by Nancy Holder
His freckled face red, Carl slipped from his stool and stepped up to the blackboard. He looked at the equation and snorted.
To Erin’s chagrin, he had no trouble solving the problem, which she had solved in her head, too. The jerk gave the class a show-offy deep bow before retaking his stool.
Mr. Puccini ran the remainder of the hour like a well-oiled machine—no interruptions, just physics, and plenty of it, keeping everyone on their toes with pointed questions and corrections of the answers given. After the bell rang, Erin let most of the others file out for next period before she picked up her briefcase.
The new girl hung back, too. “Why do they call you Ghost Girl?” she asked softly. “I’m Abby Yates, by the way.” Which of course, Erin already knew.
The eagerness in her eyes to learn Erin’s most embarrassing not-so-secret secret made Erin groan inwardly. Another torturer joins the inquisition. Abby Yates was short; her nerdy, shapeless attire accentuated the roundness of an already somewhat too-round body. Her striped wool socks flopped loosely around her ankles, but perfectly matched her purple Birkenstocks.
“I’ve been interested in the paranormal like forever,” Abby confessed breathily. “That and conventional physical sciences fascinate me. Are you into the paranormal, too?”
“I’ve got Honors Calculus next period,” Erin said, biting off her words. “Gotta go.”
As she breezed around the end of the lab table, Abby called to her back, “Calc with Mr. Bennett? That’s me, too. Can I walk with you?”
* * *
It was lunchtime after math class and Abby followed Erin to her locker, then outside. To be honest, she hadn’t tried all that hard to ditch her—assuming she actually could have; Abby clung to her like a life preserver. Having sat through a second class together, Erin was less certain of her kneejerk analysis, that the new girl just wanted to be in on the in-joke that had everyone else in school in stitches. Abby seemed as lost as she was, and maybe more than a little scared, too, what with it being her first day at C. W. Post and coming from out of state. Erin got the feeling that Abby just wanted someone to hang with. They had a lot in common, at least superficially. They shared the same fashion sense. The same disdain for boys, because boys weren’t interested in them. And the same level of smarts, or they wouldn’t both have been in the honors science program. It was great to be needed, but Erin refused to get her hopes too high—she had been burned too many times in the past.
“So, come on and tell me,” Abby said as they sat down on a bench in the quad to eat their sack lunches. “How did you get that ‘Ghost Girl’ nickname?”
Erin lowered her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Everybody else in school knows, so you’re going to find out sooner or later,” she said dismally. “Might as well get it over with.”
Then in a low tone of voice and highly compressed fashion, she told Abby the story: Corky, the dead rooster, the dead neighbor, and the haunting.
“You had actual visitations?”
Erin nodded glumly, returning to her sandwich, which had turned completely tasteless. She chewed the mouthful to paste, waiting for the other shoe to fall, for her new friend to make fun of her like everyone else.
“That is so amazing!” Abby said, beaming at up her. “Do you still see Mrs. Barnard’s ghost?” She sounded almost … hopeful.
“I saw her every night for a year when I was little,” Erin said. “Then her empty house burned down and I never saw her again.”
“Damn!” Abby said, slapping herself on the thigh.
Erin flinched at the smack. Here it comes, she thought. I knew it. She’s a crazy person. She had to be.
“Think what we could have done if we’d had the right equipment on-site.”
“What?”
“The questions we could have investigated,” Abby said. “I mean, come on! What kind of radiation was it giving off? Infrared? EM? Ionizing? Was the energy constant or fluctuating? Did it reflect or refract light? Or did it project its own light? Was there chemical trace left behind at the scene? Perhaps phosphorescence? Maybe radioactivity? Even if all we accomplished was to eliminate the obvious possibilities, it would have been a major breakthrough in the understanding of spectral phenomena.”
Erin was dumbstruck. “Do you believe me?”
