33
I staggered out of the construction site, my phone clutched tenderly in my claw. I was covered with mud and cement dust, my joints stiff from it. The color had been scraped off my metal limbs, and my screws wobbled, frayed and loose.
Time was still slow, but even if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have had the energy to do anything about it. It took all I had just to walk across the lot, climb out through the hole in the mesh fence, and totter into a small, scrubby patch of brush, thick with wild blackberries and spiderwebs.
I collapsed, my remaining legs bent, broken, and rattling. I couldn’t stop shaking. I wanted to scream. Perhaps I was screaming. Perhaps that was what the deafening ringing echoing through my skull was. A howl, raw and raging, terrible and triumphant.
I’d won. I’d done exactly what I’d sworn I’d do, sitting on the shelf in my grandma’s workroom.
It didn’t feel like I’d thought it would.
It felt better. It felt worse. It felt like there’d been a sword through me, cutting deeper and deeper, and now I’d finally pulled it out, was finally free, finally bleeding out.
I thought of Grandma as she’d been when I last saw her, pale and worn. Then I pushed the memory down and replaced it with one of her singing in the kitchen, glasses foggy, voice high and happy.
I thought of Cookie barking through the walls. I swapped it out with a memory of him snoring loud enough to shake the curtains, paws twitching as he chased a rabbit in his dreams.
I thought of Nicola.
I thought of the way she’d looked at Ginger’s tea party, half hidden behind a curtain of hair, freckles poking through her foundation, eyes sleepy and playful and curious all at once.
I thought of how she’d looked at Trash N’ Treasure, the red of her uniform faded from one too many washes.
I thought of her smile, the one she’d shown me when we sat out by her letter box, toothy and cheeky and wildly beautiful.
I thought of her getting back to an empty house and knew with gut-kick certainty that I couldn’t do that to her, not again. She’d done so much for me, and I’d done too much to her. I’d won. I’d fulfilled my promise. But I wasn’t abandoning her. Not again.
I flipped open my phone and dialed her number from memory, the press of my claws scratching the buttons on the keypad.
I hadn’t wanted to use the contact list in case something went wrong, in case someone found the phone.
As the phone rang, I felt a corkscrew of uncertainty worm through me.
What if I’d gotten the number wrong? What if I couldn’t call her? What if—
“Hello?” Nicola’s voice crackled out of my phone, distant and confused.
“Hey,” I said, breathy with relief. “It’s me.”
“Oh shit. Lu. Hi. You OK?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Right. OK. I’m driving Ginger home now. Will be home in about—”
“I’m not at your house.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m sorry. It was crazy. I didn’t think it would work. And then I was going to walk back, but it’s late and I just didn’t . . . I didn’t want you to get home and it be empty again and . . .”
“Where are you?”
“I’ve done something really stupid.”
“Where. Are. You?”
“I’m at the construction site. I—”
Time swirled forward, so sharply, so suddenly, that I jerked back in shock, the phone sliding out of my claw. The roar of the nearby road became a high, angry whine. The moon raced gleefully up the sky, a puppy with a broken chain.
Numbly, I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised. I’d been slowing down time all night, pushing back, keeping it contained. Eventually, it had to push back. The dam was breaking; I was breaking. I felt weak and wrung out, small and threadbare.
With a shaking claw, I picked up the phone and held it up. The call timer was whirling upward, higher and higher. Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty. Nicola didn’t hang up. If she was saying anything, I couldn’t hear it.
A short, high-pitched sound prickled in my ears, repetitive and persistent, like the chirping of a fire alarm or the buzzing of an alarm clock. It took me a moment to realize it was a voice, a human voice, calling my name over and over again, relentless and angry. “Lu! Lu! LUUU!”
Nic?
Instantly, she was there, kicking down the blackberry bush in a blur, seizing me in long, sweaty arms, and crushing me to her chest, as soft as a brick wall, as careful as a plane crash.
Her heart buzzed hot and frantic against my porcelain cheek, her breath blasted against my limbs, fast, and furious.
Words tumbled from her lips, too fast for me to follow as her fingers scrubbed over what remained of my head, finding the new cracks and turning painfully gentle in an instant.
I wished she wouldn’t do that. I wished she’d hug me tighter, tight enough to crush the atoms between us, to suffocate all the feelings smashing and screaming inside me.
Her face swam into view, bathed in yellow light. She said something else, voice like electricity, still too fast to understand.
