A Day at Miss Ever's House

© 2000 Walter Jones
All rights reserved.

JoJo hated high school. He hated the homework. He hated the teachers.
Most of all he hated the kids.
Today, just like every other day, Billie Ray patrolled the bus. Billie Ray was a foster child who resided with Mr. and Mrs. Allbright, a suburban middle class family. Rumor had it that the county children and youth services removed him from his biological parents because his father was an alcoholic and his mother was in jail on drug related charges.
Many suspected that the crooked nose that graced Billie Ray's chalky face was a result of numerous battles with his father. Billie Ray fumed whenever he overheard students gossiping about him. He insisted that he was in a foster home because his parents could not control his behavior.
Although Billie Ray was reserved, he never turned down the opportunity to talk about his history of macho street behavior to anyone who would listen. His rare conversation invariably centered on gang fights, confrontations with teachers, and his open disregard for laws and regulations. Anyone who dared to question Billie Ray's manhood faced his violent retaliation.
Billie Ray's fierce, dark eyes surveyed the trembling students. Which mousy eleventh grader would he choose to be his next victim? It would be someone who had terrifying nightmares about his mere presence. It would be someone whose face would flush with humiliation at the mere thought of Billy Ray releasing his seething anger. He needed to take advantage of someone. He was a bully. That's all he could be, and that's all the students on the bus expected him to be.
JoJo Farley sat alone and withdrawn in the corner seat in the back of the bus. He gazed pensively out the window with his lethally calm brown eyes.
"How much chump change you got JoJo Farley?"
Billie Ray's husky, authoritative voice interrupted JoJo from his troubled thoughts. The fear that paralyzed him at the thought of an impending confrontation with Billie Ray dissipated into a defiant smile.
JoJo was more intimidated by Billie Ray's appearance than he was his reputation. Billie Ray had an intimidating body with wide shoulders and rippling muscles that seemed to harden after each of his daily workouts. He had spiked purple hair with a pierced nose, ears, and eyebrows. Oddly, it was exactly the image JoJo secretly craved. JoJo could never be accepted by donning the popular look of the students who were going thorough their rebellious stage of development. He was an obese nerd with a crew cut and tortoiseshell glasses. JoJo couldn't fit into the most socially ostracized peer group at Overlook High.
"JoJo, you better answer me, you gay punk."
Billie Ray was accustomed to his prey immediately wimping out. Some of the kids would reach for their wallets. Others would stutter over their words while begging for mercy. It made no difference how a kid responded; the result was the same. Give Billie Ray your money or he would kick your ass.
"Do you have a problem JoJo?" Billie Ray had a future as an Army drill sergeant if he could somehow mange to live that long.
"Yeah, I have a problem with you, Billie Ray." The bold and antagonistic words impulsively shot out of JoJo's mouth.
"JoJo Farley, are you challenging me?"
"If that's what you call it." JoJo suspected that Billie Ray had a secret hidden beneath his cold exterior.
"Nobody challenges Billie Ray." Billie Ray grabbed JoJo's neck with his oversized hands and began to choke him. The two fell into the aisle with Billie on top trying successfully to wring the life out of JoJo.
"Fight, fight, fight," the students chanted in unison. All the students secretly wished that somehow JoJo would beat the hell out of Billie Ray. They knew that there was little or no chance of that happening. What they did know was that one of them was next on Billie Ray's list.
The bus came to a screeching halt and the driver and his assistant reeled in Billie Ray like amateur fishermen.
Although JoJo faced the inevitable suspension from the bus, the fight with Billie Ray was worth it because it gave him a sense of power, dignity, and control. It proved to him and the students who witnessed it his defiance of Billie Ray; that he was not a submissive man.
JoJo gradually began to focus on his mechanical walk through the suburban neighborhood to his home.
He hated his home. He hated it because it was an eyesore. He hated it because his mother had left it. He hated it because when his mother had returned, she'd died. Most of all he hated it because of his father. As he walked he again considered running away. His fear of ending up as a homeless teen on the street always prevented him from fulfilling his fantasy.
JoJo trudged across the neighbors' lawns near the edge of the dried-up creek to his house. Then he rushed to the back porch and sat in a white lawn chair that overlooked a yard that was in dire need of being mowed. Whenever he was in this mood, he would reflect on the miseries of the past that haunted his present and threatened his future. He thought about the time when he used to play on the rusty sliding board and swings that were located in the corner of the yard.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Dad fumbling in the kitchen. He heard Dad having a running conversation with the host on a local sports talk station. Whenever Dad drank heavily, he would bark out religious verses with intermittent paranoid laughter between chiding the host.
