Ghost Hand

by Ripley Patton

  I began my search. No food on the computer table, probably none in the trunk where he kept his clothes, but beyond the trunk was a stack of several plastic storage tubs with lids which I hadn’t been able to see from the cot. I opened the top one, stuck my ghost hand in as a flashlight, and Bingo! The saltines. More almonds. Some dried fruit. A bag of cinnamon and raisin bagels. Several chocolate bars. Yum.

  I snagged a bagel out of the bag and devoured it, followed by some dried apricots and a chocolate bar, all of which just barely took the edge off my hunger. Maybe there was something more substantial (like a turkey dinner with walnut stuffing) in the bottom tub.

  I set the top tub to the side and removed the lid of the bottom one, again using my ghost hand to light up the contents. This one didn’t have food. It was a keepsake box, or at least that’s what my mother would have called it—a box full of odds and ends, stuff that looked like junk but was obviously very important to someone. I knew immediately that I should put the lid back on that box.

  But I didn’t.

  I reached inside and pulled out a photo that was lying on top.

  It was a snapshot of a boy and a girl, standing side by side, shoulders touching, faces somber, eyes full of something startling I couldn’t even name. Determination? Togetherness? Desperation?

  Behind them it looked like there was some kind of dilapidated building or shed.

  The boy was obviously Marcus, three or four years younger than he was now (maybe fourteen). The girl was probably a little bit younger than that. She looked so much like Marcus—same dark complexion, same dark hair (but longer), same brooding eyes—there was no question in my mind that they were related.

  The photo was strangely overexposed, washed out to a blinding white in the lower left corner that obscured the girl’s arm and part of her torso.

  I turned the photo over to the back, hoping to find some identifying information written there.

  “What are you doing?” Marcus demanded from behind me.

  “I was just looking for something to eat,” I stammered, dropping the photo into the tub and slamming the lid back on.

  “There was food in the top one,” he said, his voice hard and cold.

  “I know,” I said, stacking the top tub back on to the bottom one. “I’m sorry. I was just really hungry, and I thought there might be something more than bagels in that one.”

  “Well, I brought you some dinner,” he said, his voice softening.

  I looked up to see that he was indeed holding a steaming plate of something that smelled delicious.

  “Oh, thank God!” I stood up and took the plate from him. It looked like some kind of goulash, full of beans, noodles, onion, tomatoes, and little bits of bacon.

  Marcus pulled a fork wrapped in a paper napkin out of his back jeans pocket and handed it to me.

  I crossed to my cot, sat, and began shoveling the amazing substance into my mouth.

  “So, I take it you’re feeling better,” he said as he checked his tubs, making sure the lids were secure. I got the message; I was forgiven this time, but there shouldn’t be a next time.

  “Not too bad,” I mumbled between mouthfuls. “Just a normal headache now, instead of an uber one.”

  “Good,” he said, lighting the lantern on top of the trunk. Its glow started out soft and pale, echoing the tones of my ghost hand and mingling with them.

  Could that really be the same spotlight that had been drilling me in the head last night?

  Marcus crossed the tent to sit in the camp chair, our knees almost touching. “We have a lot to talk about,” he said, leaning forward.

  “Yes, we do,” I agreed, cramming more goulash into my mouth. “You talk. I’ll eat.”

  “Um. Let’s see. Where do I start?”

  “My ghost hand,” I said, looking at him over the top of the fork being wielded by the very glowy hand I was referring to. “What did you do to fix it back in Calculus?”

  “Ever heard of the Vulcan nerve pinch?” he asked, smiling.

  “You gave me a Vulcan nerve pinch?”

  “Kind of. I pinched the median nerve in your wrist. I wasn’t even sure it would work, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time.”

  “Show me,” I said, setting my plate down on the cot and presenting my wrist to him.

  “The nerve runs here,” he said, reaching out toward my ghost hand without the slightest hesitation. He pinched my wrist, his thumb between the two knobby bones on top, and his index finger underneath. “It’s almost like taking someone’s pulse but the finger placement is reversed, and you have to press pretty hard, but it can make people drop things.”

  “And you know this why?” I asked, distracted by the softness of his fingertips, of his warm hand cupped over mine. He could take his hand away, now that he’d shown me. But he didn’t.

  “Anatomy’s kind of a hobby of mine,” he said, stroking his finger along the inside of my wrist to the edge of my stump. “Your median nerve stops here, because of your PSS.” His touch seemed to run all the way up my arm into my shoulder and back down to the tips of my ghost fingers.

  “Anatomy’s kind of a hobby of mine.” Was that some kind of corny pick-up line? Because if it was, it was sort of working.

  “So, if my nerve ends at my wrist, how could that even work?” I asked, forcing the tremble out of my voice. What was wrong with me? It wasn’t like I’d never been touched by a guy before. I’d been on dates and held hands and kissed. Still, it had been a while. For years I’d had this huge crush on Emma’s brother Grant. When I was in eighth grade and Grant was in ninth, we’d made out in the Campbells’ garage, something we’d both agreed never to tell Emma. When I told her a month later, she already knew because Grant had told her the day after the “garage incident.” My freshman year, I’d dated this guy, Ryan Mulligan, but that had only lasted a few weeks because he had been a total asshole. After that, my dad had gotten sick and, after he’d died, guys just seemed sort of immature and pointless.

