The Twelve Percent

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Scribbling some form of a signature onto the bottom of the clipboard on the counter, I shoved it back through the window. The nurse, in her lavender scrubbed glory, narrowed her eyes at me, but passed my items to me. Without so much as a ‘have a nice day’, she gestured towards the front door. That was my cue. I wrapped an arm around the brown paper bag and saluted her. She rolled her eyes, and turned away. Pushing open the heavy wooden door, I was taken aback by the sunlight. I squinted, lifting my free hand to shade my eyes as I searched the pick-up lot for my dad’s ratty pick-up. Not seeing it anywhere, I found a hot metal bench and sat down, placing my bag on the ground between my feet.

After digging in the bag for a moment, I found my phone. As it started up, the screen filling with a white light, someone sat down beside me. I glanced at them through the curtain of my hair. “So, you get released?”

I snorted. “No, I broke out and thought I’d hang out where they would never find me.” I sat back up, unlocking my phone with my fingerprint and checking for messages.

“Alright.” The guy sitting on the other side of the bench exhaled loudly, as though he hadn’t expected me to be such a delight. “What were you in for?”

“I see ghosts.” I said, without missing a beat.

“You freely admit that, still? How’d you get them to let you go?”

“I stopped seeing ghosts.” I sighed, breaking my gaze from my phone and bringing it up to his face. His brown hair hit his shoulders is a mass of knots and waves; and his brow was furrowed in confusion from my last statement. “You don’t think that a large percentage of the people that get out of places like this actually stop seeing what they see or doing what they do, do you?” He shrugged. I snorted again. “Optimist, much?” I turned back to my phone, tapping out short replies to the messages I actually gave a shit about.

“Not really. I guess I just hope that they can help people in there.”

I sighed again, and turned back. “Dude, the people that are forced to be in there? They don’t want help. Most of them don’t need help. The only good thing that comes out of being in there, for people like that, for people like me, is that we feel half as crazy by the time we leave. Because people in there,” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder towards the brown brick buildings. “Tend to be on one end of the spectrum, and nowhere in between.”

“What ‘spectrum’?” he asked.

“The crazy spectrum. Even they are crazy, or they aren’t crazy but they just see things differently than a ‘regular’ person, so the scrubs think they’re crazy.”

“Scrubs?”

“Doctors, nurses?” He made a sort of ‘ah’ noise. I scanned the lot for my dad’s truck again, hoping he would have come by now to save me from whoever this dude was.

“My sister is in there.” His voice was so soft I thought I was hearing things for a moment. I turned to look at him again. He took that as a motion to continue speaking. “For trying to kill herself.”

“What’d she do that for?” I asked, leaning back against the hot metal.

“She said she wanted the voices to stop. Said they were telling her what to do. Said she saw a person made of white smoke. That they told her to kill herself and join them. Eventually she took what they said, and did it. She said she didn’t want to be with them, but she wanted it to stop. So she took a hunting knife to her arms, and sat in the tub. Para’s barely got there in time.”

Finally, my dad’s rusted red truck appeared around the corner. “Listen, I got to book it before they change their mind. Your sister isn’t crazy. Maybe they can help her in there.” I shrugged and picked up my bag. As I stood, he did too. I turned to him. “But she isn’t crazy.” I pulled a sharpie out of the bottom of my bag, and ripped off a piece of the brown paper. I scribbled my name and number down quickly. “When she gets out, it won’t stop. Hell, it may not stop in there. Have her call me.” He looked at me, hopeful and hopeless. “She’s not crazy.”

I turned on the heel of my brown boots, and walked away. I heard him mumble my name to himself. “Amethyst.”

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“Sorry, darling.” Dad said, for the third time since he’d picked me up. I shrugged for the third time. He sighed. For the third time. “Uncle James was just worried about you. You know I believe you, and your mother has been trying to come to terms with it for years. But you can’t go around telling friends and family that their dead loved ones are visiting.”

“He had a right to know. And Aunt Lyla had a right to have her words honored.” When I was fourteen, I stopped having to read the lips of ghosts when they spoke to me. Like a flip being switched, suddenly their words had actual sound. And boy howdy, did they know it. Every time a ghost realizes I can see them, they take to following me around their haunts whenever I’m nearby. But once they realize I can hear them too; they start trying to attach to me and haunt me instead. Some manage to do so, and let me tell you, changing clothes is no fun when a civil war reenactor turned misfired cannon meat is watching you, begging you to tell his wife something.

