by K. A. Holt
Someone interrupts, “But we always have fun in your class, Mr. Robertson!” and everyone laughs.
Mr. Robertson clears his throat and says in a deep, grave, booming voice. “Of course, you do.” A few people whistle and hoot in excitement, but I have no idea why. Mr. Robertson continues in his grave voice, “For the next couple of classes, we are going to explore the physics behind ghost hunting.” Someone who’s sitting next to the light switch flashes the lights a couple of times and everyone laughs. I feel my heart start beating a little faster. “We’re going to learn what exactly ghost hunters look for when they’re searching for life after death, and we’re going to use our scientific minds to ask ourselves: Can physics really explain the unexplainable?”
The class is full of murmurs and excitement. My mouth has gone dry. I can’t believe this. It’s like a school-sanctioned Ouija board unit. Now, more than ever, I don’t want to think about ghosts. And even though I don’t believe Clara is lurking somewhere in the clouds, I hate to even imagine the possibility she might be trapped somewhere trying to communicate with me but is unable to get through. Stupid Twitch and stupid Taylor made me think, for just a second, that she was out there somewhere, and it was both the most wonderful and most terrifying feeling ever. It makes my stomach flop just to remember.
“If the next few classes are going to make any of you uncomfortable,” Mr. Robertson says, staring directly at me, “feel free to let me know after class. I can give you an alternative assignment and you can work independently in the library.”
Yeah, great, like the girl who’s already known as the One with the Dead Sister is really going to be the only one who excuses herself from ghost class. Can you imagine the pitying looks I’d get from everyone? Thanks to Twitch and Taylor, I know with absolute surety that ghosts don’t exist. I can handle this.
The next day speeds by like a freight train headed for a cliff. It’s the first time I’ve ever dreaded physics, and my feet drag as I walk over to the high school. The woods whisper in the wind off to the side, and I think about ducking in there to hide. But no. I trust Mr. Robertson. I think. I mean, physics is math. And math is solvable. No mysteries. Right? I take a deep breath. Everyone else might try to use these lessons to prove that ghosts exist, but I’m going to work to prove they don’t. I square my shoulders and march into school.
Twitch is already at our table for once, and he looks at me like Ratface does after I yell at him for eating my shoelaces. Fine. Let him look that way. I’m never talking to him again, so he’s just going to have to get used to it. I sit on my stool and turn my back to him so I don’t have to see his dumb face or his stupid helmet or any of him at all.
Mr. Robertson launches into a lecture on Einstein’s theory of relativity. He writes E=MC2 on the board. He talks about how energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so does that mean once a person has been alive their energy is floating in a little ball somewhere, a ghost of their former selves?
I raise my hand. “Mr. Robertson, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Everyone turns quickly to stare at me.
“Excuse me?” he says. His mustache is very, very sparkly today.
“Well, what I mean is …” I say, “if energy is neither created nor destroyed, then when we’re created as humans we’re using energy that’s already been around, right? So when we die, that energy goes back to where it came from, don’t you think? We all came from stardust, and we’re all going back to stardust.”
The class is completely silent.
“Stardust, huh?” Mr. Robertson says as my words hover over everyone.
Stardust.
Did I really just say that?
My mind immediately goes to the woods, to the tiny golden stars painted all over the mural. Is Clara stardust? I feel my eyes start to swim.
I gather up my stuff in a rush and dash out of the classroom.
“Amelia?” Mr. Robertson shouts after me, but I don’t stop. I run all the way to the woods, pushing through the branches and leaves until I get to the right spot. I throw down my backpack and heave myself onto the rock next to the art project Twitch and everyone have been working on for so long.
I stare at the tiny stars, the deep blue, the jagged teeth.
Can Clara be nowhere and everywhere all at once?
Bits of dust float in the air, riding on sunbeams that cascade through the tree branches. They are golden, too, like tiny daytime stars taking flight. I hold my hand out, and the little bits of dust and dirt dance around my fingers in the brightness and heat of a slant of sun.
