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a thump. "Chris is dead. I think Justin knows it. He just doesn't want to face up to it. He's got this positive-thinking shit that he reads, and then he says his brother is not dead and he hears from him."
    There you go: Someone who puts "positive thinking" and "shit" in the same concept can inspire some serious eye-rolling if you're the type who works at keeping your thought-life healthy. Hooray for dark glasses.
    "And?" I asked.
    "And he's manic-depressive," she said dismissively. "Any idiot ought to be able to see that. When he's manic, he thinks he hears his brother telling him he's alive. When he's depressed, he just lies there and stares at the stars, tells everyone to shut up, he's got a headache. The truth is, one night when Justin wasn't around, a bunch of kids saw Chris Creed out there in the field. He was surrounded in white light. Like, not as somebody living would appear."
    Fortunately, I had just covered a'séance held in the dorms as a feature story for the weekend section of the paper. I had experience in not laughing in people's faces. It's not that I don't believe in the supernatural, but there's a difference between believing in an intelligent and affectionate Source behind the universe and believing that dead folks wander around down here, lost.
    "Tell me about it."
    "A bright light appeared out of the trees and when you looked at it closely, you could see it was Chris," Elaine said. "No question. Just like a holograph. It was definitely Chris."
    "Sounds like a third-generation story. A pass-it-down-the-line deal," RayAnn put in skeptically. "Like somebody pointed a flashlight against a tree as a gag, and by the second or third time the story was told, it was a holograph image of Chris Creed."
    I could feel Elaine blustering. "That's why I've known ever since that he is dead.
I was there.
I saw it with my own eyes. He came straight at us, staring at us, and then simply evaporated. I can introduce you to the kids who were with me. They saw it, too."
    The silence was broken only by a giggle from Mrs. Hayden, and as she picked right up with some sentence about her workout at the gym, I gathered they weren't eavesdropping. I liked the couple.
    "But ... your friends here don't believe you, apparently," I said. Katy and Chan had a rebuttal to this story, or they wouldn't have told me in the beginning that Elaine thought he was dead but they didn't.
    "Um ... they were dropping acid," Chan said. "Don't print that, please. Or if you do, you didn't hear it from Katy or—"
    "Acid, schmacid," Elaine said. "So, somebody spiked my soda. I'm not a loadie, okay? I haven't done it since."
    "It just cuts into the ... believability of this tale." Katy turned to me, putting a hand on my arm. "We just don't talk about this. Or, not very often."
    This Elaine had a "little" voice, if I had to describe it. Not childlike, not breathy, just with hardly any power. All her energy came from her sarcasm.
    "I don't care whether other people believe me or not. Five people saw it. Justin missed the whole thing, then started threatening the screamers in school on Monday."
    "I don't suppose he likes people talking about his brother as if he were a, uh, spook. That's understandable," I said.
    "Yeah, but people will never stop talking like that around here. And word sure gets around. I don't know who told him. Justin believes what Justin wants to believe. I believe in the truth. Think of it. Acid can make you see things that aren't there, surely. But they can't make everyone see the
same thing,
can they? We all saw the
same thing.
"
    The silence broke with Mrs. Hayden's chair pushing back, and her form moved to a funny posture in front of the window. "...seeing stars now. I think of those poor drenched officers out there, all day long, and now that their work is almost done, we see the stars."
    Mr. Hayden's voice chimed with my own: "
Bad frequency.
"
    I needed this next move like a hole in the head, but I wanted my fame and writing glory