Laughter at the Academy Read online

“This isn’t healthy,” says Jenny, a frown on her face and a curl of golden hair hanging across her forehead like a banner. “You shouldn’t still be showing up here.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” I pull away from the curb, turning my attention back to the road at the last possible moment. I don’t want to take my eyes away from her, but I’m coming to learn the rules of our monthly encounters: I have to drive. That’s what matters more than anything else. “You need a ride home. I promised.”

  “Leigh…”

  “How could I live with myself if I knew you weren’t at peace because I broke my word to you?”

  “But I’m not at peace, Leigh.” She sounds like she’s in pain. I start to take my foot off the gas, automatically turning to reach for her and try to hug that pain away. I see her face when she recoils, when she cries, “Drive! You have to drive!”

  My foot presses down almost of its own accord. The car lurches forward, my heart pounding against my ribs, and for a moment, I think this is it: this is how I die.

  But the moment passes, and the car is back under my control, and we’re rolling easy down the road as Jenny says, “I can’t rest in peace. You won’t let me. Everyone else is starting to let go; they’re starting to ease up on my memory—even my parents. And then there’s you.”

  “I miss you.” The words are small and stupid and big enough to encompass the entire world. I miss her. That’s all that I’m capable of doing anymore.

  “You have to let me go.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or this keeps happening over and over again,” she says. “I keep showing up. You keep driving me home. I keep disappearing. Over and over.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Forever, I guess.”

  I think about that as I drive, the streets melting away around us. The air in the cab smells like vanilla. At some point Jenny realizes I’m not going to say anything else, and she turns on the radio, spinning through the stations until she finds a channel that’s playing the kind of music she likes, all soft country ballads and too much auto-tune. One of her favorite bands is on, performing a song that hadn’t been released yet when she died. She makes a small, wordless sound of delight, and that’s it: that seals the deal. I love her and I want her to rest easy, but that doesn’t mean I can let her go. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  “I’ll have their new album when I pick you up next month,” I say, as we turn onto her street. “You can listen to it during the drive.”

  “Leigh—”

  “I’m sorry you’re not resting in peace. But I’m not resting in peace either, so at least we can not rest in peace together for a little while longer. If that’s selfish, I don’t really care. I miss you too much. I can’t just stop.”

  Her hand touches my cheek, fingers cool. I don’t turn. I don’t want to see her disappear.

  “I love you,” she says.

  “I love you too,” I answer, and she’s gone, and I drive past her house without slowing down or stopping. Forever is a long time. I’m not sure it would be long enough.

  FEBRUARY

  Now they say that love is ended by betrayal or the grave,

  And they tell me to give up on her, the one I couldn’t save,

  But I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

  I will know no rest or solace ‘til I’m taking Jenny home.

  Valentine’s Day without Jenny is another word for Hell. I stay home sick, choosing another black mark on my attendance record over the school halls festooned with paper hearts and filled with girls giggling over their discount chocolates and wilting roses. Two weeks later, when Jenny appears in front of the cemetery, there’s a bouquet of daisies—her favorite flower—waiting for her on the dashboard, along with the CD I promised her.

  She’s still my Valentine. Death doesn’t change that.

  Death doesn’t really change anything.

  MARCH

  It’s been four months since Jenny died, and I’m starting to think about the mechanics of suicide. It can’t be that hard to kill somebody, can it? Tyler managed it, and Tyler’s a dumb jock with more muscles than brains. Or he was, anyway: they still don’t know whether he’s ever going to wake up, and even if he does, there’s no way of knowing whether he’ll ever walk again. His football career is over, buried alongside Jenny’s body, and that might be a comfort to me, if I didn’t miss her so goddamn much, if his teammates didn’t glare at me when they pass me in the halls, like I was the one who suggested he try to put the make on my girlfriend at the homecoming dance. None of this was my idea, I want to scream. None of this is the way that I wanted my junior year of high school to go. But try telling them that. Too many words, too many syllables, too many concepts for their atrophied little brains. Tyler, Jenny, and I wound up in a weird sort of triangle on the night of the dance, two of us competing for one girl, and now Jenny’s dead and Tyler’s in a coma and I’m still here, which makes me the perfect target.

