Chapter Six
A Ghost in the Machine?
“Dave!” Keisha’s eyes narrowed and she glared at me.
“That’s a sick joke, Zach! Dave Warren is dead - your sense of humor is the pits.”
“If it’s a joke, it’s on me!” I protested. I showed her the Foster story I’d turned in without realizing it. Maybe she’d believe me if she saw the horrible grade. “You think I wanted that C- ? But I’m stuck with it! And I’m stuck with this Foster character. I can’t even trash the file.”
I tried to quit the word processing program without saving the story. “Save changes to document before quitting?” the screen asked helpfully. I tried to click on “Don’t Save.” The dialogue box disappeared, but the story stayed.
“Computer glitch,” said Keisha.
“You try trashing it,” I told her.
Keisha sat down and took control of the mouse. She saved the document and then dragged it to the trash, just as I’d done the night before. But when she tried to empty the trash, the fluorescent light flickered over our heads. The room suddenly felt like we were trapped in the middle of an avalanche.
“Air conditioning?” she suggested weakly.
“In winter?” I stared at the computer monitor, certain I was right. I grabbed the CD Mr. Myers had tried this morning and jammed it into the slot. Keisha winced at the grating sound the computer made before the “Unable to read” message came up.
“That was my aliens story backup!” I told her. “It was fine last night when I used it to reload my original story, but now it’s like something in the machine has eaten it! At least I saved my revisions and burned a new disc last night, and I jerked that one out of the computer as fast as I could. But something in the computer is destroying everything I write, and freezing me if I try to get rid of anything it writes.” I realized I was sounding hysterical, and tried to calm down. “So what am I supposed to do about it?”
Keisha didn’t answer.
I rescued the document from the trash, and immediately the room warmed up.
“You’re right that Dave’s dead,” I told Keisha. “I think he’s a ghost.”
She thought about it. I could see her eyes shifting from the computer to the backup CDs to the printouts and back to the screen. “And he’s haunting you?” she asked.
She slowly turned from the monitor to look at me. “You should have let him write for the magazine, Zach.”
At least she believed me. But now she wanted to make me feel guilty. Well, I wasn’t the only editor on the magazine who’d rejected Dave’s stories. I met her eyes. “Come on, Keisha, you read his stuff too. You agreed it was…”
Keisha looked away from me, down at the Foster printout. “It was derivative.” She sighed. “But maybe we could have helped him find his own voice.”
I slammed my fist down on the mouse pad. “Who knew he was going to die? Kids don’t die - I mean…”
“You mean, if you’d known he was going to get hit by that drunk driver, you’d have been nicer to him,” Keisha finished for me. “You couldn’t have published his stories the way he wrote them, but you could have been nicer.”
I felt worse than when I read “Derivative” and thought Mr. Myers meant me. After I’d brushed Dave off all last year, he told me I was a lousy writer and a crummy editor. The next semester, he hadn’t even signed up for the magazine. And, I have to admit it, I was glad. I didn’t have to come up with new ways to tell him we were rejecting his stories. Then poor, clumsy Dave had got himself on the wrong crosswalk at the wrong time and wound up dead. I went to the funeral, along with everyone else. I even felt awful about his getting killed, for about a week. Then I forgot all about him.
Well, I didn’t totally forget him. Maybe that’s the worst part. Whenever I knew something I’d written was flat or boring, or too serious, I remembered Dave and wished I’d helped him. I wished somebody would help me. Everyone says writing is a solitary pursuit, and it is. But after you write something, even world-famous published writers need friends to read it, to see what needs work and how to fix it.
Then, in spite of my doubts, my story would come back with an A or a B+, and I’d tell myself it was good enough after all. I didn’t need anybody. I wasn’t like Dave. Still, I’d remember him the next time I suspected my writing wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be - as good as it had to be, if I was going to be a world-famous novelist.
“I should have thought,” I muttered, meaning I should have known… “how it feels to get told your work is terrible. I should have tried to help him. I didn’t even bother to find out whether he wanted to be a writer, or whether he just wanted to the magazine for some sort of an extracurricular activity credit.”
“Stop it,” Keisha said. Her voice was serious now. “Dave had some imagination, but he couldn’t have made it as a writer.”
I looked at her. “Maybe not yet. But we’re supposed to be learning, aren’t we? Getting better? Isn’t that what school’s for?” I opened the Foster story. “But it’s too late for Dave - he can’t get better than this. And I didn’t do anything to help him when he had the chance.”
I guess I wanted her to say something - convince me it really wasn’t my fault, or admit that she needed to learn to write better too, like Dave, like me. But Keisha didn’t say anything. It was too late for all of us.
Or was it?
– End Chapter Six –
