Blue Boy

I like to think I'm a spiritual person. I mean, I've watched _Poltergeist_ at least fifty times. And mom wasn't going to let me go on the Ghosts of Gettysburg premiere tour without taking someone with me. It was too late at night. The problem was, I had broken up with Greg, Drew was busy, Hunter wasn't at home, Jess thought it was stupid and refused to go on religious grounds, and the only person I could reach was Mel who refused to go but was easy enough to convince. Mel could be one of the most boring people in Littlesville, and that's saying a lot, believe me, but she could be one of the most fun people to be around every once in a while. She hung out with an interesting crowd, I mean, she wasn't like most band nerds and Drew was hot. I mean frame him and hang him over your bed hot. She wasn't going to win a popularity contest, but she wasn't on anyone else's fugly list, either.

I had my own plan, those tours never take you to the real places, everyone knows that, and I had read the book. I had been to Devil's Den at least twenty times, it was one of Greg's favorite spots because it was private, and I wasn't going for the little orb things they show in the photographs, I wanted something along the lines of getting pea soup in the face. Anywho, I figured that as long as I was driving anyone who went with me would go with me to a couple of extra spots. After I convinced Mel into going, I told her when I'd pick her up and started getting ready. I wanted to make sure that I looked fine for any guys that might be around when we were on the tour, but I still wanted to be comfortable. I've always felt that my best asset was my hair so I made sure I played it up and I accessorized like you wouldn't believe. Claire's was the best back then, it's lost something.

I knew that Mel might protest Devil's Den but I wanted to make sure she didn't protest about going to Pennsylvania Hall and taking a ride on the elevator, or wandering around Stevens Hall. It was a creepy story, my favorite from the book, and I really wanted to go to Stevens Hall to find that Blue Boy. I made sure that Mel knew I was going there to find him, whether she really wanted to or not. I mean, what was I supposed to do anyway, go there alone? I wasn't about to become ghost fodder. Plus, I knew Mel hadn't had sex and it seems to me that most paranormal things want a virgin, so that would give me a little bit of running time.

So, I told Mel the whole story, except for the running time part, when we were in the car, how the little boy had been beaten at home and wandered off in front of the women's school grounds that were there during the Civil War and they took him in, and then they had to stow him on the window ledge at night and it was winter and cold, and the headmistress stayed later than they thought and they couldn't find the boy and he hadn't fallen. I even told her the super creepy part that I should have made her read the book for where people see 'HELP ME'� written backwards on the windows. She didn't seem as freaked out as I was about it, even though I knew she loved horror movies, she had seen worse ones than I had, and I hoped she wasn't going to take all of the fun out of the scare if we did see his face floating in the window like some of the girls who stay there do.

First of all, I don't know what Mel was even thinking wearing what she was. I mean, she was going to be around college guys and the whole plain sweater and jeans with combat boots just wasn't the kind of thing that they went for. True, she could walk over any terrain, and even I was slipping in my Nikes, but if I had told her once, I told her a thousand times that no shoe was fashionable every day. She should have at least gotten something done with her hair at some point, I mean, she obviously hadn't been reading up on the wonders of highlights and perms. Anyway, I told her the story and told her she should really consider wearing something that accented that little figure of hers and it was like she was ignoring me, she did that all the time, she'd just start staring out the window and she even did that before she ever touched pot, I swear to God. I finally got her attention by asking if she believed in ghosts and got her head out of the clouds. And what did she say?

She said 'Sure.'� That's all, just sure. I had spent all this time talking and talking and trying to get her to open up and all the girl could say was sure? I wanted stories, I wanted gory facts, I was on a mission! She went off on some spiel about how her grandmother had told her she had seen ghosts and all this other stuff. The ghosts weren't interesting people, just family members. And then Mel told me the strangest thing. She told me she wished she could see ghosts like her grandmother. I told her I thought that was silly, her grandmother just saw a bunch of boring family members, and she should be more interested in channeling Mozart or someone like that, he was pretty funny in Amadeus and I thought maybe they could talk about music and he could give her a sense of humor. And then she told me that's exactly why she wanted to see ghosts and I felt bad because I had forgotten all about her mother not being there or anything. Then I didn't know what to say, because what do you say to a person whose mother isn't there but isn't dead and they might not see them even if they could see ghosts because what if something happened to Mel and then she couldn't even know her mom through her sixth sense or whatever? The only thing that I could think of to say came out lame, but I told her that I couldn't think of a cooler reason to believe in ghosts and she laughed. Even though she was acting okay I still kind of watched her out of the corner of my eye.



