Free Just Kill Me by Adam Selzer Page A

all the ways I can change it if I have to, like if there’s some miracle and all the lights are green and I have to leave out a lot. I am nervous as hell. I’ve done a few plays and all, but I’ve always been in a zombie outfit, or an old lady costume. I’ve never just been, like, myself.
    But I can do this.

    After the alley stop, as we cruise onto Wacker Drive, Rick says, “Now, to tell you about a girl who died here in 1934, here’s ourown Miss Megan Henske, Mistress of Darkness and Shadows.”
    Mistress of Darkness and Shadows. That’s me. Hell yeah.
    I feel a surge of confidence for a second as I take the mic, but just as I’m about to talk, I hear some lady a few rows back saying, “Is she supposed to be scary?” to the guy she’s with, like she’d expected me to show up in costume or something.
    I try to ignore her or picture her in her underwear. Neither helps. I swear that even the dog is giving me a skeptical look as I take my place at the front of the bus, like even a chihuahua knows I have no right to be working this job. I forget just about everything I was planning to say and try to improvise.
    Badly.
    â€œSo, uh, here at the ‘L’ tracks,” I say, “this girl Mary Bregovy died in 1934. Some people say she’s Resurrection Mary, a famous Chicago ghost. But there’s an academic article that lists a sighting from three years before that, so . . .”
    And then I freeze. For what seems like an hour. In grocery-store-hell time, which is infinitely slower than normal time. My knees start to shake, my vision goes blurry. I’m a trembling mess.
    The silence sounds like a vacuum about to suck me back to Forest Park.
    But just as the bus is getting to the spot where Mary Bregovy died, and I’m half-wishing I were her, a miracle happens.
    Outside of the bus, a rail-thin woman is standing on the corner wearing a fur coat that’s probably six sizes too big forher frame, and orders of magnitude too warm for the weather.
    â€œHey, look!” I say. “Special bonus tonight. On your right, it’s Cruella De Vil, from 101 Dalmations !”
    All twelve passengers burst out laughing, and Rick nearly chokes on his Red Bull. When he swallows and opens his mouth, he’s cracking up.
    â€œThat’s got to be a ghost, right, folks?” I ask. “Why would a living person be wearing fur in this weather?”
    â€œWhy would ghosts wear clothes at all?” asks a guy in the third row. “Your pants don’t have a soul.”
    â€œWell, maybe yours don’t, sir,” I say. “They must not have any good vintage stores where you live.”
    Rick laughs and says, “Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you want your bits and pieces showing, man.” Then he pats me on the back, retrieves the mic, and says, “A lot of people don’t really think ghosts are peoples’ souls or spirits, exactly. Some people think it’s more scientific, like some sort of leftover energy. Some people call it a ‘psychic imprint.’ ”
    â€œOr a ‘residual haunting,’ ” says Cyn.
    â€œRight. As opposed to an ‘intelligent haunting’ that floats around and knows where it’s going. And they’re not always even from dead people—just something left over from a really intense emotion. Theoretically.”
    For a moment I think back to the Summer I spent living in my dad’s apartment, back when I was nine. I thought it was haunted because of the moaning noises I heard in the nextapartment over on the other side of my bedroom wall at night. I knew “the facts of life,” but I hadn’t yet figured out that sometimes people had sex when they weren’t trying to have a baby, so it didn’t occur to me that the eighty-year-old couple next door, the Weyhers, might have been doing it.
    And the last time I stayed there, over