Portia stood right in front of me.
“Quite the entrance,” she said with a smile.
I caught my breath and got on my legs again. It still drained my energy to go through solid objects. I wondered if I would ever get used to it like other spirits who did this all the time.
“Are you all right?” Abhik asked.
“I will be,” I said and looked around. We seemed to be in a bathroom.
“Where are we?” I asked.
Portia hushed me.
“We are in a human house,” she whispered. “The mirror led us into a human bathroom.”
“Who is living here? Are they out there now?”
Portia shook her head.
“They are all sleeping. I checked.”
“Okay, so the important part is not to wake anyone up. How many are they? And where are they?”
“There’s a woman in the bedroom. Her husband has fallen asleep downstairs in front of the TV. And then a son is sleeping in his room next to the woman’s room,” Portia said.
“Okay, so all we have to make sure is—” I didn’t get any further before Portia interrupted me.
“Here comes another one! Move over!” she said motioning that I needed to move aside.
We heard a small shriek, and then Mai landed in the bathroom as well. Her small figure made it easy for her to go through, so she just floated past us.
“Now we only have to wait for Acacia,” Portia whispered.
Acacia was a much bigger girl like me. I’m not on the skinny side either, not that I am fat. Like me, she had a hard time going through things as well. So all we saw now was her hand pushed through and then it was like the mirror was bubbling underneath, as though she was trying to press through but made an imprint of her body and face instead. We heard her yell from the other side. It sounded like she was talking through a pillow.
“I can’t get through this thing. It’s like the gateway is closed!”
Portia and Mai giggled and I have to admit it looked rather funny. But I didn’t say anything.
“Try again,” Portia said.
So she did. Again we saw her face emerge and this time she got her head through, but then she was stuck.
“Try to press your hands through,” Portia said. “Then we can pull you the rest of the way.”
Acacia tried hard and groaned loudly. Slowly her hands came through and Portia and I each grabbed one.
“On three …” Portia said.
I nodded.
“One … Two … Three…!”
We pulled all we could but our hands kept slipping through hers. That was still something we needed to learn. How to hold on to things. Not having a physical body wasn’t as easy as it looked.
Finally we had to give up. We kept trying but Acacia didn’t move one inch. So Portia told her to go back to the cellar.
Acacia was disappointed and started arguing.
“Come on! It is not fair that you get to go and have fun, and I don’t,” she said with the whining voice of a five-year-old.
“We can’t spend all night trying to get you through this mirror, Acacia,” Portia said. “Wait for us there. We will bring you next time.”
Acacia sighed deeply and then she wiggled her way back through the mirror again.
“One less to worry about,” Portia said while opening the bathroom door slowly. It squeaked and we all looked at each other. Then Portia signaled that we should follow her.
Slowly we floated through a hallway and found the stairs leading down to the living room. A man slept on the couch, wearing a white shirt and black pants. His tie was thrown on an armchair next to him. His black shoes were kicked off on the floor. He slept with his mouth open and head leaning on the back of the couch. He snored and his small moustache wiggled when he breathed. The table in front of him was filled with empty beer bottles. The big flat-screen TV showed an infomercial for fitness equipment.
Portia and Mai giggled as they came close to the man. Portia took a deep breath and blew air in his face. I saw his hair move as if a draft had come through. Mai giggled again and then she tickled the man by touching his face with her finger. They circled around him and laughed.
Suddenly he moved.
He wiggled his nose and grumbled before he turned over to the side. Portia and Mai were surprised and moved back.
“He’s too drunk to wake up,” Portia said and floated away from the man on the couch.
“Yeah, he’s boring,” Mai said. “Let’s try something else.”
Portia glanced around in the living room with that incredible smirk on her face.
“Let’s make a mess,” she said.
“Yay,” Mai said.
I looked at Abhik. He looked disappointed, as though this wasn’t why he came here. I guess all he wanted was to come back to the human world as a new person. Maybe it sounds weird, but I think he wanted to see what it would be like to be in the human world without feeling pain, just being there, being able to move around as he wanted and wished, to do whatever he felt like.
So while Portia and Acacia started to move things around in the living room, giggling and snickering, I took Abhik with me outside.
We found ourselves under the most incredible starry sky. The full moon shone at our feet. We flew out in the front yard, but then Abhik stopped. Slowly he placed his feet on the grass. He looked at me and I understood. He wanted to walk. So we did. For the first time since we learned how to fly, we walked on our legs. It felt weird after months of flying everywhere. It was a slow way to be moving around. But I could tell that Abhik enjoyed it. He couldn’t stop smiling. In the backyard sat an old swing set. Abhik took one look at it and then ran toward it like a small child.
I ran after him and took the swing next to him. Since we were nearly weightless, it wasn’t quite the same as I remembered swinging in my childhood, but still Abhik seemed to enjoy it. Afterwards he tried the monkey bars and then the slide.
