Some good old-fashioned middle school drama for you this week. HEY! Support Paranatural on Patreon or with a one-time donation on Ko-fi! Toss another log on my funny fire. Thank you for your support and for reading!

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[Transcript]

        The mere mention of the meathead ghost filled Ed with vague unease, as though they had forgotten something dreadfully important.

        “...Crush? Oh. Uh. What, um—what about ’im?” Ed asked, attempting to stay cute amidst confusion.

        “Grandpa said he skipped the day’s first training session,” shrugged Isabel. “Then Murdock said he wasn’t in the dorms last night at all, and Scabs said they’d had plans to spar this morning, which even a bridge troll like Crush wouldn’t forget because he’s a big greasy glutton for punishment, and everyone agreed that she was probably right but could have definitely said it way nicer, and Grandpa did his grumpy harrumph thing and told the whole dojo to look for him before he got himself killed again. Oh, and then Tamsin said you might’ve been the one who’d seen him last.”

        “Uh. Well, maybe...” Ed considered, twisting their hair buns like the handles of a faucet.

        Clogged thoughts inside their head flowed free on cue, and Ed recalled a frightful image in a flash: a towering, skull-faced shadow in the woods. Crush had said himself that it was nothing... but it had been rather spooky for an optical illusion. Hmm. Maybe it would have been smart to let somebody know what they’d seen, just to be extra safe. Come to think of it, why hadn’t they? The morning was a blur for Ed, as though it had begun for them at school.

        “It’s kinda hard for me to remember, but, um—”

        “Yeah, right? I told Gramps that’s how it’d be. You’ve got enough on your mind, junior genius!” Isabel flashed Ed a teasing grin. “Grandpa’s just looking for someone to get mad at anyways... which I guess he’ll find when he finds Crush. That’s all that old jerk actually cares about.” The young spectral sighed and rolled her eyes. “What a pain, right? You tell a guy the sky’s falling and he grounds you for delivering the news!”

        Thoughts of skull-faced shadow men were pushed beyond Ed’s focus. They’d caught a trace of deeper disappointment underneath Isabel’s flippant annoyance. She looked like she might not have slept well, too... or maybe she’d been crying...? No, that was just their imagination. Isabel could handle even more than she was forced to... but Ed wished that they could share more of the burden all the same. They wracked their mind for something smart to say.

        “I’m, um... really sorry about your umbrella, Izzy.” Ed frowned. Surely they had something more insightful to suggest. They thought still harder. “It was... a really cool umbrella.”

        “...Yeah. It’s fine. I’ll get him back, and any of his friends that Grandpa’s locked up in the lighthouse.” Isabel’s eyes fell as her smile faded. “Somehow.”

        A new arrival standing just beside them drew her gaze back from the blacktop. Ed followed her surprised expression over to Dimitri... who was gawking back at them with even wider eyes.

        “Oh! Hey, Dimitri,” Isabel stammered, clearly caught off guard. “Sorry about, um...”

        Before she could say “interrupting your date” or something equally misleading about her visit to his house, she realized he was staring straight at Ed.

        “Um... Dimitri?”

        “Huh?” Dimitri jumped as though she’d taken off his headphones in the middle of a playlist.

        “...Is there something on my face?” Ed asked, licking everywhere their tongue could reach before they got an answer or assessed the risk of swallowing a weird bug or strange substance from the science lab.

        “What? N-no, I just...”

        A flustered Dimitri trailed off into silence. He’d been living in a sleepwalker’s haze, overwhelmed by a discordant sensory symphony, since the moment that the sun rose. Of all the strange changes he’d already witnessed in Mayview—no, in Bayview—Ed’s makeover had been the first to strike a resonant note. Dimitri shrugged, trying to hide any further signs of his confusing captivation.

        “You just look nice... today. That’s all.”

        Middle schoolers, like hungry sharks, could smell blood in the water and in blushing cheeks from leagues and leagues away. The crowd of kids departing from the buses broke out into a rising chorus of suggestive oohs and ahhs.

        Dimitri groaned and dragged a hand across his face. He hadn’t meant it like that!

        “Um. Thank you,” Ed answered in a small voice underneath the hoots and hollers, failed once again by the purportedly prodigious language lobes of their enormous genius brain.

        “...Dimitri,” Isabel said flatly, “I never noticed it before... but are you, like... a total shameless playboy?”

        Orange spectral energy erupted from Dimitri’s shoulders like a sparkler catching flame.

        “NO??” he yelped at Isabel, his voice squeaking like a dog’s paws on a freshly mopped mall floor. Could this day get any worse, any more ABSURD, than it had already—

        Dimitri turned to meet the wide and incandescent eyes of Suzy Starchman.

        “...Don’t you dare,” he said, preemptively exhausted.