  “I don’t know,” Marcus said, shrugging and letting go of my wrist.

  For a second I couldn’t even remember what we’d been talking about.

  “Amputees sometimes still feel their limbs, even after they’re gone,” he continued. “They feel pain or tingling or a tickle. They feel things only nerves could translate. Maybe that’s why it worked. When I pinched your wrist, some part of your brain told your hand to let go, even without a nerve to deliver the message.”

  “Phantom limbs,” I said. His ghost limb theory made a certain kind of sense. Cold water had worked in the hospital to snap my hand back, perhaps in the same way his pinch had. Still, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. I’d been so sure that Marcus really knew something. Some secret way to keep my hand in check or cure it from going into people. But something still didn’t make sense. “So, why weren’t you surprised when my hand—did what it did?” I asked. “You weren’t freaked out at all.”

  “I have friends with PSS,” he said, shrugging. “I’m used to weird shit like that.”

  Friends. Plural. He’d just said he had friends with PSS. “The guys on the ATVs.” I realized aloud, feeling stunned.

  “Yeah,” he nodded and grinned at my obvious surprise. “And someone else,” he added, his face closing up a little, his eyes growing serious. “You remember that friend I told you about, the one who got captured by the CAMFers, and escaped, and told us what they were doing?”

  I nodded.

  “His name was David, and he was my best friend.”

  Was. Past Tense. But hadn’t he escaped?

  “While they had him,” Marcus went on, “he saw a list with his name at the top. A list of eight teenagers with PSS. Teenagers the CAMFers were going to go after, each with a date next to it, a target date for when they’d go after them, though I didn’t figure that out until later. Anyway, after David escaped, he wrote down that list, and he gave it to me.”

  Marcus’s best friend had PSS, and he’d been t
aken by the CAMFers. That certainly explained a lot.

  “What about his parents? Did he tell them? I mean, after he came back.”

  “No,” Marcus shook his head. “David’s parents were dead. He was a ward of the State. And the police had been in on the whole thing,” his voice dripped with contempt. “It was a cop that handed him over to the CAMFers in the first place. I told you, that’s how they work. They infiltrate the existing power structure. Cops. Politicians. Fire Chiefs.”

  “So, what happened to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Marcus looked away. “He gave me the list, and a few days later he disappeared again.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. How would I feel if Emma suddenly disappeared? I couldn’t imagine that. Didn’t want to imagine that.

  “I don’t think they got him,” he said. “I think he just went underground. He didn’t trust people.”

  “But he trusted you,” I said.

  “I guess,” Marcus said, looking uncomfortable.

  “And you had the list. So, what did you do with it?”

  “At first, I didn’t know what to do. Then I started looking up the names on-line. Finding their locations, phone numbers, addresses, contacting them through social networks when I could. The second name on the list, the one after David’s, was this guy in California. I decided to go down there for spring break and see if I could find him. I didn’t know what I would say if I did. I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”

  “And your parents just let you go, no questions asked?”

  “It’s hard to ask from the grave,” Marcus said, looking me full in the eyes.

  I didn’t look away or apologize, like others had done so often to me. I had known from the beginning that Marcus and I had something in common, some indefinable mark of the soul that some people call loss. All I could do was nod and return his gaze. It was all I had to do. But there were still so many questions to ask.

  “So, you went all the way to California from Chicago?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “From Portland, Oregon.”

  “I thought you were from Chicago.”

  “I’m from a lot of places,” Marcus said, gesturing at our surroundings. “I live in a tent.”

  I looked around, the realization slowly dawning on me; this wasn’t a tent he camped in temporarily. Marcus wasn’t just vacationing in the woods. This was his home, and it had been for a long time. Yes, I had experienced the loss of my father, but I’d always had my mom, and the Campbells, and a roof over my head, and a quaint hometown surrounding me with security.

  He must have read the shock on my face.

  “It’s not that bad,” he said, looking around the tent fondly. “It’s way better than juvie. Or foster care. At least now that I’m eighteen, I don’t have a case worker breathing down my neck.”

  He’d said David had been a ward of the State. Had they met in juvie or just on the street? I tried to fit that in my brain—Marcus was homeless, and parentless, and he lived in a tent, but that was so out of joint with who I’d thought he was—some cocky city boy—that I just couldn’t make it fit.

  “So, what happened in California?” I asked, as I picked up my plate and ate some more, but slower this time. I was still hungry, and I felt exhausted, and my head was starting to hurt again, but there was no way I was going to let Marcus see that just when he was starting to open up.

  “I met the guy. We hung out for a couple of days. Eventually, I told him about the list. He was pretty skeptical until the CAMFers showed up. They tried to take us both, and we got away, but just barely. It scared the shit out of him though, and he finally believed me, so we decided to get the next guy on the list together. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last few months. Following that list and collecting the people on it before the CAMFers can. That’s who my friends are. What this camp is. The guys call it Piss Camp.”

