Chapter Text

We got off the boat, and we all agreed to sleep this off. I tossed my keys to Jonas and told him to impress me with his manual-transmission skills, ‘cause I wanted Nona to myself for a bit (didn’t tell him that part). Jonas went for the silverado, and Ren hitched a ride with Clarissa. Before leaving, she felt compelled to give me a hug. It was... weird. I mean, it was nice that she appreciated my daring rescue operation for her, but I felt her breasts pressing against mine, and the thought of those very same boobs being ferociously groped and suckled by my dead brother turned me off.

Anyways, I got Nona alone with me, and I told her that she could go home while I took care of inviting everyone over to her party. She didn’t have to lift a finger. She was exhausted (probably because her cute, frail body had trouble keeping up with my athletic stud muffin of a body), but she was grateful. She said she’d text me all the details later, but only the Edwards Island Haunting Committee was invited.

I told her I’d make sure she had a perfect birthday, and she drove herself home.

That was gonna happen three days after the ghost-haunting-extravaganza, and a lot can happen in such a short amount of time. I took up smoking again. On the drive home, Jonas needed to calm down, and I really wanted to join him. So I did. I also did a lot of drinking. A lot as in: I burned through most of my stash (I let Jonas help himself). I needed to keep my head foggy so that I could do my best to forget about all of the awful shit I had done and gone through.

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Day one, Post-Ghosting:

I almost let Jonas sleep in (his shoulder muscles are so toned, oh my God), but I just had to take him out on the town. Jonas wasn’t too keen on that, initially, but I managed to get him to tour his soon-to-be Hell on earth: high school. He hadn’t fully recovered from Edwards’ Island, as it was just twenty-four hours after bodily-possession. I got him to forgive me about threatening to break his “jaw breakers” and celebrated our survival with fresh cigarettes! I spoke fondly of my social connections, and he was polite enough to entertain my elaborate visions of drug trafficking. Then, he asked about that birthday party, and I handled it like a champ.

I also texted Nona a few times, but she never got back to me. I tried calling twice, but she never picked up.

We stopped by a crappy fast food joint, and Jonas told me he’d had enough and just wanted to get drunk and sleep. He invited me, and boy did I wanna do that, but I dropped him off and let him have the rest of my stash. There were other people on my list.

Ren was pretty decent. He was still somewhat pissed off about my threatening to punt his man-jewels. I was able to coax him like I always do, and we spent the rest of the evening just shooting the shit. He asked me about Nona, about the birthday party. I handled that like a pro as well.

Day two:

Jonas thought it was weird when he woke up to me jumping into his bed at 6 AM.

Truth be told, I thought it was weird too. I had this really bad dream involving ghosts, and out of habit I ran into Michael’s room and jumped into bed with him. Naturally, Michael had long been reduced to a charred crisp. As I was in the air, falling into my new step-brother’s big, strong, sleeping arms I realized that I could either make things awkward or make things slightly less awkward by rolling with it.

So I rolled with it, and I convinced him that I was just that awesome.

Besides, I had all of the Avengers movies on my phone, so he snuggled up to me as we watched the morning slip away. Mom and step-dad were still out for their honeymoon, so we shared the last six beers he’d saved and laughed at obvious pandering when Captain America blatently showed off his biceps.

In the evening, Nona wanted company, and I was the first she called. I had her come over. Jonas had gone out for something or whatever, and Nona just slid on in, neither aware that they had just missed each other. It was great. We talked about that book she wanted to write. I was initially skeptical, because who wants to read a story about friends and a haunting and visions of dead siblings, right?

We spent three hour on that book idea.

Nona also told me about the party: her house, 4PM, bring some beer. She said no gifts, but I felt I needed to get a little something-something for my soon-to-be-girlfriend.

I got her to leave as soon as Jonas texted me that he’d be home soon. She went out the door, and a few minutes later Jonas walked in with a few bags of groceries. He had bought steak (no beer, ‘cause I hadn’t hooked him up with my connections). We spent the rest of the evening cooking on my dad’s old grill, and holy shit does Jonas love his meat well done. I was gonna take ‘em off after a bit, but Jonas freaked out and was all like, “What are you doing?! They just got on there! You gotta let ‘em simmer and ruin the tenderness blah blah blah!”

