Chapter 3 #2
Pitched low, still for my ears only, Sebastian mutters, “Oh, so hand the thing that eats energy a lightning rod.”
The spark in my stomach kindles higher, lapping at my rib cage. I dig my knuckles into my sternum, but it doesn’t help.
“In sum,” Mrs. Wilson lectures over us, “so long as we follow safety procedures and keep our iron gates securely closed when not in use, we may consider ourselves an impenetrable fortress.”
“Except those iron gates open with electricity,” I mutter, shaking my head, “which we just established they eat.”
Shooting me a sharp glance, Mrs. Wilson purses her lips, widens her eyes. A warning to stop saying all the inconvenient quiet parts out loud. We’re just supposed to drink the Kool-Aid, not ask why it tastes funny, but I am sick to my soul of swallowing lie after lie.
My teeth squeak before I realize I’m grinding them; my fingers are numb, my soul hazing slightly out of my body. I grip the desk with four hands, flesh and party trick overlapping. Distantly, I remind myself to blink.
It doesn’t take. I stare, fixating, watching every uncomfortable twitch of her furred lip, turning back to the board like her work is done here, like I’ll tremble in fear at the suggestion of a glance, the whisper of a consequence.
“How else do we protect our homes?” she asks.
“Talismans,” a boy calls out.
“That falls under iron. More specifically?”
“Uh,” he falters. “Those suncatcher, pinwheel things? The, like… wind chimes that spin and glitter?”
Mrs. Wilson beams. “Ghost scares, yes. And why do those work?”
My lungs catch fire. Jaw hard, too loud, I tell her, “They don’t.”
Laughter spatters the room.
“She would know,” someone mutters. Mrs. Wilson’s smile doesn’t even falter.
“Something to add, Persephone? If you have an expertise, please share it.” If anything, her smirk tugs wider, an eager little glint in her beady eyes. “Stand up. Address the room. Explain to us the theory behind ghost scares.”
At least down south, they had the grace to hide their venom with a “bless your heart.” Here, I’m supposed to appease the hurt feelings of a mean girl who never figured out how to leave high school, only how to hide her meanness long enough to be put in charge of one.
I stare her dead in the face, my dry stare a stubborn challenge, and refuse to concede.
Think I’ll shy from a public shaming? I’m not the one still wandering the same hallways I grew up in. A ghost too slow to know it’s dead.
“A lot of ancient cultures associate ghosts and mirrors. Ghost scares specifically stem from the Ancient Greeks, who used polished bronze mirrors to talk to dead relatives in the underworld. Victorians loved spooky stuff, especially appropriating it from every culture they could get their hands on, so it wasn’t a huge leap from ‘talking to your dead mom in a mirror’ to ‘dead mom is trapped in the mirror, let’s have a fun séance.
’” I smile, too many teeth. “Does that answer your question? I can list my sources if you want?”
“Shut up,” somebody mutters. “Nobody did that. She’s just making shit up to sound smart.”
“Explains why her makeup looks like that.” One-third of the mean-girl trio giggles. “Spooky’s afraid of mirrors.”
“That is one explanation actually,” Mrs. Wilson says, as close as she can come to telling me I’m right without saying it. “The Victorians were much laxer with spiritual safety than we are in the modern day.”
Because the Victorians could afford to be, I want to scream. Because the ghosts weren’t there. Haven’t you been paying attention? Haven’t you noticed the difference yet between what you know and what they tell you?
But the words get tangled in my mouth. So angry I don’t even know where to start, I miss my chance entirely. Somebody beats me to it, actually raising her hand to ask, “But if they were poking at ghosts for fun, how are we here? Like, how did they not all just… die?”
My attention pricks. Goose bumps pimple down my arms. I lean sideways out of my too-small desk to stare at her, peripherally aware Sebastian does the same out of the corner of my eye.
God, she’s so close. She’s literally right there. She just has to do the math.
No, this isn’t normal. Ghosts used to be so rare we called them myths.
I’ve peeled the labels off old library books; the ones about ghosts were labeled Fantasy.
The dead stayed in their graves, streetlights were electric, and salt was for seasoning.
We used to have summers that didn’t burn the grass brown, winters where it actually snowed.
Do the math, I whisper in my head, every muscle taut. Please, somebody, do the math. So tense I’m almost vibrating, I crane back around to stare at Mrs. Wilson, but she turns her back on the room, erasing the board with a shrug.
