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I said sternly, sticking up for the harmless hipster who
works at the store across the street from us. “And yeah, he
probably does. I just pretend I don’t see her. I do that with
everyone.”
    He gave me a sideways glance.
“How often do you see them?”
    It suddenly struck me as odd
that even though Dex and I suffered from the same affliction and
were intimate with each other on a daily basis, we never ever
talked about the things we saw. I chose to suffer in silence, even
though I knew he’d understand if I told him.
    I brushed a wayward strand out
of my eyes, mulling it over. “At least once a day. I think. It’s
hard to tell, in Seattle anyway. Sometimes I think I’m looking at a
ghost but it turns out to be a meth head.”
    He put his elbows on his knees
and his fingers together like a steeple. “Do you ever get
scared?”
    I snorted. “Yeah. Of
course.”
    I mean, they were ghosts. We
weren’t seeing puppies. We were seeing the dead, and both of us
knew very well that the dead had the power to kill us. Of course,
they had the power to kill anyone, but when they found someone who
was actually able to see them, able to communicate with them, it
made things a bit riskier. They wanted to be around us, they wanted
the attention they so rarely got. That’s why when we went ghost
hunting with Rebecca, she was never in any real danger. It’s not
that she wasn’t scared herself, there were a few times where she
was freaking out on behalf of what we said we were seeing, but we
both knew the ghosts wouldn’t usually bother with her. She didn’t
see them, so she didn’t really exist herself. Sometimes I felt like
Dex and I were the ghosts—that the dead could only see us—and every
other normal person was just a passing shadow to them.
    “ Me too,” he
said, his eyes focusing now on the surfers. “I keep thinking I’ll
get used to it, but I never really do. Some days I can just kind
of, you know, gloss over them. The old man bleeding on the sidewalk
that people are walking past…I can almost pretend he’s real. As if
that fucking makes it better. But I can ignore it. Then sometimes I
have a strung out woman with a broken neck in my face, flies coming
out of her nose and…” He trailed off and I saw a shudder roll
through him.
    I reached for him, putting my
hand gently on his leg. “I know what you mean.”
    “ And then it
just slaps me in the face. Hey, I’m a fucking freak. Hey, this is
the reason I was put away in a mental institute. Hey, this is never
ever going to go away.”
    “ Unless we go
on medication,” I said quietly.
    He shook his head. “No way,
baby. I’ve seen the light. I can’t go back to hiding from it. This
is me. This is us. No other way around it, we just have to deal.”
He tilted his head down and eyed me. “You know that. It’s us
against the world.”
    We both fell into silence that
was occasionally punctuated by the cry from a soaring gull. How
right he was.
    Eventually he cleared his
throat and gestured to the houses that lined the beach to the right
of us. “Could you imagine yourself living here in five, ten
years?”
    I eyed the houses, all of them
grand with large landscaped lots and views to die for. “Sure. I
guess. It’s nice here. But I think I’d have to be independently
wealthy.”
    “ So say you
were. Say you could live anywhere. Where would you
live?”
    I pursed my lips as I looked at
him curiously. “Why are you asking?”
    “ Why not?
We’ve never really discussed our future with each other…have
we?”
    I swallowed hard, those damn
butterflies making an appearance in my insides.
    “ Of course,”
he went on, “I’m being a twat in assuming that I’m actually in your
future…”
    I gazed at him steadily, my
eyes focusing on his ear, where just the tip had been left scarred
from his encounter with the voodoo priestess in New Orleans. “Dex.
I just got a tattoo for you. I let some humorless dude brand me
with a needle and ink in a place I