Rules for Ghosting
Chapter 1
1
Being psychic is more trouble than it’s worth.
Ezra sees the world in double vision: air that’s empty one instant, and thick with the dead the next. Sometimes, they look like everyone else, indistinguishable from the living—until he tries to touch them and his hand phases through them. They look solid and alive but feel off, the air around them colder. Other times, they are hurt or sick or broken, their gaits the hypnic jerks of sleeping limbs.
There are a thousand moments when he almost tells someone: Aaron, in the early weeks after Zayde dies; when Aaron asks why Ezra never wants to play in the showroom anymore; Becca, when she’s six and asks why he keeps staring at nothing; why sometimes he looks suddenly, randomly ready to cry. When his college roommate finds him hyperventilating in the bathroom after a pale-eyed shade no older than eighteen appeared in his shower stall.
He never says a word to his parents. He thinks that some part of him knew, even as a child, that this would be one confession too many. He was queer when he was fourteen, a boy when he was twenty—adding Oh, and I see dead people, and did you know there are ghosts everywhere? would just be too much.
Instead, he learns to keep his feelings off his face. To keep his breathing even and suppress his startle reflex and keep himself from shivering when the air goes cold. He swallows the impulse to flinch from the hovering dead, and tries to keep his eyes on the living.
It’s not all bad. Sometimes they’re peaceful. Calm. Sometimes he can read them and try to…not fix things, but maybe help . Once, he’d caught a typo in a funeral program and corrected it, reprinting the cards twenty minutes before a service, and got a beaming smile from a dead English professor before she vanished in the space between blinks.
He’s not sure he’d haunt his funeral over a typo, but maybe the dead have different priorities.
It makes apartment hunting harder. He can manage the casual ghost sighting, but he refuses to have a repeat of his first rental out of college, with its disappearing-reappearing old woman who stood by his bed and cried, night after night after night.
The relative lack of ghosts was what drew him to the tiny studio he’s lived in for the past three years, despite the rattling pipes and the light fixture in the bathroom that never stopped flickering no matter how many times he changed the bulb. There was only one spirit haunting the place, a young blond woman, who seemed content to occasionally appear long enough to watch episodes of The Great British Bake Off on the lumpy futon.
And it had been a good home, while it lasted. The first night he’d brought Sappho home, fifty pounds of adopted pit mix so anxious she might as well have been a puppy, they’d slept together on the futon because she was too scared to get up on the bed. He’d done his first T shot in the tiny bathroom. He and Ollie had their last first time on his lumpy mattress, and afterward, Ollie hadn’t even laughed at Ezra when he cried.
He and Ollie had their last breakup here, too, sitting miserably together as they decided once and for all that they’d be better off as friends.
Unfortunately, his affection for the place hadn’t been enough of a reason for his landlord to resist selling the building to a condo development group. So here he is, wedging the last of his packed boxes into the trunk of his car to drive across town to yet another new home, while Nina leans against the passenger side door, Sappho’s leash looped idly around her wrist.
But he feels good about this new apartment. Ollie’s lived in the house for years, including the last year of their on-again, off-again relationship. If there were anything spectral lurking, he’d have felt it by now.
He doesn’t realize that he’s been muttering a mantra of Stop freaking out, it’s going to be fine under his breath until Nina interrupts it, cutting right to the core of his simmering anxiety in the way only she ever has, brutal as the surgeon her mother’s still annoyed she decided not to be. “You know,” she says, “I still think it’s weird that you guys are moving in together. You two only broke up for good, like, what, two months ago?”
“Three,” Ezra says. Not that he’s been counting.
Her skeptical look makes his cheeks go hot, but for once, she doesn’t comment. “Still sucks,” she says. “Especially since you’re going to have to get used to roommates again.” She shudders. “I love you, but if I had to do that after living alone for three years, I’d just buy a tent and set up under the nearest overpass.”
“You once told me that you need five bubble baths a week to live,” he says dryly.
Nina sniffs. “I’m very adaptable.” She eyes his trunk skeptically as he picks up the last box. “Is that going to fit?”
