Ghost Lover by Colleen Little Page A

sorry. Maybe you don’t understand me and I’m over here getting mad at you for not answering. Poor thing. I can tell you are an American Indian. Do you not speak any English at all?”
    A strange expression passed over the girl’s face.  Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, her face crumpled up in laughter. “I speak better English than you do, white devil,” she said and giggled. She bent over at the waist with her arms wrapped around her and stamped her foot. She laughed and laughed and finally ended up with a very unladylike snort. I rolled my eyes. Even at seven, I knew she was really more amused than the situation called for.
    When she finally stopped giggling and snorting we sat down and talked. She was Leotie. I had a hard time pronouncing it at first. She kept saying it for me, with smirks and eye rolls interspersed between pronunciations. Finally I managed to pronounce it well enough for her not to giggle when I said it. “I’m Anastasia,” I told her. She looked puzzled and tried but it came out sounding nothing like my name. She tried several times and finally threw up her hands in agitation.
    We talked for hours that day, and I was back out the next day right after breakfast. We spent the rest of that summer talking and exploring. That first day she had been surprised because she had never met someone who could see her before. Some ghosts don’t know that they are dead so they spend their days enacting the last days of their lives. They never acknowledge living people because that would mean they would have to acknowledge that they weren’t living. Leotie wasn’t one of those. She knew she was dead.
    One of her favorite games was to creep into homes and scare the people. She moved things and she touched people and she whispered and made creepy noises. The only house she had never managed to get into was my own home, and it fascinated her.
    Leotie knew all the other ghosts who lived in the area. She told me all of their stories but the only one that truly interested me was the beautiful woman who walked near the tracks. Her name was Elise and she didn’t socialize much with any of the other spirits in the area. Leotie thought she was stuck-up. I just thought she was gorgeous.
    Leotie and I stayed friends. All through school she was my closest confidante. As soon as I got home from school, I would head straight to the woods and talk to Leotie. When I finally decided that I was going to go to college in New York I told her first and we both cried. I’d seen her every day since the day we met and now I wouldn’t.
    College was the first time in my life that I had living friends. I met men and women there and found people with my same beliefs and interests. I also began dating for the first time. Half-way through my freshman year I met Joseph. He was handsome and kind and funny, and I liked him a lot. I thought that liking him translated into liking him but found out that it didn’t. We dated for six months.
    I always wondered why I didn’t feel the way I read about in books or heard other girls talk about when he kissed me. I began thinking there was something wrong with me and got depressed. The night Joseph slipped his hand underneath my shirt and tried for more was the breaking point. I had tolerated kissing in the hopes that someday a switch would flip and I would start feeling the right way. His hand brushing across my breast convinced me I was wrong. I couldn’t do it. I ended the relationship and sank into a funk.
    It was one of my closest friends at school, the ghost of Nilda, who had been the women’s studies professor who died in the ’60’s, who helped me figure out the problem. “Honey, have you ever considered that boys might just not be your thing?” I didn’t really understand what she was asking and told her so. Her gray eyes twinkled at me from behind her round framed glasses. “You were a sheltered little thing, weren’t you?” she asked as her mouth quirked up in humor.
    I shot