by Wende Dikec
Mr. Wan shrugged. “Perhaps they had unfinished business here. Perhaps they do not know they are dead. Or maybe they saw a living being and grabbed onto it because everything is so dead over there. You might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I think there was something in particular that drew them to you. I cannot say. It is impossible to know for certain.”
“What can I do about it?”
Although he’d never actually answered my question about the bad thing, Mr. Wan had suddenly become a great source of wisdom for something besides impeccable cuticle care. He stuck my hands in the dryer as he thought about it.
“I am not sure. Let me look it up.” He got up and shuffled to the back of the store, returning in just a few minutes with a giant, dusty book. He set it carefully on the table, back side up, and I stared at the elegant Chinese characters embossed in gold across the leather.
“Isn’t it upside down?” I turned my head to look at it, my hands still in the dryer.
Mr. Wan made a disapproving “tsking” sound with his tongue. “English is backward. Chinese is the right way.” He opened the book and began skimming through it. Finally, he said, “Ah ha!” and pointed one finger in the air. “Here it is. Trouble with ghosts.”
He read slowly, nodding and mumbling to himself. I tried to be patient, but began tapping my fingers on the table. He gave me a hard stare over the top of his glasses.
“You must learn to calm down.”
“To keep the ghosts away?”
“No. Because you are going to chip all of that nice nail polish and then say Mr. Wan does not do a good job.”
I stopped tapping. “Could you please tell me about the ghosts, Mr. Wan?”
“Yes, yes. First question, how many do you have?”
I counted the blobs clinging to the tiger painting. “About twenty, I guess.”
Mr. Wan’s mouth dropped open in shock. “That isn’t a haunting, that’s an infestation. Are they in my shop? Oh, very bad feng shui. Tell them to leave.”
“They don’t listen to me, Mr. Wan. That’s part of the problem.”
“Do you know anyone they will listen to?”
I thought of Zoe and nodded as I remembered how one dirty look from her had sent them scurrying away. “Good,” he said. “Figure out what they want and why they are following you around. Most of them are probably just confused, but others might need special help.”
I didn’t even want to ask what that might be. I had an infestation of ghosts. This was even worse than when I got head lice in preschool from trying on all the hats in the dress up bin.
Mr. Wan wrote something down in Chinese on a small slip of paper and then handed it to me. “Buy this from Mrs. Chang’s shop on the corner. It is a powder. Sprinkle it around the room before your friend talks to them. Make sure you put extra near doors and windows. It should help them go back to where they came from.”
“What if they don’t go back?”
“Then you have bigger problems, Miss Lily. You must be like the tiger in my painting, ready to attack.” Mr. Wan made a small pouncing gesture with his hands, and then started to laugh. “I will call you Tiger Lily now.”
“Ha. Funny,” I said. Mr. Wan was still laughing at his joke. The blobs wiggled on the tiger painting. I thought they might be laughing too. They didn’t look very scary to me.
“Mr. Wan, I don’t understand. The ghosts don’t seem dangerous. Why do I have to be ready to attack?”
Mr. Wan stopped laughing. “Because, Tiger Lily, it isn’t just these ghosts I am worried about. Try Mrs. Chang’s powder first. If that doesn’t work, then we will talk.”
I nodded, my nails all done. Time to go, but I still had one more question. “What happened to that girl, the one back in your village?”
“Her?” he asked, shaking his head. “Oh, she went crazy. Okay. See you next week. Bye, bye!” He waved at me, smiling, and I waved back, not exactly happy about that last little bit of information.
I walked to Mrs. Chang’s shop. Only a block away, I’d never even noticed it before. It looked cluttered and dirty on the outside, and not much better on the inside.
“Hello?”
