G is for Ghosts

by Rhonda Parrish

  “Come, Penelope,” he said. “Have some cereal. Everything tastes better in the dark.”

  We spent more and more time down in the dining hall instead of doing rounds. I loved sitting in the darkness with him while he told me stories of his large family. Four sisters and three brothers. I tried to imagine Thanksgiving, contrasting it with the cold, silent meals I shared with my mother and father. Laughter, warmth, inside jokes from our youth. What would it be like?

  I think my feelings for him churned into existence soon after I met him, when he spoke of how much he longed for a large family of his own. That is when the thought first struck me: perhaps our souls were conjoined twins, wrenched apart by the universe upon our births. In another life, I came from the large family, he was been raised as an only child by too-busy, too-strict parents, and I was the one who rescued him to build a future. We were meant to be together, for certain.

  But then along came a curly-haired, big-bosomed junior.

  “How are things with Nevaeh?” Three weeks after they started dating, I tried to toss the sentence out casually, one friend to another, but I barely choked out that slut’s name.

  In the darkness, Bentley sat next to me at the huge, round table. He could have taken a chair three feet away, across from me, but he didn’t. Did that mean something? His flashlight clicked on. He winked at me. I melted, caught my breath. He moved away.

  “Nevaeh and I broke up. You know how it is.”

  “Oh?”

  “She caught me making out with a Tri-Delt at a party.” Even the shrug of his shoulders was majestic. “I was drunk. She was coming onto me. What did Nevaeh expect?”

  While a less understanding soul mate may have taken pause, my heart leapt. Bentley, my Bentley, was free again. He’d done it because on some level, he knew being with Nevaeh was wrong. He wanted to be with me. He would never, never betray me. “That’s too bad.”

  Hesitantly, I lifted an arm. I wanted to touch him, purposefully, for the first time. This was my chance. I had to tell him how I felt before he decided to look up the Tri-Delt.

  He swiveled away, looked out the window. “So about our ghost.” When he turned back to me, he was far from where my fingers were. I dropped my hand. I couldn’t do it. Not yet. But someday.

  “Oh. Yes. Our ghost.”

  “I think she killed herself right over there.”

  He pointed at a closet door, but I didn’t turn. Instead, I watched the white figure standing over him. Silent, unmoving, she looked down at him.

  “She had long, blonde hair,” I said. “A pixie face, sad-looking, so that everyone felt sorry for her. But she was so lonely. Her mother didn’t love her. Her father had no time for her. She never went home on weekends, and she dreaded when Christmas break forced her out of the dorms. But even at school, she had no friends, and she ate alone in the dining hall day in and day out.”

  The figure nodded.

  “That’s great!” Bentley clapped, guffawed. “What else?”

  Now he was staring squarely at me, but I kept my eyes on the girl behind him.

  “She wore a long nightgown, the old-fashioned kind you see in horror movies.” I surveyed her unblemished, pale face. “And she had a scar across her cheek she got when she was three when she fell in a department store and cut it open on a pedestal.”

  A scar bloomed on the girl’s cheek, pink and straight.

  “I love it,” said Bentley.

  I finally met his eyes, catching my breath at the intensity of his gaze. Kiss me, I thought. Please, oh, please, just kiss me.

  He stood.

  The girl disappeared.

  “Let’s get back. We should do rounds. When’s the last time we actually did them?”

  “Um,” I said.

  He grabbed my wrist with his thumb and forefinger, circling it with searing heat. Stifling a gasp, I let him drag me out of the mess hall.

  The next night, Bentley came to work drunk.

  No, not drunk.

  Completely and utterly out-of-his-mind intoxicated.

  He staggered into the mail room that doubled as our headquarters, hair in disarray. “Penellllllllpe!” he slurred.

  Horrified, I stood from where I was filling out our report of fabricated rounds from last night. “Bentley! Are you ok?”

