#skateghosted

                “HEY, DUDE, THANKS for hanging with me this afternoon.” Alex had been confused — but amused — when the guys had been going over their plans for the day and Reggie had mentioned that he and Willie had made plans for the midday. “Alex told me to tell you hey, by the way.” 

A few days prior, Reggie had been digging through the loft to see what else of the boys had been left over for the past few decades, and had come across his longboard. He’d known that it had been in the garage when the boys had died; after all, he’d used the board to leave his parents’ just a few months before they died after a particularly nasty fight had finally driven him to sleeping in the loft while Luke took the couch. And, finding that he could touch the board and all that GHOST STUFF, he’d asked Willie if he wanted to hang, and the skater had said yes. AWESOME! 

         “ YOU must be willie, “ julie muses softly as she looks at the other, decked out in gear and his skateboard. “ are you looking for alex ? “ she wonders curiously, dropping her hands from her keyboard.

               CONSIDERING THEY DIDN’T really hang out a whole lot just the two of them, this had been a pretty weird request from Reggie. ... But then again, he reminded himself, Willie hadn’t had to say YES, but he had. 

And now they were standing in front of Reggie’s tombstone. Nothing says hey, I appreciate that you make one of my very best friends happy and would like to get to know you better like a field trip to a cemetery. 

He’d been wanting to visit his grave ever since he’d managed to track down which cemetery his parents had used. It wasn’t like there was any other family buried in LA for him to know, like, which plot they’d used, and to the best of his knowledge, they hadn’t even picked out their OWN plots yet. So it had taken a while, but now he’d found the place where he’d been buried, surrounded by names he didn’t know. 

The plot was simple, with no sign anyone had been there in a while other than the groundskeepers of the cemetery, and the stone showed some age. It wasn’t BRAND NEW.... it reminded him how much time had passed, even if it didn’t always feel like much had passed at all for him. 

REGINALD MICHAEL PETERS, the stone read. MARCH 5 1978 - JULY 25 1995. UNSER SOHN. He didn’t know if he’d expected anything else on there, but.... it was weird, seeing his name, seeing an end date to his life, especially since he was standing right there. 

He’d asked Willie because he didn’t want to be alone, but didn’t know how to share the moment with the guys. He couldn’t ask Julie — GOD, what would that conversation even look like? — and the only other person he knew was... Willie. And thank god Alex was seeing a guy who apparently had been Mother Teresa in another life, because now, Reggie wasn’t alone. 

               IT HAD BEEN a long weekend after the party. The party where Reggie had gotten his first experience kissing a guy. The weekend where he’d then thought about it nonstop, not even able to pick up his guitar to drown out the noise in his head. That was how he knew that he was in his head really deep; there were so few times when he couldn’t distract himself with music. 

That Monday, he’d expected the whole world to suddenly shift or something, but it didn’t. Apparently there’d been an even bigger kegger the next night, and most people had already forgotten about the party that Friday night. No one else but him seemed to care about spin-the-bottle with Willie. 

Willie, who, now that the day had just ended, seemed to be coming right up to his locker. Reggie immediately reddened, his hand hovering in front of his combination lock before it fell in front of him, trying to exude an air of confidence he wasn’t feeling ( let’s be real: he was a grade-A dork ). 

               HE COULD SEE why Alex liked Willie, he thought, watching as the skating ghost sat with Alex, saying something Reggie couldn’t hear but, if Alex’s laughter was any indication, it was really funny and smart. He got it, though: Willie seemed to exude the kind of cool Reggie only managed to feel when he was on stage and looking backward, able to see both Luke and Alex at the same time, thinking this is exactly where we should be; crowds don’t even matter. He didn’t know what he’d do if he had that amount of cool all the time. 

But then, suddenly, Alex had disappeared, and Reggie popped over so he was closer to Willie. “Where’s the fire?

“Wait, do we need to worry about fires? I think I still breathe, I mean I’m doing it right now. Can ghosts get smoke inhalation?”