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Every other eight year old with sensation acts differently to Erik.
However, from the other side of the door, Erik can hear his shrink nattering away to his mother saying, every other eight year old with sanity acts differently to Erik.
:::
Erik knows, that Charles can’t feel anything. When he’s having a bath, and feels the warm, soapy water lather his skin, he’s pondering over whether Charles knows how heavenly this feels after a long day of soccer out on the playground. When he loses balance and plummets onto the ground from the branch of a high tree – feels a sore throbbing pervading through his knees and palms – he wonders if Charles has ever even known this pain. The velvety softness of flowers, the silky fur of the neighbour’s Retriever, or even the coarseness of a paper’s edge – can Charles just not feel any of it? Nothing at all?
:::
Erik is walking home, satchel swaying from side to side, when he realises—
If Charles can’t feel anything…
“Can you feel the pain in your legs?” he asks, breathlessly, when he finds Charles parked at his bedroom window, looking dazedly at the world he’s not a part of.
He turns his head towards Erik, but stares above his head, thinking.
“I don’t know. Last time I remember, I couldn’t feel my legs,” Charles replies, his fingers locking together.
“But your pneumonia’s gone. Shouldn’t your other illness be gone too?”
Charles grips the armrests of his wheelchair. It’s what he died in, what he also took with him into his ghoulish pseudo-presence. It’s also the only solid thing he can touch and move, and somehow manages to phase through objects as well, without yielding to Erik’s metallokinesis. Charles’s entire apparition is beyond tangibility. It aggravates Erik most of the time, and saddens him every other.
“If you’re not affected by anything, you surely can’t be affected by whatever’s stopping you from walking. Besides – everybody knows ghosts float around. You can’t hover about in a chair.”
Charles’s thoughtful look turns sour as he purses his lips and tilts his head, evidently unimpressed by Erik’s logic – or lack thereof.
Erik does think about whether logic is even applicable in a scenario like this. He’s talking to a ghost, for God’s sake – how can any of this make sensible sense?
“What if I try…”
“Yes!” Erik says encouragingly, marching over to stand in front of his friend.
“But – what if I let go of the wheelchair, and never feel it again?”
Erik rolls his eyes and drops his shoulders, huffing out a sigh. The sigh turns into an anxious intake of breath, when Erik drops his head and sees Charles put one foot down on the carpet. He presses down, then, applying force and lifting off the the chair to see if he’s supported. His hold on the chair begins to shake, like he’s shivering from his own frigidity, and then ceases, his body slumping down.
“I – I can’t,” he says, voice thin. He pouts his lips and keeps his gaze away from Erik’s, like he’s just disappointed him.
Inwardly, Erik knows he shouldn’t be. He knows that he’s asking for too much.
:::
The next day, he runs home and sees Charles standing at the window. The wheelchair is nowhere in sight.
“I can’t feel my legs!” Charles excitedly claims, looking from his legs to Erik’s face, brightened in awe.
“But – what?”
“I can’t even feel myself stand! Or walk!”
Then he demonstrates by striding towards Erik with confident limbs, and it all looks so real and seems so true and Charles is genuinely happy; Erik can’t help but lunge forward to hug him—
His arms go right through him.
He ends up standing on Charles’s foot, with arms looped in the air, confining nothing, holding nothing, hugging nothing.
Charles is just an outline in his vision, an illusion, and how had Dr Frost put it the last time? – a hallucination.
Erik takes a step back, tentative of imposing the body that isn’t there. He clears his throat and stares at the floor as Charles stills in front of him, waiting for Erik to say something. To maybe quip at him again in that exasperated tone, where he fumes and rants about how Charles is getting him in trouble and Charles doesn’t really exist and Charles can’t be his friend if he doesn’t even eat.
But Erik only smiles placidly and says,
“I knew I’d be taller than you.”
:::
When Charles runs through the grassy lawn, he runs right past it. None of the plants, none of the grass or flowers or soil get to be affected by the breeze of his movements. Nothing is ever affected by Charles.
Other than Erik, of course.
:::
Charles doesn’t have a shadow and doesn’t have a reflection. When he walks, his footsteps go unheard, and when he breathes, the air around him doesn’t change.
But he does grow and age as Erik does.
His mother tells him he needs to sleep a lot and drink a lot of milk in order to grow up healthily. Erik glances momentarily away from his dinner plate to think about how Charles has managed to grow up fine with neither. It doesn’t stop his curiosity from prevailing, and prompting him to take a glass of milk up to Charles. He’s sitting on the ground, re-reading the same book page over until Erik will come and turn the page for him.
“I thought you hated milk,” Charles comments, looking at the glass with vacant thirst.
“Mom says children won’t grow if they don’t drink this. And you’re still very short.”
Charles scoffs and sits upright, eyeing Erik incredulously.
“It won’t go in me. I can’t taste or hold anything.”
“How are you even alive,” he mutters, regretting it instantly when Charles’s face contorts. “What if I held it and poured it into your mouth?”
“It’ll spill everywhere.”
“But can’t we just see…”
“It’ll spill, don’t – Erik!”
The milk spills into the carpet, absorbed. Erik gets chided that night, but it doesn’t feel so bad when he sees Charles giggling about it from between the crack in the door.
:::
Erik’s mom can’t see or hear Charles. He thinks that’s extremely unfortunate.
But Charles’s mother can’t either, and that makes Erik want to cry. Cry, is something Charles does too. How? They don’t know.
How – it’s becomes the single most complex syllable of their world.
:::
Charles is far too brainy for someone who is quite literally airheaded.
“I remember everything I’ve ever been told,” he says one night, when they’re playing chess. “I can still take information from other people. That’s why I know and remember every piece of information that you’ve ever been exposed to.”
Erik thinks that may just be the pinnacle of privacy invasion, and he’d mind, if he didn’t think the things he’s told in school are purely just banal. They don’t teach you how to deal with ghost friends in school – what good can long division do for him? Charles isn’t an equation with resolute digits for an answer, he’s a riddle that can’t be solved. To their dismay, only Erik is faced with it.
“You moved my knight on the wrong square.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Move it back. Just ‘cause you’re losing, doesn’t mean you have to cheat. Now move it back and give me your pawn, I’ve won it.”
“Get it yourself.”
“Stop being ridiculous, you know I can’t.”
“Stop being a stupid ghost, you’re not even scary.”
“Stop picking on me.”
“At least I’m real!”
