by Joy Elbel
“Not that I know of but you have to remember the kind of business I was in. I could have made enemies that I didn’t know I made. Plus, the last twenty four hours of my life are still a complete and utter blank, remember?”
I watched with amusement as Coco walked out of the bedroom and leapt onto the futon between Clay and me. She seemed able to see him but aware of the fact that he was different. With her furry little face cocked to one side, she made tiny little yipping noises in his direction. Then she would turn to me and let out one long meow before repeating the process. When Clay attempted to pet her, she hissed and ran off. He sure had a way with the ladies.
“Of course I remember but I think if you can tell me a little more about your life, we can find the missing piece that led to your death. Now that you know that there’s a pretty good chance that you didn’t commit a mortal sin, are you willing to give this whole moving on thing another shot?”
A flicker of doubt swept through Clay’s eyes but he nodded his head anyway. “Sure, whatever you think is best, Ruby. I’m just a ghost—you are the ghost expert. Where do you want to start?”
“Tell me about your life before things went wrong, before you made all of those stupid choices. What was your family like? Your friends? It’s kind of weird to me that we spend so much time together and yet ninety percent of what I know about you has come from Zach or Rachel.”
His face became a palette of various shades of uneasy and I had a sneaking suspicion that things went wrong well before he admitted it to himself. As he ran his hand back through his hair, I realized it was his nervous tic. Zach’s bouncing leg always made me aware that he was dreading the upcoming conversation. Now, I also knew I had a better understanding of Clay’s inner thoughts before he even spoke them. He was tortured in more ways than I even suspected.
“Here it is—my life story in under sixty seconds. I never knew my dad. My mother jumped from guy to guy and didn’t even know who he was, either. Tons of different boyfriends wound in and out of our lives, some good and some not so much. I always came second in her life. If her relationship of the week was going okay, things were good. If it wasn’t, she drank. A lot. Some of her boyfriends did, too. She always had some sort of drama going on. She always needed to be center stage. There was a point when she was dating Scott Fox where things were almost normal. He took me to Boy Scouts and did fun things with me. Mom seemed more settled when she was with him, too. But when they broke up, things got even crazier than before. I started spending more time at Jeremy Carmott’s house than I did at my own. Jeremy was my best friend who lived a few houses down from us. Do you know him?”
The name didn’t even sound familiar. I made a mental note to ask Zach or Rachel about him as soon as I had a chance. “No, I don’t know him. Do you have any other family here in town?”
“Just my grandma. She did her best to try and keep me out of trouble but it wasn’t enough. I would give anything to see her again. That’s what sucks the most about being dead. I can’t just go see people like I used to. I was really lonely until….” His voice trailed off awkwardly but I knew exactly what he was going to say. He was lonely until he met me. My suspicions were correct—Clay had a crush on me.
Awkward pause. What could I say to him? Even if it weren’t for Zach, things between Clay and I would never work out. For starters, he was dead. While I struggled to come up with more good reasons why a relationship with Clay would be a bad idea, I realized the one that I had already come up with was more than sufficient. He was dead and I was alive and therefore not suitable girlfriend material for him. He needed something else to focus on besides me. Correction. He needed someone else.
“You can go see people like before. Point me in the right direction and I’ll take you to see anyone you’ve been missing. Who was your girlfriend?”
“Oh no,” he sputtered, and lowered his head in embarrassment. “I can’t go see her!” What? If I died, Zach would be numero uno on my “to haunt” list. “Why not? You won’t actually be able to talk to her but wouldn’t you at least like to see her face?”
“No!” he replied firmly. “I can’t go see her. She dumped me, remember? She didn’t want anything to do with me and I can’t say that I blame her. I’m sure she moved on a long time ago. Hell, she may not even know that I’m dead. Or she might not give a damn. Either way, seeing her would make me feel even more alone than I already do.”
