Chapter 13
“How did you manage to stitch the word astrophysics and an atom on the cover of this tiny book?”
Arden brandishes my crochet Katherine Johnson doll at me.
“Patience and a lot of swearing,” I say. We both laugh.
I’m squashed in my beanbag chair on the other side of the room, trying not to die of embarrassment as Arden sifts through all my Great Women of History.
Not that they seem to find it something to be ashamed of: Each one they inspect seems to be cooler to them than the last. Still, it feels like their fingers are in my brain, scrounging around.
They don’t have class on Fridays, so I invited Arden over for the afternoon to help me put together some design plans for the upstairs. But we haven’t made it out of the den yet, because they’ve been sitting under the window marveling at my crochet dolls since they arrived.
A flash of motion catches my attention. A squirrel dances from branch to branch in the big oak tree outside.
I can just glimpse his shorter left ear when he pauses between jumps.
Dale. He hasn’t snuck back in the house yet, but he’s a permanent fixture around the property.
Crashing through the trees. Filling the planter on the back porch with acorns, tree bark, and god knows what else.
Swinging like Tarzan from the bird feeder Mom hung on the front of the house.
He doesn’t even bolt at our approach anymore.
At this point, I think we’re stuck with him.
Arden tosses me Katherine Johnson and begins cooing over Charlotte Bronte.
Rising to my feet, I collect the pile of dolls and yarn on the floor.
They’d somehow all toppled out while I was in the shower, and Arden showed up before I could put them away.
Hence our extended tour through the Great Women of History.
I turn to set the basket in its home by the door only to find someone standing there.
I shriek, and the dolls end up back on the floor.
Theo shakes his head at me. “For someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, you’re super jumpy.” He glances over at Arden. “I video-called her the other day, and she practically leapt out of her skin.”
Arden narrows their eyes. “Who died?”
Theo’s mouth drops open at the same time as I burst out laughing. I like Arden more and more every day.
“You’re all misanthropes.” Theo grips the frame above the door, his broad shoulders expanding as he leans into the room. There’s something familiar in the way he and Arden interact.
“You know each other?” Arden’s at least a year older than us.
“Our high school barely had two hundred people in it,” Theo explains. “Everyone knew everyone.”
Nightmare fodder. “Mine had like a thousand.” And that had still seemed suffocatingly small after Marjorie made me feel like the entire student body was watching me and laughing. Imagine if there were few enough people that that could actually have been possible.
Theo angles himself into the room, a vampire trying to force their way into a house they haven’t been invited into. Being still seems to be a struggle for him. “Sorry to interrupt. I was just wondering if you were completely ignoring my text messages now.”
He’s checked in like three times since Wednesday to make sure I’m still on board for setting up whatever ghost trap he has planned. I stopped replying after the first one.
“I already told you we could go bowling with your devil’s marble tonight. But right now, I have company.” I flourish a hand at Arden.
“What’s a devil’s marble?” Arden asks.
“Ghostbusting paraphernalia.” Those movies with the silly contraptions are the only things I can think of anytime Theo talks about the logistics of ghost hunting.
(Taylor loves that entire franchise and makes me watch all the movies every Halloween.
She says that Egon Spengler is the only man she’d ever consider marrying—lesbian or not.)
Theo looks at me in disgust. “Ghostbusters is fiction.”
This boy should win an Olympic gold medal for absurd opinions.
“Theo’s conducting a ghost hunt.” I stop myself from adding that he is going to be sorely disappointed by the results.
I’ve been living in the Harlow Homestead for almost two weeks, and besides a weirdly territorial squirrel, some construction mishaps, and that hideous picture still stuck on the wall upstairs, things have been completely uneventful.
If this place were actually haunted—if ghosts actually existed, which is a big, honking if—my mom and I would have been the first to confirm it.
Theo’s gaze registers the mess around us, and he bends to retrieve the closest doll. “Did you make this?” He displays it in his palm.
“Yup.” The heat in my face could compete with the surface of the sun. I’m not sure I’m ready for Theo to see the weird side of me. I’ve already been blabbering and awkward enough around him.
But there’s nothing but admiration in his face. “Are you serious? This is the NASA scientist, right? Katherine something?”
“Johnson.” My knees tremble a little. I put tons of detail into each doll, but it still blows my mind when someone recognizes them.