The tour went okay, I knew they weren't going to show anything interesting, they just made just tramp around in the evening, and since it was middle October our faces were burned by the damp cold. Mel and I started to walk back to Pennsylvania Hall which was a pretty good hike by the time the tour was over, and we talked about ghosts. It was almost eerie, talking about ghosts to her that night because it seemed like we were in church for some reason. I asked her if she thought that spirits were tied to places they had lived or died and she said she wasn't sure. I told her that was absolutely crazy because sometimes whether you want to admit it or not a place affects the way you are, and home is like this string attached to you and it follows you around, tugging when you get too far away, at least that is what it was like for me. She gave me this weird look like she didn't understand at first and then she said something I'll never forget.

'Shelly, that's really profound.'� She looked at me. 'Deep.'�

'Me? Deep, really? Maybe I could be a writer!'� I think it was a perfectly reasonable answer. Writers are deep, they wear black, and how hard can it be to put a few words together?

'Maybe you could talk to Drew about it.'� I told her that was a great idea, and then I asked her if she would mind because she was still mad at Drew for something he said that she wouldn't tell me. They still talked and everything but there was something in their eyes when they looked at each other that made me wonder if they were going to hit each other, cry on each other, or kiss each other. It made me a little jealous, but I knew both of them had a kind of bond by hating Littlesville so much.

We snooped around Pennsylvania Hall in the elevators where the administrators said they were stuck, and I didn't want to actually go into the elevator. For some reason my heart was thudding harder than it normally would be. The moon was full and bright and it was so dark in the building that the bright elevator looked absolutely terrifying. Mel was the one who pulled me in and just started pushing buttons. I started grabbing her wrist and she pulled her hands around in one of those crazy karate moves so they were out of the way. I was probably screaming, I remember she kept telling me to calm down and then the elevator made a weird noise and stopped and lurched for a second, and I knew we were probably between floors and the next place the elevator would open up would be in the Civil War hospital and then we'd have to hope the doors closed in time or we'd be trapped there forever cutting off nasty bloody limbs and tossing them out the window to make the grass grow greener and that's when I fainted.



I came to and Mel made me promise not to drive to Devil's Den because she had a test tomorrow and a clarinet lesson and if she missed either I better have died in the accident or she'd kill me. I knew she was kidding but it wasn't the nicest thing in the world, we were still in that freaky elevator and all, and I thought maybe she could have come up with a nicer way of saying it but she freaked and said she had been fanning me with my book for over ten minutes and she hoped I had gotten my scare. I asked her if the elevator had opened but she told me she hadn't bothered to look because she was too busy fanning me, and I would probably be a lot better off outside because it was cool and it would help me calm down.

We stood outside of Pennsylvania Hall while she smoked a cigarette and I tried once again to make conversation. I told her about how Greg had called me and asked about her and I told him he could call her his damn self and gave him her number and she turned about ten shades of purple before she went off on me and asked me why I did something like that. I told her that she seemed like she probably needed someone more mature since she never had any fun, and that Greg was kind of cute and it was an easy enough thing to set up, and it was no trouble but she still went off on me.

We started walking back towards the car and I made sure our path veered right next to Stevens Hall because it made it easier to convince Mel we should at least go and take a look. We only got within about twenty feet of the building when Mel stopped walking, and didn't say stop or anything so it took me a good ten steps to figure out she wasn't beside me anymore. She was looking over to my left, but her face wasn't frozen in shock or horror or anything, she was just still. I could barely even see her breaths, she was breathing so shallowly that they barely made little puffs come out of her mouth. I looked over in the direction that she seemed so interested in, but I didn't see anything and I certainly didn't get what was going on with Mel. She was just standing there, her head cocked to one side, frozen in time and looking like a dumb ass. Then she nodded her head once and started walking towards me, and I thought she really had lost her marbles or something. I told her there was nothing there and she had totally spaced out for no good reason and maybe she should stop smoking pot and she laughed. We wandered through Stevens Hall for a while because this one nice woman let us in when she found out that we were looking for ghosts and she thought the story was interesting just like any reasonable person would, but we never found the blue boy.

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