Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(46)

Gary pulled in the lot behind the auto-shop classes, scattering greasers and smokers like quail before he killed the engine, and gave her a little grin, that little grin she always thought of as existing just for her. "See you after school?"

Rose grinned back. "It's a date."

***

"But when are we going to get to the ghost story part?" asks a cheerleader, plaintively. I blink at her. The Last Dance seems almost like a mirage somehow, blurry and unreal in the flickering candlelight. This can't be the real world, can it? This cold, wet, twilight world, where the sun never rises and the dead live on forever? This can't be where I'm spending eternity--not after the hot, clean heat of a Michigan summer, not after Gary's smile...

"Rose?" says Emma. I blink again, clearing the candlelight from my eyes, and nod in her direction.

"I've got it," I say, and take a breath. "The school day inched by like a thousand days before it; like a thousand more would inch after it. One minute at a time, counting down to the freedom of the final bell..."

***

The final bell rang like Gabriel's trumpet, and students poured out of classrooms like angels answering the call to war. Rose stayed seated at her desk, counting slowly backward from twenty. She'd learned the hard way that it was best for her not to hurry. Let the popular girls--the ones who couldn't understand how someone like her could ever be competition for people like them--make their way out of the halls and off campus. Once that was done, it would be safe to move.

"Rose?"

"Yes, Mrs. Jackson?" Rose raised her head from the book she'd been pretending to read, flashing an appropriately respectful smile at the anxious looking teacher in front of her. Irene Jackson had only been teaching in Buckley for a year; hadn't learned the rules yet, the signals that meant it was time to look the other way, the patterns that meant something was too big for a single person to stop. She was young. She'd learn. If she had time.

Irene Jackson was a good woman, and she'd gone into teaching because of girls like Rose--girls like the girl she'd been, once upon a time. The ones who didn't think they had any options, because their families couldn't buy those options for them. "Are you all right? You looked..."

"I'm fine, Mrs. Jackson." Rose stood hurriedly, grabbing her books from the rack beneath her desk and clutching them against her chest. "I just have so much to get done before prom that I guess I was letting my thoughts run away with me."

"You're going to the Senior Prom, aren't you? With Gary Daniels?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"He seems like a very nice young man."

Rose's smile was brilliant enough to shame the sun, if only for a few seconds before it faded back into her normal low-caste wariness. "He is, Mrs. Jackson. A very nice young man. Thank you, ma'am." And then she was gone, heading for the door at the brisk walk-half-skip that all the female students used when they were trying to escape their teachers without being rude about it.

Irene Jackson--who would later write Rose's memorial page for the school yearbook, and would weep without shame over every word--watched her go, a small frown pulling down the corners of her mouth. That night, she sat on the edge of the bed with her husband brushing out her hair, sighed, and said, "It was like she was weighing the rest of her life, right there in my classroom, and she was finding every bit of it wanting. How am I supposed to help these kids? They don't want my help. They don't want anything but to be left alone."

David Jackson was a smart man, and knew that sometimes, his wife worried about things she had no business worrying about, like teenage girls from the bad side of town. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and said, "She'll be fine. Girls like that can surprise you sometimes, if you give them the chance. Just be there if she needs you."

"I'm there for all the kids," said Irene, with all the conviction of a true believer. "All they have to do is ask."

"There, you see?" He put the brush aside, reaching for her. "Now come here. It's time to forget about other people's children for a while."

***

I'm filling space, relating events that I wasn't there to witness...but I know they happened, because the people involved told me about them. They told me when I went back to Buckley to offer them a guide into the dark places, playing psychopomp for the people who'd known me when I was alive--the only people who were mine to shepherd, even though they didn't die on the road. The ones who mattered in life can matter in death, if you want them to, and I've guided everyone I cared about who's died since I did.

Everyone who'd go with me, anyway. I ran for Michigan when I felt my mother dying, but she was long gone by the time I got there, and the shades of the streets told me she'd known I was on the way, but chose not to wait for me. I guess some things don't change, not even among the dead.