“At least I’m – I’m—” Charles’s voice trails away, his eyes watering as he looks around the room, grappling for words to say. “I’m – not your friend anymore! Go find a real friend.”
Then Charles stands up on phantom limbs and storms away, walking directly through the chess set, through Erik and through the door.
:::
Erik has tried to make a so-called “real” friend. In class, anybody with a pulse is frankly too stupid or rude to converse with. Erik knows he’s the only different—gifted person in class, too, and he already gets appraising looks when he tells people he’s Jewish.
But he sits alone in the cafeteria, picking on the dire vegetarian food they’ve been serving all month – they don’t cater for religious needs, giving only a vegetarian and non-vegetarian option – and swings his legs on the bench. He’s the only one on the table, lonely and wishing for somebody to flick his food at like the other kids are.
He cranes his neck and watches raptly as the children dodge spoonful’s of food and laugh with abandon. Erik smiles, thinking about how he could pelt Charles with all of his food and still not get a grain on him. He’d be so good at that game.
But he has only Charles to play with, and Charles is mad at him. He’s mad at Charles too, because now he has to visit the shrink again, after his mom had overheard Erik speaking loudly to absolutely nobody; nothing.
:::
Charles is sitting in front of their small television when Erik comes home. His mom is standing right behind him, folding clothes and greeting Erik. When she steps forward, she steps into Charles and Erik winces. He tries very, very hard to not stare at Charles and get his attention when his mother is there too. He’s learnt from the last time, and every time before, that there’s no way he can get his mother to see Charles.
Gaze carefully controlled, he trudges up the stairs and waits at the landing for Charles to follow.
He comes minutes later, going up to Erik’s bedroom where they can talk in hushed voices.
“I went to see mother today,” Charles begins as he sits down on the ground with folded legs. “She’s been talking to your mum about how upset she is about you.”
Erik frowns and sets the chess pieces up.
“She says you’re not making any friends in school ever since I died.”
“I don’t like anybody else,” Erik confesses. “I don’t want to be friends with anyone else.”
Charles looks like he could cry.
“Why not? There are so many people you can talk to and play with who can all hear you and see you. You can be friends with anyone you like!”
“But they’re all mean to me.”
“They’re real though. Real people you can show your mum.”
“I only want to be your friend.”
“That means you’ll have no friends at all.”
“I don’t care. Can’t we be friends again?”
“Well… you are the only person who sees me…”
“Does that mean we’re friends?”
“Okay. Just don’t call me a ghost.”
But that’s a promise Erik can’t make – after all, what other way is there to describe his only friend?
:::
Erik turns twelve on a Tuesday, but spends the next day in Dr Frost’s office, as opposed to playing with his new football.
Dr Frost offers Erik iced tea and waits for him to sit back in the chair, letting silence fill expansively, before her eyes widen from from narrowed slits. She crosses her legs – again – and moves her ankle in circular motions. Her nails are painted impeccably, and her stilettos are clean and unmarred, but Erik can see her cracked heels quite clearly from where he’s sitting. He places his glass to the side.
“Erik. You were doing so well,” she says, leaning forward in her chair. “I thought you promised me that you’d start making an effort in school. Don’t you want to have friends? Play with the other kids?”
Erik swallows and nods his head. He idly thumbs his shirt cuffs.
“Your mother tells me you were talking aloud in the garden and laughing with nobody else around.” Erik looks up at her in time to see her comically widen her eyes, almost mocking, “Were you with Charles?”
He tightens his jaw, flaring his nostrils. He glares at the clock behind her head and changes the time, willing the taller hand forward with his irate mind.
“My hour’s up,” he says gruffly, rising to his feet and ambling out of the lavish office.
:::
“Can’t I come?”
Erik shakes his head and continues to peer down at his homework sheet.
“Mom practically forced my cousins to go with me. If I don’t act normal she’ll send me off to my Grandma’s for the holidays.”
“I won’t distract you. I’ve just always wanted to go to the movies.”
“I can’t risk it. Just stay at home.”
Erik knows too well, that he still hasn’t managed to perfect being oblivious to Charles. Whenever Charles goes outdoors, he’s all ecstatic and wide-eyed, walking through trees and walls and jabbering on about all the things he never got to see, the places he didn’t get to run around – whether it was because he was wheelchair bound, or simply disallowed. Erik hardly thinks he’ll be able to refrain from looking like he’s constantly staring into space.
:::
Erik is determined to leave Charles at home. He does.
Erik doesn’t enjoy the movie at all.
He only enjoys coming home, toeing off his shoes, and laying down on the bed opposite Charles’s untouchable body.
:::
He spends the majority of his days holed up in his room, with Charles. Together, they chatter quietly about Erik and school and the different phrases Dr Frost would use to describe Charles – a figment of his imagination, the remnant of a strong telepathic bond, a defence against bullying peers, a make-believe compensation for the loss of his friend.
Sometimes it’s laughable, how Erik’s inability to obtain normalcy has a brand new explanation every session. And other times, he yearns for his mother to simply accept the fact that Charles is his best friend, dead or alive, and wishes for her to stop booking him sessions with the shrink at every mention of his name, like a kneejerk reaction.
Charles always goes sullen when Erik has to visit Dr Frost after school or on the weekends typically reserved for just the two of them. Erik prefers seeing Charles laugh and smile, or simply sprawl on the bed and soak up the contents of one of Erik’s textbooks.
Erik likes to draw Charles. He sits perfectly still and lets Erik sketch the outline of his pale skin, shade in the darkness of his wavy hair, and add colour to the riveting blue of his eyes, or red of his lips.
Erik’s conceding thought is always that maybe ghosts are supposed to be surreally pretty.
And now, he hides a profusion of portraits under his bed, Charles’s features featuring on every single one of them.
He doesn’t draw them to prove that he sees Charles – that in order to vividly imagine how a young infant would grow into a freckle-speckled bright-eyed teenager, he’d have to have him in plain sight – he only draws them because of the way it makes him feel, to illustrate every portion of Charles that only he gets to see and appreciate. He doesn’t come out in photographs, and there isn’t any other way to savour the sight of Charles when he’s demurely staring back at him like he is now, head supported in the hand propped up on an elbow, laying to his side. And Charles doesn’t get strained or tired in any position at all, which makes him the ideal muse.
But then again, there’s nobody else he’d rather draw; nobody else can give him such a rewarding smile when he reveals the finished work.
