One afternoon Trevor received a notification on his dating app from someone named Rachel W. who looked oddly familiar, though he couldn't remember where he'd seen her before. She was a handsome woman in her mid-fifties, with her hair dyed black, and a broad and slightly sarcastic looking smile.
Where did he know her from, anyway?
"Can I ask a weird question?" said the message.
How weird are we going to get here? "Sure," he typed, laboriously.
"Are you the Trevor Lefkowitz who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997?"
Yes, yes he was. What was he going to do about that? While he deliberated, another message appeared.
"It's me, Rachel Weiss."
Oh, good old Rach. There'd never been any kind of romance there, but Rachel had been a good buddy to him.
And he suddenly realized that Rachel had no idea he was dead. For her, this was just a funny story about running into an old classmate on a dating app.
"Hey, Rach," he typed. "Still living on donuts?" After all, where could the harm be, right? They'd exchange a few texts, he'd feel relatively human for a few hours, and then they'd both move on. She'd be confused when she learned the whole story, but lots of people got catfished.
"Ha ha," she responded. "You know, you've got your age set to 30-45. Unless you were the youngest guy there…"
The age thing was debatable. Was he the age he died forever, or did he just keep getting older forever? "Oops, will fix," he texted.
"Liar. What are you up to?"
It's really hard to explain, Rach. "You go first," he typed.
She told him the sort of story that he would have expected to hear from Rachel—a big success at Goldman Sachs, retiring young after making her number, and then getting ridiculously bored. Now she was starting up her own angel investment fund.
He did feel a little jealous, but he tried to set it aside.
"I see you're up in the Hudson Valley, but do you ever come to the city?" she texted. "I want to meet up for coffee and pick your brain."
Suddenly he had a vision of himself and Rachel, sitting in a coffeehouse in Midtown, older and greyer than they'd been, talking business together. He wanted it so badly he could feel his stomach cramp with longing.
"20 years ago I had an accident," he slowly texted. "Now I can't really leave the house and I can't talk by phone. I can text anytime you want."
No response. Too much, he thought. He shouldn't have seemed too eager.
"Do you email?" she texted. "Are you open to consulting? I'd like to hire you to look at a prospectus for me, for the fund. Do you mind?"
Numbly, he typed in the email.
"Ha ha I can't believe you still use Hotmail. LMK Trev."
#
He tore down the stairs, calling for Sam.
"Wait, what? What is it?" She emerged into the foyer from the kitchen.
"Sam, I've got a job, and I need your help. My old friend Rach, she's a friend from business school, she wants to hire me to look over a prospectus. She emailed it to me, so that's okay, but I need a way for her to pay me, so can you get me access to the business bank account? I want this to look really normal. Can we make this look normal? Did you set up the LLC like I told you?" She was starting to look a little overwhelmed, and it was annoying him. "Come on, keep up, Ohio."
She frowned.
Had he just insulted her? Possibly. "Sorry, Sam. I'm just—I was on the dating app—"
"Who are you talking to?" asked Jay.
"Trevor. He just heard from an old friend, on the dating app."
"He's still on the dating app? I thought he was dating Bela," said Jay.
"Yes! I'm still on the dating app, Bela's still on the dating app—"
"He says he's still on the dating app so Bela doesn't feel she has to be exclusive," said Sam.
Was that what he'd been saying? Actually, yes it was. Sam was good at this kind of thing. Deep breath and slow down, he thought. "Thanks, Sam. An old friend from business school recognized me. We got to chatting, and she wants to hire me to do some consulting."
Sam looked at Jay. "And now an old friend wants to hire him."
"She wants me to look over a prospectus for a company her angel investment firm is considering."
Sam nodded. "Finance stuff. Trevor, doesn't she know you're dead?"
"I don't think she'd try to hire me if she did?" Actually, all of Rachel's reactions would probably have been different if she knew she was talking to a ghost. Like, top to bottom.
"You know," said Jay, "You'd think one of the benefits of being dead is not having to hold a job."
"You'd think," said Trevor, as if Jay could hear him. "But I feel like I have all these skills, and they're just rusting away out here. I think this will work."
Sam smiled. "I can tell it's important to you. We'll figure it out."
#
Reading the prospectus had been a little harder than Trevor anticipated, partly because he wasn't sure he understood the product the company offered. What was a blockchain, anyway? Only twenty years had passed, but everything had changed so much. He'd read as much background material as he could on the internet, but eventually realized that the product didn't matter; the core flaw of the business was the crappy marketing plan. Slowly and deliberately he typed out his email and sent it off to Rachel.
