She’s a really inconsequential human being; so much so that she sometimes convinces herself that she’s not really a human being at all. At least not in the sense that most human beings are human beings. Because she’s a ghost. That’s all. She’s a ghost that doesn’t do anything but sit around drinking Diet Coke in her underwear and wrecking whatever tiny bit of soul that she has left.  

At sixteen she was more sure of herself than she is at twenty five. She’s curled up around this girl and is explaining that what they’re doing doesn’t need to be a thing. “It’s doing the most basic action ever. Like, taking a dump.” The girl, she can’t remember her name anymore, sighs.

“So our relationship reminds you of taking a shit.” Jesse puckers her lips. Relationship is such a silly word. She’s full of relationships. Relationships with the headmaster and her middle eastern dentist and her gynecologist. She has a relationship with the mouth breather that sits behind her in Latin. 

Instead of addressing the relationship theory (which is relative; everything is relative) she stamps down on it. “No, I’m just saying that it’s not a big deal. We’re not, like, defined by whom we choose to fuck.” 

“But we are, Jess.”

“No,” she insists. “We’re not. We’re not the queer girls; we’re Jesse and ______!” the girl unhooks her leg from Jesse’s, pulling down her shirt. “People don’t call me Bangs Girl just because I have bangs, right? It’s basically the same thing as my sexuality. No big deal.” 

The girl wrestles with a button on her skirt; “actually, they do call you Bangs Girl. And dyke, and bitch, and cunt. Those are your identifiers. It is a big deal, Jesse. You’re the only one that can’t see that.” Why should she? Jesse doesn’t have the necessary feelings that bring her to care about the frivolous stuff in her life. Sometimes she just needs someone to pinch her. Wake her up. Because this reality is not very real in the eyes of a teenager is, in a word, too big for her britches. At sixteen she had drive and ambition and the incurable need to do something great—her parents would be proud. She’d be proud of herself. Jesse thinks that, if she had known at sixteen, what she had become, she wouldn’t have tried so hard. Wouldn’t have made so many people fall in love with her; wouldn’t have pulled on so many ponytails; wouldn’t have kissed the boys and made them cry.

Jesse Chambers is dead.

No one realizes it but her.

“I’m being haunted, Wally, I know it.” She only curls up around him because he doesn’t care, will absently braid her hair like she’s three years old and this is some fucked up game of dress up. The TV flickers a commercial for a made-for movie and she presses a few buttons on the remote until something interesting pops up.

Wally cracks a smile. “No, you’re not. You’re being silly. Ghosts don’t exist, Jesse. And if they did I’d know—I’ve seen enough Scooby-Doo, alright. I’m an expert.” She hates that he makes a joke out of it. Then again; he doesn’t know that she’s the ghost and she’s the one doing the haunting. It is all very symbolic. A Peter Pan Complex that isn’t very Peter Pan. Jesse has grown up, except backwards, going from very stoic to very childish. Very brave to very scared. 

“Do you ever think about—”

“What?”

“No, nevermind.”

“Alright.”

She likes him because he doesn’t ask the hard questions like what she’s thinking about and what she’s worried about, since he knows that she won’t answer anyway. Wally is a good friend. He cares just enough to not care at all.

Jesse tries again. “Do you ever have those philosophical thoughts about, maybe Poe was right and this is a dream within a dream, or, we don’t really exist at all. Like we’re part of some sociological experiment. Little lab rat people inside a snow globe?”

“Nope,” he says, more focused on Buying a Vowel than the friend with the sunken down look on her face. 

I think I’m dead, she wants to say.

So he will tell her that she’s not.

But she is.

In every possible way except for the being scattered as bone dust across the sea part.

The funny thing is that she knows dead people. Real dead people, not the Plath girls with their bared fangs and black clouds. She knows the real ones and their tombstones that she doesn’t lay flowers at, doesn’t share stories with. People are always asking her what’s the point of visiting the dead if you’re not going to pay the proper respects? Jesse explains it as, “I don’t talk to ghosts.” Can’t watch a movie or read a book with an urn. The chewed up spit out body of someone she used to know. Most of them are specs of people. Some of them are ones that leave giant, symbolic holes in her heart. She would know what it feels like. 

Her dad is dead. 

She doesn’t talk about that.

Instead she scratches the cat under its chin in a rare display of affection, ‘till Leslie gets out of the shower and she has someone to entertain her. Someone that talks back instead of staring and howling and meowing like Jesse can carry on a conversation with an animal. It roly-polys on her tummy; Leslie bumps the door open with her hip, kicks the cat off the bed and drips water onto the comforter. 

“I hate cats,” she sniffs, and Jesse rolls her eyes. 

“Do you really like anything?” 

“No, but that’s why you like me.”

“Bit of irony there, hm?” She’s not really in to the whole relationship thing. It’s part of being a ghosts. Ghosts can’t have relationships because they’re ghosts; orbs and shit that show up in pictures once they’ve been developed. Only to be shrugged off because, no, must have been a malfunction during the printing process. Jesse still doesn’t believe in them.