  “Piss Camp?”

  “You know,” he said, “P.S.S. Piss Camp.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said, “It’s just not funny.” I was having trouble believing they were out there, these guys with PSS. Psyche Sans Soma was extremely rare and it hadn’t been around that long. The first documented case had been in Norway four years before I was born when a baby girl named Thea Frandsen had entered the world with a PSS foot. I was the only recorded case in Illinois, and there were fewer than two hundred in the United States, fewer than a thousand in the world. And every last one of us was under the age of 22.

  So, even though, in my head, I had always known there were people like me out there, I had never truly fathomed what it would feel like, what it would mean to meet one. “You keep saying guys,” I pointed out to Marcus. “What about girls? Aren’t there any girls on this list?”

  “Um, yeah,” he said, looking at me oddly, “there are.”

  “There are? So what? You haven’t gotten to them yet?”

  “Well,” Marcus said, taking the fork and empty plate out of my hands and giving me one of his weighty stares, “we have now.”

  It took me a moment to understand.

  But only a moment.

  He meant me.

  I was on the list.

  17

  EXPLANATIONS IN A TENT

  “My name is on the list,” I heard myself say it. It wasn’t a question. Of course my name was on the list. That was the reason Marcus had showed up in my Calc class out of the blue just before the CAMFers had come after me. And yet, the idea that my name was on that list hadn’t even occurred to me the entire time he’d been talking. Everything he’d been telling me had just seemed like a story.

  A story about him.

  Not about me.

  Marcus didn’t say anything. He just sat there looking at me.

  “You never were a transfer.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “I dropped out of school when I was sixteen, but it’s pretty easy to enroll in a small town school and just tell them your transcripts are on the way.”

  “So, why not tell me all this from the very beginning? Why all the cryptic bullshit?”

  “If I’d told you any of this at the beginning, would you have believed me?”

  “No,” I said. “Probably not.” I barely believed him now, and I suddenly felt sick and achy and on the verge of tears.

  “Hey, it’s going be okay,” Marcus said, reaching out and taking my ghost hand in his. He did it so naturally, as if it was something he’d been doing all his life. I had never met anyone so oblivious to my PSS. Even with my dad and Emma, there had always been an underlying awareness that they noticed my hand. It was different—different than other hands, different than their own hands, and they loved me, so that difference didn’t mean “freakish” or “worse”. But there was still no denying that it was different.

  But with Marcus there wasn’t even a hint of an awareness of that. Like he was blind, unable to physically see it. Or feel it.

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me at first,” he said, looking down at my hands. “No one does. And I knew it would be even harder to convince a girl that I wasn’t just some kind of whack-job. But that isn’t your fault. If you want someone to blame, blame me. I should have thrown you over my shoulder in that hallway at school and carried you out of there.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Honestly, I was afraid you’d kick my ass.”

  “Really?” I said, emitting something halfway between a laugh and a sob.

  “A little, yeah. But mostly I was worried about blowing my cover before I’d convinced you I wasn’t a lunatic. I also didn’t want the CAMFers to see us together if they were watching you. I didn’t want to panic them into snatching you before I did.”

  “You didn’t snatch me,” I protested. “I was already leaving the hospital. You just came along for the ride.”

  “Fine, you snatched me then,” he said, that cocky smile playing at his lips. He was definitely flirting with me and, as if to prove it, his index finger brushed the inside of my wrist, maki
ng it hard to think. Still, something was niggling at the back of my mind. Something big that had to do with us leaving the hospital.

  “Oh my God!” I said, yanking my hand from his. “What about my mom? She has no idea where I am. And Emma. And her parents. They must be freaking out.”

  “They think you ran away,” he said. “Here, I’ll show you,” He got up and retrieved his laptop, bringing it back to set it in my lap. He pushed a button, and the inbox of my e-mail account popped up on the screen. I had twenty-three unread messages.

  “Hey, how’d you get into my account?”

  “Nose is a computer geek,” Marcus explained, pointing to an e-mail with the subject line: Olivia, PLEASE answer this. It was from my mom. I clicked on it.

  Olivia,

  If you are reading this, please come home or contact me so I know you’re safe. I am staying at my office. Or, if you are too upset with me, the Campbells are eager to hear from you, and you can stay there until we work this out, as I know we can. I love you.

  Your mom.

  So, my mom thought I’d run away because of the hand thing or because of Dr. Fineman, or both. Well, that was pretty much what I’d intended to do. It just hadn’t exactly gone down the way I’d planned. I stared at the e-mail, trying to figure out how it made me feel. My mother was worried for me. Or she was just worried about how it looked for the town psychologist to be the parent of a runaway teen. She was trying to assure me that if I came back we could work things out, but we never worked things out. And now there was the issue of my ghost hand going weird, which she would never drop. If I knew her, I knew that much.

  “I know this might sound bad,” Marcus said over the top of the laptop, “but this actually plays to our advantage. If she thinks you ran away, maybe the CAMFers do too. It takes a long time to embed someone like a Fire Chief, and they won’t throw that away lightly. They’ll keep him in place until they’re sure you aren’t coming back. That may buy us some time.”