Chapter 8 You Make Me Feel （Mighty Real） #2
She folded her arms and tapped her chin. “He wore the most outrageous outfits. Greens and purples together. Cowboy boots with… things that don’t go with cowboy boots. The tiniest shorts you’ve ever seen” – she gestured to her crotch – “that left nothing to the imagination.”
“Wow.” Cosmo liked to make a statement. “I can work with that. Thanks.”
“I can’t say I understood his style or his art, but he was always polite, and I think it’s sweet that you want to visit his grave.”
Micah nodded and continued down the sidewalk.
A soft breeze toyed with his hair, and a kaleidoscope of scents – flowers, exhaust, someone’s spicy cooking – filled his lungs.
Cars honked in the distance, a chihuahua yapped, and a smoke alarm let out a shrill beep.
Lemon Disco was alive. So was Micah. He needed to start acting like it.
When he reached the coffee shop and opened the door, he was inundated with the rich bite of coffee and sparkle of sugar.
The last of the tension in his muscles unraveled, and he found himself rocking back on his heels as he waited in line.
People sat at tables, typing on their laptops and chatting with friends.
There was an incomparable comfort to being at home, safe, amid his art, but right now the studio seemed dismal in comparison to the energy in The Seventh Circle of Java.
Stooping to the pastry case, he surveyed the selection. Though there were no open flame pits, their hot pepper jelly muffins had made him feel like he was tongue-kissing Satan, and he wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
“Micah? God, I haven’t seen you here in forever. I thought you moved away.”
It hadn’t been that long since he’d been here, had it?
He looked up. The cashier’s surprised smile decayed. She stared at his face, blinking rapidly as though if she did it hard enough it would make him less disfigured. Yep, apparently it had been that long.
“Still here.” He focused on the pastry case. “Can I have two medium lattes, please. Also two blueberry muffins, an angel muffin, and a poppyseed. Gotta get fat for hibernation.”
The cashier let out a strange laugh. “Yes, of course.” She filled his order, trying to fit all of the muffins into a tiny paper bag. “I think you might need another bag.”
“For my face?”
A flush flared in her cheeks, and she stammered and dropped the poppyseed muffin on the counter.
“Sorry. Still working on my routine of self-deprecating jokes.” He opened a bag and put the poppyseed muffin inside.
After paying, the cashier thanked him and urged him to come back more often. This had gone awkwardly, but he would try. Baby steps.
Stopping at Ximena’s office, he traded her a latte and muffins for a pair of pruning shears, then clipped the most vibrant roses possible from the complex’s bushes.
Cosmo might not see them since it was doubtful any ghost wanted to spend their afterlife beside their own grave, but that wasn’t the point.
Purple at the center, flanked by orange and yellow, fringed at the edges with lavender herbs that had been growing freely beside a fire hydrant. After tying the bouquet together, he set it gently in the car and drove for Cherry Lane.
GPS gave him the fastest route there, but failed to come up with the location of a cemetery.
Buildings thinned out, replaced by swaths of alfalfa and corn.
Orchards and cow pastures rolled by. Maybe what Cosmo considered his grave wasn’t a proper burial spot, but the place of his death.
He’d said there was nothing inside the grave at all.
A decaying church sat at the end of the road. Faded graffiti marked the double doors, and windows that once would have reflected the blue sky gaped as black, broken-paned holes. A strand of something sparkly was caught on the jagged glass, flapping lazily in the breeze.
Micah parked and got out, shielding his left eye from the sun.
Weeds and beer cans crunched under his shoes.
He stopped at the church and plucked a scrap of Halloween garland from the window.
Little sun-bleached jack-o’-lanterns grinned on black tinsel.
He peered inside. Shafts of light pierced the gloom from holes in the roof, illuminating more partiers’ trash, collapsed pews, and candles melted to window sills.
He walked around back, startling a crow. Seedheads quivered, and branches on nearby trees rocked slowly. A wooden cross jutted from amid the weeds and broken bottles. There was only one, leaning against the church as though it didn’t have the will to continue standing on its own.
Party streamers tied to the crossbeam caught the light as Micah picked up the cross. The bottom was splintered and jagged, caked in dirt. It had clearly marked a grave at some point.
A heart, drawn in marker, adorned the back of the cross. Micah squinted at the faded lettering within:
DéJà
+
COSMO
He gasped. Did she know it was Cosmo the entire time she was in the studio?