JoJo sat in a tranquil, almost catatonic state. He reflected on how he had told his therapist about what had taken place in the house many years ago. He told the therapist that he continued to remember every detail of the events and that they would often be reenacted in his dreams. The therapist said that JoJo had hallucinations, but what had happened between him and his dad was real. The therapist told JoJo that if Dad ever made advances again, JoJo would have to leave the home and be placed in a foster home. But JoJo didn't want to leave his house and live with another family.
JoJo heard Dad stagger out the door and on to the porch. He had heavy feet for a man with anorexic body. "What you doing out here JoJo Farley?"
Dad's bloodshot eyes protruded from their sockets. Hidden behind his businesslike emotions he was a sick, unremorseful shell of a human being.
"You've been living here too long," Dad said as his jaw tightened, "without paying the rent." He moved toward JoJo with a commanding and disciplined slowness. Dad had a gentle side to his madness. "Daddy's here for his payment."
He placed his clammy hands on JoJo's. If JoJo hadn't known that they were his father's, he may have been excited by the rough but gentle touch of a man's hand.
His mixture of excitement and anger drove him to run off the porch and rush up the stairs to his meticulously clean bedroom. He grabbed a knife he kept hidden in a stack of underwear in his dresser drawer. He stared at the blade and ran his hand across the sharp edge. The knife glistened in the light of the platinum moon that filtered through the window shades.
JoJo's thoughts raced fluidly as he edged his way back down the wooden stairs. A small amount of perspiration trickled down his arm to the knife he clasped tightly. He creeped behind Dad, who was sitting at the kitchen table with his back toward the window, drinking vodka. He knew that Dad didn't hear him because he was too focused on the thoughts in his own mind.
He lifted the knife in the air and prepared to plunge it into Dad's collarbone. Then, suddenly, he stopped his forward motion like a baseball batter taking a half swing.
He couldn't do it.
He couldn't kill Dad because Dad was slowly killing himself. Why should he accept the consequences for Dad's inevitable fate?
Before Dad recognized that he had ever entered the room, JoJo darted out of the house.

He didn't get far before a plan that had suggested itself four years ago resurfaced. He stopped at the fork in the dirt path and dropped to one knee. He slid the blade, which he continued to grip like a vise, delicately across his wrist. He repeated the gentle stroking of the blade against his throbbing pulse. To his surprise, he never felt any pain. With each stroke, the more obsessed he became with the need to see his own blood. Suddenly, he pushed the knife until it sliced though the bulging vein.
JoJo always fantasized that the blood would spurt out like a volcanic eruption. Instead, it trickled from the side of his hand and created crimson spots on his faded blue jeans.
He stood and quickly tore off his shirt, wrapping the wrist. Momentary panic stuck him at the sight of the blood soaking through the shirt. He tossed the knife into the bushes that lined the other side of the path.
JoJo resumed his frantic walk on the left path of the fork. It concluded in a dead end where a mysterious Dutch colonial house could barely be seen in the mist.
Thick, sauna-like heat smothered his face with moisture and steamed his glasses. He could feel the twisted pain of the house. It smelled like a combination of burning flesh and baby oil on an infant's bottom. There was life and death in this house. It was calling him. JoJo. His name echoed. He considered running, but the sight of the house cemented him to the sidewalk.
JoJo lifted his heavy hand and clubbed it on the door.
"May I help you?" A wrinkled elderly woman who looked like the blood had been drained from her body greeted him. She had a sadistic, playful smile. She warmly welcomed him into her home. JoJo couldn't help but think that there may not have been a visitor at the house for many years.
"My name is JoJo Farley. I ran away from home and your house appeared out of thin air." The blood on JoJo's wrist seemed to magnify as each second past. "I don't know why I'm here," he said wearily.
"Were you sent by the agency?" She winked one of her shark-like eyes at JoJo as though he knew what she was talking about.
"I don't know anything about an agency."
"I'm sure you were." She negotiated her way to the tiny kitchen and inched herself into a chair at the table. JoJo couldn't help but notice the set of kitchen knives that were conveniently sitting on the kitchen sink, still in their original packaging.
"My name is Miss Ever. The agency hasn't sent anyone for quite a long time. Did they tell you about their rules and regulations?"
JoJo didn't want to be impolite, but he was transfixed by the state of his bloody shirt.
