His Fault - A JATP short story

Your Fault

Willie walked around, the sunny street filled with the tourists he laughed at when walking. He wanted to find his family, he wanted to know they were okay. He needed to know how much time had passed, how much time he spent in a world of darkness.

His home felt like a long walk without his skateboard, without it millions of miles were added to his destination.

His kitchen didn't feel familiar, it felt empty even though people were in it. Willie stared at the two faces, sitting across from each other, his mother and father. His Mother was wearing black, but his Father was wearing regular clothes. As if nothing had happened at all.

"What are you wearing!" His mother cried. "We have the funeral in half an hour!"

"It doesn't matter what I wear." His father groaned. Willie and his father never shared common interests with each other. There were total opposites. Willie was light and a free spirit, where his father was hard as a stone.

Willie walked over to his fridge, where a calendar covered in cat stickers laid there as it always did. Willie examined the day circled on the calendar was today, his funeral was a week after he died.

'A whole week?' He thought, 'It felt like seconds ago.'

Willie had to leave the place he once called home. He couldn't bear to stay in it, listening to his parents' fight. But before he left he ran up to his room. He stood in the doorway, the room he once called small and cramped suddenly felt huge. All his stuff was there untouched. His bed was still to the right of his room, his desk to the left. All the posters, and items with little meaning were there, just as he left them. On the floor near his bed was his backup skateboard so to speak. Willie owned it just in case something happened to his first one. And something had happened to it. Willie took a deep breath, he wanted to pick up the skateboard, he wanted to ride to wherever his next destination was. But he was a ghost, ghosts can't pick things up, can they? He hadn't been able to use the door nod to get into the house, he had to walk through it. Surely the skateboard would be the same thing.

But no.

Willie reached down and picked up the red and white skateboard. He felt the rubber of the wheels, the gridyness techure that he missed. So Willie left well skated away. Far far from his house and back on the sunny streets of Hollywood when he realized, 'What am I supposed to do now?' So Willie sat on the corner of the street and thought about it. What did he know about ghosts? Well, he knew people couldn't see ghosts and ghosts shouldn't be able to pick things up, but that was clearly not true. He knew ghosts could walk through walls, and that they could teleport and-

Wait, ghosts can teleport? Willie stood up abruptly, if ghosts could teleport and he was definitely a ghost, that ment he could teleport! He would have to try that later. But two questions circled Willie's mind like a hawk. 'Why am I a ghost?' Not that he didn't know he died but why did he come back. And 'Did someone really kill me?' Willie could have sworn that he felt someone push him. Maybe that's how ghosts worked. After death, they still needed to do or complete something they could. If Willie wanted to know anything, it was who had killed him.

His first thought was his friends, he was talking to them right before he had died, they were mad at him for stupid reasons, but still mad. But how was Willie supposed to figure out who killed without being able to talk to anyone who was there?

And so he spent the next few days puttering around Hollywood seeing if anything had been said about him. He went to his school, a place no person went willingly. Nothing seemed to have changed, it was still the loud, busy place it had always been. He heard some whispers about him through the halls but nothing too dramatic.