Chapter 2
Sopping wet, I flip down the visor, ripping the mirror open.
Clawing my hair off my neck hard enough to welt, I force it into a ruthless braid.
It improves nothing. A drowned rat glares back at me, pretty as a haunted well, black baby hairs plastered to my forehead and mascara spindling spiderwebs down my cheeks.
Nice. Very funeral chic. Great impression for the third day at a new school.
Screw it. I could try to fix it, but what’s the point?
They say dress for the job you want, right?
Well, I’ve got dibs on hitchhiking ghost. Maybe if I’m lucky a tractor trailer will swipe off the passenger side before we get to school.
There’s been more than the usual number of ghosts cluttering the gutters lately—it’s not like anyone will notice an extra.
Maybe I’ll get real lucky and call dibs on a cozy little culvert.
Failing that, I rub a little salt in the wound. “So, are we going to talk about it, or…?”
Mom slaps on the turn signal with a crack so sharp I check to see if she left any broken plastic behind.
“That man is not your father.”
“You guys clearly have a history.”
“Whether we do or not is none of your business, Persephone,” she snaps. “Believe it or not, I do occasionally have a life outside the care and keeping of a recalcitrant teenager.”
“Occasionally?” I bark a startled laugh. “Occasionally you have a life? When we move two, three times a year, chasing after—what, Mom? My dreams? My ‘care and keeping’? If you’re going to lie to me, at least do a better job.”
“I do not lie,” she bites. Her eyes flare wide, mouth tight, warning me to drop it. “And he had no business speaking to you at all.”
I can’t. I can’t leave it alone any more than I can stop picking a scab—and this is an old scab, covering a festering wound full of pus and unanswered questions.
“Well, you sure don’t tell the truth.” Spinning in my seat, I stare hard at the side of her head, bitterly tempted to grab the wheel and force her to look at me, to answer me.
For once. “Since you’re so honest—tell me, then.
Why do we keep moving? Every time I dare to get comfortable, you uproot me. So, what? What are we running from?”
Mom shakes her head, her fists restless on the wheel. “What did he say to you?”
“It doesn’t matter what he said to me! I’m talking to you. What were you supposed to deal with seventeen years ago?”
My mother presses her lips into a thin, pale line and falls silent.
I know that look. God, I loathe that look.
I’ve seen abandoned buildings more hospitable, more alive with ghosts in every window than the cold, closed-off look in her eyes.
I know I’ll never force her to answer, but I can’t help trying.
“Mom, look at me. Tell me he didn’t come here for me.”
Through her teeth, biting every word, she says, “I am driving.”
Cold water hisses on the fire in my gut. Disgusted, I turn away.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “That’s what I thought.”
Heaving my carpetbag into my lap, I squeeze it close, ignoring the damp seeping through my tights, the wet animal stink of the antique wool.
My fingers know its interior cartography by heart, tracking through the catalog of cluttered pockets with library precision.
I locate my left earbud by the knot I tied in the cord, queue up my playlist by touch alone.
If the blasting music can’t fill up my hollow spaces, at least they’ll echo with a better tune while I wait for my death row march into yet another new school.
Pressing my overheated forehead against the cool window, I stare out at the blurry street, counting all the ghosts along the route.
Most people try not to look at them; I can’t stop.
Something in those hazy blue wisps demands my attention.
Staring dead-eyed through the dash at the dark-dappled morning, I track every little ghost light burning in the gutters and berms, scouring their flickering outlines for some clue of what animal they used to be.
I lose the game more often than I win. After death, ghosts lose themselves, burn down to their memories of what mattered.
Claws and teeth. The outline of a head if someone used to scratch it.
Call it a compulsion, I don’t know. It just…
it matters, okay? Their lives, their deaths—a whole unique spark snuffed out by a careless car tire—and now they’re trapped, lost, maybe hurting, unable to move forward or back.
Hell is empty and all its ghosts are here.
Somebody should at least witness it. Acknowledge that they’re suffering.
I know they’re suffering. I can… Listen, I know it’s crazy, but I swear I can feel it.
Nobody believes me. According to the science—and my mother—I’m an idiot kid playing make-believe.
