Touch-Starved

by Celia Crown

  It’s time we treat ourselves to lunch on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

  The line isn’t long, and when we get up to the window, a whiff of stronger honied hotdog makes my mouth water. Something about grilled hotdog is so much better than what we have at home. Danni eats more vegetables than I could find on a farm.

  Not that I had been on a farm anyway.

  We order and the owner looks at Danni briefly, but his smile is wide when he greets us. Danni has gotten looks all her life. She doesn’t take offense to her skin anymore, but I do it for her sometimes.

  No one should insult such beautiful skin colors; it makes her different and more special than those around her.

  Often times, I have her as my inspiration when I draw.

  The truck owner gives us our food and we leave with a bite in our mouths, moaning and savoring the flavors that explode in my mouth.

  I’m pretty sure that my reactions are caused by the hunger in my stomach; anything is delicious right now.

  As I chew, my eyes wander down the beach area and everyone has different colors on them. Some of them are clashing and some compliments the skin tones of others, but it’s the children’s floating materials that are bright yellow that are rented from the local shop off to the side for precautionary measures imposed by the government.

  I turn my gaze to the car beside me; it’s a red convertible and the color of the sky reflects off the glass.

  A man, scruffy and glowering, stares back at me with such intensity that I accidentally swallowed my food before I had the chance to break it down.

  He may be the most beautiful man I have seen; black hair, emerald eyes, and massive shoulders under a black cotton shirt. He has a sharp jawline, chiseled cheekbones, and sleeves of tattoos running up his arms like a snake coiling around its prey.

  I blink, and he’s gone. I look into the convertible’s seat, and he isn’t there. Looking behind me and to the side, I find no one near us as I cough to get rid of the piece of bread stuck in my throat.

  It’s better than fishbone.

  “What is it?” Danni asks; hot sauce stains the corner of her lip.

  “I saw a ghost.”

  She thins her lips and cocks an eyebrow with so much sass that I felt offended.

  “Has anyone told you that you’re stupid?”

  “No,” I gasp, lifting my hand to my chest with my beach bag knocking into my side, “I have been called creative, unorthodox, and idiosyncratic.”

  “They meant idiot.”

  “Hey!”

  Chapter Two

  Eli

  I’m dead.

  It’s the only plausible explanation.

  Translucent skin and unfeeling of where, I can’t physically feel anything, not the blazing sun or the solid, alive bodies walking through me. I can’t smell the car exhausts, I can’t be heard in the quietest place, and I can’t remember who I am.

  My mind is a blank page; it has no background, present, or any indications of a future.

  The details that I pick up from my body are the tattoos that swirl up my arms, but I can’t lift the black shirt up to see if it extends to my chest. My hand just falls through me, and this frightening concept is unacceptable.

  It works in a peculiar way; I don’t recall anything in my life, yet I know the basic functions of life and the best material for antennas is copper.

  The moment my eyes were able to see, I was in a bedroom filled with art supplies and a disarrayed bed. I couldn’t touch anything, no one could hear me, and I had not fallen through the flooring since my feet were able to stay there.

  Being dead is the only explanation, and I was convinced of that because a girl with messy brown hair stumbled into the room with her white bikini. She picked up a bag and a sheer coverall to put around her body, and then she was out the door with an invisible pull of me following her.

  I had no idea what it was, but it was physically impossible for me to not follow her. It’s as if I was in chains and she was tugging me along, and she dragged until I was face to face with a beach.

  It took me a while to get used to this and in a way, I adapted relatively quick as a conditioned response of my body from whatever life I had previously. I got used to having people walk through me, not feeling a thing physically, and being dead.

  That was what I thought before the girl with too much control over me looked into the car window and saw me. She saw me with an expression too big to tell me that she was not hallucinating; she had turned in all directions before her friend had to put a stop since she was embarrassing them.

  “You can see me,” I say. I watch her shoulders jump in shock.

  Those startled brown eyes widen, but she doesn’t look up from the menu. I had followed them to their apartment and went out again with a new change of clothes; their choice of destination was the mall and then dinner at a fast-food restaurant.

  I can’t smell the grease, and I’m thankful for that. I have no memories of how I know what fast food smells like, but I know the distinctive scent as if it’s an innate ability of me to have knowledge of things that I don’t remember experiencing.

  This still fucks me up every time I think about it.

  “I’ll have what she’s having,” the girl says, but I know her as Jackie.

  The girl with two-toned skin had called her that in exacerbation multiple times, and she was named Danni according to the girl who can see me.

  The waitress leaves the menu there and walks away. This fast-food restaurant is busy so no one wants to lose their seats by going up to the front to order; they would rather pay a service fee and tips to have their order taken.

  Jackie continues to ignore me until I step through the table and directly in front of her. She has no choice but to snap her head up at me and the light from the restaurant shines into her eyes.

  She winces with a groan, ducking her head down on the table with a loud and dense noise. Her friend voices her concern with a tone of deadpan as if this is a regular occurrence.

  “If you can’t behave like a civilized human, then I will feed you the peppermint green juice.”

  Jackie’s lips twitch in disgust, “Juice of Death.”

