Carolyn A. Drake

 

 

Incorrect password.

The whisper of an eerie, ethereal giggle drifts like a cold sigh through the air.

Ass sinking into my garage sale couch, I scowl at the thin wall separating my apartment from Mrs. Next Door’s place before returning my tired eyes to the Netflix login page on the television screen. The television — a simultaneous Christmas present and bribe to call my mother more often — is easily the most valuable object in my threadbare apartment, aside from the six-year PharmD degree framed and hanging above the toilet. No one calls pharmacists ‘Doctors,’ but that does not stop my mother from explaining to her bridge group how her son, Sam — you know, the doctor — moved across the country after graduation, and he has a one-bedroom, one-bathroom bachelor pad in New Brunswick, New Jersey, that is sparsely furnished due to ‘minimalism,’ which is a funny way to say ‘student loans.’

Still wearing my white lab coat and the dead-eyed, thousand-yard stare associated with an eleven-hour shift in a popular retail pharmacy chain, my brain is moving ultraslow. I want nothing more than to down a beer or four while binging mind-numbing cooking shows, but my go-to password since I was twelve — SparkyGoodBoy2 — is not working.

I twiddle the knobs to the PS4 controller, retyping the password out.

Incorrect password.

“What the hell?” I mutter.

Another unnerving giggle echoes and wafts throughout my apartment. This time, though, the sound originates from above me.

All at once, I understand. Letting my blonde head fall back on my shoulders, I heave a sigh. I really should have guessed.

“Jerk,” I call, glaring up at the ceiling.

For a moment, all I notice are ancient stains of water damage.

Then, the ghost that came with this dump swoops down through the ceiling and hovers over the television.

Dex and I met five months ago on the weekend I moved my few belongings out of my college dorm into this damp deathtrap. We had both been surprised to find that not only could I see him when he was watching me shower, I could also hear him making lax observations about my beer gut and feel his ice-cold skin when I screamed and slapped his undead ass backwards through the shower curtain.

Seeing, hearing, and feeling ghosts is new to me; Haley Joel Osment I am not, nor have I ever been.

While I did fear for my sanity those first few nights, the continued presence of a chatty deceased college kid stopped being terrifying after a while and became more or less a minor nuisance, no worse than the flickering lights or leaky faucet. Adding that to the fact that breaking my lease would cost the same as four months of student loan payments and I decided to accept Dex as a temporary fixture in my life, choosing to stay in my haunted apartment for the foreseeable future.

Besides . . . he’s kind of cute.

In life, Dex was a lanky Rutgers University sophomore. He stood at six-foot-two, so now, the vibrant pink high-tops he perished in dangle through the top of the television.

“Guess the new password,” Dex grins, his ghostly impish voice resonating in a way my living one never could. The specter tosses his head to flip his bangs away from his face, although I know the movement is only out of habit. Dex’s thick dark hair and Ramones tee-shirt float around him, caught in an otherworldly current.

“SuckMyDick7,” I snarl through my teeth.

“Well, if you insist,” Dex shrugs and glides downwards towards the couch.

“Come on,” I double-up and swat Dex’s translucent form away, guarding my loins as heat rises to my cheeks. “Knock it off!”

“Whaaaat?” The roguish voice in my ear is equal parts mischievous and coquettish, and the hair on the back of my neck stands on end when he floats back into my line of vision and leans in for an exaggerated smooch. I recoil and he laughs.

“I thought you were a hard Kinsey three,” Dex smirks.

Cursing myself for getting so drunk last week that I came out to a dead guy, I give his cold skin a hard shove away and pray that my ruddy complexion will be misconstrued as exertion.

“Yeah,” I growl, “but I have no desire to find out if necrophilia is a thing I’m into.”

“Chill out, I’m just trying to — ”

“You’re just trying to drive me crazy!” I snap with more vitriol than I intended.

To my floating haunter’s credit, Dex does not escalate the situation. He merely props his chin up on his knuckles and fixes me with a sympathetic gaze. Being the grumpy asshole that I am, I despise him for it.

“Bad day again, huh?” Dex asks, bobbing in the air above the couch.

Crossing my arms tight over my chest, I collapse into the cushions, knowing that I look like a sullen little boy but not caring.

“Yes,” I finally reply, and even I can hear the sulk in my own voice. “You want to guess how shitty it is not know a single person in this city?”

Dex raises his eyebrows and gestures to his transparent body.

“You’re dead,” I dismiss him with a wave of my hand. “You don’t count.”

“What every dead person wants to hear,” Dex’s resonating voice is as tight as his translucent jeans, “that I ‘don’t count’. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” I reply briskly. “I just hate how . . . ”

Pausing, I grasp my fingers at thin air, struggling to find the words to describe my bitter loneliness without sounding overdramatic. Linguistics is not my strong suit.

“I leapt so quickly at the opportunity to have a job,” I finally say, “any job after graduation that I didn’t even think how isolating living alone in a city five hundred miles from my hometown would be. My only living interactions are fighting with insurance company representatives and getting yelled at by soccer moms with outdated coupons.”

