by Leah Thomas
“I’m taking no part in this.” Sarah looked at Patricia. “I’m sorry, Trish.”
“Sorry? What for?”
But Sarah shook her head and sank downward through the floor.
“What was that about?”
Patricia appeared before me, her weary face only a foot away—sometimes ghosts moved in a flicker, a bending of light that had long ceased to scare me.
“I have something for you,” I said, unzipping my backpack.
“Something new to read?” This close, the traces of blood around her mouth were visible, the twigs in her hair suddenly impossible to ignore, the hollows of her skull peeping through her skin.
“Yeah.” I swallowed.
She was already holding out her hand.
“But the thing is, this isn’t a book. It’s true.”
“We still call those books, Dani. They’re nonfiction.” Her teacher voice slipped at the sight of my face. “Go on, then.”
“The pages are about your family,” I blurted.
“My family,” she said, and suddenly she was yards away again, as if she’d never left the chair. “I told you. I don’t want to know about my family.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She looked at me sharply. “Is that why Sarah’s upset with you?”
“Sort of. I mean, yes.”
Patricia’s posture stiffened. “You two have trouble with honesty. I suppose she told you that it’s futile for the dead to care about the living.”
“More or less.” I couldn’t tell whether she agreed. “But . . .”
“But what?”
“But you bring them up all the time. Just yesterday, you told me about your son, and . . . before that, you talked about . . .”
Her stare silenced me. “I told you about my son because I thought it might make you feel better. Is what you want to show me going to make me feel better?”
I inhaled. “No.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said, staring at the National Geographic again. “You know, according to this article, there’s a cemetery in Mexico full of naturally mummified corpses. It seems they died in a cholera outbreak, but the soil preserved them perfectly.”
I knew a change of subject when I heard one. But after all I’d shared with her the day before, I couldn’t bear the walls she’d put up now. I couldn’t shake the shame or self-righteousness I felt, vying against each other in my chest.
“That’s interesting.”
She vanished and reappeared in front of me, blocking the doorway. “Do you really think I should know about it, whatever it is?”
Seiji’s words ran through my head. “I do.”
Patricia softened, flickered in and out of sight. “Will you—could you read it with me, then, whatever it is?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.”
We sat together in the armchair. It shouldn’t have been big enough, but Patricia made herself small and almost invisible, a haze-like steam in the air. I held aloft the first page, and after a few minutes, she said, “Next page.” When she’d scanned the second page, her voice even smaller, she said, “Next page.”
Finally, we’d read through all the pages. She’d read about her granddaughter, her son, the fundraiser, the plans for an early Christmas at the Knights of Columbus hall. The comments of people who knew her son and his family and strangers who had posted on the site. She was entirely invisible now, but I could sense her cool presence. I set the pages on the table.
When a few minutes had passed, silent apart from the wind outside, I realized she wasn’t going to speak. I felt the trembling of her unseen shoulders beside mine.
“Do you want to talk, Patricia?”
She didn’t answer, but held my hand for a long, long time.
POLTERGEIST
The next day was Saturday. I woke up almost frozen solid in the lobby. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my nose or ears, and my breath was more a storm than a cloud. But the bulk of me was warmer than it should have been, as if a blanket had been draped across my torso.
“Patricia?” I said aloud.
“You idiot,” Sarah said, appearing before me. She was lying atop me with her arms around my waist and her cheek on my chest, the only thing keeping me from turning blue. “Why the hell are you sleeping out here in the cold? You wanna be a ghost that bad? Don’t believe the hype.”
I was so glad to be near Sarah again, so glad she didn’t hate me enough to let me freeze to death. No matter what came between us, there was that. I sat up and threw my arms around her and she put her arms around my neck, her cheek against mine.
“Calm down, Dani. You need to get yourself indoors, all right?”
“I know.” My teeth chattered. “But . . . P-Patricia?”