“Maybe. Probably. You could help, you know.”
Nina, all five feet eleven of her looking more like she’s ready to walk onto the nearest runway than help him move, reaches down to give Sappho a pointed pat on the head. “I’m holding the dog.” Sappho gives an entirely unhelpful huff, tongue lolling happily as she leans against Nina’s leg. Ezra makes a face at both of them and starts wedging the box into the improbable remaining space in the trunk.
Technically, he and Ollie aren’t really moving in together. There are three apartments in the building, and Ezra’s taking over the abruptly vacated room in the unit below Ollie’s. According to both Ollie and Lily, one of Ezra’s new roommates, the doors of the two apartments are so consistently open to each other that they might as well be a single unit, but Ezra’s clinging to the justification of not-actually-roommates like a lifeline. It had been sheer luck that Ollie’s downstairs neighbor had moved out two weeks ago, and her roommates wanted to fill the spot with someone who wasn’t a complete stranger.
It’s fine. They’ll be fine. This is going to be fine.
With a last shove, he fits the box into the car, then slams the trunk shut. “That’s as good as it’s going to get,” he says, wiping his face. “Let’s go.”
Sappho hops obediently into the back seat when Ezra opens the door for her, and settles her head on the armrest between the two front seats as he and Nina climb in. “So,” Nina says, twisting to scratch Sappho’s ears while Ezra pulls out of the driveway, resisting the urge to take a last backward glance at his former home. “Are you freaking out about the Ollie thing, the living-with-roommates thing, or some other problem you’ve made up to stress about?”
“Wow.” Ezra takes his eyes off the road just long enough to shoot her a sour look. “Rude.”
She shrugs, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
“Who says I’m freaking out about anything?”
“Well, I’ve met you,” she drawls. “So.”
“Uh-huh.” Ezra turns on the radio. “It’s a seven-minute drive. Think you can handle not trying to make me talk about my feelings for that long?”
“I’ll endeavor to suffer through it.”
Someday he’ll have a best friend who doesn’t make fun of him constantly. That day, apparently, is not today.
Despite a few threatening clouds, the weather’s still holding dry ten minutes later when they pull up in front of the old renovated Victorian that houses Ezra’s new apartment. Ezra manages—with some wrangling—to get Sappho to sit still long enough to get her leash clipped on before she bolts from the car. He has her leash around one wrist and a box in his hands when his phone starts buzzing. He props the box against the side of the car with his hip and digs his phone out of his pocket, then groans.
If it were anyone else, he’d send them right to voicemail. Unfortunately, he doesn’t want to be murdered. He shifts the box to get a better grip, mouths sorry to Nina, and picks up the call.
The first words Mom says are “Did you see my email?”
“Hi, Ezra,” Ezra says, leaning against the car and trying not to let Sappho yank his shoulder out of its socket. “How are you, Ezra? Oh, I’m good, Mom, thanks for asking! How are you? Oh, I’m great, Ezra! I just wanted to call my favorite child and—”
“That’s not nearly as cute as you think it is,” Mom says, like he can’t hear her exasperated smile over the line. “But yes, okay, hi. How’s the move going?”
“It would be better if I could use both my hands.” He meets Nina’s eyes and gives her his most pleading look, and she heaves a long-suffering sigh, taking the box and setting it on the hood of the car. He tries to convey an enthusiastic thank-you via eyebrows alone, rolling out his shoulder. “What’s up?”
“I was asking if you saw my email.”
“That’s like asking if I noticed the sun was out.” His inbox is forty percent Mom emails. They have their own filter. “Can you be a little more specific?”
Something clatters on Mom’s end of the line, followed by a muffled “Fuck!” Ezra winces. “How’s Becca?”
“Stressed,” Mom says, packing an impressive amount of dry irritation into the single word. “The email was about your bubbe’s Pesach recipe binder—Becca thinks you have it.”
