The Ghost and the Goth

With a little effort, I managed to push the publisher’s letter and the first chapter or so under the couch. Then I was out of time.

Miller stalked through the kitchen and into the living room, stopping dead when he saw his spilled bag. “What—?”

Then he turned and saw my display. Two manila folders represented eyes, and a third held the place of a nose. Then, five composition notebooks, with their black-and-white covers, formed a menacing — as menacing as one can be with paper products — scowl. All in all, it was a big giant frowny face made out of his stuff in the middle of the living room carpeting.

Miller’s face went white, and I laughed.

“J-J-Julia,” he sputtered.

“What is it?” She appeared in the living room doorway with a frown. Then she caught a glimpse of my work. Her mouth fell open, and her knees sagged, forcing her to cling to the wall.

I winced. This wasn’t supposed to be a strike against her.

“Did you do this?” Miller demanded.

“Idiot,” I said to him. “When did she have time? She went with you, remember?”

But Mrs. Killian wasn’t thinking that clearly. “It’s Danny,” she said, looking faint. “He always pulled tricks like this, moving things around. Once I found my kitchen timer in the freezer. He swore he didn’t do it, but …” She sank to her knees and started to cry.

“Don’t be silly,” he snapped. “Your husband is dead. He’s gone on to a better place. He’s not fiddling with notebooks and sending you messages. If you didn’t do it, then it’s that boy.” He glared in the direction of Killian’s room as though he could see through walls.

“Oh, yeah, because after you doped him up, he slipped past you in the hallway, did this, and then sneaked back in without you even noticing.” I rolled my eyes.

Julia lifted her chin and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You gave him a sedative, Max.”

“This is ridiculous.” He snatched up his bag and began cramming the contents back inside. “Ghosts are part of people’s imagination, designed to comfort them in times of loss. Period. End of story.” But his hands shook when he bent down to scoop up the folders and notebooks from my frowny face.

“Oh, Max, don’t spoil the ending for us,” I taunted. “You’ve still got to write it.”

He rushed toward the kitchen, nearly knocking over Killian’s mom in the process. “What about our next appointment?” she asked between sobs.

“I’ll call you,” he said curtly.

Then the back door slammed, and Mrs. Killian’s shoulders slumped even further, shaking with her crying.

“You should listen to your son,” I told her. “He’s telling the truth.” The high of my first successful communication was wearing off a little in light of her weeping. Actually, I was feeling a little light-headed and woozy, sort of like this morning when …

I looked down and found I could see through my arms folded over my chest. In fact, I could see all the way through to the bookcase behind me.

Aw, crap.

8 Will

“Did you know about this?” My mother’s voice intruded on a dream in which a large animated eggplant named Bob teetered on the edge of a cliff with thoughts of suicide and Parmesan.

I woke slowly, without opening my eyes. My eyelids felt gummy and stuck to my eyeballs, my head throbbed worse than it had yesterday, and my back ached from sleeping for hours without moving. I could feel the sunshine beaming in through the open blinds, warmer and brighter than yesterday. It had to be morning again.

“William, I’m speaking to you. Wake up!” Her voice held an unusual edge.

I peeled my eyelids up and squinted at her. She stood at the foot of my now-lopsided bed, a fistful of papers in her hand. “What are you talking about?” I mumbled.

“This.” She stalked forward and held the papers, fanned out in her hand, in front of my face.

The top one appeared to be a letter to Dr. Miller about a book….

I sat up straighter, ignoring the various aches and pains. “He was writing a book about us? Where did you find this? Did he give this—”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “I found it yesterday under the couch when I was cleaning after that stunt you pulled.”

The cleaning part made sense. My mom always cleaned when she was upset. The year my dad died, she wore out three vacuum cleaners. As for the rest … “What are you talking about?”

She shuffled the papers together in her hands and gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, don’t try that on me. I’ve been your mother too long, and besides, your father used to pull the same tricks before you. Moving things around when I wasn’t looking and claiming to know nothing about it.”

Alona. I flopped my head back on the pillow. It had to be. She was the only one who’d been here yesterday, at least as far as I knew. “What trick did you find yesterday?” I asked cautiously.

She rolled her eyes. “Are there any others more obvious? Dr. Miller’s papers spread all over the room and that frowny face made from the folders and notebooks. He was quite frightened.” She stared down at the papers in her hands, her mouth tightening in displeasure. “A scare he richly deserved in my opinion.”

“Oh,” I said. “That trick.” Wow. It must have taken a huge amount of energy from her to move all of that around without me nearby. The dead can touch things in our realm briefly — hence all the ghost stories about pictures falling off walls, doors slamming, lights turning off or on — but only with intense concentration, and it really drains them.

My mom perched on the side of my bed, bracing her feet against the floor to keep from sliding off. “That was you, wasn’t it?” she asked hesitantly. “You found out about the book somehow and wanted to punish him? You called a friend to come in while we were upstairs. Joonie, maybe. The back door was unlocked the whole time, I checked.”

She sounded so hopeful, the way she had it all worked out without any ghosts or supernatural elements involved. My father’s words to me when I was six echoed in my head. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to understand, Will. It scares her. He’d drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, while we waited for my mother to join us in the car. She was crying in the bathroom. I’d just ruined a rare night out for us in a restaurant by announcing that Grandma Reilly said not to order the fish because it looked old. Grandma Reilly, my mother’s mother, had died six months earlier of a heart attack. It’s a curse, sport, and I’m sorry that I’ve passed it on to you. Do the best you can to live a normal life, and try not to let it hurt the ones you love. That’s all I can say.

Except my father had screwed up on that one. I didn’t know how my mother would have reacted to hearing that her husband spoke to the dead, but I was willing to bet that she would have preferred that to him being dead. Still, he was my dad, and he was gone, so I did my best to abide by what he wanted.

“Yeah,” I told my mother. “It was me.”

She exhaled loudly in relief. “I thought so. Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on? Why all this staging and drama?”

Good question. Alona could have just told me what she’d discovered. When I woke up from the drugs that I’d allowed Miller to administer even over her protests. Okay, fair enough. Maybe she had reason to question my potential for follow-through on something like this. That still didn’t explain her sudden compassion for someone else’s problems, which was the true mystery.

“I didn’t think you’d believe me if I didn’t have proof,” I said to my mother. A reasonable enough explanation, if not the truth.

She sighed. “You’ll put me in an early grave yet. Next time, just tell me.”

“Okay, okay.”