  I guess if I were as suicidal as I feel I’d bait them and let them beat me to death behind the school. At least that way they’d get punished for it, and I’d finally get to stop living in a world that doesn’t have Jenny in it anymore.

  …but I don’t really live in that world, do I? I just exist there.

  It’s four months since Jenny’s funeral, and here I am again, parked in front of the cemetery, waiting.

  The sun reaches the horizon and again, Jenny: Jenny in her moonlight gown, Jenny with her golden hair, and her corsage still fresh on her wrist. Mine is just so many fallen petals now, sitting in a dish next to my bed where the smell can chase me down into my dreams. Jenny, looking at me with fond exasperation, one satin-toed foot tapping on the grassy knoll.

  “Again, Leigh?” she asks, and before I can answer her she chases the question with a question, asking, “Can I get a ride home?”

  “Always,” I say, and then she’s in the car, appearing like a miracle, and my foot is on the gas, and everything is right with the world. As long as I’m with Jenny, everything is fine.

  Again, I take the long way back to her house, choosing more time with her over the expediency of city streets. It’s better this way, I tell myself, and I realize I actually mean it: if this is a dream, I know it’ll end when I make the final turn onto her block, and if it’s not a dream—if my dead girlfriend is really riding in my front seat like this sort of thing happens every day—then the last thing I want is for someone to see us. They might react the same way I did, with confusion and disbelief and denial. Or they might decide I didn’t deserve this, and give someone else the task of driving Jenny home.

  “Tyler’s still in a coma, you know,” I say, because I have to say something; I have to fill the silence between us with words, or it’s going to drown me. “They’re not sure whether he’s ever going to wake up again.”

  “Good,” she spits, with such venom that it startles me. “He deserves to be caught that way. Not living, not dead. Just lost in limbo, for as long as their machines can keep him there.”

  I worry my lip between my teeth before asking, “You really mean that?”

  “Yes,” she says, and “no,” she says, and “I would be here with you if it weren’t for him. I would be here with my family. Really here, I mean, with skin and bones and a heartbeat, not drifting through every time I need someone to drive me home. I’d be getting older. You know, I read this book once, about a unicorn who’d been turned into a human? And she hated it. She said she could feel her body dying all around her. I know what she meant now, Leigh, and I miss it. I miss the feeling of my body dying, because it meant I had a body that could die. It meant I was real. More than just a memory. It meant I belonged to the world. I’m never going to have that again, and it’s all Tyler’s fault.”

  There are so many words that it’s almost overwhelming. It takes me a moment to process them all, and we’re moving the whole time, getting closer and closer to the point where she leaves me again. I want to ask the best qu
estion in the world, I want to stun her with how well I understand, but when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “So stay.”

  “I can’t,” she says. “I’m dead, remember?”

  There’s laughter in her voice, and pain too, like she likes remembering what she is as little as I like being reminded of it. I don’t say anything, but I hit the gas just a little harder, and neither one of us says anything for the rest of the drive.

  It’s just like before. I turn onto her street, and the smell of vanilla fills the car, and when I turn to look at her, she’s gone like she was never there. I may as well have been driving a hallucination across the city. I pull up to a stop sign and lean over to touch the seat. It’s warm. She was there enough to warm up the seat with the body that she doesn’t have.

  Maybe that means something.

  I hold that thought firmly as I drive myself back home. Jenny could still warm a seat, and maybe that means something…but what, I just don’t know.

