Greg was worried, like always he'd forgotten his pencil, pen, and notebook back in the dorm room. "Damn," he swore under his breath and he reached his 8 o'clock class. The fog had barely yet to dissipate and there was slight mildewy stench that clung to his clothes because he'd apparently left them in the washer a bit too long. The professor passed around a sheet for attendance and just as he was about to sign it, the young man that sat beside him took the paper, signed his name, and passed it on without a second look or thought toward Greg. Was he invisible?
Writing down an important date on his hand with a barely functioning pen he'd managed to scrounge up from the floor, he left the classroom slightly peeved that the day had already started off horribly. Exiting out of class, he made his way up the steps to fall flat on his face walking up the stairs to exit the building. "Who puts stairs to exit a building anyway?" Obviously the class was in the basement of the old edifice and he was simply climbing back up from the netherworld. Outside, the weather hadn't changed much. Not fifty feet in front of him was a very darkly clad man handing out signs that talked about animal equality. As each person passed by, the man would say, "Save the animals," in a voice not too different from Greg's uncle Ronnie who had been thrown in jail three years before for child pornography. As he passed the man, expecting to receive a brochure about how ten dollars a month could save the abused labrador on the front panel from animal testing, the man looked past Greg and handed a flier to another person. Greg even stopped and the man attacked other people with his moral cause. But he ignored Greg. Seriously, he would have paid the ten dollars just to get a brochure, wasn't someone going to acknowledge him?
Back in his dorm room, he moved stuff about, shuffled papers, and checked his e-mail with no luck and no new messages. It was as if the world had forgotten about him. Just when he truly felt lost, a program about ghosts came on the television. He watched in complete fascination as the abnormally fat woman with upper lip hair spoke about ghosts and how they didn't even know they were even ghosts. Perhaps Greg was a ghost? No one seemed to acknowledge him. He was invisible to everyone around there and no one helped him up when he had been on the stairs.
So, deciding that he had died somehow, he walked out onto campus, and decided to test his theory. The busiest intersection was at Mitts and Vine where buses, semis, and crazed soccer mom's drove at radical speeds to get home. Standing up next to the curb, he waved at people and they whizzed on by without a second glance. It was true, he was a ghost. He was dead and nothing could hurt him anymore.
Eyeing a particularly large semi about a half a mile away, he swallowed down his ghostly spit and waited for traffic to clear. Once it had, he closed his eyes and stepped in front of the semi.
The next day, the newspapers would rave about a toxic chemical spill that polluted most drinking water for the city within a one mile radius of the semi truck that had lost control, flipped, and ran into a cement pole. There was no mention of any deaths.
Some weeks later, one particularly annoyed professor went searching for the student who had been assigned a project that was due two weeks ago. There was no response from the e-mail or telephone and this particular professor was not one to take it lightly if someone didn't come to class. So, knocking hard on the door of 317, he waited and waited. Finally, becoming fed up, he tromped over the RAs door and knocked, demanding to know where Gregory Hines was. The RA laughed and said that he didn't know, Greg had disappeared a few weeks ago. The professor sighed and left, defeated. If only he could have found Greg, then the class would have really seen him.
The moral of the story is, don't step in front of semis.
