Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

I shoved the thought aside as Twyla spoke.

“By the way, I was joking about shooting the breeze with this thing you ran into.”

Well, good for her.

“Seriously, you should be afraid of it.” She leaned forward on that counter. “You should be afraid of everything at first, when you’re a new little ghostie who thinks she’s a bitchin’ tuff but isn’t. You don’t want to be destroyed before your life here has, like, even started.”

“Destroyed?” I asked. “You mean going back into a time loop?”

Twyla exchanged a jaded glance with Randy.

“Noooo,” she said. “I mean that, besides the odd spiritual beings you’re bound to meet, there’re stories of ghosts getting into less exotic trouble, too. Like ghosts who’ve gotten stuck in the gut by, like, iron daggers and they just disappeared, never to be seen again. There’re humans who know how to do stuff like that to clean us out of their presence.”

Randy said, “Thass why we call ’em cleaners.”

Twyla was just warming up. “They can chase ghosts from houses they’re haunting or whatever. They ban us from places we get comfortable in by using gaggy smells and sensations from energy machines.”

“They can banish a spirit from a location,” Randy slurred, “but not from the earthly plane.” He took a good look at me, measuring my reaction.

Did I have a constipated look on my face or something? I checked the mirror and, yeah, I did.

Answers would help me calm down. “Where are we sent when we’re pierced with iron in our… gut?”

Twyla clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes. “Like we know? I’ve never gotten the stuff stuck in me.”

Randy was more diplomatic. “No one ever comes back to tell, ’member? But I heard that iron can separate our forms into mist. It’s poison.”

Dead ghosts tell no tales, evidently.

He added, “But about them time loops, as ya call ’em… there’re lots of things that can suck up our energy and send us into ’em. Too much communicatin’ with humans is one.”

Twyla nodded. “And that’s why we use Ouija boards, medium channeling, raps on the walls, and automatic writing instead.”

Helpful advice from the Laup-Goth. Maybe it was worth meeting her, after all.

I said, “That’s strange, because communicating with Amanda Lee didn’t take much out of me.”

Randy answered. “Thass ’cause she’s a medium.”

“Duh,” Twyla added. “You know, she’s a conduit who can see into parts of Boo World? For some, like, reason there was a connection between you two. So talking to her is like talking to one of us.”

Randy was already on to the next comment. “Materializin’. That’ll sap ya, too.”

I blinked. Randy was right, because hadn’t I felt a loss of more power than usual after I thought I’d materialized to Gavin? Maybe I did need to watch myself more. Maybe I’d just been a lucky ghost so far.

Both Twyla and Randy were laughing now, and I knew why. From what I saw in the mirror, I was definitely less confident, and they were just having some fun with the new ghost by piling it on me.

But as they cooled out, Randy had an expression on him that told me he actually wanted me to be safe. But Twyla? I still wasn’t sure if she’d just enjoyed poking at me or if she was a good egg.

She hopped off the counter, free-falling to the floor, her petticoats flaring for the briefest, kind of impressive instant.

“Let’s get downstairs before Old Seth starts up with the country music,” she said. Then to me, “He’s an ancient fart, but he picked up on Waylon Jennings somewhere along the way and it makes me want to, like, barf.”

She sashayed out of the bathroom, and with a good-natured shrug, Randy followed.

I did, too, thinking that a little fun with the others wouldn’t kill me.

I partied like it was 1999.

For hours, we threw different music at one another, and with me being the new ghost in town, everyone let me practice my sound skills. I pulled songs out of the air—or maybe it was out of my memory—and let my favorites ring through McGlinn’s house.

The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees… I got very good at conjuring anything I wanted, even though Twyla Smart-Ass interjected tunes like “Mickey” and “Jessie’s Girl” every once in a while.

Even with her love of pop songs, though, I could still tell that half of her liked my alternative stuff.

Eventually, we came to the point in all parties where everyone collapses on couches and chairs, pulls out cigarettes, and turns on the TV because you’re done but you can’t bring yourself to go home.

Ghosts are no different. We draped ourselves on the stairs around the fire, which Randy had told me McGlinn kept stoked because of the preternatural chill the bunch of us brought to the room. And instead of ciggies, the guys from Chinatown and Cassie the ’seventies housewife were nipping at the ends of frayed live wires until Yul, Lee, and Feng—gamblers who’d passed on during a fire in a mid–eighteen hundreds den in downtown San Diego—moseyed out of the house and back to their death spots for the night.

Old Seth was leaning against the wall in the corner near McGlinn, who looked like he was passed out on his lounger, although I wasn’t sure about that since he seemed out of it when he was awake, too. The bearded cowboy was idly manipulating McGlinn’s camera that’d been sitting on an end table, making the flash go off again and again. It gave the firelit room a strobe effect while the rest of us hung out.

Little by little, I’d gotten all their death stories, just as I’d done with Twyla and the Chinatown guys. Carlota, one of the Mexican women in the big skirts, was the only ghost in her group who hadn’t left yet, and she’d told me that she and her friends had been victims of a doomed wagon ride on the way back from a fiesta when a snake-spooked horse had gone crazy. Louis, the black man in the factory uniform, was a contemporary of Randy’s; he’d worked in a bayside aircraft plant during World War II after the pool of local white workers had been exhausted, and he’d died when he was driving home one night, bone-tired, his car veering off the road.

No one here had perished in their sleep or anything peaceful like that.

When I brought that up, Louis said, “If you had a good death, you’d already be in the good place.”

“Heaven?” I asked.

They all thought that was precious. Twyla laughed extra hard from her spot by the wall, where she’d wandered over to suck on a wire next to ’seventies Cassie after the Chinatown gamblers had left. The energy sent subtle waves of color through the electricity-sucking ghosts as Cassie kept mothering Twyla, doing things like telling her how darling her hair looked tonight.

From his place next to me on the fire pit stairs, Randy gave me a tolerant grin. “I already told Jen about heaven, or whatever’s waitin’ for us.”

Carlota yawned, then said, “ Qué lastima , is it not?”

I nodded. I had enough high school Spanish to infer that it was a shame we didn’t know for sure.

Scott, the teen from the ’fifties who’d choked on a chicken bone in a diner during a date, said, “ I don’t care about what’s waiting for us.”

Randy watched him like he saw through the teenage bravado. “I do, ’cause wherever it is we’re goin’, Magnolia’s there right now.”

Everyone mumbled good-naturedly under their breath, obviously having heard him wax on about Magnolia before.

But I wanted to hear more about her. “How do you know she isn’t still alive? She had to be young when you died. That would make her…” In her nineties? Older?

“I stopped keepin’ track of age a long time ago,” he said. “And when computers started showin’ up all around, I learned to do a search or two on my gal. She’s gone as gone can be.”