The Illusion of Separation

Carter didn't go far. I wasn't thinking he would. He knew he was caught and he wasn't going to be able to avoid us forever. Chris and I held hands as we caught up to him and cornered him so that he couldn't escape. Not like he would anyway but we wanted to be sure.

"What does Chris mean, you could see him the whole time?" I demanded. Chris knew; when a person fucked with me, I could get pretty forward pretty fast. I wanted answers. I would have done the same thing when Chris died if I'd been able to see him from the first minute, and the only reason I wasn't doing it now was because it hadn't really been his fault and I didn't want him to have to relive his death. "You mean you could see him the entire time since he came back and you didn't say anything?"

"Well, not the whole time. Not at the beginning. But a few days ago I started seeing him." His voice was shaky and unsure. I felt kind of bad for interrogating him, but we were supposed to be best friends. Chris, Carter, and me. The three of us. We weren't supposed to hide things from each other, especially something like this.

Chris touched my shoulder with the hand not holding mine. He could tell I kind of wanted to punch Carter in the face.

"Okay, so you couldn't see him when I saw him in the car right after he died, right?" He shook his head. "But you could see him when you were crying in your room that day." He nodded.

"But he kept flickering in and out of my vision," he explained. "He didn't stay there for long and then he disappeared, but I've been seeing him on and off for the past few days. I just...I thought he was just a hallucination. I figured that I was the only one seeing him. But...but I guess I'm not."

"Yeah, no, you're not...because he's not invisible or a hallucination or anything. Well, he's invisible to a lot of people, I guess, because we've gone places and no one has seen him. But he's not invisible to us which I guess makes sense because we're all best friends." I was pretty damn happy that it wasn't like one of those movies where the dead person only appeared to people that were enemies or had no real relation to them. Thank God that cliches were working out for us.

"Okay, so how do we get him back to normal?"

Now that was the problem. Chris had died. His body was screwed and there was no way he was going to be able to return to it. It was mangled almost beyond recognition. Chris had been able to change out of the bloody shirt and pants he'd appeared with and put on a new shirt and pair of pants, by some weird ghost logic, but other than that he hadn't been able to do much with anything real. I guessed he might have the power to possess peoples' bodies but he'd never tried it and I wasn't eager to let him. Knowing Christofer, he'd fuck it up and end up accidentally killing someone. I wouldn't be surprised. He'd play around inside someone's body and do something wrong and the person would die on the spot.

"I have no idea," I answered truthfully. I'm sure Chris wasn't too excited to hear that, but it was the truth. What was I supposed to do, spout off some sci-fi solution that would get him back to normal? Honestly, it wasn't that bad having him like this. I could see him and Carter could see him. When he was like this, my dad couldn't flip out about him and me being together, and he couldn't tell Chris to leave because Chris wasn't there, to him. Yeah, it would be awkward being "single" all the time, but I could deal with it, right?

"Well, come over tomorrow," said Carter. "We'll talk about it and see what we can do." Of course we probably wouldn't come up with anything but we'd try. Most likely Chris would make us play Spin the Bottle his way, which was basically him spinning the bottle and if it landed on Carter he made it face me. Although there was one time that he kissed Carter really quick just to see what would happen. Carter had acted extremely violated, and we'd laughed together. After that Carter had his revenge by spinning the bottle and kissing me, and it hadn't turned out well. Chris was a bit headstrong and didn't really get the whole friend-revenge thing, so he'd stormed out saying that we could get together if we were so eager to get into each others' pants.

I had to hand it to Carter, though. He'd gone off and explained the situation to Christofer, and after a little convincing from both of us that we'd just done it to get back at him, he decided to drop it and we all went back to normal. You'd think Chris wouldn't have jumped to conclusions but that was one of his flaws that drove me nuts. He did make things entertaining, though, like when he said he was going to staple a magnet to my pants and then tape a magnet to the bottle so that it would always hit me. I stopped that one real fast though by telling him that Carter could just as easily staple a magnet to his pants, too.

After Carter left, Chris and I went up to my room and cuddled under the covers for a little while. It felt good to have him back in a place so familiar, and I kept touching him in random places just to make sure he was there. This all seemed like such a good dream that I'd wake up any minute, and I half-expected to go to sleep tonight and open my eyes to find he was gone. He promised me he wouldn't be, though, and it was good enough for me even though Chris broke half the promises he made.

"We'd be screwed if your dad could see me," he told me.

"Yeah, I know. Hey, are you going to see your siblings? You know they're probably home by now. You should go say hi...or whatever it is ghosts do. They might not be able to see you. Your parents can't."

He shrugged. "I'll do it tomorrow. They can wait another day. I'm not going anywhere and your bed is more comfortable than mine."

"Because it's clean."

"My bed's clean."

"Yeah, okay. You know, half your bed being covered in shit doesn't count as clean. Well, maybe it does for you."

"Shut up."

I smiled. "You know you get a better sleep here because you can actually feel the mattress."

He grinned and buried his face in my neck to shut me up. He knew to do that whenever he was losing an argument or whenever he just needed me to shut up in general. It took my breath away and made my heartbeat something I had to remember how to do. Being dead didn't change that at all. Being dead hadn't seemed to change much at all, really.