by Leah Thomas
“His side of the story?” Again, my chest tightened, my ears burned. “He’s not the one with a black eye!”
“I know how you must feel, but we still have to hear it.”
“People always want to hear what boys have to say.”
She sighed. “Daniela. Did anyone see him hit you?”
I shook my aching head. “I pulled him aside to ask him to apologize for writing on my desk. He hit me instead.”
I could not understand how that seemed to register in Ms. Peele’s expression.
“Seiji was the one who wrote on your desk? Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“Okay. I just—I’m so, so sorry, sweetie. Thank you for confiding in me. We’ll get this sorted out, all right? We’ll all sit down and talk it out, once your mother and Seiji’s aunt get here.”
I grabbed her hands and shook my head. “Please. Don’t make me see Seiji again.”
“Daniela. I’ll be there, we’ll all be there, and we can figure out why this happened.”
“Why this happened?” I repeated. “He hurt me.”
“I never thought—but you and Seiji—both of you have had a tough year.” She opened her mouth and closed it again. “I’ll have a word with Principal Hardisty.”
Behind us, the door opened. It was too early to be the other students—or had I not heard the sound of the bell over my screeching, glaring lies?
Ms. Peele placed herself slightly in front of me. “Seiji. What is it?”
There he stood, my sometime torturer, pale and breathless. He must have scraped the hair from his forehead while Principal Hardisty reamed him out. Seiji’s eyes, usually obscured, were made more striking by their sudden exposure, spooked and glossy black. My breath caught at the prospect of that gaze falling on me, calling me the liar I was, cutting me to my hollow center.
But Seiji looked right past me. “Principal Hardisty told me to come get my stuff. I’m suspended. For a week. He says I have to clear my desk.”
Ms. Peele’s posture softened, but her expression did not. “Okay. I’ll gather your assignments, Seiji. Don’t forget that your planetarium project is due in two weeks.”
“I won’t forget.” His eyes flickered to me.
I watched Seiji bury his hands in his desk, blood pulsing in my swelling cheek. I waited for the truth to leave him, for him to point the finger of accusation at me. But Seiji only swept the contents of his desk—loose papers and pencils and pens—into his backpack.
Seiji didn’t have to speak for me to hear what he must have been thinking. The words projected from his big eyes: You’re as bad as I am.
He zipped up his bag and accepted a folder of homework from Ms. Peele. The bell rang, and the phone on the wall rang, too.
“Yes, he’s on his way back down.” Ms. Peele cupped the mouthpiece with her palm. “Seiji, your aunt’s waiting for you in the office.”
Seiji flinched and sped to the door. His green Game Boy was dislodged in his hurry, and fell on the floor near my feet. I picked it up and held it out to him.
Seiji met my eyes at last. “Keep it. I hope it makes you feel better.”
My arm fell, all of me fell, as he stepped into the hallway.
BEETLEJUICE
They sent me home with Mom before third block began.
She didn’t speak as we crossed the school parking lot. I didn’t expect her to, exactly, but my anger was growing along with the bump on my forehead, made itchier by her indifference. She had barely reacted when Ms. Peele relayed the tragedy of Seiji’s supposed attack, hardly blinked when the teacher recommended I see a doctor and maybe even a doctor, as in a therapist. Mom just stood in the office in her sweatpants and winter coat and let Ms. Peele’s impassioned words drift past her like cigarette smoke.
The truth we knew that Ms. Peele didn’t was:
Mom expected me to get beaten up, just like she’d been beaten up. For us, bruises were as much a reality as dust on dashboards, as black ice in winter.
As I climbed into the passenger seat, Mom scanned me from head to toe. “You don’t need a doctor, do you?”
I shook my head and we hit the road.
Even then, even at eleven freaking years old, I was deeply aware that this interaction was wrong. Mom didn’t ask me what happened. Questioning bruises didn’t make them fade any faster.
Once we were standing in our dim, cluttered living room, she said, “Well, we can get a head start on packing now. Can probably move a few carloads over tonight.”
