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Whenever Trevor used his ghostly power - the ability to, if he concentrated very, very hard and used every ounce of energy he had, touch or move objects - everyone knew about it.
Sometimes he bragged about his ability, like the time he turned on the stereo so the ghosts could all listen to music while Jay and Samantha were out for dinner or something. Never mind that the stereo had been turned up all the way and he'd expended all his energy to get it on that he couldn't change the volume and the ghosts had to endure two and a half hours of The Best of 70s Disco at top volume until the livings got home and turned it off.
("I never want to hear the words 'do you remember, dancing in September' again," lamented Hetty.)
Sometimes he complained about his ability, like the time he finally pushed that ugly yellow vase off the upstairs hallway table after a week of moving it inch by inch only to have a very large spider emerge from the shattered pieces.
("I hate spiders," Trevor moaned, "and that thing scurried away into the wall and it's probably still there to this day!" Sasappis told him he was being a baby for being afraid of a living spider that couldn't hurt him. "But what if it dies and stays around?" Alberta had countered. Trevor tried to avoid that part of the upstairs hallway now.)
Sometimes he really complained about his ability, especially when it inexplicably left his fingertip aching, throbbing even, for days at a time after he used it.
In that case, Trevor told anyone who would listen (and sometimes anyone who wouldn't listen) just how much his finger hurt. Such an annoying consequence of his ghostly power, really, he would say, moaning and complaining and holding his finger up as though everyone else could see the pain radiating off of it. He ignored anyone who told him to stop touching things then.
There was just a lot of time when you're dead, and Trevor and the ghosts liked to fill all that time with something. If a lot of that time for Trevor was talking about how he could touch and move things, well then so be it. And if the other ghosts got tired of hearing it, well, then so be that too. They all did things that annoyed Trevor, too - how could they not? Outside of Sam, they could only ever see and interact with each other, and there was only so much that they could do that didn't get on each other's nerves.
The problem with this entire scenario was that it was hit or miss whether something new that happened to the ghosts was exciting enough to get traction or if it took some effort to get there (as opposed to anything happening with the livings, which was always very exciting).
Trevor had spent the last 30 years of his afterlife in this house, sulking or strutting in all rooms, down all hallways, nearly across every inch of it. Yet, it was an ordinary Thursday morning when the floor in the upstairs hallway, near the wall (but on the opposite side from where the spider emerged from the vase), between the bathroom and Trevor's bedroom, made him trip. He tripped right through the wall into Thor's bedroom.
"What is the meaning of this intrusion!" Thor boomed. He had been shouting out the window to his son, the intrusion interrupting a conversation about the best ways to cook cod.
Trevor held his hands up as he righted himself. "I don't know," he said, looking behind him as though he could see what had made him trip. While ghosts could walk through walls, they couldn't see through them, so Trevor saw nothing that would have tripped him. He ignored Thor's grunt of frustration and hurried back through the door to the hallway. Trevor crouched down to examine the offensive floor but couldn't see anything out of the normal.
He stood up again and walked slowly over the area. Nothing seemed out of place, and as a ghost, he wasn't supposed to trip over a curled carpet or a raised nail or anything like that.
Just when he was about to shrug it off as a freak accident, he stepped on a part of the floor that hurt. Trevor stumbled backwards, thankfully not going through any walls this time. "What the -?" He stepped forward again with his foot on the same board. Again, it hurt. It hurt in the same way that his finger hurt and ached and throbbed when he tried to move something or push a button.
This was a revelation, Trevor thought. Was he moving the floor? How was that even possible? He hurried down the stairs in search of someone - anyone - to tell. He found Hetty, Isaac, and Pete in the kitchen with Jay, who was flipping grilled cheeses over the stove.
"Why does that smell so delightful?" Isaac asked, tipping his nose up into the air and breathing in deeply.
"It's all that butter," Pete said, leaning forward so much he looked like he might fall forward.
Hetty shuddered. "It is entirely too much of an overindulgence."
"Something weird happened to me," Trevor announced. Everyone, except for Jay, of course, turned to look at him.
Hetty raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"
"I stepped on a spot in the hallway upstairs that hurt me just like moving things does."
Hetty and Isaac exchanged a look. Pete looked confused.
"And how did you discover this?"
"I tripped."
"You tripped," Hetty repeated. "Impossible. We don't trip over anything."
"But I did," Trevor argued. "I tripped right into Thor's room. You can ask him."
Of his three ghostly colleagues, Pete was the only one who seemed at all interested in what Trevor was saying. "What did you trip over?"
"That's the thing," Trevor said, "I don't know! I went back and stamped around on the floor for a bit and the only thing I can tell is that one part of it makes my foot feel the same way my finger sometimes does when I'm trying to move things."
Pete nodded, but when he noticed that Hetty and Isaac had started to make their way out of the kitchen, heads bent and whispering inaudibly, he offered Trevor a shrug and hurried after them. "Wait, guys, I'm coming!"