I never thought of it that way. Now I was rethinking the whole thing from my perspective, too. How awful would it be to see Zach with someone else even long after I died? Or worse yet, what if he couldn’t bear being alone and started dating the first girl he found? I would seriously want to ghost kick her in the teeth! Definitely, I would have to know for certain what I would find before I went looking for him. Lucky for Clay, he had me to help him with that. I just couldn’t let him know what I was up to in case I found something that I didn’t want to tell him.
“Sorry, I never thought of it that way. But it would help if I knew who she was—I may need to get some information from her to help us figure out who killed you.” Sudden. Terrible. Thought. What if she was the one who killed him? I pictured a girls gone wild, vandalism style scenario in my head. Boy spends too much time with car. Girl feels ignored. Girl takes out frustrations on car. Boy catches her. Girl swings implement of destruction one more time. Boy hemorrhaging from the brain. Girl panics and dumps boy’s body into Silver Lake. Forget about Mexican drug cartels, angry women were the most dangerous criminals on the planet.
I could almost see his wheels turning as he thought about it from every angle, busily trying to decide whether or not to trust me with the information. After what felt like an eternity of silent character judgment, Clay gave in. “Fine. I’ll tell you what you need to know but you have to promise not to set me up. I don’t want to see her no matter what reason you think is good enough. I know how you girls are—you get together and talk behind boys’ backs. You become instant friends and bond over what jerks you think we all are. Do you promise not to let her talk you into something stupid?”
Is that really how boys see us? As screeching harpies who enjoy tearing them apart piece by piece? Ignoring his antiquated opinions of women, I agreed with a hearty “Scout’s honor!”
Still obviously wary and acting like he’d just made a deal with the devil, Clay offered up the information I’d asked for. “Her name was Sophie Wester. She lived in Graysburg— not Charlotte’s Grove. We met at the county fair there the summer before I died. At first, I thought she was just some rich girl looking for a bad boy so she could piss her daddy off. But I was wrong. She really did like me. Until I went and screwed everything up, that is.”
Regret was written all over his face. I’d seen that same look in the mirror countless times myself. Knowing that your own dumb mistakes caused you to lose the person you loved was the worst feeling in the world. Part of me would always believe that my actions caused Lee’s death. And even though my errors never caused permanent damage to my relationship with Zach, it certainly felt like it at the time.
“So exactly how did you screw everything up? I know this isn’t easy for you, but you have to tell me everything you remember.”
Once again, Clay ran his hand nervously through his hair. “Like I said, she was a rich girl. She had a car and I didn’t. She always wanted to pay for everything. I hated that. I should have been picking her up and doing nice things for her—not the other way around. I got a job at the grocery store but I got fired after only a month because I didn’t have reliable transportation. My mom would say she would give me a ride to work but then she would bail on me. My grandma hired me to help out at the shop, but the economy was bad and people just weren’t buying enough flowers. She could hardly keep herself afloat so I barely got any hours. That’s when I got the brilliant idea to start dealing.”
“Roseman’s Floral Emporium!” I blurted out once I made the connection. “That’s your grandma’s shop, right? I remember seeing
it my first day in Charlotte’s Grove and thinking that it was funny that someone with your last name owned a flower shop! Seems like only yesterday….” While so many moments in this town seemed like they would never end, time really had flown now that I looked back on it.
“Yeah, that’s her shop. God, how I miss that place, how I miss her! It always smelled so good in there,” Clay replied sadly. “But when I saw how much money Shane and Dylan were making, I quit my job. I stopped going in there because I felt so guilty. Grandma was one of those people who could see right through you, ya know? I was afraid that if I spent time with her, she would see that I was hiding something big. The last time I saw her was the day I quit. She looked so disappointed.”
Regret. A running theme not just in my life, apparently, but in damn near everyone I met. With everything we do and say, we could be setting off a chain reaction that we will never be able to set right. If only there was a way to know ahead of time. The simple act of me sitting here now talking to Clay could be the catalyst for some tragic regret later down the line. Just the thought of it made me slightly panicky. If I thought about it too much, I would drive myself crazy and end up curled into a ball in the corner of my closet. No, I had already faced more than my fair share of regret—it was time to relax and enjoy life now. Everything was going to be just fine.