“She’s here, but keeping quiet. She came to get me last night after you fell asleep. You know how hard it is for her to leave this room, but she did. You really must have scared her half to life.”
“Ha ha.” I wiped my nose on my hand. “Did she seem okay?”
“She seemed like . . . well, herself, I guess, and that’s as okay as she can be. Can’t stop a geek from geeking, you know?”
I nodded, sniffling like a sad puppy.
Sarah stared at me, then sighed heavily.
“Look. Maybe you weren’t totally wrong to tell her.” Sarah felt so like and unlike a real person atop me, like a down comforter or something. “She didn’t look like she was going to go all poltergeist on us, anyhow.”
“I don’t see how that would help.” The voice startled even Sarah, who jerked out of my arms. “Losing myself wouldn’t help me, my son, or my dying granddaughter.”
Patricia leaned against the counter with her eyes closed.
“Yeah.” Sarah sank away from the ceiling. “I mean, nothing can help, you know? Which is why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Knowledge is power.” Patricia said it like she was lecturing a class. Her eyes remained closed, her face placid. “But I’m not powerful. I’m a coward. I was so afraid to know what I might be missing.”
“You don’t have to miss it,” I breathed, finding my feet. “Do you . . . I mean, we can try to see her. Patty Jr. Before she—we can go to the fundraiser. I can get Mom to drive us, or maybe there’s a bus, or something. Or . . .”
“I could teach you how to get cozy in something electronic,” Sarah added. “Pockets aren’t so bad when there’s a buffer. I’ll go, too, if you want.”
I squeezed Sarah’s shoulder.
“Thank you.” Patricia opened tearful eyes. “Really, thank you. But you know, I am a coward. I can’t leave this place.”
“We’ll help you.”
“I can’t,” Patricia said again. “I’m afraid of the woods. I’m afraid of the world. Being here with these books has been nice, and being with the pair of you . . . but it’s only made that fear worse. I’ve got something to lose again. I’m trying to build an unlife. But I don’t want . . . I can’t be hurt again.”
“But nothing can hurt you anymore,” I said.
“That’s not exactly true,” Sarah murmured.
“The dead are not exempt from suffering,” Patricia said.
“Emotionally I get that, but we’ll be there to—”
“She’s not talking about hurt feelings, Dani!”
The knowing glance Sarah shared with Patricia, so impenetrable to me, clearly meant something special to my dead friends.
“But you’re incorporeal. Nothing can physically hurt you, right?”
I felt the divide between us grow wider.
“Please, Patricia. Tell me. What are you afraid of?”
“It’s not as though fear needs an identity to exist,” Patricia whispered. “But mine has one. I hate to admit it, but I’m still afraid of that creep.”
“What creep?”
“Come on, Dani. You know who she means.”
And I did, or at least I thought I did. But it didn’t make sense. “Even if you weren’t already—I mean, you
r murderer died in prison.”
“Yes,” Patricia said. “He died in prison. And what do you think happened next?”
Sarah’s voice was heavy. “Your killer came back to haunt the woods, didn’t he?”
Patricia put a hand over her eyes. “He found me again.”
Sarah nodded. “I wondered about that.”
I felt nauseated at the implications of this conversation. “Wait—you mean—but that’s so fucked up! It can’t be like that. It can’t be.”
Sarah stared at me. “Why, because you don’t want it to be? Join the club.”
I fell back into Patricia’s shoddy recliner. If what they were saying was true, how many violent ghosts stalked the world? For all the victims who haunted the earth, could there really be as many victimizers, haunting the haunted? Had Patricia’s rapist really followed her into the afterlife?
“Where’s the fucking justice in that?” I thought aloud. “Where?”
I wasn’t religious, but where was the fucking heaven in it? I was trembling for so many reasons now.
“You wonder why I don’t trust men,” Sarah said, with a grim smile. “You think the sexism stops at death? You think the cycles of violence end? Nope. There are as many shitty living people as good ones, and that goes for the dead, too.”
