Cold Hands

Questions

I didn't see Jethro again for the rest of the afternoon, and I didn't see him all day Sunday, no matter how hard I tried to get his attention. I thumped on my ceiling with a broom until my mom came in and told me to knock it off. I lit a candle and googled how to say a summoning chant in Latin, but I probably botched the pronunciation. I turned off the lights in my bathroom and stood in front of the mirror and said his name three times.

"Jethro, Jethro, Jethro," in my most dramatic tone, holding the candle below my chin. "I call upon thee to answer my phone calls, dipwad."

I'd heard of "ghosting," somebody before, but this gave the term a whole new dimension.

At least I could sleep soundly now, without waking up terrified by bumps in the night and wondering if I was being haunted. It was a somehow a lot less scary now I knew that yes, I was.

I still had questions, of course. More than I did before, probably. The only difference now was I wasn't scared-curious, I was excited-curious. It's not every day you meet somebody dead. I needed to talk to that punk.

So where was he?

I tried talking to Miss Steeley about it while my mom was at the church office Sunday night. She was knitting some atrocious pink thing on the couch in the living room, counting stitches under her breath.

"Um...what are you making?" I asked.

"It's for an old friend," she said without looking up from her work. It was slow going as she had to feel her way around the knitting needles. I wondered how anybody could possibly do that blind.

"Who?" I asked.

"An old friend," she said again.

She had a lot of old friends, and I didn't think most of them were real. She wasn't all-there. Wednesday night at dinner she had spent most of the meal talking to an invisible dog under the table and spooning him my mom's mashed potatoes without ever touching them herself. I had a feeling this was another one of those kinds of situations, so I thought it best not to inquire too much.

"It's a pretty blanket," I lied. "Do you believe in ghosts?" I cringed a little at myself. Not my smoothest segue, but it got her attention.

Miss Steeley paused, and turned toward the sound of my voice. I pictured her neck squeaking like rusty hinges. "This isn't a blanket," she said. "This is an afghan."

The painfully slow clicking of her needles resumed. She didn't say anything else. I didn't believe she and I had ever exchanged more than three words with each other before.

I let it drop there, because trying to make conversation with her was weird. It was silly to expect coherent answers from a senile old lady, anyway. I left her alone with her afghan and her saltiness.

I had difficulty staying focused in school on Monday. Mr. Gill told me to stop tapping my pen on the desk before I gave him a stress ulcer, so I started doodling various dead people in my notes instead. My geography teacher snatched my artful depiction of a hanging man that I drew during lecture and ripped it up with a sour look. I realized I was probably lending a bit too much credence to my psychotic old-man-killer reputation and swiftly desisted from my macabre artistic aspirations.

I needed to root myself back in reality. I needed to do something obscenely normal to distract me from my supernatural distractions, so I chased Chelsea down as she was just leaving her locker between classes.

"Chelsea!" I crashed into the lockers on the wall with a resounding clang.

She jumped. "Jeez. Hey."

"Do you have any plans after school?"

"Oh. Um," she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Well, I work today...but Salome and I were planning on a trip to New Orleans on Saturday, do you wanna come?"

Salome. A lightbulb went on over my head.

"Hey, any chance I could get a ride somewhere on your way to work?" I asked.

"What is up with you today?" Chelsea huffed. "Did you even hear what I just said?"

"Oh. Sorry," I said stupidly. "New Orleans? What for?"

"Fun. Duh," Chelsea said. "You've said it yourself, there's nothing to do around here. I might look for a dress."

"What kind of dress?"

"For the homecoming dance. It is next weekend."

"I didn't know you had a date," I said, and regretted it instantly. Her eyes did that dangerous flashy thing I had learned they did whenever I blundered.

"I was kind of hoping to go with you, dummy," she said.

I felt my face growing warm. "Well, I'm not really sure what you're expecting, but I'm pretty sure it's a little obvious I'm not the world's greatest dancer."

"Well, if you don't want to go, that's fine," she said. "But you should come to New Orleans with us anyway."

"No, no, of course, I'd love to go," I stammered. "I mean to Homecoming, not New Orleans. I mean, I'll go to New Orleans too..."

Chelsea kissed me on the cheek.

It was totally unexpected. My gut twisted. Oh no... She might as well have slapped me in the face. I had assumed she knew already. I was going to have to tell her. "Chelsea..."

"Where did you need that ride to?" she cut me off. She was beaming. I didn't want to wipe that off her face.

I swallowed. I had more pressing matters at hand. I would deal with this later.

"To the Seeing Eye," I said.