  “Seeeeeee... Tim’s grandfather died suddenly, brain an—aneu—clot thingie. Really upstanding old—” he hiccuped, “—fought in the Vietnam War, stories like you wouldn’t…” He wavered on his feet. “Man, those soldiers, brothers to the en’… We needed to keep Tim commmmpny, couldn’t leave him alone, shoooo we shtarted drinking at eight ayyyyeeem.”

  This was just like Bentley. His frat brothers were his second family. I couldn’t help myself. I fell even more in love with him. “You need to call in sick,” I said. “I’ll get Johnathan to cover your shift.”

  I couldn’t stand Johnathan. He introduced himself as Johnathan-with-an-h and insisted that only the morally bankrupt used controlling substances. However, I didn’t want Bentley to get in trouble. If he got fired, I wouldn’t be able to spend the scads of hours laughing and getting to know him. I might never see him again.

  “Calm yer tits, P,” said Bentley. “I’m fine. ‘Sides, we’re just gonna go to the dining hall anywayssss.”

  I did not like the sibilant way he ended that word, but I nodded. Anything for my Bentley. Besides, I wanted to hear the stories from today. What would it be like to be surrounded by people who loved you?

  At the dining hall door, he fumbled with the keys, struggling to find the right one until I reached out to take them away. As I pulled them from his grasp, my fingers slid over his.

  He went still, the wavering on his feet calming as though my touch were magic. His lidded eyes met mine, and a thrill coursed through me.

  And then a miracle happened. Bentley leaned forward and kissed me.

  He tasted like stale beer. I kept my eyes open to watch while his tongue worked in my mouth. Through the window next to the dining hall door, the ghost we’d created smiled and clutched her torso happily.

  Bentley and I made love on the floor the street lamp illuminated, way across the dining hall in the back corner. It was my first time, but I didn’t tell Bentley that. He either didn’t notice the blood in the dark, or his reverence at taking my maidenhead moved him to silence. The carpet was rough against my back, and his breathing rasped in my ear. I hooked my legs together, urging him to move faster, while I smiled at the ghost-girl watching us. Her look mirrored the one I imagined on my face: pure rapture.

  I knew—I just knew—that if I waited long enough, Bentley would admit how much he wanted me.

  The next day, I bribed the creepy twenty-one-year-old senior on our dorm floor to buy me some champagne, and I picked up some strawberries and whipped cream at the grocery store. Whistling the theme from Beauty and the Beast, my favorite movie, I hurried over the drawbridge to Bentley’s dorm.

  Standing outside his room, I was nervous. Bentley had stumbled off shortly before midnight, bleary-eyed, insisting I didn’t need to make sure he got home safely. I finished rounds by myself, even though our supervisor had given lectures time and again on the safety hazards of single women patrolling the dorms alone at night. My bleeding had stopped around noon, but my core muscles hurt. That was odd, since I had mostly just lain there, but all of the pain was good pain.

  It belonged to Bentley.

  I tapped tentatively on his door. Someone groaned on the other side. I knocked again, louder. Rustles and whispers, and then the door swung open.

  Bentley’s ex-girlfriend Nevaeh stood on the other side. “Can I help you?” Bleary-eyed, she raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow—an eyebrow that reminded me of when I first started college.

  My stoic mother, a frumpy woman overly concerned with my sexual purity, had never taught me how to wear makeup or pluck my eyebrows. When she spoke at all, it was to instruct or chastise or both—a wo
man must always keep her legs closed, a woman must be seen and not heard, a woman is nothing if she does not support her man. A roommate had taken pity on me and given me a makeover, but still, it hadn’t been enough to make over whatever faulty wiring was inside my head.

  Girls like Nevaeh had kept me an outcast my whole life. Taunted me because I was different. Called me ugly because I wore big glasses. Mocked me because I didn’t know how to pair a belt with an outfit.

  “What’s that?” She pointed to the shopping bag I was clutching.

  A savage embarrassment bolted through me. I was certain I was turning the brilliant red that belonged to lobsters, a color I would stay for the rest of my life.

  “Who is it?” moaned Bentley. The shades were drawn over the windows, so his voice came from a darkened cavern that smelled of male and sweaty socks.

  “Your coworker.”