  “You’re going to meet death quicker if you keep eating so unhealthy.”

  She pouts, pink lips jutting as her nose scrunches. Jackie is a pretty little thing, a different style than the women on the beach with their tits up to their chin and ass out to seduce men around them.

  “Says the girl that ordered a monstrosity,” Jackie says, picking up the menu again and leaning back to the booth so she isn’t phasing through me.

  I take a step toward her, and my thigh seeps into the back of the black menu; kneeling down and going through the shield that she tried to put between us gets me a small shriek of shock.

  “You can see me,” I repeat.

  Her glossy eyes narrow down at me, and to many, she looks like she’s angry at the list of food choices.

  “We need sage, Danni,” she says, glaring at me with doe-eyes.

  Jackie can’t look intimidating when she looks too young and too innocent. She doesn’t have the sharp features to pose the cold and calculated look that I have. I brush off her disdain when she shifts backward. I close the distance further and this time I know that she can see me with definitive proof.

  “We don’t need sage,” the woman behind me says.

  “We do, I’m haunted,” Jackie bites her plump bottom lip, “I also need an exorcist, and where’s the closest church to hire a priest?”

  “You need sleep,” her friend retorts.

  “I’m seeing a ghost!” her hushed whisper flies through me as she never makes eye contact with me.

  “You see a lot of things,” another deadpanned comment returns with an equally uninterested tone.

  Jackie scowls at her friend and for the first time, she actually looks at me. My body is massive and tall; kneeling helps me be at the same level with her. She purses her lips with skepticism, closing
the menu on my face to see if I would go away.

  I’m persistent when she does it again; now she just looks like a moron. A damn adorable moron, but still an idiot nonetheless.

  “I never thought one day I would be haunted; that’s so not fair,” she sobs dryly with a soft wobble of her lips.

  “Don’t be fucking stupid. I’m not going to possess your body,” my lips open with an aggravated sigh and she clicks her tongue at me.

  “I wasn’t going to give you permission anyway.”

  I counter her glare with mine, “Try me.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she gasps, acceptably normal for her to talk to herself in the middle of a busy restaurant.

  Her friend doesn’t seem to mind; she simply sips her drink while watching us when I take a look over my shoulder.

  “Not Danni either, that’s the number one rule.”

  I cock an eyebrow, “There are rules.”

  “Yes, and I’ll think of more soon,” she nods, jerking her head to the side when their numbers are called.

  Danni gets up to offer her time to get the food while commenting on how she wouldn’t want Jackie to stop being unstable in the head to the people around them. In return, Jackie had been so offended that she’s speechless.

  “Look at what you did; she just offended me again.”

  There isn’t any hurt in her eyes or any changes in her voice, “Why aren’t you freaking out?”

  “I will,” she says, too clam and resigned, “It’s going to come later, probably in the middle of the night, and I’ll be screaming at the top of my lungs. The cops will be called. We’ll get charged with domestic disturbance and get evicted from the apartment.”

  I open my mouth to stop her rambling, but her voice is stronger and quicker than my thoughts.

  “I’m homeless, and it’s your fault, ghost boy.”

  This girl thinks too much; all her hypothetical thinking is unreasonable, and I can tell just how quick it is to overlook her exaggeration if I put my mind to it. Not even a twenty-four-hour period has passed, and I’m halfway of being immune to her foolishness.

  At the beach was when I really began to notice how much I stopped judging this girl for being different, but I did wish she would have kicked the unpleasant bastard that wouldn’t leave her alone.

  “You’re not going to be homeless,” I reason.

  “How would you know,” she grumbles, fanning the menu into my face to wave me away.

  For many reasons, she’s not going to get rid of me that easily; I physically can’t be too far away from her without the invisible chains choking me, and she is the only person who can see me and that means that I’ll need her help to get out of whatever the hell this situation is.

  “You’ll be in a psychiatric ward.”

  She chokes, glaring more furiously while aggressively smacking the menu side to side at my face. My expression remains impassive as I watch her idiocy catches attention from left and right; customers whisper to themselves while being cautious about this girl.

  “People get haunted by malevolent spirits, mournful souls, and tricksters. I get possessed by a translucent, annoying, ambiguous thing.”

  I will overlook her insult; she is uncomfortable when she listed my traits as if it was hard for her to insult me. She doesn’t know me; it’s hard to find qualities to stick to an insult when she has limited interaction with me.

  “You’ll know when I’m possessing you,” I whisper darkly, the baritone sparks a light of fear in her eyes.

  Possessing a live body is still a mystery to me. I haven’t figured out that part yet or even if it’s a probable thing. This is my first day of being officially dead. I’m getting a hang of it while flying solo on this without instructions.

  I stop her with a hand up, “Stop talking; you’re getting too much attention.”

  She glances around with horror etched on her pretty face, and she jerks her head down so she is in front of me, closer than what a living human should do to a fucking ghost of all things, but this girl is not normal under any pretense.

  “Whose fault is that?” she wrinkles her nose.

  I stand, stepping out of the table quickly as Danni comes back with a tray of food and two cups of soda. My stomach doesn’t growl nor do I have the urge to eat. My appetite is neither here nor there.