Abby looked her in the eye. “I saw how you handled yourself in Advanced Physics and Calculus. You’re not some whacked out, woo-woo doofus. You got game. So if you aren’t a dimwit, and you don’t think I’m a dimwit, why would you repeat something to me everybody else thinks is total BS? There’s nothing to be gained from a lie like that at this point, is there?”
Erin just stared at her, unable to speak.
“Okay,” Abby went on, “there is no physical evidence to examine, no way to confirm that you saw what you saw, but I’m willing to suspend disbelief in the absence of falsifying proof.”
Popper, Erin thought, with a catch in her throat. She’s quoting Karl Popper, one of the greatest scientific philosophers of the twentieth century. And a personal hero of Erin’s!
Abby leaned closer, her face suddenly flushed with excitement. “Please tell me what you saw and heard and felt during the experience. Everything you can remember. Was there a rush of cold or slamming doors or lights flickering on and off before the spirit materialized? What was the ectoplasmic deluge like? Was it actually wet—were your clothes soaked by it? What was its consistency? Did it have an odor or taste? Did the ectoplasm completely disappear when the presence vanished? Did the vomiting happen every night? Was the specter’s appearance, performance, and exit the same every night? Did your interaction with it change anything it did in the present moment or the next time it appeared?”
Erin did her best to explain what happened and how it happened—like a holographic tape loop every night for a year.
“Good grief!” Abby exclaimed when she was finished. “That’s a humanoid Class Four!”
“A class what?”
“It’s an application of Linnaean taxonomy,” Abby explained. “An interest of mine since middle school. One way to make sense of the disparate spectral phenomena is to note all associated facts surrounding their individual appearances and classify each into main and subcategories. I’ve started the process but only really scratched the surface.”
“Science is all about clear, precise definitions,” Erin said. “That is so totally Baconian! Oh my god, I don’t believe it—you’re really into this! I never though I’d meet any—”
“Ahh, ahh, ahh, fat-butt!” The fake sneeze came from behind them on the senior lawn.
They turned to see Carl Lund grinning fiendishly. He was backed by a coterie of nerdish hangers-on.
“Ahh, uhh-ahh, uhh-ahh…” He pretended trying to hold back a second sneeze, waving his hands like flippers, closing his eyes, and wrinkling his nose. When he let it burst forth, it echoed around the quad: “Fat-butt! Fat-butt! Fat-fat-butt-butt! Fat-fat-butt-butt!”
Abby jumped to her feet and rounded the bench with a ferocious growl, swinging her heavy backpack overhead like a mace. There was no doubt she meant business. Carl and friends turned and fled, laughing.
Erin applauded her as she returned and dropped into her seat.
“Do I have a nickname now, too?” Abby said, slightly out of breath.
“I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t be,” Abby said. “Ghost Girl and Fat Butt. We sound like comic book superheroes.”
It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
And collaboration.
Oblivious to everyone else, and mostly in secret, they set about making the first truly scientific study of the paranormal. Like Erin, Abby was very organized, self-motivated, and disciplined. First they read the standard “ghost hunter” works: Spates Catalog, Tobin’s Spirit Guide, and The Roylance Guide. Then they began cataloging everything they could find on the Internet, including the confirmed fraudulent incidents, so they could more easily and quickly identify and discard them. The she
er volume of information was daunting—ninety-six million search results on the word “ghost” alone. Clearly, they needed some help. But whom could they ask? And how? They couldn’t pay someone else to do the work, they didn’t have that kind of allowance money, and they were just kids, what adult would work for them?
Abby finally came up with a novel solution. They both belonged to the Physics Club at Post High, so why not start a Metaphysics Club, too, and have members help with the research? They wouldn’t even have to pay them. Mr. Puccini provisionally allowed them the use of school property because he thought the idea was funny and that it was all about debunking the spiritual and unscientific. But that was only part of it—the public part.
They held three club meetings after school in the chem lab and no one showed up except the janitor, and all he wanted was to wipe down the lab tables and stack the stools. Of course word got around school about the club and the empty lab, and the yahoos like Carl made the most of it. Strangely enough, nasty remarks didn’t seem to bother Erin as much anymore, not with Abby to turn them into their own private jokes.