Yeah. Seeing ghosts got real not-fun real fast. Three weeks ago, my Aunt Lyla died. She went in for a routine surgery, and something went wrong. She went brain-dead. But the brain-dead are technically dead. Meaning I can see them. When I went to visit her to see if she was around; she was. She was standing by her comatose body, trying to hold her own hand. But she was only a two day old ghost. They don’t have a lot of juice to do things like touching. She looked up as I walked in, and when she realized that I was looking at her ghost-self and not her physical-self; she rushed to my side. She begged me to tell Uncle James to pull the plug. She knew as well as I did that she had a better chance of moving on to whatever came after; if she was actually dead.

I waited. I put it off for thirty-seven hours. I knew from experience that telling people about my abilities ended in screaming or terror or a mental institution. Or all three, in this case. I gave in. I told him.

“Did he listen to what I said though?” I asked Dad.

He nodded. “Yeah. After a few days he realized that it really was what Lyla would have wanted.” I pursed my lips and pulled my feet up onto the seat.

“So, he agreed with what I said, but still had me carted off to Woodglen?”

“Am, you know why he did that.”

“Yeah, cause he thinks I’m crazy and you didn’t stop it.”

“Oh, now you’re mad at me?”

I gestured at the brown bag on the bench between us. “I spent two and a half weeks in Woodglen, this time. Two and a half. Every time I go back to one of those places, they keep me longer because they don’t believe me when I tell them it was a joke or I don’t see them anymore.”

“To be fair, you are lying.”

I made an exasperated noise. Dad pulled into our current home. I looked out from the front windshield. “You got the siding done.”

He nodded proudly. “And started on the shutters.”

I followed up him the path and into the halfway renovated Victorian era home. “Mom!” I called. "I’m home!” I heard footsteps coming slowly from the back of the house. Probably the kitchen, knowing Mom.

Holding her flour covered hands out from us, she hugged me with her elbows. “Hi sweetie. How are you holding up?”

I shrugged. “Alright. Glad to be back.”

She smiled. “Good. We could use you back.” She stuck her tongue out at me, and then padded back towards the kitchen.

Dad was smiling. He nodded towards the stairs. “Go have a shower and get changed and then come help me with these shutters out back.”

I nodded, giving him a hug before taking the stairs, two at a time. I dumped my paper bag onto my four poster bed (Mom said it would give this particular house more character once we were ready to show it.) and headed into the bathroom. Dad had installed my new tub while I’d been gone. Large and white, it had golden claw feet. An oval shower curtain hung from golden chains in the ceiling, and a light green curtain fell around it. The shower head was golden as well, and jutted out over the front of the tub. I fiddled with the knobs until I’d gotten the water flowing from the tub spout to the perfect temperature, and then changed it to fall from the shower head.

I hadn’t had a skin-peeling-hot shower in three weeks. I basked in it; letting it run for at least twenty minutes before I even started to wash. I got out, wrapped up in a towel, and stood in front of the mirror. I wiped away a streak of the steam with my hand. Frowning at my bedraggled appearance, I picked up my brush from the open shelves on the wall. Yanking it through my waist length brown and purple hair, I cursed at the hospital, and cursed at my Uncle James. I hadn’t been allowed a brush on the inside, and now my hair was knotted and angry.

After yanking three-quarters of the tangles out, I brushed my teeth and headed back out into my room. Before I’d gone away, my room had been a construction zone. Paint samples spread across one wall, carpet and hardwood samples lining the floor. Now three of the walls were a very pale yellow, and the accent wall behind my bed was covered in a swirly pattern of Victorian-ness. The once scratched and half ripped up tile floor was now a plush cream carpet. My feet sunk as I walked. I have to say; it was delightful.

I yanked a sports bra over my head, followed by a plain brown tank top. As I was pulling a pair of jeans shorts up my legs over my underwear, I saw a flash in the corner of my eye. “Great.” I mumbled. “I swear to God, if you’re a male ghost, I will kick your ass if you have been watching me shower.” I buttoned my pants and picked up one of my signature long feathered earrings from atop my dresser. As I slipped it into my ear I looked around the room. Seeing no one, I slipped a plain golden arrow into my other ear. I looked under the bed and pulled my hair into a ponytail that still swept across my mid-back.

“Back for an hour and already there’s a damn ghost.” I slipped my sock-clad feet back into my brown boots.

Giving up on my search, though still certain there was a ghost around, I headed down to help Dad with the renovation.

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