Page 33 of Haunted

There’s a notice taped inside the window, and I’m three steps past it before my body stops walking.

It’s us. Me and Lance. The Excelsior photo—the one that went everywhere, the one that outed us to the world. Both of us covered in smoke and grime. You can see the tear tracks on my face. We’re looking off to the side, and I remember now what we were looking at: the woman who had just found out her sister was alive. That picture followed me across the globe. It’s the first image if you do a search for Parker Bishop, and it’s on the first page of images if you just search the word Fairhaven.

I go back and lean in to read what it’s actually for. “Fairhaven Wildfires: Ten Year Memorial Commemoration.”

I lean back from the window.

Parker Bishop. I haven’t been him in a long time.

It’s the truth. I can tell people that in three languages. And it holds up right until I catch sight of his face on a ten-year-old photo taped inside a window on Chancellor Street—seventeen years old, still coughing, scared out of his mind—and I have to stand on a wet sidewalk and look at him and admit that I never got him out.

I just gave him a different name.

I look down at my own forearm without meaning to. There’s a green bracelet I’ve been wearing for about eight or nine years, and tattoos: a phoenix and vines running up past the elbow. None of that is there by accident—under the ink, if you know to look, the skin doesn’t lie flat. Nine years and a lot of money to make one part of me unreadable.

There’s a date at the bottom of the flier. I do the sums before I can stop myself, and the answer is that I’ll still be here. Of course I will. I’ll be here for the memorial, my birthday, Thanksgiving, and I’ll probably be here when they put the Christmas lights up on Chancellor Street.

I decide, standing there with my hood up, that I’m not going. I’m not walking into a room so this town can look at me and see him. Lecture, scan, flight.

And underneath that, so quiet I can nearly pretend I didn’t hear it: I would like, one time, to be in this place without being afraid of it.

I walk home slowly, hands in my hoodie pockets, taking in the quiet streets. A campus map they’ve put up near the Grier building lists what’s coming up—drama auditions, a concert, and at the bottom, the conference: “Digital Entrepreneurship for the New Age.” They could have asked me about that title. It’s not punchy. My name isn’t on the notice, but that’s fine. Jonny Bishop has no origin story, no hometown, no dirty laundry. He’s as much a creation of my viewers’ imagination as he is a man in his own right.

Back in the apartment I settle at the desk and skim my emails. Three hundred unread. Patreon notifications, scammers, a man in Ohio who has now explained twice what he’d like to do to my mouth. Eight years ago there were eleven subscribers and most of them were my aunt on different devices. These days it pays for my life, which in Goa goes further than you’d think.

I respond to a few loyal fans asking about travel to India—a quick personal reply is a good way to keep people on the Patreon. God, I’m such a shill.

Before I turn the light off I open the fridge, because Aunt Shelley’s fridge is a crime scene. Half a jar of mayonnaise, a box of wine, and something in foil I’m not opening. She’s three weeks out of surgery and she’s been living on toast.

I’ll cook for her tomorrow. Not because she’d ask—she’d sooner starve than ask—but because it’s the one thing I know how to do that feels special.

I go and stand in her doorway, because she isn’t asleep either. She has the Kindle propped on her knees, her reading glasses down her nose, and a row of orange pill bottles on the nightstand.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” she says.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“It’s these goddamned pills.” She waves a hand at the nightstand without looking up. “What do you want?”

“The survivors’ group. The Phoenix Society. Do you know where they meet?”

That gets the Kindle put down.

“The Baptist church hall on Palmer. Sunday afternoons, I think.” She takes the glasses off. “Why?”

“They’ve got my face on a poster.”

“You were on the front page of the paper, honey. Everybody’s got your face.”

“That was ten years ago. I was seventeen.” It comes out harder than I meant it to. “I’m not going to the memorial. And I would rather not be taped up in a window on Chancellor Street looking terrified so they can use my face for PR.”

Aunt Shelley looks at me for a long moment.

“Then go and tell them so,” she says. “Politely.”

“I’m always polite.”

“You’re always something.” She puts the glasses back on and taps her Kindle. “Go to bed. I’ve just got to the good part. He’s finally told her he’s been in love with her since the beginning, and she’s winding up to say something stupid, and if this woman throws it away after four hundred pages, I will riot.”