“You know I didn’t get to do this much when I was human?” he said. “It was too much for me. I was so fragile and in too much pain.”
“Well I am glad you get to do it now,” I said.
“Me too.”
We played like two small kids in the yard for hours, although it felt like minutes. When we got back inside, Portia and Mai had put their mark on the whole living room. Pictures were hanging upside down, chairs had been placed differently, and books were on the wrong shelves, one even on the top of the ceiling fan. Portia had a big vase between her hands and looked like she was going to break it.
“Portia!” I said. “That’s enough!”
She stuck out her tongue but put the vase down.
Great, I thought. Nice and mature.
“I wasn’t going to break it, just put it somewhere else. We were only having a little fun, that’s all,” she said. Don’t be such an old spinster.”
Who uses that kind of words? I thought while laughing on the inside.
“Well I don’t want to be involved in it. Let’s go,” I said to Abhik.
But he didn’t come. He looked at me like a defying child.
“I want to try this,” he said.
I rolled my eyes as he started pushing pillows on the floor from the couch. He missed a few times when his hands just went through it, but I could see on his face that he was having fun.
The drunken man on the couch didn’t seem to wake up, so I felt it was safe. They didn’t leave a big mess. It was mostly just small things like tying the man’s tie around his leg and taking his socks off and placing them on top of the TV. And when he woke the next morning he would think that he had been very drunk and had quite a party in the living room. Or at least his wife would, we figured, as we left the living room and floated up the stairs.
Everyone was giggling—even Abhik—and I couldn’t help being a little amused myself.
But that was only until we reached the bathroom door. As Portia opened it with that squeaking sound, we heard another door being opened
as well.
Chapter 9
The face in the doorway immediately grew pale, eyes wide open with a scared look—the one spirits see a lot when they appear to humans. Spirits get used to it eventually, but at this point I had never seen it before. I had never had anyone afraid of me before and it sincerely scared the crap out of me. We all got so scared of the guy who was staring at us that we screamed and fell into each other trying to get to the bathroom mirror.
“Hurry, let’s get out of here,” Portia yelled.
She pushed herself ahead of the rest of us so she could get to the mirror first. Then she went through it. I was last in line as the boy closed the door to the bathroom with a shriek.
“Hurry, hurry …” Abhik said while Mai slid right through.
Then came Abhik and he had no problem either. He went through and now it was my turn. I put my right arm in front of me and pushed it through and as I did the bathroom door opened slightly. A baseball bat was the first thing I saw and then I panicked. Trying too hard to get through the mirror made it impossible. My hand was stuck. Not only was I trapped in a human house with a human, but I couldn’t move either.
Great, I thought.
“Who’s in there?” I heard the boy yell while swinging the baseball bat in the air. Who was he thinking he would scare off with that?
Then with a sudden bang the door opened and he stood in the doorway with the baseball bat on his shoulder, ready to swing it. I felt the others trying to pull my hand on the other side, but I didn’t move an inch.
It’s all in your mind, I thought. Come on, have you learned nothing?
The boy stared at me from the doorway. His eyes were still wide open. Then he took a swing at me. The bat whistled through the air. Forgetting all about who I was, I covered my head and … the bat went straight through me.
“Now what do you know?” I said quite impressed. I felt it go through me, but it didn’t hurt at all.
The boy’s eyes became even wider and his mouth opened. He dropped the bat on the floor. He looked at me like he was paralyzed. His whole body shook and trembled. That was when I saw it. There was something about him. I was certain I had seen him somewhere before. Maybe I had known him before I died?
“Who are you?” I asked.
Of course he didn’t answer. He was still in too much of a shock. “You’re … You’re …” he stuttered.
“I am a spirit, yes.” It sounded so weird in my own ears and I tried to imagine how it must have sounded in his.
“But … But …”
I tried to smile. “I’m kind of stuck, as you can see.”
“This must be some dream or something,” he mumbled and tried to pinch his own arm.
“Nope, I am real.”
He kept staring at me. “Where … where did you come from?”
I sighed. “Well it’s kind of a long story. See we come from this school … well … it is going to sound a little strange, but it is the truth. We go to a school of … spirits. See, I kind of … died some months ago and now I am … well … this.”
The boy seemed less pale now and looked at me with suspicion.
“You’re really dead?”
I tried to smile again. Once he got the color back in his cheeks he was kind of cute-looking and about my age as well. I noticed he had a purple mark on his forehead, like he had been in a bad fight.
“Well … if you put it like that, then yes. I am dead.”
“So what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be with God in Heaven or something like that?”
“Well I sort of am. We do have Angels at the school … but you see I need to go through this training at the Academy to learn stuff. … It’s kind of complicated.”
“Have you seen God?”
“Not yet. But I hope to one day.”
“What is Heaven like?”
“I have no idea, honestly … But the school is great. And being a spirit is really cool.”
“Are you an Angel?”
