He looks ridiculous.

Sitting on his bed trying to get me to talk.

I've been laying on his floor for the past hour and a half listening to him.

I've learned that I can't really control when I'm visible, but so far he's been the only one able to see me anyways.

And also I don't want to talk to him, so there's that.

So why am I laying on his bedroom floor?

Good question; and there really isn't an answer except that he has glow-in-the-dark-stars on his ceiling.

The stick-on kind I had growing up but that my dad made me take down when I turned twelve.

It didn't matter.

I painted them onto my ceiling with glowing paint that you can't see during the day.

I also painted my walls purple one weekend when my parents were out of town, and they didn't want to pay money to repaint so they just left them.

Zoe helped me do that, it was back when she didn't hate me, when my brain was still functioning almost normally.

Except for the car crash.

And the addiction that followed.

I'm not - I hadn't been addicted for a while, just took pills to take the edge off sometimes.

The problem was that sometimes was almost daily.

Fitting that that's how I went I guess.

At least it wasn't messy like the car wreck.

They don't really teach you this but head and arm cuts bleed a lot.

It could have been worse than a few ribs, but I didn't really care anyways because the few seconds right before I hit the tree we're filled with the most emotion I'd felt in months.

I think Zoe could tell because even though I still have my license and am - was generally a safe driver, I wasn't ever allowed behind the wheel again.

We were FaceTiming when I crashed

(Not a good idea but our town is so small hardly anyone is ever driving anyways)

More because we both hate talking without being able to see people's expressions and she was yelling at me about something I'd said to mom.

This was before she stopped talking to me completely, and I wasn't really listening because I was focused on this tree that was coming into view and I was wondering what my car would look like wrapped around it, and I think Zoe must've noticed the change in my expression and started screaming at me not to do whatever it was.

She always knew when I was about to do something,

Like the time when I decided to jump off the roof onto the trampoline, fell through, and broke both of my legs.

Or the time I threw most of our electronics into the pool because they were buzzing and I couldn't stand the sound.

Funny, how the person who hated me the most understood me better than anyone else.

Well, almost anybody.

I haven't been to visit him yet, I can't bring myself to.

He isn't the reason I'm gone, but knowing him he'll blame himself for it anyways.

I don't want to have to deal with that too.

I would have left him a note, of course, but it looks like Evan's got that taken care of.

Oh right, him.

I look over at him, still saying my name as if I'm going to answer.

He's closed his eyes and folded his legs like he's praying or something.

I would say that being a ghost is scary or depressing, but this is basically the way I lived my life anyways, drifting in and out of people's focus like a fucked-up kaleidoscope.

The one good thing is that I don't feel like there are bugs under my skin, and I'm thinking fairly rationally,

And looking back Evan probably wasn't trying to fuck with me in the computer lab, or in the hallway before.

I would apologize maybe (probably not), but he lied about the letter, so I think we're even now anyways.

The first day of being dead, I just wandered around the hospital watching people come and go.

All these people that all had separate lives they lived and different people that they loved and hated, but morality is, i suppose, something that all humans have in common, so it makes sense that a hospital would be a good middle-ground for everyone.

The second day, I went and visited my body for the last time.

It was strange, seeing my physical self.

I know I was dead, but I looked exhausted.

You could see my cheekbones jutting out grossly and my eye sockets were hollow.

I smoked a lot of pot, so I was sure I was eating a ton, but then I was hit with tons of memories of nights spent hanging my head over a toilet.

I wanted to know if I had always looked like that, or if death had done it, so I went back to my house to look through pictures.

There were hardly any in our photo albums, and even so, my hair was generally obscuring my face so I couldn't tell.

The next place I checked was our school forum-thingy.

Amazingly, I'd made it into some kind of group picture from one of Zoe's concerts - how in the hell I managed to do that, I have no idea - and yes, i looked like a ghost.

Looking at myself and realizing that I would never be anything more than this to anyone made me oddly sad.

It wasn't really that I wished I had friends - I didnt appreciate the flakiness of humanity in general - it was more like a mourning for the person I could have been, in a different life.