:::
Erik’s mother finds the pictures. While she seems to instantly understand who it is in them, she’s not at all understanding about it.
She scatters them at his feet when he walks through the door from school. Charles is sitting against the wall, looking away and extremely apologetic. His mother follows his eyes and heaves an agitated sigh, placing her hands on her hips. Erik swallows and bends to collect the pictures. So many, a collection of a thousand expressions, hours of friendship, ardent voices of gratefulness and silent appreciation for the others’ presence, no matter how eerie—
Charles’s head turns to face him, eyes wet.
How can Erik not turn to look? He does, he has to, he wants to, and of course – his mother sees. In a flash she charges towards him and snatches every coloured canvas out of his hands. Just like how she can’t see Charles sitting in her house, she doesn’t look down at the pictures of him as she holds each drawing in her hands.
She waves them wildly in front of her son’s face.
“He’s dead! Forget him!”
Erik sniffs and clumsily rubs a tear out of his face. He looks down at his hands. They’re slightly silvery where his fingertips had grazed the lines of chalks and graphite. He’s probably swabbed the colours onto his cheeks now as well, but he doesn’t care when he sobs into his hands.
“Do we need to visit his grave again, Erik? Do I need to explain it to you all over again, that he’s gone and doesn’t exist anymore? You’re grown up now, get over this fantasy!”
Erik shakes his head. Charles’s warm mind, a stark contrast to his cold presence, is now close in his vicinity. He wants to shrug him off, but Charles will always win him.
“Erik,” her voice goes tender as she softens and shuffles towards him, “sweetheart I’m worried about you,” she whispers, stepping hesitantly closer.
“I’m fine,” he proclaims, voice muffled by his hands. Charles pours reassurance and affirmation into the front of his mind.
“But this—” she exclaims, holding out the sketches of Charles’s easy smile, his open-mouth laughing, his eyes cast down and reading, nibbling on his bottom lip, “—is not okay. It’s unhealthy, honey.”
“But I’ve done nothing wrong!” he retorts, looking up to meet his mother’s eyes. Hers are swollen with maternal concern, and his are wide with integrity. He hasn’t done anything wrong – he could chant it for hours – he doesn’t verbally remark when the children in class call him a freak, he doesn’t hit the boy who pushes him and calls him deluded, and he doesn’t disobey his mother when she tells him to sit in the office with Frost and talk to her about how stupid the idea of Charles is. When really, if he hasn’t done anything wrong as of yet – hasn’t swore back, hasn’t fought back, hasn’t transgressed – it’s all because of Charles. He can’t deal with having to feel the weight of his disappointment through the day and through the night. It could be so easy to turn the tables on every person to have upset him, but it’s even more easy to upset Charles. He can’t do that to his best friend, not when he hasn’t even lived.
:::
He charges to his room and skips dinner. Charles fusses over him, insisting he eat something, but Erik doesn’t listen. Charles tells him to go downstairs and help his mother with the dishes, and to apologise for shouting to her – but Erik chooses this moment to pretend Charles really doesn’t exist.
:::
She can only stay mad for a few hours before she’s ascending the stairs and sitting on his bed, waiting for Erik to move his head into her lap and grumble the apology that she’s doesn’t know Charles has drilled into him so well. She accepts it with a fond squeeze of his shoulder.
“You’ll wake up one day, and – Ch-Charles – will have disappeared,” she says.
Like it’s promising.
Like she’s assuring him, comforting him, by mentioning possibly the worst thing that could ever happen to him.
When Charles curls up next to him and lowers his mouth to whisper, “never,” his mother catches the long, content smile that spreads over his face and she’s misconstrued the root of it, as expected – but at least she’s happy, too, when she heads off to sleep that night.
Erik is even more elated to wake up the next day and see that Charles has fulfilled the promise of staying in Erik’s life.
:::
They slowly become better and better at fabricating Erik’s vision of his best friend. Equally, they become better at keeping Erik’s mother content with her son’s behaviour, while concurrently preventing her income from reaching Dr Frost’s pocket.
But the silence can appease for only so long, before Erik is forced to ask the questionable a question,
When are ghosts supposed to vanish—
When are are dead people supposed to go back to their grave—
“When will you leave me?”
And isn’t it ironic, when his answering smile is so full of life.
Charles shifts closer on the duvet, rumpling it in the least, but bringing an uninvited surge of cold air with him as he nears Erik. Suddenly, the answer of his question gnaws at him, instilling worry. What if there’s a rule, to never ask? What if there really is a specific point in time, a date, set for when Charles will go back and never return?
Erik least expects Charles to be that specific, but his vague response is perhaps more welcome,
“I’ll go when you go.”
:::
He holds onto those words for the length of the night. He maintains his steady grip for days, weeks, months, and certain moments in between. When he shudders awake from a nightmare, he first remembers – and then he sees; he sees the daunting, magnificently daunting truth of those words.
Charles will only go when Erik does. Whatever that may mean, whatever the philosophy is behind the words coming from the mouth someone who’s been dead for almost a decade, and however great the temptation is, to demand an elaboration, Erik greedily latches on to what he has.
:::
At fifteen, Erik is hired to work at a small bookstore. He’s easily beginning to pass off as much older, having finally grown into his features and fitting into the clothes that belonged to his father.
It’s as normal as it can get, for a long while, as Erik starts chipping in towards the house expenses with his own modest income.
His mother makes a habit of refusing every pay check he hands her, insisting to him that he should keep it for himself, spend it on outings with friends—
Erik has to dredge up a sigh and dismiss her words, because after this many reminders it’s hardly even amusing anymore.
Nobody needs to spend any money on priceless things like Charles’s company.
Charles sleeps particularly close that night, as though it makes a difference.
It turns out, it does.
:::
A big problem manifests in the Summer after he turns sixteen.
A problem Charles is keen to help him with:
Girls.
:::
It’s one of the rare days they’re outside, flitting in and out of shops as they try and seek a present for Erik’s mother. They purchase brand new red shoes, ones that are worth an entire month’s pay, but Erik is glad to indulge. Along with it, they buy her a thin, daintily decorated neck scarf a shade similar to the bow on the shoes.
And it’s meant to be as simple as that, but having Charles as his best friend is like having to cater to a restless puppy only just discovering the outdoors.
Charles runs ahead, not waiting for Erik to catch up – he can’t phase through people after all, he has to manoeuvre his way around them – and stops next to a brunette standing in front of a jewellery shop. She’s wearing a pink pinafore and has her hair up in a bouffant. Erik briefly looks at Charles, and then back at the girl.