He’s my brother, which is great and not-so-great for me.

Day three was the birthday party.

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Nona’s house had actual pillars (like Greek and Roman shit) out front. Dull, red brick pasted over the hastily-constructed frame by workers in desperate need of cash. A small, eloquent yard with a thin, rectangular walkway sandwiched between two squares of grass. Thick bushes lined the perimeter as the house’s fence, but in this part of town you didn’t have to worry about home invasion.

I drove up to Nona’s front yard in my scraped up Sivlerado, and this was a neighborhood where people drove Ferraris. It was 4:30 PM, and I had managed to survive this far, so I wasn’t going to stop now. I parked directly in front of their shiny, white-picket fence and promptly kicked open the gate as my hands were full. I had two boxes of beer, not actual boxes either just cardboard with newspapers to pad my own random cans of beer. Two of those, right? On top of those two, I had Nona’s birthday gift wrapped up in the Sunday Funnies.

I smashed my grass-stained tennis shoe against the doorbell (remember, I’m flexible) and was greeted by a timid Nona, dressed for the occasion. A little black dress. The seventeen-year-old high schooler’s rich parents, in their rich house, put her into a little, black dress.

Holy Hell. It was amazing.

Just one problem: her eyes were puffy and red, her whole figure quivered, and her tears weren’t as dried as she had clearly tried to make them.

“Alex!” she snorted, wiping her eyes and swallowing hard, doing her best to smile. “What are you d- doing here?” she huffed, standing in the doorway, clinging to the big, black, cast iron frame as if it were her lifeline.

“Uh...” I paused, recognizing that she had been drying tears for a while. “It’s your birthday, and I’m here to get shitfaced with you?” I offered, nodding to my supplies.

“O- oh! My birthday,” Nona mumbled, trying to blink away more tears. “I’d forgotten all a- a- about-”

She couldn’t finish her sentence, and I wasn’t going let her try. I (gently) set my beer down, and pulled the girl into a hug. Nona is, at first glance, a small, frail little girl who’s as quiet as a mouse; but she has the grip of a barn owl.

She cried into my old, crumpled white T-shirt, those little hands of hers threatening to tear even more holes in my dead brother’s jacket. I held her tight and restrained my own hands from wandering over her bare back.

I was half an hour late, and Nona was alone. Ren didn’t show up. Clarissa wasn’t going to anyways, but she had sent her a few dozen snapchats of her wishing Nona a happy birthday from the airport. I had shown up without Jonas, and that made it worse.

After a few minutes of desperate hugging, legs shaking, and chest puffing in and out with each teary huff, Nona let go and begged for me to come inside. I grabbed the beer and the gift and hustled on in.

Nona’s parents, rich as they were, weren’t quite as rich as they’d like you to think, y’know? So apparently, they both got some important business calls about flying away to conduct expensive business just one day before Nona’s birthday was going to happen.

Imagine that, waking up to an empty house on your birthday. With two sticky notes saying, “Happy B-day, have to work, back next week.”

I wasn’t really focused on being awestruck anymore. Sure, the entrance room had this shiny, wooden floors that reflected dim, yellow light off of fake crystal chandeliers. Yeah, there was a living room on my left and a dining room on my right, and they were other rooms too, but I had this beautiful girl (previously in my arms) who was in tears, because she was all alone on her birthday.

Nona, amidst her crying, thanked me for coming, for bringing the beer, and for wrapping the gift that I didn’t have to get her. She took me into the dining room, which had this massive mahogany table that stretched out for twenty-something feet with matching chairs that had actual armrests. There was plenty of pizza for a party of twenty. In the middle was the Lord of Diabetes: A mountain of chocolate cake. Four inches high, two feet wide, three feet long, decked out in green icing on the edges, dotted with red icing that read “Happy Birthday, Nona!” in the center.

