E. P. Beaumont

No one was quite so enthusiastic about that sort of sin as the sinners themselves, grown weary; in one breath they’d be talking about how drunk they got in college and what pranks they’d gotten up to (generally involving property damage and a lot of work to clean up, work for someone else). Then in the next it was ‘these kids today have no values.’ Max would turn on the vacuum cleaner and pretend he didn’t hear.

Actually there were lots of conversations he had to pretend he didn’t hear, especially the ones about things they’d visited on the boys who weren’t manly enough or the girls they considered ugly. When those grown men waxed nostalgic about the cruelties they had committed in adolescence, Max thought about the gangs at school that he avoided. It had been particularly bad when he was twelve and thirteen, until he had met Erika and Chloe and Thaddeus.

 ***

Max and the Ghost was released this week by Glass Knife Press.

At the drop-in center, Erika beamed at Max across the table, as he applied himself without complaint to the practice trigonometry exam that they had drawn up together during study hall. 

He couldn’t draw the triangles without thinking about the height as a depth, the depth of an unlighted shaft in a nineteenth-century factory, a bottomless pit that opened under an unobtrusive hole in a plank floor. Nonetheless he finished all of the problems, even the hard ones, as he turned over in the back of his mind how to tell the story to Erika. He understood why she liked this, now. It was a great deal simpler than the world with its ghosts and its tangle of stories and its family secrets.

He thought about it some more as she marked the exam.

“There’s something about that place that makes them nervous,” he said, and Erika frowned. “They got a deal. Anton usually likes to talk about his deals, but not this time.” 

Erika smirked. “Maybe there’s a body in the basement.” Her mother knew about things like that, being a cop.

How Erika got from the yellow pad with its grubby pencil lines to the utmost stars and an ancient ship drifting on the infinite ocean, Max didn’t know, but it proved once again that they were brother and sister under the skin. Erika was a dreamer like him, just another sort. If the world held together, she wanted to be a civil engineer. Max knew that Erika’s mom was a cop, who wanted her daughter to do something a little less dangerous. Erika loved watching things being built, and trying to figure out how they were put together. 

It was the sort of dream that his parents wished he had, without saying so in so many words.

As usual, Anton was abrupt with Max about his daydreaming and flitting and his blue hair, which was his friend Chloe’s term project for cosmetology school. She told him it had been quite a success, but Anton didn’t seem to think so. 

“I can’t tell sometimes if you’re a boy or a girl,” Anton said. 

Max bridled every time Anton said that. The tone implied there was something wrong with girls, and Max perfectly well knew there wasn’t. Most of his friends were girls: Erika and Chloe at school, and then Lelia from the bookstore who was a grownup but talked to him as if he were a real person, unlike Anton who talked to him as if he were a somewhat dim child.