Sappho, having realized that Ezra isn’t going to let her go to the house without him, hops up on her back legs to brace all her weight on his chest and begins to lick the side of his face. He gets her into a delicate headlock to remove her tongue from his neck, and she starts slobbering on his shirt instead. “I have it somewhere,” he says. “But it’s probably buried in boxes, Mom. I don’t really have time to go digging for it if you still want me there by four today.”
Mom sighs. “I still can’t believe you planned a move for today.”
“Yeah, well, take it up with my ex-landlord.” Ezra tries, and mostly fails, to get Sappho’s tongue out from under the collar of his shirt. “Didn’t you two plan this menu, like, weeks ago?”
“You know your sister,” Mom says, which, yes, fine, but so not helpful. “Is there any chance you can take a look before you head over here? You’re so organized, I’m sure you know where your books are packed.”
Ezra turns his face skyward. No divine intervention appears. “I will do my absolute best,” he says. “Mom, I really need to go. Sappho’s going to eat my face.”
He can practically hear her wrinkling her nose. “Right,” she says. “And you’re…sure your new roommates can’t watch her for you when you come stay with us?”
“Am I sure that I’m not going to ask the people I’ve met literally twice if they want to babysit my dog for three days? Yeah, I’m sure.” Another lick to his face. “I’m hanging up now. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
“I’ll try to dog-proof the house before you get here.”
“I love you, too,” Ezra says dryly, and hangs up.
“That sounded fun,” Nina says. She’s lounging against the car, scrolling through her phone and deliberately not helping him with the dog.
“You know my mom,” Ezra says. “There’s always something.” He picks the box up again, gives Sappho a firm look he hopes conveys Don’t you dare yank my arm out of its socket, and heads around the corner of the long driveway toward the front door.
Nina scoops up another box from the back seat and follows him. “And yet, somehow your response is never to tell her to…not do that.”
“You want to tell her that?” Ezra says. “Be my guest.”
Nina shudders. “Hard pass. That woman scares the hell out of me.” She abruptly stops, and Ezra nearly crashes into her. “Um—I don’t want to alarm you, but I think someone’s trying to break into your house.”
Ezra gets Sappho’s leash under control, fixes her with a stern look that she returns with wide-eyed innocence, and follows Nina’s pointing finger.
The house is a gorgeous three-story Victorian, built—according to his new roommate Lily, who’s apparently obsessed with old architecture and spent most of Ezra’s just-checking-that-you’re-not-a-serial-killer tour rattling off trivia—in 1900 and converted into apartments back in the seventies. The exterior is painted a flaking, faded yellow and ornamented with random balconies and decorative railings. There’s an octagonal tower on one side and a narrow turret on the other, tacked on as if an afterthought. A questionably stable porch wraps around the entire first floor.
And there is, indeed, a man on said porch, attempting to pick the lock.
It’s broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon. Ezra’s a little impressed by the nerve.
“Uh,” he says loud enough to be heard over the slightly pathetic scraping of whatever metal tool this guy is using—is that a paper clip? Jesus —to get the lock open. “Can I help you?”
The guy’s head snaps up so fast Ezra honestly thinks he might get whiplash. Does, actually, if the face he makes is any indication. “Oh, hi,” he says, and then takes in the box in Ezra’s hands, the keys dangling from Ezra’s forefinger, and his own position crouched in front of the door. To Ezra’s surprise, his face lights up, as if in recognition. “Oh, hi!” he says again, much more brightly. “You must be the new guy on the second floor?”
It’s alarming, Ezra thinks, how much a smile can transform someone’s face. Even crouched under the door like an amateur burglar, this guy is handsome. Objectively. But it’s his smile that changes everything, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, set behind a pair of thick-framed glasses, softening his dark brows and turning the strong line of his jaw into an easy warmth.
Ezra’s messy hair and the blooming sweat stains at his neck and armpits suddenly feel very obvious. Just his luck.
He’s also probably been quiet too long. Ezra clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says, and shifts the box onto his hip to hold out a hand, Sappho’s leash still looped around his other wrist. “Ezra. This is my friend Nina.”
“Jonathan.” He climbs to his feet and shakes Ezra’s hand, firm and warm, and smiles at Nina. “I’m on the first floor.”
