Ghostbusters (5 page)

“Look out, Ghost Girl!” Carl said. “Here it comes…” He opened his yap, stuck out his tongue, and made gross barfing noises.

The whole class cracked up. Some of the kids caught the fever and mimicked Carl, pretending to vomit. Which made everyone laugh even louder.

The joke apparently never got old.

Way back in second grade, Erin had made the mistake of confiding her experience with the spirit of Mrs. Barnard to Darla Murray, a girl she had desperately wanted to be her friend. Darla had promptly told the other popular girls in the class, to secure her place as their reigning queen. The story spread around the playground like chicken pox. No one believed Erin. They all thought she just wanted to sound important and special when she wasn't. So not only was she geeky and friendless, she was a mental case to boot. They started calling her “Ghost Girl,” behind her back at first, then to her face, and the name had unfortunately stuck.

As the class bell rang, the physics teacher hurried into the room with an armload of notebooks. He was a big man with a tight crew cut. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a bow tie that clashed with his slacks.

“Welcome to Honors Physics,” he said. “I'm Mr. Puccini.” His baritone, no-nonsense voice silenced the laughter and talking. He glanced down at a three-by-five card in his hand. “We have a new student with us today. From Indiana, isn't it, Abby?”

“Yes, Mr. Puccini.”

Erin looked at the smiling girl one stool over.

“Let's give her a special welcome to our school,” the teacher said.

“Ahh, ahh, ahh…” Carl pretended to sneeze as he shouted, “
Fat-butt!
”

Everyone laughed; everyone but Erin and Abby.

Although Erin felt really bad for the new girl, part of her was relieved the focus of derision had momentarily shifted.

“Enough of that, Mr. Lund,” the teacher said, staring him down. “On your feet. Get up here. Let's see if you can solve the problem I've written on the board. If you can't, maybe you don't belong in an honors class…”

The students made appreciative “ooooooh” sounds.

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 sheer 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.