We Are the Ghosts

by Vicky Skinner

  Cade has been staring out the window the entire time, and I’ve been staring at him. I can’t believe he’s really here. After the way things went down between us, I assumed that was it. Cade would become another face in the hallway, one more thing in my life that got turned upside down, something I couldn’t seem to control, and now here he is, and having the familiar shape of him beside me makes some of this tension inside me uncoil, like I can let some of it go.

  But I still feel the fizz of anxiety about what we’re doing, what I just did, leaving home without a word to my parents to find some mystery person who may or may not be able to tell me why Luke left, why he never called, why he was in Ann Arbor in the first place. There’s a burning in my throat at the idea that I just did to them what Luke did to all of us, instead of the triumph I thought I would feel. Instead, I think about my mom telling me Luke is gone.

  My vision goes blurry, the way it does every time I start to think about that night, and I have to look out the window to focus again, to make the world right itself before I can look at Cade, feel that same comfort, let it take away the edge of panic inside.

  Cade turns, and his eye catches mine, and he smiles. He smiles like he knows me, like the last year never happened.

  * * *

  Cade drives me an hour out of Eaton, to the drive-in theater in Berryton. He just got his license this week, and he said he wanted our date to be the first place he drove without his grandmother in the car. My stomach has been in tight, excited knots all day.

  “I’ve never been here before,” I tell him, and he smiles while he waits for the lady at the box office to get his change.

  “I know. You told me.”

  I laugh nervously. “Oh. I don’t remember.”

  Cade pulls his grandmother’s car into a spot and turns the radio to the station for the movie. “There’s mini golf, too, if you’re into that sort of thing,” he says, gesturing toward a little course by the highway, where a group of people I recognize from Eaton are laughing over a game.

  “Totally my sort of thing.” I smile at him, and he smiles back, and my heart is pounding so loud I can’t hear the cheesy old-fashioned concession stand advertisement over it.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you out since, like, eighth grade, you know.”

  I barely knew Cade was alive before freshman year, but I’m definitely not telling him that, especially since hearing him say he’s liked me that long just makes my heart race faster.

  “So, why didn’t you?”

  He shrugs. “Talking to pretty girls isn’t really something I’m good at, if you haven’t noticed.”

  I blush, but I have noticed. Like me, Cade doesn’t seem to have too many friends, and I’ve never seen him with a girl.

  “Why is that?”

  He glances sideways at me. “People think I’m weird.”

  I think back to Luke’s comments, those very words, and feel embarrassed for all of us. Luke barely knows Cade, knows no more than anyone else at school, and I hate that he judged Cade this way, and that Cade knows it.

  “I don’t think you’re weird. You’re smart and you work hard and you’re interested in things no one else is. I mean, who is going to be able to tell me how many countries there are in the world?” I raise my eyebrows at him, and he smiles slowly.

  “One hundred ninety-five.”

  I smile and reach for his hand, loving that it’s a little stained around his fingernails. “See, interesting. Not weird.”

  * * *

  We’ve made it all the way to Louisiana before the sound of Wes’s voice wakes me up. I sit upright in my seat and find Gwen leaning over the console between her and Wes, studying something on the dashboard.

  “Shit,” Wes mutters. “Shit, shit, shit.” Wes swerves to the side of the highway and puts the car in park, but I can already feel it, even before Cade gets out and throws open the hood, steam pouring out into the open air like a fountain. I know something is seriously wrong, and I know, whatever it is, that there’s probably no way to fix it here, on the side of the road.

  Long moments pass as Cade does something under the hood, and I rap my fingers on the window as I watch cars fly by us on the highway. This is just great. Less than twelve hours into the road trip, and we’ve already hit a road block. My eyes go to the side pocket of my bag, to the map that I know is there but I can’t see. I should have just insisted we go straight to Michigan, no lies, no pretense. I want to be on our way there, not here, in Louisiana. Stuck.

