Chapter 9
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Flying admit that you built it. Look me in the face and tell me I was right, that something is rotten between us—that something in me is missing—and has been for a long time. Tell me the truth, I dare you.
Strained, my mother looks away.
She says, “Learn something new today.”
Once again, I already have. And not from this farce of a school system.
I climb out of the car and into a wall of pressure so intense I damn near face-plant onto the ground.
Walking the short distance to the front doors feels like wading through gelatin, the air unbreathable, a physical weight climbing my shoulders and shoving me down.
I’ve weathered ghost storms before, but none of them hurt like this, every nerve in my body blazing with a searing, desperate awareness, ears pricked and straining for every rustle and whisper.
I can hear them. All of them. There are hundreds—maybe more. Ghost lights in the woods. Muted sobbing from the weeds, an anxious stirring. Suffering.
The strange pressure barely alleviates inside the building, once I’m supposedly safe within its lackluster wards.
I stumble through the entryway, hyper-aware of every eye on me, the distant gaze from the woods tracking my progress, the impatient neediness of a hundred waiting ghosts a cold current down my spine.
I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t think.
I can’t see. I need to find Bas. I stagger forward, groping toward the stairs—maybe he’ll be waiting for me in the library?
—but before I can reach the door, I collide straight into the vice principal.
He laughs at my look of surprise when he leads me to the in-school suspension room.
Blinking between dreams, I find I’m the only one assigned there.
“Did you think you were going to spend the day sitting with your boyfriend?” he asks, chuckling at his own dumb self. “Obviously not.”
Idiotic bullying, designed to make me feel smaller—but infuriatingly, it works.
I shuffle to my seat, red to my burning ears, feeling every mortifying inch of my flesh-and-bone body.
Last night I shed my mortal body, thwarted an entire basement designed to kill me, and sucked power from the power grid like a milkshake, but today I’m just a helpless teenager, small and limited and in-school suspended.
All because a middle-aged man who peaked in high school mentioned my boyfriend.