The Girl in Acid Park by Lauren Harris

reach put him close enough for a wrinkle in his shirt to brush my arm.
    "You have to take a step back from the literal mythology," he said. "Look at what it's trying to explain."
    I shook my head. "People want to know where they go after they die. That explains it pretty easily."
    "Yes, but what about the ones who can't get there?" He pulled open his drawer again, extracted a box of sugar packets, and brandished it at me. "What happens to them?"
    "They...become...ghosts?"
    "They become ghosts." He dumped a sugar packet into his mug and stared at it. "I just realized I haven't got any milk left."
    "You gonna survive?"
    "I'm ninety-percent certain it won't end in death-death. Anyway, my theory is that the role of the psychopomp explains people like you. Lots of religions have rites on exorcisms in terms of ghostly or demonic possession. That's what most of the world focuses on, so that's what people know about, but it's not what you do. A a psychopomp is something different. Their role is literally to guide spirits to the afterlife."
    I hummed, depressing the plunger and pouring myself a cup of black coffee. Without milk, I didn't want sugar, so I nodded my satisfaction and we retreated to opposite beds, cradling our beverages.
    "Okay," I said. "So let's say I'm a psycho-thing."
    "You are a psycho-thing. But also, a conveyor of souls." He gave a one-shouldered shrug and a half smile over the rim of his mug. The steam fogged his glasses. "It's something to think about. Hermes was also the patron of orators and literature, and a messenger god--sort of the Ancient Greek equivalent of a news anchor. That can't be such a bad thought, can it?"
    "You're such a nerd." I said it with love.
    "You're welcome."
    I swallowed a sip of coffee and looked toward the window, trying to discern whether there were still police cruisers in the parking lot. Jamie glanced as well, but he couldn't know what I was looking for. He seemed not to mind silence, so we sat there, gazing out the window for a while, until he finally lowered his mug.
    "Can I ask about the brick?"
    I sighed, and as I dragged the toes of my shoes along the floor, explained. He listened attentively, only looking away once when he reached a long arm all the way to his sink and grabbed a bottle from it. By the time he stretched across to hand it to me, I was done.
    The bottle was an analgesic spray. "For your knee," he said. "So, you think the brick was the stick monkeys?"
    I shrugged, squirting spray onto my cuts. "It could have been lacrosse. Or anyone else at the school. I had to disable comments forever ago, and even deleting the backlog doesn't work because mirror sites just keep popping up. And social media is a nightmare." The sting in my knee abated, and I set the spray next to Aaron's rosary. The movement caused my shorts to ride up and I adjusted them self-consciously. "At this point, anyone on my blog has motive."
    When I looked at Jamie, his gaze flicked suddenly away from my legs, and I swear I saw the tops of his ears turn pink. " I'm on your blog," he said.
    "But I didn't know you then. And you liked the Bond villain comparison. Besides it wasn't a picture of your pregnancy test in the bathroom trash Crystal took."
    Crystal had been one of the other three girls who co-wrote The Toilet Paper until her parents found her stash of gay erotic fan fiction and sent her to military school. (Which is a real shame, too, because her Harry/Draco stuff was genius; I will never thing of an engorgement charm the same way.)
    "I should have made my pregnancy test more conspicuous, then," he said.
    "Slut."
    Jamie choked on his tea. I leaned back, surprised to see him actually laugh. I wasn't aware he ever did that. I stared, both confused and proud, laughing more at him than at my joke. He had a funny grin, one that looked too big for his mouth and crinkled his cheeks like whiskers. He covered it with a hand, though that might have been his attempt to catch the Earl Gray dripping onto