“Seriously,” I said.
Suddenly, I was queen of cool while Randy told her every detail he could, obviously relishing my story.
“Oh my Ga-od.” Twyla looked half Goth, but she sang out the phrase like a true Val. “You’re, like, interesting.”
“Totally,” I said, not sure if I was mocking her or just falling into the bad habit of aping her speech. That sometimes happened to SoCal girls—even the resistant non–Pod People who hung out at the beach or sheltered ourselves with normal friends. Val talk had been a plague that you could catch without knowing it.
“Jen’s jus’ learnin’ the ghost ropes,” Randy slurred. “She jus’ joined her first human dream yesterday.”
“Ah, dreams.” Twyla went back to the hair, testing out ways to hide the shaved part of her head with her longer hanks. “I’ll go into one of their dreams just so I can feel what it’s like to be touched again, you know?”
Randy couldn’t help himself. “Jen likes humans even more ’an that. She’s on a mission for one of ’em.”
And he spilled everything about my former alliance with Amanda Lee and her crusade.
When he was done, Twyla gave me a perplexed look in the mirror. “Like, why would you go through the trouble?”
“I asked her that, too,” Randy said. “Why worry ’bout anything but your own state?”
Twyla shrugged. “Come to think of it, caring about humans’ problems is sooooo cute. It really is.”
I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or genuine. Either way, I didn’t dig her attitude.
“It keeps me from being bored,” I said, not wasting my time on any more complex explanations. She wouldn’t get it.
Randy floated off the toilet tank. “Jen’s also managed to find a strange buddy in the otherworld.”
Awesome. It was now time for fake Dean stories.
“He or it seems like a wrangler,” Randy said, “but I ain’t sure. Ya ever meet up with a thing that took ya to a starry place?”
The Goth Val seemed highly intrigued. “No. What happened?”
I started to suspect that Randy got more of a kick out of telling my stories than I did.
“It snatched her off this plane, and it looked like her ex-boyfriend.”
“Awww,” Twyla said. “And… ew.”
I casually shrugged at both as Randy continued.
“The thing tried to get Jensen into a light—and I don’t think it was our light. Then, when she wouldn’t go in, it dumped her.”
“What a dick!” Twyla said. “Have you seen him after?”
“No.” And it tripped me out that it hadn’t been so long since my sick rendezvous with fake Dean. A day? Two? Ghost time sure blurred a lot.
“I’m guessin’,” Randy said, “you’ve never come across something like that, Twy.”
“No day, no way. But it is a pretty gnarly tale.” She hopped up to hover-sit on the counter very ghost-gracefully. “But if you do run into your boy toy again, Jensen, you should make the most of it. Ask him who murdered you, you know?”
Again, she might’ve been playing around with me. I’d had a so-called friend like that in middle school who took great pleasure in tormenting everyone with mind games. Twyla might be one of those.
But I had to admit, her comment was a grain of an idea. Was fake Dean a higher being or just a really talented kind of ghost? He’d created a star place, after all. Would he know more than any other regular ghost?
I shoved the thought aside as Twyla spoke.
“By the way, I was joking about shooting the breeze with this thing you ran into.”
Well, good for her.
“Seriously, you should be afraid of it.” She leaned forward on that counter. “You should be afraid of everything at first, when you’re a new little ghostie who thinks she’s a bitchin’ tuff but isn’t. You don’t want to be destroyed before your life here has, like, even started.”
“Destroyed?” I asked. “You mean going back into a time loop?”
Twyla exchanged a jaded glance with Randy.
“Noooo,” she said. “I mean that, besides the odd spiritual beings you’re bound to meet, there’re stories of ghosts getting into less exotic trouble, too. Like ghosts who’ve gotten stuck in the gut by, like, iron daggers and they just disappeared, never to be seen again. There’re humans who know how to do stuff like that to clean us out of their presence.”
Randy said, “Thass why we call ’em cleaners.”
Twyla was just warming up. “They can chase ghosts from houses they’re haunting or whatever. They ban us from places we get comfortable in by using gaggy smells and sensations from energy machines.”
“They can banish a spirit from a location,” Randy slurred, “but not from the earthly plane.” He took a good look at me, measuring my reaction.
Did I have a constipated look on my face or something? I checked the mirror and, yeah, I did.
Answers would help me calm down. “Where are we sent when we’re pierced with iron in our… gut?”
Twyla clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes. “Like we know? I’ve never gotten the stuff stuck in me.”
Randy was more diplomatic. “No one ever comes back to tell, ’member? But I heard that iron can separate our forms into mist. It’s poison.”
Dead ghosts tell no tales, evidently.
He added, “But about them time loops, as ya call ’em… there’re lots of things that can suck up our energy and send us into ’em. Too much communicatin’ with humans is one.”
Twyla nodded. “And that’s why we use Ouija boards, medium channeling, raps on the walls, and automatic writing instead.”
Helpful advice from the Laup-Goth. Maybe it was worth meeting her, after all.
I said, “That’s strange, because communicating with Amanda Lee didn’t take much out of me.”
Randy answered. “Thass ’cause she’s a medium.”
“Duh,” Twyla added. “You know, she’s a conduit who can see into parts of Boo World? For some, like, reason there was a connection between you two. So talking to her is like talking to one of us.”
Randy was already on to the next comment. “Materializin’. That’ll sap ya, too.”
I blinked. Randy was right, because hadn’t I felt a loss of more power than usual after I thought I’d materialized to Gavin? Maybe I did need to watch myself more. Maybe I’d just been a lucky ghost so far.
Both Twyla and Randy were laughing now, and I knew why. From what I saw in the mirror, I was definitely less confident, and they were just having some fun with the new ghost by piling it on me.
But as they cooled out, Randy had an expression on him that told me he actually wanted me to be safe. But Twyla? I still wasn’t sure if she’d just enjoyed poking at me or if she was a good egg.
She hopped off the counter, free-falling to the floor, her petticoats flaring for the briefest, kind of impressive instant.
“Let’s get downstairs before Old Seth starts up with the country music,” she said. Then to me, “He’s an ancient fart, but he picked up on Waylon Jennings somewhere along the way and it makes me want to, like, barf.”
She sashayed out of the bathroom, and with a good-natured shrug, Randy followed.
I did, too, thinking that a little fun with the others wouldn’t kill me.
13
I partied like it was 1999.
For hours, we threw different music at one another, and with me being the new ghost in town, everyone let me practice my sound skills. I pulled songs out of the air—or maybe it was out of my memory—and let my favorites ring through McGlinn’s house.
The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees… I got very good at conjuring anything I wanted, even though Twyla Smart-Ass interjected tunes like “Mickey” and “Jessie’s Girl” every once in a while.