by Leah Thomas
Also by Leah Thomas
Because You’ll Never Meet Me
Nowhere Near You
When Light Left Us
Wild and Crooked
To every queer kid stuck in a small town: This isn’t forever. Hang in there.
CONTENTS
JANUARY 1998
LISA FRANK
BOO BERRY
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK
SHARPIE FINE POINT
FORENSIC FILES
SPACEMAKER
POP ROCKS
GAME BOY COLOR
BEETLEJUICE
TOY STORY
TAMAGOTCHI
OCTOBER 2002
ADIDAS
SLURPEE
SOBE
ALWAYS
FUNYUNS
HBO
GATORADE
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
BONE DANCE
THE CRUCIBLE
STAR TREK
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
POLTERGEIST
LIME JELL-O
TIDY CATS
“NO SCRUBS”
POP ROCKS (REPRISE)
SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS
NOVEMBER 2002
ORAL-B
MOD PODGE
ORLANDO BLOOM
CAMPBELL’S
GMC
POWER WHEELS
BUD LIGHT
MEOW MIX
ROPES
FUNNY PAGES
MIRACLE-GRO
OXYCODONE
BOUNCE
NOVEMBER 2002
SPRITE
BUTTERBALL
“RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER” ™
THE HUSTLE
TEEN SPIRIT
SHARPIE FINE POINT (REPRISE)
GREEN GIANT
NESPRESSO
POP SECRET
HOOVER
DUVET
FRAPPUCCINO
THE THIEF
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN
HALLMARK
MOBIL
“AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE”
SWISS ARMY KNIFE
BLACK CAT
DECEMBER 2002
DUPLO
POWERPOINT
TARGET
GOLDEN CURRY
LISA FRANK (REPRISE)
JIM BEAM
NORTH FACE
MIRACLE-GRO (REPRISE)
DECEMBER 2002
SOPHIE
MOM
ADDY
PATRICIA
SEIJI
SARAH ZIELINSKI
MARCH 2003
ME
AUTHOR’S NOTE
JANUARY 1998
SARAH
LISA FRANK
By the time I met Sarah, she’d already been dead for two decades.
It was the winter of 1998, and I was just barely eleven. My classmates were obsessed with Titanic, but Pokémon was becoming a thing with the younger kids. I knew I should be fawning over Leo, but if I’d had any friends apart from my GigaPet, I’d have sheepishly traded two of my cold lunches for a Meowth card.
I was just barely eleven, and I was already learning to hate the things I loved.
Sarah was lying supine beneath my bed in the exact place where she’d died. My fingers brushed against her tangled hair as I reached for the Lisa Frank folder that held my hidden stash of magazine cutouts.
I felt the prickling clench of a ghostly hand around my wrist. “Need something?” she asked dryly.
I don’t know why I didn’t scream.
Maybe it was because her grip was lukewarm, not cold. Maybe I really didn’t want to wake my mother. Or maybe I didn’t scream because living dead girls weren’t the scariest thing I’d ever encountered.
Sarah sounded like the older sister I’d always wanted: sarcastic and funny and cool. And I was so desperate for company that a family of rabid opossums could have bitten my hand and I’d have offered them lemonade.
“Um, yeah. Do you see my folder?”
“There’s a ton of stationery and such under here. Be more specific.”
“It has a panda on it. And, um, the panda’s painting a picture?”
“Well, that’s weird.” I could hear her smirking. “Okay. Give me a minute.”
Sarah’s ghost let go and I withdrew my hand, rubbing my tingling skin. I heard the shuffling of paper and boxes, and a stuffed animal was ejected from the darkness.
“Wow, you weren’t kidding. A panda painting a picture.”
I peered over the edge of my mattress and watched the colorful folder slide out from beneath, propelled by a pale brown hand with bloodied, broken fingernails.
If Sarah were a corpse, the flesh and blood of her murderer might have been scraped from under those nails. But Sarah was only a ghost. There was nothing forensics could do for her now.
