Slow Dance in Purgatory(23)

Maggie shook her head in amazement, and Johnny began to walk again as if he hadn't said something completely mind blowing. Maggie watched him for a moment, and he turned back toward her, waiting.

"Is that what happened to you?" Maggie said hesitantly. "You weren't destroyed....just redirected?"

"No, Maggie. That's the problem." Johnny's eyes spoke volumes as ancient as time. "I wasn't redirected."

"What does that mean?" Maggie whispered.

"I seem to be stuck here, or stuck in between here and somewhere else."

"You mean somewhere between life and death?”

"Maybe…..or between Heaven and Hell. I guess this is Purgatory. I'm trapped in high school." Johnny's voice was dry with irony. "The place I hated the very most, and the funny thing is, I begged to stay. When I was dying, I begged to stay. I refused to go."

They walked together for several minutes. Maggie noticed absently that his feet made no noise in the deserted hallways.

"Maggie?"

"Yes?" Maggie looked up at him and blushed at the intensity of his gaze.

"What year is it?"

"It's November of 2010."

Johnny sagged where he stood, and the absolute desolation that played over his features had Maggie reaching out to him. She clasped both of her hands around one of his, and he jerked at the contact, shocking her with a sharp frisson of static. She didn’t let go, though. All she could think about was how it might feel to never touch another human being for over 50 years. As if he could read Maggie’s mind, Johnny's hand clenched hers like a drowning man, and Maggie felt a sensation similar to that of holding her hands close to a television or a computer screen without actually touching it - like a humming, buzzing heat radiated out from him. Her breath caught in her throat.

"Mags?" Shad's voice was a high pitched mix of laughter and scared confusion, and Maggie jerked like she had been shot. Johnny vanished like she'd flipped a light switch. Her hands, now empty, were posed mid-air. Why hadn't Johnny warned her Shad was coming?

Maggie's hands dropped to her sides, and she slowly turned towards Shad, her mind a tangled torrent of excuses and alibis.

"Margaret O'Bannon, what in the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. are you doing?" Shad invoked the name of Martin Luther King only when he was truly bowled over. Thankfully, his mouth also went in to hyper drive.

"Wait….you saw him, didn't you? You saw the ghost? Can you see him now? Is he nearby?" Shad went into Ninja stance, his basketball forgotten, bouncing forlornly down the hall. "What did he look like, Mags? Can you see through him? Did he float?" Shad did a couple lunges and karate chops to the left and then the right. Then he glanced in terror up at the ceiling, as if the ghost of Johnny Kinross were waiting to drop over him like a net.

"Shad...calm down!" Maggie tried to interrupt Shad's blithering tirade, but he was moving down the hallway in Ninja squat, arms still high and poised for an attack by a ghost… or anyone with a black belt. Retrieving his basketball, Maggie followed behind him, trying to convince him that Johnny Kinross wasn't going to drag him off.

By the time they had shut off the lights and exited the school, Shad had resumed normal posture, and his speech had returned to its regular speed, which was still almost too fast to follow. It wasn't until they pulled out of the school's parking lot and headed for home that he fell silent. The silence was almost worse than his non-stop chatter, and Maggie wiggled uncomfortably. Shad looked out the window and said nothing until Maggie pulled into his grandpa's driveway. Dim light shone through the front window, and Maggie could see Gus rocking in his chair in front of his old fashioned television. It still had rabbit ears on the top, although she didn’t think rabbit ears worked on TV’s anymore.

"I know you're holding out on me, Mags," Shad said softly. "I saw you! You were standing there in the middle of an empty hallway like you were reaching out to someone…or touching someone. That was super freaky, Mags." Shad looked scared, and he reached for the door as if he were suddenly afraid of her, too. "What I can't figure out is why YOU aren't freaked out, too."

"It was nothing, Shad!" Maggie laughed weakly, and it sounded wrong even to her own ears. Her ability to lie to strangers obviously didn't translate to lying to people she cared about. "Everything is okay. You don't have to worry." At least that much was the truth, and the ring of sincerity must have satisfied Shad, because he sighed and proceeded to open his door.

Suddenly, the lights of another vehicle swung around the corner, and a run-down pick-up truck jerked to a halt alongside Irene's classic Caddie. Shad froze in his seat, his hand gripping the open door.

"Shaddy! Is that you, baby? Shadrach! Come help me with my bags." A thin, black woman with matted corn-rows hanging half way down her back tumbled out of the driver's seat and was pulling odds and ends out of the back of the poorly parked truck. Apparently, Malia Jasper had decided to come home. Maggie looked at her young friend and wondered what was worse, losing your mother to death, like she had, or losing her year after year, over and over again, every time she decided to split.

The door to the little house opened, and Gus's thin frame filled the doorway, backlit by the blue glow of the television. He flipped on the porch light, and even from the harsh shadow, Maggie could see the strain on his face.