That first day back at school was pretty weird.
People didn’t even recognize Amy. Her math teacher was totally clueless. She walked into his class, sat in her usual seat, and he actually walked up to her and asked, “Can I help you?”
When she just stared back at him, he went on with, “Look, if you’re new, you’ll have to go back to the office and talk to a counselor, because I don’t have any paperwork for you.”
She assured him she wasn’t new.
“You’re not?” he said fumbling through his grade book. “What’s your name again?”
People didn’t quite know how to take the new Amy.
Now that she’d stopped dressing like a hog farmer and her face wasn’t hidden behind a wall of stringy hair, it was hard for them to keep thinking of her as “Amy LaBlob”. Besides, now that she was no longer all haunted and depressed, it was becoming obvious to anyone who cared to notice that she had an actual personality.
All the rules had changed, and now people didn’t know how to act. Back in the LaBlob days it was easy. She was the school scapegoat. Anybody could show off how witty he was by cracking jokes about her, and they could all tell themselves, “I may be a loser, but at least I’m not Amy LaBlob.”
Now not even Amy LaBlob was Amy LaBlob.
“I don’t know how to deal with this, Marc.”
We were sitting in the cafeteria. At the next table, behind Amy, a group of girls were doing a lot of whispering while trying not to let me catch them staring at her.
I stole one of Amy’s French fries. “Deal with what?” As if I didn’t know.
“The staring and the whispering I can ignore. I’ve been getting that since the first day I got here.”
She set down her milk carton. “It’s ones who all of a sudden are acting all nice to me that I have a hard time with.”
“Being treated nicely, ouch, that is tough.”
She gave me a backhand slap to the shoulder. “Knock it off, Marc, I’m serious. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Some of these people who are all, ‘Amy you look so great! Love that outfit!’ are the ones who used to say the meanest stuff.”
Now she was looking hard at me. “So tell me, what am I supposed to do with all that now?”
I shrugged. “Well, I suppose they’re trying…”
“And the guys…” she rolled her eyes. “Don’t think I don’t know the things they used to say about me. Now it’s all ‘Yo, Amy! Lookin’ good!’ Puh-lease.” She shook her head and took another sip from her milk carton.
“Hey babe,” I laughed, “you’re a hottie now. You’d better start getting used to it.”
She whacked me again. “Don’t you get started!”
I rubbed my shoulder. Not that it actually hurt or anything. “Look, I can adjust to having a hot babe for a girlfriend, but these random acts of violence have got to stop.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “You are so helpful.”
I’d been puzzling for some time over how to tell Amy about Zach.
I didn’t really want to make a big deal about that invisible world of spooks and specters that only I seemed to be aware of. She hadn’t brought up the ghost thing after all the business with her mother, and I’d been carefully ignoring the random phantoms that crossed our path when we were together.
But it was starting to bug me. Zach had become the nearest thing I had to a best friend, and I was starting to wish I could share that with Amy.
Then one day it just sort of happened.
Amy’s initial reaction was less than encouraging. “Great. I finally have a decent boyfriend, and then I find out he has an imaginary playmate.”
We’d been sitting on the Henry Clay Fontaine memorial bench. It had kind of become “our spot”.
Amy had been musing about who Henry Clay Fontaine could have been, and how probably no one even knew anymore, and how that was kind of sad…
Then I started telling her about Henry Clay. I told her the whole tale of who he was, his Civil War days, his years at Gierman College, even his role in the discovery of the Eugnosis of Alexandria documents.
“Get out of here,” Amy said. “You’re making this up. Are you trying to tell me you spend all your spare time researching the history of the outdoor furniture of Gierman College?”
That’s when I told her about Zach.
“What do you mean ‘imaginary playmate’?” I protested. “There’s nothing imaginary about Zach. That you could even say that after…”
“Hel-lo!” she sang. “Jo-king! Lower your defense shields, okay? I believe you, Marc…reluctantly, but you’re right, after all that happened with Mama, I pretty much have to.”
She sat back against the bench. “But come on, you’re best bud is a dead kid from the Civil War? You’ve got to admit, it sounds weird.”
I admitted it.
Amy looked around nervously. “Is he…uh…here now?”
I shook my head. “Not right now, no. Hang on a minute.” I silently called out to Zach, who promptly appeared before us. “Now he is.”
“Where?” she asked, head swiveling.
I pointed at the space in front of us.
Amy squinted, seeing nothing. “O-kay…and you can like, see him and everything?”
I nodded, feeling awkward.
Then Zach spoke up. “I reckon there might be a way to inspire the lady t’have a little more confidence in my existence. If you all will just excuse me for a minute, I’m goin’ to do a bit of scoutin’.” And with that, he hurried off down the path.
Amy watched me staring and nodding at what was, to her, empty space. “Uh, what’s happening?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “He said something about scouting.”
“Scouting?”
Just then, Zach reappeared.
You may recall from my earlier description that Henry Clay’s bench was in a little wooded grove at the dead end of a brick pathway, and that pathway intersected with another path that students used as a short-cut to go to and from the library.
Looking out from the bench, all of the trees and bushes around the edge of our little mini-park left only a narrow section of the short-cut visible, about three to five feet max. You were totally screened off from seeing anyone walking to and from the library except for those few seconds it took to cross the intersection with the pathway to Henry Clay’s bench.
That’s why, when Zach floated up and said, “There’ll be two fellers comin’ by in about ten seconds, goin’ from left to right. One feller’ll be wearin’ a bright yellow rain slicker and a red cap set backwards on his head, and the other feller’ll be wearin’ a grey tunic with a hood on it,” I could see how he was setting up his demonstration.
I relayed Zach’s prediction to Amy, finishing just seconds before the two guys passed in and out of view. The things Zach called a “tunic” turned out to be a sweatshirt, but otherwise his description was a bull’s-eye.
“Whoa!” Amy exclaimed. “Your Zach told you that?” She stood up and looked around. “There’s no way to see anybody coming down that path…”
Then Zach floated up with another prediction. I passed it on to Amy. “Next, there’ll be a girl. She’ll be dressed all in black, have purple hair, and be carrying a green backpack.”
Another bull’s-eye.
“Okay, I’m impressed,” Amy said, looking around again and confirming that I couldn’t have seen anyone before they hit the intersection of the two paths.
“Next there’ll be an old guy with a long grey beard, but he’s a ghost, so you probably won’t see him.”
“You’re kidding right?”
Actually, I wasn’t.
The three of us then held what passed for a conversation.
I had to translate everything Zach said for Amy, which was awkward at first, but a lot easier emotionally than translating for her mother.
Amy was still a bit weirded out, but then she got into asking Zach about life in the 1800s and the war and what being a ghost was like. Within a few minutes it was like we were just three friends hanging out and talking. And while technically, there was nothing normal about it, it didn’t feel all that strange to us.
As I relayed the tale of Zach’s untimely demise at Gettysburg, Amy’s face turned grave, then sad. At the story’s end she sat silently staring into space.
I supposed she was thinking about her mother.