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A Ghost’s Chance © 2012 by Mia Natasha
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A Ghost’s Chance
By Mia Natasha
Ellen and I were supposed to be soul mates, but then I died. I know this - the soul mate thing - because I found out afterwards. Because it’s different now - knowledge, that is. It’s hard to explain. You have to experience it for yourself to understand what I mean. Life really is like a rollercoaster ride, believe it or not. The highs and lows are nothing compared to when you get off. There are all these rules and regulations as you wait in line for another ride. But only certain people can get to do that. People who believe, I guess, and those of us who are allotted second chances by the powers that be. I’m not saying that Ellen and I…it’s just…the thing is that I’m not really sure of anything, and at the same time anything is possible. I know it doesn’t make sense. I still don’t really understand all of it – but I know I’m right about Ellen and me.
We were high school friends, acquaintances really, the hi-how-are-you? type friends. But, now I know that she’d liked me very much. She liked my freckles, and my longish blonde hair and the way my green eyes shined in the fluorescent light of the school corridor, the one that housed our lockers. I’d say she liked my package too, especially when I wore my baseball uniform, but back then teenage girls didn’t think about a guy’s naked body, at least that was what Janine Stewart used to say when I’d wanted her to talk dirty during sex. Ew, gross, had been her response to the word cock, as I recall.
Ellen Murakami had imagined romantic things about us even though we had never dated or anything, and she still does, which I know because I tend to hover around her while she writes in her journal. She has quite an imagination - creating scenarios of things we could do together if I hadn’t died, like that thing she’d described in explicit detail, boffing on her kitchen island with the ginger, the carrots and some sushi. Stuff I never would have thought would have been in the head of a pretty but shy, smart Japanese girl. Had I known all this I would have been more careful. I wouldn’t have let that truck hit my bike, and I wouldn’t have careened over the handle bars. I wouldn’t have hit my head on that tree, and fallen into the gulley - and drowned in four inches of water. It happened on the second to last day of senior year. I was the first kid in our graduating class to die. Twenty-two years ago.
I guess I shouldn’t have been riding without a helmet, but nobody did back then. It wasn’t cool for one thing, and for another, I liked having the wind in my hair as I rode hands free down a hill on a rare warm, almost summer day in Watertown, New York, especially since we get some of the coldest weather in the country during winter.
My body wasn’t found for two days. During that time, my mom had posted missing person signs all over town. She had actually hoped I’d been kidnapped or something, because I wasn’t the runaway type, and although I had thrill seeker in me, I had never been accident-prone. So when the cops found me all bloated up like human road kill, they were not sure it was me at first, even though my wallet complete with library card and the money Mom had given me to buy a yearbook was still in my back pocket. I feel bad remembering the way Mom and Dad had to go to the morgue and identify my eighteen-year-old body. It makes me so sad to know that my carelessness hurt them so much.
Ellen hurt almost as much if not the same amount. She bawled her eyes out at my funeral – way more than Janine did. Janine Stewart, my girlfriend at the time, thought that was sketchy. She’d thought I’d been cheating on her with Ellen!
Janine confronted her. “Did you love him or something?” she asked Ellen.
Ellen just looked at Janine with her eyes glazed over in pain. I could tell that she felt embarrassed for crushing on me and for wishing that it had been more.
“No,” Ellen said quietly. She wiped her nose with a tissue from the pocket of her dress. Ellen had on a simple black sleeveless dress with black tights and pumps. She’d worn a black ribbon in her hair too.
“You look like his widow,” Janine said. She had on one of those prairie dresses, the kind with the button down front, long to the ankle in a floral pattern. Janine wasn’t big on wearing dresses back then, so she had to borrow that one from her older sister and it had been a little big on her. She looked a frump, especially with her perm all wild that day too, really fluffed dry blonde squiggles, like dandelions when they’ve turned white and are just about to blow away. She didn’t look like the kind of girl I would have ended up marrying.
“He was just…my friend,” Ellen offered. “I might have been the last person to speak to him before the accident.” I’m sure it wasn’t Ellen’s intention to get Janine so pissed upon hearing that, but that was exactly what happened.
