Michael's Ghost Girl

Memories and Dreams

Later that night, Michael dreamed he, Dewey, and Short Round were young boys again, sitting in the room where Short Round's grandfather kept his altar.

Grandfather Van had been a Buddhist monk until he fell in love with a young nun. He left the monastery with her to start a family and became the village wise man. Michael remembered him well, a small, wizened man with bright black eyes, his face a parchment mask of wrinkles. When the war in Vietnam ended, he and his family escaped from Vietnam and was granted American citizenship at the request of the grateful soldiers he had served with during the war.

Grandfather Van seemed to carry Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam within him. He had a wealth of stories he would tell the boys, old folktales he had heard when he was young, stories of his adventures with the American soldiers, and stories he had heard in the monastery.

He was fond of his grandson and his friends and fed them sticky rice sweets and small oranges. Then he would take up his prayer beads and kneel before the altar that contained the large brass Buddha and the offerings he put in front of it. His room smelled of a combination of incense and the liniment he used and was not an unpleasant place to be, even when he made the boys kneel behind him and listen as he chanted a prayer that only Short Round could understand. The prayers somehow always made the boys feel good, even as they fled the old man's room and escaped outside to their bikes.

This dream of the old man was all crazy, like the dream of the girl. Short Round's grandfather knelt in front of his altar, clad in the saffron robes of a monk, chanting the same prayer over and over. Short Round knelt behind him, next to Michael, wearing the same saffron robes, his hair shaved instead of in its usual mohawk. When Michael asked him what was going on, Short Round looked at him intently, saying, "He's saying a prayer to protect you. He's asking the gods to watch over you." Then he disappeared and Grandfather Van turned to him and said in his gruff voice, "You know what you have to do boy--now do it."

Michael woke in a sweat, breathing heavily, his hand on his heart to slow its beating. The dream had seemed so real that he had expected to wake up in Grandfather's room. "Oh god," he thought as he sat up and swung his legs onto the floor. He ran downstairs and took a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with milk, then went outside, despite the chill of the early morning, and sat on the back porch, looking at the yard.

It was that peculiar time when the sky starts turning from a dark inky blue to the colors of dawn, lightening slowly until changing to rosy pink just before the sun rose. The sky retained enough of the night for him to feel hidden and safe as if something was out there that would make him feel afraid. There was no one he could talk to, when it came to seeking advice he would have to look elsewhere. Was that what Grandfather had been trying to tell him?

He went back inside and returned to his room. Suddenly he no longer felt like a fifteen-year-old. There was a burden on his shoulders; one he did not understand but felt intensely the weight of. The unfamiliar sense of anxiety he was feeling caused an uneasiness he did not like. There was more to this than meeting a pretty girl who happened to be a ghost. He did not know how the girl died, but there was a small voice inside him that spoke a truth he did not want to hear. He didn't want to say the word out loud, but in his heart, he knew that her death was not a natural one.

Unfamiliar, unwelcome words repeated themselves over and over in his head: "Murder", the voice whispered, "She was murdered."

He didn't understand why he couldn't get the voices out of his head. Here was a girl, a very pretty girl, maybe the prettiest he had ever seen. Those midnight blue eyes, the thick sheaf of dark brown hair, the fine bones of her face; all her delicate prettiness had not protected her from someone snuffing out her life. Death was something that he understood but was still distant from him. Murder was an unthinkable thing, even though he read about it in newspapers, or watched stories on television. To him, the murder of a pretty fifteen-year-old girl was unthinkable.