Ezra eyes the paper clip in Jonathan’s hand. “You sure about that?”
“I locked my wallet and keys inside,” Jonathan says, smile turning crooked and a little self-deprecating. It’s a good look on him. “I’d offer to show you my ID to prove it, but…”
He looks like a kicked puppy. Ezra could never resist a stray. “Hold on,” he says, and pulls out his phone.
Ollie answers on the first ring. “Hey,” he says, cheerful, and Ezra tells the part of his chest that leaps in gleeful optimism at the sound of Ollie’s voice to simmer the fuck down. “Are you back?”
“I’m on the porch with someone who says he lives on the first floor but doesn’t have a key. And was trying to break in with a paper clip,” Ezra says, biting back a grin when Jonathan shoots him an offended look. “Ring any bells?”
“Tall guy, dark hair, major Nice Jewish Boy vibes?”
Ezra looks Jonathan over again. He doesn’t not give off NJB vibes, breaking-and-entering attempts aside. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“That’s Jonathan, you can let him in. Oh, hey, let me put my shoes on. I’ll help you with the rest of the stuff in your car.”
“About time you did some heavy lifting,” Ezra teases, and hangs up on Ollie’s indignant squawk. “He says you check out,” he tells Jonathan, who grins.
“Nice Jewish Boy vibes, huh?”
Ezra’s cheeks heat. Beside him, Nina looks like she’s ready to burst with delight. She’s barely restraining it. “You heard that?”
“You have your volume up, like, really high.” Jonathan nods at the box in Ezra’s hands. “Carry that up for you? Least I can do.”
“Oh, that’s okay—”
“He’d love that,” Nina interrupts. Ezra shoots her a dirty look, but she grins breezily. “Dog wrangling, you know? The extra hands would be great .”
“Sure,” Jonathan says.
There’s a tiny glint in his eye. He’s completely aware that Nina isn’t even bothering to be subtle. Ezra can absolutely carry this box himself, but screw it, he’s not going to turn down a good-looking guy offering to carry it for him. His legs are tired. “Sure.” He passes it over, then unlocks the front door and lets Jonathan go in ahead of him. “Stop that,” he hisses to Nina when she starts to follow.
She widens her eyes at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m firing you as my best friend.”
“Please,” she says. “You’d be screwed without me.” She steps inside and raises her voice to shout up the stairs. “Oliver! You’d better be ready to help move some boxes!”
Ezra rolls his eyes and follows her inside, past a door on the first-floor landing that must lead to Jonathan’s apartment. The stairwell is narrow enough that they can’t walk side by side, so Ezra falls back a step behind Jonathan and Nina, reining in Sappho’s leash to keep her from pushing past Nina to sniff at the new guy’s feet.
“So, Ezra,” Jonathan says, looking over his shoulder. “This is maybe a weird question, but have we met before? You look really familiar.”
Is that a pickup line? Ezra genuinely can’t tell. “I don’t think so.” Jonathan has one of those faces where it’s hard to tell his age. He looks like every grad student Ezra saw on campus at Brown, cute and a little tired. Ezra knows the first-floor apartment is another three-bedroom, which means Jonathan’s either got roommates or a decent income. “We could play Jewish geography, if you want.”
Jonathan lets out a startled laugh. “Unfortunately, I think we’d be here all day, and I have plans tonight.”
Not flirting, then. Probably for the best. Ezra already has one ex under this roof; he doesn’t need to start something that’ll end up giving him another one.
The door to Ezra’s new apartment is propped open with a novelty garden gnome wearing leather pants and proudly waving a rainbow flag. Ezra has no idea who owns it, but he’s in love. Jonathan holds out the box, and when Ezra takes it from him, he catches a flash of metal—a plain band on his left ring finger.
Definitely not flirting. It was a nice moment of fantasy. “Thanks for the help.”
“Right back at you.” Jonathan grins, nodding back toward the front door. “See you around, Ezra. Nice to meet you, Nina.”
“You too,” Nina calls after him.