“Amelia.”
It’s Twitch, and he just about gives me a legitimate heart attack.
“TWITCH!” I shout, jumping up. “You scared me!” A wave of dizziness makes me wobble as my breath tries to catch up with my heart rate.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for everything.”
I hold up my hand. I don’t want to hear it.
“I—” he starts, but I point at him.
“No,” I interrupt. “I don’t want you here. I’m … I’m thinking about the theory of relativity, okay?”
He holds up his hands. “Fine. I’ll leave you to think. But, Amelia, I really am very sorry.” He pushes his way through the trees and is gone. I hate that my first instinct is actually to call him back over. I know I said I didn’t want him here, but if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t really want to be alone either. I don’t call for him, though. I let him go.
“Oh, Clara,” I whisper. “If you’re everywhere, why do I feel so alone all the time?”
“Ready?” Mom peeks her head into my room.
I look up from the homework spread out all over my desk. “Not going,” I say. “Why are you going? I thought you hated Kite Night.”
Mom is awkwardly holding a box kite with reflective tape all over it. Her eyes are bright. “Dad was right about the lake. Maybe he’s right about this, too. Why don’t you come with us?”
“I was going to go,” I say. “But ever since the thing with Taylor and Twitch, eh, I’m just not feeling it.” Kite Night has never been a huge thing for me. Not like with Mom and Dad. I’ve seen pictures from when they were kids and went, and then the pictures from when they took Clara and me when we were super tiny. I guess it used to be a big deal for them. Mom hasn’t been since … well … she hasn’t been in a long time.
“Fair enough,” Mom says, and I think I might fall out of my chair. She isn’t going to argue with me? Tell me I need fresh air for a fresh soul or something silly like that? “If you change your mind, you know where to find us.”
“Eating delicious corn dogs and flying ridiculous kites and winning at dancing!” Dad yells upstairs.
“If I change my mind, I know where to find you,” I say. “Have fun. Don’t get into any trouble.”
Mom laughs. “We’ll try not to. Though Dad is going to be handing out free samples of his bacon chocolate chip cookies, and I’m pretty sure he needs a permit for that.”
“Then I’ll be here to bail you out of jail if I have to,” I say. Mom gives me a thumbs-up and pulls my door shut. Wow. That conversation was just … almost fun, and not full of arguing? Huh.
I look back down at my homework, but my concentration is broken. I take Clara’s letter, which is getting pretty beat-up, and I flatten it out on my desk. It doesn’t actually say “go to a dance with Billy,” it just says ask him to a dance. So, technically, I can still cross this off the list, right? I’m mulling over the semantics when I hear a tap-tap-tapping at my window. I slide the curtains to the side just as a handful of pebbles scatter over the surface, sending me back on my heels, startled. I go closer to the window and look down.
Twitch.
He’s pretending like he’s going to throw the softball next. Down at his feet are two gloves. I shake my head. He makes an exaggerated pout. I shake my head harder. He falls to his knees and holds his hands up like he’s begging or praying or both. I sigh and unlock the window. I push it open an
d stand there, hands on my hips, shivering in the breeze.
“Catch?” he shouts up at me.
I don’t say anything.
“Come on, Amelia. Please? Just for a minute? It’s about to get dark anyway.”
In that moment I feel really, really tired. I don’t want to hate Twitch. I don’t want to hate Taylor. But what do I want? “Don’t move,” I say down to Twitch. I close the window, grab a sweater, and go downstairs. Once I’m on the front porch I wave at him to come over and sit beside me.
“Here’s the thing,” I say, after a few seconds of us sitting quietly next to each other. “I know you said you were sorry. I just … I don’t know why it doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t know what to do about that.”
Twitch tosses the softball from one hand to the other. “I could stand on Mr. Robertson’s desk and shout to our whole physics class about how I did a stupid thing and now I’m sorry. I could take out an ad in the newspaper. I could invent a time machine, go back in time, not do the Ouija board thing, come back and tell you I didn’t do it, and you’d be super confused because it had never happened. Though I guess if I invented a time machine, I’d go back and stop Clara from getting in that boat. But then you and I wouldn’t be friends.”