“Oh?” she asked. “And what were his last words?”
“Maybe I’ll see you around,” Ellen answered.
That was totally true. Ellen had been the last person I’d spoken to. She was sitting under a tree at the back entrance to the high school, probably waiting for a ride. We made small talk, really small, because she made me nervous. I used to think it was easier to let the women come to you instead of the other way around, you know what I mean? Janine was the loud sort, the kind of girl you knew would go down on you without more than an ask nicely. But Ellen was the nice kind that you had to put forth an effort for, and maybe even then she wouldn’t have put out until college or after you married her – and that was scarier.
I was able to muster a, “Hi.”
“Hi, Jeff,” she said and nothing else. Janine would have blathered on about some school drama, like what a cunt the principal had been. Janine always called Mrs. Kent a cunt, but that was because she was always getting in trouble for wearing low cut tank tops, which was stupid since she had small tits. Anyhow, I hated having to think of something to say to carry on a conversation.
I ended up with, “Nice weather.”
“Uh-huh,” Ellen said. I kept forgetting the combination to my bike lock because I was so flustered. At the time, I felt so stupid.
“Did you buy a yearbook yet?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
That was when I finally managed to unleash the ten-speed. I hopped on - in the nick of time. “Will you sign my yearbook?” Ellen said. “I mean, not now.” She could tell I looked like I was in a hurry, as she held it in her hand. “Maybe tomorrow, at the assembly.”
“Yeah. We can crisscross,” I said. “I’ll have mine tomorrow. I forgot to pick it up today. I had the money and everything.” I felt like a moron – I didn’t know what I was saying because I was getting a hard-on. I had to book. “Maybe I’ll see you around,” I said and took off down the paved sidewalk towards the road.
I decided to take the bike trail to the other side of town, because it was such a nice day. I couldn’t get Ellen out of my head. On the ride home, I remember thinking how pretty she was in that exotic way that Asian girls are. Like aside from her very thick and straight dark brown hair she had virtually no body hair on her arms and legs. That day she had worn a blue plaid sundress and red suede Chuck Taylors without the laces. She had on a quirky Mickey Mouse watch on a white leather band. Red, white and blue. I remember what she’d worn, because I’d been thinking about her long smooth legs. Fantasizing about an alternate ending to our talk, where she might wrap them around my hips and lift that dress to show me a baby soft hairless pussy. I’d enter it with my hard-on and make mad love to her. It was the last thing in my head before I cracked my skull open.
Ellen’s thirty-nine and still single. She’s dated a bunch, but nothing to write home about in the sex department. I’ve been watching her all this time. I don’t know why. Like a guardian angel, I guess you could say. She has one of those too, and her grandmother shows up now and then. Sometimes when she’s upset or lonely, she talks to me, always when she’s alone and usually when she’s driving home from work.
It’s almost always the same conversation. “Why am I so alone?” she’ll say. “Why can’t I find someone? Why did you have to leave me, Jeff, and if you’re there, why can’t you help me now?”
I answer her, of course, even though the questions posed are rhetorical ones.
Three days ago, it happened again, just as always, but this time felt a little different. It was as if we’d both crossed partway through our glass doors, and found our way to a middle ground, like we do when I come to her in dreams.
I said, What can I do?
I guess I should tell you that I’m not just a spirit in the ether. To myself, I’m as plain as day when I’m in the other world. It’s only when I’m with Ellen that I appear to myself as transparent, and of course, she can’t see me. I don’t always wear the same clothes. I have a wardrobe of things I like – really, anything I can imagine myself in – jeans, khakis, T-shirts and button downs, my baseball jersey, even a suit if I feel like it. I like to wear silk boxers against my skin just because I’d never worn them in life. I can feel my physical body when I’m sitting in a car or walking around Ellen’s house. I can hear my voice and hers when we are together, as though we’re having a real conversation, but I don’t know what she hears, if anything, unless she writes her thoughts in her journal.
Ellen wiped the tears from her eyes. “You’re here, aren’t you Jeff?” she asked. “I feel you near me. But you can’t help me, can you?”