Violet Ghosts

by Leah Thomas

  “Seiji, he killed himself.”

  He got to his feet slowly. I watched his face do something I hadn’t seen before—it crumpled into despair.

  “All this time,” he asked, “you weren’t bullying me again.”

  “What? No, Seiji—please, talk to your aunt. Ask her!”

  He shook his head. “I wanted to believe you. I wanted to think you were my friend. That you didn’t hate me anymore. That you liked me, that you understood what it felt like to be a gay loser in Rochdale.” He laughed again, as if mocking himself. “That you talked to ghosts. Man, I must seem so stupid to you. Simple, stupid Seiji.”

  “Seiji, I swear—I’m not bullying you. And I do see ghosts. I haven’t seen your mother. But your father’s here, and maybe I can help him instead!”

  He closed his eyes. “This is worse than when you framed me.”

  “Seiji—”

  He opened the door. “Don’t forget your binder.”

  “Seiji—”

  “Go!” I’d never heard him shout before.

  I walked past him and down the stairs, trembling all over.

  In Stella’s Garden, Seiji’s father dangled from the ceiling, another broken pot at his feet.

  “Come with me, if you want,” I told his bloated face.

  His eyes were pained and aware. He shook his head before fading into nothing.

  LISA FRANK (REPRISE)

  I went to bed instead of checking in on Sarah, and when I woke in the night, I knew she was there, sitting on my desk.

  “How was Seiji’s party?”

  “You’ll be pleased. It went downhill.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” she said softly, “but you know, I’m not surprised.”

  “You think Seiji’s awful,” I said, rolling over, putting my back to her. “I get that. But you know what, Sarah? He never bullied me. I was wrong, and I treated him like crap for years.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with whether Seiji’s awful. It has to do with people being awful in general.” She paused. “Sometimes I wonder whether either of us even knows what a good thing is.”

  I wiped my tears on my pillow.

  “I died on my birthday, you know.” My eyes shot open—Sarah never talked about her death. I watched her drift toward the window. “That used to annoy the hell out of me. I mean, couldn’t my killer have waited until I opened my presents? I was supposed to get a hair straightener. Instead I’ve got eternally frizzy braids.”

  “I love your braids.”

  “Well, duh. You love everything about me.”

  “Not everything.” I lifted my face.

  “But you do love me, right?” She settled in at the foot of my bed. “You wouldn’t have loved me if you’d known me in life. You love me because I haunt you, I care about you. Is that a reason to love someone? Just because they don’t hit you? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Speaking for myself.”

  “Sarah . . .” She was scraping out my rib cage.

  “I saw your gift from Seiji. What the hell is it? Some kind of swimsuit?”

  “No. It’s an FTM binder.”

  “FTM?”

  “Female-to-male. It’ll flatten my chest so I’ll look more like a boy.”

  “Why would you want something like that?”

  “I think you know why.” I was beyond lying. I was tired and reckless. “I want to look like a boy, Sarah.”

  “It’s hard being a girl and walking alone at night. I get why you’d want a disguise.”

  “It’s not a disguise, Sarah.” I exhaled. “Everything else has been a disguise.”

  She smiled a little. “Is this about the panda folder? That collection of boys you kept under your bed? I used to think you were in love with them.”

  “I wasn’t in love with them. I wanted to be them.”

  “So you’re a tomboy. A lot of girls are. I used to have scabby knees all the time. So what if you’re a little more into it than I was?”

  “I’m not a tomboy, Sarah. I’m a boy. An actual boy.”

  “Boys don’t need to bind their chests.”

  “Some do.”

  She started to laugh, but stopped when I glared at her. “Gee, and all this time I thought I was living a dangerous lesbian fantasy.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Sarah.” I thought of Corina’s aunt. “I’m not the only one.”

  “Well, I don’t mean—I mean . . .” She stared at her chipped nail polish, feigning apathy. “I come from a time when people like that are jokes, okay?”

  “And I come from a time when ghosts don’t exist.” I shook my head. “Don’t pretend you’re behind the times. You’re more with it than I’ve ever been.”