“She did all these too.” Arden drops to their knees to collect the other dolls. Theo immediately does the same.
I flop back down on my beanbag chair and curl up as tightly as I can. Theo holds up each new doll at me like I don’t already know them all.
“Charlotte Bronte.”
“Correct.”
“Joan of Arc.”
I nod.
“Amy Poehler?” He sounds a little less certain this time.
“She’s an icon, but that’s supposed to be Taylor Swift. I haven’t finished her guitar.”
“You’re a wizard,” he murmurs.
My stomach twists, but not in that heavy, painful way that accompanies my social anxiety. This is warm. Soft. A hot bath. A cozy blanket. Something to sink into.
“I use patterns.” At least to start. I had to do some improvisation with most of them since no one but me seems interested in crocheting famous women.
“So what? I couldn’t do this”—he uses Taylor Swift to gesture—“with a pattern, a teacher, and someone literally guiding my hands.”
He’s being too nice. Most people don’t look this closely at me. They don’t care about seeing me. But Theo’s now peering at my RBG doll like it’s a Pulitzer Prize. Then those moss-colored eyes shift to me and the expression in them doesn’t change.
My heart leaps to my throat. I push to my feet before I choke on it. “Now’s as good a time as any to set up your marble, right?”
Arden stands too. “Can I come?”
I shrug and look to Theo.
“The more the merrier,” he says. Then he sets down RBG and selects Charlotte Bronte again. He tucks her into the front pocket of his T-shirt. “Okay if she joins us?”
I blink at him in question.
“I really liked Jane Eyre.” His words seem to be saying something more than that, but my brain can’t compute anything. Not with my pulse pounding like the beat of a torrential rainstorm.
“Plus,” he adds as he heads for the door, “she’ll be able to help us if we run into Rochester’s wife, Bertha.” He glances between Arden and me. “You know. From the book.”
“She was in the attic.” I trail behind him. The last thing I need is Theo summoning ghosts and madwomen to my new room.
Three flashlight beams dance down the second-floor hallway.
Even on a bright day, in the middle of the afternoon, it’s dark up here, since we aren’t worrying about the upstairs lighting yet.
Mom’s been tracking the moving company like she’s a missile specialist, and it looks like they’ll be here by the weekend, but until the drywall is up and painted and the windows are replaced, there isn’t much point in moving into my rooms. Most of my stuff will go into the den for now.
Theo has pulled out his trusty EMF meter and is walking up and down the hallway. “Trying to find the strongest spirit activity for the marble,” he explains. Arden and I aren’t sure what to do, so we keep our lights trained on him, illuminating him like he’s the star of a Broadway show.
They lean into me as we watch Theo disappear into the bathroom—“To check for any frequencies,” he reassures us. As if we thought he was going to use the toilet with the door wide open.
“What’s going on with you two?” Arden asks.
You’d think a spider crawled across my face the way I jump a thousand feet in the air. “What?”
“You two.” They point at the bathroom, then at me. “There’s electricity.”
I shake my head. “There is frustration”—I tap my chest, then gesture in Theo’s direction—“and there is nonsense.”
“Okay, but he looks at you like you hung the moon.”
“Because I’m letting him use all his gadgets to try to find ghosts in my house. That’s like saying there’s electricity between a dog and whoever feeds them.”
Arden presses their lips together until they’re flat. “Uh-huh.” When I don’t go on, they add, “He’s a really good guy.”
“He’s two steps away from building a bunker.”
Arden lets out a loud laugh. A chortle, even. It’s a great sound.
“He went to prom with me, you know.”
I do my best to disguise my surprise. For whatever reason, I assumed that, like me, Theo skipped the prom.
That he didn’t have a date either. But that’s not really fair.
I don’t know him that well. And everything I do know screams life of the party and oh hey, I’ll happily serve the punch and start the conga line.
I guess I wanted to have something in common with him. I’m not a fan of the strange twist this realization summons to my insides.
“Did he bring his EMF meter?” I joke.
Arden snorts. “He wore a nice tux and no proton pack.”
I do my damnedest not to picture Theo in a tuxedo.
Arden’s fingers comb at the icy-blue tips of their hair.
“I didn’t come out as nonbinary until my senior year.
Nobody was outright mean to me, but this place isn’t exactly P-town.
