Haunt Me

by Liz Kessler

  And when the methods you use for coping with their bullying ways are the very things they turn into weapons to use against you, you start to lose faith that anything that feels good can ever be real. The words, the laughter, the hatred — they get stuck fast somewhere deep inside you, and once that happens, it’s not easy to know how to tear them off without ripping up your insides.

  But I’m not meant to focus on that now. I’m meant to face forward. We agreed. A fresh start for all of us; no what-ifs, no looking back.

  “Erin!” Mum’s voice breaks into my thoughts. “You ready? We’ll need to get going if we want to see the beach before the movers arrive.”

  “Coming, Mum.” I get up and head to the door. I give the bedroom one last look. “See you soon,” I whisper. Then I join Mum on the landing, and we look at the last two rooms before going down to the beach to find the others.

  Which is pretty easy. It’s a cool, windy evening, and Dad and Phoebe are the only people out there. Mum waves, and they amble over to join us.

  Phoebe’s constant chatter means it’s OK that I don’t talk much as we wander around the harbor together. I nod and say, “Mmm, yeah, nice,” while Mum points out shops and cafés. I link my arm through Dad’s and smile as we roam the cobbled streets together, and I let my thoughts drift while we look for the empty shop they’re taking over, retracing our steps again and again and getting lost on almost every corner.

  And I try not to think about how much I hope that I don’t actually get lost myself.

  I’m awake.

  But where am I?

  I force my brain to think. When was I last awake? Feels like it was years ago. Or months, at least. I feel as though I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep forever.

  Something’s happening. Like a pressure against my back. What is it? Is someone kicking me? I realize I’m slumped against the door. I stumble to my feet, dragging my body up like I’m raising it from the dead. Next thing I know, the door’s open and some girl practically comes flying through it.

  I step back, partly out of shock, partly to get out of her way before she knocks both of us over.

  “Who the hell are you?” I ask. Hearing my own words shocks me. It’s almost like hearing a stranger. I don’t recognize my deep, gravelly voice.

  When did I last speak?

  I look her up and down. She’s wearing jeans with a rip in one knee and a baggy blue sweater. Her hair is dark and tucked up in a beanie hat. A couple of strands hang over her face, as though she’s hiding behind them. Tiny stud in her nose.

  “Hey,” I say. Clearer this time.

  She doesn’t reply. Acts like I didn’t even speak.

  She’s walking around my bedroom as if she owns it, touching the walls, looking in my walk-in closet, standing in the middle of the room as though she’s surveying her empire.

  I pull myself together and follow her across the room. Glancing around, I see that it’s empty — and then I have a memory.

  My room. I woke up, and there was nothing here. When was that?

  There’s still nothing. Except now there’s a girl.

  “You can’t just ignore me, you know,” I say to the girl as she turns away from my closet.

  She ignores me.

  “Oi!” I reach out to grab her arm, but she’s moved again. She’s heading for the window seat. My window seat. My special place.

  She sits down.

  “Hey!” I say, louder, getting pissed off now. Who does she think she is? “That’s my seat.”

  She ignores me again, just stares out of the window. I watch her for a moment. There’s something about the look on her face as she sits there. It reminds me of something. Or someone. It takes me a moment to work out who she reminds me of. Me.

  Another memory. Sitting in the window seat. Taking refuge, escaping from the world.

  The connection deflates my anger a little. I still haven’t got a clue what’s going on, though. Especially when I follow her gaze. That’s when the next bit comes back to me. I remember looking out this window before, but it was different. The garden was coming into bloom then. Pink blossoms, yellow daffodils everywhere. Now it’s bare. Wet leaves line the path; straggly dead weeds lie bent double and neglected.

  What’s happened to the garden? What’s happened to me? I swallow down the cold feeling that’s creeping into my throat and try to remember. Actually, that’s a lie. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to know the truth. In fact, I’d do anything to put it off.

  The girl is still sitting in the window. Who the hell is she? Do I know her?