“She thinks you’re attractive,” Charles steals a thought, saying it with unabashed pride. He narrows his eyes and leans closer to the girl, who now curiously turns to look at Erik. Erik quickly whips round to look at the pendant on the display behind the window. He stifles a curse.
Charles continues to deduce her thoughts, walking a neat circle around her.
“She thinks you have lovely eyes,” he adds, looking pleased. Erik tries his best to remain impassive and smile at the girl as their eyes meet in the reflection of the glass window. “Ask her out.”
He immediately sends his mental disapproval in Charles’s direction.
“Why not? She’d say yes! – oh, and she really likes Italian food. Do you know any Italian places around here?”
I don’t want to do this – he sends the mental message with a large share of his rage. He locks his teeth together to contain his impatience, trying to keep his expression unchanging as he broods at the necklace.
Adamantly, he adds – I don’t want a girlfriend.
Charles frowns, transmitting a wave of dissatisfaction towards Erik repeatedly, until Erik has no choice but to turn away from the shop and stalk home.
:::
“I don’t want a girlfriend,” he emphasises, when they’re alone in Erik’s bedroom. Charles has been leaning over a copy of The Once and Future King, with Erik waiting to be told to flip the page over to the next.
At his words, Charles turns to look at him like he’s the ghost. If Charles was alive, he’d have a girlfriend by now, Erik thinks. He’d have had plenty, and he’d maybe even have picked someone to marry.
“Why not? Why don’t you want to have a girlfriend?”
“Would you?”
“Of course!”
“I don’t know if I want to. She’ll think I’m crazy, just like everyone else.”
“You’ll get better at ignoring me. You have to live your own life, you know.”
“But I don’t want to ignore you. You’re my best friend.” And if his shrink and own mother doesn’t, then— “What girlfriend would understand that?”
“Nobody needs to. You can’t really expect yourself to get a girlfriend if you tell her you speak with a ghost.”
Speak with, play, laugh and sleep with.
Currently, arguing with.
“You mean I should lie about you? Pretend you’re not a part of my life?”
“You have to interest girls, not repel them.”
Erik fixes him with a stare, frowning at him across the bed. Before Erik can open his mouth to yell in a pitch too loud to go unnoticed, Charles stops him with a hand.
“Maybe we should just discuss this later,” his friend says in a reasonable, compromising tone. “But eventually, you’re going to start having feelings for someone and then you’re going to wish you had this conversation beforehand.” Charles crosses his arms and exhales self-assuredly.
Get better at ignoring me. Erik scoffs at the thought. Like that day would come.
:::
The older he gets, the less he socialises with the other students in school. He silently gets on with his studies, paying no heed to the others as they throw around words like introvert and anti-social. Having heard it all since he was five, he finds himself complacently somewhere between unbothered and unable to disagree. Slowly, nothing matters, as thoughtless phrases begin to fade into the oblivious centre of Erik’s mind.
:::
Erik whines “No,” while Charles chants “Yes.”
“Look, I especially brought you a suit to wear. You’re going to look awfully handsome in it,” his mother insists, as she cheerfully forces the outfit out of its coat hanger. Erik sighs with an emphatic slump of his shoulders.
“I don’t want to go. They all ask me weird questions and expect me to never go back for seconds of the wedding cake.”
“You can go back for seconds, Erik. It’s a small wedding anyway.”
Erik fully suspects his mother’s intentions lie in getting her son to look presentable and clinically sane in front of her work colleagues. It speaks volumes, considering nothing’s changed about whom Erik still keeps in his room, as his friend. Behind him, Charles’s struggle to not speak aloud wanes as he concedes to speak into Erik’s mind.
Please go to the wedding. You know I can only go if you do. And I’ve always wanted to see one…
“Fine,” Erik mutters, determined to ensure he gets second helpings without being judged for it.
:::
The few rows of the Evangelical Church fill out copiously with clean pressed tuxedos and ruffled dresses. Erik and his mother take the seat nearest to the door, and after a quick imploring, they get to be seated at the end of the bench, so that Charles can sit cross legged next to the aisle.
Erik had given him strict orders to stay silent throughout, but he doesn’t have the heart to chide him when Charles wistfully says,
“I used to come here every Sunday.”
:::
The ceremony had been oddly quiet and tense when the Bride’s father didn’t show up. But things had moved on swiftly, with plenty tears shed during the vows and exchange of rings. Erik had been looking at Charles, he had seen the pleasant smile on his face when the Groom had taken his Bride’s hand during his exchange and said,
“There’s nothing better than being married to your best friend.”
He’d clasped onto her hand and squeezed it, and by his feet, Charles had been watching with a craned neck and wet eyes.
:::
Erik’s seventeenth appears without fanfare. He has exams leading up to it, and when they finish, he’s more glad to be done than to be growing older. He’s even more relieved to know he’s got the day off work and that his cousins won’t be coming over.
It was going to be a day as blasé as any other, but then Charles decidedly changes that by sternly asking him to sit beside him and saying, “I have a surprise planned for you.”
Instinctively, Erik is bemused, then suddenly uncertain of whether this could potentially get Erik in trouble again, after all these years of vigilant caution and upholding the documented version of textbook sanity.
“Shh, relax your mind,” Charles tells him. “Just think of me.”
But – he already always is. Always strong in his mind. When the teacher rattles on monotonously in class, when he needs to muster the power to move a particularly dense slab of metal, when those insipid girls strut into the bookstore and ask Erik if he’s busy tonight, and he chokes out a yes, Charles always in mind—
Something coats the back of his hand. Warm, soft skin blankets his own, and after a beat of hesitance, overlaps completely, until Erik is more aware of the sharp heat than his own sheathed hand. For a while, he feels strained by the pressure of his beliefs: it’s not real, but his mind tells him it is. Somehow, his senses have escaped him – he feels nothing but the gentle press of contrived flesh and submits to letting false beliefs take him to a better place. The line that disambiguates between the tangible touch of a boy’s strong hand and the fact that his touch cannot be felt, is just as faint where the question of Charles’s entire presence is concerned. If that hand is there – the same hand, Erik observes, that he has yearned to feel against his own on rainy nights, then maybe it’s just as there as Charles is.