  After a few minutes, Cade pokes his head inside my open window, draping his arms along the car door. “It’s the radiator. It’s shot. There’s nothing I can do from here. We’ll, uh, we’ll have to have it towed.”

  In the front, Wes lets out a humorless laugh. “Well that’s just fucking amazing.” I can’t help but agree.

  Cade gets back into the car, and Gwen starts to look up tow trucks on her phone. We can’t even turn on the air conditioner, so we sit with the windows rolled down and the doors open.

  “God, everything is going to take hours and cost a fortune,” Gwen says, hanging up on another call.

  “I could fix it easily,” Cade says, “but I’d have to be able to get a radiator, and I don’t even know where we are.” He picks at the black specks of grease on his skin. It’s amazing how five minutes under a car’s hood can do so much damage.

  “We’re almost to Shreveport,” Gwen says, tipping her head back to look at us over her headrest.

  “Maybe if we—” Cade doesn’t get the chance to finish his sentence before a pickup truck rattles by us on the highway and then slows as it swerves onto the shoulder in front of us. It’s an old red GMC, and with all of our windows down, we can hear the country music playing loud inside the truck.

  “What the—” Wes says, and then the music stops, the truck turns off, and a very tall guy in jeans and a western shirt climbs down out of the truck. While the four of us watch in silence, he comes to Wes’s window and bends down to look in.

  “Need some help?” he asks, his eyes moving over all of us and, I notice a little uncomfortably, lingering on me. Cade glances over at me, and I do my best not to make eye contact with anyone.

  “Just a shot radiator,” Wes says casually, but he doesn’t really sound like he knows what he’s talking about. “We’re just waiting for a tow.”

  “Oh, I got you,” the guys says, smiling in at us. “I’ve got tow straps in the back. Gonna be a hell of a lot cheaper than whoever you got coming out here. Where y’all headed?”

  The four of us exchange glances because, of course, this is a complicated question.

  “Do you think you could tow us to Shreveport?” Gwen asks. “We can get what we need there.”

  The guy leans even farther down, raises an eyebrow in Gwen’s direction, and smiles. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Gwen grins at him, always the first to be kind to anyone who’s kind to her, and the guy heads back to his truck, opening the tailgate and pulling out some kind of straps. “Are you sure we should—” Wes looks over at Gwen, his face uneasy, but Gwen is already halfway out of the car.

  The guy is standing on the edge of the highway, bent slightly at the waist to see something under the front of our car, his hands planted on his hips while Gwen speaks to him, her mouth moving quick. She claps her hands together and smiles at him, and I see Wes’s hands grip the steering wheel.

  Cade leans over in the seat beside me, and when he speaks into my ear, it sends a chill down my spine. “Are Gwen and Wes, uh…?”

  He never actually finishes the question, but he doesn’t have to. “Yes,” I whisper back.

  He nods and goes back to his side of the car, and I do my best to focus again on what’s going on with Gwen and the guy outside. She smiles big, and then she races back to the car, sticking her head in through the open window and letting her dark hair cascade inside.

  “He’s going to tow us to a garage in Shreveport,” she says, like she’s telling us we just won the lott
ery.

  “Yippee,” Wes says sarcastically.

  She leans all the way into the car just to smack him on the arm. “His name is Kevin, and you’re going to be nice to him because he’s doing us a favor.”

  Cade leans up between the seats, and the three of them are all so close together that I feel like I’m being left out of some secret meeting. I lean back in my seat and watch them.

  “We don’t need to go to a garage,” Cade says. “Just an auto-parts store. I can fix the radiator.”

  “This’ll be faster,” Gwen says, but she says it so gently that Cade couldn’t get mad, even if he wanted to. Cade nods in agreement.

  Only it turns out that it takes a long time to hook something up with tow straps and then you can’t drive very fast, so by the time we actually make it to the garage in Shreveport, we’ve spent an hour baking in the sun, since all three of us wouldn’t fit in Kevin’s truck, and we all stubbornly refused to take advantage of Kevin’s air-conditioning if all three of us couldn’t.