Some people can’t even see them. For the rest of us who can, the government’s official stance is to ignore them, don’t worry about it, they don’t feel a thing, they’re basically just a new kind of weather, same as spring’s rolling blackouts, summer’s searing droughts, or winter floods.
Just another fun souvenir of the Ghost Wars or climate change, pick whichever equally made-up poison you prefer in your Kool-Aid.
Mom takes it to a religious extreme so strict it’d make a priest weep.
The only way I know for sure she can see them at all is that she ignores them the same way she ignores me.
Jaw hard, shoulders rigid, she pulls into the school’s ghost-proof iron gates at a crawl, swinging wide to avoid the little blue flicker sitting at the very edge of the grass berm.
Ghosts rarely stray far from their death site—trapped forever in the bone-crunching loop of their last fifteen minutes—and this one’s no different, sitting on a stain in the asphalt.
Its little head turns, following our progress as we trundle past the guardhouse and are waved through by the bored-looking, balding man inside.
Not that it’s supposed to do that. Ghosts seek out electricity sometimes, sure—that’s how people get ghost-drained, hungry ghosts listing off course toward living bioelectricity that got too close—but they’re not technically aware.
They’re not supposed to react to stimuli.
They’re certainly not supposed to react to me.
To only me.
I brought it up once. Mom refused to look at me. She called it a random coincidence, a morbid fascination, and told me, “If you feel the need to fabricate facetious experiences out of a desire to feel important, Persephone, you should channel that energy into something productive instead.”
She didn’t have an answer when I asked if that meant she’d ever leave the stupid basement long enough to drive me to something productive. No, she just grounded me and told me never to mention it again. So I don’t. But I don’t stop watching.
I stare at this one now, nose practically pressed to the window, hunting down every little detail.
No claws, no obvious teeth. A rabbit maybe, or a squirrel. Except… rabbits and squirrels don’t usually watch me like that, head inching around to track us as we pass. The empathy-ache squeezes my lungs so hard I have to dig my knuckles into my sternum for a gasp of relief.
God, I think it’s a dog.
My right hand spasms on the door handle. I could just… open it? At five miles an hour, it wouldn’t even hurt. Hell, the ghost is so close, right there on the edge of the road, I could just lean out. I could—
My thoughts fog and scatter. Could… what? It’s dead. There’s nothing I can do. And ghosts siphon off electricity from anything nearby. If I touched it, it would eat the electricity out of my brain and heart, leave me deader than catatonic disassociation in under sixty seconds.
So why do I feel like I need to? Why is my every aching nerve ending screaming at me to open this door? To cuddle that little light close? What is this bone-deep certainty that if I could just touch it, I could let it know it’s not alone, I’m here, I understand—
Mom punches a finger into the lock button. She holds it there so long even the car protests, beeping a sullen complaint.
“Nice try. You’re not getting out here. Since apparently, I can’t trust you to walk ten feet on your own power, I am going to pull up to the school and watch you walk in.”
“And if you’d just let me get a GED, you wouldn’t have to watch me walk anywhere,” I snarl back.
But we’ve rehashed this argument so many times we’ve worn holes in it.
Mom’s attention plummets straight through the fraying gaps and she doesn’t bother to listen this time any more than she ever did.
Windshield wipers on high for a drizzle, headlights blasting through the barely dim outside, she creeps us up the road.
For what? A minute ago, she had somewhere to be in a hurry, furious that I made her late to work.
Now, kids on the weed-eaten sidewalk outpace us without even trying, taking this slow-moving opportunity to gawp at the weird new kid with her funeral eyes and sopping hair.
My cheeks burn. I want to kick the door open so bad my bones echo with anticipated impact.
Mom must be savoring this. God, my discomfort must be like cocaine to her.
Locked in her elaborate show of slow-rolling up the hill, her performative little turtle crawl catching the attention of the entire school, I stare at her, silently daring.
Go on. Just say it. Stop pretending we haven’t acted out every scene of this script so many times I memorized my lines from the brackets around your frowning mouth, your furrowed brows, your constant weaponized disappointment.
Just get it over with. Make it all my fault, my responsibility.
Make it because of me, for my own good, none of my business, a learning experience—
But Mom just pulls over, tires gently butting the curb, and says, “Learn something new today.”
I can’t breathe. Something like a laugh catches crookedly on the fury blocking my throat, too thick to choke down.