“What are you doing?” Erik’s a little breathless when he asks, marvelling at his ability to speak while such a large part of his mind has gone against him. Immediately, Erik is wishing he hasn’t asked. Charles will proceed to tell him that he’s tinkering with his mind, projecting the sense of receiving touch, and his birthday gift will be tainted by the technicalities of it all.
“I just wanted to hold your hand.”
Erik crumbles. He wonders if Charles can do that, shatter Erik into tiny, lonely pieces. He tries. And all by closing thin fingers around his hand, slowly, with a million thoughts, and nudging him to turn it over so they’re palm to palm. Erik is submissively still; Charles thoughtfully steeples his brows – Erik wonders if he can reach out and touch the creases that fold the skin of his forehead, wonders if Charles will make that touch real for him too, or if that’s for another day’s mental improvisation. Charles smiles and the creases disappear – it’s definitely an idea, his smile says.
Their hands interlock. Tentatively, Charles’s fingers are sliding upwards, and it feels like somebody is tying him down with silk.
If Erik had been unsure before, of why Charles would resort to this pretence to make Erik happy, he finally understands when Charles’s hand clasps closely and squeezes.
It’s this exchange that manages to leave Erik as the one with the wet eyes.
:::
Usually, Charles closes his eyes when they’re in bed, though they both know he doesn’t sleep. Tonight, his eyes are open and staring.
Erik fears he’s never going to be that Groom with that Bride, but maybe that’s not how he’s ever going to be happy. Maybe happiness is the sight of Charles always next to him, the feel of a hand that isn’t there, and those eyes that know everything.
If Charles goes wherever and whenever Erik goes, then he doesn’t need to promise anyone else forever. Then he doesn’t need to be that Groom with that Bride in order to truly be happy.
He just needs Charles irrevocably, without having to explain anything to anyone. He can move metal – that itself is already unfeasible. Surely getting to keep a ghost close to his haunted heart can’t be that much of an outrageous request.
“Of course not,” Charles says, and then there’s that hand again, a vision for his eyes and a touch for his skin, pressing over his wrist. His mind remains happily tricked into believing the shoulder pressed against his own is real too.
:::
Erik hurts his knee during tennis practice. He limps home with a grazed swell under the hem of his shorts, and he’s immediately sent to his bed to rest and wait while his mother roots around for the medical box.
He sits on the edge of the bed, wincing at having to fold his knee and stretch the bruised skin.
He expects another stab of pain to follow as he kicks off his gym shoes; what he feels instead is the throb of his injury becoming quieter, until it’s completely mute. His head snaps up to look at Charles, then drops down when Charles does too, falling gracefully to his knees on the carpet.
Then, what look and feel like Charles’s fingers are tentatively prodding at his wound. Blue eyes look up at Erik inquisitively, and in reply, he shakes his head. No – he can’t feel it hurt anymore.
And can you feel this?
Charles’s eyes don’t leave his for even a moment when he descends his lips down on his knee. Ghost’s lips are tender and beautiful. Charles’s mouth has been designed to feel like everything that’s soft. The kiss lingers for as long as necessary.
By the time his mother comes upstairs, the blood has dried and he can’t even remember what pain feels like.
:::
“How do I know you’re not somebody else’s ghost too?” he asks pragmatically, over a game of midnight chess.
“Because,” Charles begins, as he assesses the board, “I’m always here with you. I told you I’m not going anywhere.” Erik surrenders his bishop to Charles without protest this time. He gazes up at Charles as he places the piece in front of him. “And I haven’t.”
“How would I know? You can make me believe anything. You make me think you look like a seventeen year old when you’re actually five.”
“But… that’s the way you’d prefer it,” Charles murmurs, voice timidly pitched low. “I mean… it is, right?”
“What do you mean?” he asks, forgetting his next move. He’d had it thought out for so long, waiting for that square to finally clear.
“I am meant to look exactly the way you like. It’s kind of the deal with being your telepathic ghost-friend.”
“I don’t understand,” he replies. Erik’s wishing he was deliberately playing dumb.
“I wasn’t always going to stay in my five year old body, was I?”
“Are you sure I’m not just imagining you to be the way I like?”
“You’re not imagining me, Erik.”
“So you know what I like, and change accordingly.”
“I suppose.”
So when he laughs at Erik’s witty quip, it’s tailored to look the way Erik would find charming. When he smiles at Erik’s eagerness to see him at the end of a long school day, it’s precisely the way Erik would define beautiful. And when Charles grows freckles in new areas, and when his hair grows wavier at the ends, and when he forewarns Charles I’d like to touch you now and reaches for his hand, which always, always feels softer than the pillow’s down, it’s all because Erik finds it perfect.
Somehow, it all makes sense.
A flicker of thought turns the light off. The chess game lays abandoned on the ground as Erik rises to climb back into bed. He sinks beneath the covers as he waits for Charles’s mind to get closer.
“Charles? Do you really know everything about me?”
“I think so.”
“Do you know why I don’t find girls attractive?”
Charles’s answer isn’t as immediate as it always is; he’s having to stop and rifle around in Erik’s mind. Erik’s never had it any other way, and he’d never told him to stop, but since when has a question’s answer been that difficult for Charles to determine?
For once, Erik thinks he has a better idea than Charles does.
“It’s because of you, isn’t it.”
“What?”
“If you really were gone, I’d probably be normal. I’d find girls attractive and I’d date them.”
The more Charles withdraws from his mind, the colder he feels. He begins to shiver.
“Is that what you think?” Charles says. Erik keeps his back turned to him though, even while Charles stares down at him. “What else do you think? What would you be like if I wasn’t here?”
“I would probably have more friends.”
He glances up to see if the windows are shut. They are. Still, his teeth chatter.
“How come?”
“Because I wouldn’t have to compare everyone with you. I could just make friends without wondering if they’re better than you or not. And Ma would be happy with me.”
He shivers again and has to pull the covers up higher around himself.
“What else?”
“I don’t know… Ma wouldn’t be in debt from all the money we had to pay the shrink.”
“Oh… of course. And?”
“She’d stop sending me off to my Grandma every time I mention you.”
“And.”
“She wouldn’t be so ashamed of me. I wouldn’t have to hide so much and lie about everything and worry her when I’m doing things alone or speaking aloud or staring off into space. She’d stop getting calls from my teacher about my detached behaviour and inability to socialise and integrate. About how I get bullied and called names every day.” He pauses for a long moment before he continues. “Maybe she wouldn’t have to take medicine for high blood pressure.”
