The locker itself is empty, but its rear panel is missing, and, instead of revealing the back of the warehouse, the space opens onto a hallway where there hangs a black-and-white portrait of a blind and deaf high-school graduate wearing a mortarboard on her head.

In the years since I last saw Helen Keller, she has not changed one iota. She has been locked in time like me. She gives me an encouraging look, as encouraging a look as a blind lady can. “Come along now, child,” she seems to say. “Don’t be afraid.”

Helen faced many ordeals in her life boldly and bravely, and so must I. I look down at Pierre. He looks up, wet-eyed, tongue tip sticking out. He emits a low squeal.

“Stay,” I say to him. “I’ll be back.”

Will I, though?

I wedge myself into the portal before me. I know I will fit: Jermaine Tucker once shut me inside this very locker. I close the door behind me so that Pierre cannot climb through. Just as I slip out of the locker and into the hallway of my old school, the bell rings. Hordes of students spill from the classrooms up and down the corridor. For a moment, I am frozen. My heartbeat quickens because I fear seeing Jermaine Tucker, Kevin Stein, Henry Axworthy, and their ilk—but of course I do not. I do not recognize any of the seventh graders and eighth graders jabbering and cursing and giggling and roughhousing. Thirteen years have passed.

Am I invisible? I hold my hands to my face. They look pale but solid. The ghost around my wrist, Casper, now reads three thirty. The bell that rang is the last bell of the day.

“Do you mind?” says an Asian girl with butterfly clips in her hair and a shell necklace around her neck. “You’re, like, totally blocking my way.”

I am not invisible.

I step aside so the new owner of my old locker can fetch her belongings. Since I stepped out of it, the locker has closed behind me. The girl fiddles with her lock, and I almost ask if the combination is still 7–25–34. But she does not give me a second glance, nor do the other students. Yet the blind Helen seems to. “Get a move on,” I imagine her saying. “You have a haunting to do.”

I swerve through the crowd as the students jostle one another. Unfurled on a wall is a team banner reading, TROJAN, SLAY THY ENEMY! The walls have been repainted: they were once pale yellow but are now spearmint green.

I pass an empty classroom, the room where I used to study science. On the teacher’s desk is a plastic model of the human heart with its chambers, valves, and arteries exposed. I am drawn toward it, but before I can examine the heart, another item attracts my attention. Thumbtacked to a corkboard is, lo and behold, a periodic table. An updated periodic table!

“May I help you?”

I turn around and face a man whose head is bald but whose chest must be furry because a tuft of black hair pokes out of the top of his shirt. I have not seen an adult—other than the grown-up Johnny Henzel—in thirteen years, so I am startled, as though I just stumbled on a bear in the woods.

“Your periodic table,” I say to this man whom I do not recognize, “it has one hundred and nine elements now.”

The science teacher glances at the periodic table and then looks back at me. “That’s right. One hundred and nine, yes.”

“I thought there were only one hundred and six. I imagine that”—here I read from the table—“bohrium, hassium, and meitnerium were discovered in the last dozen years.”

Speared behind the teacher’s ear is a long pencil indented with teeth marks. The man gives me a quizzical look. “Oh, we’re making new discoveries all the time,” he says. “You never know what’ll turn up next.”

Peter Peter used to say more or less the same thing about objects destined for Curios.

“Good day to you, sir,” I say to the science teacher.

“Good day to you too,” the man says, scratching a patch of psoriasis on his elbow.

I turn and walk from the room into the crowded corridor. I am pushed along, past bulletin boards filled with students’ reproductions of album art (Little Earthquakes, Lucky Town, Nevermind, 99.9F°), a poster for auditions for a play (Death of a Salesman), and a perplexing campaign flyer for student council (PHIL PRATT IS PHAT!).

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse Mr. Miller, my English teacher to whom I taught the difference between “who” and “whom.” He now has a potbelly, and his salt-and-pepper hair is now just salt. Another actual adult. I avert my gaze lest he think he has seen a ghost. Down the hall and across the lobby I hurry. As I push through Helen Keller’s front doors, I realize that the last time I left this school, I was lying on a stretcher, a blanket thrown over my corpse.

Outside I see so many things I have not seen in a dog’s age. Speaking of dogs, at the edge of the school driveway, I see a German shepherd, which runs by me leash-less. I see a dozen sparrows flutter into a tree. Around me are bungalows, automobiles, school buses, mailboxes, stop signs, traffic lights, and convenience stores. How liberating and peculiar to be free of the towering Great Walls that imprison us townies.

My eyes go watery from joy!

