Read Online Forever Freaky by Tom Upton - Free Book Online Page A

after the door shut behind us
that I noticed how chilly the air was in the bathroom. Jack was
moving the flashlight back and forth. The beam of light swept over
the sinks and stalls and pretty pink tiled walls. I felt dizzy as I
watched the light playing over everything. Finally I reached over
and flipped the light switch next to the interior doorway.
    Jack shrieked and squinted when the bright
light filled the room.
    “Somebody will see,” he complained.
    “Nobody’s here,” I said.
    “Somebody will see from outside.”
    “If they do, they’ll just think somebody
forgot to turn off the light.”
    Reluctantly, he turned off the flashlight,
and returned it to his bag.
    We both wandered around the room, checking
things out. Everything looked pretty normal to me.
    “Hey, why’s the girls’ room so much nicer
than the guys’ room?” Jack asked.
    “Duh.”
    “What? I really want to know.”
    “If I have to explain that to you, then
you’re hopeless.”
    “Well, I guess I’m hopeless.”
    “My point exactly,” I said, and then asked,
“Does it seem cold in here to you?”
    He considered it a second or two. “Maybe a
little. It must be chilly outside by now.”
    “I think it’s a bit more than that.”
    “Drops in room temperatures usually accompany
the presence of a ghost,” he stated.
    I stopped in front of him. “You read that in
a book.”
    He shrugged. “I heard that from a lot of
sources.”
    “Well, it doesn’t always work that way. Jerry
shows up at home every single morning, and never once did I feel
the slightest draft when he was around. Besides, this is
different,” I said, “This isn’t cold spots. It’s the whole room.
The coldness seems evenly distributed from wall to wall. Do we know
which stall Mary Jo was in when she vanished?”
    “No,” he said.
    I crossed over to the first of the three
stalls. I eyed it carefully. Everything looked safe, so I stepped
inside. I felt the floor round the toilet base with the toe of my
gym shoe, and the floor seemed solid enough. I leaned over and ran
my hand over the wall behind the toilet. Other than feeling
abnormally cool, the wall seemed all right. I repeated this process
with the other two stalls, but discovered nothing that suggested it
was possible a person could slip through to an alternate dimension
or, for that matter, to any place else.
    I stepped out of the third stall, and saw
that Jack had been watching me closely the entire time.
    “I don’t get it,” I said.
    “Maybe the timing isn’t right,” he suggested.
“It’s not midnight yet.”
    I gave him a look. “Midnight? The witching
hour? You’re kidding me, right?”
    “There is some truth to every myth.”
    I sighed. “Jack, really--”
    “No, listen,” he said, and seemed agitated.
“I know you think I’m stupid, but I’m right about this. When did
Mary Jo disappear?”
    “Not at midnight—that’s for sure.”
    “No, at lunch-time,” he said. “Noon and
midnight— different sides of the same coin.”
    I wagged my head. “I don’t know about
that.”
    “Did any of the cops go missing in here?” he
asked, with greater confidence.
    “No.”
    “When did the cops take their lunch
breaks?”
    “I see what you mean,” I said, yet still I
wasn’t convinced.
    Jack looked at his wristwatch, and said,
“It’s almost eleven-fifteen. So we wait an hour, and see what
happens.”
    “Sure, why not,” I said, but I couldn’t shake
the feeling this might end up being one huge waste of time.
    Jack sat down on the hard floor, and tried to
make himself comfortable, while I slowly paced the length of the
room. A couple times I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror
that stretched across the wall above the sinks. My hair looked
stringier than usual, my face…paler, my eyes… wearier. I looked
like a 98-pound corpse that had somehow crawled her way out of a
grave. How could anybody possibly find me attractive? I hopped onto
the counter, so that I didn’t have to