The first time his mother said something about marriage or engagements, Slate froze. Dash had been against relationships when they met, and he didn’t want to scare him off. After he suggested they were going to elope to avoid a bothersome wedding, Slate relaxed. They’d get there, but on their time schedule, not his mother’s.
This time, it felt more like a decoy, meant to lull him and Dash into a false sense of calm. He knew what they wanted to talk about, but if they were going to wake him up on a Saturday, they’d need to bring up the topic.
His father refilled everyone’s cup and Slate knew it was time.
“What’s going on with Gary the ghost?” Cliff asked after a sip of coffee. “We’ve been hearing stories around town.”
There it was. The unspoken expectation was that he and Dash needed to handle Gary and his party. “What kind of stories?”
“Julie at the grocery store swears she heard Jimi Hendrix playing in her kitchen yesterday morning,” Marge said. She cut in so quickly he wondered if his parents had rehearsed this conversation before they got to the Manor. “Purple Haze. Clear as day, she said, but when she looked for the source, there was nothing there.”
“Bob at Oriskany Falls Hardware reported the same thing, just a different song,” Cliff said. “Like having a radio on in another room that didn’t have a radio.”
“We’ve heard similar stories.” Dash pushed his mostly empty plate.
“Finish your breakfast, dear,” Marge said. “I don’t care what you say, you’re not eating enough. You’ll get sick.”
Slate watched the play of emotions on Dash’s face. He didn’t like being told what to do—or that he was skinny, but Marge’s tone wasn’t mean. She treated him like her son. More than Dash’s own parents, who never called him in the year they’d known each other.
Looking down, he slowly pulled his plate back. “Yes, ma’am,” he said without his usual snark.
“How many reports have you gotten?” his mother asked.
It had annoyed Slate that his parents showed up unannounced, but her treating Dash like family brushed his irritation away. She loved big, and she loved Dash.
He took a deep breath to clear his head. “Eight, maybe nine since Wednesday,” Slate said. “I figured that was Gary’s friends getting settled. They’re not trying to cause trouble.”
“No, but they’re careless,” Cliff said. “They don’t understand discretion, or the consequences of their actions.”
“How bad is it?” Dash asked, his plate now clear. “It sounds like the people in town are just confused, not panicked.”
“Bad enough that we drove over here at dawn with emergency breakfast,” Marge said dryly. “People are starting to compare notes. When one person hears phantom music, it’s a cute story. When five people hear the same phantom music, it becomes a pattern.”
And patterns were not good. They didn’t need a host of paranormal ghost hunters descending on Oriskany Falls. It would scare away the spirits who wanted to cross over.
After his parents made sure Slate and Dash had eaten enough to satisfy parental requirements, they insisted he keep the extra food, because “you’re both too skinny.” Marge suggested they take a walk through town to assess the situation firsthand. It made sense, but he and Dash needed to change.
“OK,” Dash said when they were alone. “If your mom thinks you’re skinny, she’s gonna stuff me like a Thanksgiving turkey every time she sees me.”
He suspected his mother lumped him into the same category to make Dash less self-conscious. “Two things: first, I love your body, so she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. And second, Mom still thinks it’s the Victorian era when being plump was a sign of living well.”
“Oh, heck no.” Dash found a hoodie in the closet. “I refuse to be called plump. Ever. Tell her I’m going on a hunger strike.”
Slate wrapped his arms around Dash. “Unless you want her to come over every weekend, don’t say that around her.”
After a kiss, Slate dragged them back to reality. “They wouldn’t have come by if this wasn’t serious. Gary and friends could make it hard for spirits to use the portal.”
“Then I’ll be the model of serious.” He pulled a hoodie over his head and Slate groaned. “What?”
The front of his navy blue hoodie had a big yellow caution triangle with a goofy bug crawling out of it. ‘Warning: May contain logic errors?’ That’s what you call serious?”
“It’s better than my ‘Ask me about my bad decisions’ one. Or this.” Dash reached in and pulled out a dark green hoodie with “Professional Troublemaker” on the front.
Slate always liked Dash’s goofy side, but between his parents showing up unannounced, Gary inviting who knew how many ghosts to Oriskany Falls, and now those spirits were causing trouble, he needed a bit of serious. Before he could express those thoughts, he saw Dash’s face. He looked disappointed. Slate didn’t know if it was at him, the perceived need to tone himself down, or everything, but he knew how to fix it. “Wear the first one. It’s totally you.”
It took a few seconds for Dash’s smile to reappear, but when it did, Slate knew he’d made the right call. “Come on,” he said, grabbing Dash’s hand. “Leaving my mother unattended for too long might be dangerous to our renovation budget.”
It had been a long time since Slate walked around town with his parents. What should have been a five-minute trip to the town center took closer to twenty with all the times they stoppedto greet people. He used the extra time to assess the changes Gary’s arrival had caused.
