Page 12 of All Her Ghosts
“You’re awfully pale,” she settles on, voice gentling. “Are you feeling okay? You look sick.”
“Lovesick, maybe,” somebody stage-whispers. “Missing her freak boyfriend.”
I’d flip them off, but I can’t feel my fingers. My hands belong to a distant stranger, buzzing with cold static. My soul swells at my seams, threatening to rip. Every inhale, every drop of blood in my veins, demands my full concentration. I—I have to stop. I can’t do this. Not here. I need to get my head on straight.
Grinding my teeth, I force my body to move. I shove against the desk, cracking my spine on the chair back. My knee jogs restlessly. My fingernails tap out the rhythm of a song. It’s not enough. The free-falling feeling still threatens at the corner of my blurry vision, my head listing, ready to drop and leave my flesh behind it. I need to wake up. I need adrenaline. I need a fight—
I blurt, “Whydon’twe talk about the Ghost War?”
Something in me needs to hear her say it. I stare at her, this sudden wildness itching me down to the bone.Go on, I want to tell her.Say it.Tell me all the best lies. Tell me about microplastics in the water supply causing metaphysical decay. Tell me about experimental 6G cellphone towers giving us brain cancer and warping our perception of reality. Tell me about the enemy nation that snuck in and bombed us with mad science no one has ever seen before or since, how no one knows the nation we’re at war with, or how to replicate what they did. Tell methe government didn’t build a necromancy department. Tell me how it wasn’t founded before all the conspiracies began. Before microplastics and cellphone towers. Before the Ghost War. Before I was born.
Tell me you believe it, right here in front of everyone.
A hungry, waiting silence swallows the room, heavy with the expectation of impending punishment. Mrs. Wilson purses her lips, staring at me. Another war, weighing the risk and reward of picking a fight with me?
It takes a second, but she comes to a decision, crosses back to her desk. She pulls open the detention slip drawer again, metal body bouncing on its runners, but this time a plank of wood lands like a coffin closing on her desk.
My vision flickers. For a split second, tongues of fire leap at my bare feet. I smell pine tar seeping, ocean salt. The waves rise up, seething—
No—I swallow hard, dragging myself out of this cloying daydream—it’s just teenagers whispering, giggling, the competing stink of body sprays and ghost salts.
“Because it was never a war,” Mrs. Wilson says with unusual gentleness. “It was, as best anyone can prove, a naturally occurring tragedy, and sensationalizing it does a disservice to the memory of those we lost.”
Her voice carries to me down a far tunnel, overlapping with the sound of wood falling. Mrs. Wilson drops a hall pass on my desk, a nub of two-by-four sawed short, flaking acrylic paint spelling out her room number in a field of flowers. My vision whitens—
(Raspy asphodel catching in a cotton gown. The hush of distant reeds. Water laughs from a deep, black river. And stars, oh thestars—my belovedhoard, diamond-spattered, reflected in every grasping white flower head and in the endless, glittering mirror of black water.)
I snap my eyes shut. The dream winks out, a projector turning off. I slam back into my body, stagger to my feet. I can’t stay here another second. I have to get out, have to leave. Snatching up my carpetbag, I shovel my textbook inside it, juggle the hall pass under my arm.
“Go straight to the nurse,” Mrs. Wilson tells me.
I barely hear her, the door already swinging shut behind me.
CHAPTER 4
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Youth” by Daughter
What is happening to me? I’ve fallen out of my body before, but I’ve never fallen asleep, tumbled into some other life, some othertime.
Shoulder braced against the cool, white tile walls, I inch down the hallway. Every footfall drags a mountain behind me. An oily smoke lingers on my tongue. A distant drumbeat echoes in my ears.
Some kind of band practice. Must be.Ignore it.
Concentrating so hard my teeth squeak with the effort of biting back my errant soul, I navigate the stairs, picking a careful path to the nurse’s office. The halls sit empty, bigger somehow without the rush of teenagers all trying to get somewhere. Trapped behind shut classroom doors, the murmuration of living bodies barely reaches me. No tangled hydra of mean girls lurks guarding the stairs. Even my boots make no sound, each step swallowed by the thin, mossy mist seeping out of the linoleum. Everything is empty. Silent. Dead.
Is this what ghosts feel like? Wandering a living world without being trulyinit? Watching the world go on without them through a frosted-over window?
I blink hard, rub a fist over my eyes, count my breaths with forced steadiness. By the time I open them, the mist evaporates—was it ever even there? My hazy vision clears. I feel… not right, exactly, but better. Steadier. With my head almost on straight, I hesitate outside the nurse’s office.
In another room down the hall, someone bellows loud enough entire words escape under the door—respect,poor attitude,gratitude,juvenile delinquency. I can’t see in, blinds firmly shuttered on the room’s only window, but I know who’s in there. I know the way his lips curl, the flash in his eyes. Ifeelthe pauses in the thunder where he responds, worsening the storm with every brief reprieve, and his rebellion kindles something in me.
Worse than the mist, a crossroad cracks open under my feet, spilling out possibilities. I… don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be the tolerant girl, sullen but obedient, doing what I’m told and going where I’m sent. Two new schools a year, always playing catch-up, never making friends. And for what? I know where this road leads—college after college, bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate, all of Mom’s choosing.
Staring down the barrel of another eight years, I flinch. The hall pass slips from my numb fingers, its oaken clatter drawing the nurse’s attention. A chair squeaks. A moment later, she pads around the corner.
“Did you need something, honey?” she asks. “Don’t be shy, you can come on in.”