I snatch the ball from his hands. “Time travel is complicated.”
“Everything is complicated,” he says, standing up and putting on a glove. He jogs down the front walk and punches the glove. “Right here. Hit me as hard as you can.”
I throw the ball with a ferocity I’ve never tried before, and it slams into the mitt with a satisfying pow. Twitch looks at me and smiles. “Again,” he says.
Over and over I throw the ball as hard as I can, until I get lost in the rhythm. Wind up, release, step back, catch. My shoulder starts to ache, my fingers are going numb, but it feels incredible to fling this angry energy out of my body.
“Did I ever tell you why people call me Twitch?” Twitch asks, throwing the ball to me a little harder than before.
“No,” I say.
“Clara never said anything about it?” Wham. The ball lands hard in my mitt.
“She didn’t,” I say, throwing it back.
“When we were in third grade, Clara and I were at school walking together to bring the attendance sheet to the front office when I collapsed. I don’t remember it at all. I only remember waking up in the hospital after. It was my first epileptic seizure.”
“You have epilepsy?” I had no idea. And now I feel this awful dripping, sinking feeling down to my toes because I know Clara, and I think I know where his story is going. The ball lands even harder in my glove, and my palm stings through the leather.
Twitch pushes up his sleeve and shows me the bracelet I’ve always seen but never paid close attention to. “That’s why I wear this.” Then he knocks on his ubiquitous shark-mouth helmet. “And this. Though, technically, my medicine works great now and I don’t have to wear the helmet like when I was little. I still like it anyway. It makes me feel, I don’t know, safe or something.”
I toss the ball back. His Adam’s apple bobs for a second, then he continues.
“Apparently, after the ambulance took me away, Clara told everyone I’d had a ‘Twitchy attack.’ She showed them how I’d seized up and shaken and wet my pants. When I came back to school a few days later, everyone welcomed me with imitations of my shaking and whispers about my pants wetting.” The ball pounds into my glove. I throw it back and give my hand a shake, to try to disperse the painful tingles. “It took a while to get my epilepsy under control, so I had a few more seizures at school and I had to start wearing a helmet. A real freak show. And lots of Twitchy attacks to entertain my classmates.”
“That’s so awful,” I say. “Why were you friends with her after that? Why do you let people call you Twitch?”
Twitch laughs, but it’s sharp and not the ha-ha kind of laugh I usually hear from him. “There’s not a lot of ‘let’ to it, Amelia. People are going to say what they’re going to say. It took me a long time, but I learned that instead of getting mad, I had to take over the nickname on my own terms. Does that make sense?” The ball slams into my mitt and I wince.
“So, you asked them to stop and they didn’t,” I say.
“Yes, but it became more than that. I wanted to control this mean thing and turn it into something boring, something that would melt all the meanness out of it. So, they called me Twitchy, and I started calling myself Twitch. I turned it into something that belonged to me. I introduced myself that way to teachers and new kids and everyone. YOU didn’t even know my name was Billy.”
“That’s because I didn’t know Billy was a nickname for William!”
He smiles and shakes his head. “I took control of the name and, by doing that, I took away its power to hurt me. I was mad at Clara for a long time, but we were eventually friends again—because eventually I believed her when she said she was sorry, and because I took the thing she did to me and turned it into my own thing.”
I toss the ball back to him even though it’s getting super dark now and hard to see. I thought I’d known how his story was going to end, but I’d actually only figured out part of it. “Are you telling me that I should start calling myself Ouija and keep being mad at you for a while?” I try for a smile.
“No,” he says, with a real laugh this time. “I’m saying that people can be mad at each other and they can forgive each other and they can be mad at each other again and they can do stupid things and they can do smart things. The best part of being a human, Amelia, is being a human. We are all whiteboards that can be covered in terrible words, erased, and re-covered in better words.” I lower my glove a tiny bit, feeling that sink in, just as he throws the ball really fast. It clips the edge of my mitt, takes out the wind chimes hanging from the top of the porch, and smashes through the plate glass window right into the kitchen.
