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The dead girl needed to come back to life and then the credits needed to roll.
No blood, no guts, no evil queen being made to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes.
A nice happy ending for a nice happy movie—no revenge, no ugliness, just a golden castle in the sky.
And, honestly, I like it. I like the way the music swells when Snow White opens her eyes, the exaggerated expressions of joy drawn on the faces of all the dwarfs.
Grumpy no longer grumpy. Sleepy wide awake and dancing.
It’s so good, I don’t even care that it’s corny as hell.
Because sometimes you need a fantasy, a happy ending, a rotoscoped prince to ride in on a white horse and deliver true love’s first kiss, a little late, but hey, postage is free, and now you get to live happily ever after.
A prince didn’t save me; Nicola did, and she sure as shit didn’t do it with a kiss.
She picked me up off that shelf and glued me back together.
She screamed back at me when I screamed at her.
She sat with me in the mud on my dog’s grave and took me home wrapped in her rain jacket.
And now, years later, she’s still with me, still saving me, with a smirk, a wry comment, a hoarse, happy laugh, better than any prince. A thousand times better.
I love her. I love her more than anything.
She’s with Ginger now, and they’re a good couple. A great couple. An iconic couple. Clark Kent and Lois Lane energy. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t sometimes make me jealous. But the truth is, I’m not even sure who or what I’m jealous of.
It’s been a long time since high school, sitting at the back of the room with Krissy, rolling my eyes at Ginger’s sparkly pink pen all while pretending I wasn’t captivated by the way she sucked on her bottom lip.
It’s been even longer since I was a kid in primary school, throwing dirt at the kids that called me a lesbian.
I’ve had time to think about myself, my feelings, and accept that what little sexuality I have is definitely zeroed in on women.
And that’s fine. It’s awesome, actually. It’s a relief to realize that not only was I holding on to some internalized bullshit, but that bullshit was something I could let go of.
I use both the labels ace and lesbian now.
Who cares if it confuses some people? It’s how I feel.
An ace lesbian. A lesbian ace. An acebian, if you will.
A lesbace. Nonsense is real and it’s beautiful.
Honesty for me means rejecting neat categories and embracing the chaos.
The Snark was a Boojum, and I can be what I am too, even if I’m dead.
And hell, maybe one day, I’ll find someone to match my freak. Frankenstein got a bride, after all. Perhaps somewhere there’s a suave, sassy sapphic haunting one of those robotic T. rex toys who wants to snuggle.
Until then, I’m third wheeling Ginger and Nicola.
Weirdly, they seem happy to have me around.
I’m a good babysitter. Rowan—Ginger’s son, who has curly blond hair and eyes like Krissy—loves spooky stories, and I love telling them, whispering to him late at night through the baby monitor.
Most of my stories are just reworked classics.
Pride and Prejudice, but the Bennet sisters use necromancy to turn their father into a corpse-puppet so his will never comes into effect.
Dracula, but his brides change the castle locks during his passport-bro era.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, except the Hatter journeys through a portal of his own to kill Willy Wonka and free the Oompa-Loompas.
Rowan loves them all. What can I say? The kid has taste.
And if all the bad guys in my stories end up buried alive, so what?
“Don’t be a tool or you’ll end up drowning in cement” isn’t the worst moral to impart onto a four-year-old.
We’re all doing our part to raise the lad up right, after all.
Ginger helps him with his speech issues, Nicola makes sure he eats his food, and I keep him company at night, teaching all the important life lessons.
He’s even taken me to daycare a couple of times.
The staff there hate me, but the kids aren’t scared.
A generation raised on Toy Story. A haunted doll couldn’t ask for better propaganda.
I play with them when the staff aren’t watching and make rude gestures behind the staff’s backs whenever they call me creepy.
Which is fair, because I’m not even that creepy anymore.
Nicola found me a new body, one of those wooden figurines that artists use, and Ginger made me a suit with a top hat and tails to fit it.
The shattered remains of my face had to be glued onto the wooden head, Phantom of the Opera style.
If I ever want it, my metal spider body is in the shed, waiting.
But for now, I’m serving sexy Regency Pinocchio.
It’s hot, I swear.
Maybe not as hot as a human bod would be, but we work with what we’ve got. And I am working it. I’m good at being a haunted doll now. I’m used to it. Better at controlling time, though sometimes it still slips away from me. Better at controlling my grief, though sometimes I lose hold of that too.
When I see green carpet.
When I remember a freckle that I used to have that I’ll never see again.
When I think of Krissy, who still hasn’t accepted what Kyle was and sees Rowan only at family gatherings because she hasn’t forgiven Ginger or Nicola for everything that happened.
But I’m not giving up. I’m not letting this be the end of me.
And I guess that’s why I wanted to write this.
I wanted to understand what happened to me.
I wanted to piece together the moments that led me here, to this place, with Nicola, and Ginger, and Rowan, and Cookie the Second, who is a fluffy white Pomeranian and looks nothing like Cookie the First but also likes belly rubs.
He spends most of his days at Lu’s Antiques, Oddities, and Curiosities, which is the store Nicola and Ginger started last year. I do most of the admin, while they work the floor, doing the hard stuff. Stocking shelves, marking prices, chatting to customers.
This isn’t a fairy tale. The dead girl isn’t coming back to life. I will never be whole again. What happened to me won’t be fixed. But—the good news is—what happened to Kyle can’t be fixed either.
The police’s manhunt never went very far, and after five years of no leads, I’m pretty sure the case has been slid quietly onto the back burner.
Everyone’s saying he hopped the country.
Argentina, Thailand, Luxembourg, Fiji, Canada, Antarctica.
There’ve been a lot of theories. But so far no one’s guessed the failing megamall’s parking garage with cold spots and electrical issues that no one seems to be able to fix.
It doesn’t matter.
Kyle doesn’t matter.
But what he did to me does.
What happened to me can never be undone.
I can’t go back to who and what I was before.
True love’s kiss isn’t real. I’m not going to wake up again, alive and healed and happy.
And that sucks. It really fucking sucks.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the end. Actually, for the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m at the beginning of something, like this whole time I’ve been climbing up a mountain, staring at my hands and feet on the rock, and only now, standing at the peak, can I see how far I’ve come, and all the places I could still go.
The future, stretching over the horizon, misty and uncertain, but there.
Ghost Lore Fact #3: The secret ingredient is anger a big fat question mark.
I don’t know what’s driving me forward. I don’t know if it’s hope, or will, or spite, or fear.
All I know is I don’t want to fade away, no matter what’s written on the script, no matter how nice and neat that ending would be.
I don’t want to pretend everything broken has been magically repaired either.
I want to continue, to get back what pieces of my life I can.
I won’t be the same as I was—I can’t be—but that doesn’t mean I can’t still be me.
Just because I’m small now, and damaged, and a little fucked up, that doesn’t mean I have to vanish. Just because I checked revenge off of my to-do list, that doesn’t mean I have to peace out. I may be dead, but I’m not done. I’m not.
Ghost Lore Fact #5: You decide when you’re ready to go, no one else. Fuck the storybook ending.