GHOSTS AND PHYSICS: episode 2 of who knows how many episodes....

          The eight-year-old version of myself stared dubiously out her bedroom window.  The ten feet between ledge and ground were much scarier at night than they were in the daytime, and it was such sights that made me long for the real-life existence of transporter beams.  Normally after a fun-filled Halloween evening of candy gathering, hoarding, and devouring I was ready for sleep, but not this Halloween evening.  Tonight my friends and I were going to find ghosts.  What we were going to do with them once we found them, we didn’t know.  We just liked the glamorous idea of looking for them because, odds were, we’d run screaming into the opposite direction should one actually appear. 

Having changed out of my Lt. Commander Deanna Troi costume and into something more clandestine yet teeny-bopperishly stylish, I clutched my Hello Kitty bag crammed full of trick-or-treat chocolate bounty while intently watching the driveway leading up to our house.  He was late.

            “Katie!”

            I jumped at the sound of Mick’s nine-year-old voice unexpectedly coming from the side of the house instead of the back.  “Up here!  Did you bring the ladder?”

            Mick clunked his way to my window, dragging the modified ladder he’d just “invented” along behind him.  “Yeah, I just finished it today.  Do you have any extra chocolate?  I didn’t have time to go out and get any myself.”

            That was his code for “I was too busy combining uncombinable chemicals and blowing up stuff to remember today was Halloween and we were supposed to go candy-gathering and ghost-hunting tonight.”  Even at age eight, I had accepted this about Mick’s personality.  “Plenty.  I got extra just in case.  Where’s everybody else?”

            Mick quietly and carefully leaned the ladder against my outside wall as I tentatively made my way onto the ledge.  It had a bizarre configuration, but even as I stepped onto the top step, I knew it would be the sturdiest ladder ever.  Mick was a brilliant and nice kid like that, always making sure he didn’t inadvertently murder me.  As I slowly descended, Mick replied to my previously asked question.  “They’re not coming.”

            I stopped mid-ladder.  “What?  The big sissies, are they really that scared?”

            Mick stood at the base of the ladder helping to hold it steady.  “No, they got caught toilet- papering Principal Dooley’s house.  They barely got away before he smacked ‘em all with that paddle of his.  Anyway, now they’re hiding out.”

            I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of my friends being chased down Rosewood Avenue by an irate Principal Dooley armed with his monogrammed paddle.  “Then I guess we’ll just have to do this ourselves and make fun of them later,” I said as I hopped off the final step.  Together he and I dragged the ladder behind the house until it was sort of hidden in some tree shadows.  “You ready?” I asked him.

            Mick dug around in his pockets for several seconds then pulled out a compass, map, notebook, and a pencil whose use I could only assume was for taking notes.  He spent several more seconds aligning his compass with magnetic north as I rolled my eyes.  “We’re only going a few blocks away.  I don’t think magnetic poles are going to flip in that length of time.”

            He looked at me, surprised.  “How do you know about magnetic poles flipping?”

            “I decided to read my science assignment this month.  Now let’s go.” 

            “Candy, please?”

            I handed him my Hello Kitty bag.  He was less than pleased.  “Really?  You want me to carry this thing?”

            “Did you want the chocolate or not?”

            He finally took the girly accessory from me, his lust for candy overcoming his manly sense of shame and embarrassment.  A walk that should’ve taken fifteen minutes wound up taking half an hour due to the “unusually bright and defined appearance” of Mick’s favorite constellation at which he decided to stare for the additional fifteen minutes.  And he took notes.  Copious notes.  They even had equations in them.  Never trust someone—especially a nine-year-old—who uses words and equations on the same sheet of paper.

            “Stop it with the math already!  We have a mission, and it has nothing to do with the dimensions of the Snickers Galaxy.”

            “Milky Way.”

            “Whatever!  Don’t talk about it, just eat it!”

            We spent the rest of our walk in relative silence, relative because anytime Mick ate caramel, he smacked it like a gum-chewing cow with TMJ.  As we reached the front gate of our destination, Mick was excited in a scientifically intrigued sort of way.  I was bloody freaking terrified.

            Mick yanked out his pencil and notepad again then grabbed my hand.  He was in “unparalleled discovery” mode.  “C’mon, Katie!  Let’s see what we find!”

            He may as well have been attempting to coerce an antelope to play in the lion’s lair.  “I can’t.  I, umm…I have to pee.”

            “No you don’t, you’re just scared.”

            “Scared people have to pee all the time!”

“You can hold my hand, and I promise I won’t let go.”  He meant it.  It was sweet.

            Still, I continued to resist his insistent tugging at my hand.  Suddenly an old white, lacy curtain wafted from one of the supposedly haunted house’s front room windows and into my line of vision.  The ghosts wanted my soul!  “No, I really do need to pee now!  I think I’ll run over to Rosewood Avenue for some toilet paper.”

            And with those words, I ran fearfully in the direction of my house leaving a poor, bewildered Mick standing on that forlorn sidewalk all by himself. 
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