“That’s too awful.”
Patricia almost smirked. “Only as awful as people can be, sometimes.”
But I thought it must be worse. Because both the ghosts I knew, both these women I admired, had mentioned that in the years before I met them, they spent a lot of time confused and lost, aimless and unanchored. At least in life there were moments of okay-ness, sunlight through leaves and laughter and Halloween. At least bruises would heal, and sometimes bad people were punished for their crimes.
But in the finality of death, where was the good to balance out the bad?
“Hey, you’re turning blue,” Sarah said. “Get your butt inside where there’s heat.”
I nodded, numb, and left my friends to grapple with a burden I couldn’t fathom.
LIME JELL-O
I didn’t catch my death from the cold, but I did come down with a nasty flu. I spent most of the weekend feverish and pukey, and by Sunday evening I was still so irredeemably phlegmy that Mom even offered to stay home from work with me. I protested, and finally she left me with a kiss on my sweaty scalp, a two-liter of Sprite, and two packets of Jell-O I didn’t have the energy to make.
She closed the front door and I felt a warm wind settled beside me. Sarah tucked her skinny legs under my blanket and put her hand on my forehead.
“Jesus. Death warmed over, etcetera.”
“Pretty much. How’s Patricia?”
Sarah frowned at my red eyes. “You sap. You should be thinking about feeling better, but you’re still thinking about the tragic doom of the dead, huh?”
I stared glassy-eyed at the television, where a bright and obnoxious sitcom cast made bad jokes inside a cardboard living room. “Yeah, I am. I repeat: How’s Patricia?”
“Stubborn.” Sarah leaned her head back on the cushions. She was a little translucent in the light of the television, and I could see blocks of color through her skin, the sitcom picture through her torso and face. “She’s sad, you know, and probably really fucking annoyed.”
I flushed. “I wouldn’t have told her, if I’d known she couldn’t leave . . .”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit.” Sarah cuffed my ear and let her hand rest on my cheek. “She’s probably not mad that you told her about her grandkid. She’s annoyed at feeling helpless. God, feeling helpless is painful, but it’s also just so annoying.”
“Annoying.” When my father used to pull me to my bedroom by my hair, or when he used to knock Mom to the floor and smack her, it hadn’t occurred to me to feel annoyed. I’d never been anything but scared.
“Yes, annoying!” Sarah had that fire back in her eyes. “Look, it’s bad enough that someone hurts you and you’re expected to carry the word victim like a scar, whether you want to or not. But sometimes the world is so bogus that no matter how you try to avoid it, you end up being a victim again.”
As usual, her words rang true. “The world’s so freaking scary.”
“Sure. But scared’s not all you feel when this shit keeps happening. When someone tries to make you feel helpless again when you know you’re not, fuck them for putting that on you. I’d rather be annoyed than afraid. At least anger is something I can throw back at ’em.”
“Sarah, you’re amazing.”
“Don’t you snot on me,” she said gruffly.
“Sarah?”
“What?”
I’d thought through my words, hampered slightly by my stuffy sinuses. “If there are as many bad ghosts as good ghosts, why haven’t I met any of them?”
“You’ve only met two ghosts total, to be fair,” she said, “and not everyone who dies ends up haunting the world. Most people don’t, you know? Otherwise this tepee would be a lot more crowded, don’t you think?”
That notion had occurred to me. I thought about asking whether it was only people who died at the hands of others who stayed. I also wanted to ask whether there were ghosts she saw that I didn’t, and why that might be so.
But those were conversations we should have had years earlier. I couldn’t decide how to begin them now. They were like picks that might shatter the ice we stood on.
“Does your murderer haunt you, too?”
I felt her temperature plummet. As my fingers turned numb in hers, she said, “No, he doesn’t.”
“But . . . did he ever?”
She was barely visible, a girl made of glass. Her chin dipped only once.