I froze. “Tonight? We aren’t moving to a new town, like last time?”
“Not this time, Dani. It’s a little apartment complex in downtown Rochdale that’s twice as clean as this place. I’ve agreed to manage the property, so we’ll live there for cheap so long as we keep the tenants in line.”
“Rochdale,” I echoed. “We’re staying in Rochdale.”
“The new place is only ten minutes away. You’ll be able to walk to school, and I’m gonna look for part-time work on Main Street. That’ll be good, won’t it? Less of a do-over, more of an improvement?”
Wordlessly, I left the living room and dragged my feet up the creaking stairs.
I made it to my bedroom and shut the door before all the air left me.
I crumpled into a breathless coil on the bed. Something rectangular dug into my stomach—I yanked Seiji’s Game Boy from my hoodie pocket and tossed it to the floor.
I was going to be closer to school. This wasn’t going to be another false start in a new place. I’d have to face Seiji and the others again, and again, and again.
Today I had buried myself alive.
And once we left this house, I’d have to face my fate without Sarah’s nighttime pep talks, without her sarcasm to buoy or build me. And she’d have to face the long dark alone.
I could hear Mom shifting furniture and clearing cupboards. A pickup’s engine revved somewhere down the block, and a stranger hollered junkie nonsense in the street, but mostly what I heard was Seiji’s voice:
I hope it makes you feel better.
My fear became another sound, a dull whining in my ears and chest. I switched off the bedroom lights and pulled my blinds closed. They went crooked as they descended; I whimpered as I fought them into submission.
Stubborn daylight continued to creep between the slats. I cursed and tore the red comforter from my bed. I stood on my mattress, stretched toward the top of the window frame, and wedged the blanket between the wall and siding.
The room was lit in orange but empty of real daylight.
Finally I could breathe again, and I could call out her name.
“Sarah?”
She didn’t appear. And I wondered whether I’d imagined her after all. I wondered how pathetic I must be, to delude myself into thinking that a ghost would want to befriend a twisted, lying freak like me.
I yanked the pillows from my bed and attacked the tiny beam of light beneath the bedroom door, rug-burning my knees in my hustle, determined to shut that light out, too—
“What the hell is this thing?” Sarah sat on my bed in her eternal nightgown, bathed in diffused auburn light. Her broken fingernails hovered above Seiji’s Game Boy. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Is it some kind of robot?”
I slumped back against the door, limbs leaden with relief. “Sarah. It’s a Game Boy.”
“Doesn’t look like a boy to me.”
I winced. Lots of things don’t look like boys.
“No. A Game Boy . . . a computer . . . a video-game player for rich kids.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Sarah shook her head. “Computers are huge. They take up whole rooms. Computers help send people to the moon.”
“Not anymore.” I sank onto the mattress beside her, close as I dared. “This one’s only a toy. It can help you catch some Pokémon, but it can’t send anyone to the moon.”
“A toy? Computers are toys now? Christ.” Sarah seemed so much deader whenever she was sad. “The world’s really
changed, huh? Man, sometimes I forget. Or maybe I try to forget.” She glanced at my black eye. “Then again, some things don’t change. You okay, Dani?”
I bit my lip, eyes welling. Sarah had asked the question my mother hadn’t.
So I told her what I’d done.
After, Sarah whistled. “You’re kind of terrifying, you know.”
“Don’t.”
Sarah rested her hand on my cheek; summer breezes found me. “Hey, it’s not a judgment, you know. I’m a ghost. Terrifying is a compliment.”
“You’re not terrifying,” I blurted. “You’re lovely.”
Her grin faded along with her fingertips. “That’s what he said, too, before he killed me.”
I’d promised never to ask more, but every glimpse into her reality, every glancing mention of the man who’d ended her, infected me with her fury and sadness.
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Say what you want, but if I’d been less lovely and more terrifying, things might have ended differently when he came at me. Just . . . never get too lovely, okay? Follow my advice and maybe you’ll live to see college.”