  I just have a hollowness in me.

  “Eat; it’ll calm your overactive imagination,” Danni says as she pushes the food to the middle.

  “I’m not imagining him,” she sniffs, opening her burger up and sinking her pearly teeth in it.

  “Really,” Danni hums, and even I can hear the disbelief in her voice. “What does he look like?”

  “He has black hair and green eyes, like the reincarnation of a Roman gladiator,” Jackie chews as she spares me glances to make sure her description of me is correct.

  “That’s about a fourth of the Earth’s population,” Danni takes one gulp of her soda while holding her burger in the other hand.

  “That’s what he looks like.”

  Danni puts her burger down after another bite and wipes her lips with a napkin while Jackie sips aggressively on the straw; the neon green beverage has one solid go into her throat and she has no intention of stopping.

  “You’re going to choke,” I snap, instinctively swiping my hand down to take it away from her. My hand goes through the cup and into her face. She jerks back with wide eyes and jaws dropping.

  “The wraith just tried to suck the living daylight out of me,” she squeaks, eyes darting between me and her friend.

  “I’m trying to save your dumbass from drowning in sugar,” I scowl, vexed at my misunderstood intentions.

  “I think this new character you imagined for your new artwork is getting too heated. You’re arguing about the details to yourself,” Danni crumbles her wrapper in her hand.

  “He is not,” Jackie ignores me and growls, kittenish and damn adorable, “He’s real, and he’s arguing with me.”

  “I don’t see him,” Danni points out, chewing with a mouth full of food. “And, there is no such thing as ghosts.”

  “Eli is right there!” she whispers with wild eyes, peering at me with determination to make me visible to her friend.

  “Eli?” my voice synchronizes with her friend’s.

  “He sounds like an Eli with that sass,” she explains.

  Danni finishes her drink when the little drops of her soda echoes hollowly, “Should he look like an Eli?”

  “No, he has too much sass,” Jackie shakes her head, biting into her burger again and chewing on her left cheek.

  “Lively and cheeky?” Danni laughs with a straw between her teeth.

  Jackie shoots me a look, squints her eyes and through instinct, I glare back. “Rude, talks back, audacious—”

  She stops herself with a flick of her tongue darting out, “Prickly.”

  “Hmm,” Danni thinks with her head tilted as she analyzes Jackie with keen eyes, “Eli is your dream man.”

  Jackie gapes, jaws dropping and the soda cup would have fell if her fingers hadn’t gotten caught on the plastic lid. My hands stop midair with a breath of relief, but my mind is echoing after Danni’s words.

  “Come again?” Jackie coughs.

  “He is exactly the type of men you’re attracted to,” Danni replies softly, “Your track record tells a story. Austin, Bryce, Cameron, Daven… we have the whole alphabet to go through.”

  Jackie frowns; she’s slightly upset with big, brown eyes gleaming under the lights. “They think I’m weird.”

  My eyes take in the hand stretching over to pat Jackie’s hand around her cup, “They didn’t last two weeks. I give credit to Fernando; he got to the first day of week three.”

  A twitch of something in my chest runs like a current of water, calm yet fatal in its own way. I have this intense dislike of Fernando, and I should be able to feel anything let alone dislike when this stop between life and death prevents me from feeling.

&nb
sp; “You’re supposed to comfort me,” Jackie complains, chomping down on her food.

  “Everyone has different tastes; the taste of Jacqueline is one of a kind. Someone will love every little, quirky thing you do, but don’t bring your hope up on the next one. These things take time.”

  Her full name is Jacqueline, and it suits her; nonconventional and unique, she’s not a girl to be swept off of her feel when some man flashes her a smile. She doesn’t need the attention. It’s evident in the way that she felt uncomfortable when the man approached her too strongly at the beach.

  “He has to love you for talking to yourself,” Danni nods to herself, tapping her chin and bringing a noise to her throat.

  “I’m haunted,” Jackie corrects, “I should buy holy water and a book of demonic spirits.”

  “Why?” I ask, unable to be ignored anymore.

  Her thick lashes flutter and she clears her throat, “I have to fight evil with evil.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Danni says.

  I sigh, standing tall and intimidating when I glare down at the top of her head. Her pink lips suck on the straw and teeth at it, and she would lick her tongue mindlessly around it.

  “You can’t follow me home,” she adamantly articulates.

  “I can’t leave you.”

  “You can haunt someone else,” Jackie stacks the trash on the tray and picks it up with Danni getting out of the booth.

  Jackie’s small body walks through mine, and I shouldn’t feel anything, but I did and it was chilling. The passing isn’t cold and careless; her body had a brief contact of warmth that felt like a thousand of fire ants crawling through my body.

  This is new, and I can’t decide if it’s good or bad for me. Everyone else felt like the sun passing through a day of May, but Jackie was a burst of scorching fire that singes my presence. I don’t have a physical body, but something in me keeps ignited after her heat phased through me.

  The tug comes to my heart as it forces me to turn around and follow the two girls out the door. Jackie would look back every couple of feet to see if I’m following her, and when she sees the same distance for a block, she whines with a gesture of shooing me away.