  He groaned. “Tell her I’ll talk to her at work tonight.”

  “You heard him.” Nevaeh’s face was alive with the suspicion of the cheated-on. “Now scram. We’re trying to get some sleep.”

  In a horribly cliché and rather catty move, she shut the door in my face.

  I arrived at work half an hour early. I clipped the walkie-talkie to my waist, slid the flashlight and holder into their place, and attached the keys to my belt.

  The dining hall was a darker than usual. The street lamp next to the window had burnt out. I managed to get the lock open with barely a jingle, glided into the room, and shut the door behind me.

  “Where are you?” I spoke to the empty hall. “I know you’re here.”

  The ghost-girl appeared in front of me, pale and bereft-looking.

  “What’s your name?”

  She shook her head, pointed at her mouth. A mute, then, or maybe the law of the afterlife. Appear to the living, but never speak to them.

  Unlike me, Nevaeh must have had a perfect childhood. She couldn’t understand what it was like to love someone who didn’t love you back. She got whatever she wanted, whoever she wanted. She had bewitched my Bentley.

  And now she would pay.

  The ghost-girl was shaking her head. With ears ringing, I realized I was repeating the words aloud. “Now she’ll pay. Now she’ll pay.”

  The ghost-girl stepped forward with palms open, and I took it to be an inquiry as to why I was so upset.

  “The guy I was here with last night is back with his girlfriend. He finally admitted how he feels about me, and somehow she convinced him to get back with her.”

  A head shake, first slow, and then faster. Fury—pursed lips, furrowed brow, wrinkles across her forehead.

  “I love him. He’s supposed to rescue me.” Tears were threatening at the corner of my eye. I savagely wiped them away, pulling my eyelid so hard it hurt. “She’s just like the others. Thinking I’m stupid and annoying and ugly. Stealing away my Bentley.”

  The ghost-girl raised a hand to my cheek. Her touch was electric. As it got closer, my skin hummed. When she was within an inch of my face, she stopped, and her fingers were like live wires humming above my skin, just on the precipice of pain.

  A knock came at the door.

  “I asked her to meet me here. Please help me.”

  The ghost-girl leaned forward and kissed my lips in a painful flash of white. Then she disappeared.

  I strode to the door. I grabbed the handle. I threw it open.

  Nevaeh stood under the recessed lamp illuminating the entryway, arms folded. “You again.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “So you brought me here in the middle of the night.”

  “I wanted to make sure he didn’t find out. Please come in.” I held out my arm in a gesture of welcome and stepped into the shadows.

  Nevaeh shook her head at me.

  “I can’t turn on the lights or we’ll get in trouble,” I said. “I’m sure Bentley told you that when he brought you down here.” Because I knew he had. He’d shared our kingdom with her.

  She stepped inside and I shut the door behind her.

  “I need to tell you something.” The ghost-girl was standing around the corner, visible only to me. She put a finger to her lips. “Do you want something to eat?”

  “What?”

  I held my head high as I crossed over to the stack of clean bowls. “Do you want some cereal?”

  Nevaeh rubbed her hands over her arms. “No. Get to the point. This place is creepy.”

  “Did you know a ghost inhabits it?”

  “Stop it. Bentley tried that, too, but it’s not going to work. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  Behind her, the ghost-girl stepped from the kitchen and floated around the nearest table.

  “Just tell me what you wanted to tell me.”

  “About that,” I said.

  The door rattled. Keys jingled. The ghost-girl darted back into the kitchen.

  Shit. Chronically late Bentley was here early. He’d gotten the note pasted to his walkie-talkie, but my surprise wasn’t ready for him yet.

  The door creaked open.

  “Um, hey,” said Bentley. “What are you guys doing here?”

  Light flooded the room and then dimmed and disappeared with the door’s closing thump.

  Nevaeh said, “Your weirdo coworker brought me here to tell me something, but now she’s getting cold feet. Can we please be done in here? I really don’t like it.”

  Bentley was moving across the room slowly, holding his head carefully. He was still hungover. The ghost-girl peeked from around the corner, watching as he stopped next to Nevaeh.