  “Boys tended to kiss me or kill me.” She looked at me, her face twisted. “Dani, I’m not interested in dating a boy.”

  She was trying to hurt me, but I held steady. Ending this was like drawing poison from a bite. “Good. Because I’m not interested in dating you, either. I never was.”

  She did not budge, but her eyelids flickered. “Never? Rightbackatcha.”

  “But—you said—” My stomach dropped to the floor. “Sarah.”

  She tilted her head. “Aren’t we using each other? Isn’t that what people do?”

  “I don’t know.” It wasn’t like I’d seen relationships to the contrary. I’d only seen my parents, the women at the Green House, my ghostly gang. “I don’t know what other people do.”

  “It’s after midnight. If I were alive, I think I’d be so old.”

  “Happy Birthday, Sarah.”

  She stood, a moonbeam in the windowless space. “Can I have a present?”

  JIM BEAM

  I borrowed Mom’s truck. She’d fallen asleep sipping eggnog and bourbon on the couch, and it was easy enough to grab her keys. I didn’t have a learner’s permit, but I knew the basics. When we first moved to Rochdale, Mom told me I needed to know how to get away from danger. She didn’t say so, but I think she meant Dad.

  I wanted and did not want to think it, but I appreciated the lessons she gave me.

  We parked across the road from the O’Connor Petting Zoo, in the snowed-in driveway of some summer home in the woods. Sarah led the way across the vacant road. The zoo was a seasonal attraction, and a yellow sign declared See U Next Sum_er! in peeling letters. The gate at the end of the zoo’s long dirt driveway was padlocked shut, but it was easy enough to duck under it on foot.

  Sarah waited for me wordlessly on the other side—I guess we weren’t talking now. I should have been seething, but mostly I felt tired and cold, and this sort of numb resignation.

  It wasn’t like I’d truly believed Sarah and I had a healthy thing going. I wasn’t delusional. But her rot was my rot. Having her close—that was our normal for so damn long. And I couldn’t tell if she’d been getting sicker, or had been sick all along, and the same went for me, too.

  Now, staring at her floating above the long driveway, a pillar of pale in a field of white, I felt like I was seeing her anew. I wondered what it would feel like not to know her. For her to be a ghost to me.

  Sarah waved for me to follow her. As always, I did as she asked.

  I thought I had some inkling of why my mother had stayed with my father as long as she had.

  The air was bitter, maybe only ten degrees with the windchill. As we walked the long driveway that was crisscrossed with empty wooden corrals, my breath crystalized on my lips. Christmas lights dotted the roof of the O’Connor farmhouse and barn a few acres away, and smoke spat from a chimney, gray against the starless black night. The snow had been plowed or flattened by tractor tires, and though my toes went numb in my boots, at least they weren’t wet. Sarah’s toes hung delicately above the tread marks.

  When we reached a fork in the driveway, the residence felt too close for comfort. I saw a dog kennel beside the house. Should a farmer appear, angry and gun-toting like some television caricature, all he’d see was one creepy kid trespassing on his property, carrying a shit ton
of fireworks and enough salt to fill a small sea.

  “Supposedly the bodies were found under the alpaca paddock.”

  “How are we supposed to find that if the alpacas aren’t outside?”

  Sarah held her bloody stomach. “We’re getting closer.”

  We took the left fork and made our way toward the barn. We passed a wagon laden with the remainder of pumpkin patch rejects, some frozen and some rotted and caved in. By the glow of Sarah’s skin, I thought I spied a folksy-faced scarecrow, his hat frozen to his potato-sack skull.

  Sarah flickered in and out of focus as we walked alongside a long wooden fence. “Electric,” she observed, as I noticed the silver wires looped along the posts. “Be careful.”

  I wondered if Sarah felt electricity like living people feel wind.

  No matter how close we were, there were always moments of unknowing, a curtain caught between us.

  Sarah stopped in front of the third paddock. It looked as empty as the others, but Sarah buckled in half and gasped, vanishing like a popped soap bubble.

