Warnings: None

The Ghost in You

Chapter 19:

"Friends"

After Kuwabara walked Botan out to the balcony, he was gone an awfully long time.

Not that that bothered me or anything. Seriously. It was no business of mine how Kuwabara said goodbye to his friends—even the really, really pretty friends with brilliant hair that Botan claimed wasn't even dyed, which seemed impossible to me or whatever, but I digress.

Kuwabara stayed out there on the balcony with Botan for far longer than I personally thought was necessary. I hovered in his bedroom door waiting for him to come back, watching him through the balcony's sliding glass door as he leaned over the railing to talk to Botan with a big, bright smile on his face. She smiled back, hovering over the edge of the balcony in midair on her oar. Her ponytail was even longer than mine, the blue color scintillating in the light of the nearby streetlamp (which also seemed impossible since she was a spirit and not a solid person; maybe her hair was just weird or something?). I tried not to look at Botan's cute face or pretty kimono too closely, instead staring at Kuwabara's grinning profile. He had a nice profile, I decided eventually. You could really tell how square his jawline was from this angle, and his old-fashioned Yankee haircut almost looked modern when seen from the almost-but-not-quite-back.

Just what the heck were Kuwabara and Botan talking about, though, anyway?

That unspoken question made me shiver; touching the scarf around my throat for reassurance, I drifted away from the bedroom and into the living room, toward the windows by the easy-chair overlooking the street below. Can you blame me for getting bored of just lurking in the doorway and asking myself stupid questions? I mean, I'm a ghost, but I'm not a creeper or anything, nor am I the kind of person who likes to pretend to know things I definitely, definitely know—namely that Kuwabara and Botan had to be talking about me, obviously. They were probably talking about my missing identity and how I had di…

That was one question, stupid or otherwise, I wasn't quite willing to indulge.

I settled on the windowsill, one leg stretched along its length and the other held to my chest. The sill was only an inch or so wide. Impossible for a flesh-and-blood person to sit on, but totally chill for my ghostly ass to use as a perch. Being dead had its perks. I kept an eye on the sky and leaned my head against the window (which felt distant and rubbery against my not-face, like it was made of trampoline material and I had acquired nerve damage). Normally I sat there to watch the fashion of the passersby on the sidewalk beneath the windows, but I didn't have the heart for that just then. Instead I angled my head as much as I could toward Kuwabara's bedroom window, out of sight since it lay along the same wall as my window seat. I pressed my head against the glass, which wouldn't let me pass the way the walls and doors in the apartment always would, and kept an eye out until a flicker of blue appeared; Botan sailed upward and away from the building, heading off into the dark night sky and out of sight. A minute later the balcony door slid opened with a metallic zippering sound. Kuwabara's feet padded softly over the carpeted bedroom floor toward the living room, and then he appeared in the living room doorway with a grin stretched across his blocky features.

I saw that grin, not to mention his reappearance, in the window reflection, though. I'd made sure to turn my face away before he came inside. Didn't want him thinking I'd been waiting for him like a lost puppy, right?

If he saw through me, he had the good sense not to say anything, at least. "So what did you think of Botan?" was all he said as he strode over to the easy chair, which he plopped into with a contented sigh.

I shrugged, still not looking at him. "She was cool."

He paused. Then, prompting me with the same tone of voice you use on shy kindergarteners, he said: "So she was cool, huh?"

I touched the silken scarf around my neck, fingering the cold fabric (as I tried not to wonder how it was possible to even do so in the first place). "I mean. Yeah?" I told him, lamely. "She was."

One thin brow arched, and his face looked all the more angular for it. "… that's it?" he said, skepticism like paint spilled across his words. "She's just cool?"

I shifted in my spot atop the sill. "… I mean, that's a pretty ringing endorsement, so…?"

"I guess so?" he said, but he still didn't sound convinced.

Something told me he wanted to talk about Botan more, but I reminded him that a TV show I liked was on and he reluctantly left me to my afternoon drama. Kuwabara did homework at the kitchen table after that. Sometimes I thought I felt him looking at me, but I kept my eyes locked carefully on the TV and didn't glance at him to confirm. I didn't want him prying into how I felt about Botan—not because she hadn't been a lot of fun or anything, because of course she'd been fun. A barrel of laughs and a totally chill girl, really? But nice though she'd been, I had to wonder if Kuwabara would get offended if I told him about the way the room had gotten so damn cold when Botan walked into it. Cool though she'd been, the minute I saw her, my not-blood had turned to ice inside me. Neat though our conversation was, something in the back of my head kept telling me to flee and run away, run for your not-life, don't go near her, run! as we sat beside one another on the couch. A sort of yawning darkness waiting to swallow me lurked behind Botan's smiling eyes, and no matter how chipper and bubbly the reaper was, Botan was still exactly that—a grim freakin' reaper who guided dead souls (like yours truly) to the great beyond. And I wasn't ready to move on just yet, thank you oh so much.

… but at the same time, I'd been not-living with a boy for so damn long that getting to talk to an actual freakin' girl for a few hours had been too amazing an opportunity to pass up, the chill winds of danger said girl brought with her notwithstanding.

The hour soon dragged late, and eventually Kuwabara closed his book and yawned. He bid me a sleepy good night and went to bed, his snores filtering through his bedroom door and into the living room where I'd stayed up to watch some late-night talk shows. When those ended in the wee hours of the morning, I wandered the apartment watching the no-signal-static buzz on the TV, and when that got too boring to bear, too, I followed Kuwabara into the bedroom, slipped into my closet, and settled in to nap.

