Free How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley

smaller than ever. Every inch was planned and decorated because I had no choice. I looked in Nell’s bedroom. Everything was so neat and perfectly matched. I felt myself falling somewhere between Nell and Sang. I could sense them both categorizing me as the other when they looked at me, a feeling that made me wish I could put them in the same room together and say, “You think I’m bad? Look at this!”
    Mentally, I was already packing, deciding what I’d bequeath to Nell when she returned from Nepal and what I’d have to hide before she found out I was moving. This would be good for her. She could find a more suitable gym buddy to fill my room and cover the kitchen drawers in antibacterial contact paper like she’d always wanted. Maybe they could even share soymilk and—with a little time and a little trust—shampoo.
    I got a pair of tweezers, took the peanut butter jar down from the kitchen cabinet, and started digging.
     
     
     
     
    IT WAS HARD TO PIN DOWN WHICH WAS STRONGER: the desire to live like a real live grown-up or the desire to spend some quality time with the dead. True, the slutty ghosts had their appeal, but my relationship to the supernatural had a longer history than that. I was nine years old when I saw my first ghost, and I had been waiting for another ever since.
    I grew up on a rarely trafficked street—the kind of street you could play just about any sport in the middle of with little automotive interruption. At night, when the occasional car passed through, I could follow its headlights as they projected their way around my walls. Sometimes I’d pretend I had escaped from prison in some brilliantly confounding fashion and they were searching for me. One night when I was tucked in with my disintegrating blankie, a car passed by but failed to take the light with it. My bedroom remained dimly but steadily illuminated. I was not afraid of the dark. The dark is what happens when the sun goes down. It was like cowering from dirt. But I was afraid of inexplicable light. In the movies, a sudden glow was generally accompanied by exhaust fumes from an alien spaceship. It’s why I was never comfortable with night-lights. They were unnatural. Plus, if they worked for me, would they not also work for the eight-eyed monster hiding in the closet? Bitch has eight eyes. She can see a night-light. Best to level the playing field.
    So I crept out of my room, on the hunt for artificial brightness. I turned off the hallway light and returned to bed. There, I thought, that should take care of it. But the ghost was just getting started. The perfectly sharp silhouette of a little boy with a bowl haircut appeared in the far corner of my bedroom. He was approximately my size and shape, with a Peter Pan gait, except that he was obviously a minion of Hades. He glided across the wall, stopped, and looked up at some invisible speck on the ceiling. Then he turned to face me for a moment before quickly merging into the darkness of the adjacent wall.
    And that was it. Like a photosensitive plant reaching for the sun, I widened my eyes, attempting to absorb all the paranormal presence possible. The strange cocktail of fear and magic kept my eyes bouncing from wall to wall in time with the eyes of my cat-shaped wall clock, which ticked off the seconds with its tail. I assumed the boy would cycle back, but he never did. I felt a little rejected. I always thought there was an understanding in the community of the dead that it’s best to appear before children, who are more apt to accept what they’re seeing. My ghost took one look at me and changed his mind.
    “Hello?” I whispered. And he pretended not to hear me.
    Beyond the rejection, there were pretty convincing social reasons to keep the sighting on the down low. Every nine-year-old knows the difference between wanting the impossible and getting it. I didn’t need my friends shouting “Boo!” at me on the bus any more than I needed a school psychologist holding up