Chapter 13
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“This Is Why We Fight” by The Decemberists
I read once that the absence of evidence doesn’t mean evidence of absence—that you can’t prove something’s missing just by pointing at the empty place where it should have been, since you have no proof it ever existed in the first place.
Fair, I guess. But in my case, isn’t the absence weird enough?
Steely-faced, my mother drags me outside.
Sun beams down from a cheerful blue sky, dancing in mud puddles and on the wet grass.
Eerie. Like some lost god pulled a sleeve over their divine fist and wiped away the storm, the army of ghosts, their suffering.
Only the kicked ants’ nest of local police swarming along the drive prove anything’s happened at all.
Mom takes one look at the horde of flashing lights, a black van pulling up in defiance of a One Way sign, and grips my shoulder hard.
She steers me down the side of the building, away from the crying, hiccupping crowd and stressed officers trying to cordon off the area and take statements at the same time.
An officer rolling out crime scene tape shouts something in our direction, but Mom pretends not to hear him, striding toward the parking lot with official-looking purpose.
She also pretends not to hear the girl on the outskirts of the crowd wailing, “The room was so cold, and we couldn’t get away from them.
The door was still barred; we had nowhere to go.
But they were only interested in her. She just, like—ate them.
She held out her arms and they walked right into her and disappeared. ”
A muscle twitches in Mom’s jaw. The police officer calls again. With a frustrated wave, she slaps his concern out of the air, cuts us between two big police vans.
The voice trails after us, hiccupping but clear. “Why did she do that? Is she dead? She has to be dead, right?”
Mouth set in a thin, grim line, Mom yanks my hood up over my head and shucks out of her own coat, ripping it inside out.
“Put it on,” she says.
I start to protest—I have a hoodie; why is she giving me her coat when all she’s wearing is a silk blouse?
—but the look on her face… Mom stares in the side mirror of the police van, angling it with one long finger so she can watch around the hood of the car behind her, and it reminds me of Cain.
His craggy lighthouse gaze echoes in the way she scans her corners, gauging the distance between us and the car, then between us and the massive black vans, emblazoned with an upside-down caduceus and two dripping snakes: Department of Necromantic Research in tight, white font.
The school nurse stands in the middle of it all, funky scrubs at odds with the hard look on her face and the official black tablet in her hands.
She barks out orders, carving ghost-drained kids from the herd of mildly shell-shocked ones with cold efficiency, slicing them off into a knot of nearby ambulances or over to the queue of orange juice and Costco-cookie-laden folding tables.
Now, I know enough to know this is standard procedure for a Remnant Contact Event—on-site medical care right there in black-and-white government vans—and with that setup in our basement, I know my mom knows it too.
I was ghost-touched. I should be over there.
Heck, I should be dead. And the fact that Mom’s here at all means someone from the school called her, told her at least some of what happened.
Even if they didn’t, even if she only saw it on the news, that girl out front was screaming loud enough I’m sure passing cars a half mile away could hear. Mom knows what happened to me.
What I did.
Yet she watches through the side mirror until the nurse turns away to talk to a paramedic.
Steering me in front of her, she marches me across the parking lot, folds me into her car with a hand on my head, and practically jumps across the hood to climb in.
She doesn’t even bother to back up, just throws the car in drive and inches out into the muddy field, cutting straight for the driveway.
The driveway, I can’t help noticing, is eerily free of ghosts. I scan the tree line but can’t find a single staring eye.
All this absence—tell me it’s not evidence of something. That it’s not evidence of what I did, what I am.
It’s high time Mom told me what the hell that something is.
Awkward in my mom’s wool coat, I fold my arms, glaring at her rigid profile, willing her to open her mouth.
God, can she not just admit it, even now?
Is the truth that bad? Is something that wrong with me?
Or is she just embarrassed? Am I some shameful thing, some old mistake she can’t even bear to look at?
And every time I fuck up—every time I fail a test or “dissociate” or do something strange—she’s gotta run away again in shame?
I make it all the way to the corner gas station before my fragile patience cracks, an echo in my ears like boiling water in a broken glass.
“So, here?” I demand. “Or did you actually mean not ever, like always?”
