Spencer's always been a weird one, ever since we met in third grade. I found him in the library. We were both in the horror section, which was marked with a friendly-looking spider at the end of the shelf, and I was looking for the latest Goosebumps book. As it turns out the class fat kid beat me to it so I'd have to wait a week, but it worked out in the end because I ran into Spencer. He was checking out a book about ghosts that was probably around when our parents went to school. He was a twig of a kid with green eyes and short, rusty brown hair, wearing a basketball jersey. My memory's fuzzy, but it went something like this:
"Hey."
"Hey."
"You like scary books and stuff?"
"...Yeah?"
"Cool. Me too. I read that one before, even the pictures are scary in it. There's this one thing that's like a big huge head but it's a balloon and its eyes are buggin' out and it's chasin' this guy down a road, it looks just like Mrs. Sanders when she's real mad."
He looked at me for a second and then we both laughed hard enough that we almost got put in quiet time for the day. We were best friends after that. He did like scary stuff, and so did I, probably more than most prepubescent boys do. Between the two of us, we made quick work of the school library's horror section, and by middle school a good piece of the local library's too. When we had sleepovers, we told ghost stories that got creepier every weekend. I always came out of them laughing, a little nervous, but laughing. Spencer didn't, always. Spencer's been a weird one for as long as I've known him, and he tended to take the ghost stories more seriously.
When we were in seventh grade, Spencer's cousin Tracey was killed in a drunk driving accident. They were pretty close. We lived in a small town, and they lived only a couple houses apart so they saw a lot of each other. Mom didn't think it was very appropriate for me to attend her funeral, but Dad helped me into my dress clothes and sneaked me out to the funeral parlor. As I remember, Tracey had a reputation for being kind of strong-willed, but she wasn't a bad person and had a lot of genuine mourners. Spencer, he was pretty broken up about it, of course. I held his hand at the ceremony, and his Dad held his other, and he didn't stop crying the whole time. It was at least a month before anyone saw him in school again, and another month before he actually got over the event. Or at least, until he pushed it under and got on with his life.
He was more or less the same after that, but ghost stories weren't something he wanted to get into anymore. We sort of redirected that horror interest into zombie junk, B-movies and comics and all that nerdy sort of media that started resurfacing in pop culture at the time. The bond was never quite the same after that, and we sort of grew out into high school in our own directions. I started skateboarding, and he joined the basketball team. We were still good friends and hung out a lot, but we had our futures to consider and girls to chase after and a whole high school to impress. We grew from tadpoles to little social frogs in that pond. It wasn't until everything slowed down around the middle of our senior year that we started really reconnecting. We were best friends united again against the big scary world we were going to have to face soon, and we started taking each other more seriously. I never had a brother, but if I ever did I hope he'd be as good to me as Spencer was.
That spring we were hanging out one night at my place, playing a skating game, sitting on beanbag chairs in the dark of 1AM, tiredly going through all our fond memories of childhood. I asked him about ghost stories, and he kind of stopped for a second.
"I mean, we used to love 'em man. What happened?"
"Ah, you know. I thought we grew out of that." He grinned at me. It was common sense, I guess, kids grow out of being scared by shadows and creaky houses, but I got the feeling there was more there and against my better judgment I pressed him for it.
"No I mean, like, the zombie shit is cool, but you know it's not scary. Listen, we know scary, Spence, we were all about it for years. It's like you just kind of blanked out on it, I don't know." I trailed off a little. I was losing focus, and I couldn't figure out how to say what I meant. I mean, I could, but I wasn't going to be a dick to him. I was pretty sure I knew what it was already. I think he knew, too. My boarder tumbled headlong to an ugly demise on the concrete below. He looked at me with his big green Irish eyes, devoid of all humor, and things got real heavy.
"I think...I think it's just that all our stories were really terrible, you know? Like the guy would get killed by a vengeful ghost with a rusty hook, or the girl would leap to her death after running from something, she'd jump off a bridge in sheer terror..." The girl who jumped off the bridge was my favorite. I just watched him. I'd never seen him so serious. His eyes were searching for something, a way to put together the epiphany he'd had in a way I'd grasp. "...I guess, if I ran into someone from the other side, I wouldn't want to run away screaming. I think I'd want to ask, 'Hey, how ya been? We missed you a lot. You never visit.' I'd want to shake their hand, or hug them, or...Something, you know?"
The look on his face, in his eyes. His complete vulnerability at that moment. I knew he was serious, and I knew who he had in mind. It was almost insulting to me, that he'd throw away our biggest "thing", our bond, for someone who wasn't coming back. For someone's memory. Sympathy isn't my strong suit, it never has been, but for Spencer...I just couldn't get selfish about it. Not with him wide open like that, and he probably knew it. Maybe it was just violent fantasy, I thought, maybe we just liked those scary stories for their shock value, for that brush with insanity that makes your heart beat faster than you ever thought it could. Maybe it wasn't worth fucking up another childhood memory that was more important to him just to make myself feel better. It's not like chiding him now would turn back time for me either. I just nodded at him, an understanding and respectful little nod. I started the stage over and handed him the controller.
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