Rock N Soul (8 page)

I kept silent. This didn’t seem like a topic I could contribute anything meaningful to.

After a moment, he continued. “I didn’t feel sad for a long time. And then I started feeling like a monster for
not
feeling sad.” He shrugged. “So I was angry instead. Furious. At everything. And I picked up a guitar and started trying to make sense of my life through music.”

There was a long pause again, and after a bit I felt the need to fill the silence. “Did that work?”

“Sort of. I mean . . . I was never a very good songwriter. I wrote a few that were pretty decent, but I wasn’t ever ready to play them for anybody. Especially since they were so, you know, personal. About my dad and about my life and about grief and not-grief and feeling like there’s something evil inside you that keeps you from feeling things you should feel.” He pulled his hands out of his pockets, fluttered them around for a few seconds like he didn’t know what to do with them, then put them back in his pockets. “Besides, it would have killed my mom. To hear what I thought of it all.”

“Is that when you joined up with the band?” It seemed like a safe question.

“When I was fourteen, I went to this place where local musicians played,” he said, almost like he hadn’t heard my question. “Just a coffeehouse, really low-key. And there was this guy on stage with a guitar and a microphone and he was amazing. He said he wrote all the songs he was singing and everything he did had so much soul and emotion to it, and I just stood there with my mouth open.”

“That was who? Eric?” I turned down yet another street and sped up. It was getting even colder, so I wanted to get home.

He smiled. “Yeah. And after the show I went and talked to him. He asked me if I could play the bass and I lied and said I could even though I’d never played bass before. I figured if I could handle six strings, I could handle four.”

“How’d that work out?” I asked, my lips quirking up into a tiny little smile of their own accord.

“Pretty well, I guess,” he said. “I’ve been playing bass ever since.”

“Do you ever play a six-string anymore?”

“Sometimes.” He frowned. “Although I guess those days are over.”

I frowned too. “Sorry, man.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets as we walked. “I think that’s even worse than not having sex again.”

We’d made it to my apartment building, but I paused in front of the outer door and looked at him. “For real?”

He gave it some more thought. “Yeah. Definitely.”

“Wow.” I tried to think of something else to add but came up empty, so I turned around and put my key in the door and shuffled inside with Chris at my heels. “Why’s that?”

“Music literally saved my life,” he answered. “I mean, that’s cliché and cheesy as hell, but it’s true. I was lost and I didn’t know what to do. The guitar and the band gave me a purpose and a voice that I didn’t have before.”

“I guess I get that.” I headed up the stairs toward my apartment door. “It must be nice to have a purpose.”

“It is,” he said, then grunted softly. “Well, it was. Before I blew it.”

“Because you died?” I unlocked my door, but I wasn’t quite ready to go inside, so I paused with my hand on the doorknob and waited for his answer.

“Because I let some dumb shit come between me and Eric,” he said. “Well, me and the rest of the band, too. But especially between me and Eric.”

“And so . . . you stopped being friends?” I ran my hand over the doorknob absently.

“We were going to break up,” he muttered, staring at the floor.

I blinked. “You and Eric were . . .” What did the gays like to call it these days? Boyfriends? Partners? I wasn’t sure.

He looked at me, his forehead wrinkled, and then his eyes went wide. “Oh. No, me and the
band
. The band was breaking up.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to keep my embarrassed cringing internal-only. “Well. Okay. Carmen would have hated to hear that.”

“The girlfriend?” he asked, then kept talking before I could answer. “Well, she doesn’t have to worry anymore. Not now that Nathan Vale is rocking the arenas better than I ever could.”

I shrugged. “He’s not better than you. At least not from what I’ve heard.”

Chris raised an eyebrow at me. “Thanks for the compliment,” he said, in a voice that clearly indicated that he did
not
think it was a compliment.

“No, I was being serious,” I insisted. “I was reading articles about it after you died, and they all said that he was, you know, decent. Passable. But people said he didn’t have your, you know, passion. You know.” Ugh, could I have thrown a few more “you knows” in there? I kicked myself thoroughly.

“Well, thanks,” he said, a little more sincerely this time. “But still. I’m pissed about it.”

“Yeah,” I said, then cleared my throat. “I guess we should go inside.”

His forehead wrinkled again, and he looked around the hallway like he hadn’t even noticed we were in the building. “Oh. This is it.”

“Yeah,” I said, then I gave him a stern look. “And before we go in, I don’t want to hear any lip about how cluttered it is and how you’ve been in bathtubs bigger than the whole apartment. I live by myself and rent is a bitch in this city and this is all I can afford.” I deepened my frown.

“Okay, okay.” He rolled his eyes. “May we enter?”

I sighed and opened the door. Chris breezed through the doorway in front of me and then burst out laughing.

It was at that point I remembered I had a giant poster of him hanging over my couch.

Well, not him specifically. It was a concert poster of Incite the Masses, and it was really more focused on Eric than Chris, but still.

Chris was laughing so hard he started to wheeze, although I’m not sure why a ghost needs to breathe at all so the wheezing was probably just to be obnoxious. I crossed my arms. “Laugh it up, Casper. Go ahead and be a dick.”

“You have . . .” He tried to compose himself but clearly failed. “You have a poster of me on your wall.”

