Katie took him out to the back porch and sat so close to him their thighs touched all the way from hip to knee. She was impressed that he could name a few constellations—thanks to an astronomy elective at Andover he’d taken for the easy A—and together they’d counted the fireflies floating through the dark.
“I used to pretend that fireflies were fairies,” Katie had said, her voice a little thick. “I’d imagine I was a fairy cursed to live in human form, and someday I’d transform back.” She turned to him. Her breath smelled sweet, like raspberry vodka. “Do you ever wish you were someone else?”
And he had answered truthfully, “All the time.”
But then Marcus had showed up with more alcohol. Marcus. What a sleazeball name. He looked like a sleazeball, too, with a goatee thin as a rat’s tail and dirty jeans and a tattoo on the back of his hand of a girl in a bikini using his pointer finger as a stripper pole. He must have been at least twenty-five.
Trenton had been so close to kissing Katie.
He was just starting to doze off when he felt it—a change in the atmosphere. His lungs tightened in his chest and he was temporarily paralyzed, as he had been the moment he’d first woken in the hospital, encased in plaster, unable to move or even cry out, because of the tubes in his throat.
He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them, it would prove to be just his imagination. Or she would get scared. He squeezed them together so he wouldn’t cheat, feeling his heart beat deep in his chest, and found himself praying that this was real. That she was real. That he wasn’t crazy.
Trenton felt her sit down on the bed. The mattress didn’t sink, the headboard didn’t groan, but he felt it nonetheless: a change next to him, as though a sudden wind had sprung up. Now he didn’t know whether to open his eyes or not.
Don’t go away, he thought. Don’t go away. But he was terrified. He could no longer feel his fingers or toes.
The thought occurred to him: maybe she was coming for him, to take him over to the other side. And he remembered the moments after the accident, and the feeling of soft shadowed hands all over.
“Are you asleep?” Her voice, too, was like wind across the sheets.
“No,” Trenton said, and he forced himself to open his eyes.
He tried not to scream. Or maybe he tried to scream and couldn’t. The desire was there, a hard pressure in his chest and throat and terror deep in his guts; but he kept breathing, in-out in-out, and made no sound.
Once, in seventh grade, Trenton had come down with a bad migraine just before basketball tryouts. Standing on the court, he’d seen holes in the boys charging at him, holes in the floor, great swirling pits of darkness in the air and ceiling. He’d spectacularly missed a free throw before puking right in the middle of the gym. But nothing was worse than the holes.
That’s what this was like: parts of her were there, and parts of her weren’t, but he couldn’t exactly tell which was which because the holes, the dark spaces, seemed always to be moving, eating up first her jaw or the left part of her cheek, then her shoulder and elbow or half her chest or a leg. The more he looked, the worse it became—dizzying, immobilizing, like entering a house after staring directly at the sun and fumbling blindly for familiar shapes.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m Trenton,” he said. “I live here.” It was far better when Trenton didn’t look at her directly. He scooted up on his elbows, leaning back against the headboard, and stared instead at the wall, where he could see the faint outlines of posters he’d had tacked there when he was a boy—places where the sun had bleached more or less, and small nicks in the wall from the thumbtacks. In his peripheral vision, she seemed far more solid. “Who’re you?” he said, although he thought he knew.
“I’m nobody anymore, am I?” she whispered. Then: “The others told me I was dead. They told me to get used to it.”
“The others?” Trenton said. His throat was dry.
“They’re always fighting,” she said simply.
For a minute, there was silence. Trenton was waiting for the girl to ask him for help—to avenge her death, or something. Wasn’t that why ghosts hung around? But she said nothing. Would anyone believe him? No. Of course not. He wasn’t even sure he believed him. Maybe he was imagining this whole thing, hallucinating. Maybe he’d finally cracked.
Or maybe the accident had killed him, and the past four months had been one weird dream, and he’d been dead the whole time, and he was only just discovering it. There was a movie like that.
“What’s your name?” Trenton asked.
“Does it matter?” she said. Then: “Why am I here? What is this place?” Her voice broke and she began to cry. The holes became even deeper and darker. He quickly looked away. “I miss my mom,” she said.
Trenton felt the sharp wrench of sadness again, an emotion so strong it seemed to bring his stomach to his throat. He wished he could reach out and put a hand on her shoulder. But she would break apart, he was sure of it. And he wouldn’t be able to handle it—if his hand passed through her. He might throw up.
“You were killed.” He swallowed. Jesus. It was hard to break the news of someone’s death. He sympathized, a little, with the nurse who had called his mom with the news of Richard’s death, even though she’d been a bitch about it. “A long time ago. You were shot here, in the house—”
“That’s her,” she said. “One of the others. Sandra. She got shot. Some guy stole a letter from her . . . ” She flickered briefly and Trenton thought she might vanish. But then she was back: a small dark curve in his peripheral vision. “The others don’t like me very much.”
Trenton closed his eyes and opened them again. The voices he’d been hearing . . . he must be hearing all of them. The ghosts. One of them had been killed in the house, his house. But there were others . . .
It was crazy. He hadn’t even believed in ghosts, at least not until the accident.
The thought returned to him: maybe he was already dead. And even though this was what he had wanted, and been planning for, he felt sick.
“Do you remember anything?” he said.
There was a pause. Trenton shivered. He felt as if a wind had come in through the window and tickled the back of his neck, before realizing that the ghost had shifted, that they had briefly touched.
“I remember Ida,” she said. “She lived next door. But there was something wrong with her bones. They grew all crooked. She always wanted me to play cards, but I didn’t like to. Does that make me a bad person?” Before Trenton could answer, she went on, “And the church—we lived down the street from the church. The bells drove Mom crazy. But I liked them. Especially at Christmas, when they played the hymns.” She fell silent again.