  I reach out for her, more gently this time. My hand hovers above her arm — I don’t know why. Something stops me. Then I shake myself. Don’t be an idiot. So I reach for her arm.

  My hand slips right through it.

  I leap back, as if her skin were on fire, as if she’s infected me.

  A ghost! I’ve got a ghost in my bedroom!

  Have I, though? Does that make sense?

  Does any of this make sense?

  I’m clutching my hand and staring, just staring. Have I taken drugs? Am I hallucinating? What the hell is happening here?

  “Erin!”

  There’s a voice outside. The girl — Erin — calls back. “Coming, Mum.” Her voice — it does something to me. The tone of it. Like, soft but hard. Open but protected. Can you get all that from two words?

  Erin gets up and crosses the bedroom.

  I’m standing in the middle of the room as she pauses by the door. She turns back, her hand on the door handle, and I swear, she stares me straight in the face, right in my eyes, as if she can see all the way inside me, but as if she’s looking right through me at the same time. She whispers — to me? — “See you soon.”

  And then she’s gone.

  Too late, I follow her to the door. I want to get out. Want to follow her. Want to know more — but she closes the door, and I know even before I try that I won’t be able to grip the handle. That much I remember from last time.

  A moment later, I hear mumbled voices and two sets of feet going up the stairs to Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

  Mum and Dad.

  A picture of my parents blasts into my mind. I can see them both, their faces above me. I can feel my pain as I watch them, feel the tears inside me that won’t leave my eyes because they are frozen inside my body.

  My dad is crying openly. My mum is kissing my cheek. The vision brings me to my knees as if someone has punched me in the stomach.

  As quickly as it arrives, the image is gone. But the memory remains, like a bruise, a dull ache. And with the ache comes the knowledge that I’ve been avoiding — but I can’t ignore any longer.

  The house isn’t haunted.

  At least not by a girl and her mum.

  I remember it. Lying in a bed. All of them standing around me, holding my hand, kissing my cheeks, telling me they loved me. I remember the day they said good-bye. The day I died.

  This girl isn’t a ghost.

  I’m the ghost.

  “Come on, girls, we’re going to be late,” Dad calls up the stairs, and I laugh to myself. We move five hundred miles across the country to start our lives afresh in a brand-new town, and still some things don’t change. He’s shouted the same thing up the stairs every school day as far back as I can remember.

  Something about the familiarity of his words gives me comfort, makes me feel safe. Which is a good thing, since nothing else is making me feel that way this morning.

  A memory shoots into my mind. Packing my bag for school. Hopeful. Excited. First day of year seven. My friends from primary school went to three different secondary schools across the city. Just a couple of my best friends and I were going to the same one.

  Running down the stairs and across the driveway into the road. The car was going too fast; they all said so. It wasn’t my fault.

  Broke my leg in three places and shattered my kneecap. But that wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was the dama
ge that took place under the surface — the parts you couldn’t see but that were at least ten times more broken than my leg.

  The problem was, afterward I could barely get across a street without having a panic attack.

  The problem was, I missed almost half a term — and every opportunity to find my place in the new world of secondary school.

  I never found it.

  “Sweetheart, you’re going to be late.” Mum’s voice beside me breaks into my thoughts.

  I shake the memories away and turn to Mum. She touches my arm. “You OK, darling?”

  I nod.

  Phoebe’s behind me. “Come on, sis,” she says, her coat open, shirt hanging out, so casual, so carefree. I push away a pang of envy and follow her out the front door.

  Dad parks the car at the end of the road from the school. Phoebe waits in the back as Dad reaches out for me. Touches my chin, turns me toward him. “It’s a fresh start, OK?”

  I nod. I can’t speak at this point. I’m too busy trying to encourage my breaths to get past the thumping in my chest and make it all the way in and out of my mouth.

  “It’s a small seaside town,” he continues. “Everyone’s friendly here. It won’t be the same. Just be yourself, and they’ll love you.” He smiles at me.