As I admire my surroundings, a gray squirrel bounds toward me and stands with its tail twitching and paws limp-wristed. “Thank you, Zig,” I say to the squirrel, as though Sciurus carolinensis were my god. The animal snatches a maple key and then scrabbles up a tree. I wish it were fall so I could see orange and red maple leaves! I wish it were winter so I could see snow, and perhaps grasp a bumper and skitch down the street!

On the edge of the sidewalk is an anthill teeming with ants. I drop to my knees. I am awed by my little friends’ strength and purposefulness. An ant can carry fifty times its body weight. Were I an ant, I could carry an ice-cream truck on my back. I mention such a truck because one passes by, ringing its bell and attracting a Pied Piper line of students. Townies would be envious, since ice cream is not among the foods Zig sends. For a frozen treat, we townies make do with putting peeled bananas in the freezer and then running them through a food processor.

Compared with Town, Hoffman Estates has such a variety of humans! After thirteen years of nothing but thirteen-year-olds, it is heavenly (ha-ha) to see, for example, an old man walking with a cane. How old is he? Sadly, I can no longer tell age. Sixty-two? Eighty-nine? Running beneath the translucent skin on his forearms are whole tributaries of snaky blue veins, so he must be very old.

“It’s beautiful out, n’est-ce pas?” I say to the man, whose nose has the same texture as cauliflower.

He looks up. An airplane is passing, creating contrails across the wild blue yonder. “The sky used to be bluer in my day,” he says.

“But it is your day,” I reply. “You aren’t dead yet.”

The next person I pass is a man in a tank top with ballooning muscles like a cartoon superhero’s. Then I see a shawled lady pushing an actual toddler in a stroller. In the child’s hair is clamped a swarm of bumblebee barrettes. As you know, I was never fond of young children because conversing with them is dull, yet I actually babble “Gitchy gitchy goo!” at the child.

I must stop all this staring at my surroundings and make haste. Who knows how long this haunting will last? I once thought a haunting would be unfair to you, cruel even. I have changed my mind. Perhaps I am being selfish, but I want to see your faces again. Zig willing, I will.

I start running. I am a speed demon. I intend to head straight for Clippers, since at this time of the day that is where you should be, but since Sandpits is on the way, I cut through our apartment complex. I take Hill Drive, and I am huffing and puffing by the time I reach 222. I stop and glance at the second-floor balcony. Through the balcony door, I glimpse movement, a person walking past. You may be home early! Or perhaps you have taken the day off because it is the anniversary of my death.

I hurry up the walkway and into our low-rise. When I reach Apartment 6 on the second floor, I see on our door a wreath made of sticks twisted together with little plastic cardinals nesting within. Mother, you must have made it in one of your arts and crafts workshops. I bang the door knocker without thinking what I will say if you answer and find your late son standing before you. I do not have time to think because I fear that Zig will reel me back any second—perhaps even the very second I glimpse your faces and you glimpse mine. Perhaps when the door swings open, I will vanish and you will have the ghost of your son burned on your retinas as your only proof I was ever there.

But when the door swings open, you are not whom I see. Whom I see is an older teenager with a nest of messy black hair. He wears a black T-shirt with the name ROBERT SMITH written across the chest in white letters designed to look like dripping paint.

“Are you the paperboy?” Robert Smith asks.

His lips are orangey red. His skin is as white as mine, but I believe he has applied powder, because I can see that it is caked in his nostril folds. He looks almost like the zombies that townies dress as on Halloween.

I stare at him. I am sure I am wide-eyed, as though he were the ghost, not I.

Is he your foster son, Mother and Father?

From the apartment comes music, a slow song featuring a sad violin and sung by a gloomy man who keeps repeating that he is always wishing for “impossible things.”

Robert Smith repeats his question: “Is it collection day? You deliver the Tribune?”

I slowly shake my head. Then I say, “May I speak to Mr. and Mrs. Dalrymple?”

“Who?”

“The Dalrymples.”

“Never heard of them.”

He is not your foster son.

“They’re barbers,” I say. “They run Clippers out by the highway.”

“You got the wrong building. All the buildings look alike in this sh*thole.”

“The Dalrymples used to live in Apartment 6 at 222 Hill Drive. I am certain of that.”

“Well, they don’t no more. Me and my mom have been here three years now.”

Oh dear! It never occurred to me you may have moved. I am unsure what to do. I hesitate. Robert Smith stares at me with his mascaraed eyes. Finally, I take a step forward. “May I come in and look around?” I ask.

On his middle finger, Robert Smith is wearing a silver ring with a skull engraving, a kind of death’s head ring. I notice it because he reaches across the doorway to block my entry. He frowns his black eyebrows. “No, you little freak,” he says. “You can’t come in.”

A boy in pancake makeup with bouffant hair is calling me a freak.

“Pretty please,” I say.

Robert Smith slams the door.