I dumped my stuff dangerously close to the magnificent cake and pulled Nona into the living room, because it had this really nice, long sofa made of brown leather. It sat in front of this gigantic TV, the kind you’d see hanging above a hockey stadium. It was long enough to fit three people lying down, and since Nona was in such a terrible state she didn’t wonder why I sandwiched her between the armrest and myself.

She held onto me, burying her head into the crux of my shoulder. Laying my head on top of her’s, I rubbed her back and encouraged her to get it all out. It’s not like I had dressed up for the party, so I wasn’t too worried about getting wet.

“Why?” she whispered, huffed, sniffed. Burying herself in my shirt, she mumbled again, “Why? Why can’t I keep friends?”

I could do nothing but try to sooth her. I proved myself a capable leader when it came to yelling at ghosts, but handling mundane teenage crises was a foreign matter for me. Losing a brother kinda set a scale for me, and I never worried much about friends.

“Clarissa was there for me,” Nona bemoaned to me as she clung to me, her grip tightening as she recalled what must have been endless bullying in her single-digit years. “She saw me getting picked on by Jake and his band of dicks, and she sent them away in tears!” she recalled, raising her voice as she dried her tears on my shirt. “She was even with me in a Goddamn ghost haunting!”

I hugged her tighter as I braced for the big, unanswerable question.

“So why isn’t she here now?!” she demanded. Pulling her head out of my neck, she sucked up the snot that was dribbling down her face, eyes stained red and skin rubbed pink. “Why, Alex?” she whimpered. “W- why isn’t she here? Why isn’t Ren here? Why isn’t Jonas here? Do they hate me?”

“I don’t know.” She scrunched her eyes shut and threatened to cry again, but I continued, “But I do know this: anyone who’s brave enough, who’s strong enough, who’s smart enough to survive an Edwards’ Island Ghost doesn’t need friends.”

She pauses, not sure how to respond. “I... don’t?” she asks as I take the initiative and wipe her tears away for her. “But I’ve always been alone. Clarissa was there, and now she’s gone again. I mean, it’s not her fault, b- b-”

She broke down again, so I pull her in close, resting my head on top of hers again. “Nona, when my brother died, I got showered with letters from pretty much everyone in school telling me all about how they’d be there to help me, and I couldn’t go five minutes in the halls without someone offering their condolences.”

“I th- think I was one of th- those people?” Nona vaguely recalled, shaking as the tears kept coming.

I continued, “No one ever followed up on that. I was alone.” Huffing, I patted Nona on her side, ‘cause my arms were all wrapped around her, and she was starting to shuffle a bit.

“How... how’d you manage?” Nona wondered, her breathing leveling out as she calmed down.

Running my hand over her silky, black sleeve, I answered, “I stopped giving a fuck.” Grinning, I offered, “And you can too if you buy my twenty-step plan available on a twelve VHS set for just sixty-nine, ninety-nine.”

Nona laughed a dry, throaty laugh, the kind you have when you’ve just cried all day. “I’ll take ten.”

“A satisfied customer!” I laughed along with her. I held her close again. She allowed it, I think.

We spent a few minutes in a comfortable silence. I felt pretty confident about the situation.

“I’m glad you came,” she sighed, her tone about as chill as that night on Edwards’ Island. “It means the world to me, Alex.”

“I know I’m not Clarissa,” I consoled. I noticed a jolt in her posture as I compared myself to the most popular girl in school. “Well, I could dye my hair. Oh wait, I’m pretty sure I did that.” Using my right hand, I grabbed my cyan ponytail and fluffed it in Nona’s face.

Giggling, she pushed herself off me. “Yes, yes you did, I suppose.”

Craning my back, I turned to face my future girlfriend. Her facial features still bore the remnants of salty tears, but that beaming smile of desperation for hope was rekindled. “So, did I ever tell you why I started studying the ancient and taboo subject of cannibalism?”

Furrowing her brow, Nona shrugged. “I get the feeling you’re going to tell me?”

She knew me well. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering why people would do it.” I paused for dramatic effect, leaning in until I was within kissing range of my sweet Nona. And, taking a deep breath, I told her, “It was really eating at me.”

