Spree (YA Paranormal) Read Online Free

Zipper seriously, that he’d found joy in bullying the kid, in pounding away at the strange and unfamiliar.
    “What’d you say?” Alex asked him.
    He grabbed Zipper’s backpack—the one that had the gun in it—and gave it a shove. Zipper went circling towards the wall. I wanted to make the gun go off, to get people to notice, but I couldn’t do a thing. I didn’t yet know how.
    No one laughed. Everyone knew the tenor of the day.
    Zipper murmured, but Alex didn’t follow up. He just went up to the paper mural Mrs. Cowell had just finished putting up and picked up one of the markers she’d attached to a string.
    I stood over his shoulder, looking on as he wrote:
     
    Hello, Mrs. DeSoto:
    I’m sorry your daughter was such a whore and a drunk .
     
    Kids who’d seen him write it stood back as he walked away.
    The teachers were too busy congregating with the students, huddling and crying with them, to notice.
    Even though my mom would never see the comment, I felt so pissed I could slap Alex. He cheated on me too, though after, I admit, I’d cheated on him. Just last Monday we were all lovey- dovey, throwing chalk at each other in Mr. Higgins’s class. I thought we were moving on.
    Today, this.
    I saw Alex scamper off, towards a bathroom stall. He locked himself in, pounded on the stall a few times, and then broke down and cried like the kids he made fun of.
    I wanted to hold him, but I couldn’t.
    I just knelt by him and said: “I wish I could undo it all, but I can’t. Just know that I love you too.”
    Just then I felt myself pulled elsewhere, up and floating, above the crowds of crying kids huddling off the buses and into the gym, away from the anger, the grief, the accusations.
    “What’s happening?” I asked.
    “Looks like someone’s made her Death Day wish,” Crazy T said.
    His voice sounded uneven. His black hole eyes sparkled in this reddish light of insanity.
    “It’s no matter,” he said. “I want you to see something before we go.”
    He pointed to the image of Zipper holding my picture.
    At that moment I remembered. Zipper had cried when we broke up in eighth grade. I laughed before heading off to have my first beer in Preggers’s basement.
    Yeah, I was a bitch.
    “He liked me too much,” I said.
    “He loved you,” Crazy T said, mockingly.
    I watched as Zipper stalled himself up in another bathroom, then took the gun out of his backpack.
    “Maybe today’s the day,” he said to himself.
    I could tell Alex had humiliated him. I could feel how sensitive he was, could see it in the pink orbs that floated around him. If they only knew how alike they were, they could grieve together.
    But a world of status and condescension separated them: the world of high school.
    “You wanna help?” Crazy T asked me. “You wanna undo it all? Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you got behind the wheel.”
    I watched as Crazy T transformed himself into a cloud of blackish mist, like the Takers hovering around Zipper, urging him on.
    “Don’t do it,” I whispered to Zipper. “Forget me. Live. Just live.”
    I could see Zipper jump up a bit, then calm down and put the gun back into his backpack.
    He zipped it up and busted out of the stall, off to his first period class.
     
    * * *
     
    Faint whispers of light surrounded me, and I knew I was somewhere else, somewhere that looked a little like the smoky haze of a never-ending party. Around me was music blaring in colors along with silver shadows dancing, spilling into each other, and the smallest hints of gold that framed the whole place in infinite metallic fire. I felt I was in a field, surrounded by creatures I couldn’t even make out. Their presence felt unsettling, but familiar.
    “Is this hell?” I asked.
    I searched around for Crazy T, but I heard no answer.
    “The Spree,” I heard an unfamiliar voice say. “Land of lost souls.”
    “I can’t quite make it out,” I said.
    “You will—in time,” the voice said. “Every