“Yeah.” I plucked it from the floor. “Thank you.”
“It’s casual.”
“What?”
She sighed. “It’s casual. It means don’t worry about it. So. What kind of secrets do you keep in there?”
“Not secrets. Just . . . things I like, I guess.” I pulled a crumpled photograph from the pocket of my robe and flattened it against the folder. The picture showed five members of a boy band standing on an airport runway, arms aloft or bodies leaning, hair meticulously styled and faces brightly lit.
“Why should the things you like be kept in a weird panda folder under the bed?” Sarah asked. “Believe me, it’s not a pleasant place to be.”
I tucked the photo into a pocket filled with dozens of similar pictures: boys in cars, boys in fashionable clothing, images of fishing trips and EXTREME!! hiking from a copy of Boys’ Life magazine that I’d stolen from the school library.
“Can you hide it—I mean, put it away again?”
“Sure, Daniela.”
I cringed. “Can you call me something else?”
“But Daniela’s your name, right?”
Doubtless Sarah’s ghost had heard Mom yelling, just as she’d felt the bed rattle as I sobbed atop it, had heard me scribbling notebooks black until I poked holes through the pages.
“I don’t like my name. Can you call me Dani?”
“Fine. Hi, Dani. I’m Sarah.”
“Sarah.” It tasted sugary on my tongue.
“So? Hand me the folder, then.”
I set the folder in her palm. In the glare of the streetlight outside my window, I noticed that her chipped fingernails had once been painted yellow, and she wore a mood ring around her middle finger. “Daniel—Dani. You should really clean up down here. It’s like living in a junkyard.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It’s casual,” Sarah repeated.
———
In the morning, I peered under my bed. There was no sign of Sarah. Somehow that made sense to me. Everyone knows ghosts and nighttime go hand in hand.
Sarah’s absence carved a little ache in my chest.
And she was absolutely right. It was a real pigsty under there.
BOO BERRY
Before January 1998—before Sarah—my knowledge of ghostly encounters was limited to watching Ghostbusters on a battered old VHS recording and eating Boo Berry cereal in December after it went on sale. That was about it, apart from a single cherished memory of telling ghost stories around a fire at Girl Scout camp. I must have been like eight or nine, because this was right before Mom and I fled West Branch to live in the Rochdale women’s shelter.
I’m sure that night’s been forgotten by the rest of the troop. Those girls probably had a dozen more nights just like it. I’m pretty sure they only tolerated me because Scouts can earn badges for being nice to social lepers, or something. Our
leader, Mrs. Stenley, saw me as some kind of charity case.
Still, around that fire, for several minutes or more, I felt like I actually belonged to something.
The stories all had death and a certain random chaos in common. This girl named Elaine told the tale of a hook-handed man who really didn’t like teens who engaged in PDA. And Tammy Carlson spoke of “the hag,” an elderly woman who broke out of an insane asylum (or maybe a retirement home?) and attacked a babysitter for no good reason.
Sure, these stories were fun, but even then I thought they were unrealistic. Mom and I had watched the first dozen episodes of Forensic Files religiously. I knew that statistically, most monsters were middle-aged white husbands, and not senile, neglected women or piratical amputees.
Chelsea Lyttle was almost in hysterics by the end of the hag story, so I tried to ease her mind: “Don’t worry, Chelsea, some random old lady won’t kill you.”
“I know, but . . .”
“Strangers aren’t so bad. Almost half of murders are committed by an acquaintance,” I recited, “but almost a quarter are committed by a spouse, parent, or other male family member.”
Mrs. Stenley gasped, and Elaine’s marshmallow fell into the fire. Chelsea burst into tears.
“You’re such a creep, Daniela,” Tammy said, wrapping an arm around Chelsea’s shoulder. “That’s not funny.”
“Why would you say something like that, Winky?” Elaine demanded.