I was more exhausted than I thought possible, stretched, thinned, frayed, and faded.
But I couldn’t leave her. I pushed back against the time stream, pushed with everything I had.
Reluctantly, the world slowed, sharpened, and came into focus.
When it did, Nicola was standing by her car.
It was parked, doors hanging open, headlights spearing light into the trees.
As time returned to normal, the glitchy, graphical noise hanging in the light resolved itself into insects.
Fat, bumbling beetles, dust-colored moths, and a couple of long-limbed crickets with wings that hummed.
“. . . don’t understand,” Nicola was saying, voice dipping into my auditory range. “I don’t understand why she’s here. I . . .”
“You don’t understand?” Ginger stepped into the light, arms wrapped around her middle, eyes wide and shoulders shaking.
It was the first time I’d seen her, really seen her, since I’d died.
I hated that she was still beautiful. Hair a tangle of tight curls, cheeks pinked rose, and lips pert and perfect.
“What are we doing here, Nicola?” she asked in a voice that teetered uncertainly upward, a question, but not one she sounded like she wanted to know the answer to. “Why is Kyle’s car here? Where is—”
“Do you care?” Nicola asked. “Do you really care where he is after everything you heard tonight?”
“I . . . no, but . . .” Her gaze flicked to me and back to Nicola. “What’s that toy? Why does it have a phone? Where’s your friend? What’s going on?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You owe me—”
“No,” Nicola snapped. “No. I’m sorry, but I don’t owe you a thing. I’m tired, Ginger. I’m really tired. So, if it’s all right by you, I’m taking my weird, gross, spooky, lying doll and I’m going ho—”
Hey.
She jerked in surprise. “Lu? You’re awake?”
I don’t sleep. I go f—
“Who are you talking to?” Ginger asked. “God. Nicola. What have you done?”
“What have I done?” Nicola rounded back on Ginger. “I drove you hundreds of kilometers to talk to someone who told you exactly what I told you a year ago. I held your hand while you cried about it.”
Shame was etched into every line on Ginger’s face. Still, her eyes weren’t sticking on Nicola; they kept falling to me, then snapping back, uncertain and scared. I curled my legs up, hooking a couple into Nicola’s shirt, anchoring myself to her.
“Lu,” Nicola said, softly, pulling me around so I could see her better. Her cheeks were flushed beneath her freckles, her eyes bright. “I need to know. Is Kyle here? What happened to him?”
He’s gone.
“Gone?” There was a strange sort of intensity in her voice. “Gone where?”
I didn’t answer.
“You got him, didn’t you.” She said it not as a question but rather a realization, a revelation, the sort people have in church with their eyes closed and hands in the air. “You got him.”
“Nicola,” Ginger said. “Nicola, you’re scaring me.”
Nicola closed her eyes and took a deep breath that hitched and shivered in the back of her throat.
“Nicola?”
“I don’t want to scare you,” Nicola said, opening her eyes. “I don’t. I just . . . I can’t explain this, OK? I can’t—”
“I need you to try.”
“No. No, I—”
“Your friend called,” Ginger said. “We came here to look for them, and that’s my husband’s car. I know you hate him. I know that. I know why, and I know I let you down, but please, you have to tell me if—”
“If I killed him?” Nicola asked. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You think I killed him.”
Ginger’s silence said it all.
“I’ve been with you all night, Ginger.”
“Who?” Ginger said. “Who called you? Who did we come here to see?”
“You’re not going to believe me.”
“Try me.”
Nicola’s face twisted into a dry, pained smile. “Lucy,” she said after a while. “I’m here for Lucy.”
“Lucy’s gone,” Ginger said, her hands in front of her, palms forward, like she was facing down a velociraptor, not one of her oldest friends. “She’s been gone for ye—”
“No. She’s dead, but she’s not gone. She’s .
. . fuck. Fuck. I know you think I’m crazy.
I thought I was crazy when this started.
But I’m not. She’s here. She really is. Ghosts are real.
Or, well, one of them is. I looked for others, back when I was still trying to wrap my head around it all.
I went around the graveyard and dropped a ‘knock knock’ at every plot, just to see if someone spooky would pop up with a ‘who’s there?
’ but they were as silent as the . . . well.
You know. Which, like, is statistically improbable, right?
If there’s one ghost, there’s got to be more.
But if there are, I haven’t found them. I’ve only ever found Lucy. Or, really, she found me. She—”
You went ghost hunting without me?