  My brain tells my mouth to make a smile shape back at Dad.

  My mouth obeys, and it seems to satisfy him, since he kisses my cheek and pats my knee. “Good girl. See you tonight.”

  “We’re walking home,” I remind him. School is only a mile down the road. Dad wanted to bring us on the first morning, as we’ve both got loads of new books and stuff to take in with us, but the last thing I want is for people to laugh at me for having to get a ride to school and back from my parents.

  “You sure you’ll find your way home OK?”

  “We’ll be fine!” Phoebe insists as she opens her door.

  “OK, but make sure you girls wait for each other.”

  She steps out of the car. “We will. Promise.”

  Phoebe’s classes finish earlier than mine. Now she’s starting year seven, and I’m starting year twelve. She’s right at the beginning of secondary school, and I’m at the end — starting sixth form, so at least we didn’t move in the middle of anything.

  I don’t think I could do that again.

  Phoebe will be fine either way. You could put her in any situation, and she’d make friends straightaway. She’s just got that kind of personality. Always smiley, makes everyone feel warm and happy, makes them want to be with her.

  Pretty much the opposite of me.

  I get out of the car. Dad leans across the passenger seat. “It’ll all be OK,” he says, and for the first time I realize that he’s scared for me, too. Of course he is. He saw the state I got into, even if I never told them what was really going on. He and Mum watched me lose weight, watched me turn more and more inward. They found me the day I . . .

  No. I’m not going there. Not now. It’s a fresh start. I take a deep breath. The deepest breath I can. I do that thing my therapist told me to do, imagining the breath coming all the way from my toes, up through my body — then I breathe it out, getting rid of it.

  I do the other thing that always helps me feel like I’m taking control of my situation, too. I make a list in my head.

  THREE REASONS NOT TO BE SCARED

  1. Nobody knows anything about me here.

  2. I never need to see those bullies again.

  3. People are nice to strangers in a seaside town.

  The third one is a guess, as I don’t have any documented evidence, but it feels like it should be true. And the thoughts help me; my breathing calms.

  “I know, Dad,” I say finally as I shut the door.

  “See you later, Dad. Love you,” Phoebe says casually, and we make our way up the road together.

  “Meet me back here at the end of the day,” I tell her as we pass through the school gates. “I’ll be out after you. Just wait for me, OK?”

  “I can walk home on my own, you know,” she says. “You don’t have to walk with me. I know the way.”

  “No. Wait for me. At least for the first few days. We don’t know the roads yet — it’s safer to go back together.”

  Phoebe gives me a look. The kind of look only an eleven-year-old can give you. The kind that says they understand better than you ever will how the world works.

  Memories flood in before I can stop them. Walking home alone. Taking the long way across the fields and down the canal towpath so I can avoid crossing any roads. Listening to my favorite tunes on my iPod as I walk. Lost in my music, then suddenly surrounded.

  Kaylie, Heather, Darcy. Who else? How many of them were there that first day? Six, seven? More? It was just silly names that time. Car Crash Katy. Panic Alec. That first time. They made up fresh names for me every week, each new name drawing me further and further back into my shell. Silent Movie. Dumb and Dumber. Mute.

  I hold Phoebe’s eyes and try to keep my gaze steady. Can she tell? Does she know I need her more than she needs me?

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she says eventually, leaning in to give me a quick squeeze. “Mum’ll kill me if anything happens to me on the way home and I didn’t wait for you.”

  I laugh at her logic, and at her generosity. She might be five years younger than me, but she was there; she knows what I went through, too.

  I kiss the top of her head. “See you at the end of the day,” I say.

  A second later, with a quick swat of her hair to wipe my kiss away, she’s gone.

  And I’m alone, in a school yard.

  I learn two things on that first day. Thing one: school is school, whether you’re in a big city or a small seaside town. Either way, it’s teachers and homework and groups of kids who all know one another. Thing two: sixth form means that it’s not about conjugated French verbs or quadratic equations anymore.

