Any Ghoul Will Tell You Chapter 3

On the way home Sophie meets the perfect boy...under the wheels of her car.

Three:

 

Mom was sympathetic to how my very first date turned out. On the way home she continuously patted my knee, saying, “There will be other boys, dear.” Maybe so, but they probably wouldn’t look as good as Stephen. Well, until his lip fell off anyway. I still didn’t understand that one. Maybe I would ask him one day…or maybe not. Something else was bothering me instead.

“Hey Mom, how did you know where to pick me up?”

“You told me where, sweety.”

“No I didn’t. You hung up too quick.”

She patted my knee again. “Well, you must have told me where the two of you were going before you left.”

I didn’t want to argue, but I knew that wasn’t right. Even I didn’t know where we were going until we got there. I’ve never really considered my mother weird like most adults are but this little detail freaked me out a little. Had Stephen told Mom beforehand where we were going? Or was Mom psychic all of a sudden? As a little kid she always seemed to know when I had done something wrong, like when I put my goldfish in the toilet or made mud pies on the hardwood floors in the living room, but I had always put that down to some motherly instinct. What if it was something more than that though? What if she had some sort of super intuition? Or could see things in the future? No, obviously not, because five minutes later we ran over the emo skater kid.

He had come out of nowhere. One minute the road in front of us was empty, the next he was skating into our path. In all fairness there’s no way mom could have avoided him. Still we both screamed in the moment we saw him. A split second later came the crunch of impact, and him flipping over our hood to land on the other side of the street in a heap.

Mom slammed on the brakes. “Oh my God, we just hit somebody!” She put her head in her hands and started to shake. “What are we going to do?!”

I wasn’t going to wait around in the car to discuss it. I opened the door and was running across the road to where the boy lay. I knelt down by him. The good thing was that he wasn’t bleeding too badly, just a few cuts to the head, but one side of his face was bruising up pretty badly. His eyes were unfocused and glazed over, his skin turning a pasty white as if his oxygen had been cut off. But he was breathing in ragged gulps and perspiration seemed to cover his face, neck, even down to his arms and legs.

I didn’t know what to do so I held up a couple of fingers in front of his face and asked, “Can you hear me? How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Twenty-two,” he replied.

“Jeez, I hope not,” I said, checking my hand just to be sure. “Well since you can’t count, can you tell me your name?”

“I’m dead.”

“That’s a cruel thing to name a kid,” I joked.

“I must be dead,” he murmured in response. “I’m seeing beautiful angels in front of me.”

Normally this would be the lamest pick up line ever, but who am I to say he wasn’t seeing angels for real. Nothing surprises me these days.

“We have to get him to a hospital,” Mom said, having finally composed herself enough to come over.

“No hospital,” he said. “Just help me up, I’ll be okay.”

“I don’t know about that,” I replied.

“Please.”

Mom and I looked at each other and got our hands up under his armpits - which were very sweaty, yuk! �" and lifted him shakily to his feet. We held on to him as his legs were going all wobbly.

“I’ll be okay. You can let go,” he assured us.

Mom let go of him as if he were rat poison. I myself was a little more reluctant to take my hands off him. Despite his sweaty armpits he wasn’t that bad. In fact, he looked pretty good. Oh what am I saying? Most guys look good to me. Man, I just hate being boy crazy! Okay, no not really, but it does feel frustrating when your mom has just run over this guy and all you can think of is if he has hair on his chest or not. Personally I was hoping he didn’t.

The boy took a few steps forward on his shaky legs and then started swaying side to side. I could tell he was going to keel over any minute. And in the instant I glanced at mom to see if she noticed too, he went. His legs collapsed and he dropped back to the ground. Again, I was at a loss of what to do. For one, he wasn’t moving. For another �" well, didn’t I say he wasn’t moving?

I knelt by him and like a good faithful medical drama watcher I felt for a pulse. He didn’t have one. I jerked my hand back.

I looked up at mom’s worried face. “I think he’s dead.”