That nightly nap turned out to be pretty not-boring, I soon found out.

It turns out ghosts can dream.

Sinking into ghostly not-sleep feels like falling into dark, warm water, only you can't feel the water on your face or warmth on your skin. It's more like sensing these qualities rather than feeling them. The dark isn't something you see with your eyes; it's something you feel with your brain, more like quiet than like an absence of light. The warmth isn't a kind of heat, but more like an insistent absence of cold; it's a softness, a muffled quality, one that dims awareness without extinguishing it, leaving me entirely alone. The difference between feeling and sensing sounds negligible, probably, but to me it's important—because when the qualities of my not-napping abruptly changed, turning from darkness to light and soft warmth to hard sensation, I need you to know how unmistakable these changes truly were.

In lieu of silence, I heard voices and music and the rush of wheels over a polished floor.

In lieu of darkness, I abruptly beheld the sparkling lights of a disco ball.

In lieu of muffled oblivion, I smelled sweet cake and felt a rough taffeta party dress scraping against my skin.

And instead of isolation, I became surrounded by people who loved me.

All at once, forged from the fabric of my sleep, I realized I had begun to dream—or, more specifically, that I had begun to dream the memory of a birthday party.

The roller-skating rink brimmed with children and their parents. Arcade bells rang and chimed; children squealed with delight as tickets poured out of the machines and into their eager hands. People skated in circles around and around the nearby rink, their skates' wheels whirring over the floor with a sound like hissing thunder. The nine burning candles on the cake before me cast warmth into my delighted face; my cheeks hurt from smiling, the nylon cord of a paper party hat digging into the skin beneath my chin, but I hardly cared because the people around me were singing. A dozen other children sat at a table beside and across from me, singing "Happy Birthday" so brightly it made the candles seem dim in comparison. And the boy beside me (the snaggle-toothed boy with the patched clothes and mop of untrimmed hair and eyes like roman candles) sang the brightest of all, holding my hand under the table as he warbled out the tune.

"Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!" he and the other children sang. "Happy birthday dear—"

(If they sang my name, I couldn't quite hear it.)

"—happy birthday to you!"

And they all applauded as I blew out the candles, and the warmth of their love was so bright I could almost bask in it. But before I could tell them—these familiar faces I couldn't place, but ones I knew I loved as certainly as I knew this was my birthday party—that I loved them, too, my parents appeared. My mother stood on my left, and my father whisked away the cake for cutting before standing on my right. My heart swelled at the sight of them, and I wanted to tell them I loved you and I miss you so much, I miss you so much it hurts, I can't remember your names or faces but I miss you like crazy—

My mother held a long box, tied with ribbon, in her arms. She handed it to me as my father caressed my hair, the pair of them exchanging a loving smile above my head.

"Well, go on," my mother said.

"Open it!" said my father.

"Happy birthday, angel," said my mother.

"What's in the box? Show me!" said the snaggle-toothed boy at my side.

The other children demanded to see my present, too. How could I possibly deny these people whom I loved for what they asked? I tore the ribbon away, lifting the box's lid and diving into the tissue paper within without hesitation—but even before I saw what lay inside, my fingers skimmed its hidden contents, and I knew. I knew the minute I touched it what lay inside, and as I uncovered it for the world to see, my throat began to swell. I looked up at my parents in awe and in wonderment, smile trembling from emotion too pure to begin to name.

"You got it?" I whispered as my gift slid silken between my tiny child's fingers. "You really got this for me?"

"Of course, honey," they said, beaming. "Are you surprised?"

"This is mine?" I pressed, hardly daring to believe it—because they had said 'no' when we saw my gift in a department store, scarf golden and bright on the neck of a long-limbed mannequin. They'd said 'no' to that coveted Hermes scarf, but here it was, in my hands and shining under the cheap lights of the roller rink. I pulled the scarf from the box and draped it over my hair, rubbing the fabric against my cheek. Breathless, I could only ask, "I can really keep it?"

They laughed at the question. They laughed and pulled me close, and I buried my face in my mother's side and smelled her perfume, trying to drink her in and remember this moment, always, as they told me they loved me and held me tightly to them, too.

The golden Hermes scarf wasn't the only gift they gave me at that birthday party, but as the dream of the memory played out, I found I couldn't remember any others. They were all overshadowed by the golden Hermes scarf, which I knew I'd wear every day from then on out until the very day I died. It was my favorite of all the gifts, and that day I wore it proudly around my neck as I skated with my friends. My friends gave me birthday gifts, too, and ate cake with me, and held my hands as we ran through the arcade and fell asleep in a pile while watching a movie on the floor of my parents' bedroom, scarf sliding cold and slippery and magical against my sleeping cheek.

The boy with the snaggle-teeth—my best friend in the world, I realized somewhere deep inside me—held my hand through the night.

Friends.

I remembered my friends, now—or at least, I remember what it was like to have them.

NOTES:

Her memory comes in bits and pieces, it seems.

Thanks to all y'all who chimed in last time. Would love to hear from anyone still reading, because you rock my world: Kykygrly, Deamachi, o-dragon, Blaze1662001, rya-fire1, Ink Outside the Lines!