  APRIL

  Jenny’s already standing on the curb when I pull up, her arms clasped tight around herself like she’s cold. I find myself wishing she’d died wearing something warmer, which turns quickly to wishing she’d never died at all, and that’s dangerous; that’s the kind of thinking that I can chase down the rabbit holes of my mind all night long. So I just stop the car and roll down the window and wait for her to ask the question.

  “Can I get a ride?”

  “Always,” I say, and she disappears, leaving me alone. This time, my heart doesn’t stop: I’ve learned enough to know what comes next. I turn, and there she is in the passenger seat, her seatbelt fastened, a smile on her perfect lips. Trying to be casual, I say, “You look good today.”

  “One good thing about death: no more bad hair days,” she says, with a laugh that isn’t a laugh at all: more a close cousin to a sob. Kissing cousin, even—the two are so tangled together that I couldn’t pry them apart if I tried. “I’m really glad I like this dress.”

  “I wonder if that’s what you’d be wearing if they’d buried you in something else.” The words are thoughtless. I cringe.

  Jenny doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, she looks relieved. She’s been dead for six months, and this is the first time I’ve talked to her like that mattered at all: like it changed anything about our relationship, apart from how often we get to see each other. “I think so,” she says. “It’s different for everybody, but most of the ghosts I’ve met have been wearing something they cared about when they were alive. Lots of wedding gowns, tuxedos, graduation robes…this was the prettiest dress I ever owned. It only makes sense that I’d be wearing it now.”

  “I’d say that wearing it made you the prettiest girl in the world, but you didn’t need a dress for that.”

  Jenny laughs without the sob this time, and leans forward to turn on the radio. “Just drive,” she says.

  So I do, and everything is perfect, and I could go on like this forever, just me and Jenny and our monthly date, her in her homecoming dress, me in whatever I threw on that day, driving into eternity.

  MAY

  Now they say that love is something you’d be lucky to forget,

  But I say that I was lucky on the day that we first met,

  And I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

  I will roam the lonesome highways ‘til I’m bringing Jenny home.

  The halls are buzzing with the news that Tyler—elevated in his absence to young god, deified like Jenny was, but without the absence of flesh to allow his memory to erode—has started responding to treatment: why, he opened his eyes yesterday, which is nothing short of a miracle as far as his legion of adoring fans is concerned. If this continues, he could actually wake up soon! Imagine! Tyler, All-American high school god, walking among us mere mortals like we have the right to glory in his physical presence and breathe his rarified air!

  It makes me want to vomit, or punch someone, or scream. But all these things are anti-social, and the school counselors are still watching me more closely than I like, since apparently my inability to “move on” from the death of the first girl I ever loved means I’m a potential suicide risk or school shooter or something. I’m not really clear on what the problem is, and no one else seems to be either. They just know that I’m not fitting easy into their pre-fab high school mold anymore, and so they watch me, and they wait for me to make a mistake.

  Tyler’s name is on everyone’s lips today, even the teachers, who urge us to focus on our studies because “that’s what Tyler would want us to do.” By seventh period, I’ve had enough, and when my history teacher invokes Tyler’s name in an effort to quiet us down, I stick my hand in the air and ask, “Do you think Tyler was quiet when he was committing vehicular manslaughter? Or do you think he had time to scream at the sight of Jenny’s corpse before his brain damage kicked in?”

  I get sent to the principal’s office for my trouble, a red detention slip clutched in my hand, and it’s not until I see the sun setting through the study hall window that I realize what this means—that I won’t reach the cemetery until hours after I usually arrive. I bolt to my feet.

  “Sit down, Miss Winslow!” barks the Vice-Principal, and my knees buckle, years of trained obedience ordering me back into my seat before my conscious mind is invited to the party. I shoot another panicked glance at the window, but it’s too late, it’s too late; the sun is dipping down below the horizon. I don’t know much about the strange dance that I’ve been locked in since homecoming, and still something tells me that this is a line that should never have been crossed. She appears at sunset. Well, the sun has set, and when I reach the cemetery, Jenny won’t be waiting.

