“What in the world did he mean by ‘a host body’ anyway?” came Sixx’s disembodied voice in my ear.
I lowered the phone and glared at it. I’d been talking with Sixx and she would not let me off the hook about my afternoon at the beach with Shane. When I didn’t return to school the rest of the day, she of course thought the worst possible thing and when I got home there were only fifteen messages on the answering machine from her to call.
“Well, what do you think he means, Sixx? We’ve all watched enough of Creepshow’s boring movies to venture a guess, don’t you think? We need to find someone close to his age, or at least his last alive age, who resembles him, at least as much as possible.”
“What’s this ‘we’ thing all of a sudden? You’re not in this with him, are you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Are you, Juice? Balls of crud, you are!”
“Well, what’s wrong with it anyway? I mean, he like, chose me and everything. That means something, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, it means you’re getting all wrapped up in a ghost who can’t even French kiss you, or take you to the movies or prom or all those other gag-me events you’re always mooning around about.”
“Well, he could if I find him a host body.” I said indignantly.
“Balls. Of. Crud.” Sixx enunciated every word. “Can you even hear yourself?” In a high-pitched sneer, she mimicked me. “‘He could if I find him a body.’ Now you sound like one of those B-movie thrillers Creepshow has on Beta, for the love of lice!” She talked so loudly now, I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. “Have you even told the guys about any of this?”
“No! We agreed not to, remember?” Truthfully, I didn’t know how Jett and Creepshow would react to Shane, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. Jett could be pretty progressive when it came to these kinds of things, but I had never gotten a read from Creepshow in this direction at all.
“Okay, I won’t tell them. Does Shane know you told me about him?”
“No, I haven’t exactly shared that with him yet.”
“Oh. So, tell me. Did he share with you how you’re supposed to get him a host body?”
“He said I can find one at school. He hoped for one in our same grade as he used to be in. And I thought it would be good if the new body sort of resembled him.”
“Oh, I’m sure you did.”
“Man, Sixx. Not like that.” It offended me that Sixx would think me so shallow I would only be interested in what Shane’s host body would look like.
“You know, Juice, this whole conversation is starting to make me trip. You realize we’re talking about body-snatching here?”
“I don’t think it’s exactly that.”
“Are you new here? Let’s recap, shall we? You meet the guy of your dreams, only he’s not real, he’s a ghost. He can’t hold your hand, or kiss you, the way a real boyfriend would, until you help him find a body he can hijack and make his own. And oh, yeah, you’re hoping it’ll be a hot one. Did I get everything right there, Juice?”
“You’re making it sound so bad, Sixx. You’re making Shane seem so awful. I wish you could meet him.”
“Well, so do I, Juice. But in more breaking news, he’s a ghost! And you’re the only one who can see him. So, that is totally not happening anytime soon.”
“I know.” I couldn’t have felt more defeated. I knew Sixx might be right about it being so futile, but she didn’t understand how I felt when we were together. I realized she wouldn’t know until I told her. I took a deep breath and started. “There’s something I need to explain to you, Sixx.”
“What is it?”
“There’s a little bit more involved here than just him asking me to do it. I know I haven’t known Shane for very long, but there’s, I don’t know, a connection, I guess you could call it, between us, that has never happened to me before. I don’t have another word for it, Sixx. I feel connected to Shane in some way. I felt it from almost the first moment I met him.” I braced myself to hear a sarcastic remark from Sixx, but once again she surprised me.
“Juice, you’ve been my friend when no one else would be. You’re the smartest girl I know. If you feel somehow Shane is right for you, then I’ll do whatever you need me to do to help. And I know we haven’t told Jett or Creepshow yet, but they both love you. I know they’ll do whatever you need.”
I didn’t speak for minute. Truthfully, I felt overwhelmed. Sixx had never spoken that way to me before in the whole time that I had known her. I thought she had probably never spoken like that to anyone in her whole life. My eyes welled with tears over the love I felt for my friend just then. Because I knew she would hate it, I waited another minute before I spoke so she wouldn’t hear the tears in my voice.
“Thanks, Sixx.” I kept it brief, afraid my voice might crack and give me away, even over the phone.
“Yeah, whatever. You need to get off my phone now. I’m so totally bored of this topic.” That sounded more like my Sixx. This one I knew.
“Okay. See you tomorrow, Sixx. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, ghostrider.” She hung up while I still giggled.
****
After I hung up with Sixx, I did what I always did when I needed information about a subject I knew nothing about; I turned to the Internet. Mr. Blake, my homeroom teacher always told us that we had it easy because of the World Wide Web. He said when he was our age, he had to research all his papers in gigantic encyclopedias, photocopying pages in the library, and handing in typewritten pages corrected with liquid paper. Yeah, Mr. Blake really laid it on thick. He didn’t try to get away with the old walking-up-hill-both-ways-in-the-snow story, but he still got a good one in there now and then.
I did an Internet search on ghosts and quickly became overwhelmed by the number of responses. Clearly, I needed to narrow my search. Okay, I thought. I’ll try ghosts and host bodies. I just hoped I didn’t die soon and have some CSI team investigate my hard drive the way they were always doing on television and have my mom need to explain what I had been doing on these websites.
Entering ‘Ghosts and hosts’ narrowed the findings. I got a ton of hits on blogs from people who were truly ‘out there’. No, thank you, to the freak zone. I had enough weirdness going on for right now. Then I zeroed in on a couple of sites that looked promising. One site had an article about people who had died and were trapped between now and what it called “the hereafter,” because of some unanswered question. That seemed to be right on target.
I opened the site and read the article. It said that some ghosts haunted the place where they died, sometimes for years, usually for three main reasons. The first might be because they needed to know why they died, if they died of natural causes or who killed them. This would be especially true for ghosts who happened to die before their time. That sounded exactly like Shane. If dying in his teens wasn’t dying before his time, I didn’t know what would be. I kept reading.
The second reason could be because the ghost is trying to exact some kind of revenge. That sounded nothing like Shane. As far as I had discovered about him, he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Or mean anything in his anything. Whatever.
On to the third reason. An unrequited love. I hoped that wasn’t it. Because that would make him a ghost and a player, and me a fool. I snapped my laptop shut. It’s now official. If Shane only pretended to like me so he could get a new body out of it, and I had fallen for it hook, line and sinker, then that would make this officially the Worst Week of My Life.