One Ghost Per Serving (8 page)

Eric wound his bike through traffic.
Taffy’s school was still a few miles away, but at this rate, he wouldn’t get the cooler to her in time – and ‘Disappointing Taffy’ was at the top of his already long list of things to avoid. ‘Disappointing Taffy’ ranked even higher than ‘Getting Possessed by a Narcissistic Spirit Who Refuses to Leave,’ and that was saying a lot.

He put his hand on the roof of a Honda to stabilize himself on the bike while he waited for an opening.

“Are you a model?” The thirty-something woman in the driver’s seat to his immediate right put a hand out the window and tapped her long, coral-colored nails along the rim of the window.

“Me? No.” It was true that he was not currently a model, but he had appeared in more than thirty print ads (some full, some just underwear), had been a nude model for art classes, had small parts in some regional commercials and a jeans commercial in Italy, and posed for two male pinup calendars in college. A scholarship was nearly impossible to sustain over three years with the law school grading numbers game, so he planned on paying the rest of his way with modeling.

“Because you could totally be a model.” She dropped her hand and poked his leg gently with a fingernail.

“Thanks.” He flashed her a half-smile then took advantage of a slight opening to ride up a few car lengths to an intersection. He had the option of a few different routes, and considered which one would get him to the school faster.

“In a hurry?” Rex was sitting to Eric’s left, on the back of a black motorcycle behind a tattooed thug in a leather jacket. Rex pulled the man’s fringe on the back of the vest.

“It’s none of your business.” Eric darted his eyes, trying not to turn his head or move his mouth. After pulling his life back together, Eric realized that Rex wasn’t leaving, and it wasn’t because he couldn’t. Rex could go anywhere he wanted. Sometimes he would leave without notice for days to possess someone else, but he would always come back.

“Everything is my business, especially you.” Rex pointed at him. “I have a responsibility. I could be possessing anyone right now, but here I am.”

“I hereby absolve you,” Eric said through gritted teeth. “Again.”

“‘Preciate that. So, where you going?” Rex asked.

Eric shook his head. “Didn’t you hear me?” Then, after a few seconds, the muscles in his face tightening, he said, “I could go left and take the service road, or go straight down Main, or head right and go through the side streets.”

The thug turned his head like a gargoyle coming to life. “You talking to me?”

Eric’s heart thumped faster. He tried to act like he was just waiting in traffic and had maybe been repeating complicated directions to himself. The light changed but there was no room for the cars to pull forward, so all but one moron stayed put. Eric was nearly frozen with anxiety. Any path he chose would be the wrong one, as it had been for most decisions he had made in his life, even as simple as
Look, a free sample of a drink. I’m thirsty and in a hurry. I’m going to stop and take one
. And now he had this guy who wanted to pummel his face in.

Main Street seemed like the most obvious wrong choice, but it could clear up, and it was the most direct path to the school. If there were a truck on the service road, it would block the whole thing, and make passing dangerous. Taking side streets through the town would be time-consuming.

“I’ve seen that look before,” Rex said. “You want my opinion, I say service road.”

“Oh, really,” Eric said. “What makes you think I want your opinion?”

Rex smiled. “You’ve asked for it about a million times.”

The thug snarled and revved his handles.

Eric waited a few minutes so it wouldn’t look like he was just blindly following Rex’s suggestion, or like he was intimidated by the thug, then rode left to the service road, where he promptly got stuck. A commercial truck had broken down and another, smaller truck had pulled up next to it. He heard the thug’s motorcycle rumble up behind him.

Eric rode his bike over to the side streets on the opposite side of Main Street, zipping through narrow spaces, between cars and fire hydrants, wherever a motorcycle couldn’t go. There were a couple of close calls when the thug drew close and even drew a blade. With one deft move, he reached out and drew a shallow cut on Eric’s thigh, then pushed the bike frame until Eric almost fell over. Eric regained his balance and shot through a narrow alley between a pizza restaurant and a real estate office.

He didn’t get to the school until 5:40 p.m. Forty minutes late.

Eric held the cooler close to his chest and ran with it inside the school. At the last minute he remembered the bandages he stuffed in his pocket at the house. Even though his cut was shallow, it was bleeding, and he didn’t want to distract Taffy. He set the cooler down on the floor and ripped open one of the bandages. He let the wrapping flutter to the floor and affixed the bandage on the cut. He wiped some blood off with spit then picked up the cooler. He burst through the heavy double doors of the gymnasium into the science fair and looked around frantically for his daughter.

“You’re too late,” Taffy said, her arms crossed. She appraised her Dad’s appearance with blue ‘Michael Corleone at the end of
The Godfather Part II
’ eyes. She was in her usual fluorescent orange high-tops, jeans, faded t-shirt (fungi assortment), and denim jacket as a concession to science fair formality. Her hair was tied back with plastic fluorescent orange balls.

“The judges did their review and I was disqualified,” she said.

Eric’s heart fell. He sighed then lowered himself onto a metal folding chair. “I’m sorry, Gibby,” he said, using her pet name. “I’m so, so sorry.” He rested his head against the wall, then inhaled and leaned forward, arms outstretched “I’ll fix it. I’ll talk to the principal and –”

She put up a hand. “No, Dad, I’ll take care of it. Thanks for trying. You can leave the cooler here. I’m getting a ride with Amy’s family.”

Eric stood. He wanted to hug her, but hesitated, and instead picked up the cooler and handed it to her. She opened her mouth as though to say something, but changed her mind. She held up a hand in a still wave goodbye, then returned to the labyrinth of exhibits.