“Yes. Thank you for the observation. Good to know you’re not blind as well as dead.” I tightened my crossed arms and scowled. “Besides, it’s not my poster. It was Carmen’s. I just never took it down after she left.”

“Yeah, I’m sure of that,” he said, finally stopping with the laughing. “Did ‘Carmen’ also leave behind her copy of that magazine where I was shirtless? And if so, do the pages still open right or are they all stuck together?”

“You’re a douche,” I grumbled. “I told you not to rag on me.”

“No, you told me not to mention how small the apartment was, and I didn’t.” He looked around again. “Dude, though, is that your bed?”

“Shut up,” I snapped.

“It’s in the
living room
,” he said, his eyes sparkling.

“It’s called a
studio apartment
. Meaning there isn’t a bedroom. And I’m lucky I can afford it.”

“Come on, man.” Chris turned and raised his eyebrow at me. “Surely you can get something better than
this
.”

“I can’t, you asshole.” I hoped he couldn’t see how red my cheeks were getting. “It’s hard to pay for this as it is. So maybe you should have thought about that before you went around stiffing people like me on the tips. I can’t even keep the heat on in the winter because it’s too fucking expensive. I have to save the heat for nights when I’d freeze to death without it, and every other night I just pile on like six blankets and hope for the best. So you can take your rich dick privilege and shove it, you got me?”

He huffed and then clamped his mouth shut, and I couldn’t bring myself to give even a single shit about it. After a moment of awkward silence, he asked, “Couldn’t you just get a roommate?”

“Yeah, I had one,” I muttered. “And then she left because I killed you.”

He blinked a few times, rapidly. “Because you killed me,” he repeated in a monotone.

“Yeah.” I pulled one glove off my hand, a little more viciously than necessary, then yanked off the other glove too. “It’s not that uncommon a theory among the people who think there was foul play.”

“There are people who think I was murdered?” he asked, raising his eyebrows almost all the way to the ceiling.

“You’re a famous rock star who died suddenly and young,” I said. “I mean, come on. Cobain blew his brains out after writing an actual suicide note and people still think he was murdered. Of course there are crazies who think you were too.”

“But why
you
? We didn’t even know each other. You had no motive.” He started drifting around my apartment, running his fingers lightly over things even though he couldn’t feel them.

I shrugged, more for myself than for him since he wasn’t watching me. “I found your body. So I’m a suspect.”

He did turn to me at that. “You were a suspect?”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Not to anybody who wasn’t two brain cells away from comatose. But to the crazier conspiracy theorists, sure.” I took off my hat and tossed it onto a table by the door along with my gloves. “And to Carmen, yeah. She kept saying I’d killed you, or at least that it was my fault you died because if I’d gotten to your room sooner I could have saved you. But whatever. She was a bitch anyway and I’m better off without her.” I grabbed some warm clothes out of my chest of drawers and gave Chris a look. “I’m going to go change out of my work clothes. Try not to die any more than you already have.”

He pursed his lips, clearly affronted, but I just turned around and disappeared into the tiny bathroom before he could say anything. I stripped out of my formal work clothes and draped them over a towel rod, then quickly bundled myself in a sweater and a pair of sweatpants. I sat down on the closed toilet lid and put on two pairs of socks, then just stayed there, my elbows on my knees, and tried to process everything.

To be honest, I wasn’t absolutely sure that I wasn’t losing my mind.

I mean, I was handling it pretty well, I guessed, all things considered. Either there was a ghost standing in my living room putting his ghosty hands all over my shit, or I had gone off the deep end and needed psychiatric help. Really, neither option would bode well for me. Haunted or crazy. Talking to a ghost or talking to myself. Normal people don’t have to wonder about this sort of thing.

I sighed and stood up, putting my hands on the edge of my bathroom sink and leaning forward to gaze into the mirror.

“Tyler,” I said to myself, “you crazy.” I nodded knowingly at my reflection. But I didn’t really look like an insane person. Most crazy people have wild beards and eyes that are way too white around the edges, and I was just a clean-shaven bellboy with dirty-blond hair and greenish eyes that were the appropriate level of white around the edges.

I pushed away from the sink and opened the door back into the living room. Chris was looking through my movie collection. Probably judging me, the fucker. But it wasn’t like I’d had time to run home and hide all the embarrassing shit before he decided to be less dead than I’d expected and follow me to my apartment. He was just lucky there weren’t days-old bags of fast-food scraps all over the floor and several nights’ worth of used tissues in a pile beside the bed.

I leaned against the bathroom doorframe and crossed my arms. “Find anything interesting?”

He glanced up at me and shrugged. “You don’t have terrible taste. You definitely are a nerd, though.”

“Yeah,” I said, walking over to the couch. “Did you want to watch
Supernatural
or what?”

“I do.” He straightened up from the stooping position he’d taken to see the bottom row of movies. “Put it on.”

I found the remote, then settled down on the couch and tucked a blanket around me. Chris walked over and perched on the other end, watching me curiously.

I navigated through the menus of the streaming service and then couldn’t stand the staring anymore. “What?” I asked, letting the exasperation creep into my voice.

“So . . .” He shifted a little on the couch. “You weren’t lying. About the not being able to afford heat.”

I frowned and pushed play on the first episode.

“So he’s spent his whole life tracking and killing monsters and demons and shit, and he’s afraid of
airplanes
?”