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“Are you kidding me?”
“What?? I didn’t watch you. But … I mean …” He tries laughing it off. “You did leave your door open. I stayed here in the kitchen, gave you as much privacy as I could but … I’m stuck here, as we established already … and … it’s not like I’ve got a set of ghost noise-canceling headphones over here or anything …”
“Oh my god you heard me wanking off.”
He eyes me. “Dude, to be fair, you’re loud.”
I cover my face in mortification and moan, muffled through my fingers.
“Look.” He’s suddenly right next to me. I flinch away from him, startled. “If we’re gonna be roommates, we gotta get used to each other.”
“We’re not roommates. We’re not a damned thing. You’re a figment of my imagination, or a punishment for my not believing in ghosts, or … a cleverly planned strategy to get me to hate Halloween even more than I already do. I don’t care. I need sleep. I’m going to bed.”
“Hey, c’mon. I actually kinda like you. Even when you’re being a little bitch to me. It’s fun. Reminds me of my buddies … when I had buddies.”
I gape at him. “A ‘little bitch’ to you?”
“Yeah. What? I’m just having some fun.”
“Ah, I see. ‘Fun’. That’s what we’re calling this. You know what else will be fun?” I head for the kitchen counter where the candle still burns.
He leaps in front of me. “Dude, c’mon!”
I stop before crashing into him—then wonder if I will crash into him or just pass straight through. For some reason, I’m reluctant to try. He was able to pick up pizza. He was able to pick up the candle, too. Why he isn’t able to just light his own candle, I don’t know. There’s clearly some kind of mass he occupies. I think.
I’m pretty sure not being able to properly assess or understand this situation is exactly why I flunked half my science classes back in school.
“Hey, I can be of use to you!” he tells me—and I can tell from the slight edge in his voice he’s growing desperate. “I can clean up the place while you’re off at your new job—whatever you score tomorrow. I can be a shoulder to cry on when you got girl problems. I can—”
I snort, cutting him off. Girl problems. Clearly he wasn’t paying that much attention to my activities last night. This guy has no idea who his new roommate really is, and if he did, I’m pretty sure a guy like him would lose one hundred percent of his enthusiasm about the mismatched pair of us living together. Then this would really turn into a Beetlejuice situation with him trying to scare me out of here.
I change my tone of voice completely. “Yeah, that sounds great! Clean the place. Cook me dinner. Do my laundry. You’ll make the perfect ghost househusband.”
He opens his mouth, then frowns at me. “Huh?”
“What? It was your suggestion, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t call myself a househusband. I just—”
“Do all the busywork here while I’m gone bringing home the bacon. Make sure you wash all of those used socks in my bedroom, too. Lord knows what’s in them.”
“Dude, gross.”
I don’t really use socks that way, but he doesn’t have to know that. “You’re right,” I decide, cheering up. “This could be fun. Totally fun. But for now, I need my beauty rest, and …” I swipe the candle straight off the counter before he can stop me. “… you need to go.”
“Griffin, dude, you better not—”
I blow it out.
Westley Harmeyer disappears.
Silence fills the kitchen. For a moment, I sincerely feel as if I imagined the entire thing, no matter how real it was just a second ago. The fact that this candle holds the power to make him vanish at will is remarkable to me, like turning on and off the TV, or flipping channels. I can cast him away or bring him back whenever I want.
And as I hold that candle, I wonder once again why he can’t just light it himself. Must be some ghostly thing I’m not privy to yet.
But the more I stand here in silence, the less I find I care, and sleep is quickly taking me over. I set the candle down, then head back to bed in the darkness of the still-powerless apartment. Thoroughly exhausted, I drop to the mattress like a sack of potatoes. My eyelids are ever so heavy, and sleep isn’t far off.
But neither is West, if what he says is really true. Is he there right now, standing at my door, watching me? Is he gonna have to wait in suspended nothingness until I light that candle again?
And more importantly: do I seriously believe any of this crap?
“Night,” I say anyway before hugging my pillow and closing my eyes.