A bell tinkled on the door as I shut it. I could hear the faint sound of water coming from somewhere in the shop, like a fountain, but it was so dark inside it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. When they finally did, I jumped back in surprise. A little, old lady wearing traditional Chinese dress stood directly in front of me, so tiny she barely came up to my chest. She had wisps of white hair pulled into a bun on her head, and she walked with a cane held tightly in her gnarled fingers. She smiled at me and bowed in greeting.
“Mrs. Chang?”
She nodded and chattered in Chinese, taking the slip of paper from my hand. She didn’t glance at the note, but went straight to the back of the shop, rattling on and on in Chinese as she searched the shelves. She paused just a second before tapping a box high on the top shelf with her cane and looking at me expectantly.
“This one?” I asked, reaching for the box. Covered in dust, I sneezed as I brought it down, making Mrs. Chang laugh.
“Yeah, that’s very funny. Dust mites are hilarious,” I mumbled to myself as I followed her to the cash register at the front of the shop. I’d need to bathe in sanitizer after this.
She rang me up, wrapped the box slowly and carefully in paper, and tied it with a string. I tried to be patient, but it took forever. Finally, when done, she handed it to me, bowing. I bowed back to her a few times, rather awkwardly, before heading to the door.
“Good luck with the ghosts, Tiger Lily,” she said. I turned in surprise, but she’d already shuffled back into the bowels of her store.
“Thanks,” I said, and heard her chuckle as I walked out into the sunshine.
Shadow Guy came to visit me again that evening. I woke chilled in the middle of the night because I’d left my window open. When I got up to close it, shivering in my tiny white cotton nightie, he was there. He sat at the bottom of my bed, just like he had at the hospital, and stared at me with the same sad, soulful expression in his brown eyes.
I approached him slowly. Even though he looked like a guy, he was a ghost, just like the blobs that had become my constant companions. They hovered on the ceiling right now, waiting and watching as I moved closer and closer to Shadow Guy. I stopped only inches away from him, my eyes locked on his.
“Go back to where you came from, spirit.” I waved my hands in the air for emphasis.
He raised one dark eyebrow at me. “Are you feeling okay?”
I walked over to the window and reopened it. “Out, out, I say!” I used my most authoritative voice, but he didn’t even budge, so I slammed the window shut again.
“Are you on meds?” he asked.
I scowled at him. “No. I’m just trying to get you to move on. Go to the light. Please. To the light.” I leaned over, putting my nose close to his.
“You really can see me, can’t you?” he asked, his voice low and rough. He wore a black t-shirt and jeans, and seemed pretty buff for a dead guy.
I folded my arms across my chest and sat down. “Of course I can. You’re sitting right here. Why are you in my room, by the way?”
He shrugged. “When I saw you at the hospital, something seemed different about you. I know it sounds creepy, but I followed you. I couldn’t help it. I needed to find you and ask you something important.”
“What?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Why are you able to see me when no one else can?”
“I don’t know. I had an accident and died for a few minutes. Apparently, now I see dead people. Lucky me.” I pointed at the black blobs that looked like they were doing laps back and forth across my ceiling.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, getting very still.
One of the blobs flew around his head, but he didn’t even glance at it. He just looked confused. He couldn’t see them.
I groaned in frustratio
n. “Why am I seeing ghosts when even ghosts can’t see ghosts?”
He shook his head and gave me a pitying look. “Girl, if you aren’t on meds already, I suggest you try some. Who are you, anyway?”
“Lily Anne Madison.” I extended my hand to him due to force of habit. When he reached out to shake it, his hand slid right through mine. The same thing had happened with the blobs, so I’d expected it, but Shadow Guy obviously hadn’t. He jumped off the bed, staring down at his hand with a horrified expression on his face.
“How did you do that?”
I tucked my hair behind my ears and folded my hands neatly on my lap. “I didn’t. It’s because you aren’t alive anymore.” I knew I spoke to him like I would to a small child, but I’d never had a conversation with a ghost before.
Confusion and fear slid across his face. He really had no idea what was going on. I felt bad and walked over to him, but he backed all the way to the wall. “Stay away from me.”