  I always knew I was going to study English lit, English language, and history. I’d been stuck on a fourth one. I finally decided on psychology just before moving here. I guess I’ve become more interested in psychology over the last year or so. It’s worth giving it a go. We have to drop one at the end of the first year of sixth form anyway, so I’m doing what Mum always insists on and keeping my options open.

  I see there’s a creative writing lunch club advertised on a notice board. I consider it for about a minute. Half of me really wants to do it — but I’m pretty sure it would mean having to read my work out loud, and there’s no way in ten trillion years I’m doing that, so I don’t sign up.

  I’m assigned a “buddy” named Brooke. She spends half an hour giving me a high-speed tour of the school. “You get lunch here. Best bathrooms for gossip are these ones. Best for putting on makeup are the ones on the second floor. English is down there. Psychology’s up that corridor and turn left, and the cafeteria is that way. Any questions?”

  I tell her I’ve got it, and she gives me an I’m a nice person, but I’ve done what I was asked to do, and can I go now? smile, tells me to give her a shout if I need anything, and then leaves me to it. I don’t see her again for the rest of the day.

  Which is fine by me. I don’t want to be a drag on someone else’s social life, and I don’t want to have to make conversation with a stranger all day just for the sake of it.

  After that, the day is mostly spent getting schedules and shuffling along the halls, following others who are doing the same subjects as me. By the end of the day, I think I’ve pretty much figured it out.

  By which I mean I can find my way around. But by which I also mean I think I’ve sussed out how the pecking order works. I’ve noticed a group of girls who seem to be the cool gang. The leader is a girl named Zoe, with two or three girls who follow her around and flick their perfect hair in the same way every five minutes.

  I know those girls. Girls like them, anyway. Zoe has perfect blond hair, perfect clothes, perfect smile. The kind of smile that makes you either feel warm to be in her pres
ence when it’s on you, or want to run fifty miles away when it turns into cold, harsh laughter.

  A couple of her followers have blond hair, too. Not quite as perfect as hers, but you can see they style themselves after her. Same mannerisms, same-length skirts. The only one who looks different from the others is a girl with dark hair, dark skin, slightly more genuine-looking smile. If she weren’t with them, I’d probably smile back. As it is, I make a very early decision to give the whole group a wide berth.

  Then there’s the usual sporty group, the nerds, the emos, the misfits. It’s the same as anywhere.

  And no, I don’t suddenly bump into my perfect best friend and become instantly joined at the hip.

  And yes, everyone does already know one another, and I can tell that the various social groupings are well established. Which is why I spend break time mostly hiding in the bathroom (the one described by Brooke during our high-speed tour of the school as good when you need a bit of privacy, if you know what I mean) and eat my lunch in the library, huddled over a book that I pretend to be absorbed in.

  Old habits die hard.

  But at least I get through the day without a panic attack. Which means I don’t need to breathe into a paper bag at lunchtime.

  Which means no one calls me Bag Lady and makes the class laugh so much that the name sticks for the next five years.

  So, yeah. Relatively speaking, it’s a good day.

  Which is what I tell Mum when we get home and she calls, “How was school?” the second we’re through the front door.

  She can’t stop herself from showing how relieved she is when I reply, “It was fine, Mum.”

  Which shouldn’t irritate me but kind of does.

  Phoebe saves the moment. “Brilliant!” she exclaims, before raiding the fridge and telling Mum all about her day.

  “I’m going upstairs to dump my things,” I say, and head up to my room before Mum can grill me any further.

  The moment I walk through my bedroom door, I feel better. This room has a weird effect on me. It calms me, makes me feel safe.

  I drop my bag on the floor and grab my notebook. There’s no way I’d have taken that to school. I made that mistake once. Hearing your innermost thoughts read out to a jeering crowd on a school playground is the kind of mistake you don’t allow to happen twice.