Then he'd gone out to sit in the driveway, on the edge of the fountain, in his favorite spot. Sass was there already, but that was okay—Sass was good company, even when Trevor was feeling quiet. Actually Sass seemed to enjoy his company better when he was being quiet.
Time melted away in the way it often did for ghosts. Often he'd realize that hours had passed without him being aware of it; the sun had jumped in the sky, or he woke up in the midafternoon. Having Sam and Jay around kept him better able to keep track of things.
And then a rental car pulled up in the driveway. Out came a handsome, middle-aged woman, and with a jolt Trevor realized it was Rachel, in the flesh. She was heavier, and more lined in the face, and her hair was dyed, but then it had been something like twenty-five years since he'd seen her.
He was usually okay with the idea that the face he saw in the mirror never changed. But it struck him now that he was sad, and sorry, that he'd never had the chance to get used up, to accumulate the scars and scabs of daily living, to become his real self.
"Do you know who that is?" asked Sass.
"It's my friend Rachel," said Trevor.
"She looks really angry," said Sass.
As soon as Sass said it, the anger dropped from Rachel's face, replaced with a bland friendliness. She went right up to the door and knocked.
Sam opened up. "Oh, hello."
"Hello," said Rachel. "Are you Sam Arondekar?"
"Yes," said Sam. "That's me!"
"I'm Rachel Weiss, and I'm interested in planning an event at your B&B? May I come in?"
Trevor had known Rachel for a very long time, and he could already tell this was not going to be good. He followed Rachel in, wondering what exactly she was thinking.
Sam, on the other hand, seemed to have no idea what she was in for. Trevor was sure she'd recognized Rachel—she'd seen her picture—but she seemed to think that this was like the situation with Pete's family, where all she needed to do was pass on some chipper messages from the deceased.
Rachel put up with being shown the foyer, the dining room, and the living room before interjecting. "So," said Rachel. "Funny story. I got back in contact with someone who said he was an old friend of mine. We did some work together, and he asked for payment to go towards this B&B."
"Did you like what I wrote?" asked Trevor. He knew she couldn't hear him, but he couldn't help it.
"Did he do a good job?" asked Sam.
"He had no idea what a blockchain was, but otherwise—that's not the point. The point is my old friend said he'd been in a terrible accident twenty years ago. And I wanted to find out what had happened, because I wanted to visit him, because I figured he was just being vain, because he was always—anyway, there was no accident. He died twenty years ago, right in this house, in an incredibly stupid way."
Was Rachel crying? Oh, shit. "Rach—" he said.
Rachel wiped her eyes. "But that's not the point. The point is, I don't know what the hell you were trying to do here. Why were you pretending to be Trevor? He wasn't famous. He was just some guy. He was kind of an asshole, but he was my friend, and that was a cruel thing to do."
At some point, Jay had come up next to Sam and taken her hand. "I think maybe you should leave."
"No, wait," said Sam. "Rachel, I'll tell you the truth. I can see ghosts, and this house has several of them, people who died in and around this house. Trevor is standing right there. I can pass on a message if you like."
Trevor liked Sam's cheery optimism, but sometimes, optimism was really close to just being dumb.
Rachel's voice raised a few decibels. "What the hell is wrong with you people? Is this some kind of unhinged marketing ploy? Come to our B&B and talk to our ghosts? These people had families, and friends, and lives, and some of us are still around, and this is not going to happen."
Trevor could tell that Rachel had left reason behind. He grabbed the back of her jacket, and then his ghostly hand broke through the fabric. Holding things got harder when he was emotional.
"Who the fuck just grabbed me?" Rachel said, turning around. He jumped out of the way so she didn't walk through him.
Good, there was a pad of paper and pen on the table in front of the mirror. He snatched up the pen and scrawled, "Rach, it's me," but he was too agitated to hold the pen. It slid through his hand, fell through his body, and landed on the ground. He tried to pick it up from the carpet, but he was at the limits of his strength, and it fell back down immediately.
"How did you do that?" asked Rachel, looking up at Sam.
"That was Trevor," said Sam. "He can move things, a little. I know you won't want to hear it from me, because you don't trust me, but if you open up the Notes app on your phone and set it down somewhere, he can write to you."
"This is so stupid," said Rachel, but she did it, and stepped back.
What should he write? He could make her go home, if he wanted, but that wasn't what he wanted. "I had a Nerf football. You were studying, like always. I asked if you wanted to play catch. You threw it and nerfed me in the eye. That's how we met."
"Oh, hell," said Rach, holding a hand to her mouth. "Oh, hell."
"it's good to see you, Rach," he wrote.
"Oh, Trev," she said. "How are you?"