The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  “Yesi?” I ask, struck by a nagging thought.

  She turns back. “Yes?”

  “What’s your book about?” I ask. “You said you were writing a book.”

  “It’s a ghost story, of course,” she says, showing that row of tiny, even teeth. In the light, her hair is painted silver—she isn’t blond at all. And she shuts her door, but not before I catch a flicker of emotion cross her face, something melancholy, something cold and ancient.

  4

  ANGEL: 2020–100

  Buried in the muddle of sky above the ice is the cloud house, cobbled together from all sorts of clouds—cirrus, nimbus, cumulonimbus, you name it. I fly there straight after leaving Yesi in the hallway. The air feels chilled and damp, and the moon hangs beside me, fat and sleepy. As soon as I pass the threshold, I see Charon, dozing on a chair built from cushy altocumulus clouds, like goose down. He must sense me, even though I’m not much to look at, and he shakes awake, pawing at crusts of drool on his chin.

  “Delaying the inevitable, are we, young Padawan?” He means my mandatory nightly return to the Other Place.

  “I don’t want to go back there.” I fight a shiver, just thinking about that shapeless hell. It’s the existential equivalent of setting your world on fire and being left with one surviving furniture-clearance outlet intact to wander through, its lights turned off and corridors empty. I know I arrived there because of a moment of violence by my own hand, but I couldn’t have known I’d be trapped there, just as I couldn’t have known I’d get a chance to escape here, slipping through the sole exit door on the day it wobbled into view. Still, I’m only allotted a day pass here. Each night I must slink back to the Other Place: It’s a gothic Cinderella-Persephone mash-up for the ages.

  “First of all, too fucking bad, and second of all, that’s not what I meant, kiddo.” Amusement plays in his keen rat eyes. “You’ve got to suck one of the meat bags bone-dry before you jet out of here for the night. You’ve got to shuck its pretty little skull like a corncob.”

  I nearly choke on crystal spit. “Excuse me?”

  He rises and shuffles toward the cloud fridge, its contours painted in impressionistic cirrus dashes, wrenching at an impossible handle to find a congealed cheesesteak sandwich waiting inside. “Are you feeling as rosy-cheeked, pray tell, as you did when you got here this morning?”

  I’m not feeling great, truth be told. Spreading myself through walls and other surfaces is an exhausting business. I can’t help but think of someone tugging through knotty hair with a fine-toothed comb. Walking through walls is like that except I’m the gunked-up hair. It’s better to behave like a good little living person, flitting through open doors.

  A fun fact hits me: When little kids shut doors on ghosts and shake under their covers, they’re only keeping the tired, agreeable ghosts out; the angry, energetic ones will still be all too eager to barge through and raise hell. I wish I could tell Rob—he always giggled when I got spooked by the dark and pulled the sheets up to my chin, as if flimsy cotton would protect me.

  Rob.

  The rush of pain attached to his name knocks the air out of me a good three seconds later than usual.

  Rob was Mama’s miracle baby, born on a crisp fall day when I was nine years old.

  But he was my baby, too, my baby brother. I was called Angel, but we all knew who the real angel to Liese’s devil was.

  He was so goddamn cool for a fourish-foot-tall, little, Bambi-eyed creature that it hurt. He’s the only kid I know who loved the dark. He even closed his eyes whenever he enjoyed himself a lot, as if the absence of light, of sight, could help him relish it more—

  But I can’t think about him—I’m gagging already, my guts clenched up in anticipation of pain. Some days I can’t think of him at all without choking. Other days a bright little memory nudges its way through before the pain can block it out. Is there anything safe to miss about him right now?

  I think of him, eyes closed, tucked into a cocoon of warm, clean sheets every night. Eyes closed, feeling the random, grazing tickle of a salty wind when I took him to the pier. Eyes closed, sighing and flopping onto the grass after a game of tag, his every eight-year-old muscle oxygenated and warm. I just hope he’s still—

  I stop myself cold.

  “I’m just tired, okay?” I snap at Charon. “Get off my case.” My polite charade is donezo, as far as Charon goes. It’s also easier to be an asshole when you’re invisible-ish.

  He snorts. “Tired! That’s rich. You’re not tired. You need to feed.”