She watches him go down the stairs and then waggles her eyebrows pointedly at Ezra. He rolls his eyes at her and nudges the door the rest of the way open to find Ollie, Lily, and Ollie’s roommate Max all leaning toward the door, clearly eavesdropping.
“Wow,” he says, carefully moving the gnome with a foot and letting the door close behind him. “Hi. This isn’t creepy at all.”
“In our defense, none of us have seen him talk to anyone in weeks,” Max says. She’s dyed her hair since the last time Ezra saw her, her tight curls now a deep turquoise that pops against her brown skin. “He’s been kind of a hermit lately.”
Ezra puts the box down and rolls his shoulders, then his neck. “He seems like a good guy.”
“He is,” Lily says, getting to her feet with a grin as Sappho starts pulling toward her, leash taut in Ezra’s hand. Lily’s the kind of gorgeous that Ezra used to think only showed up on Instagram, all airbrushed and stunning long legs and cascading dark hair. She’s a paralegal who stepped out of a Bollywood movie poster. “But more importantly, hello, my real new roommate. Come here, precious baby, I’m gonna be your new mom.”
Ezra takes the hint and drops Sappho’s leash. She leaps across the floorboards to Lily, nearly knocking her back through the door, all muscle and enthusiastic slobber. Lily either has experience with dogs or possesses the strongest thighs of anyone Ezra’s ever met, because she braces herself and scoops Sappho’s face into her hands, nuzzling their noses together. “You are going to get so spoiled, ” she says. “Did you know that? Did you know that you are going to be the most popular good girl in the whole apartment? Yes, you are.”
“She comes with a very nice walk schedule, too,” Ezra says. “If you want to hang out with her at six in the morning.”
“Ew, no,” Lily says, straightening up with a last kiss to Sappho’s nose. “I’m strictly an afternoon dog aunt, thanks. Noah might take her, though, if you ask him very nicely. He’s basically nocturnal.”
Ezra hasn’t met Noah yet, other than a quick Yo in the group chat Lily added him to when he signed the lease. He knows three things about Noah so far: He’s a graphic designer who works mostly with overseas clients, the kombucha in the fridge is his, and he communicates primarily through memes.
“Wait, let’s go back to Jonathan,” Max says. “Because I was getting a flirty vibe from that.”
“ See? ” Nina says, dropping onto the arm of the couch next to her and reminding Ezra abruptly why he hates letting her and Max be in the same room. “It’s not just me.”
Ezra keeps an eye on Sappho out of habit to make sure she doesn’t get too out of hand, but he can’t help the quick skeptical look he shoots Max. “You got a flirty vibe from fifteen seconds of overheard conversation?”
She shrugs. “I have a sense for this sort of thing,” she says. “I matchmake for a living.”
He blinks. He thought she worked in an art gallery. “Since when?”
“Since never,” Ollie says, eyeing her with a mix of exasperation and affection. Ezra has been on the receiving end of that look more times than he likes to admit. “It is her side hustle, though.”
“I’m very good at it!”
Ezra’s reference points for matchmakers are Fiddler on the Roof and Mulan . Neither of those will serve him well here. “I don’t think you’re on track with this one,” he says. “I’m pretty sure he’s married.”
Lily wrangles a lolling Sappho down onto the rug for tummy rubs. “He’s not,” she says. Ezra raises his eyebrows, then holds up his left hand and wiggles his ring finger pointedly. Lily shakes her head. “He was, ” she clarifies. “His husband died, though. Like—what, a year ago?”
“Something like that,” Max says. “It was really sad. Totally out of nowhere.”
Oh, okay, hard nope. “So then he’s definitely off-limits,” Ezra says. “I don’t want to be someone’s grief rebound, that’s the worst.”
“But he’s totally your type,” Ollie protests.
Ezra gapes at him. “Et tu, Brute?”
“How is he Ezra’s type when you’re Ezra’s type?” Max says, clearly skeptical, looking back and forth between them.
“I was a fluke,” Ollie says cheerfully. Nina audibly snorts. “Right?”