There were like three kids in the GSA and I was the only one that wasn’t a freshman.
All my other queer friends had graduated. ”
“That had to suck.”
“I felt pretty alone.”
My stomach drops. I wish I could turn back time and change that for them. Loneliness can be one of the worst kinds of pain. And Arden has gone out of their way to make sure I don’t have to experience that here.
“As the yearbook photographer, it was sort of mandatory that I go to prom to document it, but I was determined to go as me: tuxedo jacket, bow tie, black tutu, and combat boots.”
“Iconic,” I say.
Arden grins. “Theo was waiting outside the country club. We didn’t know each other that well, but he and Matt usually sat at my lunch table and we’d chat. He told me he was there to make sure I had a good night.”
That warm, squishy feeling returns to my insides, and I want Theo to come back into the hallway so I can throw something at his head.
Arden smiles. “And I did. The best time, actually. I got a ton of compliments on my outfit, and people didn’t inch away when Theo and I were on the dance floor.
It felt”—they shrug—“normal. Maybe even better than normal? Because I was doing all these everyday things like dancing and eating bad frozen appetizers as myself. And I don’t know, it might have turned out that way even if Theo hadn’t shown up, but I’m glad I never had to find out. ”
I feel like the Grinch, my heart growing a thousand sizes at their story.
And at the same time, I’m not surprised at all, because that’s the vibe Theo has been giving off since I met him.
It’s so clear he cares about other people.
And that’s making it harder by the day for me to see him as ridiculous.
“All I’m saying”—Arden raises their hands in surrender—“is that if there is something there, it’s okay to go for it.”
If only I could be sure their words were truth. Solid, dipped-in-the-strongest-metal, undeniable truth. I’m not sure I can give anyone my heart without knowing it will be safe.
But I can’t know that. Not even with Theo.
He steps out of the bathroom a second later. “I think the closet is probably the best spot.”
“What? My toilet isn’t lighting up with paranormal activity?” I feign shock.
He can’t even pretend to glare at me. “Let’s get this set up.”
The three of us make our way into the big bedroom and crowd inside the closet.
From his cargo shorts, Theo produces a red ball and a tiny camera.
I swear those pockets are scientific marvels.
Bigger on the inside. Like the TARDIS or Mary Poppins’s bag.
There’s probably a portal to an entirely different dimension in them.
He offers me the devil’s marble, and I roll it around on my palm. It’s about the size of a clementine. Though constructed of red plastic, almost like a small hamster ball, it has a decent heft to it.
Theo presses the power button and different-colored lights flash across my skin. “That’s what will happen when the device is triggered.”
When. Not if. A week ago, I would have found his faith in this cheap piece of equipment hilarious, but it is getting harder and harder for me to see him as foolish. His belief is so earnest. I can’t help but want him to uncover something, even if I know that will never happen.
“Can you set the marble right under the picture?” Theo asks. He digs some wires from his pocket and is rigging the camera to a nearby shelf.
I avoid eye contact with Mercy’s portrait. If anything in this house were truly haunted, it would be that thing, no question. Theo’s instincts are not off in that regard.
I place the ball on the ground where he’s pointed. “How is it triggered?”
“When it’s moved,” Theo says.
“A ghost has to touch it?”
He nods.
“But it’s just a plastic ball. If a ghost can touch that, it should be able to touch us too.” I peer at him.
His brow furrows, and, for a minute, he busies himself with the camera. Then he straightens his shoulders. “They run the risk of accidentally possessing us if they touch us. These kinds of trigger objects are safer.”
He must catch the skepticism on my face, because something mischievous glints in his gaze. “Since you’re my assistant—”
I squawk. “I am no one’s assistant.”
Arden’s eyes swing back and forth between us, and they’re grinning hard, like we’re an exciting tennis match.
“Fine, as my helper…”
I am two seconds from punching him in the arm, and he knows it.
“The devil’s marble’s not quite centered. Can you move it for me?” His eyes are glued to the video feed on his phone. As if he’s aware of the incredulous expression he’d find on my face if he looked at me.
His helper. He’s lucky he’s grown on me. Otherwise, I’d shut this ghost stuff down right now.
I crouch and roll the ball a few inches. He gives me a few more directions, then finally seems satisfied.
“Tomorrow,” he declares, “we check the footage.”
We. Because, whether I like it or not, I’m in this now.