Slumping her shoulders, Nona hung her head. I could tell she was grinning, though, with the way she groaned. “Why did I invite you again?”

Laughing heartily, I hopped up and pulled her along, the frizzle-frazzle of her black dress swaying in the wind. I pulled her into the dining room and dramatically motioned towards the grand feast that her out-of-touch parents had presented to the hip millennials. “Nobody likes plain, old cheese pizza, but we shouldn’t let it go to waste!”

“I like cheese pizza, thank you very much,” she huffed indignantly, crossing her arms and cocking her head with a knowing smirk.

Pausing, I recalculated accordingly. “Nobody likes plain, old cheese pizza.”

Slumping her shoulders, Nona slouched and groaned. “Alex, I swear to God, it’s a miracle you have friends.”

Chuckling, I nodded. “Yeah, yeah I suppose it is.” Throwing my right arm over her slim shoulders, I nudged her cheek and asked, “But who needs friends when I’ve got you?”

Rolling her eyes, she sighed, “Would you like to dine with me tonight?”

Jumping away from her, I did an imperial bow, draping my hair on the floor, and dramatically answered, “Miss Nona, it would be my honor to accompany you.”

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We hastily assembled an ice bucket, 'cause room temperature beer sucks. I was already on my third can by the time I had managed to coerce Nona into going through her first. These weren’t the fancy kind you buy for a pre-haunting party either, these were safe investments. So their alcoholic content wasn’t the highest.

But she’s just so cute when she’s making icky faces and getting used to deadening brain cells.

We had some pizza, and we talked about school stuff. Nona lovedd dancing. She’d ditch class (class with me, shockingly) to practice ballet instead. So there we were: two teenagers getting full on beer, pizza, beer, chocolate cake, and beer. And we burned through that first twelve pack, thanks mostly to the low alcohol content.

“Ren’s not dating material,” I told her. “You want someone who can actually stand up, stand with you, not cower in a corner every time there’s an issue or if someone raises their voice.”

“I could... I could spin Ren,” Nona imagined, carefully calculating her breaths as she balanced the weight of her head on her shoulders. “Does Ren like spinning? I could carry him in a tour en... en tour... tour en l’air.”

I was doing laps around the table, gently pacing as I swayed with each step. “But could you spin him around as you did a spinning on the spin you’re doing?” I asked. “And what about that dress? Could you do that to him in the dress?”

That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy drinking, my mind just starts racing at a million miles per hour, and I just think of everything and yet nothing productive happens.

Lifting her fourth can to her delectable lips, she gulped away as I theorized, “He wants to get into your pants, Nona, like, he’s head-over-heels for you, but I knew he only knew you just a little bit, y’know? So, like, y’know, I think that he’d be happy to dance in bed but wouldn’t- wouldn’t want to on the- the floor, y’know?” I bumbled as my own thoughts of impurity seeped into my ramble.

“Alex... you... you saw his...” Nona began to blush and laugh, slapping her hands over her face and bowing her head in shame. “Oh my Gaaawd. Do you think... I’d be...” Looking up with a face so red it’d make Stalin jealous, she scandalously whispered, “Disappointed?”

I promptly fell down on my ass, the hardwood floor jolting my roaring laughter. “Nona! Oh my God!” I fell to my back, smacking my left hand against a chair leg and my right against the wall. But I was drunk-ish, so I wasn’t too worried about the suspicious bruises people would see I’d gotten, just after getting a new, ex-con step-brother. “I shouldn’t say anything, oh my God!”

“Whaaat?” she giggled. “Gah!” She fell out of her chair, crawling, dragging that sexy black dress along the wooden floor as she made her way over to me. “Alex! Aleeex!” she laughed as I laughed even harder. She straddled me, and boy was it hot. Gently pounding her hands on my chest, she demanded, “Tell me! C’mon, tell me!”

Wrapping my hands around her wrists, I pulled her close. “Nona, I don’t know if it’s because we’re drunk, or because you weren’t there when I said it, but I only saw his baby carrot-”

We erupted with laughter at that one.