  It’s a quiet and slow ride, and by the time we’ve made it all the way to Shreveport, I’m ready to pull my hair out.

  “Yeah, we can take care of it,” the mechanic says when we’re finally parked in the garage. “But it’s gonna take a few hours. We’re pretty backed up today.”

  The mechanic in front of me waves at Kevin, who takes off in his truck, and next thing I know, we’re carless at a mechanic’s shop in Shreveport.

  “What do we do now?” Gwen asks, her question so innocently spoken, and her eyes on me, like I can somehow fix the situation we’re in.

  “Shit,” I whisper. We have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and we’re still more than five hours away from New Orleans. It’s already late in the afternoon, since we didn’t really get an early start, so now we have to make the choice to either stay in Shreveport overnight or drive into New Orleans in the dead of night. Everything starts to spin in my brain.

  “Maybe this is a sign. Maybe we shouldn’t have left.” I say it to myself, and I don’t even really mean for anyone to hear me, but I hear shoes slip over the gravel to me, and then Cade is beside me.

  “Ellie, no. Come on. This isn’t a sign, okay? It’s not anything. It happens. Cars break down.” He puts his hands on my shoulders, and even though I know he’s trying to comfort me, it’s my first instinct to pull away from him, until his hands fall to his sides. He watches me for a second, and I have to look away because he always looks like a kicked puppy, and I already feel bad enough.

  “Look, we’ll just have to take a detour.” I hear him pull out his phone and start typing.

  “What are you doing?” Wes asks. I almost forgot they were with us, Gwen and Wes.

  “Calling us an Uber.”

  * * *

  “Is this a joke?”

  I’m not usually inclined to agree with Wes, but at this particular moment, I can kind of see his point. Cade has taken us to an old theater in downtown Shreveport with a statue of Elvis in the front, and the doors are locked.

  Cade presses his face to the doors, which are actually just giant metal gates looking onto another set of doors. The building looks like it was built about the time the Roman Empire came down.

  “Not a joke,” Cade says, “but they’re closed. It looks like we’re going to have to get creative.” I have no idea what he means, but a second later, Cade looks over his shoulder and waves our Uber driver away.

  As tires scrape across the concrete, Wes turns to Cade. “Why’d you do that? How are we going to get back to the garage?”

  Cade smiles over at me. “We don’t need any witnesses,” he says casually, and my heart starts to pound at his words, and it ratchets even higher when he starts to rattle the doors and examine the lock on one of them. He looks around, and next thing I know, he’s taking something out of his pocket and sticking it in the lock.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Gwen hisses at him, and surprisingly, that’s enough to get him to stop. His hand drops down at his side.

  “Look, this theater is the first real stage Elvis ever performed on. Aretha Franklin. Johnny Cash. I’m not letting this stop be a total wash. We’re going in there.” With that, as if we’ve all agreed just with our silence, he starts to wiggle something in the lock again, and I glance around quick to make sure no one is watching because even though I’m not sure I’m down with breaking and entering, I’m also not sure I’m not down with it.

  “How do you even know all this shit?” Wes asks Cade.

  Cade grunts, struggling with the door, and I watch someone across the street walk out of a building there and into their car before driving away without a glance in our direction.

  “Read about it in a book last week,” Cade says, all of his focus on the door.

  “Cade’s into … research,” I say because I can’t really figure out another way to put it.

  Wes sends me a look, and I know exactly what he’s thinking. Weird.

  Something pops, and then the gate opens slightly in Cade’s hand. “Your party awaits, my lady,” he whispers to me, and I give one more look around before I slip inside.

  Cade repeats the process with the front doors, and then we’re in.

  With all the lights off, I can’t see anything, but I can make out the shadows of a lobby as I hear everyone come inside behind me. The door shuts behind us with a slam.