My mouth flies open as my head swings from Twitch to the smashed window and back to Twitch again. He drops his glove, runs up to me, and puts his hands on his head.
“I hope my parents are as good at forgiving as you are,” I say as I start to laugh. Then he starts to laugh, too, and soon we’re both buckled over laughing so hard we can barely breathe.
“Are you going to say, ‘You should see the other guy’? Because I don’t want to see the other guy,” Dad says, coming up behind us. He’s holding a couple of bags, and his arms hang limply at his sides. He gives Mom a helpless look. Her mouth hangs open much like mine and Twitch’s just did.
“Are you at least friends again?” Mom says, rubbing her forehead.
Twitch looks to me and shrugs. I take a deep breath and say in a quiet voice, “Yes?”
“Well, good,” Mom says. “Then it will be more fun when you rapidly, rapidly, RAPIDLY work together to raise the money to fix this.”
“William,” Dad says, shaking his head. “Go around back and find the big blue tarp in the shed. Amelia, go get the broom and dustpan.” Dad goes inside, and Mom follows him. They drop the bags they’re carrying and stare at us through the former window. “Go!” Dad says. It looks like he’s trying to be mad, but really he wants to laugh. Kind of.
Twitch and I both disappear to the shed as fast as we can.
“Good Morning, Nolan Ryan,” Dad says as he wanders downstairs and into the kitchen, still in his pajama pants. His hair stands up all over his head, making him look like a cartoon character that’s just been struck by lightning.
“Who’s Nolan Ryan?” I ask, pouring myself a glass of orange juice. The tarp covering the window makes an ominous whap whap whap noise as the wind outside tries to rip it loose from all the duct tape holding it to the window frame.
“Amazing pitcher for the Texas Rangers,” Dad says. “Probably broke dozens of windows in his day.” Dad is trying to start the coffee, but is not quite awake yet. Coffee beans go everywhere as he tries to pour them into the grinder, and he curses under his breath. Dad has never been much of a morning guy. For a w
hile after Clara died, he wasn’t an anything guy. He just never got out of bed. He got some medicine, though, to help with that, and now he’s back to not being much of a morning guy.
“Technically, Twitch is Nolan Ryan, then,” I say, helping him clean up the spilled coffee beans.
“Technically, I am going to flip my lid if we don’t get this window fixed as soon as possible. Did you sleep at all last night?” He rubs his eyes, and I wonder if that same move is something he did when he was little. He kind of looks like a pouty kid right now.
I shrug. “I slept okay. Why?” Right on cue the tarp makes the whap whap whap noise again, and Dad gestures to it with a frustrated arm fling.
“That! That noise! All night, whap whap whap. I can’t take it, Amelia.”
“It’s going to take a little while to figure out how to pay for a new window, though, Dad,” I say, popping some bread into the toaster. “It’s not like Twitch and I can just whip out a credit card and get it fixed.”
Dad points at me and frowns. “I feel like your voice has more of an edge than it needs to, ma’am. You guys broke it, and you’re going to have to pay for it. However”—his pointing hand is now stroking his beard thoughtfully—“I do have a credit card, so here’s what’s going to happen.”
Mom comes downstairs now, all dressed for work. She steps on some coffee beans we missed and they crunch under her heels. She kisses me on the top of my head as she goes over to the coffeepot that is busy grunting and whirring as it works to create its addicting elixir.
Dad kisses Mom quickly and then turns his attention back to me. “I am going to pay for a new window. Think of it as a loan. You and Twitch will owe me the full amount of the bill. Possibly I will charge you interest.”
I’m about to protest, but Dad holds up his hand. “In order to pay me back—and, Amelia, this is nonnegotiable—you and Twitch will work at Pits ’n’ Pieces after school and on the weekends until your debt is paid.”
“Ooh, good plan,” Mom says, stealing a bite of my toast.