I pulled my mind back to the important part of this conversation—gaining enough knowledge about Clay’s life so that I could understand his death. And help him understand it, too. “So Shane and Dylan were your suppliers then?”
Clay nodded. “They were a few years older than me and lived on my street. We all lived in government subsidized housing and were poor as dirt. I was walking to Jeremy’s house one day and noticed a flashy new car parked in front of Dylan’s house. He caught me admiring it and told me that if I wanted one too, he would show me how to get it. I pretty much knew what I was getting myself into but I convinced myself that it was okay and that I wouldn’t get caught. Of course, I never dreamed that I would end up dead.”
No one ever really does, do they? No one wakes up in the morning and says to themselves, “Today seems like an excellent day to die.” Do they? I certainly didn’t. As a matter of fact, no day is an excellent day to die. You would think that my firsthand knowledge of the afterlife would take away my fear of death. Nope, it only compounded it. There were so many intricacies, too many ways that your spirit could get caught between worlds. Why couldn’t I seem to get my mind off of such depressing things? Grr! Seventeen year old girls aren’t supposed to think this deeply. I was supposed to be thinking about boys, clothes, and shoes not death, ghosts, and regret. It was time for me to loosen up and have fun. Well, almost time. The sooner I helped Clay move on, the sooner I could focus on being normal. I was determined to be normal someday even if it killed me.
I pulled out my phone and navigated to the notes app. “What are their last names? Shane and Dylan what? And what’s your address?” I asked as I typed out their first names. My plan was to figure out a way to take all of the information I got from Clay and hand it over to the police. Not chasing killers around town was the best first step to being normal that I could think of.
“Shane Taylor and Dylan Rush. We all lived on Spring Avenue—over on the west side of town. You aren’t thinking of going over there to question them, are you? If they killed me, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, too.”
“No, but I do want to talk to your friend Jeremy—he may know something but be too afraid to come forward. What’s his last name again?”
“Carmott. Jeremy Carmott. He and my grandma are the only two people I would really like you to take me to see. Can we go find them now?”
“Now? Do you realize what time it is, Clay? It’s already pretty late and I have school in the morning. We can go some day this week, though—Scout’s Honor.”
While he looked bummed that I wasn’t going to take him tonight, he managed a brief smile when I repeated his trademark phrase. “I guess I need to leave you alone now, huh? Time to go haunt the cemetery like a good little ghostie.”
He sure knew how to lay a guilt trip. I put the finishing touches on the note in my phone, making sure to enter his girlfriend’s name, as well. If I couldn’t get anything useful out of Jeremy, Sophie was my next target—I just didn’t want Clay to know that. Keeping secrets from him wasn’t as bad as keeping them from Zach—or any other living person—but it still felt slightly wrong. To make up for it, I offered him a late night haunting ground alternative that I was certain he wouldn’t refuse.
“You don’t have to go wandering around alone in the cemetery tonight—unless you want to, of course. As long as you swear not to get in bed with me again or anything else even remotely inappropriate, you can stay here tonight. You can watch TV or something—just don’t rattle your chains and keep me up all night, okay?” Wow. I was inviting a ghost to spend the night at my house. Why did something so insane sound so perfectly rational to me?
“Really? Sweet!” Clay exclaimed excitedly. “You won’t even know I’m here—Scout’s Honor.” “You’re welcome,” I said and turned the television on for him. I skimmed through the channels until he found one that he wanted to watch then dragged myself to my bedroom. Before closing the door, I gave him one final warning. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“Yes, Dom,” he said with a laugh as he held up two fingers. Now if I could only work that same dominatrix magic on Zach in the morning. Getting him to allow me to buy him a car was going to be the toughest thing I faced tomorrow—a scary thought since I was up against a huge test in, gulp, French.
