He’s leaning forward, and I can tell he wants to make an impact on me. But his gaze is missing the mark; he’s looking about two feet to the right of where I’m actually sitting. I’m used to that—he’s guessing based on the location of my voice—but for the first time it sinks in that I’m going to do the exact same thing someday. And all my friends will feel sorry for me as I look at empty air instead of at them.
“You and I are exemplary in a lot of ways. We are imbued with gifts.” My dad always talks like this. Not special—exemplary. Not filled—imbued. It’s like living with a Scrabble board.
“Okay.”
“So our diagnosis is here to keep us humble and human. It’s a blessing from God.”
I’m thrown. My family is a model Catholic family, so we never talk about God or spirituality at home. That is saved forSundays, at church. Talking about God at home feels about as appropriate as talking about your period during English class.
“I don’t know, Dad. Feels like the opposite of a blessing from God to me.” Not that I’m even sure I believe in God, but I’m not going to say that to my dad. This conversation is uncomfortable enough.
“The good news is you are doing much better than I was at your age.” Then he launches into a story I’ve heard before that he always relishes, how he used to play baseball with his friends on summer nights at the park, how he couldn’t see the ball when it was pitched, so he would just swing at every pitch and would still get a hit every so often, and one time he got a grand slam. I think he thinks the story highlights how athletic he was, but it makes me sad.
When he’s done, I clear the plates and excuse myself. He doesn’t protest, so I guess our big talk with all his great insight is over. He’s not surprised I have RP? Well, I’m not surprised he can’t make me feel better. So there.
In my room, safe from fake silver linings, I scroll through music to find just the right thing. Something that knows how stupid life is and how clueless people are. Billie Eilish. Overplayed, but in this sitch, perfect.
I dim the lights, make a nest out of pillows, and snuggle down. But instead of thinking about my depleted future and the canceled dreams that will go with RP, all I can think about is Mason. What really happened at the creek today, anyway?
I try to be analytical about it. It seems to me there are onlythree possible explanations. The loudest one reverberating around my skull is that I have made contact with a legitimate ghost, that somehow Mason’s spirit is not yet at rest and is instead wandering our town, eerie but seemingly harmless. That I can’t see what most people see, but instead I can see ghosts, or at least this ghost.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I can actually eliminate the second explanation. I had been considering the possibility that he wasn’t actually dead, that he staged his own death so that he could run away and now he is trying to suss out if I am a safe ally while officially still keeping his undeadness a secret. But that wouldn’t explain that weird inner glow, or how he could disappear and reappear somewhere else. He was on the cross-country team, and he was fast, but he wasn’t that fast.
The last possibility is one that I really don’t want to consider but is definitely the most likely. And that is that I am messed up in the head. That I’m spinning out over my friend dying or my eyesight or both and it’s causing me to hallucinate. Maybe I’ve always been mentally unwell, and the grief just woke it up. I don’t feel crazy, but isn’t that exactly what crazy people say?
“Hey,” Mason’s voice says in the dark. “Is this okay? I know I was a lot before.”
I take that back. At this exact moment, I feel completely batshit crazy. Because right now, I am filled with relief that I get to make up with a ghost. I am so glad he’s here.
“Hey, yeah,” I say.
“Good. Billie Eilish? Jesus. Why don’t you just put on RickAstley while you’re at it?” Mason took (takes?) his music very seriously, to the point that he was sort of a music snob. If more than three people on earth had heard of a band, that was too mainstream for him.
I turn the music down and the lights up a bit so I can focus on him in the corner of my room. He’s perched on top of my desk with his feet on my desk chair. It’s maddening how he manages to look extra attractive when he’s giving me a hard time.
“You showed up to mock me?”
“Never.”
“Then whyareyou here?”
“Why areyouasking so many questions?”
“I’m sorry, I just … Indulge me?”
“Hmmph. Proceed.” He sweeps his hand out in front of him in an official sort of way to show that I have his full attention.
Now that I have permission, I’m not sure where to start. I try to organize my thoughts, going back over my possible explanations. “Are you really dead?”
“Yes.”
“Are you really here?”
“I mean, look, philosophically speaking, you could just be a brain in a vat with electrodes sticking out and nothing you experience is really there.”
“How about not philosophically speaking?”
“Then yes.”