Erin never told her therapist about the interest in the spirit world she shared with Abby—she had fibbed when the question had come up and said physics and higher math were the hobbies they had in common. She didn’t want her parents to find out about the scientific ghost hunt she had embarked on. They had been so relieved that she had finally found a friend and that she seemed happier about high school in general.
It was weird; she had been thankful when Mrs. Barnard had stopped haunting her, but sometimes wished she had her back, bloody barf and all, to confirm that the experience was real—and that she wasn’t crazy. She knew searching for ghosts in order to prove she wasn’t crazy would make her look deranged in the eyes of her parents and her therapist, as if the years of analysis had all been for nothing. It would crush them to discover what was really going on, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted an explanation for what had happened to her, even though she was afraid of what she might learn about herself in the process.
Even though they used special algorithmic tools they had designed to refine the searches, the task was just too much for two people. Plus they had schoolwork to complete. After a couple of months, they gathered a lot of useful information to make some generalizations about forms of spectral anomalies. But clearly the Baconian approach would take the rest of their lives simply to compile the data, let alone analyze it.
“We’ve got to try a different method,” Erin said. They sat on her bed amid heaps of printouts and charts and empty candy wrappers. The debris flow spilled onto the rug on either side of the bed frame.
“Okay,” Abby said, “I’m listening. What have you got?”
“Screw empiricism. Let’s try rationalism.”
“Descartes, Descartes, Descartes…” Abby chanted, pumping her fist in the air.
“In the absence of evidence to the contrary,” Erin continued, “we assume that ghosts are real and proceed from that as a general rule to test what makes them appear the way they do to us. Bigger-picture stuff. What could they consist of, where do they go when they aren’t here, what keeps them from commuting back and forth when they want?”
“Those hypotheses could all be tested with limited experimental variables, if we had the right gear,” Abby said. “I’m loving this—real science applied to the paranormal. Gilbert, you’re a frickin’ genius!”
Instead of merely collecting data for later analysis, Erin and Abby began extrapolating and synthesizing from the paradigms of conventional science in an attempt to explain the observed phenomena. Those theories included quantum and nonquantum physics, Lagrangian mechanics, string theory, parallel universes, interdimensional membranes, and ionization caused by the friction of cross-dimensional transfer—like a thermonuclear static charge.
Night after night, seven days a week, they stayed up late on the phone giggling and laughing and evaluating their progress.
Erin’s parents thought they were talking about boys.
* * *
As the memory burned a hole in her stomach lining, Erin scowled through the window of her taxi. Apparently that wasn’t the only time Abby let people think she was doing one thing when she was actually doing another. No one was supposed to know about the book.
And now everyone did.
5
Erin got out of the cab. She was in the Bronx, standing before the Kenneth T. Higgins Institute of Science, an academy of higher learning that she had never heard of before. It was housed in a large, run-down building fronted by three arches; pennants above them read Imagine. Invent. Inspire. As she walked past the threadbare patch of front lawn, a lively student discussion deteriorated into a multicombatant brawl.
Indignation over Abbey’s treachery was the fuel that propelled her into the dismal structure, down a narrow flight of stairs, and along a dim, dank basement hallway until she reached the door she sought: number 25. There she halted, suddenly out of steam.
The door was marked PARANORMAL STUDIES LABORATORY—DR. ABIGAIL L. YATES AND DR. JILLIAN HOLTZMANN. A piece of paper was taped to the door. On it, in thick capital letters, were the words DO NOT WRITE STUPID THINGS ON THIS DOOR. The word “stupid” had been added in red marker.
I have to do this, Erin thought. But she didn’t want to. She really, really didn’t want to. Taking a deep, dread-filled breath, she knocked.
“Enter!” a voice called. It shocked her that she knew that voice almost as well as her own. Actually, better, since sound was a wave and the vibrations of one’s own voice were created inside the cranium in the ear canal, then sent to the auditory nerve for interpretation by the brain.
