fandomhighdorms | First floor lobby, Wednesday

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First floor lobby, Wednesday

Selling dance tickets was probably Tip's least favorite part about being on Student Council on a normal day. On a day where she'd much prefer to be hiding in her room . . . weren't her hormones tired?! The rest of her was! Her arms still ached from smashing metal in class yesterday! Among other things!

But here she was, as a dutiful StuCo representative, sitting at a table with a cash box and a roll of tickets for the prom, trying to distract herself by scrolling through Tumblr.

And kind of wishing her tumblr aesthetic had gone more for "absurdist comedy" than "things I find pretty".

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Okay, Norman had to laugh at that.

"Grandma still shouts at Dad," he admitted. "Even though she knows he can't hear her. I think it makes her feel better about raising such a jackass."

Norman loved his father, sure, but... Jackass.

"Personally I look forward to the days when I get to shout at people with impunity." She was planning to have a cane to whack people with, too. "I can see wanting them to just go on and on, even after your body's gone."

"I mean, once your body's gone, pretty much everything you do is going to be with impunity," Norman noted. "At least unless you're strong enough to be able to affect things on this side again. But not many ghosts ever get to that point, really."

His grandmother would mostly just be happy to be able to throw things at her son from time to time, admittedly.

"What makes one ghost stronger than another?"

Norman shrugged a little.

"Something about their force of will and strength of spirit, I guess," he replied. "I've only ever met a couple of really strong ghosts, and they were both..." He waved a hand around. "I mean, they were both like me, when they were alive."

There was no way to say that and not sound like he was bragging. He kind of hated that.

"Even if all my weird great uncle did was unroll some toilet paper and flood the school bathroom."

. . . Huh.

"So whatever it is that makes it so you can see ghosts is probably going to make you an extra-strong ghost when it's your turn?"

Norman's shoulders hiked up a little.

"Unless I go peacefully and just move on, I guess," he replied. "If there's something to stick around for, maybe I will be, but that's not exactly a life goal of mine."

In his experience, death was a lonely thing for most people. Sure there were other ghosts, but most of them didn't tend to talk to each other.

And Tip had just kind of figured everyone who died in Norman's world became a ghost automatically. Though she supposed that would end up with a very, very crowded world.

"Do you mind if I ask why your grandma stuck around, then?"

Norman smiled faintly, fondly.

"She says there's no canasta in heaven," he shared. "But... she promised she wasn't going to let me deal with being what I am alone. Mostly, she's keeping that promise."

Tip nodded slowly, frowning. She'd never actually had any grandparents -- her mom's parents were never part of her life, and she didn't know who her dad was -- but they sounded pretty cool.

"Is it a total either/or kind of thing? Or can she move on someday when it looks like you're going to be okay?"

"She's not stuck forever, no," Norman explained. "Some people stick around because they have unfinished business. But... I mean, sometimes it's as simple as wanting to leave a note to their kid to clean out the fridge before things go bad."

He shrugged.

"I get a lot of weird requests from people who want to move on once they realize I can hear them."

"Leaving a note doesn't sound too bad, but yeah. I bet there's plenty of, I don't know, gross or mean stuff. Avenging people's most foul and untimely murders or something."

"Not as much as you'd imagine," Norman noted with a shrug, "but there aren't many murders in Blithe Hollow, and the people who were murdered... I mean, their killers have probably been dead for a while, too."

Or they were cursed zombies, but that wasn't really what they were talking about.

"What kind of stuff do they ask for, then?"

"Feed the pigeons in the park on Sundays at noon," Norman offered. "Tell their kids that they were loved. Make certain nobody messes up distributing the will. I had a frog in bio class who wanted his body buried in the swamp, once. There were moths who just needed me to turn on a light."

Simple stuff. Mostly simple stuff.

". . . Do the moths speak English?"

"Bugs don't talk," Norman replied with a shrug. "That doesn't mean they don't want things."

"How do they let you know?"

Norman shrugged.

"Mostly with them, I have to guess," he admitted. "But moths are pretty straightforward. If it's dark, they want a light. They probably don't even realize they're dead."

The frog, on the other hand, had played charades.

"How is your world not just, like, totally filled with dead bugs?" Tip wondered.

"I guess the same way it isn't full of dead everything else," he suggested. "Not everything sticks around in the first place. And bugs have pretty simple wants. They usually get it before long themselves."

"Fair point. Have you ever seen, like, a dead dinosaur? Before Fandom, anyway."

Fandom had dead versions of all sorts of things, apparently.

Norman gave his head a shake.

"Nah," he replied. "I used to wonder why I didn't, but then I realized exactly how long 'millions of years' really is. Even ghosts get tired, you know? I've known humans to stick around for centuries, but unless animals have something compelling to keep them around, they generally just get ward and wander off in time."

"What's the oldest ghost you've met, then?"

This conversation was way more interesting than one about sex.

"The oldest?" Norman looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. "Aggie was three hundred years old. Most ghosts don't hang around that long, but Aggie... she was angry. She was trapped in that anger and tortured with it, put back to sleep when she woke up every year for three centuries."

It was hard to be horny when you were talking about a murdered child, too. Funny, that.

"Maybe there were older. I run into old ghosts, the ghosts of natives now and again, but most of the time we can't communicate. I don't know the language."

He wasn't going to expect them to know his. What use would they have for it now?

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