“No, that I am not. They are kind of special … I think, that is, see I don’t really know that much …”
“But you are good, right? You are not like an evil spirit haunting houses and stuff, right?”
“Well, no, not in theory… Not normally. But … you see… we kind of did something to your living room that wasn’t under the category of being nice, so … It’s really very complicated.”
He looked at me even more suspiciously now.
“You don’t seem to know much about anything, do you?”
“Well I am new…”
“Why don’t you just go back to where your friends went?”
“Well, I’m kind of stuck in this gateway … and I can’t seem to go either back or forth. So …”
I felt so incredibly embarrassed. It was like nothing I had ever gone through before. Seriously. It was worse than the time I realized I had walked around at school all day with toilet paper sticking out of my pants, or the time when I finally got the courage to approach this guy I had liked for a long time and I accidentally spit on him while I was talking.
“So you are stuck here.” He said with a smile, like he found it incredibly funny, which of course I didn’t.
“Yeah, that is kind of a problem …”
“Why?”
“We’re not supposed to show ourselves to humans before we graduate from the Academy. I’ll get in big trouble if they find out.”
He looked at me. “Can’t spirits make themselves invisible?”
I sighed. “Yes, they can.”
“So why didn’t you just make yourself invisible when you saw me?”
“Well … the thing is… we haven’t quite gotten to that part yet. That’s not until next semester.”
The boy burst into laughter.
“You’re funny,” he said.
“Yeah well, I might be,” I said. There was a pause between us. Then I said, “Listen, I’m sorry about the mess downstairs in your living room.”
He sighed. “Well, I guess my step-dad is sleeping down there on the couch anyway. He usually does when he’s drunk. So my mom will probably think he did it and clean it all up before he wakes up. I’m sure it will be fine,” he said.
Another awkward silence followed.
“How did you get that purple mark?” I asked and pointed at his forehead with my free hand.
He felt the big purple bump. “Oh this?” he asked and seemed all of a sudden a little embarrassed, like he didn’t want to talk to me about it. “It is nothing. I just fell down the stairs.”
“Oh, okay.” I thought it was a strange answer.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
“I have to get out of this mess,” I said and looked at my arm. I still couldn’t move it either way.
“Can I help?”
“That’s kind of you, but I am afraid not. See, the problem is all in my mind. I have a hard time believing that I can actually go through things yet. Once I get it and stop overthinking it, I will no longer have this problem.”
The boy’s face lit up.
“Maybe I can help you,” he said.
I looked at him quite surprised.
“How?”
“Well, my mother always says to me that I overthink everything. That I worry too much about things I shouldn’t. And when I do, she always tries to distract me with something else.”
I had to admit that sounded like a good plan.
“Okay,” I said. “Can you distract me then?”
He smiled and put a hand through his sand-colored hair.
“Sure. Give me a second,” he turned around and started walking but then stopped. He looked at me again.
“By the way, my name is Jason,” he said.
“I’m Meghan.”
He was only gone for a few seconds but that was enough time for me to worry that someone else in the house would wake up and find me here. Also I had started wondering what my friends were doing on the other side of the mirror. They had gotten awfully
quiet and since they had tried to pull my hand, they didn’t seem to have tried anything else. Knowing them, I guessed they had run and left me here.
“I found the perfect distraction,” I heard Jason’s voice say. He had come back to the bathroom and was holding something in his hands. He showed me what it was.
“You have got to be kidding!” I said. “A puzzle?”
He smiled again. I was about to burst into laughter. I hadn’t made a puzzle since I was a kid. At first I thought he was trying to make me laugh, but little by little I realized that he was serious.
“It is not any kind of puzzle; it has eight thousand pieces. Believe me, it will work,” he said and took off the top of the box. Then he tipped out the many pieces on the white bathroom tiles. Then he took a big piece of cardboard and placed it next to the pieces.
“We’ll make it on the cardboard. I always do,” he said and looked up at me with anticipation in his brown eyes.
“What? I can’t even reach them. I am stuck, remember?”
“You can tell me which ones to pick and where to put them.”
I sighed. This had to be by far the stupidest thing anyone had ever suggested to me. He turned the top of the box and showed me the picture. It was very beautiful—a woman and a man kissing in the window of her bedroom.
“It’s Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “The eternal story of two who can never have each other.”
Jason looked at the box. “I guess you’re right. My mom gave it to me. It’s good for me to have something to do, she says. So I won’t think too much.”
“What do you worry about?”
He gave me a curled smile.
“Nothing … and everything, I guess.”
I sighed. “Listen. This will take forever to make, and I really have to get back soon.”
I didn’t want to break Jason’s heart, but a puzzle wasn’t really me and especially not now, when I was this stressed out and in kind of a panicky mode.
He looked up at me while showing me a corner piece. “I found the first one,” he said and looked at the picture on the box. “It looks like this goes in the right upper corner.”