HOME | DD

Description
By the time the doorbell rang that night I was acting on autopilot. The Halloween sequence: haul butt off couch, yank open door, smile at greedy little brats yelling and bouncing from side to side (what do they need more sugar for?), give said greedy brats candy, close door, and go back to couch. Repeat as often as necessary.
Anyways, if I’d been thinking I wouldn’t have opened the door. What sane little kid is going to ring the doorbell and pass up the chance to shriek ‘Trick or Treat’ at the top of their lungs and thank the people who gave them candy by giving them headaches? It was obviously somebody else, but that fact only registered after the door was already open and it was too late to slam it in their faces. Not that it would have mattered. They spilled out of the landing into the rest of the house, making it more crowded than I would have thought was possible. One of them stumbled into the table and tipped it over with a crash that reverberated throughout the house.
“Mel, they’re here.”
“Did you think they wouldn’t be?” she asked, coming up behind me and looking them over disdainfully. “Honestly, Bryce, I can’t believe you were ever friends with these people.”
What could I say? That I had never meant to? That much was true, I had never sought them out. But being on a football team with somebody pretty much guarantees that you can’t ignore them. We ended up being friends, or what they called friends anyways: they dragged me to all the wild parties, where people got drunk and stoned and made out with people they couldn’t even see and made me feel like a total jock cliché. Ironically, I would never have met Mel if not for the team – she volunteered at the after-school daycare and often came by during our practices to berate us for being too loud. For some reason we just kind of clicked, and we ended up becoming an item.
Then came the crash. It was September of last year, after a really wild party, and we were trying to get home. Following the logic of being intoxicated, it turned out that the drunkest of us all was the one who got behind the wheel. I don’t remember it very well, but I think we swerved into a semi. It was pretty horrific, from what I recall: blood all over, upholstery on fire, sirens everywhere. The car was one of those twisted hunks of metal you see on the MADD commercials. It really does happen.
Me and the semi driver were the only survivors.
The recovery process was going pretty good – I had almost stopped having nightmares – until a month after the crash everything fell apart again. The reason? They came back. Everyone who’d died in the crash showed up at my door on Halloween night, expecting to party. They didn’t come at a time corresponding to the crash or anything, so Mel said it was probably just the Halloween night thing. They trashed the house that year, banging around from seven till midnight. That was the only good thing – they had to leave at midnight. Another ghost thing, I guess. They didn’t even seem to realize that they were dead.
A voice interrupted my reminiscing. Actually, what I came back to wasn’t all that different from my memories – the team seemed to be right in the middle of the trashing-the-house thing. “Come on,” ordered Mel.
I followed her downstairs, where she sat me down on the couch. “What are we going to do?”
She gave me a weary smile. “There’s nothing we can do. Keep them from destroying your mother’s furniture, I guess. It’s only” – she checked the enormous grandfather clock across the room from us – “five hours till midnight.”
“It’s gonna be a long night,” I sighed, and followed her back upstairs.
By the time I mounted the stairs – only about two milliseconds after her – Mel was already barking out orders. She sounded pretty sure of herself, so I just let her do her thing until she rounded on me.
“Help me out!” she commanded. So I waded into the fray and began confiscating the various kinds of booze they had brought with them. The questions of where they had gotten them and how exactly they were ingesting them, I left to more persistent minds than mine. Once the alcohol was poured down the drain – to the boos and hisses of the partiers – I started breaking up the brawl in the living room. It took them almost fifteen minutes to figure out I wasn’t part of the fight and I ended up with a bloody nose and a black eye for my trouble. I went into my mom’s study, the one place they wouldn’t go, and flopped down, already exhausted.
Mel looked at my battle scars with a wry grin. “You should put some ice on that,” she advised, pointing. Immediately I stood, knowing I had to get back on duty. “And you don’t need to get up if you don’t want to. Listen.”
The noise outside the study had softened to a quiet chatter, punctuated every few minutes by a roar or a groan. She grinned. “They’re watching the game.”
I raised my eyebrows. “How long do you think that’s going to last? They have the attention spans of gnats.”
“Sssh! Don’t jinx it!”

We ended up downstairs, so we wouldn’t disturb them and they wouldn’t disturb us, and played checkers. Mel won about fifty times in a row – as well as being one of those saintly, organized people who volunteers for everything and still has a job, she was smart. I had the same kind of ADD attention span as my teammates, which didn’t help – I just kind of got bored and plunked the pieces down anywhere to see what would happen. What happened was Mel jumped me every time. But I was also competitive, so I would challenge her to another game and resolve to pay attention the entire time. Endless cycle sort of thing. We played until the ancient grandfather clock upstairs played the annoying little every-fifteen-minutes tune for 11:45 and we trekked upstairs on a silent agreement to watch them leave. They started fading as soon as the clock started ringing twelve. They didn’t seem to notice or care - they just kept shouting at the TV.

I turned to Mel, who smiled at me sadly. I could already see the wall through her stomach. “I'm sorry,” I told her. “I know it doesn’t help, but I'm sorry I brought you through this.”
The smile disappeared and she looked like she wanted to slap me. “It’s been over a year, Bryce,” she said. “Can’t you just get over the guilt thing? I have a minute left to spend with you and I'm not wasting it on wallowing.”
I didn’t answer, which she must have taken as dissent.
“Look – I agreed to go to that stupid party with you when you invited me – I'm just as much to blame as you are. And none of us could have known what was going to happen.”
I could barely see her at all now; she was just a faint outline of a girl as the tenth chime sounded. But I could feel her mouth on mine as she kissed me. Everybody’s wrong – ghosts are just as warm as everyone else.
“I love you, Melissa Williams.”
“I love you too, Bryce Rivers. But don’t let that stop you. Get married, okay? Go out and get a girlfriend and live your life, you idiot. Don’t you dare wallow…”

Her voice was fading too, and as the clock struck twelve at last, it was gone for good.

Well, there’s always next year.