  Cade steps up beside me. I gasp when his fingers brush against mine, but then he’s pulling me along, his hand in mine, and the rhythm of my heart matches the rhythm of our footsteps.

  Behind me, I hear Wes’s voice. “Been away from home for six hours, and we’re already going to get arrested.”

  I look at him over my shoulder, contemplating the possibility of security guards a little too late, when Cade stops, and I run into him.

  “Sorry,” I whisper, but he doesn’t answer me because we’ve reached a set of doors. I’m not sure exactly what that book Cade read said about this place, but he seems to know exactly where he’s going.

  He reaches out and opens a door. “Wait here,” he tells me. I wait, holding the door open with the side of my body, until suddenly the lights come on, and I’m staring out at the stage. We’re at the stage entrance, looking at it from the side, and Cade appears again to pull me into the room.

  When we’re standing in the center of it, looking at the empty auditorium, there’s a weird tingling in my stomach that I can’t quite put a name to, and for the first time, I’m aware of how far from home we are, and I get a rush in my veins. Six hours from Eaton, in a completely different state from my parents.

  “This is amazing,” Gwen says, taking a seat on the edge of the stage and throwing her hands up. “Elvis stood here, on this very floor.” She slaps her hands against the stage beneath her and grins.

  Wes comes up behind her, sticking his hands in his pockets and looking up at the catwalk above us. “I doubt it. It’s probably been renovated. Maybe even more than once.”

  And that’s when I realize that Cade is still holding my hand. And I realize it because he’s trying to sit down without letting go, and I’m being tugged to the floor beside him. Cade lets my hand go once we’re seated.

  I watch Gwen and Wes move away from the stage, out into the seats. Wes says something, and Gwen laughs. There’s that twist in my stomach again, and I can’t even figure out why. Her smile is so bright, I can see the white of her teeth from across the huge room.

  “You told me you really liked music.”

  I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around my legs, watching as Gwen and Wes move down the aisles and then out the door and into the hallway, talking as they go.

  Once they’re gone, the auditorium is completely silent. The door bangs shut behind them.

  “I did?”

  He nods.

  “It was Luke.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, and I don’t know if it’s because we’re so far from home or because we’re sitting in this auditorium, but it feels okay
to say it here, like anything I say here won’t follow us when we leave.

  Cade looks over at me. “What?”

  “It was Luke who loved music. I mean, it’s not like I don’t like music. I do. But he was the one who was always discovering new bands, making me playlists, walking around with his headphones on all the time. He got a job at J-Mart just so he could afford concert tickets when my parents wouldn’t buy them anymore. He always took me to the concerts with him.”

  “You’d just gone to a Nova concert.”

  I blink up at the lights until my eyes start to burn.

  “You said you’d just gone to a Nova concert. At the drive-in. I remember because you had a sunburn.”

  At the drive-in. I scrub my hands over my face, rub my eyes, do anything I can not to look at him. I’m scared if I do, he’ll have that look on his face again, the one that tells me that night changed everything.

  I press my head to my knee and turn my face away from him. Why are we doing this? Why are we rehashing what happened that night, like it matters? I get that flutter in my stomach again, the one that never really went away, and I’m frustrated with myself for still feeling this way, for feeling anything.

  “Hey, Ellie. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” I hear him slide closer to me, feel his hand on my arm, and this time, I don’t flinch away. I just feel the heat of his palm on me. “I’m so sorry,” he says, and it’s not like when other people say it. Everyone has been telling me they’re sorry for the last two weeks, telling me how sad, how devastated, how heartbroken they are, but this is the first time I believe it.

  I open my mouth to say something, my face still turned away, but the door to the auditorium slams open. “We have to get out of here!” Wes says, trying to keep his voice low, but he and Gwen are rushing toward the stage. And just before the door shuts behind them, I see lights turn on in the hallway. I scramble to my feet, and the four of us make a run for the stage door.

  “What are you doing in here?” a voice shouts right before we throw open the door.