"Miss Ever, don't you see the blood on my wrist?"
Miss Ever inspected JoJo's left wrist. She flipped it over and said nothing. She paid more attention to his palms.
"I used to believe that I could read palms."
"The blood, Miss Ever. Don't you see the blood?"
"I don't see any blood, JoJo, but if you believe there is blood on your wrist, I'm sure there is."
"My palms were bloodstained. You had to see the blood."
"All that existed in your palms, JoJo, was loneliness and the pain of a suffering child."
The face of a child pressing against the patio window suddenly startled him. The terrorstricken child appeared to be the mirror image of him at that age. After a moment JoJo realized that his initial assessment was incorrect. He recognized that the face was that of a seven-year-old girl.
"Who's that, Miss Ever?"
"She lives in there with her father. They never come out. The agency doesn't allow them out."
"What is this agency you keep talking about?"
"They own the house and I owe a debt. After they find a new tenant, I can leave this house."
"Will the girl be able to leave, too?"
"Unfortunately, she will die once I leave."
"Miss Ever, you can't keep the girl against her will!"
"JoJo, you still don't understand. It is the agency. I am only a keeper. She must follow the rules, too. It's how we survive in this place."
Jojo wasn't satisfied. He opened the door and ventured inside the junglelike backyard. It was like being in a dream state—a cartoon. The girl he saw at the window peeked though the vines. He chased her to an opening where he found her on the playground swinging on the swings.
"She's evil. Miss Ever is evil, I tell you." The girl bore a remarkable resemblance to Miss Ever.
"What's your name?"
"Maria, Maria Ever."
"Are you related to Miss Ever?"
The girl darted off.
"Please, don't run!" JoJo chased again. He saw the girl in an open field. She was with an older man. The two kissed one another on the lips. She turned and looked at him, then vanished into the jungle.
Her voice drifted in the air.
"She's evil. She keeps me here and never lets me out."
The voice made his flesh crawl.
"Have you looked in the upstairs room? There are two of us, you know."
The voice became fainter.
"You must leave this house because once you get locked in, she'll never let you out."
JoJo's exhaustive search yielded no results. He stopped at the swings and started to push one until it kept going higher. The memories slipped through his mind once again. He allowed the swings to move by themselves as he began to pace. Any thought of Dad made him need to walk off his anxiety and nervousness. He needed someone to talk to. He needed someone who would listen to him and have empathy for him. Maybe he thought, maybe Miss Ever would listen to everything he kept bottled up for so long. Maybe that was why he was brought to her house.
He returned to the kitchen, where Miss Ever had prepared dinner for him.
"You should never have gone in there, JoJo." Miss Ever poured a glass of lemonade.
"Miss Ever, that girl wants to be let out of that room."
"The girl lies. I have no control over her. It's the agency. They make all the decisions about the conditions under which the tenants live. I am simply the keeper of the house."
"She bears a remarkable resemblance to you, Miss Ever."
"If only I could be so youthful once again. I suppose that you saw the man, too."
"Yes."
"That's her father. I suspect that she and her father have more than a natural father-and-daughter relationship. They are the only two who live there."
"I lived with my mom and dad once. My mom left my dad and that's when the trouble began."
"Your father provided you with a home. Many children don't even have that."
"There was a guy I had a fight with after school, Billie Ray, he doesn't have a home, not a real one."
"It's not good for children to move from place to place. A permanent home is what a child needs."
"I could have stayed with Dad, but he needed a woman. He couldn't find one when mom left. That's when the trouble began." JoJo glanced at Miss Ever with suspicion. She seemed different than any other person he tried to open up to, but was something about her that he didn't trust.
"Miss Ever, my wrist it's bleeding. Don't you see the blood?"
"If you need to see blood, JoJo, then the blood exists."
He knew Miss Ever saw the blood. How could he tell her his deepest secrets if she lied to him? Miss Ever was hiding something and he aimed to find out exactly what it was.
"The girl said that there was another person upstairs."
"It is extremely dangerous to wander into the rooms of the house. You've already broken a rule by going to see that little girl. You must not go upstairs, JoJo. The agency forbids anyone from going up there."
JoJo paid no attention to Miss Ever. He made his way up the winding stairs and opened the door.
The sight of the woman he recognized as a younger version, perhaps in the mid-twenties, of Miss Ever, entranced him. She was dressed in a red teddy and spraying herself with cologne. She excited him. On the night bureau was a picture of the girl he had seen in the garden.