Trevor scratched the side of his head. He wasn't crazy, he thought. He wasn't. He knew that they as ghosts didn't trip over things. And he also knew that something had made him trip upstairs in the hallway. Both things could be true at the same time. Now he just had to find someone who would believe him . . .
None of the other ghosts believed him.
("You've been walking around up there for three decades and nothing has changed," pointed out Alberta. "Ghosts can't trip on things," Sasappis said, in a refrain echoed by pretty much all of them at some point. Even Flower had something to say: "Did you smoke something you've never seen before? That happened to me once and I started walking through walls.")
Having nothing else to focus on at the moment, Trevor made it his mission to prove to everyone else (and to himself) that he wasn't crazy.
Every day, Trevor walked back and forth over the part of the hallway floor that made him trip. Every day, he did this for long enough that his foot aches and he spent the rest of the day limping around the house.
At first, some of his fellow ghosts would ask about the limp, but once Trevor brought up the upstairs floor, they got less interested. Soon enough, no one bothered to ask Trevor what was with the limp. And the truth was, Trevor was doing the floor stepping so much that the ache in his foot and leg was happening all the time now. But he couldn't give up, was like a dog with a bone, and had come down with an obsession.
Three weeks after the initial tripping incident, Trevor made a major breakthrough. Just before he decided he was due for a break, Trevor decided to stamp his foot as hard as possible over the spot on the floor. He stamped so hard that he almost passed out, and he was very glad he didn't, because his efforts had paid off: the floorboard moved enough that Trevor could see a gap under it.
"Aha!" he exclaimed. He shook his fist in the air and let out a whoop of excitement. "I was right!" he shouted. Then, he repeated himself again, quieter, as a validation to himself.
Trevor gave himself a minute to preen in his moment of glory before turning and hurrying off to find Sam.
He found her, along with Pete, Alberta, Hetty, and Thor, in the lobby gathered around the computer. "I was right," he told them all, not bothering to wait for any kind of break in the conversation. "I was right," he said again, without waiting for a response. "There was something weird with the floor upstairs. I managed to get it open."
"Open?" Hetty repeated, "whatever do you mean by that?"
Pete followed it up by saying, "Did you break the floor?"
And Alberta huffed. "No one cares what you're going on about, Trevor."
But Trevor was focused only on Sam. "You have to come look at it. I think there's a hole in the floor. Maybe there's something under it."
"Oh, like buried treasure!" Pete suggested. And that was enough to get the whole group of them hustling up the stairs, leaving Trevor to convince Sam.
"Can you come and see what's under there?" he asked. "Please?"
"Trevor, I'm trying to finish this update to our website. Can't it wait?" Sam didn't look away from the laptop screen.
"No," he said. "It can't wait. I've been trying for weeks to prove I was right about the floor. Now you've got to come see what's under it so I can tell everyone else 'I told you so.'"
Sam sighed. "Oh very well," she said, closing the laptop. "Let's go see what you found."
He pumped his fist again and followed Sam upstairs. They found the rest of the ghosts gathered in a semi-circle around the broken floorboard. "Move, move, move," Trevor insisted. "Let Sam through."
"I don't know, Trevor, looks like you just broke the floor, and Sam and Jay have enough to fix around here already," Alberta said.
"It was already loose," Trevor said. "That's what I've been telling you. I just got it open. There's something in there." Well, he didn't know for sure that there was something underneath the floorboard, but why else would it have been loose? This house held more secrets and problems than any in the whole world, Trevor figured.
Sam crouched down on the floor and pulled at the floorboard until it came all the way off. She peered down inside. "I can't see anything," she said.
Around him, the ghosts huffed in a way of saying that they were right and Trevor was, of course, wrong. "Maybe you need a flashlight," he said quickly.
Sam pulled her phone out of her pocket and turned the light on, using it to look down under the floor. "Still don't see anything," she said, and Trevor's shoulders fell. That couldn't be right. He opened his mouth to argue, but she continued on. "Ah, wait a minute," Sam said, "I think I can see something." She stuck her hand right under the floor and then came back up with a small stack of papers tied together with twine.
"I told you so," Trevor said, jumping and pointing. "I was right, I was right."
Now the rest of the ghosts were interested, and everyone crowded around Sam and the packet of papers. Hetty asked what on earth the papers were, and Thor clapped Trevor on the back. Everyone seemed to talk at once as Sam shuffled through the papers, which seemed to be a mix of letters, postcards, and a few photographs. They didn't seem to belong to any of the ghosts or be from any of their time spent at the house.
Trevor left them all to their discovery, arguing and debating over who they belonged to and where they came from. He didn't really care all that much, if he were being honest, about what was actually underneath the floorboards.
All he cared about was that he was right, and the pain in his foot was completely justified. Despite the ache in his foot, that night, Trevor went to bed with a satisfied smile on his face.