“Ghosts were not as prevalent or as severe as they are in our current climate.”
Current climate? Current climate, like the roving electrical storms are a minor inconvenience?
The scorching summers and wet winters just one-off occurrences we have the misfortune of experiencing every single year?
Global warming, we’re working on it, sip your paper straws and don’t worry about the damage.
I dig my fingernails so hard into my arms I’m probably drawing blood but if I don’t do something to ground myself, I swear, I’ll fly out of this seat.
Current climate? Is that really what the government tells her to call it—what they expect us to swallow without question—when this climate has been current for the last seventeen years?
Seventeen years when it didn’t used to be like this. Seventeen years without a solution.
And yet, we can’t acknowledge either reality: not the lack of solution in nearly two decades, not even the fact that a solution is needed at all.
Never mind that kids die every day by ghost drain and then just…
never go away. Everybody knows which playgrounds to avoid—which childhood friends are still on the swing set waiting for them, frozen in time until everyone forgets them, until they forget the shape of their own face, their height, their own name, and wander, lost, little more than light.
But that’s just current climate. That’s just weather.
God, it must be so easy for Mrs. Wilson to spout their propaganda.
She can see ghosts, sure, but the ghosts don’t see her.
They don’t stare, don’t follow, don’t haunt her like they haunt me.
She has no idea what it’s like to live every moment under the weight of those indistinct eyes, ghostly faces pained, hazy fingers always reaching, pleading.
She can’t feel them suffering, silently begging for help she can’t give.
She doesn’t know what it’s like to fall out of her own body, to wander through the world untethered and aching.
To her, death is just a distant inconvenience. To me, it’s everywhere, every day, in everything.
“Now, with that covered, we can move on to today’s actual lesson,” she announces.
I can’t hear her. I can’t blink. I can’t breathe.
My blood fizzes in my ears. Distantly, I’m aware Sebastian’s watching me, and I know I should smile, I should act normal, you freak, but I can’t make my body respond. “Now, in 1848, Andrew Carnegie—”
The pressure of Sebastian’s attention pivots.
“You’re not even going to talk about why?”
Lightning strikes me in the chest. I spin to look at him, shocked that someone finally said it. Finally, someone is tossing the truth down like a gauntlet they can’t ignore.
Finally, someone who sees it.
Mrs. Wilson’s shoulders tighten. The marker in her hand squeaks, tip flattening on the board.
“We are moving on,” she says, and her tone threatens another kind of everyday magic, an impatient spell for obedience. “If you have further questions, you’re welcome to stay after school to discuss them.”
“That’s it?” Sebastian insists and my nerves sizzle, hyper-aware and floating.
With every word he speaks, I feel an invisible camera zooming in.
“The world broke seventeen years ago and you’re not even going to mention the cause?
You’re really just going to pretend the Ghost Wars didn’t even happen? ”
Mrs. Wilson’s mouth tightens. “That is an ugly conspiracy theory with no place in my classroom.”
“What about the creation of the Department for Necromantic Research? You don’t think it’s the slightest bit weird that our government mumble-coughed ‘hey, we’re gonna study ghost magic now’ into the footnote of a funding bill for climate research?”
“The official government stance—” she starts, but Sebastian grins without humor, shaking his head.
“Oh, please,” he says before she can finish.
“You’re too smart to embarrass yourself like this.
Pretending you actually believe that ghosts boiled up out of the dirt one day because we ‘put too much plastic in it’?
” He glances back at me—a match strike of his dark eyes against mine—before finishing, quieter, as if speaking to me alone now. “That’s an insult to us both.”
The marker cracks into its tray below the board.
“This is world history,” Mrs. Wilson says in the tone of a last warning. “We do not indulge in internet propaganda.”
Sebastian laughs and I don’t know him, but somehow, I know he’s… furious. Under the smile and sparkle, something seethes in him, a twin to the fire ravaging my lungs.
Hidden in my hoodie pocket, I curl a fist into my suddenly aching stomach. I can’t explain why, but just that—his vehemence in the defense of the dead, digging up their inconsistencies and propaganda to toss their rotten bodies into the light—strikes me as unspeakably important.
He sees it. He sees them.
He sees my world full of ghosts, and he can’t let them go either.
“Oh yeah? You sure you don’t want to expand your repertoire? You’ve already memorized all the government lies, what’s a few new ones, right?”