Rex materialized next to him. “Bummer.”

Eric whirled around to glare at him and spoke in a low, tense voice. “If you hadn’t told me to take the service road –”

Rex backed away a step. “I merely
suggested
you take the service road. You should have done whatever you thought was best. How is this my fault?”

Eric leaned in closer and tried to talk without moving his mouth. “Because you showed up and I asked for your opinion.”

“Which is normally infallible,” Rex said. “But I don’t take the roads. I mean, did you see what I just did with the wall?”

Eric checked the busy floor for Taffy, with a dim hope that maybe she would come back. He spoke to Rex while looking straight ahead at the fair. “Did you steer me the wrong way on purpose? Will you ever be done with screwing up my life?”

“I’m
helping
you,” Rex said.

“You’re about as helpful as whatever Taffy had in that cooler.”

“I’ll come back later when you’re less fussy, since I don’t have a cookie to give you.” Rex disappeared.

Eric wanted to go see Taffy, but he’d just embarrass her, considering he looked like he fell off his bike and into a wet ditch then knifed by a thug. And if she wasn’t actually mad at him, she was … not pleased. He wanted to see her exhibit and be there for her, but knew she wouldn’t want him around, and he hated that he let her down again. He was having such a great day, he considered topping it off by having his doctor image everything in his body so they could find something suspicious.

No, screw this, he thought. He was being an idiot. He was going to see Taffy’s exhibit. He strode up to the center of the fair and twisted around, scanning the booths for her face, for her orange hair thing, for her t-shirt.

“Hey, are you going to –” he heard Rex say, and it startled him. At first Eric thought he was hearing him even when he wasn’t there, feared for his sanity, and turned around. As he did, he pushed a large promotional sign into a student’s booth, which knocked over a couple of beakers of fluid that incited a plume of smoke and then a small fire.

“Everybody out!” Security started to herd everyone to the exit doors and an alarm sounded.

Taffy stood in front of Eric looking like a 1930s-era hard-boiled investigator. The parking lot was full of students and teachers waiting for the okay to go back inside the auditorium.

“Any idea why we had to evacuate the fair?” she asked, head tilted, eyes narrowed.

“Nope,” Eric said.

“I thought you left ten minutes ago.”

“Nope.”

“I heard you bumped into Liam’s project.”

He looked to the side. Looked back at her. He tried to smile, but held off when it felt like his appendix was about to burst.

“Dad.”

Someone announced they could go back in and Taffy gave Eric a look that he knew he would be attempting to interpret for the rest of the day to no good end. She left. The students ran and the teachers sort of shuffled through the propped-open doors. It was time to go home – and by home, he meant his bus – then order some pizza and sleep for about ten hours.

Eric parked the Princess in an empty corner of the Quantity Market then strapped two large cooler bags across his chest like ammo.
He was going to fill the coolers to the top with Quantal Organic Yogurt, and if there were any yogurts left, he’d put them in a cart, which he grabbed by the entrance and steered straight to dairy.

The yogurts, squat and yellow, adorned with strange glyphs, stretched out before him like a pirate’s treasure, beckoning with the possibility of getting his family back on his side. He wasn’t a complete idiot; he could tell that Willa and Taffy were slipping away from him. Was it foolish to put so much personal stake in an obscure brand of yogurt?

He suddenly felt very alone. Even his parasitic ghost wasn’t around. His old friends, anxiety and dread, zipped through his synapses like they were a roller coaster. Taffy wasn’t like anyone else. He wasn’t worried that she would fall for a boy and let everything else go; she was too focused and ambitious for that. He wasn’t worried that she would start running in packs of girls who were bad influences. What he was worried about was losing Taffy’s affection, losing Willa’s affection, and that they would move away and not want him to be with them.

Buying these yogurts so he could win this farfetched and evidently unwinnable Amass-and-Win contest was the only thing he could do to get them back. Taffy wanted this prize, and winning this contest would get her what they couldn’t afford to provide. And he would look like the greatest Dad ever. If he could win the prize for Taffy, show that he was worthy of them, maybe that would be enough.

With a surge of purpose, Eric pulled the little containers off the shelves and dropped them in his bags.

Then he was corralled.

Four other customers had encroached upon him from behind and surrounded him as they considered the Quantal with unusually intense interest. Eric had underestimated the popularity of the dairy aisle, and of this yogurt brand in particular. The customers, three women and one man, reached for the yogurt with glassy eyes. Eric nudged them aside, and if one pushed against him, he pushed back. They made a sound similar to Taffy’s greeting in the morning, before her allotted small cup of coffee.

Eric blocked one of the other shoppers with his shoulder as he reached further into the shelf space for the containers in the back. The customers didn’t seem to notice. “Hey, excuse me,” he said, but they grasped out, crowding Eric until he spread out his arms to retain a pocket of space. He glanced over his shoulder at movement on his left. More were coming. If the store manager changed the music selection from an instrumental version of an adult contemporary song from the Watergate era to something by Bad Brains, he could probably crowd surf.

“There are other yogurt brands, you know!” Eric raised his voice to a near-yell, but the other customers only wanted the kind with the Amass-and-Win contest and the glyphs. One of them shoved another into the cottage cheese display, causing tubs to tumble off the shelves onto the floor. The tubs burst, spurting and oozing cottage cheese on the floor. Eric let the customers fight. He pushed the other customers away from him on the sides as he took advantage of their apparent lack of mental acuity and grabbed the remaining Quantals and then tossed them into the cart. Eric’s forearm hair stuck to his arms from the competitors’ sweat rubbing off on him.