Maybe that’s why she’d said there wasn’t a rowdy ghost and tried to pin it on Micah.
She didn’t want to deal with a friend who’d passed away.
He snapped a picture of the writing on the cross, then attached it to an email and sent it to Déjà with the phrase, You know my ghost.
After setting the cross carefully back where it came from, he headed to the car for the bouquet.
He wasn’t sure what he wanted from Déjà.
Her admission wouldn’t prove that the ghost wasn’t himself – he already knew that – and he no longer needed help getting Cosmo to leave.
He didn’t want Cosmo to leave. And more details about his life, his art, his music, his outfits, were only going to get Micah more worked up about the fantasy in his head.
Still, maybe it would help Déjà to know that Cosmo was making efforts to move on to a place he’d be more at peace.
As he reached for the door handle, his phone vibrated. He opened Déjà’s reply, met with: Cosmo Kozlov isn’t your ghost. He isn’t dead. Where did you get that cross? It was from a party we threw years ago.
Micah stared at the message.
He isn’t dead.
It was a mix-up, then. But how could that be? There were too many coincidences for it to be the wrong Cosmo. He typed back, White artist with curly hair and hazel eyes who wears eccentric outfits and calls people “darling”?
He climbed into the car, the phone growing clammy in his grip.
Déjà wrote, That’s him. But he’s very much alive. Go check his Flashbulb profile.
Blood pounded in Micah’s temples, his finger hovering over the attached link. This made no sense. Cosmo had materialized in the studio at least twice, once with half his torso missing. Moonlight had shown through his incorporeal form, and he’d vanished before Micah’s eyes.
As he tapped the link, a profile appeared, displaying a grid of photos.
Cosmo, with his arm around a woman’s waist, a mixed media sculpture on a pedestal beside them.
Cosmo, pouting seductively for the camera, his pursed lips glossy and heavy earrings pulling at his lobes.
Cosmo, a cigarette between his teeth as he arched his neck, the strap of his dress falling down.
Micah expanded the image, ensnared in the curve of his throat, his bare shoulder, his smoldering I-know-how-hot-I-am gaze.
He scrolled through dozens of comments, most of them flirty, some outright propositions.
Someone wrote, Damn, sexy! I’m sorry I missed that party.
Beneath it was a reply from Cosmo, dated only the day before: It was positively dull. I had to make my own fun. Would have been much better if you were there!
A torrent of confused feelings howled through Micah. He raced home, hands clenched on the wheel. When he got back, he emailed Déjà and attached both his phone number and the video of Cosmo appearing in his bathroom.
His phone rang, and before he could say hello, Déjà said, “What the hell is this?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“But this is Cosmo. Isn’t it? Your same, very alive Cosmo? Appearing out of thin air in my bathroom. He used to live in my studio.”
“He isn’t mine, and he may as well be dead to me. I see him around, but we don’t hang.” She sighed. “I don’t understand this.”
Neither did he, and if Déjà didn’t have an answer, the only other one who might was the “ghost” himself.
Micah paced the front room, then picked up the tube of pink lipstick from the drafting table.
“He was in my room last night. I saw moonlight go right through him.” It sounded delusional, and he was grateful he had proof of one appearance.
“What time?”
“Around midnight.”
“He was at a gallery event until one last night. There’s a video on his Flashbulb.”
“You aren’t friends, but you stalk his Flashbulb?”
“What I’m saying is he can’t be in two places at once.”
Micah turned the tube of lipstick over in his hand. No explanation he could come up with – a dead twin, astral projection, alien bodysnatching – was remotely comforting. “There’s a serious glitch in the Matrix then.”
He didn’t mean it literally, but she said, “I don’t believe in Simulation Theory.
And I don’t have the answer just because I’m a medium.
At first I – I didn’t realize your studio was the same one Cosmo used to live in because I’d forgotten the apartment number and it had been remodeled.
But your switch plate in the closet is made of polymer clay.
Turquoise blue with eyeballs. He made a bunch of light switch plates in college, and that was one of them. ”
Micah walked into the closet and flipped on the light.
Of course Cosmo had made this thing. “The first time I reached into the closet to turn on the light, I felt the lashes on those eyes and thought I’d accidentally touched a huge spider.
” There was no way Ximena had seen that when remodeling, or she would have replaced it.
But Micah had liked it; this strange, gaudy surprise tucked away in the closet.