  “Feed?”

  He tsks me before setting his sandwich inside a cloud microwave and slamming it shut. “You’re greener than I thought,” he says, fiddling with grayed buttons on the blurred dash. “Others feed on humans’ dreams,” he communicates, as if speaking to a toddler, “like little piglets at a metaphysical teat.”

  “But I’m not made of anything.” An escape should be an all-inclusive kind of deal. “Why can’t I nap and gorge on cheesesteaks like you? Be a vegetarian?”

  “Do you get how vegetarianism works?” The microwave beeps. “Relax, kid. Chugging their human sauce doesn’t hurt them. Imagine they’re semitrucks on an uphill slope through life,” he says, scooting a flat hand forward and up. “You’re lightening their burden.” A second, concluding beep.

  He opens the microwave, plucking out the steaming cheesesteak and playing hot potato with it as it burns his dirty fingers.

  I scan the empty cloud shelving. “Don’t you have a plate for that?”

  He shoots me a withering look as he holds the disintegrating organlike sandwich by its dripping edges. “No.”

  I feel nauseated.

  “What happens if I take a hard pass? If I conscientiously object?”

  With an elbow, he slams the microwave shut. “Then you’ll be shunted back to the Other Place, Gandhi. I can conscientiously promise you that. You’re an Other now. Revel in it.”

  Revel in it.

  And the truth is, even though reveling sounds over-the-top, in a spring-breaker kind of way, I don’t want to be forced out and miss my mother’s Argentina. Not yet. Not before I’ve had a chance to figure out why I’m here. I rationalize feeding in my head:

  Is feeding a grosser, cruder version of being a narcissist like Liese, who needs constant external validation to survive?

  Okay, just kidding. “How good does my fake tan look?” is as gross and crude as it gets. But maybe Charon’s right and we can gain energy without someone or something else losing its own. Maybe cosmic balance isn’t mandatory.

  Yeah. Nice try, Angel.

  I must be silent too long, because Charon barks at me. “Don’t overthink this. Now beat it, okay? Time to get a move on.” He motions at the cloud door with his designated sandwich hand, dotting his belly with grease.

  When I don’t move, he brings the cheesesteak to his slimy lips and hesitates. “Try the ghostfucker if you have any trouble.”

  “The ghostfucker?”

  “She’s a little thing,” he says, holding his free hand out to waist height, “about yay high. Silver ringlets, sort of a consumptive albino Orphan Annie look. Always has her nose in a book.”

  He’s talking about Yesi. Yesi, who sensed me. Yesi, whose trembling hands explored the darkness, seeking me.

  * * *

  All is quiet at four in the morning in Yesi’s baby-blue bedroom; the moon, through the bathroom skylight, casts a cool glow onto Yesi’s face. It’s as if the universe itself is acting as an air traffic controller, showing my sticky fingers where to land to feed. But I can’t do it. I can’t feed from the ghostfucker.

  I shouldn’t call her that. I shouldn’t. She’s Yesi. I know she’s Yesi by now—she introduced herself to me. But I know it would be easier to feed if I branded her as one single thing and disconnected—choosing simplicity of thought over curiosity in the complexity of human nature. The less aware I am of her nooks and curves—the more I view her as a paper cutout of a human being
—the easier it is to flatten her into nothing, all for my agenda. Flick—there goes the paper doll, smoothed to nothing at all. I’ve been the paper cutout before. I guess now I’m the flicker.

  Yesi is sprawled in bed, arms stretched overhead like she’s on a rack. Comfortable, though, by her peaceful expression.

  I’ll have to look into her face as I feed. I’ll have to touch her, in the fake way I can. I shudder and look away.

  That’s when I see a stain above her head.

  It ripples with the blue scarf she’s pinned up, this stain—it judders into view. I approach and see that it’s a crystalline ripple. Two ripples. They look like luminescent soot and vibrate in the air. Sort of what I must look like.

  Others.

  Others with their steaming hands on her skull, drawing in energy. I fall back in disbelief at what I’m seeing. Her thoughts, dreams, whatever they are—they look like liquid crystal threads, blooming a pretty blue beneath their shadowed fingers.

