The Bystander Effect

Chapter 11- Number 29

It was pitch black in the school janitor's closet, except for the soft glow of light barely peeking under the thick door, lighting an inch or so of the grey speckled white linoleum. A damp mop smell clung to the air. Kelly banged her elbow on a metal shelf as she pushed her hair back away from her left shoulder. Warm, wet lips crash against her uncovered neck. It was like being slobbered on by an overly eager saint Bernard.

Jeff couldn't believe Kelly was hooking up with him. No girl had ever had much to do with him, not when he was in high school as a student, nor during these three years that he'd been at the high school as a janitor. He wasn't very attractive, which he decided must be because of his skinny figure and shaggy hair. His mother always told him nobody would take him seriously until he cut his hair, and to be honest, he kept it long specifically because it annoyed her so much. Although, he was taking steps to improve his looks. He had recently joined a gym, but was wielding no results yet that he could tell, so when Kelly winked at him, he thought he must be imagining things. Maybe he was dreaming.

She smelled like vanilla. Her lithe body twisted in his arms. She was real, he decided, and this was really happening.

"So you'll tell them?" she asked, bursting into his dreamlike state.

He mumbled into her neck. Kelly pulled a face in the dark. This guy was completely inexperienced. Fish could do a better job at kissing...and are probably smarter, too, but that's why she chose Jeff. He was easy for her to manipulate.

"That I was here that evening?" she kept saying. "You saw me in the library, doing research. You'll tell them I dropped a stack of books when you startled me, and you helped me pick them up?"

"Mmm-hmm," he said, before crashing his lips down onto hers.

----

Lucas sat in his white Titan in the parking lot, waiting for Kelly to finish whatever she said she had to do. The local radio station spilled out of the speakers, playing some old rock song he's heard many times. With basketball and cheerleading practice over, the parking lot was almost empty. Lucas nodded in time with the bass drum and played air drums on his steering wheel, but he couldn't seem to get into the song. He reached for his phone, sitting in it's clip holder on the dashboard vent. His screen had gone black, reflecting much the way his rearview mirror did. Someone was standing behind his truck. Normally that's no cause for concern. He was parked in a public area, and people were bound to walk by. But that person looked a lot like-

"Hayden?" he gasped, nearly choking on the air he'd sucked in during the moment of panic.

She was standing there, looking at him, as if she'd climbed out of the grave they put her in and decided to find him. When he turned around to meet her eyes, to prove to himself it was just some girl he didn't know instead of Hayden, nobody was there.

While he sat, stupidly looking behind him at an empty space, something slammed into the hood of his truck. The whole truck shook violently, then went still. The stupid song was still blaring and Lucas looked out in horror as a face on his hood looked back at him. She stared emptily, blood running from her bright maroon lips--Hayden's signature color. It was her, laying in a huge body-sized dent on the hood of his Titan, and looking like she'd died just now rather than weeks ago.

It was chaos inside Lucas's mind. What he was seeing wasn't possible. Immediately, he tried to remove himself from it, by jumping out of the truck. Music spilled out of the wide open door as he backed up slowly. Blood dripped down the side, cutting a striking red line on the white paint. His eyes shot upward to the roof of the school, the only place that she could have come from at such an angle, and what he saw there was even more terrifying. Hayden, standing there, looking down at him, even though he'd just seen her dead on his truck.

His feet got caught up on themselves as he tried to back away faster, and he fell hard on his back. Hayden was gone from the roof, and he was afraid she'd come for him. He looked for her back on the hood, but instead of a brunette, there was a blonde. It wasn't Hayden at all. It was Kelsea Sparks, a girl he knew from the cheerleading squad. Sometimes he hooked up with her behind Kelly's back. He wouldn't be hooking up with her anymore. Nobody would.

Lucas scrambled inside for help as fast as he could. Hayden watched him go. She would have liked to laugh, if she remembered how. She couldn't laugh now, unless there was an audience. Unless it was just a maneuver to use on someone. Alone, she was just a shadow. A whisper. They were the ones that gave her the twisted type of life she had now. Silently, while the flow of blood ran down the truck and across the pavement to her, she watched him go out of sight. It was only her and the girl. The dead and the revenant. She watched the girl as the number 29 that marked her slowly burned away, leaving the space black, then Hayden left to find the next brightly blazing number.