Chapter Sixteen Lee
That morning, Lee conducted an experiment.
When Sen had stumbled out of the archive, he’d seized the opportunity to cut off a small lock of her hair with Hina’s nail
scissors. He’d intended to keep it to look at later, to compare it to the hair of someone who wasn’t a ghost.
But the moment he’d cut it, the lock had turned to ashes in his hand.
Lee thought of the windswept gray world that had appeared when he touched Sen, the ashes in that expanse of nothingness that
had burned his eyes, the taste of ashes in his mouth whenever he ate. That world, the food, and Sen were all one and the same.
It was an interesting enough development that he almost hadn’t minded when Sen ran off. She would return, he was certain.
She still owed him her help.
Lee could have written it off as just another trait of being a ghost. Maybe souls rotted just like bodies, and anything not
physically connected to her would decay. Maybe her decay was contagious, and that was why it broke down the world around them.
But the problem was that now, when Lee reached into his pocket to get rid of the ashes, his pocket was full of hair.
The lock of black hair he’d cut was whole and real once more, soft and prickly in his palm. He turned his pocket inside out, emptied it onto his desk, and shuffled the strands back together into something resembling a lock of hair instead of a pile.
Why had it changed back? Lee could think of two likely variables: Time had passed since he’d cut the hair, and he was in a
different location.
He set half the hair aside, then thought better of leaving it out in the open and tucked it into his drawer instead. The last
thing he needed was Sen seeing her own hair on his nightstand. He would monitor that half as time passed.
As for location...
Lee walked into the hallway, but the hair remained the same. His room was not the cause, then.
He walked out the front door—slowly, so the hair wouldn’t blow away. He didn’t know how far he intended to retrace their steps
into town—surely his father would hate to see him walking around with nothing but a handful of hair—but he didn’t have to
go far. As soon as he crossed through the front gate and stepped beyond the property line, the hair turned back to ash.
A wind rushed by, stirring the ashes into the sky. Lee watched them float away and couldn’t decide if that had answered his
question or just given him yet another puzzle.
The house was the difference.
There was something fundamentally different about the house behind the sword ferns and the hotel room in Cambodia, but Lee
still didn’t know what that difference was. He hoped he got the chance to find out.
He wiped the ashes from his palms, then returned to his room, opened his laptop, and reviewed his spreadsheet. Still, he couldn’t
figure out the secrets of the door. The house clearly had some impact on Sen’s hair, but the door was always in the house
and only sometimes open. Lee lay back in bed with a sigh.
Iwasaki Sen , the archivist had said.
That wasn’t the name Sen had given him, and he wondered why. His gaze darted to the door, waiting for it to light up, for
Sen to tear through in anger at him for unpeeling her secrets. But the door remained dark and silent. It was the afternoon,
and he’d never seen the door between their worlds light up midday.
It took Lee about twenty minutes to find out exactly how the Iwasaki family had died.
When he finished reading, he closed his laptop and sat alone in the dark.
Lee did not understand the feeling that bloomed in his chest, like mold devouring a piece of rotten meat. He could see it
now, so vividly—Sen lying dead on the floor, her face papery white, her eyes bloodshot and unseeing. The feeling made his
ears ring, his fingertips numb. He had known that Sen was dead, but not like this.
He looked toward the door and imagined the soft edges of her silhouette. Even though her eyes were sharp like Lee’s, her shadow
was gentle. Lee wanted to hold that shadow version of Sen, the one he was allowed to touch.
He decided he would not tell her how she died.
He told himself it was out of kindness, that it would be over for her quickly and there was no point in scaring her. He told
himself it was because she was in denial and wouldn’t have believed him anyway. If he’d said the words out loud, maybe he
would have heard the lie in them. Lee Turner was very good at lying to everyone but himself.
Lee never silenced his phone at night because nobody ever called him.
No one from high school had said a word to him since graduation, and no one at NYU had his number.
For Lee, people ex isted in their own separate worlds that never intersected: home, high school, college.
No one wanted to talk to Lee even when he was in front of them, and they certainly didn’t want to think of him when he was far away.
Now, in this strange, slow life in Kagoshima, no one needed to know where he was except Hina and his father.
But the night after he brought Sen to town hall, when the moonlight fell cool across his face and darkness pooled across the
tatami mats, someone, somewhere, had something to say to him.