“You were kind of a fluke,” Ezra says. Ollie’s dark-haired and dark-eyed, too, but he’s fine-featured and slim, more Let’s go tour a museum than Shoulders for days . Ollie used to joke that Ezra was using him for his mom’s Korean cooking, and Ezra usually just shot back that Ollie was in it for Ezra’s mom’s brisket. That was easier than either of them admitting that at a certain point, they were both just in it for the familiarity. “I can’t be held responsible for sporadic lapses in my taste.”
Lily gives Sappho a last pat and moves back to the couch, slinging her legs over Max’s lap. “Wait, are we going to talk about this? I thought we were all going to just act like you guys never slept together and that this wasn’t super weird.”
“Nosy,” Ollie tells her. “Very nosy. Ezra, back me up.”
Ezra shrugs. “They’re your friends, I just live here.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Max says, grinning at him with just a hint of dangerous glee. “You’re part of the madhouse now, cutie-pie. Welcome to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
The urge to ask for his security deposit back and bail is overwhelming, but his alternative—moving back in with his parents—is worse, and at least this apartment is a three-minute walk from a good coffee shop.
“Yikes,” he says. In his head, he says a prayer: that his thought process is not visible on his face, that it’s written in invisible ink. “Okay. Can I at least start the ordeal with someone other than just me carrying the rest of the stuff up from my car?”
“I already helped,” Nina says, settling on the floor. Sappho, the traitor, flops immediately into her lap.
“You carried one box .”
“Yeah, but I also helped you get all your stuff out of your studio.”
He gives up. “Ollie?”
“I already said I’d help you, drama queen,” Ollie says, climbing to his feet. “Come on.”
He’s grinning, but when they round the corner on the stairwell, out of immediate earshot of the conversation in the living room, he nudges Ezra’s shoulder with his. “Hey. You okay?”
Ezra’s skin tingles where their arms touched. “What? Of course. Why?”
Ollie shoots him a familiar look, the one that says Come on. That says We’ve done this too many times for you to lie to me. That says I know you.
Their breakup was months ago, but that look still makes Ezra want to drop his head onto Ollie’s shoulder. It was easier back when he knew he wouldn’t have to wake up the next morning alone.
—
Past the timeworn but classic exterior of the house, the apartment itself is full of what Ezra’s sister would call character and his mom would call an absolute hell to dust . It’s all nooks and crannies and built-in shelves and cabinets and original hardwood floors and crown molding that someone, for a blessing, decided not to paint over or rip out during renovations. None of the rooms fall at right angles and there are windows everywhere . Compared to his studio, with its lack of sunlight and terrible eighties carpet, it’s like a breath of fresh air.
“You’re lucky, you know,” Ollie says idly, helping Ezra carry another box into his room. “I almost stole this room when Cait U-Hauled out with her girlfriend. The light’s incredible.”
He nods at the large, east-facing windows, his fingers fidgeting around the edges of the box like he’s itching for a camera, and Ezra can’t help but grin. Ollie’s a photographer; he’s always been picky about natural light. “Why didn’t you?”
He sets his box down on the bed that Cait had left behind. Gorgeous lighting aside, it’s a small room, most of its space taken up by the bed and the dresser he’s inherited from Cait. He thinks there will be room for the desk and chair from his studio, and even for them to be usable if he’s clever about rearranging things, with enough room left over to spread out a yoga mat to practice in the mornings.
“Max threatened to disown me,” Ollie says, a little glumly. “How long do you have before you need to head out?”
Ezra checks his watch and bites back a swear. “If you ask my mom? Negative ten minutes,” he says, rubbing a hand over his face. “So much for having enough time to shower.”
Anything sympathetic Ollie might have been about to say is abruptly interrupted by Nina bursting into the room like a hurricane, slamming the box she’s carrying onto the dresser. “Did you see Ivy’s email?”
What is it with the emails today? “What?”