  They don’t acknowledge me. They don’t react when I crawl toward them; they even shuffle aside as I approach. They must be weak, like me.

  “Who are you?” I ask, even though I’m wary of them. Afraid.

  They don’t answer.

  I look into Yesi’s face one last time: She’s oblivious as to what’s going on. At peace with it all, in her painful ignorance.

  The crowd gives me courage. I’m like the worst of us.

  Trembling, I place a hand by her forehead, then another. I can feel her heartbeat through the veins at her temples. There’s something so intimate about the exchange that I draw back at first. But I return my hands to her head and wait. I feel that drawing in, that singular tingling sensation where my fingertips should be—

  She’s dreaming. I can feel the brightly colored threads moving through her consciousness, like yarn on Circe’s loom; her skin is warm to the touch, feverish. She’s a deep sleeper. She’s running along a field, running, running, running. It’s summer. Like Florida in the pictures I’ve seen—thick air, I can taste the eucalyptus and citrus rind.

  I take the thread of memory from her. Pull the gluey thread out of her, her breath calm and even. The dream gushes into my fingertips, my palms, my wrists. It gives me shape, its images flooding me. Sunlight illuminating baby hairs into a halo; a crimped red mark of elastic on skin; birdsong laughter. They seep into the hollow in my chest.

  I feel good, too good. Like Hercules—no longer weak, in fact, never weak. Satisfied. High with it all. If sane consciousness is the skeleton that gives structure to a life, this must be the unpolluted marrow of those bones. Like my memories of Mama, of Rob.

  Am I stealing the rooting of her happier dreams?

  What will she be left with when the night is done? What does she get from me, from us, in return? My guilt, my pain—hopelessness, worthlessness?

  An Other moves away, and two more rush in, like those piglets at a teat.

  “Every Other for itself, I see,” I say, guilt surging up into me. Guess it’s not passed off to Yesi completely. No one around me says a word; we’re all consumed by our using and abusing. I hesitate, still close to Yesi’s scalp.

  A shadow, almost human, flits toward me and latches on beside me. Latches onto me. Through me. An Other.

  “You’re supposed to ask for permission to come aboard,” I say to it. Nothing in reply, of course.

  That’s when I feel leaking from the edge of my form: The bastard is trickling newly acquired energy from me. I shimmy away, and it follows greedily, silently.

  “Stop it!”

  No answer. Whatever my moon flesh is made of quivers as I weaken.

  “Leave me alone,” I say, shoving it away again. “Don’t you have anything better to do? Like haunt some little girls?”

  It’s a bad joke because it’s not much of a joke at all. I taste a sourness in my mouth. It doesn’t reply, and the pressure doesn’t relent. I have to flee if I want to preserve my energy; I have no choice. I run off, back to the refuge of the nut-brown girl’s room.

  “I’m not a good person tonight,” I warn the room, as if anyone’s listening. And yet: It’s difficult to ignore that in my badness, postfeeding, I feel more substantial, more alive. Real. As if badness is my default setting, and I know I will feed as long as I have to. That must make me a true Other.

  The nut-brown girl is alone, sleeping calmly. I can’t know why no one’s feeding from her—it’s a mystery for another night. She’s smiling. She looks hopeful, as if her dreams are transporting her someplace nice. She has no idea what’s coming.

  Seeing that, I can’t stop from heaving onto the floor beside her bed.

  Of course nothing comes up. Nothing can come. But I know deep in my crystal ribbing that I’ve done something ruthless to further myself.

  I tuck myself into her closet, dreading my return to the Other Place. Souls aren’t like steam, I realize. They’re like viruses, spreading to the surrounding organisms, infecting them with their unfulfilled dreams and inescapable worries.

  5

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, MARCH 1978

  In the morning, I wash up in the empty bathroom and dress in my best church clothes. Yesi must have gotten up earlier, because her wet toothbrush and towel are drying on the sink, and I find a note on the edge reading, Meet at breakfast? Starving. Follow croissant smell & stampeding teachers. I unlock my bedroom door and sniff divine butter in the hall, which has seen a cheery transformation. The skylights above, unnoticed before, work wonders, giving the polished wooden doors and burgundy carpeting a beautiful richness. Either that, or a good night’s sleep erased my trepidations. Yesi must have been right—Vaccaro School feels off only at night. Just as some succumb to strange moods when the moon is high, so does this house.