“Look, I want to help you. I have some magic powder that a Chinese lady sold me.” I pointed to the bag of white powder on my dresser.
“Magic powder? Did you give me drugs?” he asked, his eyes narrowing. “Are you one of Bambi’s friends from The Zone?”
The Zone, a club on the far side of town, had a questionable reputation. I’d never been there, but I’d heard rumors about it.
“Do I look like the kind of person who would give you drugs?” I put my hands on my hips. “And for that matter, do I look like the kind of person who would have a friend named after a cartoon character?”
His frown morphed into a smirk as he studied me, taking in the thick white ribbon holding back my red hair, the eyelet and lace on my shorty nightgown, and the white feathers on my silk mule slippers. My little toes peeked out the tops, and I had to admit Melancholy Baby was definitely my color.
“I guess not,” he said, “except for the cartoon part. I keep waiting for you to burst into song or tap dance or something.”
He rubbed his face with his hands and started to pace. “This can’t be happening. It doesn’t make sense.” In spite of his tough guy demeanor, he seemed afraid. My heart went out to him. I couldn’t help it.
I sighed and sat down on my bed, my legs curled underneath me. Rude and kind of annoying, he was also a lost soul and needed guidance.
“Let’s start with the basics. You must have been from around here since you know about The Zone. Tell me whatever you can remember. Who are you, and how did you die?”
He stomped over to me, strange since his feet didn’t make any noise. “My name is Nick,” he said, “and I’m not dead. Please get that into your stupid head.”
About to argue with him, I heard a strange swishing sound. A gust of wind blew through my room, in spite of the fact that every window had been shut tight.
Nick looked around, panic growing in his dark eyes. “Help me,” he said, just before vanishing into the night. “Please.”
“A rumor goes in one ear and out many mouths.”
Chinese proverb
Chapter Five
“I know why I’m seeing ghosts,” I said.
“Oh, goody.” I’d cornered Zoe first thing Monday morning at school, and she didn’t look happy about it. A group of Goth kids stood by the door to the art room, staring at us and she frowned. “Didn’t I tell you not to talk to me here?”
“Can we meet later?”
I tried not to feel hurt that she looked embarrassed to be seen with me. She was the misfit, after all. I was the normal one. I wrote down my address on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. She snatched it out of my hand and shoved it into her pocket.
“I’ll come after school,” she muttered and brushed past me to join her friends.
“She doesn’t like you,” said a deep voice right in my ear.
I jumped and almost dropped my books. Nick stood right next to me.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed.
He shrugged and leaned against a locker, his arms folded across his chest. He looked really good for a dead guy.
“No idea, but I figured out that the only way I’m going to get any answers is to follow you around. No one else seems to be able to see or hear me.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“I realize that,” he said with a smirk. “But I don’t have many options.”
“I’m your last resort?”
“Kind of.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you do. Girls like you annoy me.”
“Girls like me?”
He looked me up and down, from my headband embellished with crocheted daisies, to my white blouse and buttercup-yellow skirt. He had on his usual black t-shirt and jeans. Those must have been the clothes he’d died in. I could see part of a tattoo on his right arm, peeking out from under the sleeve of his t-shirt. He looked like the kind of person who might have tattoos in other places too. The thought of those other places made me blush.
“See what I mean?” His mouth curved into a naughty smile. “You’d never be caught dead with a guy like me.”
He’d made a joke. I laughed so hard I snorted, bringing a bunch of strange looks from students passing us in the hall. They couldn’t see Nick, but they could see me talking to myself and laughing. As soon as they left, I gave him a hard glare.
“Very ladylike of you, princess,” he said with a grin.
“Not funny.” This time I tried not to move my lips as I whispered.
“I thought it was,” he said. “But I meant what I said before, Lily. I’m not dead, and I’ll just have to keep following you around and annoying you until you agree to help me. ”
I rolled my eyes. The black blobs swirled around him like a fuzzy tornado. Maybe they also needed my help. That could explain why they followed me around too.
