A Selfie to Die For

43)He's a Heartbreaker

Jax Siler closed her eyes as she tried to block out the same horrid noise echoing through her head.

A woman was wailing uncontrollably ten feet away from her. The small woman looked to hover between the ages of twenty-five to thirty. Her ash blond hair was in a tangled display as her eyes were red and bloodshot. The heavy knife sticking out of the place where her heart was supposed to be clearly showed the woman was either murdered or committed suicide by plunging the knife into her own chest. Blood leaked from the wound, flowing down her lovely royal-blue summer dress the woman was wearing. The blood splattered all beneath her, looking as though it was actually falling onto the crisp carpet beneath her bare feet. It wasn't. Still, it fed that impression.

Jax stayed absolutely still. If she remained quiet enough and didn't draw attention to herself, the dead woman wouldn't realize she could hear her.

This wasn't an act of cruelty on Jax's part for not wanting to help the dead woman. It was strictly self-perseverance. Her parents took her to a psychologist. They didn't believe the things she could see were real. They firmly believed their daughter had gone a lot of time with an undiagnosed case of paranoid schizophrenia. They claimed the things she saw were merely mild hallucinations brought upon from a head injury she once received. They didn't care that Jax's grandmother claimed that the phenomenon talking dead was real. But, it was. Sometimes the dead could talk, and sometimes, they had a lot to say.

It didn't even matter that Jax was able to help two local police departments with their murder investigation; her parents still thought of her as a freak. They didn't believe she could see things most others couldn't.

Only her twin brother was really on her side, as sad as that was.

Jax tried to drown out the cries of the woman as she watched the ugly floral carpet of the busy airport. The hardest part of listening to the dead was the sad realization that not all of them could be helped. A good majority were destined to walk the earth, forever oblivious that they were in fact dead. Other times, they couldn't remember who even killed them. That went along with the former; not all of them could even reconcile the fact they were no longer alive. The knife sticking out of the woman's chest should be her tell-tale sign she was no longer alive, but, ghosts didn't always pay attention to the obvious little things. They sometimes only saw what they wanted to see.

"You ready?" Owen Siler asked, stifling a yawn. He shrugged at his sister. "It'll be fine, Jax. We're going to college, we're leaving everything bad behind, alright....Er..." he trailed off, frowning. "I know that look. What do you see?"

Without removing her eyes from the floor beneath her, Jax answered. "Woman. Mid-twenties, knife sticking out of her chest. She's freaking out nearby and I don't want her to follow me."

Owen sighed. Fishing in his carry-on bag he brandished a familiar pair of headphones. "Here ya go. Just hang tight, I'll get the boarding passes and then we'll be set for the flight to Chicago."

Jax slipped the headphones on, careful to hide the cord that wouldn't be plugged into anything. Spirits could mess with technology. Jax had learned the painful way that headphones plugged into an iPod could hurt your ears in the volume was raised too high when a spirit messed with one. So, she'd learned to hide the cord to headphones in the pocket of her jackets. She could move her head, pretending to listen to music. Usually, spirits didn't pay her any attention feeling she couldn't hear or see them. They assumed she was too preoccupied with music.

The woman continued screaming nearby, a loud shriek of a noise that caused Jax to wince.

"Doesn't anyone notice!?!? He's right there! He's right there, he's looking for her!! HE'S LOOKING FOR HER!!!"