“So make some living friends,” Dex replies dryly.

“Making new friends is next to impossible when you’re a twenty-five-year-old dude who is kind of an asshole, and not good looking enough to get away with it.”

“Hey, I offered to blow you,” Dex grins, and I can’t tell if he’s just trying to be nice or flirting again. I won’t admit to myself which one I’m hoping for. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

“No,” I snip, petulant. “I want the password to my Netflix account.”

“That’s rough,” Dex nods in sympathy, “but it’s not happening.”

My personal poltergeist has time to stick his tongue out at me before he is forced to dive into the couch to avoid my grasp. He pops up beside me through a ragged cushion to reveal his body from the shoulders up, mirroring a bizarre version of whack-a-mole.

“I’ve wanted to watch the new X-Files for weeks,” Dex says, his large, dark eyes on mine.

Goddamn, why does he have to be so cute?

“You keep saying ‘tomorrow,’” Dex continues before ducking back into the cushions as my hands come down on the area where his head had been. He reappears a second later with an impish grin. “Honey, it’s tomorrow.”

“Watch it when I’m at work,” I grunt and grab at Dex’s form once more before he bolts from the couch and floats too high for me to reach.

“I need someone to talk to about it,” Dex all but whines, pouting his spectral lower lip for effect in a way I secretly find adorable. On occasions like these, I wonder if he is aware of how often I steal glances at his perfect cheekbones when he is not paying attention. “And since you’re the only one who can talk to me . . . ”

“I don’t like your sci-fi shit!”

“Then guess,” Dex gestures to the television, drifting backwards to hover over the device once more.

My tired eyes bore into his sightless ones, but my patented retail death glare never yields results with my undead roommate.

If I want to find out who won Cutthroat Kitchen without the aid of Google, I will have to play along.

Sighing, I steeple my fingers and think. “BuffyBabe7?”

“Nope,” Dex grins, clearly pleased that I have given in and am going to provide him with a few moments of entertainment.

“ScruffyNerfHerder7?”

“Why do you keep adding ‘7’ to — ”

“It’s your lucky number,” I cut him off. “RidleyScottIsMyGod?”

“Hell yeah he is.”

“Dexter!”

“Samuel?”

I glare up at the annoying, good-looking ghost floating and smirking smugly above me. He is enjoying this too much.

“I’ll destroy Twin Peaks,” I blurt out.

His smile falters. Mine widens.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Dex replies at last, sounding more confident than he appears. “You got that for my deathday.”

Keeping my eyes on my deceased roommate, I yank the drawer of the dime store coffee table before me open and rummage through the mess of DVD cases. At last, my fingers land on the newest plastic case, and I pop it open. I place a single finger on the shining disc, smiling as Dex winces at the thought of smudges from my fingerprints.

“Any last words for your Special Agent?” I ask.

When he does not speak, I remove the disc from its case.

“Don’t!” Dex yelps, hands flying out before him but useless to stop me.

“Password.”

“This is extortion!”

“Laura Palmer’s gonna bite it a second time.”

“Fine! So Say We All.”

“One word, all caps?”

Dex gives a vehement nod.

Grinning in triumph, I slip the disc back into the case and wiggle the knobs of the remote control to enter the password. The Netflix account homepage appears on the screen.

Still beaming, I turn to Dex to gloat.

Slumping his shoulders, Dex hovers in a sitting position over the cushions beside me, but I am struck by the downcast expression on his transparent face. This is no sulking act. This is despair, and the rawness of his pain catches me off guard.

I need someone to talk to, Dex’s voice repeats in my mind. You’re the only one who can talk to me . . .

My eyes are drawn to the vertical gashes on the inside of his ghostly wrist, the ones he is usually so careful not to let me see.

Guilt gnaws at my stomach. How has the realization that Dex has no one else in the world to talk to but me never crossed my mind?

If I’m lonely, then what is he?

Sighing, I direct the cursor on the screen to the pilot episode of the new X-Files reboot series and throw myself backwards into the overstuffed couch cushions.

The skin on my right cheek bursts into gooseflesh as my phantom roommate plants a small, undead peck there.

“Thanks, babe.”

“Meh,” I grumble as a reply, pretending I do not feel the pleasant flip of my stomach and warm heat rising in my cheeks.

“Oh,” Dex adds, throwing an arm around my shoulders as the opening credits begin to roll, “the password to your email is SuckMyDick7.”

 

 

 

 

CAROLYN A. DRAKE is a Jersey shore native, and she currently resides in Denver, Colorado. In 2016, her story “Pill Pusher” was a winner of the Quarter Life Crisis contest by Three Rooms Press and was published in their anthology, Songs of my Selfie. In 2017, her story “The More Things Change” was published in the Utter Fabrication anthology by Mad Scientist Journal, and a flash fiction entitled “The Marionettes” was published online in the Trembling With Fear Archives by The Horror Tree.