He stays with his back facing Charles, too afraid to turn. He’s already leaving his mind as easily as he enters it.
“Have I not just made your life worse by staying in it? You’ve relied on a dead person’s company for most of your life. That’s not… right.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“But you ought to. You should have plenty of friends to play with and you should be taking girls out on dates. You shouldn’t have to worry about the ghost in your bedroom.”
“I told you I can’t ignore you. It’s impossible to. You’re always here and you’re always in my head. I’m the only one who can see and hear you, so who else will talk to you?”
“Don’t you think that’s unfair to you? I’m dead, I don’t exist. Your life shouldn’t revolve around me. You’re going to get married soon and have lots of children; I can’t… stay.”
“I’m not getting married tomorrow, Charles. There’s lots of time.” Though in his heart, he’s certain that time will never come. Charles will never have to leave him because Erik will never marry. Charles will be the ghost in his room forever.
“No, I can’t be the ghost in your room forever, don’t you understand? You have to live a normal life—without me.”
“I don’t want to,” he snaps. His voice is getting louder, and he finds himself not caring.
“See? This is all wrong, and it’s all my fault. You can’t be like this.”
“You sound like Ma and Dr Frost combined—”
“But I shouldn’t be here in the first place, I’ve ruined your life.”
“It doesn’t matter. My life is better with you. I don’t need girlfriends. It doesn’t matter if I’m not attracted to them, I don’t care. Pretend I never asked.”
He hears a heavy sigh, and rolls over to his back to seek Charles in the darkness of his bedroom. He flicks the light back on to see if Charles has agreed to drop the subject too, has stopped frowning to show he’s happy to move on, but the lamp’s glow reveals his unhappily pursed mouth and sodden eyes.
“Erik, how are you ever going to get married and give your mother grandchildren?”
He says nothing. Charles’s expectant, hopeful gaze drops down, his eyes covered by lids and lashes. The look of disappointment on Charles is so ill-fitting – but ghost or not, he’s Erik’s best friend, and he’s irreplaceable. He thinks he’s being comforting, when he whispers,
“You’re all I need, honestly.”
But that had been the apparent wrong thing to say, because when he shuffles closer to him on the bed, warns him I’d like to touch you with his mind, and stretches his hand forward to reach for him, it goes straight through. He doesn’t feel silky skin, he feels air, until his hand collapses against the bed sheets.
Then, Charles’s telepathy grows absent.
He’d never thought the feel of Charles’s mind completely separated from his would be so discomfiting. He scrambles for the tether between them, hoping to reel Charles back inside where they’re both so used to being connected, but finds nothing for him to latch onto.
If that’s not bad enough, if feeling his best friend depart from the house he’d built in Erik’s mind isn’t already harrowing, Charles brings his phantom fingers to his temple and shuts his blue eyes.
And disappears.
“CHARLES!” he shouts, calling out for the dead boy—
Dead boy. Oh, but now he’s not just dead, he’s gone.
Panting for breath, he struggles out of the covers, calling for Charles with his mouth and his mind, trying to reach for something that isn’t there and never was. He has no place to look—Charles could be anywhere and he wouldn’t know. He could be resuming their game of chess, he could be out taking somebody’s knowledge from their mind, he could be sitting on the window sill. He could also really, truly, be gone.
“No, you promised me you’d go when I go and I’m still right here!”
The only sound that comes in reply is his mother storming through the door with her hands trembling around the tie of her night gown.
In the end, he tremors out, “N-nightmare, Ma. Don’t worry,” if only so that she stays and cradles and coos him until he stops crying against the fistfuls of her clothes.
Charles won’t just leave him, he assures himself. Ghosts don’t just leave like that. Best friends don’t just leave like that.
Charles can’t leave Erik like this.
:::
Erik is seventeen when he last sees Charles.
If this is what being normal is like, then he really doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.
:::
It’s only been a few days of solitary brooding before he gets himself into trouble.
The boy calls him queer and mama’s boy in one breath.
He doesn’t have Charles’s gentle voice filling his mind, telling him to be calm, you’re better than this, don’t retaliate—he doesn’t, so nothing stops him from nudging the boy’s balance back by his pretentious metal-buckled boots before he punches him in the jaw.
But that’s difficult to convey to the Principal and his new assigned behaviour management advisor. So he remains tight-lipped as they talk about his punishment in the kind of detail he’s sure no other student has ever had the privilege of hearing.
:::
He spends less time at home, now that there’s no longer a glowing mind perched in front of the chess board, waiting for him to play and talk about his day. He still checks every afternoon and storms right out just the same. His mother is too relieved to question his whereabouts.
He gets fired from the book store for not letting a customer take out The Once and Future King from their bestseller’s section.
He’ll just never know, then, if Charles will ever come back to read it for the eighth time.
:::
On his way home – bereft of his pay check – he sidesteps past a tall girl who sidesteps in the opposite direction to him, which, essentially, means they collide paths again. Then he moves to his right as she does to her left, mirroring him. Erik huffs out an agitated breath, ready to manhandle her away from the sidewalk, when he glances up at her face. She’s still giggling; she looks familiar. She’s from his school. He remembers borrowing one of her pencils in English and chewing on its top. He’d still returned it.
“Hey, Erik,” she says meekly, to which Erik shrugs in reply. Even if he knew her name he wouldn’t have bothered to greet her back. “Are you alright? You look a bit lost.”
“I know the way to my house.”
“Oh, well… I may as well just ask—if, um, thing is… I was wondering, are you going to Senior Prom with anyone?”
Erik stares intensely at the cloud above her head before he sighs and answers her.
“No, I’m going home.”
“I mean—”
“You mean…”
“Forget it. Forget it then.” She shakes her head like she’s fighting a fly out of it.
“Great.”
The third time, it’s easier to breeze past her, because she doesn’t move.
He notes that the girl, when he turns around to spare her a glance, wears disappointment in a way that matches Charles so well, he could’ve been fooled.
:::
They grant him the Scholarship on the grounds that one use of his mutation, one step out of line, one single disruption in any way will get it revoked to the point of no redemption.
His record is clean for the first two years—nobody expects Erik to voluntarily drop out himself.
“I’m no longer focused,” he says to his Mentor, head bowed below the level of his shoulders. He’d never been focused, really; currently his thoughts revolve around whether or not Charles will be angry enough to resurface. Wherever he is, listening in on Erik, he now knows that Erik will reconsider the step he’s about to take the moment Charles tells him to. He knows he’s not asking for much.