Or the person I wanted to be.

I wanted to not need drugs.

I wanted the world to stop being the world,

Blah blah blah, it doesn't actually matter.

I clicked through for a couple more minutes and found a picture of me and M that was taken back when we were at school together. I had no idea who posted it, or where they got it, and M had been cropped out for some reason, but I looked happy.

My eyes weren't nearly as dark, and I was smiling.

He had that effect on me.

And I threw it away because of my own fear.

I blinked back tears and shut down the computer,

Tugging at my bracelets as I remembered a day in late May, the late afternoon sunshine filtering in through the shutters of a window.

The head of soft, curly hair tucked against my neck, the warmth of another's breath on my chest.

And I lost it.

I ran out of the house and it was raining.

How poetic.

I never really thought about if ghosts could get wet, but in a couple of minutes I was soaking, the raindrops mixing with my tears and running down my cheeks as I ran.

I couldn't feel the cold of the water, or the burn of running, which would have been nice, except that the pain inside was burning white-hot, and I had nothing to drag me back into reality, and eventually o just collapsed into the road, sobbing, and let the pain pull me down and into the darkness.

Eventually I woke up (fun fact: ghosts can sleep?)

And peeled myself off the ground, stars still kind of dancing around in my vision, and then I just started walking.

Eventually I got to the school, right when all the fun was starting.

They even made an announcement about me.

Like anyone actually cared.

I shake my head to clear my thoughts and open my eyes, bringing myself back to the present.

I pull myself off the floor and start walking around his room, touching his things and trying to figure out who he is.

I didn't even know his name until yesterday.

I'm sure I've been told it before, because me and my parents met with him last week about something.

I was really high though, so I don't remember anything except that no one had signed his cast and I think he looked really sad.

Maybe that isn't the right word, he looked weary, like he was so tired of running without ever getting anywhere, like he knew the race was never going to end but he wished it would.

I remember him telling me that he fell out of a tree.

I wasn't high that day, but I have a weird kind of brain where I can remember things really specifically, it's just I usually chuck it in the "for later" box and then a specific phrase or something pulls it back out for a second.

At the time, It seemed completely plausible that this kid could have fallen out of a tree, but now remembering the look on his face at the meeting, I really should have called bullshit way sooner.

I'd tried offing myself plenty of times, in a lot of different ways, but I'd never jumped off of anywhere high enough to kill me.

A lot of the time I hadn't planned on doing it, I just kind of ended up in a convenient place and decided on an impulse, like so many other things.

Ay fingers are trailing, I come across a smallish box decorated with the those shimmery little stickers Zoe used to collect.

The memory makes me smile, and I check to make sure Evan isn't looking before I open it up and find a couple of prescription bottles and some crumpled pieces of paper.

I don't really want to read his personal writing, so I quietly close the box and move on.

Standing on the opposite side of the room is a bookshelf filled with barbies (I'm kidding what else would be on this fucking thing) and I cross the room to take a look.

There's a lot of comics, mostly X-men, but there's also a ton of great ones, like to kill a mockingbird, persuasion, the time machine, the outsiders, and the catcher in the rye. I'm not really surprised to see them there, but it's kind of jarring to realize how alike we are.

Like two sides of the same coin.

I suddenly remember trying to talk about to kill a mockingbird with him, that day in the computer lab.

He didn't seem like he understood, but he may have just been confused that I had read it.

I think essays on what a book is about are stupid so I never wrote any, but I read the books I was given.

I've always like reading.

It's like and escape from myself.

Almost.

It's weird to think that we've gone to school our whole lives - not counting the year I was at the private one - but that if we'd ever sat down and talked, we might have been friends.

But then again, I tend to fuck relationships (and people) up, so it's probably best.

I don't really want to be here anymore, but Evan is still calling my name, and it's gettin kind of awkward, so I decide to write him a note.

I grab a pad of sticky notes and a sharpie from his desk and scribble out a message before throwing it at him.

It smacks him in the forehead, knocking him backwards, and I leave right as sits up and grabs the note, rubbing his forehead that's now a bright red.