He nodded, got up, stepped over her and headed back into the kitchen. It took him a whole seven steps. She followed.
Their bodies were still there, but it wasn’t them David headed toward. He took a right, stepped up to the apartment door, gulped, and walked through it. Naked. She almost yelled out to put some clothes on, but reality smacked her brain around a bit, and she groaned before following after him.
She froze as other people in the dorm walked by. Walked by, and almost directly through her. She dodged at the last second, but when someone else walked and went through David, she gave up dodging the second person. Straight through her, no sensation, nothing. They didn’t look at her or her naked body, and they didn’t so much as make a sound when they were literally inside her, and her inside them.
“Hello?” David said. No one reacted.
“We’re dead,” she said, shoulders drooping.
“Yeah… confirmed. We’re dead.”
They both stood in the hallway as more students went to morning classes, most of them around nineteen like Mia and David. Young, most of them completely unaware of what it was like to have their next door neighbor die on them. They were going to find out, eventually. It’d be days, maybe weeks, before anyone would bother to check on a couple uni students not going to class. And it wasn’t like they had any parents keeping an eye on them who’d call and ask the university to check on them.
David took a deep breath, and walked down the hall.
“Where you going?” she asked.
“I wanna try something.”
“Try something? Like… contacting whoever we’re supposed to contact?”
He looked back over his shoulder at her, eyebrow raised.
“We’re supposed to contact someone?”
“I dunno, are we?”
“No idea.” He shrugged and stepped into the shower room.
Of. Fucking. Course.
She groaned as she followed him in. The dormitory was unisex, and the bathrooms in each dorm didn’t have a shower. You could brush your teeth and take a shit in your place, but if you wanted a shower you had to go to the shower room, which had separate stalls for showers.
David stepped through the door, looked around, and casually walked through the nearest stall side-on, and into it.
“David!” God damn it. She followed after him, and the world blurred into a mess of colors and shades as she stepped through the shower stall wall, and into David’s back. Okay, she could collide with her brother, good to know. And he felt like normal flesh, too, alive and well. Very strange for a ghost.
He stumbled forward before turning around and facing her.
“What?”
“David you idiot! This isn’t the–” Mia blinked as she stared at the naked woman showering. Marcy Thomson. Attractive as all fuck, busty as all fuck, and washing herself. There’d always been rumors that Marcy had had surgery to get tits like that, but fake tits didn’t ripple like that.
Mia glared at David, marched forward through Marcy into her brother, and shoved him into the next stall. Empty.
“Weren’t you just thinking about what the fuck do we do now?” she asked. “What, you’re suddenly okay being a ghost and now you’re gonna spy on naked chicks?” Standing naked with her brother in a shower stall while another woman, oblivious to them, was busy washing her giant tits in the next stall, was not what she wanted to be doing.
“I’m in denial.”
“You’re not in denial. You know we’re dead. You confirmed, right?”
He shook his head. “Clearly I’m still in denial and want to wander around and spy on naked chicks.”
Mia threw up her hands. “Dude, you don’t even know if you can get hard as a ghost! The fuck is the point in all this spying if you can’t jerk off?” And, unfortunately, she glanced down at her brother’s dick, and rolled her eyes and looked away. Well, he wasn’t hard, but he was shaved, same as her, which put the annoying image of her brother shaving his junk in her head. Ugh.
“Just… let me be a pervert for a little bit before the existential crisis of being dead really sets in, okay? I’m sure I can panic a bunch later about it.”
“Uh huh.”
He squinted at her with one eye. “Don’t even give me that shit. You’re just as much a pervert as me. You don’t have any dudes you want to spy on?”
“Not spy on!” Okay, that wasn’t entirely true, but James and Adam and Mark and Derrick and Tim and Oscar and Sam and Nathan and Josh and the other James and Tony and Brian were all probably in class. “Fuck, yes, but not spy on. I–oh god.”
David’s eyes opened wide. “What?”
“We died virgins.”
David collapsed to his knees, and slapped the shower room floor.
“Nooooooooo!”
It took effort to not fall to her knees and join him.
“Come on. I mean, yeah, I wouldn’t mind spying on some people, too, but I’m a little more worried about being dead and I don’t think we should procrastinate on dealing with it.” Whatever dealing with it would entail.
David sniffed and gulped, nodded, and forced himself back to his feet.
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She stepped out of the stalls, and waited for him to follow. He did, out of the other stall with Marcy. “God damn it Dave.”
“I’m here I’m here.”
“Okay. What do we do?”
“How could I possibly know what to do?”
“I’m sure you’ve read a book on after-death experiences.” She could always trust her brother to know random shit about random shit.
“I’ve read a few articles and stuff, sure.” He shrugged as the two of them stepped back out into the hall. “Pretty much every out-of-body experience has been discredited. It’s all bullshit.”
“All of it?”
“No one’s managed to provide any even remotely decent evidence to back it up. And every ghost, haunting, and shit like that, is in the same ballpark. There isn’t any good evidence anywhere, and I can’t come to a conclusion about what to do or how to do it, without some kind of evidence.”
“Okay, then we wing it.” Nodding, she grabbed his hand, did her best to ignore they were both still naked, and took them down the hall to the stairs. Their feet and hands interacted with the floor, for some reason, so unless they developed the ability to hover and fly through shit like movie ghosts did, they had to take the stairs. Maybe they could learn to do that shit with time?
Except, why the fuck would they stick around? Other than indulging their perviness and spying on people, what possible fucking reason did they have to stick around? Ghosts haunted shit because they couldn’t let go, supposedly anyway.
David and Mia didn’t have anything, or anyone, they were holding onto.
They approached the lobby of the dorm, a sort of rec room with a tv and some couches, and some doors on the other side where people came and went. Sure enough, a couple dudes were playing a video game, a couple girls were sitting across from them chatting with them, and other students passed by, backpacks overloaded with books and laptops. And it was all glowing gold.
Mia and David traded glances, and looked to the four push doors that led out of the building onto the campus. The windows in the doors would normally show the grass, the paths lined with sidewalk, the nearby buildings, several stories high with lots of windows on their walls showing students filing in. University life. Not that David and Mia ever really got into university life, but maybe some day they would have? Except, not anymore.
It didn’t show that. The door windows showed a glowing gold haze, and gold mist dripped from them over the floor, fading out but reaching far enough to touch their feet. It felt warm. It felt nice.