“Finally, they’re gone,” Sadie said. “Now we can—what were we doing again?”
“Talking about highly classified secrets,” I whispered conspiratorially.
“Well, then get on with it.” Sadie clapped. “You said we had an emergency that we needed to solve. Let’s do it.”
She clapped again in my face.
“Really?” I asked.
She clapped as fast as she could.
I fantasized about a friendless, lonely existence.
“Did you hear that?” a doctor asked, their shadow pausing outside our door.
Sadie whispered in a spooky voice, “Thisss isss a poltergeist, you didn’t heaaaaar anything or I will haunt youuu.”
I smacked her arm.
She hit me across the face and her nail took a chunk out of my cheek.
We both raised our arms and smacked at each other as fast as we could for five minutes.
“Don’t worry.” She wheezed between laughs as she put her talons down. “No ghost would want to haunt you. You’d haunt them.”
A male soldier screamed, then started sobbing uncontrollably, and the doctor outside our closet ran to assist him.
“Pussy,” we both said at the same time.
It wasn’t funny, but postbattle delirium had set in.
The closet was exacerbating our instability; however, there weren’t many quiet places you could meet these days and not have men watching you like perverts. We were making do.
“That’s actually part of the reason I dragged you in here to talk,” I said as I tried to calm my racing heart.
Sadie stopped laughing.
Awkward silence expanded.
“You’re a pussy?” She asked.
“The other part.”
“Oh,” she said. “If I’d known you actually had a ghost problem, I never would have mimicked one. What do you need me to do? An exorcism?”
I smacked her. “That’s not a real thing.”
She punched me. “Do not disrespect the time-honored tradition of violently extracting ghosts from people.”
“What are you going on about?” I asked.
Sadie shrugged, “That’s for me to know and for you to find out—be gone, evil spirit.”
I huffed. “It’s not a ghost issue. I’m in good standing with the poltergeist community. I meant the haunting part.”
Needles clattered like Sadie was playing with them. “I’m not going to lie, I have no idea what’s going on right now. A part of me thinks I don’t want to. Spell it out like I’m stupid.”
It was only on account of our friendship, and the fact that I loved her like a sister, that I refrained from a sarcastic reply.
“Stop playing with stuff,” I said.
“Oh my sun god,” Sadie whined. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going to stab you with a needle. The suspense is killing me. You know I’m not patient, come onnnn. Just blurt it out.”
“Some things,” I enunciated each word, “just can’t be said.”
“Just give me a hint,” Sadie demanded. “Is it about the ungodly? Your dead mother? Is the cannibalism coming back to haunt you? I always worried that would happen. Is it the kings—because I noticed they’ve all been acting weirder than usual around you lately. Malum made a show of opening the door for you the other day, and I was honestly worried he was going to bludgeon you with it—but he didn’t, and then you thanked him and he turned red like a tomato. It was all very strange. Side note—does he have a rosacea skin condition? I might have a cream recommendation.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. “It has nothing to do with any of that. Please stop talking.”
Sadie ignored me. “Is it the fact that ‘whore’ is carved on your back? Did you wish she wrote ‘slut’ or something a little trendier? I’ve always wanted to ask you that but didn’t want to sound insensitive.”
“Too late,” I said.
She continued, “Is it because it hurts when you’re turned on? Or is it because she wrote it super inconsistently and the w is so much bigger than the h? Honestly, that’s also always really annoyed me. Like how hard is it to carve a word evenly into someone’s skin? The lack of basic decency, and any eye for proportions, is horrible.”
“Are you for real right now?” I asked.
Needles clattered. “Yeah,” she said brightly, “I honestly feel so much better after telling you. A huge weight off my shoulders. At first I thought this whole postbattle hiding-in-a-medical-closet-thing was a little weird. But I get it now.”