I winced at the nickname; my right eye had always been an easy target, because my pupil and iris were always pointed inward toward my nose. The doctor called it “strabismus,” and said it was caused by injury, and that we might be able to fix it with surgery. But my classmates called it “lazy” and said, “You can’t fix ugly.”
“I wasn’t being funny,” I protested. “It’s important to know!”
“Important for you,” Chelsea spat. “Your dad’s always trying to kill your mom.”
The other girls fell silent. Meanwhile, my heart collapsed inside me.
Mrs. Stenley cleared her throat. “Girls. That’s enough for tonight.”
It was enough. It was enough to make me realize that most people enjoyed horror because it was far removed from their reality, while I enjoyed it because it showed me I didn’t have it so bad, not really. Maybe Mom and I had to file restraining orders against Dad. Maybe we had to run away from home. But it could have been worse, right?
I could have been left to bleed out under a bed.
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK
“Thanks for tidying up under here, Dani.”
“Sarah?” It had been a week since our first meeting, and the night was cloudless, and I was beyond relieved to hear her voice, relieved she existed. “Is that really you?”
“I mean, unless you’ve got other dead girls under here, then yeah, it’s just me. You’re not losing it, are you?”
“It’s casual,” I told Sarah, when it was anything but.
So far the Winky nickname had not followed me to Rochdale, and neither had Dad. But the gloss of being a new student had lasted all of one hour before girls started sneering at my stained clothes and boys began teasing me about the botched bangs of my self-inflicted haircut. Nobody bothered talking to me now, unless snickering counts.
Sarah’s voice was the farthest thing from casual to me.
She snorted. “Well, we can say it’s casual, sure. But I’m dead and you seem downright miserable, so I’d say it’s not totally casual, Dani.”
I swallowed. “Sarah. Will you . . . I mean, are you going to tell me how you died?”
“Nope.”
“Oh.”
Sarah sighed, long and heavy. “Is that all you wanted to ask me? Typical. That’s all anyone wants to know about a murdered girl, right?”
“No! No, it’s not!” I was terrified she’d go quiet again, so I blurted the very next thing that came to mind. “Sarah—did you have any brothers or sisters?”
“I did, but I don’t want to talk about them, either. Siblings are overrated. I had three of them and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone else. And my parents were another can of worms.”
“I get it. My parents are like . . . a can of snakes.”
“Right? So let’s talk about anything else apart from death and family.”
It was hard to think about what else there was, except—
“Sarah. Do you like ghost stories?”
One of her bloodied hands took hold of my comforter. The fabric barely wrinkled under her transparent weight, hardly shifted when she hoisted herself above the edge. “Sure I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well . . . because.”
“What, you think a ghost can’t like ghost stories?” Sarah pulled her torso up and onto the bed. I noticed dark stains on her forget-me-not-patterned nightgown. “You’re still breathing, but don’t you like stories about living people?”
“I guess I never thought about it that way.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think things over under there.”
Sarah, exposed by the moonlight, knelt at the end of my bed. Her hair was long and black and braided into the loose, messy pigtails I imagined real girls—girls who knew what to do with their hair and their bodies—might wear to bed. Sarah’s ghost existed in color, but she was faded like photographs left in the sunlight too long. Her skin was darker than mine, but I couldn’t decide what color her eyes had been, because now they were entirely black with no irises to speak of. Insubstantial though she was, I felt her, like those breezes that rustled the shortest hairs on my legs and arms.
“You’re staring.” Sarah cocked an eyebrow. “What, are you scared?”
I shook my head. “No. I’m not scared of you.”
Ghosts were not the things to be afraid of. Ghosts hadn’t murdered Sarah.
“Then quit it.” She placed her hand over one of the many stab wounds that marred the fabric across her chest. “I’m self-conscious. No one wants to be trapped in pj’s for eternity.”
“You’re so pretty.” Warmth blossomed in my chest. Would I have said those words in daylight? Would I have dared sound so envious?
“You think so? Well. See where being pretty got me?” Sarah looked away. “Being pretty is a curse.”