Ivy is the director of the Providence Queer Community Center, where Ezra teaches yoga four days a week and Nina manages the youth outreach programming. He’s technically only a part-time employee—the pay’s not great, but it gives him health insurance and a reliable paycheck. Nina keeps trying to nudge him to ask about a full-time gig, maybe joining the constantly hiring program or education teams, but Ezra’s true love is still his birth doula work, and he doesn’t want to lose the flexibility he has to take on new clients. He’s only been doing it for two years, but working in birth has been such a refreshing departure from the world of death and dying he grew up in that he can’t imagine doing anything else long-term, even if the income isn’t as predictable. “No, my phone’s…somewhere. I haven’t been checking it.” He turns his work notifications off on the weekends—if someone needs him badly enough, they’ll text.
Nina pulls out her own, taps at the screen a few times, and shoves it at him. “We have a problem.”
Ezra takes it, frowning when he recognizes their boss’s email address at the top of the screen, right next to a subject line marked Urgent . He feels around for the edge of the bed and sits down without looking, scrolling through the email as nausea starts to curl in his stomach.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: [URGENT] RENOVATION UPDATE & EMPLOYEE SAFETY
Dear Team,
As you all know, we’ve been excited for our building renovation since the success of our capital campaign, made possible by our incredible Development team.
This evening, we took our first step in that direction by meeting with a state building inspector in order to acquire our permits and permissions. During this inspection, we discovered significant instabilities in our building’s foundation, as well as additional flaws in some of the key support structures and electrical wiring. The inspector’s conclusion, which I have reviewed and agree with, is that our building is not safe for occupation at this time, and will not be until some critical infrastructure has been repaired.
Effective immediately, we will be closing the Center’s physical operations in order to ensure the safety of our employees and participants. Because this represents a significant loss for us in anticipated program revenue and funding eligibility, all nonessential employees will be furloughed until the building is safe to reopen. We will continue to provide employee health, disability, and paid leave benefits. At this time, we estimate that this will be a furlough period of approximately eight to ten weeks.
Payroll will be processed at your standard salary or wage through the end of this pay period, at which time we will be reducing all nonessential staff payroll to 25% of your usual rate. In the interest of continuing our policy of transparency and organizational commitment to equity, I will also be reducing my own salary to this 25% rate, and the rest of the executive team has committed to a salary reduction of 50% during this period in order to ensure we are able to continue to provide some support as we—
He stops reading. Nothing good is coming after that. “Fuck,” he says.
Nina sits next to him with a huff. “Yeah.”
Ollie nudges Ezra over to peer at the screen. “What’s going on?”
Ezra passes the phone over, putting his head in his hands. He wishes he’d unpacked his pillows, to have something to scream into.
“Are you panicking?” Nina asks. “I’m panicking.”
She doesn’t sound like she’s panicking, but when he picks his head up to look at her, he can see the ticking tension in her jaw and the too-wild look in her dark eyes. For Nina, that’s practically an anxiety attack. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, sure,” she drawls, sarcasm dripping. Ezra winces. Unlike him, Nina works full-time at the Center, running education programs and support groups in addition to teaching dance classes. “This is great for me. I love finding myself spontaneously unemployed because nonprofits can’t handle running regular building inspections.”
Ollie hands Nina her phone back. “I don’t even know what to say,” he says. “I mean…Is there anything I can do to help?”
Nina scoffs, swiping over the screen. “Find me a rich husband so that I can live the trans girl trophy wife life I clearly deserve?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he says, and then looks at Ezra. “Hey. Breathe.”
“I’m breathing,” Ezra says automatically.
Nina freezes, her head snapping up. “Ezra, oh my God,” she says. “You’re literally about to go to your parents’ house. Your mom’s gonna freak .”
Yes. Yes, she is. Ezra rubs his eyes. “Maybe she’ll be too stressed about the seder tonight to pick up on anything.”
“Has that ever worked for you?”
“Never.” His mom has a sixth sense for anything that might potentially get him back under her roof.
A new thought occurs to him, and he snaps out a hand to grab Ollie’s arm, hard enough that Ollie almost falls off the bed. “You can’t say anything about this.”
“ Ow, ” Ollie protests. “Say anything to who?”