He rolled over, tapped the screen of his phone, and squinted as the worst words he had ever seen filled the screen.
From: JAMES BALDRIDGE
You ok man? Haven’t seen you in a few days
“You okay?” James asked, setting a take-out cup on the table.
Lee looked up, less confused about the cup than the fact that he’d somehow missed the sound of the door unlocking, of James
calling his name long enough without a response to be concerned. Luckily, Lee had his astronomy textbook open, so it looked
as if he’d been reading rather than staring deeper and deeper into his own mind. He’d only moved in a week ago, so James hadn’t
seen anything too strange yet.
James was still standing in front of the table, smiling.
“Is this... for me?” Lee guessed. He’d guessed wrong before and taken a bite out of someone else’s sandwich.
“Yeah,” James said. “Do you like coffee?”
“No,” Lee said, but he picked it up and took a sip anyway. When the smile dropped off James’s face, Lee realized he probably
shouldn’t have said that. But James had bought it for him, so he knew he was supposed to drink it. “Thank you,” he said belatedly.
“Why did you get me this?”
“I pass by Dunkin’ on my way back from bio,” James said. Lee wished he would sit down. He hated how James was looming over him, how his shadow fell over Lee’s textbook. “I heard you talking on the phone in Japanese?”
“My stepmom is Japanese,” Lee said quickly, sure that James had already decided he was some hentai pervert. But James only
nodded like he’d expected this answer.
“I was thinking of signing up for Japanese 101,” he said. “Maybe you could help me out?”
“You don’t need to buy me coffee for that,” Lee said. “I’m not fluent, but I can help.”
“Awesome,” James said, his grin so bright, tight across his face, like it didn’t fit. He’s lying , Lee realized. About what, he wasn’t sure. Taking Japanese? Passing by Dunkin’? They all seemed like such unimportant things
to lie about.
“I’ll see you around,” James said after a moment, heading to his room and reappearing with more books under his arm before
leaving once more.
Lee took some more Benadryl, went to his room, and tried to think about supernovas instead of secrets. He pretended not to
notice when an itch bloomed just beneath his skin.
Lee read the text message over and over again, then he wanted to stop reading it, but he couldn’t close his eyes, couldn’t
move, couldn’t breathe. He felt like electricity had surged through him, leaving him a scorched skeleton. He was trapped inside
the cage of his bones with his heartbeat thundering inside him, his pulse so loud in his ears. Was this what it felt like inside the suitcase?
Let me out, Lee.
In a renewed surge of panic, Lee bolted upright and cast his phone into the corner of his room, where the darkness inhaled it. He scrambled back, as if the words would crawl out of the shadows and bite him.
It must have been a wrong number. Lee had put James’s phone number into his contacts as a formality in case one of them ever
got locked out, but he couldn’t remember ever texting James, so maybe he’d typed the number incorrectly. It had to be someone
else, because there was no way it could be James. The way that Lee had left him... there was no way he was still alive.
Where is James Baldridge?
Lee curled up against the wall farthest from his phone, under a pale square of moonlight beaming from the window. He pinched
the skin of his elbow, which was covered in red scratches as if he’d been itching at it in his sleep.
His phone beeped again.
Lee jumped to his feet and shoved open the doors to his room, hurrying into the hallway, as if there was any distance on earth
he could put between him and what he’d done.
He shoved open the door to the north porch and wind screamed in his face, forcing him back into the house. Far in the distance,
the sea had retreated into the horizon. The wind ripped clouds of white sand into the air, like the shore was swarming with
sandflies. Another strong breeze sent some of Lee’s father’s papers spilling off the kitchen table, so Lee slammed the door
shut and locked it.
He pressed his back against the door and let out a breath. Maybe if he checked his phone again, the text would have mysteriously
disappeared. Lee was still detoxing from years of sedatives, after all. Vivid nightmares weren’t unheard of, given the circumstances.
He headed back toward his room, his every footstep creaking as he moved through the house.
But as he stepped into the hallway, instead of a soft tatami mat, his foot splashed in a warm pool of liquid.
He lifted his foot up and examined it. A dark substance had soaked through the bandage on his foot, staining the hems of his
pajama pants. More of it flowed from the doorway to his room.
Slowly, he slid the door open.