Spectre

When I woke in the middle of the night to see a pale and shimmering Christopher St. Germaine in my bedroom, I reacted quite casually.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He looked slightly confused, though I thought I should have been the one confused. Here was a boy who was supposed to be deep in a coma at the Regent’s Hospital, standing at the foot of my bed looking quite conscious, if not somewhat see-through.

“I don’t know.”

That seemed like a reasonable answer. I certainly didn’t know myself. What wasn’t reasonable was the fact that I was wasting precious sleeping time. It was four in the morning, and I had to get up for school in three-and-a-half hours.

“Will you still be here in the morning?” I asked. “Because I’m kind of tired.”

He blinked. “I should think so.”

“Alright.” I lay down, then sat back up. “Don’t watch me sleep, though. Just because you’re pushing the boundaries of paranormal right now, doesn’t mean you can adopt their norms.”

“Erm. Right. Very true.” He turned around and walked through my door, as though this was something he did quite often. Watching to make sure he didn’t come back, I wondered what it would feel like to walk through a door. Then I curled up in my blankets and fell asleep.

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True to his word, Christopher was there when my alarm went off at a more appropriate hour, though seven-thirty was really pushing it. He was trying to hit the snooze button, but his finger kept going through it. He looked at me, frustrated.

“Here.” I pushed the button, and the alarm went silent. I decided it was time to get down to business. Maybe it was the sun streaming through my blinds and burning my eyes, but I was suddenly realizing just how odd it was to have a boy pop into my bedroom. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the hospital? You know, in a coma.”

“Coma?” he echoed, eyes widening.

“Yeah. I suppose you must have hit the ground pretty hard when you, well, jumped from your roof.”

He looked at me as if I was crazy. “I never jumped from my roof.”

“You did,” I confirmed. I had always lacked a bit of tact. “It’s what the papers say. Not that I read them. I just listen to the school gossip about what’s in the papers. But, you know. Your mother found you and called the police, and they investigated. The report was that you jumped, but it wasn’t high up enough. Thankfully,” I added.

Christopher didn’t seem to have heard anything I just said. Apparently, he was thinking something of his own. “I must have been pushed.”

It was my turn to echo him. “Pushed?”

“Yep. I would never try to end my life. Life is beautiful.”

His words were cheesy, and had the ring of a Lifetime movie, but I had to agree. I nodded. “Who could have pushed you, then?”

I could hear footsteps on the stairs, and when I turned to look at my door, I could see my father’s hear poking in. “Who’re you talking to?” he asked.

I looked back at Christopher, but he was gone. 

“No one.”

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Christopher appeared again when I was walking home from school. I had failed a test in science, so I was in a bad mood. I wondered when, exactly, I would need to know the names and locations of each and every bone in the human body.