She sits on the corner of the couch with her knees tucked up to her chin and cheap red licorice dangling from her mouth like an especially floppy cigarette. Her name is Lynn, short for Rosalynnde, birthed of parents with too much Shakespeare and too few vowels in their life. It's Saturday night and every Saturday night since the summer she met Kyle they have a ritualistic watching of bad movies on the same itchy orange couch.

They met at an amusement park.

She was twelve and short for her age at a time when everyone else was eternally stretching up to the sky like Redwoods. Her friends were lost in the belly of a three mile line for The Bone Crusher while she entertained the idea of popcorn on an empty bench that would not swirl and loop until her faced turned green. There were pigeons gathering at her feet when a shadow crossed her path.

"You're not raising an army, are you?"

He was young and red haired with skin smothering freckles. His jeans had a very fashionable rip in the knee and his hat was uselessly propped backwards. Being a ghost, of course, he was also wholly transparent. She scooted over without disturbing the pigeons and he sprawled into the space next to her.

"No," she said. "I thought about it. But pigeons are really stupid, they'd be awful for taking over the world."

"Yeah, but there's like millions of them. There'd be so many of 'em that you'd win just by numbers."

"Yeah maybe." Upending the popcorn brought a swarm of birds by her bench. White ones grey ones brown ones skinny ones, warrior pigeons with glittering red eyes, veteran pigeons with their pitiful little peg-legs and one very daring seagull. She glanced over during the chaos. "You know you're dead, right?"

"Word."

"Nobody says 'word' like that." She folded the bag flat between her fingers and smoothed it out against her thigh. Stray salt leaked out across her jeans and she brushed it off without thinking.

"I say it like that," he insisted. "I think it makes me sound edgy."

"I think you sound like a pose-ur." Her fingers worked the bag into triangles and rectangles until it started to take the shape of an origami crane. She started after her class ran out of paper for their 'Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes' project and hasn't quit since. She will, over time, build her collection of trash cranes until she has a full thousand to wish for health and luck and happiness. She will be regarded by future generations as a misunderstood genius.

"Whatever. What would you know? You're just a girl." His third grade class read 'Lord of the Flies' instead of 'Sadako'. He spent a week unable to eat hotdogs and played alone on the monkey bars until his death at an early age. "Why aren't you going eek and running away?"

"It's too hot for that." She dangled her legs once her feathered minions were clear and watched the strange black shadow of her feet on the asphault. "All that screaming and running takes energy."

"What if I said I was going to cut open your head and eat your brains?" He leaned close and pressed his ghosts hands around her throat, a curious combination of bloodless cold and skinless touch on the back of her neck. She felt the little hairs prickle up like a porcupine.

"Ghosts don't eat brains," she said calmly. "That's zombies."

"Oh." He pulled back to his personal space and stared thoughtfully at a crowd disembarking the White Water Rapids. Two boys were laughing and throwing hatfulls of dingy park water while their mother tried to pull them apart and their older sister wailed about spending all day in a dripping white shirt. Their feet squelched as they ran off toward the arcade.

After a time he extended his hand to Lynn. "I'm Kyle. I died playing whack-a-mole."

"Lynn. And you're totally lying. Nice to meet you."

Over the years they don't talk about his death. She tries, but every time he brings out a plethora of new and exciting lies to fill the space until she gets distracted and their conversation winds the way of Crest commercials and overdue Sociology exams. She knows that he did not, in fact, concuss himself on a whack-a-mole hammer, nor did he incur the wrath of a burly man running the ring toss and wake up in the river with cement shoes.

She thinks maybe he drowned on the Rapids and that's why he used to stare at them with fire intense eyes. He went, she theorizes, with his best friends from school and a girl that he had no idea he secretly liked. They were joking, him and Matt and Brian, about how the rapids were calmer than bathtubs the way their little raft floated along the river like a rubber duckie.

They could jump in, Matt suggested, shake the raft. That would be awesome, they agreed, and incredibly rebellious. Little Mackenzie with her bouncy brown ponytail was, of course, pretending not to be amused. But her blue eyes were alight with the idea and Kyle saw this and something in him grew stupidly bold.