“But Sarah . . . we’re moving away.” A sob shattered my words.
Sarah put her palm to the back of her neck, suddenly shy. “Well, I mean, I didn’t want to just up and say it . . . but can I come with you, Dani?”
I gaped at her. “Come with us?”
She stared at her knees, voice tight. “Dani, give me a break. This isn’t easy to ask.”
I grabbed both her hands, or tried to—I mostly passed through them, but I tried all the same. “No—Sarah, I mean, can you really come with us? You’re not stuck haunting this bedroom for forever or something?”
Her face became less shy and more sarcastic, more her own. “What, did you think I was doomed to live under a bed for eternity? Come on, Dani. That’d be dull as hell.”
“But in stories, ghosts get stuck where they died. Like in Beetlejuice! The ghosts can’t leave the house.”
“Betelgeuse?”
“It’s a movie.”
“It’s part of a constellation, actually.”
“Whatever. In the movie, there’s a handbook of, um, ghost rules.”
“Gee, that’d be convenient.”
“And when the ghosts try to leave home, giant sand snakes attack them.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “That’s so freaking stupid, Dani.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess it is. But a lot of stories go that way.”
“Do I look like a story to you?” Sarah drew herself upright. She caught fire in the orange light, or close enough. She lit up my everything. “I mean, maybe people say dead girls have to haunt the places where they died. Come on, Dani. Isn’t that just one more way to dictate where a woman should be, where she belongs? Fuck that. I’ll go anywhere I want, so long as I don’t catch too much sun. I’m over reliving my tragic demise here.”
I savored that “fuck,” that entire speech. I wanted to put her words on my tongue. “If you could have left all along, why haven’t you?”
“At first I thought I couldn’t. Not because of some movie, or any ‘ghost rules’—I mean, come on, how would I know any ghost rules? But . . . the light leaves me holey, like I’ve said. I’ve thought a lot about sunlight.” Sarah shuddered. “I wonder how many ghosts have stepped outside and disappeared. Like maybe in some ghostly handbook that’s what dead girls are supposed to do. Straighten our shirts, fix our hair, step into the sun, smile, and evaporate.” She rubbed her hands together, then let them separate and fall to her lap, slow like feathers. “Spick-and-span.”
“People aren’t spick-and-span,” I said, thinking of Seiji, of the shame burning a hole in my heart. “We’re all a train wreck. And ghosts are people, too.”
“Exactly. Fuck the rules. We’ll write our own. I refuse to tidy up my act! I refuse to be scrubbed away or told what to be.”
“I don’t want to be told what to be, either,” I admitted, for the first time, and though she couldn’t know what I was really saying, couldn’t know the betrayal in the core of me, Sarah’s grin was every confirmation I needed.
“But . . . that’s not the only reason I’ve stayed here.” Sarah looked away, tinged by a spectral blush. “I never seriously thought about leaving, until I met you.”
My cheeks flushed. “Never?”
“Time passed differently when I was alone. I didn’t always know what time of day it was, whether I even existed. It was like I was living in a constant fever, until you started talking to me.” Sarah cleared her throat. “I don’t know how, but . . . I think you made me realer, Dani.”
“You made me realer, too,” I breathed. “Definitely.”
“Christ, just give me an answer,” Sarah blurted, covering her face with her hands. “You’re killing me here! Will you take me with you or not?”
I threw myself around her. “Please haunt me forever, Sarah.”
“Sure thing, Dani.”
TOY STORY
Moving house took all of nine trips, since we’d only been in Sarah’s old place for a few months. Mom didn’t think any of the furniture was worth keeping, apart from a claw-foot side table she’d inherited from Oma. She said the thing was a priceless antique. I doubted it; that table was scratched to pieces, and one of the feet constantly fell off. But this weird table was a hill Mom wanted to die on.
“It’s the only nice thing my family ever gave me.” That was obvious, since her family had given Mom virtually nothing. You could probably argue it was more creepy than nice, this table that might crawl around the house whenever you weren’t looking, some monstrous adult escapee from Toy Story.