Ezra gestures to the door with the fingers he’s not digging into Ollie’s wrist. “Them! I just moved in, it’s not like I can tell them I just lost almost all my income—”
“Hey, no,” Ollie says. He pries Ezra’s death grip off his arm, but doesn’t let go of his hand, squeezing his fingers firmly. It’s not an unfamiliar touch, but it doesn’t reassure him like it used to. “They’re not going to evict you. We’d figure something out.”
Ezra shakes his head. “I just met them,” he says. The words come out more desperately than he means them to, his voice cracking. He swallows hard. “I can’t.”
“Okay, okay.” Ollie huffs out a sigh. “Fine. Be a secretive little gremlin. I just think—”
There’s a knock at the door, and Ezra almost jumps out of his skin. It’s just Lily, poking her head in. “Hey,” she says brightly, and then falters at whatever she sees on their faces. “Am I interrupting?”
“Not even a little,” Nina lies, her face perfectly straight. “What’s up?”
“Noah’s home, and we were going to order dinner,” she says, waving her phone. “Ezra, I was thinking we should do some kind of welcome-to-the-apartment thing. Can we treat you?”
Ezra musters a smile. “Rain check,” he says. “I actually have to run—I’m having dinner at my parents’ place tonight.”
He braces himself—he really doesn’t want to be the weird antisocial roommate who moves in and then immediately vanishes—but Lily just shrugs. “Next time,” she says. “Ollie? Nina?”
“Sure,” Ollie says, before Nina can open her mouth. He gets up, pulling Nina with him. “We’ll come look at a menu.”
Nina purses her lips at him. They’ve all known one another since college, but Nina was Ezra’s friend first, and has always reserved the right to go hot and cold with Ollie based on whether he and Ezra are currently on or off. So far, she’s been unmoved by Ezra’s insistence that this off is permanent but that they’re staying friends. “You’re buying,” she says finally, then turns back to Ezra. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says, going for smooth and easy and probably landing in the vicinity of wobbly. “If you see Sappho, can you leash her? I’m just going to make sure I’ve got everything for tonight.”
“Your funeral,” Nina says, but she leans down and presses a smacking kiss to his cheek before she lets Ollie nudge her out the door.
Ezra watches them go, then huffs a sigh and drops onto the bed. He rubs a hand over his face, trying to gather himself back into something like a normal state so that he can get Sappho and get out the door without looking like a breakdown waiting to happen. To buy himself a minute or two of productivity, he reaches for the backpack he’d tossed onto the end of the bed earlier, dragging it over and unzipping the largest pocket, as if inventorying his toiletries will settle his nerves.
The air shifts. Ezra pauses, hand halfway into his bag.
He knows what’s coming before he looks up.
It’s been long enough since that first sighting, so many years ago, that he’s rarely surprised to see the ghosts anymore, and he doesn’t fall over himself at the sight of a strange man standing in his doorway. That sixth-sense tingle is whirring to life, cataloging the cooler air, the too-bright glow of otherworldly eyes.
All the same, Ezra stares.
The ghost stares back.
He’s tall, broad in the shoulders, dressed in a cable-knit sweater and dark pants. For one heartbeat, Ezra sees him in kaleidoscopic vision: He is a man in his early thirties, dark-haired and light-eyed, pale and calm as he meets Ezra’s gaze—and then bleeding and bloodstained, his face twisted in the agony of dying.
Ezra blinks. When he opens his eyes, the ghost is whole again, and the broken afterimage has vanished, leaving only a man, tired and just off the edge of normal. He blinks again, and the hallway is empty. The tingling in the back of his head subsides, and his fingers begin to warm again.
If it were any other day, he’d at least try to figure out who that ghost was. If they’re haunting something, there’s a reason, and when that something is a some where and that somewhere is Ezra’s apartment, it’s pretty motivating.
But honestly?
Ezra narrows his eyes, looking at the spot where the ghost had stood, in case it reappears.
It doesn’t.
“Okay,” Ezra says out loud. “Not today, Satan.”
He zips his backpack, shoulders it, and leaves the room, hitting the light switch on his way out.