He met his end when his foot slipped and he went under. He knocked his head against the gravelly bottom and his body floated, senseless, beneath the black rubber raft until the horrified children drifted to the end of the fake river and the ride shut down for three weeks of litigation.

Little Mackenzie was so traumatized that she became a pacifist at age nine and spent her college years protecting old growth from loggers.

That was then, however, and now is the hour of black and white TV glow and the itchy orange couch. Lynn's house shows as much taste as her name, key lime wall paper and a mysterious wool carpet with a penchant for eating shoes and runaway cookies. Outside it's raining and the water droplets go plinkity plinkity on the window glass.

He is quite at home on her couch and he digs his bare toes into the itchy fabric until they pass a short distance into the cushion. A screaming bombshell's shadow reflects across his knees and he reaches for a licorice stick without caring that he doesn't need to eat.

"That," he declares, "would so never happen. We'd never manifest like that."

A bed sheet ghost with lopsided eyeholes materializes from the closet, arms outstretched ala Frankenstein, the Mummy, and a thousand various flesh eating zombies. The screen jumps and jitters from the storm but his wobbling white presence sufficiently drives the bombshell into a faint. Lynn snickers just a little.

"Did you really expect accuracy from 'It Came From Beyond the Closet'? Part two no less." She skims the back of the library VHS, eyes wandering over lists of long dead actors and more 'stupefying', 'horrific', 'mesmerizing' and 'fantastical's than she'd ever like to see in one lifetime.

"It's humiliating. I feel oppressed just watching it." He gesticulates with an arm that's grown longer since she's known him, grown into two layered cotton shirts and leather bracelets. He's as old as her now, her ghost, and she may never know how old he really is. She'll be a wrinkly old woman and he'll be the wrinkly old man with his toes in her parent's couch. They'll argue about ancient Twilight Zone episodes and she'll realize when he fixates on the one with the Cold War bunker that he might've been alive in the 50’s.

"I think it's funny."

"Don't laugh at the plight of my people, yo." He grabs for a pillow and chucks it at her but she ducks and it narrowly avoids a grass-skirted tiki lamp to her left. The lamp, the poor lamp with its wobbling hips and cigar burned shade waits eternally in their living room until the magical day a garage sale yields its long lost sister. The day of their reunion will be glorious.

She fights to bottle her laughter and fails. Her face contorts into masterpiece theater solemnity but the corner of her mouth twitches and she knows if she breathes wrong that she'll fall over in giggles. "Perhaps you're selling your own people short by dismissing the possibility that somewhere out there a fellow ghost might like the traditional white sheet wide arms manifestational approach."

"Uh-huh. Fancy words for a heart beater." A vigorously thrown pillow bisects his stomach and thumps onto the couch where he's sitting. He pulls a face somewhere between a grin and a frown, flicking the pillow away. "I bet if a movie got someone’s heart beat wrong you'd freak out but nooo, I’m just selling my people short."

"Why did you really die?"

The pillow rolls like an abandoned hula hoop and rests gently at the foot of the TV neither of them is noticing any longer. Thunder could be flashing or it could just be a scene change of the movie but the moment feels pin-dropping dramatic.

"I told you already. Poisoned corn-dog incident. The fry-cook was an escaped convict and he feared the police would soon arrive, so he-"

"Kyle, you’re lying."

Petulant silence.

He stares through the television, beyond the million little white and black dots that show a woman running through creaking hallways, beyond the key lime walls and deeper than the source of the plink plinking. She's waiting for the mysterious men in black coats that only come out at three AM, the dares to hide in ferris wheel cars, the deathly allergies to a rare kind of peanut only found in theme park sundaes.

He pushes a hand through his hair, long and red and wild like he knows it would be if he still had a body to grow into. The white of the TV obscures his face until all she can see is his silhouette and freckles.

"I don't remember."

"Oh." She flips her hair over a shoulder and offers him a stick of licorice. Food is critical and she'll be offering him that stick until her wrinkled old fingers turn transparent like his. "You could have just said."

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