I didn’t believe in ghost stories until a week after my best friend’s death. Showing up at my door, wanting to talk, changed my mind about quite a few things.

“You’re a ghost,” I told her, the second time she tried to steal a sip from my teacup.

She bit her lower lip. “Oh, I hate this. I’m so thirsty.”

It made me a bit sick. “You drowned, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. Yet I’m so damn thirsty. This sucks.” She pushed her hair out of her face, as though the long black strands actually hung there. I wondered if I could poke her, but she was a ghost, so I was fairly certain that would be a no.

“…how are you here?” Wow, my question sounded stupid.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. First I thought I’d made it, you know? Then everyone was freaking out and I wasn’t hit by a car, though it couldn’t go through me…” She waved my teacup around.

“Hey, hey, hey! Just because you can grab inanimate objects doesn’t mean the tea won’t spill!”

“Right.” She put it down. “Sorry.”

I nearly grabbed it to take a sip of my own when the thought came to me. “Wait. People saw you and you stopped a car?”

She nodded.

“Did people see you come here?”

Apparently they had, because when we looked through the blinds, there were a lot of people out there.