Leslie throws the towel on the floor instead of answering—Jesse hands her a t-shirt. They’re kind of domestic, now.

It makes her sick.

She’s not the type to settle down—more the type that you’d love to take home to Mom because of how much Mom would hate her. They don’t do the parents thing, though. They don’t do much. They drink their tea in the morning and wear each others clothes and make out in front of Wally. They burn their Jiffy Pop and avoid talking about the future. They avoid talking about anything that could make this something. Because making it something when it’s no big deal is really, well. A big deal. Too big a deal then Jesse has mentally prepared herself for. She’s used to the neon colored girls she went to college with in Gotham, who corrected her papers with pens that matched their hair and shared cigarettes that Jesse didn’t really smoke. She’s used to late nights of sneaking out in someone else’s underwear after a fuck in some dark dorm. Used to holding hands under tables and subscribing to the cliche.

Sometimes she chokes on the hilarity of it all. How pointless, she thinks, to try so hard and never enjoy what you have.

Then there’s Wally who—

He’s Wally.

This punk ass kid. Wallace. It’s hard to pretend to hate him and his lesbian haircut because he’s not the kind of person you hate. He’s the kind of person you rag on and laugh at for being an idiot. Wally’s always just—there. Answering her phone calls at three in the morning when she’s screaming into his answering machine telling him to wake up, wake up, wake up, she needs to tell him something, and he wakes up and sleep breathes into the phone while she tells him all about nothing. There are the occasions when she actually tells him stuff, like when she told him that she was gay like, “yeah, so, did I mention? Gay? Me? Gay.” and he widens his eyes and puts his hands up near his cheeks like, “oh, really? I had no idea!” with the implied extra exclamation points.

She didn’t cry on his shoulder, though, after her dad.

That body buried under an American flag.

Johnny Chambers isn’t a ghost like his daughter is. Lying in the savasana pose in the middle of her living room, the one in that three story brownstone bought with her trust fund money. That hadn’t been in the plan. The plan was to probably live in her father’s office at QuickStart, because after the divorce he didn’t do anything but inhale his work while Jesse laughed at him. The former super hero with the paunchy belly who told her that he wanted her to be something great. Drilled that fucking formula into her head so she could cheat during track meets and save lives and be just like he and her mother had been. Her parents take the superhero stuff incredibly seriously. That’s why Jesse is so disenchanted with it.

The teenaged rebellion phase has lasted ten years longer than it should have. 

When she went to Gotham University instead of immediately joining the family business, her father might have strangled her. Might have done it again upon realizing that she had dropped out of the business program and in to something Anthropological. That he said like it left a bad taste in his mouth. She fucked around in South America for a semester observing culture, transplanted herself back in Gotham with a bunch of sugar skulls and notebooks filled with observations. Then she filled up some more with observations about Gotham and its surplus of freaks in spandex. Wrote her dissertation on the Effect of Heroes In Modern Day Society. Got an A. Graduated. Didn’t do anything else.

“Jess, I payed for you to trapeze around Gotham for four years. I didn’t say anything when you chose to—live your lifestyle. I kept my mouth shut when you brought home that girl with the ring in her tongue. But I’ll be damned if I let you waste your life across the world, doing ‘research’. I’ve already set up an internship for you at the JSA.” Her father sends her on errands and gives her a second desk job at the company answering phones (she never does).

She claims not to know how she got into the superhero thing.

She claims not to know how all these lightning bolts incorporated themselves into her wardrobe.

Wally winks at her like he knows and says: “the call of justice doesn’t allow itself to get hung up on!” and she punches him in the shoulder. 

“If you ever say that again, I will shove my cat  up your—”

“Child in the room, Jesse.”

Bart Allen sticks out his tongue. “I’m not a child!” 

Boys. Jesse crosses her arms, waiting for them to shut up. Boys. They’re her boys, but they’re still boys. Silly, silly, silly boys that make her head hurt and move too fast and never listen to what she has to say. Do stupid stuff like wear matching shirts when they’re all together that read: I’m proud of my gay sister! (She flinches at the reference to familial ties, now.)

Bart doesn’t understand that Jesse’s a ghost, either. He thinks she’s the cool dyke-y aunt that takes him to buy condoms and shows him how to put them on using cucumbers as stand in penises and making sure he knows not to feel inferior because the cucumber is bigger than what’s in his pants. Bart’s not like Wally in the sense that, he doesn’t talk over her and sometimes he listens and has really clever things to add in that just bowl her over. Like she can’t believe someone so young could be so smart. He fishes a piece of broccoli out of his take out carton with a fork—points it at her.

“So I’m not supposed to pull out her chair for her if we go on a dinner date.”

Jesse swallows. “No, that’s just chivalrous bullshit. Girls don’t like that.  Girls like boys that are kind of mean to them and still pay for their meal.” 

“But,” he slurps up a noodle. “You don’t like boys.”

“Correct.”

“Then why should I take your advice?”

“Because I’ve dated more girls than you have,” Jesse smiles, giving him a fond little pat on the head.