I woke up cheerful and optimistic—a rarity for me. I grabbed breakfast and ran back up to my room so that Clay and I could talk. Knowing that he once had the same issues with money that Zach had, I wanted to get his opinion about my plan to buy Zach a new car. Of course, I expected to hear that he wouldn’t have accepted such an offering from his girlfriend. I was shocked when Clay gave me the exact opposite answer.
“Giuseppe gave you that money because of what his son did to you. Zach was sort of a victim, too. Rightfully, some of that cash should go to him.”
I’d never thought of it in that way before. He had an excellent point and I now had an excellent rebuttal for Zach’s inevitable argument. Without thinking, I blurted out, “You’re right! OMG, Clay, I could kiss you right now!” It wasn’t until he started to run his hand through his hair that I realized how uncomfortable that comment made him. I was right. He really did have a crush on me. I needed to be careful—ghost or not, he definitely had feelings and I didn’t want to hurt them. Boys are like turtles—tough on the outside, but defenseless once you crack open their shells. My goal was to not turn Clay into turtle soup.
My mood took a serious decline when Zach slid into my car with a foul look on his face and gave me a grumpy “Morning.”
I smiled anyway. “Good morning, Sunshine! You look like you could use some good news.” Zach simply grunted in response. Okay. Maybe now wasn’t the best time to tell him my plan. Would there ever really be a good time, though? Probably not. I spit out what I had to say as fast as I could physically say it. Rachel would have been proud of me.
“Fine. Whatever. I’m going to need a vehicle to drive back and forth to the construction site every day for the rest of my life.”
“ What? What construction site? What about college and your job at the shelter?” The fact that he didn’t argue with me about the car told me that something far worse was on his mind.
“Dad told me that if I ever want to drive again, I’ll have to get a better job. He found out how much my insurance went up and hit the roof. He’s right, though. I can’t afford it with what I’m making at the shelter. And how in the world am I going to afford it once I’m in college? I’m going to have so many more bills to pay when we move to Ohio. I can’t afford to go to college now. I’m going to have to wait a year or two.”
“No. Absolutely not! You can’t! If you take t
ime off, you’ll never go back!” I shouted. And I realized exactly what I was saying as my dad’s words echoed from my own lips. I got it now. I understood completely why Dad thought I should spend my first semester at Trinity. It was because he loved me and didn’t want to see me make a stupid mistake—just like I didn’t want to see Zach make one. Seriously, no one ever told me that growing up was this humbling. Dad was right. He was one hundred percent right. I was still going to Ohio with Zach, but I would now be going with the knowledge that it truly was a stupid thing to do. Dammit! Growing up was supposed to be about having fun new experiences, not turning into your own father before you even turned eighteen. Out of the corner of my eye, I took a look at the red streak in my hair just to make sure it hadn’t turned gray already. Nope, at least one part of my teenage-ness was still sacred.
As Zach opened his mouth in protest, I gave him the rebuttal that Clay had provided for me. “Technically, some of my money should be yours anyway. You’re going to let me buy that car and pay for your insurance—and that’s final. You’re going to Pendleton in the fall even if I have to drag you there kicking and screaming.”
“Geez, when did you become such a dominatrix?” Zach inquired with a slight smile. “Never mind—I kind of like you this way. You’re right—if I don’t go to college now, I probably never will. I hate that I have to rely on your money but it will be worth it in the end. We’re a team. We need to stick together.”
Whoa. It’s like my whip was made of pure gold. I was in total control of everything. Zach, Clay, my parents—life in general. Maybe plans for world domination weren’t so far out of my grasp. Under my reign, Misty and people like her would be at the bottom of the high school food chain. I had vivid images of her and her coven working the line at the cafeteria— hair nets and all—as Zach and I walked into the school. Until I was distracted by weird noises coming from practically everyone I came across. Why was everyone mooing like they had mad cow disease?