She turned ashen white. I could see something building up inside her, and I began to look around to see if anyone else was close by. I didn’t see anybody, thank God.

“Don’t scream,” I told Mom.

Of course, she didn’t listen. Her scream was like a banshee howl from hell, and if it didn’t get someone’s attention then nothing would. Her wail pierced the air, and the boy’s body spasmed. He nearly jumped to his feet.

“What?!” he said in alarm, as if we had just wakened him from a peaceful afternoon nap. “Man, what the hell was that?”

Mom stood there, her mouth wide open, nothing coming out now, but still open enough for a family of birds to fly in and roost.

“Mom screamed,” I explained. “I guess it was loud enough to wake the dead, because you didn’t have a heartbeat.”

“Yeah right,” he replied, giving me this look that was one part ‘hey you’re cute’, two parts ‘but you’re crazy as hell.’

“Oh my, I’m really sorry,” Mom interrupted. “We didn’t even see you in the road.” I was wondering when she was going to get around to apologizing for running him over. “We should take you to the hospital, or call the police and report the accident.”

His face turned whiter than it already was. “Police? Hospital? No, please don’t. I’ll be alright.”

I looked at him closely. His aversion to Police and hospitals could only mean one thing. He was one the run. Yes! My mind rejoiced. A bad boy! I had gone from a guy with his lip falling off to an emo gangsta in one day. My luck couldn’t get any better.

“Well, I feel like we should do something,” mom told him.

He was only half paying attention to her; the other half was looking around. “I think I lost my skateboard,” he said.

“Sophie dear, see if you can find the poor boy’s skateboard,” mom smiled.

I felt like telling her to do it herself. There was no way I was leaving a dreamy boy to look for a freaking board that was probably in splinters anyway. Still I glanced around to see if I could see it anywhere.

“I don’t see it, Mom.”

“I had some shades too,” the boy added.

I thought to myself he better just kiss them goodbye. If he was wearing sunglasses when we hit him they were now probably up in the trees somewhere.

“Well here, young man,” mom said. “You can have mine.”

She took her favorite pair of sunglasses that she always wore on the top of her head and handed them to him. I was in shock now. She wouldn’t even let me borrow them, and here she was giving them away to a total stranger. Who replaced my mom with an alien all of sudden?

The boy took the glasses and slipped them on, flashing her a big smile. “Thank you, this helps a lot,” he said.

“Helps what?” I asked curiously.

He looked at me and winked. “Keeps the sun out of my eyes.”

He did have a point. It was hot and the sun was bright in the afternoon sky.

“I’ve never been much of a sun worshipper,” he added.

Mom’s face lit up. “Really?! Me too!!”

I rolled my eyes. Mom was acting like a gushing schoolgirl. Was she really trying to impress a boy my age? I was getting ready to ask her what she did with my real mother when she dropped the real bomb.

“Well since you won’t go to the hospital to recuperate, would you like to come to our house and rest?”

My jaw just about hit the floor. Mom asking a boy to come over? This wasn’t her at all. She would usually stop boys at our front door as if they were invaders to the kingdom of chastity.

“We have a spare bedroom. You could stay as long as you like. Well, until you’re better.”

Personally, I thought he was looking better already. He wasn’t perspiring as much anymore, and though his skin still had that deathly pallor he didn’t look half as bad as he did before Mom gave him her glasses and started falling all over him.

“I don’t want to take advantage of…”

“Nonsense,” Mom quickly interjected. “We’d love to have you. Right, Sophie?”

Love to have him. Yeah, I admit that sounded kind of nice, but I was wondering if Mom’s offer of hospitality was to help my suddenly broken love life or her own. Dad was out of town on business all the time. Maybe Mom was starving for male attention too. But a boy my age? Even I wouldn’t be tripping over my own feet to get a boy to notice me.

“Sophie,” the boy said with a smile, looking me in the eye and repeating my name slowly. It seemed to roll off his tongue like romantic poetry whispered in a lover’s ear.

Okay, maybe I would trip over my own feet after all..