Just Kill Me Read Free

duct-tape, and two of the windows are cracked, but the ceiling is really cool—they’ve painted a giant map of the city with markers, showing famous disaster sites, the dens of various antique serial killers, and old neighborhood names like “Little Hell” and “Satan’s Mile.” A few of the landmarks are jokes, like “South Side: Birthplace of Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Rick and Cynthia’s Apartment.”
    I wipe a smear from a window with my sleeve. “So, are you and Rick . . . you know?”
    She glances at the back of his head through the window in a way that makes me think he’s her unrequited love, but she says, “Sometimes we are, sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes we aren’t but we still sleep together. It’s complicated.”
    â€œGot it.”
    â€œWhat about you? You seeing anyone?”
    â€œNot exactly seeing, but I have a long-distance thing with a girl in Arizona.”
    Just as I say that, as if by telepathy, Zoey sends me another “good luck” text and a drawing of me dressed as a Disney villain, summoning lighting and thunder from the balcony of my castle.
    I would have preferred a picture of her , but she’s reallyparanoid about that sort of thing. She’s never sent a photo, or done a voice chat, or anything like that.
    Which, of course, means that there’s a pretty good chance that she’s not who she says she is. Maybe she’s really a guy. My hunch is that she’s transgender and afraid to tell me, even though I’ve told her again and again that I’ll be okay with anything she is. All things being equal, I think I like girls the best, but you know how you automatically go for chocolate over vanilla most of the time, except sometimes it’s a choice between a smooth, creamy vanilla made with real vanilla beans and some crummy dollar-store chocolate that tastes like chalk, and then you’re like, “well, I guess vanilla this time?” And sometimes there’s strawberry, too, and that just fucks the whole thing up? It’s like that.
    All I care about is that Zoey gets me. She loves my fan-fic stories instead of being freaked out by them—even the darker stuff that I worry is going to make her run off screaming. And if I follow in Mom’s footsteps as a funeral-home owner, that won’t scare her off either. From previous crushes and aborted attempts at relationships, I’ve learned that people putting up with your weirdness is important.
    And really, really hard to find.
    Long-distance invisible girlfriends might be all I ever get.
    While I answer Zoey’s message, I look at the pictures that are set up in the space above the bus windows and below the map on the ceiling. They’re shots of what I guess are supposedto be ghosts—odd shadows and blurry, vaguely humanoid forms glowing in alleys, stairwells, and dead-end streets.
    â€œYou get these shots on the tours?”
    â€œMost of them. We only get a picture that I’m really impressed with every now and then. Even with most of these, we know what they really are, and we’re pretty up front about it. That shot that looks like a guy in a hooded robe on the staircase is really just a reflection of Rick’s ear.”
    I can think of good explanations for most of the pictures without much effort. The rest could just be outright fakes, but that doesn’t seem like Rick and Cyn’s style. And I appreciate that. I’d been thinking I’d have to tell people that pictures of their flash bouncing off of windows are actually “spirits” on this job. If I don’t, the gig is a lot more attractive to me.
    I take an empty seat up front as customers start checking in. When the bus is about a third full, Cyn gets in the driver’s seat and tests the microphone.
    â€œSo, what do you guys wanna see?” she asks.
    â€œGhosts?” someone asks, like they aren’t