Free How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley Page A

inanimate objects and asking me if they were real. Plus, I was already starting to second-guess myself. Even if it was real, as far as paranormal experiences go, mine was pretty unsexy. Haunting Lite. It was brief and subtle and left no proof for the living—no recovered keepsakes or cardigans folded on headstones. No bones locked in a trunk in the attic, shrouded by a moth-eaten wedding veil.
    So I was eager, to put it mildly, to move into McGurk’s. I wanted to see what a real ghost looked like while simultaneously accessing my inner militant feminist/whore. I left a message for Sang, thanking her for showing me the apartment. When I didn’t hear from her, I decided to follow up with an e-mail, thinking the chances of Sang’s phone being disconnected were better than not. I felt like a desperate girl angling for a second date after my nerves had gotten the better of me on the first. Why didn’t she love me? Was I not a catch? She could use my loofah if she wanted to. I never heard from her again.
     
     
     
     
    IT WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE NELL REENTERED THIS half of the world. I couldn’t believe I had packed in a whole real estate dalliance in the time she’d been gone. It was like the end of The Bridges of Madison County. The never-released director’s cut of The Bridges of Madison County, with the dead prostitutes and the broken glass and the decapitated dolls’ heads.
    I sat at a bar with Mac near his new apartment, eating stale popcorn and moping into my beer. I said I just couldn’t believe Sang hadn’t called.
    “Who?”
    “Sang.”
    “You did? When? You can’t hold a tune.”
    “Shut up, racist.” I laughed.
    And he laughed, too. And then he stopped and said, “What are we talking about?”
    For the first time, I found myself perversely grateful for Nell. If I didn’t know that her punctual bill-paying and obsessive cleaning originated from a larger fissure in her psyche, I would be happy to have her as a roommate. If I lived with Mac or Sang, I might come home to find the house burned down. Mac wedged a lime into his beer and squirted himself in the face. I reminded him of his amazing apartment tip, which had turned out to be a big, fat tease, robbing me of the impossibly hip version of myself and dooming me to a life of banality and a cupboard of Snackwells sandwich cookies. Though the devil’s food ones aren’t half bad. Mac looked at me.
    “I can honestly say I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you been smoking pot out the window again? ”
    “That’s hardly the point.”
    It took a few minutes to get his version of the story. Motivated by real estate guilt, Mac confirmed, he did pass on the e-mail. That he remembered. But he claimed never to have called me beforehand, reminding me that we were only tenuously “speaking.” Furthermore, the e-mail was passed on to him via a friend of a friend. He had no idea who this Sang person was.
    “Why would I call you to tell you I was going to e-mail you? I’m not eighty years old.”
    I said I didn’t know but that I had become accustomed to living with such obsessive-compulsive behavior. No amount of triple-checking or scheduling or Handi- Wiping fazed me anymore.
    “I distinctly remember having this conversation with you.”
    “I love it!” Mac slapped the bar. “This is so like the Twilight Zone movie.”
    “That’s a TV show.”
    “Movie.”
    “TV show. And are you kidding me?”
    But he wasn’t kidding. The more I pressed him, the further he backed away from it. My mind spun. But Grandma’s been dead for twenty years! I had spoken to someone that night. Hadn’t I? Something had stopped me from putting foam-core museum plaques next to Nell’s Ansel Adams posters and sorority photos. Was it possible I had had an adulterous real estate conversation but couldn’t recall with whom? Now who was the big whore? And where did this end? Maybe Sang was a ghost. She certainly had the demeanor for it. More likely, I had been a