My heart fragmented. “Did you . . . I mean, did you stop him?”
When I couldn’t feel her presence, I thought I was alone. I thought she was angry. but then I felt a peck on my cheek and heard her whisper, “Get some rest, you turkey.”
TIDY CATS
Rest didn’t come easy, but by Monday I was itching to leave the couch. I dragged my sorry self out of the apartment. The first snow had stuck around and become a sheet of ice. I almost had to skate to school, moving so sluggishly that I almost slipped twice on the back road. I made for Main Street, hoping it might have been salted.
Main Street’s Halloween decorations—the flour-painted ghosts and skeletons in shop windows—seemed incongruous against the flecks of falling snow. I made my way down the sidewalk. It hadn’t been salted, but a few townies had dumped kitty litter on the pavement to counteract the slipperiness.
As I passed the flower shop, I heard the ringing of a bell in the doorway. Looking up too quickly, I lost my footing with spectacular aplomb and collided with a small giant. I cursed and caught myself on a display window filled with autumnal flower arrangements and a painted illustration of a pumpkin latte.
Seiji stood before me in his duffel coat, a satchel slung over his shoulder. Of course it was Seiji, again and always. Seiji was like a splinter I couldn’t remove. He looked about as glad to see me as I was to see him. Although who knew really, with that blank face of his.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I gasped, drawing myself upright.
“I’m walking to school.”
“I’ve never seen you walk this way before.”
He shrugged and began walking away. “Not my problem.”
No, of course it wasn’t his problem. But his turn of phrase riled me. Maybe it was the fever or exhaustion, or maybe it was my exchange with Sarah, but hearing Seiji discount me like a piece of trash irked me to no end.
None of my problems were anyone’s but mine, but I also had a dozen problems that weren’t mine but were the problems of the ghosts I lived with, not to mention a thousand problems that had nothing to do with my choices. I didn’t know any “girls” who didn’t take on problems that didn’t belong to them: the woes of siblings or friends, the weight of a stranger’s stares, the doors held open unasked for.
&
nbsp; And here was Seiji, carefree and callous, broad-shouldered and indifferent. Was that what it felt like, being a real man? Like you didn’t have to bother with anyone but yourself? That everyone else’s problems were simply irrelevant?
I hated him. And how I envied him.
“Hey,” I blurted, stomping after him, ignoring the ice, “why is it that you’re everywhere I am, all the damn time?”
Seiji didn’t slow his pace. “You’re the one following me.”
“I don’t mean now. I mean lately. At the 7-Eleven—”
“I work there.”
“Okay, fine. But last Friday, at school—”
“I want nothing to do with you at school.” For the first time emotion colored his voice. “I don’t want any more suspensions, thanks.”
My face burned. I grabbed Seiji’s arm and finally he stopped moving. He scowled at my fingers as if they were spider legs.
“You brought that on yourself!”
“I don’t remember hitting you in the face.”
I cringed. “But do you remember calling me a whore?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I’ve never called anyone that, and I never will.”
His denial was infuriating. “Oh, right. You didn’t call me that, you just wrote it on my desk in permanent marker.”
“Clearly there’s no point in denying it,” Seiji said, with another shrug.
“You are such an asshole, Seiji Grayson. Do you get off on hurting people?”
He spun, black eyes glinting. “Do you?”
“Excuse me?”
“You are so angry all the time. That must be exhausting.”
“I’m not angry!” I shouted, and I knew that was ridiculous, because god, was I ever angry, and god, did his calm demeanor upset me more.
Very seriously, Seiji said, “Maybe you should see a counselor.”
I had no idea what to make of him. I wanted to think he was devoid of empathy, because that would justify what I’d done to and thought about him. But I also wanted boys not to suck, to think that people like Seiji could grow from being bullies into decent people. If there was anything redeemable about Seiji, I wanted to know about it.
“A counselor,” I echoed.