        “Don’t I dare?!” Suzy squeaked. She raised her eyebrows with enough force that they raised her glasses with them. They found a perch upon a bulging vein that snaked across her forehead. “DON’T. I. DARE. WHAT?!”

        “LEAP TO A CONCLUSION!” Dimitri helplessly protested.

        “WHERE’S THE LEAP?!” Suzy shot back. “Now that you’ve CAST OFF your CLOAK OF LIES and laid it in the MUCK for ALL TO SEE, I can take a single ginger STEP to the conclusion, Dimitri! One dainty tiptoe on the SUGARCOAT you’ve SLOUGHED OFF, that’s all I need to skip the TEARS and reach the BITTER TRUTH across the puddle! One last GENTLEMANLY GESTURE as we PART WAYS at the CROSSROADS of BETRAYAL!” She took a heaving breath in, as though filtering krill from the depths of the ocean. “CLEARLY you have a NEW peppy blonde in your life! Yet another SECRET DALLIANCE with the ACTIVITY CLUB! Well, I wish you two the WORST!”

        “PLEASE keep me off of your runaway train of thought, Suzy,” Dimitri groaned in impatient exasperation. He had more to worry about than Suzy’s constant search for pointless drama. “Your wild tabloid fantasies belong in the school paper... where nobody will read them!”

        “WHAT?!” Before Suzy could gnash out an infuriated “So THAT’S how you really feel,” her voice caught in her throat, and big, sloppy tears began to well up in her eyes.

        Dimitri regretted his words immediately. As annoyed as he’d been by Suzy’s ill-timed arrival and snap-judgment misunderstanding, he’d known how proud she was of the pamphlets they’d poured hours into. He could see disbelief in Suzy’s eyes; she’d traded worse barbs with a smile, even laughed off him and Collin making jabs at her devotion to their silly, slapdash gossip rag... but this time, for the first time, she had felt he truly meant it. They’d both realized how much she’d prized his respect at the moment that Dimitri had called it into question.

        “F-FINE!” Suzy stammered, balling her fists at her side. “You’ve said your piece! Consider it the LAST you’ll ever PITCH TO ME! D-Dimitri, y-you’re... you’re FIRED from the JOURNALISM CLUB!!”

        Dimitri frowned, blinked in frustration, then fought down pointless words and looked away.

        “Hey, Suzy, wait!” Isabel stepped in front of her before she could storm off. “There’s nothing to be jealous of! We’re really all just friends!”

        “I’M NOT YOUR FRIEND!” Suzy warbled through her tears. “DON’T TOUCH ME!”

        “Huh? I mean, my hands are in my pockets? And I didn’t mean that WE’RE friends—”

        “OF COURSE NOT! WHY WOULD WE BE?!” Suzy jabbed at Isabel’s jersey with one finger.

        “OK, now you’re touching me—”

        “YOU WISH! GET OUT OF MY WAY. YOU’RE THE ONE WHO TURNED HIM WITH YOUR WILES!” Suzy blubbered, apparently forgetting she’d accused Ed of the same thing seconds earlier. She started to scuttle around a stationary Isabel before stepping back and choosing to bump into her instead. “DON’T EVER TALK TO ME AGAIN, ISABEL GUERRA,” Suzy growled at her through gritted teeth. Then she froze, as though she’d said something she realized she’d regret. “AS IF YOU’D EVEN LISTEN IF I SAID THAT! TH-THIS ISN’T OVER, GOT IT?! I’LL... I’LL TALK TO YOU AGAIN!”

        “Oh, OK,” a bewildered Isabel surrendered. “That’s good.”

        “WHY.”

        “Huh?”

        “WHY IS THAT GOOD,” Suzy clarified.

        “So we can... work out this... Dimitri stuff?”

        “HMPH!”

        The ace reporter scrambled off into the gawking crowd of onlookers. Isabel watched her leave, then glanced back at Dimitri.

        “Sorry, Dimitri, I... I feel like this is kind of sort of my fault. Y’know, since I—” Isabel noticed, then, that he’d withdrawn into a sullen, far-off haze. Was it the fight? She couldn’t blame him... but he was acting kind of strange a bit before that, too, and seemed troubled and distant even back when she’d seen him at his house. “Hey, um. Is everything okay, Dimitri?”

        “...Yeah,” he said at last, digging his hands deep in his pockets. “Same as it ever was.”

        Ed and Isabel shared a concerned look as they watched Dimitri slink away in a moody slouch, ignoring everybody’s stares and snickers. Lost in his cloud of complicated feelings, the spectral paid little mind to his unfamiliar surroundings... not to Bayview Biddle School, nor to the web of power lines that choked the trees surrounding it, nor to the Blackened Annex looming just beside it. The school’s burnt and broken wing rose from its shadow like a monster from the pages of a pop-up book, a ghost story collaged, creased, cut and pasted with precision to give children ghastly dreams...