“Join the club,” I said.
That whole day turned into a nightmare. Nick came with me to every class. He made fun of me in calculus, my worst subject, and took special joy in the fact that he seemed to know every answer long before I did.
“Not a lot going on under that headband, is there, sweetness?” he said with a grin as he got another answer right that I didn’t. The worst part was he did everything in his head. He couldn’t hold a pencil, and there was no way he could use a calculator.
In American Lit, he distracted me so badly I screwed up on a quiz I’d known every answer to. In chemistry, he startled me into dropping a beaker of acid and nearly burning my lab partner. In psychology, he listed every disorder and problem he thought I suffered from personally. He may have been right on a few of them. By lunchtime, I’d become a frazzled mess.
“What’s up with your headband?” asked Maura.
I touched my head. My headband had slid onto my forehead, and a row of daisies rested on my eyebrows. Nick had upset me so much that I hadn’t even noticed a major headband malfunction.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I muttered under my breath to Nick. Maura looked confused.
“I just did.”
“I wondered why someone didn’t tell me sooner. That’s what I meant.” I gave her a weak grin.
Throughout lunch, Nick did everything he could to annoy me. He looked down Maura’s shirt, which was pretty low cut and didn’t leave much to the imagination. He sat on Jessica’s lap. He stretched out across the table and made fun of our entire conversation, especially when the girls started asking me about Josh.
“My friend from Baldwin said that Josh would totally go to prom with you,” said Maura.
“Totally,” said Nick, who was on his side with his head propped up on his hand. I had to crane my neck to see Maura over him.
“Seriously?” I asked, trying hard to sound enthusiastic. Maura looked at me oddly. It was hard trying to appear normal while a ghost lounged on your cafeteria table, making snarky comments.
“Uh, yes,” said Maura. “Is there something wrong with your neck?”
I shook my head, but she seeme
d unconvinced. “Anyway, he wants to ask you out, but didn’t want you to feel any pressure due to the whole life saving thing.”
“I felt exactly the same way. And he’s so blond, buff, and perfect. My ideal guy and a total dream date.”
Going out with Josh could be a great distraction from all my problems. I’d dated a few guys at my school, but I’d never liked anyone enough to go out with them more than once or twice. Josh had long-term potential.
Nick covered his face with his hands, moaning like he was in pain. “Total dream date? Do people honestly talk like this?” He peeked out from between his fingers. “Oh. I get it. You’re Lily White. Never been kissed. You’re like a Vestal Virgin or something.”
“Shut up,” I said, glaring at him. The table got really quiet. I cringed, realizing it seemed like I’d told Maura’s salad to be quiet, and Nick burst out laughing.
“Are you okay Lily?” asked Jess, rubbing my arm.
“I’m fine,” I said with the falsest of false smiles. “Just excited about prom. And about Josh.”
One of the blobs flew up Jessica’s nose and out of her ear. Another perched between Maura’s significant breasts. Suddenly, I needed to get out of the cafeteria. I jumped up, almost knocking over a freshman walking behind me.
“Excuse me,” I said, my cheeks getting hot. Maura and Jessica eyed me with concern. “I need a little air. I’ll be right back.”
I walked as fast as I could out the door of the cafeteria and into the commons. Nick followed close on my heels. I began to understand why the girl in China had lost her mind.
“Stop it,” I said through clenched teeth as Nick circled around to face me, He came to a stop, and the blobs all froze in mid-air behind him. I guess even they recognized a girl on the edge. I pointed my finger at them.
“This ends right now. I will help all of you, but you’ve got to give me a little space.” Lake Eugene sparkled in the distance, but I couldn’t even enjoy the view.
Nick looked around. “All of us?”
He still couldn’t see the blobs, but they could definitely see him. They clung to his black shirt like he might protect them. From me. Ridiculous.
