To the best of my knowledge, none of the boys had ever had an experience with the supernatural before. No ghost, no premonitions, just a material world of black and white. All of that was about to change.

***

George hit the release lever and the inertia rocked the daredevil’s head back, sending the football helmet jettisoning across the parking lot like a bounty hit from a Saint’s linebacker. The boy rocketed from the catapult like a pilot ejecting from a jet fighter.

Buddha felt sick as he realized the sand bags had been weighed in anticipation of Tex piloting the catapult weighing eighty pounds. George probably weighed closer to sixty-five. The increased thrust put him at full speed near the door instead of the top of the arch decline.

Our hero was on a perfect course for the opening except that his body moving at close to sixty miles per hour was heading through at the wrong angle. His helmet-less head was on a collision course with the exposed, rusty, six-penny nails lining the door frame. Spider knew their new friend’s head was about to bust like a melon thirty feet in the air into sticky pieces.

We may never know the answer to what caused the chance meeting that day. Whether you call her a ghost or a phantom or a spirit is irrelevant, but she was doing something that day; maybe playing with little baby ghosts from the old orphanage or just admiring the old architecture from when she was flesh and blood. Whatever she was doing, she saw the boy fly; something she was familiar with. She also thought the boy was going to die and be struck down in the dawn of his life, something she had been familiar with for almost a hundred years.

In the span of a hummingbird’s heart beat she intercepted the pitiful projectile. In that instant, that fragment between worlds, all time stopped. All clocks belonged to her. Basketballs became frozen moons, jetliners perched like clouds, and blood froze like ice in a billion veins, except for George. His heart beat on and his ears could still hear. His body was suspended thirty feet in the air, no wind, no gravity, while his heart pounded like race horse hooves.

“What do we have here?” the floating girl whispered as George hung weightless inches from door nails aimed at his sky blue eyes. She hovered face to face with him and extended a delicate ivory hand to caress his smooth cheek.

“Are you the one?” she whispered to herself.

Even though his eyes could blink and his heart could beat, he was as stiff as a stone so he could not answer her rhetorical question.

Her lips were so close to his now that he could feel their icy coldness. Although he was filled with terror that any second time would resume and he would face certain death, he was crimson faced on the verge of cardiac arrest that the girl was going to kiss him. She backed away without contact and a smirk crossed her mona lisa lips.

“We’ll be watching you.”

It was only then that he saw a younger olive-skinned apparition standing inside the clubhouse. The teenage time lord pulled George’s head while the other girl pushed at his leg, rotating him in mid air like a pinwheel until he was clear. All except one leg that had splayed too far to the right.

“What about his leg, Miss Izzy?”

“It’ll have to do, Nikki,” replied the floating phantom as she winked at George, blew the blushing cannonball a picture-perfect kiss, and disappeared as time, inertia, and gravity slammed into the test pilot like an avalanche.

The world was electric with life, never having missed a beat. To the boys on the ground, one second their new-found volunteer was facing clandestine horror, then like a glitch in a movie reel he rotated from 6 o’clock to 9 o’clock fast than the eye could see. Instead of his head splitting on the door the shin of his right leg collided instead. The crack and snap was sickening as his leg bent completely back at an angle only licorice sticks could achieve. His body landed inside the clubhouse beyond the bloody door frame and lie limp, out of sight. Three young friends stared in horror, stunned in disbelief, their minds struggling to put together the impossible.

The old Jamaican fortune teller’s voice snapped them out of shock as he started wenching the cable to the catapult down and yelled, “You bombaclads betta get up deah. Finally sumtin comes into ya lives what got a look of destiny about it and you leave em up deah wit dem monsters.”

Spider and Buddha ran to the catapult and the Prince shot them both at once. They reached the bottom of the door frame, pulling themselves inside seconds before Tex made the same trip unscathed. To their horror, George laid on the floor with a jagged shin bone sticking through a pair of Levi Toughskins and lodged in bubble wrap amongst bloody duct tape. Buddha scooted over to him telling him he’d be okay as George gazed off into the distance, not even seeming to be hurt.

“Buddha, did you see the angel who saved me?”

“We saw something, I don’t know what.”

“She was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” George’s voice was dreamy, his face peaceful.

“The Prince said it was monsters.”

“If monsters looked like her, they’d never sell a nightlight.”

Tex and Spider were staring out past Buddha with eyes as big as tea saucers. Buddha turned to see what was so amazing. There next to an in-ground, L-shaped swimming pool standing on a diving board in a two-piece baby-blue striped bathing suit was JoAnna Fullilove. What a day this had been!