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What the hell?
“Hello?” I call out. “Will? Uh … Willis?” Crap, I already forgot his name. “Where’d you go? C’mon. Quit playing around.”
I wait for a moment.
Dead silence fills my ears.
Perhaps that’s a poor choice of words.
After too long a time just standing there in a daze, I find my mind drifting to all of that weird crap Mrs. Shaheen went on about. What was that third rule she almost told me? Something to do with fire? Is it possible that I—?
No. This is ridiculous. All of it. Maybe I’m actually asleep and I’ll wake up and realize I have no interviews at all. This, the milk, the missing pizza slice … it’s all a wishful-thinking dream I’m having in my restless sleep. If only it included a random make-out session with the hot barista, too.
But this doesn’t feel like any damned dream I’ve ever had.
And I’ve got quite a few more matches.
I yank open the drawer, fetch another, grab the candle, then hold them both uncertainly as I stare into the silent gloom of the apartment, like I’m waiting for something to happen. “Hello? … Pizza guy?” I try once more. “You, uh … wanting me to light this again …?”
Silence pierces me.
I sigh. “Fine, I’ll play along.” I strike the match, put it to the candle, and birth another tiny flame into this mortal coil.
The instant I do, he emerges from the darkness like he was there the whole time holding his breath. “West!” he says, frowning. “Bro, I even told you my name three times—Wes, West, Westley—and you still forgot it??”
“What kind of crazy optical illusion is this?” I cry out, astonished. “Are you a magician or something?”
West snorts. “A magician in beer pong, maybe. Listen, don’t blow the candle out again. I wanna talk.”
“Is this for real?”
“I dunno. Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not? Are farts real? We can’t see them, but they sure as hell let us know they exist, don’t they?”
I squint at him. “Are you calling yourself a fart?”
“No.” He comes up to me, takes the candle out of my hand, and sets it carefully on the desk. Then he eyes me. “I’m the ghost who lives here. Westley Harmeyer.”
“Ghost …?”
“Yep.” He crosses his arms in that cocky way again as he stares me down. “You scared now?”
I consider him for a moment. It is rather peculiar, how he was able to completely vanish the moment I blew the candle out.
In fact … “Can I try something?”
“Sure, knock yourself out. Wait. Try what?”
I pick up the candle once more.
“For fuck’s sake—” he starts to say as I blow—and the moment the flame’s gone, so is he. I reach out in the space where he stood, right in front of me, and my hand touches nothing but air. I look to my left, to my right, even up at the ceiling. Then I grab another match, light the candle again—and at once he’s back. “Great.”
“Holy crap!” I exclaim.
“Now I’m a parlor trick. Fantastic. Can we please stop doing that now?”
“One more time.”
West snatches the candle out of my hand with a lot less care than he did before, takes it over to the kitchen counter—far away from a significantly-more-intrigued-than-before me—and sets it down. “No more of that.”
“But it was kinda fun! How’d you do that? How—”
“How does your heart beat without you asking it to every time? It just happens.”
“Are you really a ghost?”
“Yes. Do I look like I’m pranking you?”
“How’d you die? I mean, if you weren’t murdered.”
He eyes me. “Bro, slow your roll. That’s my actual life you’re so carelessly asking about. You shouldn’t try diving into the deep end before learning how to swim.”
I’m fully invested. There may still live a tiny flea of doubt that’ll never go away no matter how much proof my eyes are given, but I am utterly compelled—even if he is just an amazing illusionist. “Why are you here?”
“I died here.”
“By murder?”
He frowns. “You really love going straight for the big questions, huh, Griff? Look, I already said I wasn’t murdered.”
“Are you stuck here or something?”
“Probably.”
“Forever?”
“I dunno.”
“Is this a Sixth Sense thing? Are you gonna want me to do things for you? Is your soul bound to the living plane or something until all your unfinished affairs are sorted out and dealt with?”
“Never saw that movie. No idea what you’re going on about. I don’t know any of that.”
I lean against the back of the couch and sulk. “You don’t know much of anything for a ghost, apparently.”
“What do you expect? Some kind of Beetlejuice thing where I get a handbook the moment I die? I don’t know what’s keeping me here. I just—”
“Seriously? You’ve never seen Sixth Sense, yet you can make a perfect Beetlejuice reference?”
“So? Look, I’ve been kinda on my own for a very long time in this place. You don’t know what that’s like. It took Miss What’s-Her-Name a long-ass time to find someone dumb enough to actually rent this place with its reputation of being haunted by—well, by me. And all this time, I’ve just been staring at walls, counting bricks, peering out the window all day long like some tired, old, bored, abandoned dog, and—”
