Free Just Kill Me by Adam Selzer

joke. An extra syllable can screw up the rhythm.
    And the same goes for ghost stories—one word, one pause, can be the difference in a gasp line working or falling flat.
    Back home, I spend all night practicing in front of the mirror, just quietly enough that Mom can’t hear me. I refine my stories a word at a time.
    And I forget all about how Rick had said something back at the cemetery about an “initiation” after my next tour.

Chapter Six
    T wo days later, when I next come on a tour, I am a Resurrection Mary expert. I’ve learned my way around genealogy sites and found death records for lots of girls named Mary who ended up at Resurrection. I’ve pulled their obits from the Tribune . I’ve found academic articles about the urban myth of the vanishing hitchhiker from the 1940s. I am totally ready to tell the story on a tour.
    On the Blue Line train into the city I sit across from a guy who seems to think he’s a werewolf or something. He writhes and grunts and howls and licks his fingers as though they were claws, and he rambles something about cross-breeding gorillas with hippos. Everyone just goes about their business reading their books like nothing unusual is going on, because it’s the Blue Line, after all, and he’s not biting anyone or anything.
    When I get to Clark Street, the necklace guy and the portrait guy are plying their trades again. A costumed guide fromAl Capone Tours lets a little kid pretend to shoot him for a charming photo his family can take home.
    Edward Tweed is running two buses for DarkSide Chicago tours tonight. He’s standing in front of one of them, and next to him is a scruffy red-haired guy in a threadbare brown sport coat that must be sweaty as hell in the heat, plus a fedora that has seen better days. He looks like the kind of guy who gets kicked out of pool halls.
    Tweed tips his cowboy hat at me, and the other guy gives me a two-finger salute.
    I meet up with Rick and Cyn by their bus, and Rick tells me the other guy is Aaron Saltis, Tweed’s protégé. “He’s younger than he looks,” says Rick. “Actor. Nice guy, but he really needs to fact-check Tweed. Now and then we bump into him in the alley, and he’s always saying a serial killer in the 1970s used to pick people up there. Pure BS.”
    The pure BS is clearly popular; Tweed’s thirty-seven-passenger buses both look full, and our one smaller one is only half full. It feels half empty.
    The customers we have are mostly tourists with kids, including a woman who shows up with a tiny accessory dog and insists that she has to take it along. I think that pets are officially against the rules, but she’s with a party of five, and Rick and Cyn aren’t doing well enough to turn away a party that large. And anyway, it fits in her purse.
    Rick introduces me to the passengers as “part of the team,”and I feel like people are giving me skeptical looks, like I’m too young to have this job and have no business being here. Maybe they think I’m Cyn’s sister or something. I’ll have to make myself look a bit older. I don’t usually wear much makeup—I sort of associate it with dead people—but I know some tricks.
    As we start, Rick says, “Now, this neighborhood isn’t all that spooky these days, except that occasionally we do have this guy in a frog suit standing outside of Rainforest Cafe, and that guy scares the bajeezus out of me.” When people chuckle, he says, “Yeah, you guys laugh, but I have to go through life without a bajeezus now.” He pauses for another chuckle, waits until just the right time, then adds “Boom! You all just got privilege-checked.”
    While he points out all the murder sites, hanging sites, and disaster sites between the Rock and Roll McDonald’s and the Alley of Death and Mutilation, I’m obsessively going over the Resurrection Mary story in my head, thinking of