  I follow a determined—or deaf—woman hurrying down the stairs, to the right, into the stone hallway, and into the first door on the right to the staff dining room—that cavernous room of stone with one long table, now bearing a lavish spread of pound cake and pears and cereals and steaming trays of scrambled eggs and sugared ham and more. My mouth salivates. And only then do I see the people: At least two dozen people of all shapes and sizes mull about the display. People! I compose myself, even though I want to kiss their cheeks, shake their hands, cling to their shoulders. Great to see you. Great to meet you. Great. Just great. Alone, I questioned everything I saw, but around other calm bodies, I can become another routine-driven shell in a crowd. Stuffing my face. I hurry to the buffet and load a plate with crepes and apple slices and sausages and scrambled eggs and everything I can fit, no matter how the juicy contents spill and splatter onto one another. The woman I followed, wearing cat-eye glasses, tucks into a lumpy bowl of oatmeal with the same resolve I witnessed earlier, and I see her—that her—Carmela De Vaccaro herself, who cuts an impressive yet slender figure in a white pantsuit, standing tall by the artfully spilled basket of whole apples. Seeing her in the flesh is to see a glamorous actress in the grocery store. That she deigns to eat breakfast with teeth and a tongue like mere mortals…! She’s beautiful, surreal, every millimeter handcrafted by some god to form the Perfect Woman, lacking, of course, the sort of imperfection that makes some of us interesting. Her skin is poreless, wrinkle-free; her hair a glossy platinum bob that rejects the idea of split ends and flyaways existing. She is the mythical one who has it all. She speaks with a white-haired man, who holds an oversize mug of coffee, hands palpitating as he surreptitiously watches Carmela with bowed-head awe.

  I bite into the croissant and stifle a moan at the taste of butter. Happy cows, I can tell. I haven’t eaten pastries this delicious in months, and it reminds me of my early-morning runs for facturas with my mother. Yesi sidles up to me at the fruit station and, with tongs, drops individual blueberries into a bowl. Of course.

  “Sleep well? No ghosts, right?”

  “None at all,” I say. “But then again they didn’t have a fighting chance at haunting me. I crashed hard after the chocolate.”

 
She grins. “Get your coffee and meet me outside?”

  Agreeing, I obediently serve myself coffee, dripping a bit on the hand-embroidered tablecloth in my eagerness, only to feel someone waiting behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck prick to attention.

  It’s the young man from the window, his blue-white eyes truer than the ice.

  “Have you served yourself enough?” he asks, nodding at my overfilled plate. “There’s no weigh-in later.”

  My face immediately burns, and I know it has betrayed me. “I missed dinner because of you.”

  He’s carrying an apple in one hand and a half-full cup of coffee in the other, watching, surely, my cheeks turn a shade of red little known beyond baboon’s backsides. I know he enjoys stirring discomfort in people, and that makes it all the worse.

  “You missed dinner because you decided to take a nap out front. I woke you.”

  “By spitting on me.”

  He raises a brow. “What a repulsive suggestion.” He sets down his apple and extends a napkin toward me. “For your cheek,” he says. I raise my hand there: croissant flakes. A pastry basket’s worth. “Some of us are better than our base instincts,” he adds.

  I swallow and take the napkin, brushing his hand with my thumb and forefinger. His skin is icier than his eyes; he recoils, disgust curling his lip. I can’t help but wonder if my hand is sweaty or if he caught a whiff of morning breath or if he’s seen into the pinkish gum of my insides only to glimpse the black rotting bits—

  “I see you’ve met my son, Domenico.” Carmela smiles at me—it must be a smile, as her lips turn up, but there’s no effortlessness in the muscle movement—and I nearly choke. I wish I could hide the damned plate. The son. Of course he’s the son.

  “Miss Quercia has a great appetite for teaching,” he says.

  “Miss Quercia.” She sounds out the syllables, as if the name is unfamiliar. How, I do not know, because she hired me. She does not acknowledge her son’s double meaning, and whether that is merciful or cold, I’m not certain. “How nice.”