I Was a Teenage Ghost Hunter

Devin stared through the large plate glass window of the Escamonde Hotel at the dark branches of the walnut tree. In between two of the large, lower branches there was a wispy, white piece of fabric. Or at least, there had been one a second before. He blinked, and saw the fabric again. But then he jerked away and yelped.  

A small stream from the cup of caramel latte had burned his hand. The paper cup lay on the floor where he'd dropped it, a pool of overpriced, precious sugary brown liquid pouring out around it. "Shit," he muttered.  

"Isn't that the fourth latte you dropped this week?" Ramona was asking in all seriousness, without the slightest trace of humor. She had somehow instantly turned up at Devin's side, where he hadn't realized she was standing, and was looking darkly at the mess spreading on the floor. 

Devin quickly wiped the hot latte drippings from his hands on a white towel and began soaking up the remains of the failed beverage with all the recycled napkins and paper towels in the vicinity. He muttered some insincere apologies to Ramona and the elderly lady tourist who looked on peevishly from the other side of the counter, waiting impatiently for her indulgent drink. 

"I'll get that for you," Ramona told the frail lady without enthusiasm. She went into action on the latte, with her patented, sullenly slow-motion technique. 

"I want whip cream," chirped the lady, repeating her earlier instruction. She was clearly perturbed at having her carefully planned Arcata idyll interrupted by a teenage barista's incompetence and was eager to re-join her equally elderly lady friends at one of the cafe's little wooden tables covered with one of the hotel's quaint, handmade tablecloths so they could plan out their birding or antiquing adventures for the day.  

"Yeah," said Devin. He'd popped back up, a soggy towel in one hand. As Ramona plunked the latte on the counter, he grabbed a nearby canister and shot onto it an unceremonious glob of lopsided whip cream, giving the latte a final, disorderly glop of indignity. The tourist lowered her white eyebrows darkly but took the cup and retreated without another word before some other injury could be visited on her beverage. 

The elderly lady, who seemed to be a proper New Englander, was no doubt putting down Devin as yet another surly, incoherent California teen, the kind of kid who hung out after work at the local arcade or bowling alley, smoking illegal weed in the parking lot and trading tales of bad behavior with fellow delinquents.  

In fact, Devin considered himself a lot more considerate than most of the kids from Grey Bluff High, the county's second-most-populous high school. But there was no denying he'd been getting distracted more often lately. And maybe distracted wasn't a strong enough word. He'd be at work, or at school, staring at some object in the middle distance and before he knew it his mind had blanked out and he was off in some kind of half-trance where any activity or talking around him - the sardonic droning of his math teacher, the meticulous orders of picky Escamonde Cafe customers, even the usually very appealing British beer recommendations of his friend Clive - disappeared behind an invisible filter. And now there were actual images that had started to appear during his phase-outs, as he called them. Wisps of clothing that shouldn't be there, or even partial apparent faces that looked like they were floating or staring... 

"-a few unpaid days off." He'd been so preoccupied that Devin caught just the last few words of Ramona's latest sarcastic comment. She was the manager at the Escamonde Café, a little coffee house where Devin worked that was integrated into a boutique Arcata inn. The Escamonde Hotel catered to guests looking for a throwback to the "intimate, personalized hotel of yesteryear", at least according to its website.  

Not that there was any other kind of hotel in Arcata. The big chains weren't to be found in the carefully cultivated city interior that preserved a conspicuously quaint, historically authentic quality the tourists loved but that wasn't so popular with the local teens, who would've preferred a town center with at least one Taco Bell or Jack-in-the-Box. An elderly Maine lady's perfect picturesque resort was a teen's vision of boredom purgatorio.