Ghost ⇔ Cake ✓

Fourteen: Soap and Water

Calum's mind was blank.

Not blank in the way that people get when they stare off into space, or when they are on the edge of sleep, or when they are presented with a concept that they don't understand. Blank in a way as though all of his memories were stripped away from him, ripped from his mind as though they were never there in the first place. Blank in a way that held vacuous space, a vacancy, a gap that couldn't be filled.

Calum really didn't know how to explain it. He constantly tried to rewind his memory back to before the train ride over to town, back before he met Luke or Michael or Ashton, but it was like a brick wall was cemented in his memory. There was nothing there.

Calum couldn't remember where he was coming from, or why, or if he had parents or brothers or sisters. He couldn't remember his own last name, or where he lived as a kid, or who his childhood best friend was. He came up with nothing.

Calum really hadn't been doing too well after he found out nobody could see him. He kept wandering up and down the streets, in the school hallways, watching people's gaze go right through him. He yelled at a rather cowardly freshman student, who kept walking without even flinching. He cussed out a geometry teacher. He dropped books out of shelves in a full classroom and listened to everyone shriek about ghosts. Then he sat in the corner and put his head in his hands and listened to his heart beat slowly, slowly, slowly.

Everyone always talked about having invisibility be a superpower, but clearly nobody had ever experienced it before. It sucked. It was demeaning. Nobody knew who you were or cared if you were there. All you got was turned backs and averted eyes, people seeing straight through your body and leaving you with an empty feeling in your stomach. Calum hated it.

He had gotten no contact with the boys after they left him at the school. Ashton, he had heard through talk on the streets, had gotten himself thrown in jail for murdering the other Calum. Michael hadn't texted or called. Luke had seemed to disappear off the face of the earth, which was harder on Calum than he would have thought. He hadn't realized how much he depended on the boys until suddenly they were ripped out of his life. Calum felt stranded and lost.

He had contemplated going to Luke's house, knowing he and Michael would be in there. But Calum couldn't forget the look on Luke's face when the realization set in. The confusion that melted into fear, and then utter detachment.

I don't know who you are. It was one of the last phrases spoken to Calum by Luke before they abandoned him at the school. Calum was teary-eyed and frustrated, hair a mess and eyes glistening, angry with himself and frightened of why he couldn't remember something as simple as his last name. He was just as confused as them, but their patience had grown thin. They had cut the strings between them with a fine-edged knife and left for Calum to pick up the pieces, confused and terrified and helpless.

Calum sat in his apartment on the edge of downtown. He had hardly grown home there at all, although thinking about it now, he didn't know where home even was. He held his head in his hands, a half-drunken cup of coffee in front of him, his eyes burning from no sleep. He had stayed awake mostly all night for the past couple of days, trying to figure out who he was and why his memories were blank. He shuffled through his phone and pictures but found none from any time before the train ride. It was as though he had never existed. He wondered vaguely if he had some kind of mental illness, or perhaps a disease that attacked the brain. What else could explain something so out of the ordinary and strange?

Calum picked up his phone and called Luke for the tenth time that day. It rang in his ear and then Luke's smooth voice said, "You've reached Luke Hemmings. Leave a message, thanks."

Calum kept his head in his hands. His voice was slightly muffled as he said, "Luke. It's Calum. The-- fuck. I don't know. The new one? Just, please, call me back. I don't know what's happening to me any more than you do. But I really, really need someone to talk to right now. And I would call Michael but I think he sort of hates me, so... yeah. Please call me back. Please."