"I was expecting someone a little older," she said. "Most of my customers are in their late twenties. You look like a teenager."
"I'm not a customer."
"Then who are you?"
"I'm JoJo Farley. I accidentally came here and the girl in the garden said that there was someone living in this room."
"Come closer, JoJo. I don't bite."
JoJo cautiously moved forward.
"Have you ever been with a woman before?"
"I've had girl friends, if that's what you mean."
"No, I mean, have you ever gone any further?"
"I fantasize. Sometimes I think about having sex with girls. And sometimes I think about having sex with .... I probably shouldn't tell you, but with ... let's say it's not with girls."
JoJo fumbled through his pockets and pulled out a picture.
"It's a picture of my mom. Do you want to see it?"
She flashed a knowing smile.
"She's beautiful."
"She came back home for a short period of time and died from an illness."
JoJo shifted his attention to the picture on the dresser bureau.
"The girl in the garden is the same one who is in the picture."
"Why, that's me as a child."
"And you look like...."
"Miss Ever. Miss Ever, the girl and I are all one and the same." Her fiery and alluring eyes were saturated with fear. "What has she told you?"
"That an agency controls the house and she is the keeper."
"This house is a living hell. Miss Ever was abused as a child and became a prostitute as a young adult. Our lives are replayed in her dreams. Every day the little girl gets abused by her father and every day I fulfill the fantasy of a gentleman caller. We are locked in Miss Ever' mind forever. We are locked here because she decided to slash her wrist and the blood dripped the life out of her. You must leave this house before you are trapped in her dreams. You should never have entered the rooms."
Panic gripped him. He glanced down at his wrist and the blood was dripping profusely. He drifted between the reality and the world he created.
He needed Miss Ever to be real. He needed to know that the house was real.
He made his way back down the stairs where he found Miss Ever slumped on the sofa. She lifted her decomposed head and maggot-ridden head and glared at JoJo.
"I told you the rooms were forbidden."
JoJo ran from the house to the path that led him there. Thunder pounded through the sky and the heavy rain felt like stones against his body. He looked back and saw jagged lightning highlighting Miss Ever's house.
He followed the muddy path to where he had tossed the knife. He climbed the ledge on the other side of the path and found it. He lifted it in his hand. It gave him power and control over his life.
He started back to the house, determined to prove to Dad that his father had not won his sick and twisted game.
His foot slipped. He slid down the hill, rolled though the mud and slammed his head against a rock.
JoJo tried to open his scatchy eyes. The emergency-room light beamed from overhead. He drifted deep into a dream. A cloud cushioned his fall through the sky. A grim, conservatively dressed man who snickered from the side of his mouth came forward.
"Welcome home, JoJo. This is your dream, or your nightmare. It depends on your perspective."
"I don't know you."
"There is no need to know me. I am the agency's representative."
"Finally." The two walked with one another.
"You should never have gone into Miss Ever's rooms."
"She can't keep people locked up."
"She can do anything the agency has directed her to do."
"Then the agency should be investigated."
"You don't quite understand. When you decided to take your life, it became the property of the agency. The agency provides a home for those who are neither dead nor alive. You live between heaven and hell. You get the joy of life in a house, but the pain of reliving an event or events that contributed to your untimely death. You will move on to your true resting-place after someone enters your house and they make the mistake of exploring your rooms. If you have not repeated the same ungodly offense that caused you to become one of the undead prior to your death, you will go to heaven. If you have, you are destined to have your body burned to a charred corpse in hell."
"That's all we can do." JoJo heard the doctor's voice over as his eyes permanently closed.
JoJo awakened in a locked house. Strangely, he felt comfortable there. Like he should have been living there all his life. He had aged, but not nearly as much as Miss Ever. He surmised that you aged while living in the house and that the agency assigned you as the house's keeper. The agency was taking good care of him.
There was a knock at the door. Was someone coming so soon? He hated the thought of having to move on.
"Hello, Billie Ray," he said. "I wasn't expecting you so soon."
JoJo walked Billie Ray to the kitchen. A set of knives that were still in their original package conveniently sat on the kitchen sink. He watched as Billie Ray gazed out the window at the jungle of a lawn. Billie Ray initially saw his twin as girl, but after he looked closer he realized that it was a version of JoJo at seven years of age.
"Who's that, JoJo?"
"He lives in there with his father. They never come out. The agency doesn't allow them out."
Billie Ray's curiosity wasn't satisfied. He opened the back door and ventured inside the yard.

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