  “Penelope, I’m sorry for the thing I said last night. Nevaeh knows my mouth sometimes goes off before my brain. We don’t need to bring her into this, do we?”

  “Yes, we do.” I needed to punish him, too, a little bit, since he’d let her sway him away from me. “Bentley and I slept together. Right over there.” I pointed across the room to where a small spot of my blood would forever hide in the dark blue carpet.

  “You did what? With her?”

  “Look, babe, I’m—”

  “Oh, do not ‘babe’ me. We are done. I could put up with the idea of you tongue-wrestling with that plastic sorority bitch, but her? She’s disgusting.”

  We were facing one another, a love triangle made literal in this underground cave of a dining hall. Behind them, the ghost-girl crept along, moving across the floor first slowly, then darting in a distinctly inhuman manner. Step, step, leap, step, step, leap.

  “Thank you for surrendering him,” I said. “It’s all I really wanted.”

  Bentley said, “No, look, Penelope, you’re… something, but I want to be with Nevaeh. I think you misunderstood last night. I was really drunk. I kind of don’t remember whether we slept together or not, but if we did, it didn’t mean what you think.”

  The ghost-girl paused.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” I said.

  “Right, well, I’m not going to say I’m sorry because my frat brothers and I made a pact never to apologize for having sex, but I wish it hadn’t happened.” His laugh was strained.

  “I don’t understand.” I was confused. He’d declared his feelings for me through his actions. Was he confused? “We’re meant to be together.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “about that. If I mislead you in any way, I didn’t intend to. I like Nevaeh. I want to make it work with her.”

  No. He didn’t know what he was saying. I needed to put an end to this once and for all.

  The ghost-girl started moving again.

  “We can be something,” I insisted. “Don’t you understand that? We can have a big family, four girls and four boys, just like yours.”

  He shook his head, and Nevaeh mirrored the movement. “Penelope, you’re crazy,” he said. “And I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean that in a, ‘You clearly have severe emotional issues that would be best looked after by a professional’ way.”
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br />   The ghost-girl was standing behind them, mouth half-open, eyes on Nevaeh’s neck. If only she had long vampire-like fangs. Her canines grew and lengthened.

  They would see her now. I would make sure of it. They would both see her and fear her and know exactly—exactly—what I had created. And then, after it was over, Bentley would know my power. He would realize Nevaeh was ordinary and I could give him what he wanted, and he would finally realize he wanted to be with me.

  I silently looked at the ghost-girl behind them. They both turned their heads slowly, ever so slowly, until they were staring directly into the face of whatever this thing was that haunted the dining hall.

  “Penelope, what’s—”

  The ghost-girl leapt forward, biting into Bentley’s neck so hard blood splattered Nevaeh’s face.

  “No!” I shouted as Nevaeh screamed.

  He squawked and fought against the ghost-girl, but he was no match for her supernatural strength. Nevaeh’s scream died and then tore the air again, louder, harder. The ghost-girl ripped and pulled away a chunk of flesh, blood spraying across the nearest table. Bentley gurgled, fighting, but she was more angry, determined, and hell-bent than he could resist.

  And I couldn’t stop her.

  I watched as she tore apart the man I loved. Nevaeh’s scream tapered off, and she stood, staring, silent, hand on her own neck, unmoving.

  Why was she attacking him?

  The ghost-girl looked up at me. Her eyes caught mine in another white flash like the one from before, forcing memories—ideas into my mind.

  Bentley drunk on top of me, wheezing and staring off over my head.

  The tone of Neveah’s disgust—at him, not me. “You did what?”

  The desperate feeling that came from wanting to belong, but strangely enough, it wasn’t my own familiar feelings of loneliness. Instead, it was me inside Bentley’s skin, knocking back a beer at a party with thumping bass, wishing his frat brothers respected him more, loved him more. Thinking of unspeakable things he’d done—pranks played, getting drunk too much. And above all, feeling lost in a roomful of people. The more of his blood she consumed, the stronger the feeling felt, like she was ingesting all his torment and funneling it over to me.