  Even knowing that, I run for my car as soon as we’re released, breaking speed laws all the way down to the cemetery gates. But Jenny isn’t there. I stay until midnight, listening to her favorite CD over and over again and praying to a god I don’t entirely believe in, and Jenny never comes. I broke the rules. I broke the chain.

  What if Jenny never comes again? What am I going to do then?

  JUNE

  I skip school on the day Jenny’s due to appear, even knowing she won’t be there until sunset. I missed her once. I can’t run the risk of missing her again. Not when we only get one night a month, and that night is limited to however long it takes to drive from the cemetery to her house—not exactly the kind of dates I used to lay awake dreaming about. I haven’t kissed her since the night she died. I ache to hold her in my arms, kiss her cheek, and tell her how much I’ve missed her, how much I miss her every single day. But if I can’t do that, I can at least do this: I can be here; I can wait for her until she comes.

  I have to move the car three times when the security guard comes by and gives me the hairy eyeball, suspicion written plainly on his face. What’s a chubby teenage girl in a beat-up Volvo doing parked in front of the cemetery? What mischief am I planning?

  No mischief, sir, I want to say, but I can’t imagine he’d take well to being told I was just here to pick up my girlfriend, who’s been dead for seven months—don’t worry, she looks just fine, on account of how she doesn’t have a body anymore. I’d be lucky if he called the cops. It’s more likely he’d call the local loony bin, and I’d be hauled away by men in white coats, screaming for my ghost girlfriend all the while. No. Nuh-uh. I don’t have time to be committed, and so I move the car again and again, wasting gas and wasting time as I wait for the magic moment when Jenny will appear.

  Then I’m coming around the corner and there she is, blazing up in the headlights like a fairy tale princess, all moonlight gold and helpless longing. I stop the car, roll down the window, look out at her, and smile.

  “Hey,” I say. “You need a ride?”

  I’m trying to sound cool and smooth and like the sort of person who belongs in a place like this. All I really manage is sounding like my dorky self. Jenny still smiles as she walks toward the car. That’s all the validation I need.

  “Where were
you last month, Leigh?” she asks. “I thought maybe you were getting over me.”

  “That’s never going to happen,” I say. “I had detention.” She disappears, and then she’s in the car with me, and my heart hurts from the reality of her. I know that what I have to say will hurt her, but I have to say it anyway: “Tyler’s waking up.”

  Jenny goes still, and it’s not until that moment that I realize she isn’t breathing, she’s never been breathing, not any of the times I’ve seen her or any of the nights when I’ve driven her home. The realization changes something. It’s like for the first time I can’t pretend she’s not dead, not on any level. There is only one living body in this car, only one person who’s getting older, only one unicorn trapped in a human form. The other person, the Jenny-shaped person…she’s dead and gone, she’s dwindling into dust underground, and she’s never coming back to me. This is the closest we’re ever going to get, these strange moments of stolen time in my car.

  “He shouldn’t get to wake up,” she says finally. There’s a bitterness in her voice that runs all the way down to the bone, the kind of dark, resentful hatred that used to be reserved for people who abused animals or argued against gay marriage. I bite my lip and keep driving, not wanting to see the look on her face as she continues, “I didn’t get to wake up. Why should he?”

  “He may never walk again.”

  “Well isn’t that a shame—oh, wait. I’m definitely never going to walk again, because I’m dead, and it’s his fault, and I can’t even rest easy in my grave and forget about all this, because you won’t let me go. So what do you want me to do, Leigh? Be happy for him? Oh, hooray, the man who killed me is waking up, and maybe his life’s been changed forever, but it’s still a life. He still gets to have a life. He gets to grow up and get old and I get to keep asking you to drive me home. How is that fair?”

  “It’s not,” I say quietly.

  “Then what are you going to do about it?” There’s a challenge in her voice that I don’t know quite how to answer, and so I don’t. I just drive her home.