Mom stares at the stoplight with her whole attention, fists so tight on the wheel her knuckles lose all color. She stays quiet long enough I almost give up, chest aching, sure she’s not going to answer at all.
At last, she says, “There’s a lot I can’t tell you.”
“Won’t,” I snap.
“Can’t,” she insists. “By contractual obligation and sworn oath.”
You know, that’s almost worse? I’d rather the silence than this childish insult to my intelligence. I snort, shaking my head. It’s not even a good lie.
“Some old promise is more important than your own kid. Figures.”
“No. Nothing is more important to me than you.” She rips her eyes off the road to glance at me, seeking out my eyes with every break in traffic, every hesitation at a stop sign. My face burns. My gut twists. I have to swallow twice to choke it down.
“Why do you keep glancing at me? Checking to see if I believe it?” I clench my fists around the handle of my carpetbag, hard enough the line of stitching sears my palms. “You didn’t even have the medics look me over.”
Something flickers across her face, faster than I can track it. “Did you need them to?”
“No! And that’s weird, Mom!” I protest. “I shouldn’t be fine, I should be dead. How are you so calm right now? A human ghost swarm broke through the fence and raided the school, and you haven’t even asked me what happened.”
“I know what happened.”
“Oh yeah, of course. Because you were there and you know everything. Fine.” I throw up my hands. “Great, even! So explain it to me, then. What the hell happened today?”
Suddenly, traffic consumes her full attention.
Quietly, staring dead ahead, she says, “You saved your teacher’s life.”
The wind rushes out of me like a punch to the chest. I suck in an unsteady breath.
“He’s… okay? He’ll be okay?” My hands spasm on the handle of my bag, the appendages of a distant stranger. My soul slips a little from my seams and for a second, I’m afraid if I shut my eyes I’ll slam right back into the corner of that classroom, cupping the vital flame of a man’s life in my hands.
He burned so brightly, a living bonfire against the backs of my fingers as I peeled the cold and clinging dead away, gathering them close.
But, no—I shake it off, digging my fingernails into my wrist, grounding myself in the pain. My mom can’t know that. She’s just trying to distract me.
“The school wouldn’t have known that, and no medic would have told you.”
“Believe it or not, I know more people than your school administration.”
“So your desk jockey friends, then? Like Bas’s babynapper said?” I snap. The shot lands—Mom’s mouth tightens. “Oh, let me guess, you don’t wanna talk about that?”
Mom falls silent for a second.
“Is that what he calls him?” she asks at last. “His babynapper?”
“Yeah.” I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. I gather up my bag to my chest, holding it tight enough to dig the edge of my cellphone against me, its hard edge a reassurance, all my secrets safe where she can’t pick-pick-pick them apart even if she’s about to give it the ol’ college try.
I glance at her, trying to figure out her face. “What? It’s a joke.”
Mom sighs. She swallows.
“It isn’t, actually,” she says with a weird, quiet surety.
Anger flares so hot and bright it burns, my skin flaming, itching like poison ivy under all this inside-out wool.
“What is your issue with him?” I snarl. Fighting the seat belt down, I rip my way out of her coat, tossing it onto the floor-well regardless of the mud on my boots. “What, you had a bad breakup with his babynapper so now you’ve got a hate-on for Bas? You slapped him the second you saw him.”
Mom sucks in a breath. Here we go—
“He willfully endangered your life, prevented me from reaching you in an emergency, prevented medical aid from reaching you in said emergency—”
“Which you agreed I didn’t need!”
“I couldn’t know that at the time,” she insists.
“You can’t know it now, either. You dragged me out of that parking lot before anyone even saw me. Cain is right, you are running from something.” I punch the car door, voice rising. “Does it have something to do with Bas? You hated him before you even knew for sure he existed.”
“It… does. And it doesn’t. I… know more about him than I can say.” Mom hesitates. She chews the inside of her cheek, adds, “Legally.”
“So break the law. Tell me illegally. What, you think the feds are listening?” I demand, whirling around in my seat to stare at her. “Did they bug the car, Mom? What am I that they would care so much?”
Color flares high in her cheeks. “You are my daughter. You have never been anything other than my daughter.”
“So why did Cain call me a weapon?”