Ziggy wakes up tangled in a sleeping bag on a hardwood floor, mouth glued shut by the flavorless paste of morning breath and reheated panic. He cracks an eye. The room is a graveyard of pizza boxes, half-drained soda cans, a toppled stack of manga with their spines twisted into drunken angles. The late-spring light is a thin, sickly strip, barely trickling in through the slatted blinds. For a second, he can't place himself. Then he remembers: Arty is dead.
Ziggy can't remember the dream he was having, only the ending. There's always an ending: Arty in the rain, walking away, head tipped back and laughing at the clouds, until he turns and his face is caved in, missing, a blank horror-movie prosthetic smeared with ketchup. Ziggy jerks upright, panting, and slams his head against the bottom edge of the coffee table.
"Fuhhh-," he says, as if this will exorcise the ghost of the dream. It doesn't.
A groan from beside him. Ziggy blinks and squints to the left. Raven is curled up in a human pretzel, their hair a burgundy tangle haloing the pillow. They're awake, or almost--one olive eye open, the other squashed shut by a bony fist.
"Jesus," Raven says. "You snore like a chainsaw dying. I almost smothered you with a pizza box."
Ziggy snorts. "I wish you had. At least I'd die with honor. Pepperoni shroud."
The two of them sit in a silence that is both easy and not. This was supposed to be Arty's room, the place where they spent every Friday night for the past three years—movies, arguments, bottomless snacks. There is something indecent about occupying it now, with Arty's ghost barely a day cold. Ziggy's eyes dart to the yellowing paint at the edge of the ceiling, the frayed carpet, the pencil-drawn dinosaurs that trample the closet door in a childish stampede. He wants to say something smart, or at least not stupid, but the words are all sawdust.
He's still wondering how to begin another day without Arty when the lights flicker. Then they flicker again, more insistent, like someone jiggling a stuck remote. Ziggy and Raven both look up. The room is suddenly colder, or maybe that's just Ziggy's own nerves sweating out through his skin.
And then Arty is there, looking deeply unimpressed.
He's less a ghost in the old-school sense and more an afterimage, like someone turned the saturation down on his existence. His hair floats in a directionless mess, defying gravity and taste. His eyes are pink, not the irritated red of a stoner or an allergy victim but a spooky, nuclear pink that glows a little, like a defective Halloween LED. His T-shirt reads I'M WITH STUPID (STUPID KILLED ME), which is either a cosmic joke or proof that death is just as petty as life.
Neither Ziggy nor Raven move for a full five seconds. Then Ziggy, because it's either this or scream, says: "You look like the world's worst hologram."
Arty frowns, or at least simulates a frown. "I think I'm stuck," he says, and his voice is doubled, like it's coming from inside Ziggy's skull and also from a busted speaker in another room. "It's like—when you try to leave a party but everyone keeps calling you back for one more round. Only the party is…not fun."
Ziggy risks a step closer. "Are you, like, corporeal? Or can I poke you?"
"I wouldn't," Arty says, and looks vaguely nauseous. "Last time Raven tried, I lost feeling in my entire right side for fifteen minutes. Which is weird, because technically I don't have a right side anymore."
Ziggy looks to Raven. They're sitting perfectly still, arms wrapped tight around their knees. Their face is doing an impression of total calm, but their knuckles are white.
"I thought we were just—grieving," Raven says finally, voice flat. "But you're really here, aren't you. This isn't a group hallucination or a guilt complex or a psycho-breakdown."
Arty hovers a little closer. "I wish it was. You think I'd haunt you two dorks for eternity if I had a choice? I'd be in the afterlife's witness protection program by now. Drinking a virgin piña colada on a cloud. Not stuck in my bedroom wearing this dumb shirt forever."
The absurdity of it lands like a brick in Ziggy's lap. He giggles, because it's that or sob, and giggling is easier.
"So…what's it like?" Ziggy asks. "Dying, I mean. Is it like getting unplugged, or is there a light or something? Not that I'm, you know, planning to join you anytime soon."
Arty's expression shifts from snark to something almost gentle. "It's like tripping and falling down a bottomless pit. And at the bottom, you wake up and everything is see-through and everyone you love is out of reach, but you still see them, all the time. It's like being the last guy at the aquarium after the lights go out. The jellyfish are still there, but nobody feeds them anymore."
"That's…awful," Ziggy says. "But also, kind of poetic. In a horror-movie way."
Raven finally moves, unfolding like a stork and brushing the sleep-crud from their eyes. "You died because someone dared you to ride a shopping cart down Devil's Drop, and now you're comparing it to a haunted aquarium? You never change."
Arty grins, flashing transparent teeth. "I'm dead, not boring."
There's a silence, less awkward than before but heavier. Ziggy watches Arty non-float—if that's the word, it's more like drifting, as if someone cut the gravity for just his atoms. He wonders if it hurts, being dead. If Arty remembers the crash, the way he tumbled over the guardrail and into nothing. Ziggy does, in flashes, and his insides knot up like old phone cords.
He must be staring too hard, because Arty says, "Hey. I'm not here to make you feel bad."
"Too late," Ziggy mumbles.
Arty moves closer, and this time he's a foot away. "I don't want to be alone. You two were all I had. Now I'm…this." He gestures, as if that explains everything. Maybe it does.
Raven stands and paces the room, arms folded like they're holding themselves together. "We can't help you, Arty. We're not exorcists or spirit guides. We're barely qualified to microwave popcorn without a disaster."
Arty shrugs. "Maybe that's what I need. Regular stuff. Bad jokes. Pizza grease. Someone to talk to."
Ziggy wants to say: That's not fair. We're not built for this. But instead, he nods. "We can do that. We'll hang out. Just, uh, maybe not at the skate park."
Arty laughs, and for a second, the room feels warmer.
"Can you haunt someone else's house for a change?" Raven says, and there's a smile creeping into their voice. "I'm tired of being the sidekick in your unfinished business."
Arty crosses his arms, insubstantial but somehow very Arty. "You'd be nothing without me."
"Debatable," Raven says, but the tension is bleeding out of their posture.
Ziggy grins, and it hurts, but in a good way. The three of them together, even like this, feels more real than anything that's happened lately.
Ziggy settles back onto the sleeping bag, ignoring the stiff ache in his shoulders. Raven sinks down next to him, and the air between them hums with the new, bizarre normal.
Arty watches them both, head tilted, ghostly hair floating like seaweed. "I'll try not to be too creepy," he offers. "But no promises."
"Please do," Ziggy says. "At least then my nightmares will be original."
The sunlight creeps across the carpet. In the weak, filtered glow, Arty flickers in and out, never fully gone, never quite solid. Raven's eyes never leave him, like they're trying to memorize every glitch and fade. Ziggy just lets the moment stretch, breathing it in, afraid to blink and lose what's left of his friend.
The morning drags on, full of stupid jokes and almost-crying and, finally, microwaved pizza. Arty's ghost refuses to eat, but he critiques every bite. Raven says they're going to document this for science, but Ziggy knows they just want an excuse to keep the three of them together a little longer.
Eventually, the day softens at the edges. Ziggy dozes, head heavy, Arty's voice trailing off into static. In the liminal haze between sleep and waking, he thinks maybe death isn't as final as it's cracked up to be. Maybe, if you're lucky, your ghosts come back not to haunt, but to hang out.
When Ziggy finally falls asleep for real, it's with the sound of Arty and Raven arguing over which dinosaur would make the best housepet. The answer is always, inevitably, all of them.
He doesn't dream of the accident this time. Just rain, and three shadows walking side by side, laughing at the thunder.