  “Sarah? Sarah!”

  She came back into sight, grimacing. “This is it.”

  I peered into the darkness. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “No. It’s definitely here. I feel like my head’s full of aphids.”

  Seven women and one child, bones a hundred years old.

  Sarah put one hand on the electrified wire and held back the current while I clambered over the fence. My battered ankle caught on the top of the fence and I fell onto my hands and knees in the slush, cursing and spitting.

  Back by the house, like I’d feared, the dogs heard or smelled me. A cascade of barking cut the night air as I found my feet. I wondered whether we should run right then, light the fence on fire and flee—­

  Then I saw them.

  I saw all of them, standing a few feet away from me in the corral.

  Ghosts in old cotton dresses, some in suits torn asunder, some in outfits whole and untouched. I spotted the dead child—he was a boy, and his eyes had been gouged out. None of the dead said a word, but stood statuesque, watching me closely. While they all had bodies, they bore only garish, naked grins. Their faces had been torn away, revealing white bone beneath.

  Sarah had been right about the location and the spiritual presence. But she’d been wrong about a lot of other things.

  If there was a killer here, I couldn’t pick him out from the group.

  There were the ghosts of seven women and one child, as predicted. But there were also at least two dozen more ghosts, men and women, lining the perimeter of the empty corral. Some had certainly died long after the turn of the century: they wore clothes from the fifties or sixties or eighties. One girl wore a North Face jacket. She might have died last month.

  This wasn’t just a mass grave. It was a massive one.

  “Hi,” I said.

  NORTH FACE

  None of the ghosts responded to my greeting. Sarah leaned against the fence beside me, wincing and bent double.

  A dead woman stepped forward. She wore all black, and her hair was tied back in a dark plait. No part of her face remained, but both of her eyes did, floating white orbs in black sockets. She tipped her head and held her arms aloft.

  “Welcome, wandering souls. Have you come to abide with us?”

  “I’m not—I mean, I’m not dead,” I managed.

  “Fear not; you shall be one day,” she said, not unkindly. “And you are welcome to stay here until that blessed day, if you so choose.”

  The quiet stillness of the other faceless ghosts chilled me. When she spoke, they did not blink or move. They listened to her with their heads bent, palms together.

  “Sarah, we should go.”

  The gathering watched us, unmoving, beneficent.

  “Not yet.” Sarah gritted her teeth and addressed the watchful crowd. “We’re here to avenge you all.” She drew herself up as best she could, staring the half-faced woman in the eyes. “Where is your killer? We’ll get rid of him for you.”

  It was hard to say for sure, given their lack of features and their eerie poses, but uncomfortable glances were exchanged among the gathered dead.

  The woman spoke again. “We thank you. But there is no need to avenge us. We have long since forgiven those who ended us.”

  Sarah’s face twisted in disbelief. “What? You forgave him?”

  “Not him,” I repeated. “They said those. Them. Sarah, there’s no way they were all killed by the same person. They’re from different decades.”

  “It was not one who ended us, but many brought us together.”

  “And together we are one,” the others echoed, clapping their hands in unison.

  “Holy shit,” Sarah uttered in furious disbelief. “It’s a ghost cult.”

  Ludicrous as that sounded, she might have hit the nail on the head.

  “We forgave them all,” the woman intoned. “Through them, we found each other, and solace in the immortal existence. We are never hungry, we are never alone, we are neither cold nor bruised nor lowly.”

  “Solace?” Sarah said. “You’re standing in an alpaca field, for fuck’s sakes!”

  “Sarah—stop.” Their ghostly bodies pressed closer. “They want to be here.”

  I felt an electric shock travel up my arm as she swatted away my hand. “No. No. Even if they want to be here, I don’t care about their forgiveness. So? Where are they? Where are the murderers?”

  “They are among us,” the woman said, “And they are murderers no more.”

  In that crowd of faceless people, there was no way of telling which of them had once borne a viscous face of tar. I realized it must have been intentional, and that meant—­

  “Sarah,” I said, “why are all their faces gone? Who tore them off?”