“Being ugly sucks more,” I snapped. “Pretty people have no clue.”
“Hey.” Sarah leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “Did you just get angry? I’ve seen you cry and all, but I’ve never seen you mad. Now that’s a good look, sis.”
I blushed furiously but I would not lower my gaze. I had never looked at someone for so long, and no one had ever looked back at me for so long either.
Sarah’s grin faded. “But you’re right. It’s bogus being pretty, and it’s bogus being ugly. Girls suffer either way, you know? Besides, who says what’s pretty or ugly anyways? Probably some creepy old pervert decided what pretty was a thousand years ago and taught everyone else to believe it.”
“Oh. I guess . . . yeah, maybe.”
“Definitely. Pretty doesn’t mean anything. Say it enough and it stops being a word that means anything.”
So what if Sarah had eyes that looked like shining marbles? So what if she was brutally sarcastic and incurably deceased? It wasn’t like I had room to judge. In stories, ghosts were always sad and defeated, but Sarah wasn’t. She was a wall, unbeaten and resolute, more real in my room than I had ever been and I already loved her.
Sarah said things I’d never dared think of.
“Why won’t you tell me your ghost story?”
“My ghost story’s not the kind anyone likes, all right?” Sarah wrapped her arms around her knees. “No one wants to be known for what someone else did to them.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard truer words, not in my classes or outside them. And I knew then how she might feel. I knew the value of secrets. People like to say secrets are bad for you, but sometimes secrets are the only things that keep you warm.
“Okay, Sarah. I won’t ask.”<
br />
She smirked. “Never again, no matter how long we’re friends?”
I held up three fingers, the Girl Scout Promise. “Never again.”
“Fine.” Her posture unwound a bit, and she lay back on my bed with her arms behind her head. “Because if you ask me about my family or my death again, I’ll vanish, and you’ll never see me again.”
The air grew chill and I shivered. “I won’t ask. Not ever.”
“Good.”
“But did you know,” I added carefully, “that the majority of murder victims are killed by acquaintances or family members?”
Sarah paused, just as the girls around the campfire had. But before I finally closed my eyes, I heard her whisper, “Yeah, I definitely know that.”
SHARPIE FINE POINT
On a Monday in February 1998 I walked into my sixth-grade classroom to find the word “whore” written on my desk in bright blue Sharpie. The word was as long and wide as my forefinger, just big enough not to ignore.
“Whore” was a word I had sometimes heard my dad call my mom, not long enough ago. It was one of a dozen words my Rochdale classmates used on the regular without seeming to care about its actual meaning. “Whore” didn’t suit someone like me. Loser? Yes. Freak—oh, definitely.
“Whore” didn’t describe me at all.
For a minute or longer I stared at the blocky, uneven letters. The snickers of boys in the back of the room pinged off my eardrums. Tiny bullets. Dad used to lay his hands on me whenever he wanted to see me cry. But sometimes, if I refused to cry, he’d take his hands off again, because where was the fun in that?
The best thing to do would be to smirk like Sarah, to pretend “whore” was a compliment.
Finally I sat down, eyes tingling, breathing heavily through my nose, not crying.
But I was not good at pretending, and I wasn’t Sarah, and it wasn’t a compliment.
Despite my best efforts, several double-crossing tears dampened my desk as the bell rang. I shoved my chair back and ran from the classroom before Ms. Peele could see me go. The boys at the back pulled grisly faces as I passed.
I’d almost reached the bathroom when I realized that someone had followed me out. The ghost of his heavy footsteps, an echo after mine, made me turn.
Seiji Grayson, a hulking boy with broad shoulders and big ears, glared at me through the strands of black hair that perpetually hid his eyes. He was one of a dozen bullies who plagued the back of my classroom, maybe the backs of all classrooms. He only stood apart because he was tan in a field of white. Otherwise he was interchangeable with the rest of them, just as heartless and removed.
