The Ordinary Haunting

26. The Forgotten Exercise - Part 1

"You're a fool, Tay Tawan."

I kicked my foot out and brought it down flat upon the cover page of Mild's latest manuscript draft. I pressed my hands together under my chin at her behind me. Perched on the concrete edge of a fern garden, she crossed her legs and speared her pouting lips with the straw of her iced coffee as she adjusted her sunglasses a centimetre lower on her nose. I cringed inwardly and hurried to collect the rest of the pages fleeing in the wind down the length of the office's carpark. Just as I came within reach of the last one, it was plucked up by another hand. I straightened to see Krist from Finances holding it limply towards me. I smiled gratefully and took it.

"Thanks, Krist."

He gave a jerking nod and backtracked several steps. "You're welcome, Tay," he said before threading a wide half-circle around me and darting into our building. He was going so fast that the sensors on the automatic doors almost didn't catch him in time. The sun glinted off their surface when they trundled open and then closed again. I returned to my place beside Mild, shuffling the manuscript back into order. She patted her hair down and glanced after Krist.

"That's the superstitious one, right? He can see you now?"

I double-checked the page numbers and slid them into their original yellow envelope. "Yeah, no idea why."

I saw Mild's right eyebrow stand on its tail. "That's not a very Tawan answer," she chortled. "You don't have one of your long-winded, hypothetical, surprisingly often accurate theories?"

"If it were a problem for him I'd try to think of something, but it seems like it was a good development, so I'm not really planning to spend any time on it." I stretched an elastic band around the package and handed it back to Mild with an apologetic dip of my head. "I'm pretty busy right now."

"You've always been 'pretty busy'," Mild grumbled, taking her manuscript with her fresh magenta manicure. "You know who you sounded like just now, right?"

I lifted my shoes to check for scuffs from my battle with the escaping papers. They weren't mine. "You do make my job as inconvenient as possible, don't you, with these outside meetings and paper manuscripts--"

"Excuse me? Tay Tawan is telling me off for inconveniencing him? Now I'm really confused."

"Oh, no, I was just making a friendly jibe--"

"Any particular reason you don't want to be too far from the office today?" Mild flapped the envelope in front of her face like a royal paper fan.

"Well you said you didn't want New with us. It's bad enough I had to ask him not to go any higher than the twentieth floor, just in case--"

"You know 300 metres is equal to like 90 floors, right? How many does your building have? Like 35?"

"I don't know, I got zapped from the roof to the eighth floor before."

"What?"

"Yeah, right into a meeting."

"But that doesn't-- Why am I trying to troubleshoot inaccuracies in a ghost's teleporting system? That's not where I was going with this. I'll repeat--"

"There's also the horizontal distance to consider--"

"I'll repeat myself: You're a fool, Tay Tawan."

I got to my feet under the bright blue sky and, for lack of anything better to cut the conversation, started doing what I could remember of the morning exercises they used to make us do in elementary school. Arms up, out, up, down. Arms out, twist waist left twice, twist waist right twice--