  “We all did,” the woman in black declared, “for it was not our place to judge the dead for choices made while living. Here, killers and killed are equals. Here, we are companions.”

  “Then you’re as bad as one another.” Sarah’s eyes weren’t black anymore, but shone as bright as halogen bulbs. Her teeth grew sharper, and light sputtered from her skin in firecracker spikes of red and gold. “Tell me, which of you killed that child, and these women.” She snapped her fingers, and the electric fence sparked and popped. The crowd shook at last, broke formation. In a flash of movement, Sarah got her hands on a ghost wearing overalls, lifting him from the ground by the throat. The rabble protested, crying out and closing in.

  “Sarah! Stop it!”

  Behind me, the dogs were going wild, but the sound seemed like a world away. I only barely registered porch lights turning on.

  “Was it this jackass?” Sarah held out her hand and another man, dressed in jeans and flannel, was pulled inexorably toward her grip, yelping as she dragged his neck into her other fist. “Or this one?”

  I tried to grab her arm, but it was like trying to hold a hot iron. I passed through her with a yelp, burning welts searing across my palms.

  “Tell me!” she demanded. “Are you really going to shelter murderers and rapists?”

  “Many brought us together,” rasped the first man, as the second gasped in her grip, saying, “and together we are one.”

  “Do no more harm here, wandering soul,” the woman in black intoned. She remained as impassive as the snowbanks, as tranquil as an antique black-and-white photograph. “Leave us be.”

  “Was it you, then?” Sarah produced a third hand—just as Addy’s killer had—and willed the woman in black toward her. The other ghosts cried out as Sarah held her neck, but the woman was stoic like Seiji.

  I fell to my knees, placing my scalded hands in the snow, but a great number of ghostly bodies pressed on my shoulders, too, a gentle velvet smothering that left me gasping.

  The dead stretched and bent their bodies to wind themselves around Sarah’s illuminated figure, separating her from the woman in black. These ghosts became ropes and walls between the two of them. I tried to g
et up, crying out at the heat, but pushing against the dead was like breathing cotton. I felt so woozy.

  And I felt so far from Sarah. She was in another place entirely, glaring at the unreadable face of death.

  Then someone dead took my hand.

  It was the ghost of the little boy in breeches. “It’s all right, ma’am.”

  “Dani,” Sarah growled, eyes flashing. “The fireworks.”

  “No, Sarah! Let’s go, okay?”

  “Murderers and rapists, apologists and idiots! They don’t get to be left alone! Light them the fuck up, Dani, if you ever cared about me.”

  My hands began shaking. “If I did that, you’d be gone, too.”

  “So what? Does that matter?” she cried, eyes desperate as she turned her gaze toward me. “You’re outgrowing me, right? So just end it!”

  I understood then what she was asking, and why she had seemed so distressed and cruel the past few months. Her reckless behavior, her kisses, her desperate acts of aggression, her meaningless birthdays.

  How long had Sarah been looking to die again?

  I felt a sob leave my throat and I shook my head. The dead were on all sides of her, their fingers on her skin, their arms around her in knots.

  The woman in black reappeared several yards away, alongside a few members of her flock, serene in the face of the swarm.

  “Please stop,” I begged the woman, scrambling to my feet to fall at hers. “We’ll leave. Just let us, okay?”

  The woman tilted her blank skull toward me. Beside her, a ghost in track pants and a ghost in bell-bottoms did the same. “You may leave, but she is lost. We have found her.”

  “I found her first!” I declared, as fiercely as I could.

  The woman did not flinch. “She does not look found to me.”

  Sarah screeched and the fence behind me sparked again—I yelled as a jolt of electricity shot through my legs and hands like knives. I couldn’t get up.

  I saw Sarah’s hand emerge from the clouded fog of the dead, and I fumbled for the fireworks at my belt.

  I could toss them.

  I could do as Sarah asked.

  The electricity had set the fence posts and a few ghosts alight, and they howled and slapped at their clothes. Sarah’s face appeared above the mass of faded and foggy limbs. She held one hand open.