Don’t stall.
She went inside. Blinked. If this was a lab, then the lunatics really had taken over the asylum. She was staring at a huge junkyard for geeks piled with all manner of machines, motors, monitors, ducts and duct tape, speakers, copper wire and steel housings, wires of every color and thickness, rivets, tablets, tools, blue component shelves, yellow component shelves, and scratched-up tables loaded with computers, computer chips and potato chips and chocolate chips, and was that a jet pack?
And there was the damned book itself, proudly on display for all to see. She gulped down a bitter pill of guilt and shame.
“I’ve been waiting a long time,” the voice she remembered said sternly.
“Oh, Abby,” she said. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of—”
“I hope I got more than one wonton out of you.”
She tried to parse that. “Excuse me?”
A deliveryman had come into the room behind her. He was carrying a plastic bag and inside, a soup container. She got it: wontons.
“Oh,” she said.
Then Abby walked into the room from between yellow plastic curtains. She was still the same old Abby: green eyes, little turned-up nose, and a complicated, antenna-like helmet on her head that resembled an old-fashioned hair dryer belonging to a fifties housewife from the planet Xenon. It was covered with toroid magnets, circuits, bristling filaments, coils of wire, and possibly a Ginzu knife or two. Those days, those old days of scientific questing—
Abby spotted Erin and instantly slowed, a fire smoldering in her eyes. Erin had had dreams and nightmares both about this moment of confrontation and retribution. She held her breath.
“Well. My old friend, Erin Gilbert.”
Erin couldn’t look Abby in the eyes. She lowered her gaze to the floor—was that a fishing rod? Why would they have a fishing rod?—and soaked in the tension.
“What’s on your head?” the deliveryman asked her.
“An advancement in science,” Abby replied. She handed him some bills and took his delivery order. “That’ll be all. And please show her the exit. I’m sure she was already looking for it.”
Abby turned away as the confused man took Erin by the elbow and began to lean her to the door. “It’s the same door we came in,” he explained. “It’s very simple, really.”
Erin brushed him off and walked after Abby’s back.
“Abby,” she began, “we need to have a conversation.”
Abby pointed to the thing on her head. “Well, I’m trying to have a conversation with the constant frequency signal I’m relaying through spectral foam. If you can be more interesting than that, be my guest.”
Erin’s attention was diverted. According to their hypothesis, localized ether excitation, known as “spectral foam,” could result in regions of seemingly unphysical occurrences and the appearance of “specters.” Ghosts. Abby had access to spectral foam? How in the world had she managed that?
Erin, refocus, she ordered herself.
“You put the book online without my permission.” There. Plainspoken and to the point.
Abby raised a brow. “I wasn’t aware I needed your permission.”
She was going to make this difficult. Erin was going to have to play through. Just like in miniature golf.
“Yes, you do, Abby. I really need you to take it down.”
Abby defiantly pulled herself to her full height, which wasn’t much. The fire in her eyes reignited. “Absolutely not. It’s a great book. Or have you forgotten?”
Abby sat down and pulled her Chinese food out of the delivery sack. She wasn’t going to make this easy.
“Look, I’m up for tenure right now,” Erin said. “This is the first thing that comes up if you Google my name.” She showed her the book. “If my colleagues see this, I will be the laughingstock of Columbia University.”
Abby was about to pry the lid off her Chinese food. She shrugged. “So?”
“So,” Erin pressed, “there is no experimental backing for anything in that book. No one has ever been able to prove the existence of the paranormal! That book just makes us look crazy.”
Abby lifted her chin. “Guess what? If all theories had experimental backing, we wouldn’t be anywhere! You tell Columbia University that! You give them that from me!”
She looked down at her soup. A scowl shadowed her face. “There is only one wonton! Unbelievable!”
Erin remembered the many all-nighters they had pulled, subsisting on wonton soup and meat-lovers’ pizza. And the time they had gone shopping for the black turtleneck sweaters they were wearing in their author photo …