“But Erik, you’ve been doing so well,” his Mentor says, though she’s overtly exaggerating. “Please think about it.” Her dark eyes glaze over with something desperate, something other-worldly. “Please reconsider.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He politely shakes her hand before he leaves. He knows what he’ll see if he turns around, so he doesn’t.
:::
She lies on the stretcher, the pallor of her skin slowly turning blue. She’s sixty-six and she’s hardly responding to the shocks they’re giving, of course they’re about to give up. They’ve been working on her for thirteen long minutes. Erik’s heart sinks and sinks as he turns his head away.
That’s when the male doctor shocks her again. Erik thinks he hears ribs crack from the force. Then again and again, as the monitor beeps on, as though something’s just come over him. Even the nurses, who had been slowly unhanding his mother, ready to pronounce her dead, look on in disbelief as the doctor applies shock after shock.
Still, there are flat green lines.
The doctor gives up ten minutes after everyone else had. When he walks past Erik, he pats his shoulder thoughtfully. His eyes don’t have that searing energy anymore, but Erik still doesn’t think he’ll ever forget. He never has.
Erik is twenty-two when his mother dies.
:::
He’d never realised being lonely would be this unforgivable – he has more expenses to pay for, has to make all of his decisions on his own, and has to rely on himself for everything that ranges from trivial to life-altering. He’d spent so much of his childhood being taught how to be normal, that somewhere along the way, he’d missed out on how to be independent.
The man he’d gone home with and woke up next to is in fact the one who tells him the best place to get his clothes cleaned. He staggers out of the man’s large bed as quickly as his legs take him.
The roads are inexorable, streaming with busy vehicles. When he crosses the street, he realises he should’ve stayed on the other side of it. He feels foolish when he has to turn right around and head back into the path of the cars. His legs don’t agree with the sudden switch of motion and catch up with him last as he rolls to the ground. He stables himself to his knees in an instant, though he’s rising to his feet the way he does in one of his dreams – lethargic, drowsily, like somebody’s caught his other leg and won’t let go. By the time he’s standing up, it’s inevitable for a car to be inches away from him.
He goes rock-still. He could either run and get hit by the other car or wait for this one to take him first. He hardly remembers, in that moment, how to control the metal impending.
He doesn’t realise he’s staring right at the driver heading towards him until he sees him close his eyes and sag onto the steering wheel. Erik gasps when his knees hit the car’s headlights just harsh enough to have been bracing him back onto his feet.
The cars behind blare their horns, with both Erik and the unconscious driver sharing the blame of holding them up. The car’s engine still hums away, its heat burning at Erik’s thighs as he walks towards the driver’s seat.
The elderly man rouses, blinking down at his hands. It takes him a full three seconds to get back into gear and restart his car along the road. He doesn’t seem even the slightest bit befuddled by his mid-road nap as he drives away. Nobody does.
Erik thinks he’s going to be sick. He reaches the sidewalk with his legs still ablaze and his heart thumping restlessly in his chest. He feels haunted. He looks around for a place to sit and inspect himself, and finds a small café adjacent to the man’s apartment.
Almost every table is empty except one. He sits by the window and looks over at the roads one more time before he turns to look at his hands, irritated by the gravel on the ground. He brushes it off and orders water when he’s asked.
“Are you okay?” someone to his left asks. Erik turns to find a girl, about his age, looking at him with concern over the edge of her book. “Did you get hurt?”
She has blue eyes, her brown hair falling over them just enough so that when Erik squints, it’s Charles.
The girl smiles.
:::
Her apartment smells nice. She reads a lot of books and has a small aquarium of fish.
Her bedroom drapes are still drawn closed. Erik is eager to undress her – she has pretty, pale skin and he’s ready to cry into the memory of it – but the girl keeps herself atop him, setting her own pace. She keeps him there by a hand on his. She clasps and squeezes.
When she goes down on him, Erik’s positive he calls out the name her parents couldn’t have named her. She doesn’t correct him once, and when she crawls up the bed, he feels a fleeting kiss pressed to his bruised knee.
:::
He wakes up at three-thirty, or so the wall clock tells him. He’s certain that when the girl next to him blinks awake, she won’t remember anything. He thinks of that driver from a few hours ago and turns to look at the girl who sleeps too quietly to even be alive. So he surreptitiously extricates himself from inside the bed and collects his clothes from the floor, bolts out, and gets dressed in the hallway.
He buys art supplies on his way home.
:::
It’s a rainy night to start drawing all over again. Erik doesn’t know why he’s surprised when he remembers the placement of every golden freckle, the shape of every smile he exercised in, every shade of blue that comprised his orbs—it’s no surprise that the finished piece feels like he’s just reconstructed the aesthetic beauty of his childhood. He scales the portrait up and prints it out onto a bigger canvas.
Charles is smiling in the living room. In the kitchen, he’s laughing with his head thrown back. The one where he’s reclining against the bedframe is in his own bedroom. Sitting on his wheelchair, book on his lap—in the spare room.
He calls it Art Therapy.
:::
If he doesn’t get a job, he’s told, he won’t be able to live in his apartment anymore.
He gives it up before they can come and take it from him. It goes on sale and Erik gladly shows the potential buyers around the rooms. Some let their eyes linger on the drawings, some ignore it and pretend they’re more interested in which way the windows face.
One man doesn’t leave until he’s given Erik his card.
“My name’s Steve Rogers. Your portraits are absolutely stunning, Mr Lehnsherr, if I might say.”
“Yes. He was.”
“Pardon?”
Erik turns around to look at the blonde-haired man as he stands next to Charles Playing Chess.
“I mean – my muse. Very beautiful.”
“I can tell.” Rogers shifts from one foot to the other. “I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’m aware of your financial situation, Mr Lehnsherr, and as sorry as I am to bring up something so uncouth – I’d like to say I’m happy to buy any painting you’re willing to sell.”
:::
Erik is twenty-four when he’s given a check for five hundred thousand dollars.
The irony is humiliating. He wonders – would his mother have been proud?
:::
When he can afford almost anything, he realises there’s nothing he really wants. The cash machine keeps showing him six digits, and he wonders what exactly the world expects him to buy to get it to five.
The easiest way is to donate a large chunk to a charity that supports young, disabled children. He sleeps well that night.
One of his paintings of Charles Under Rain gets sold. It goes back to six.
