Roses for the Wallflower

Prologue

The problem with growing up a ghost hunter is it often results in being treated like you're invisible yourself.

You see, the profession very quickly loses its novelty after the ripe age of eight, when your parents go from cooing about how cute it is that you've made your own conspiracy board to whispering about finding you a therapist.

And, as Quinn was soon to find out, attempting to exorcise the therapist was not an acceptable means of getting out of it.

A majority of his five-to-ten-year-old career he spent surrounding himself with books about cryptids rather than friends. Daycare was an hour or two of sitting in the corner with a packet of dinosaur crackers, doodling swamp monsters of every kind. Each morning before he turned eleven, he would go up to the very edge of the docks, dangle his feet over the edge, and talk to Nessie about things like school, and parents, and the weather way up here.

She was a wonderful listener. For a creature of the lagoon who never quite replied when Quinn prompted, she understood far more than anyone else had ever pretended to.

On the walk back home from school, he would wave to the line of trees by the path and hold staring contests with the Dover Demon.

He never won.

During camping trips, he tried catching skyfish rather than fireflies. All throughout elementary, he'd leave the Jersey Devil the pieces of crust torn from his peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, and drift off to sleep with the soothing ribbits of his favourite Frogman. In the morning, he was delighted to find not one trace of crumbs.

He was always a stubborn kid like that. No matter how many times Mom and Dad tried to keep him from his "expeditions", he'd always believed. And he never stopped wanting to.

Once Quinn set up his very own ghostbusting business, they'd given up on the matter entirely.

He made up top-secret ciphers to doodle into his math homework. On multiple occasions, teachers tried to bring up their concerns about him being into the occult at student-led conferences. When he showed up to Caressa Danh's seventh birthday party, he came with homemade business cards.

Ezekiel from Ms. Collier's class turned the flimsy slip back and forth in his fingers. "Paranormal investigator? What's that mean?" His face was all twisted up and puzzled; screwed and shut like the man-eating Venus flytraps he'd read about in the school library waiting for his mom to pick him up.

This was something called judgement, Quinn would later learn, and he should generally avoid it.

"For if you have a haunted attic, or basement, or creepy wishing well in the woods. See, look," he pointed at the bold sharpie. He thought his handwriting was very good for his age, if he did say so himself.

Ezekiel squinted. "There's a super small un next to the licensed."

"Well, it's not lying, is it?"

Needless to say, he was not invited to Caressa's eighth.

Word about the little boy who keeps wandering around town snapping pictures in the shadows spreads fast, and exciting as it was to try out being an urban legend, it didn't exactly get him in with the other kids. This made entering highschool as one of the nice, quiet, approachable-and-sufficiently-cute geeks much harder than it needed to be.

At the very least, those nerds got out with a few snide remarks signed into their yearbook. It's humiliating when you realise you aren't even worth the hallway bully taking time out of his day to stuff you in a locker.

In fact, one of the memories from sophomore year emblazoned deep into his brain came from Sajan Aatreya—now captain of the football team, which in highschool terms means God—giving him a quick double take as his teammates pointed. Something about grabbing that dweebus by the bow tie (shut it, it was picture day) and using his suspenders to shake him wrong side up for lunch money.

At which point he'd inquired, "Who?"

Luckily, you are marginally less difficult to find in footage when you get yourself a ghost hunting partner. For Quinn, this was Dani Ryder, a girl with magenta-highlighter hair who takes her skateboard everywhere she goes, swears creature features are the height of film, and has been the first-half of their package deal since neither of them could reach the cookie jar.

And the thing about Dani Ryder is that falling for her was mortifyingly easy.

It wasn't sparks, like they tell you. It was sitting at the edge of a fireplace after getting caught in the rain. It was missing the crackle of thunder overhead because they were too busy laughing. There were fireworks, but it wasn't the popcorn bursts of colour sprawling across the sky that grappled his attention. It was the way she'd covered his ears and pretended she wasn't equally as afraid of the noise.

There was no dramatic dive into the deep end of love so much as there was Dani dragging him off a floatie when he refused to learn how to swim. And there were no butterflies the way there was a flip-flop in his stomach at the peak of the rollercoaster when she clung to his arm.

Or maybe that was the puke.

Really, honestly, falling for his best friend wasn't hard. Loving her was.

It's classic. It's been done before. It's so used it's been flipped upside down, inside out, and turned over to dry in the sun. Quinn is every other boy with a soul-crushing, mind-numbing, hand-sweating, name-forgetting childhood crush. And it is embarrassing.

So embarrassing that he hasn't spoken a word of it since he came home in third grade with a Polaroid that wasn't full of poltergeists, but rather a girl he happened to meet exploring the haunted house on the end of the street. He still remembers the tentative wander into the halls, peeking for ghoulish silhouettes in the dark, and the loud thud that got him to drop his flashlight and abandon the camera on the hardwood.

Dani still makes fun of him for the face he made when she tapped him on the shoulder to ask if it was his.

"Like a jack-rabbit," she'd tease. "Or a frightened baby deer. I should call you Bambi."

He'd roll his eyes. "Hilarious. Hey, how do you feel about Shortstack?."

That one got him a paperback of Stephen King's It right to the ribs.

When he first showed the photos they'd taken together to his mom, she laughed and said it was nice he found something other than ghosts. It took five minutes of searching the photos for one to admit he agreed. It took five years of deliberation to admit he knew there weren't any in the first place; the pictures just made him feel giddy. Now it was the boy with the flashlight and the girl with the light-up sneakers.

Now he wasn't alone.

But no matter the angle, or the lighting, or the suspiciously placed coat rack by the wall, there's no clever trick that'll let Quinn convince himself he'll ever be anything more than the guy at the party who passes the time studying the cracks in the plaster.

He's a permanent fixture of the corner. A wallflower.

And if there's one thing he knows to be hard, solid fact, it's that the wallflower doesn't get the girl.