“Okay, okay, shut up, shut up,” I gasped between heaving huffs of lush laughter. “Nona, I only saw his dick when we were kids, in the tub, after we thought you could bodypaint with actual wall paint.”

She went “Oooh” in acknowledgement, nodding along as she sat up, still straddling me. Swaying side to side, she murmured, “That would make... some sense.”

“Why?” I chuckle. Bouncing her on my hips, I ask, “You in the mood to ride cowgirl, cowgirl?”

“Oh my God!” she shrieked, falling off of me. I, being an idiot, threw my head back while laughing and didn’t get to see what kind of panties Nona was packing as she toppled herself over and rushed to stand as far away from me as possible. “You’re such a pervert! How! How... how do you... keep the...” she slurred as she leaned against a very fancy, delicate-looking china cabinet. It had green dishes, so you know it’s expensive.

“Friends?” I offered with a shit-eating grin as I stumbled to my own feet. She nodded with a grin of her own. Grabbing yet another beer for me (and one more for her), I told her, “I play you all like pool balls, and my dull sense of humor is the pool cue.”

Pursing her lips, she realized, “I... I actually have a pool.” She saw my eyes light up with excitement and ambition, so she added, “I haven’t... swam-ded in... in years.”

“Let’s go!” I decided, downing the rest of my can (I outdrank the fratboys at our community college once. I am a badass.) Grabbing Nona with one hand and her birthday gift in the other, I told her, “You can unwrap your gift outside! It’ll be better that way! And then we can go swimming!”

“Uuuh,” she hesitated as I pulled her along, snagging one more beer for the road. “My proportions are...” Poking my left breast with the cold can, she giggled, “My bathing suits... would be a tight fit.”

“Oh my God, you are precious,” I groaned as she took the lead. Her house, y’know.

Anyways, she sauntered and swayed past a kitchen that could hold forty people, did hold four fridges, and it even lead to a wine cellar. I made a note to get in on that too.

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She took me out back to this party-friendly patio. It had swinging benches, pool chairs, patio furniture, and the most magnificent private pool I’d ever laid eyes upon. My ghasp echoed as I walked out from under the patio’s massive, concrete dome and into the warm, fading sunlight.

It was a simple, rectangle. The shallow end with the pansy staircase was on the left (the only real way to get out of a pool is by scraping your skin on the rocky edges as you push yourself out), and the diving board with a clear-water deep end was on the right. Smack-dab in the middle, on the opposing side of me was this circular hot tub that connected directly to the pool itself.

It lacked palm trees, but this wasn’t California. Instead, we had an eight-foot-tall shrubbery fence separating us from the neighbor’s yard.

Nona flopped down in the swinging bench, carefully positioning herself right next to the armrest, and she patted on the spot right next to her, so naturally I cosied on in.

“Ren would never get you these bad boys,” I told her as I wrapped my left arm her, placing the gift in her lap.

“I think Ren would wrap it better,” she giggled, hiccupping as her rosy cheeks got a bit redder. Turning her head, she looked me in the eyes and, despite having trouble keeping her noggin balanced, she whispered, “Thank you, Alex. This day... it would’ve sucked so... so much. But you saved it.”

Smiling back, I slurred, “I always save the princess.”

“And this princess wants her presents from her loyal subjects,” Nona giggled as she tore into the small package, politically-charged comics fluttering away in the gentle wind as she uncovered the truth.

She cocked her head as she realized I’d gifted her a box of cigars. Technically, it was a pack of six wrapped up in plastic, but no one cares about the details. “Alex, what am I supposed to do with these?” she wondered, looking at me with tipsy confusion.

“We’re gonna smoke ‘em!” I tell her as I offered her my pocket knife to cut through the plastic wrap.

And smoke ‘em we did. I had tried one with my dad and Michael when I was fifteen (never told Mom). Nona, being the perfect, little angel, didn’t have any experience with anything sinful. At least, according to her parents.

