Page 85 of The Player
“The ghost room, you mean?”
I stopped chewing, my mouth hanging open as I said, “There’s ghosts here?”
“Yeah.” He raised his eyebrows at me, and his eyes darted to the door then back at me. “Didn’t you see him, sitting in the window, staring out?”
I swallowed, icy-cold spreading over me as I thought about the silent boy.
I leaned closer to the kid next to me. “Is he not real? He looked pretty real to me.”
The kid laughed and shook his head.
“Oh, he’s real. But we call him the ghost, ‘cos he never speaks. All he does is wander down from his room every morning and sit in that window. He doesn’t play with any of us. He rarely leaves that room.” He leaned into me and whispered, “He’s the ghost of Clivesdon House.” And then he made a wooo sound like a ghost and started laughing again.
Suddenly, I heard someone shout across the table, “Shut the fuck up with your bullshit stories, Ricky,” and I whipped my head around to see the Obi kid glaring at us. “Leave the kid alone,” he snarled, and I couldn’t tell if he meant me or silent ghost boy.
When dinner was over and we’d cleaned our plates, I left Ricky and his friends behind to argue over whose go was next on the Nintendo, and I took Frankie back to the games room. There was a plate of sausage and mash on the table next to where silent boy sat, and it looked like he’d had a few bites of mash, but nothing else.
“The sausages were good,” I told him, but he didn’t answer me, just sat watching the world as the sun was starting to set.
“Me have the sausage?” Frankie said, wandering over to the table and stealing a wet, gravy-soaked sausage from silent boy’s plate and clutching it in his chubby hand.
“That’s not yours,” I chastised him, but silent boy shook his head.
“It’s okay.”
We sat in silence, except for Frankie, who was gobbling on his sausage, and then he started to make choo-choo noises as he pulled a toy train across the carpet.
Eventually, I couldn’t hold back any longer, and I asked one last time, “What’s your name? You need to tell me because the boys at dinner said you were a ghost, but I don’t want to call you ghost, and in my head, I’m calling you silent boy, but that doesn’t seem right either. So, what should I call you? If you don’t want anyone else to know, I can always just use it in my head. But I have to call you something, and I’d prefer to say your real name, not a made up one.”
I was rambling; that’s what Mum used to call it when I couldn’t stop talking, but I couldn’t help it.
Silent boy took in a deep breath, but he didn’t reply.
“Do you want to make one up? You can give yourself a cool name if you want, like Stone Cold Steve Austin or Kurt Angle.” I took the wrestling figures out of my pocket to try and prove my point, that they were cool guys with cool names, but he didn’t look at them.
“You could be Triple H or Batista,” I went on, and when silent boy cleared his throat, I shut up, waiting to hear what he’d say.
“Zye,” he whispered, then a little louder, he said, “You can call me Zye.”
“Zye,” I repeated, seeing how it sounded out loud. “That’s a good choice.”
“It’s not a choice. It’s my name. Actually, it’s Isaiah, but I prefer to be called Zye.”
Outside the window, it grew darker, and Frankie started to yawn.
“We go home now?” he asked. “Mummy come get us?”
“No, Frankie,” I told him. “We’re sleeping here tonight.”
“Here?” His little lip started to quiver. “Me no like that.”
“It’ll be okay,” I told him, sitting on the floor and pulling him into my lap. “It’s a sleepover, and it’ll be fun. I’ll be with you.”
“And Zye?” Frankie asked.
“I hope not,” Zye replied, his eyes still fixed on something outside as he stared out the window. “I hope you get to sleep in Obi’s dorm. You don’t want to be in mine.”
“Why?” I asked, because the thought of being in a room with Obi sounded worse than anything.
