The last time I saw Kike was on a Friday when we were playing, together with the other children, after school.
My family and of course I were new to the area and local friendships were few and far between.
This was the third time we had moved for my dad's work.
Almost everyone we met to play after school, while walking to our respective houses, was between 8 and 9 years old, it was a way to accompany us.
On Monday the teacher gave us the unhappy news that our friend had died.
We learned from the sixth graders that he had traveled with his teenage brother to visit his older sister who lived on a farm many miles away and that by accident, he had tampered with a hunting rifle belonging to his brother-in-law and missed a shot that hit my friend in the head, killing him instantly.
I was shocked by the event and that night I could not sleep.
She closed her eyes and saw him laughing as usual, as he was always making jokes at us and mocking our reactions.
More than once I woke up screaming and that worried my parents.
Several days went by like that, so I didn't go to school and my teacher notified me of the situation and visited me for several afternoons and talked to me, explaining about death and such things.
A week later I went back to school and everything was back to normal, but a few months later when I was eating ice cream with my parents, I saw Kike in a sweet shop in the area.
I didn't say anything but my heart almost skipped a beat and I was scared.
The apparition was repeated on several occasions and, driven by the fear of seeing a ghost, I refused to accompany my parents to places where it was customary for us to go as a family, such as the supermarket, a fast food restaurant, and even the amusement park.
My worried mother got me to confess the reason and they decided to send me to my grandmother for a week.
She was a very folkloric and excessively superstitious person and I was an ideal patient to be auscultated by her friends who had communication with beings from the beyond.
In those days her house was transformed into a peculiar office, whose mission was to rescue me from the hands of my friend, whose soul for having died in a tragic accident was wandering in limbo and he wanted to take me to accompany him.
Tobacco, incense, holy water, herbal baths, spiritualistic cessions and a variety of rituals ended the diagnosis that I was now free of danger.
However, I was never able to corroborate that since I did not return to the house because the company where my father worked transferred him again urgently to another city and they came to pick me up with the moving van.
Years went by, life continued normally without the appearance of Kike's ghost and I ended up convinced that Grandma was right.
As life is an eternal return, one day I met up on a plane to a city abroad where I would give some talks in a company, with someone who also studied at the school where I was in the year Kike was killed.
The conversation and the discovery of that in common, arose because he was sitting next to me and we were both bored, so we began to tell each other anecdotes and I remembered the one about the ghostly appearance of my friend.
The memories of both of them blew up and with a serious face he told me:
-"What a tragedy for that family, a year after Kike died, a car hit and killed his twin brother.
The face of astonishment that I put on was undoubtedly apotheosis because he immediately asked me:
-Didn't you know that Kike had a twin brother?
I thought:
If I had known, I wouldn't have believed that the person I saw several times was my friend and not his brother.
