Good thing ghost girl can listen through the walls

We watched Jeopardy for a lot longer than I’d expected. The show is good and all, but I’m not smart enough to keep up. I only did better than Kenzie, and I’m pretty sure most of that was due to her being Russian. I had to admit I was insanely impressed by Kate’s performance; I only saw her miss one question the entire night. The question was something to do with African history. Kate was incredibly embarrassed, mumbling about ‘not getting around to that yet’. She pushed her glasses up similar to how Cait did, which I found funny.

Speaking of which, my performance may have been hurt by my thoughts being full of Cait. I wanted to think of a perfect second date, but I didn’t know what to suggest. Bookstore? She liked books, right? Or did she already have them all? I mean, there can’t be that many books….

After what felt like a hundred episodes, we all finally separated to our rooms. My ghostly apparition of a roommate greeted me with a small wave and a weak smile.

“Hey, Michael….” Vanessa said weakly, yawning afterwards.

“Are you tired?” I asked, looking up at her. She was floating above her tall, fancy dressing cabinet that I’d yet to make my own.

She groaned. “Yeah, long day… in the ghost world or whatever…”

“Jeez. Uh, sorry to hear that.” I didn’t really know what to say. It wasn’t like when someone had a long day at work.

“Uh huh… I stayed up to ask you about your date, but I heard you talk about it through the wall. You really vomited and got a second date?” She gave a real smile at that.

“I’m glad my pain brought you joy in these tumultuous times.” I joked as I dressed down to my sleepwear.

She laughed softly. “No, no; I’m happy for you. Is she cute?”

I nodded. I got on the bed, looking up at the ceiling as we spoke. I felt a dreamy smile taking over my face as I started talking. “Oh, yeah… she’s kind of a small skinny girl, right? She has this pretty red hair, with a little bit of freckles. She always pushes up her glasses when she laughs. She-“

“You’re just describing Kate.” Vanessa said, floating above me with her eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, Cait. That’s the girl I’m dating.”

“What? I thought she was with Kenzie?” Vanessa said with a bewildered look.

“No, that’s Ka-“ It clicked. Oh, shit, I understand the confusion now. So: Cait, the girl I’m dating, is named Caitlin. She just goes by Cait.”

“So… both you and Kenzie are dating skinny, nerdy-looking redheads with the same name?”

“Uh… I mean, spelled different, but… I guess.” I genuinely hadn’t realized that.

“That’ll make any dinners over her awkward, huh?”

“Yeah, probably. Damn.”

She floated down to me, nestling herself beside me, face in my chest.

I played with her hair some. Her dark locks were impossibly silky. “So… ghost business stuff: is it stuff you can talk about, or…?”

I felt her tense up slightly before relaxing. “I… can talk about some. Not much.”

“That’s fine. You don’t have to talk about it at all if you don’t want. I’d understand.”

“No… I think it would be good.”

She was silent for a time. I let her gather her thoughts, just running my fingers through her hair softly as I stared at the ceiling.

After a time, she took a breath. “Okay. So, when I disappear, I’m technically just… going somewhere else. It’s like a mirror of this world, right? But it’s… darker. A purple haze covers everything. In some places, it’s really pretty; lakes, fields, forests. But here? In the inner city? The smog turns this place into a… hm… it’s kind of like a nightmarish fever dream?”

“What?! Why would you ever disappear?!”

Vanessa looked up at me, seeing the worry in my face. “Oh, don’t worry! This room is sacred, so this is a safe place. I did a lot of set up for my ****, okay? I have ways to travel through thicker areas as well. Just trust me, I’m fine.”

I nodded, but I didn’t feel good about it still.

She continued. “I do eventually need to be able to travel to the worse areas though, right? For my… what I need to do. So, I need to condition myself to handle it, and I need to be able to defend myself against whatever is out there.”

“Out there?”

“Like, real ghosts. Demons, ghouls, the like.”

“Those are real too?!”

Vanessa giggled. “Michael, you’ll come to learn that anything the human can imagine likely comes from something that already exists. You can’t imagine a new color, can you?”

“Uh… no.”

“So, by that logic, why could you imagine a creature that doesn’t exist?”

“Huh.” That was scary. I can imagine horrifying things.

“Don’t worry about it, you’ll likely never meet anything worth worrying about. Though, you did meet me, and most people wouldn’t meet things like me, so….”

“Their loss, then. I’m happy I met you.”

Vanessa looked up at me again, smiling wide. “Alright, alright, enough with the cheese, let me continue. So, basically, I was training pretty hard today. I went the deepest I’d ever gone into the darker bits of the city, yeah? Well, as I reached my limit and began to go back… a figure appeared. It was a large man. He was bulging with muscles, and I could see a hole in his head. My guess is a steroid user in life, murdered with a shot to the back of his head.”

“You can tell how people die when you meet them… there?”

She nodded. “You can see the red patch over my heart, right?”

I nodded.

“Same thing. I just took precautions to ensure it wouldn’t be as gruesome looking once I died. Anyway, he seemed to be recently deceased. Kept going on about ‘SEIZING YOUR DESTINY’ and stuff. He was mad about some ‘TWERP WHO GOT ME KILLED’ because he’d shot some ‘SPINELESS FAGGOT’ a bunch or something?”

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“I think you met the guy who shot me.”

“What?!” She sat up, looking at me.

“Yeah, the dude at the pizza place that shot me talked about stuff like that.”

She looked at me with an open mouth before laughing. “You’re the ‘spineless faggot’?!”

“Well… I wouldn’t describe myself that way.”

“Holy shit, that’s funny! Well, it makes me feel much less bad about what happened next.”

-

Hey :) thank you guys for 500 likes! Would you guys be interested in a Q&A or something in celebration of chapter 50 coming up? I’d be down for it to be asking me, the author, questions or asking the characters questions. Obviously, there’s limits to what I’d answer, but I’d do as much as I could.

Anyway… thanks for reading! I’m feeling reinvigorated for this story, which is very nice. I think pulling myself back some was good, as now I can ensure I don’t get burned out anywhere near as quick.

Get updates early on https://www.patreon.com/MichaelChaseLit