:::
“But Mr Lehnsherr, you are a walking-talking contradiction!”
Erik swallows thickly as he pours the contents of his champagne flute into the fake plant pot nearby. The journalist—or whatever he is, it’s usually one of those—doesn’t notice, because he rambles on.
“Not only are you uneducated, but you are an openly homosexual omega-level mutant!” he raves, then stops and looks down at his notepad of wayward scribbles. “Oh, and you’re Jewish. Oh! And you’ve had a history of psychiatric illness, my, this is gold. How about this, one of the youngest millionaires of New York is a—”
“For the last time, sir, I am not interested in having a biography written about me. There are more interesting people in this world you should be using your ink on. Please excuse me.”
Ambling past the stout man, he adjusts his suit again before he’s escorted across the building and handed scissors. He cuts the ribbon, smiles reluctantly at a selective number of cameras, and lets himself get ushered into his Gallery. He’s seen it before, of course, but the high ceilings and wide open spaces still make him uneasy. It’s a real, gigantic Gallery, and people are taking it seriously. They stride in and gape at the portraits, whisper everything from horrid musings to incoherent praise. They notice things he hadn’t even thought about himself.
He’s gone from hiding Charles in his bedroom to plastering him on large white walls. He’s gone from being bullied in corridors to being ambushed for autographs.
He feels sick.
There’s Charles on every wall, and yet, there’s that Charles, thrown at his feet in disgrace when the drawings were unearthed from under his bed. He can share this Charles with millions of people, and yet, he can’t have Charles himself. If he could have him back, just once, at the expense of every figure in his bank account and every lauded piece on these walls, he would. There’s no question – this could all go away, he could be insane and anti-social all over again, and he wouldn’t mind.
If he’s honest – he’d much rather bear the pristine white interior of Dr Frost’s office than the spotless white of these walls.
“Congratulations,” someone says to his left. He whirls around and sees Steve Rogers, hands tucked into his pockets casually. “You’ve done well.”
“I have you to thank,” he says, surprised he hasn’t vomited out his words. “I’m glad you could make it.”
Rogers nods once, then goes inert, eyes washing over with a look of distant concentration. Erik turns to look over his shoulder at where Steve’s eyes are focused, but sees nothing extraordinary. His hands come out of his pockets, and he speaks like the tall girl he left disappointed on the sidewalk, the Mentor who pleaded him to reconsider, the doctor who was suddenly overcome with duty, the man who went limp at his steering wheel, the blue-eyed girl who didn’t mind being called Charles when she brought him to climax—
“Somebody’s waiting for you downstairs. You should go to him.”
:::
He charges down the stairs, bumps into someone he’s sure he’s seen on Forbes magazine, and finally makes it to the lobby. There are eight different divisions to the lobby.
Erik’s dress shoes take the heat of his furious steps as he dashes from room to room, heart panicking like he’s been overheard talking to the ghost he loves.
Every room has Charles, but then it doesn’t. One room has Charles In The Grass, the other has Charles With His Back Turned. The next has Pensive Charles, and the one opposite has a young man standing with his back turned to the door.
Erik re-enters the room.
He hears every loud sound his shoes make against the tiles as he walks.
The young man barely shifts from his spot, gazing up at a painting of Charles Pretending To Sleep. Erik goes to stand next to him and looks up at it too, counting on his heart to calm down so he can speak.
For a long time, neither happens.
His sweat makes his clothes stick to him. He loosens his tie and runs his sleeve over his damp forehead. The distant sound of people celebrating and admiring his work fades to insignificance.
“See. See how I’ve done without you?” his voice echoes in the large room, when he finally speaks. “Are you happy now?”
“I’m sorry.”
Erik continues to look up at Charles hung up on the wall, smiling softly at everyone who looks. His voice has changed to the way Erik likes, of course. Erik likes his voice a lot.
“I’m sorry, Charles. I’m sorry it didn’t go the way you wanted. I know you tried.”
But Erik was never going to be that Groom with that Bride. He’d known the day Charles promised to never leave.
“I never did leave.”
Erik nods. It’s evident from his Gallery, evident from his mind, that Charles never left. He steps closer to him, but he’s still scared to look. Charles Standing Next To Him, another sight made with him in mind, but one he’s waited to see for too long to share with the world, on these walls.
They both know that Erik is still anti-social and introvert, just richer. Richer, and lonelier. Still without friends, still without a wife, still without family. He’s achieved nothing from Charles’s absence—and he was never going to.
They both also know that the things he can’t share with the world will become his secrets. All he really wants is to make Charles his secret all over again, even in exchange for his sanity—and his wealth, the expensive tuxedo on his body, and this Gallery of memories, if Charles will willingly be prepared to give him more.
He feels a warm mind nudge his. He grants it entree, feels it infuse his own mind, and revels in the comfortable heat of being enveloped all over again.
The link between them is so indubitably real, the newness of it so alarming, that he can dare to reel Charles closer and send his message, this time knowing he’ll get it,
I’d like to take you home now.
Beside him, Charles turns his head.
“Nothing’s changed, Erik. I’m still dead, I’m still—”
“No, Charles, I’ve been dead. All these years, I’ve hardly managed without you. Isn’t it obvious? Look all around you, Charles. Did you think I’d just forget you and move on?”
He looks straight on at Charles when he shakes his head. He’s meant to be as beautiful as Erik could ever want, but it still hurts his eyes. All these paintings, and what had he expected? To recreate him in order to soothe the pain of his absence? He has tried and failed at capturing his allure; every person who walks into this Gallery and extols the beauty of his muse has no clue, really, of Erik’s inability to replicate his best friend on a canvas. If they knew – they wouldn’t pay a dime.
“Just come home with me, Charles,” he whispers, hand inching closer to Charles’s. He should probably forewarn him, that he’s pawed helplessly at empty air for too long now, and he wants to feel the deceit of touch. He wants it with the burning ache of that seventeen year old who went astray.
Now, he’s twenty-seven years old, the loneliest man alive, and he’s ready to unhealthily depend on a ghost for love.
Soft fingers intertwine with his own, tying him to silk. A palm presses against his; the hand clasps and squeezes.
“Can you feel this?”
Erik can feel his happiness become restored, he can feel himself devolving into his teenage years, and he can even feel tears prick at his eyes.
“Yes. I can feel you.”
Behind him, shoes click against the tiles with the sound of someone approaching.
“Hey, who are you talking to?”
Erik smiles.
“Nobody.”