Clarissa had apparently shown her a thing or two about smoking. But those were the flimsy cigarettes that Jonas and I had burned through. These were birthday cigars.

First off, she thought she needed a cigar cutter. I showed her how to chew it appropriately. I watched her try to take one long drag of it and promptly laughed like a tipsy fool as she hacked up her lungs. I showed her how to take short puffs and “enjoy” the refined version of Cancer-On-A-Stick.

We spent the next fifteen minutes talking about the hot guys in our school. Get this: in the three years we’d both been there, seven guys had asked her out.

I got asked out by the guy who always wore trench coats and camo, and Ren made an attempt. I promptly shut him down like he was Windows 98.

Nona had a ball with that one. She was delighted that Ren was that kind of guy. We naturally got onto everyone’s favorite topic, and she confessed that she had had a crush on Michael for a bit, before Clarissa wooed him away from the Singles Circle. That wasn’t much of a confession for me. Michael drew all the ladies in. He had that kinda charm. Seriously, I had more girls come to me asking how they could date him than anyone asking me how I was doing.

Then that surge of energy kicked in. Nona had never experienced it, so it was fun to see her freak out a bit over it. I’m more the type to lean back and enjoy the hum of my engine when it comes to tobacco. She, however, stopped slurring so much and started talking more normally.

“Okay, I’m not very tipsy now.” She was still very tipsy, especially after she chased down the cigar smoke with her beer, but she finally decided to acknowledge, “But you really like me, don’t you.”

Grinning like an idiot, I fessed up. “Yeah, I do. Getting to know you in the middle of a Ghost Haunting really accelerates your ideas of ‘taking it slow’, y’know?”

Scrunching her lips, Nona leaned back into the wooden bench, causing us both to sway.

My heart raced, and my hands began to go numb. All of my effort and planning could have gone down the drain right then and there. She could have asked me to leave, that she didn’t feel comfortable being around me anymore, that she was as straight as a pencil.

“Why me?” she asked. “I mean, you said it yourself in ‘Truth or Slap’, you’d screw Clarissa.”

Raising my eyebrows, I grinned and asked, “Aha, but don’t you remember I said I’d marry you?”

Giggling, she nodded. “But why?”

Shrugging, I told the truth. “You’re thoughtful. You’re smart. You’re cute. And you were the voice of reason with me when Jonas and Ren were busy measuring dicks at Harden Tower. Those are nice things to be attracted to, right?”

“I... I get that.” Looking to me again, Nona decided, “I mean, no girl’s ever... hit on me before, but you’re no ordinary girl.”

I didn’t really have anything to say. She wasn’t wrong. “Would it be so bad? I mean, I’m not the prettiest or the smartest. I am pretty cunning, though, and that’s always part of the ‘bad guy’ profile that attracts all the babes!” I offered with a nervous laugh as I began rambling again. It’s not my best feature. “Partial credit!” I finished before forcing myelf to shut up.

Nona smiled. She appreciated my humor but remained silent for a bit. Looking back to the setting sun and cloudy skies that radiated with fading gold, she hummed in thought.

I was on the verge of asking her if she wanted me to go, ‘cause I sure as Hell didn’t know what to do to win.

“Why not,” she simply offered. Looking to me, she frowned and warned, “But you’d better be romantic as Hell, because my throat feels like a swamp.”

We went swimming. We laughed at how my breasts bulged out of Nona’s onepiece suit. We shrieked as we cannon-balled into freezing cold water, and we cried as we spent the night watching “Spirited Away”, and we moaned as we made out ferociously through all of these activities.

And we were beautiful. The good guys won, the survivors cheered, and the babe hooked up with the fair and noble hero (second base). I spent the night (in my own sleeping bag) with a beautiful girl who wasn’t quite ready to go all the way, and we only burned three eggs trying to feed ourselves in the morning after. And, for a romantic finale, we parted ways with a deep, passionate kiss before I drove back home in my scrapped up Silverado.

Everything went according to plan. Everything turned out perfectly. The good guys had won. The survivors cheered. Everyone lived happily ever after. The hero got the girl.

Just one problem.