You in Real Life

Chapter 5

"What do you mean?"

"You're easy to talk to. You're a ghost so by definition, I should be terrified when you're around, but now that I know you're not a demonic spirit, it's the exact opposite. I'm terrified by regular people, but not by you. You think I'm witty and that I always come up with smart things to say, but most of the time, I only think those smart things a good half hour after a conversation has ended. If you forced me to do improv comedy, collapsing on stage from humiliation would be the only remotely funny thing I'd be capable of doing."

"You could be this way with other people. There's no reason you have to be shy."

"I've heard that line before." I propped myself atop the barstool at the counter dividing the kitchen from the breakfast nook. "Social anxiety doesn't work that way. You can't always reason your way out of it, especially when it feels perfectly reasonable to be a panic-ridden hot mess."

Jack circled the kitchen as we spoke, testing the limitations of his world. He came to the opposite side of the counter from me and paused there. "At least you know yourself. You've got the inner workings of your mind figured out, even if those workings are a bit odd. I haven't a clue about myself yet. Was I shy around people? I wouldn't know. Maybe I was a great guy. Or maybe a complete jerk."

"I doubt that."

"But I could've been. The thing that gets me though, besides not knowing why I'm dead, is that I don't know if anyone loved me. The only thing I feel a lot of the time is loneliness, so maybe I was just as lonely in life. Maybe no one even cared when I died."

"Don't say that, Jack! That can't be true. Who in the world wouldn't love a tapdancing boy with puppy dog eyes? I'm sure your parents have a shrine to you set up in their living room. As we speak, they're lighting incense and leaving your favorite candy bar below a picture of you sporting a toothy grin and a bowtie. You probably have a dog that waits every day at the bus stop, hoping that today's the day you make it home."

"Is this supposed to make me feel better? I think I might cry. Poor Sparky."

I sat up straight. "Wait, do you really have a dog named Sparky? Did that just come out of your subconscious?"

"I was just trying to be funny." He began circling the room again.

"Look, we're going to figure this out. I'll convince my parents that you're real and they can help. Or... I'll just leave them out of it and do it on my own. I'm assuming you're from this area."

"Why?"

"Aren't ghosts only supposed to haunt the place they're from? You must have some connection to this town, and probably this house."

"I guess that makes sense, if you believe all of that about ghosts."

"It's all I've got to go on, so until we can prove differently, I'm choosing to believe it. The next step is research. We've already established that you're not an old timey ghost. Judging by those kicks you're wearing and your knowledge of Nicole Kidman movies, you haven't been dead more than fifteen years or so. You just started haunting me a few days ago so maybe you're freshly dead or maybe there's some lag time between death and haunting. But either way, I should be able to find a record of your death. What do you say, are you up for some info gathering?"

#

Jack hovering behind me while I played ghost detective got old after two minutes. This was partly because he wasn't just hovering in an overbearing helicopter parent kind of way, he was literally hovering. Like spy drone hovering, tappity feet not tapping because they were floating over my floor by a good half foot. He hadn't done this before. I had to wonder if it was a new development or if it was just something ghosts did when they were nervous.

"I can't type with you staring at my fingers while they type, Jack. You gotta back up a bit. Give me some space."

By now, we'd already scoured the online archives of the Dorn Daily, which contrary to its name, was only published twice a week. I'd looked back as far as 2001, the year the Nicole Kidman movie The Others had come out, but there were no reports or obituaries coming close to fitting Jack's age or description. I'd moved on to the county publication, with little luck there either.

A car accident had taken the lives of teenage brothers five years ago, but they were both blond haired, blue eyed descendants of Vikings. I showed their picture to Jack and he'd slowly shook his head.

"Here's a mention of a guy from Bremerton, no picture, but... he was seventeen when he went missing after going off trail on a hike in the Olympics back in 2007. He lost a toe... do you have all your toes? Or maybe just sense that one of them might be gone? Maybe you tap dance because your feet froze off in the wilderness and you're obsessed with being able to use them again." I scrolled a little further. "Wait, never mind, he's still alive. Damn."

"I'm sure he's not as disappointed as you to hear that he survived."

"Also, his name is Charles. You don't look like a Charles." I leaned away from my laptop's glow, stretching my arms up above my head before diving one of them towards a half-eaten bag of kettle corn. "I must be missing something. Somewhere around here, sometime this century, a tapdancing teenage boy must have died."

"Maybe..." Jack mused, "I'm not from somewhere around here, but from somewhere else altogether." He snapped his fingers. "Maybe I'm from Spokane and that's why I'm attracted to you."

"Aw, and here I thought it was my radiant smile."

"I didn't mean it like that." His ghost cheeks reddened.

"Right. Look, geography is always very important for ghosts. They have a predefined area they can move around in. They don't travel, so..."

"How would you know any of that?" His feet were at bed level now. Pretty soon, his head would go right through the ceiling. "You only think you know about ghosts. You don't really. I'm the first one you ever met. But I am a ghost, at least I guess I am, so I think I know better. I say I can be from Spokane. So, check Spokane!"

"Hey, ease up. I realize this is aggravating for you and that your afterlife depends on us getting to the bottom of it. I'll look at Spokane, but you don't have to be rude about it!"

He sunk down a few inches. "I'm sorry, Mazie. Being so helpless makes me angry. I can't do any of the research. It all has to fall on you, and that's not your fault."

"It's not yours either." I clicked onto the website for the Spokane-Review. "I wish we knew your real name. That would help."

"If we knew my real name, none of this would be a problem, anyways, because I'd know who I am."

"I know, I know." I spent the next half hour searching in vain for Jack's identity. "Maybe you didn't die in a way that would make news headlines and maybe your family didn't publish an obit... or maybe..." I sprung away from the overturned box I'd been using as a makeshift desk. "Maybe you're a runaway and no one knows you're dead yet. No one... except your killer!"

"Why do you look so happy about that prospect? You want me to be a murder victim?"

"I don't want you to have been murdered. I don't want you to be dead at all. But here you are. Dead. Nothing either of us can do about that."

He sighed, releasing breath like air going out of a balloon. He slowly sunk down until his feet were once again on the floor. "I could be from anywhere, Mazie. How are we ever going to figure this out?" I wished I could grab his hand, give it a reassuring squeeze. "We're only just beginning to work on this. It's a big mystery; the one in which we uncover Jack's origin story. Sometimes it takes years for detectives to solve mysteries."

"And sometimes, they never do."

"We have to be more optimistic than that. Be hopeful."

As hours of research turned into days, however, it was increasingly difficult to take my own advice.