb. He was the first to speak.

“How is it you can see me?” His voice was hushed…incredulous…as if the night he had rescued her had been an anomaly – as if she’d imagined it all. Johnny cocked his head to the other side and raised his one eyebrow. It reminded her of his senior picture, and the very normal human gesture released her from her paralysis.

“How is it….that ….you can be seen?” Maggie questioned in return, her voice cracking as she forced it to thaw. “Aren’t you…. dead?” Maggie didn’t even cringe at her preposterous question. The dreamlike quality of this encounter made her query eminently reasonable.

Johnny took a few steps toward her and halted.

“Sorta.” He shrugged nonchalantly, but the eyes that swept over her were anything but casual. They were a piercing, unblinking blue, as if he feared closing them would cause her to vanish. Seconds passed, and then he continued speaking, his voice mystified.

“Nobody else can see me. Nobody else can even hear me.”

“Gus Jasper has seen you. He’s the one who told me about you.”

“Thank goodness for Gus.” A brief grin flashed across Johnny’s face, revealing strong white teeth and deep dimples that bracketed his mouth briefly before disappearing as his smile fled. Maggie gulped. He was way too beautiful for a dead guy, even a ‘sorta dead’ guy. She reached down and pinched herself hard. Was this really happening??

“But Gus has only seen me a few times… a few times in….what must be decades,” Johnny protested. He took a few more steps until only five or six feet separated them. His eyes bore in to her, as if she were hiding something vitally important to his existence.

“It’s different with you. You see me and hear me…although there have been times when you have been unaware that I was near. I don’t know why you see me sometimes and other times you don’t, and I never know when those times will be….so I’ve had to start watching you through the walls.” He seemed reluctant to confess the last bit, and shifted awkwardly, breaking his intense eye contact.

“You can see through walls?” Maggie squeaked. Maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe Johnny was from the planet Krypton. It would explain so much.

“I can see anywhere I want in the school without actually being there. I just have to picture the room in my head until it comes in to focus,” Johnny explained hesitantly, as if knowing how ridiculous his explanation sounded.

Maggie didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing. She knew he could control the sound system without being in the room, so if he said he could see through walls she supposed he could.