I had no room to talk, considering the last thing I had left to pack.
“You ready?” I asked, peering under the bed.
My lazy eye had swollen right up, so I couldn’t see her. Sarah’s voice rang out, tremulous but determined. “I’m ready. Get me the devil away from these dust bunnies.”
I pushed a battered fanny pack into the darkness. “Are you sure you’ll fit?”
“One way to find out.” A moment later, I heard the zipper jangle.
“How do you make yourself smaller, Sarah?” I asked, as the fabric rustled. “Do you just wish you would shrink and—ta-da! You’re pint-size?”
“The worse you feel, the smaller you get. So I think of really awful stuff until I want to vanish.”
“Well. That sucks.”
“Give me a second. Hey—your panda folder with those magazine pages of pretty and ugly boys is still under here.”
I flinched. “Oh. That’s fine. I don’t have to take it.”
Sarah paused. “But do you want to take it, Dani?”
I thought of what she might say if I admitted I did. I thought of all she’d said about the shittiness of boys, and how much I wanted her approval, wanted never to see her disappointed in me. “No. I . . . I don’t need it anymore.”
“Of course you don’t,” Sarah agreed, triumphant. “Can you zip me up?”
I felt for the fanny pack zipper. When I brushed the space inside with my fingers, it felt full and soft, like a heated water bottle.
“I’m not even gonna ask what you’re up to,” Mom said, as I backed out from under the bed on all fours.
“You never do,” I grumbled, but she didn’t hear me.
I pulled my hoodie down over the fanny pack and followed her through the doorway. If Sarah felt any loss as I put distance between her ghost and the place where she’d died, she didn’t say so.
———
Downtown Rochdale was mostly indistinguishable from other downtowns of small-town America, but because this was Michigan, there was probably a higher ratio of pine trees within its boundaries. Rochdale was a hunting and snowmobiling town, more a place for cabins and campgrounds than apartments. It wasn’t all that surprising to learn we weren’t moving into an actual apartment complex, but some defunct old motel a few potholed roads away from Ma
in Street, backed by a dark line of trees.
The motel had once been called the Teepee, which seemed about as tactful as it was accurate. The first thing we threw into the dumpster after we arrived was an offensive statue of an Indian chief selling cigars. The tin roof of the distended lobby at one end of the mono-level strip of rooms had been shaped to look like some approximation of a tepee, but the tin was filthy and rusted. Mom warned me that the lobby was locked up and out of bounds, because the roof could cave in any day.
The “apartments” themselves were a tragedy. The walls between every other room had been knocked in when the place was converted; twenty-four ragged and rustic motel rooms had become twelve oddball lodgings, of which only four were occupied—well, five, after we showed up. Ours consisted of a living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and horror beyond horrors: a carpeted kitchen.
“Your bedroom doesn’t have a window,” Mom told me. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine.” It was better than fine. The moment I got away from Mom and the boxes, I closed my new bedroom door and let Sarah stretch out in the dim, grungy space.
“I’ve always wondered what a coffin feels like,” she joked.
I didn’t want to sound defensive. “You told me you wanted to come.”
She placed a hand on my shoulder. “Calm down, Dani. I wasn’t talking about the room—I’m psyched about the room. The fanny pack was a coffin.”
“Oh.”
“It’s casual. You couldn’t even hear me when I was in there, could you?”
I shook my head. “No. But I thought I . . . um, felt you.”
“God, I hope you did. I was pounding my fists on the vinyl the whole time. We’re gonna have to try some other way of getting me around. Seen any movies featuring rules about ghost transportation? Should I get a bike?”
“Transportation? But . . . there are no windows here, and there’s a closet.”
Again, her shyness came as a surprise. “Well, yeah. But . . . I was thinking I might start going to school with you, too. I don’t want you facing Asshole Schmo alone, not after I’ve just made things worse. Get a little more vicarious, you know?”
