Page 44 of Paper Ghosts

She immediately dropped her bag and sat heavily on her bed with its same red-poppy comforter, looking around at all the things that had defined her life eight years ago. She thought they would’ve gotten rid of this detritus by now. It was a little overwhelming.

She took out her phone and called Justin.

“Hey,” he answered immediately. “So you got there safely?”

“Yes.”

He was the only person in her life who knew she was coming home, and why. She didn’t get close enough to most people to share anything personal, but Justin was a burr, and he wouldn’t let her get away with dropping their friendship, which certainly started with a bang.

Her first year away was the worst. She thought a fresh start would mean having the same life, only in a different place, but she had never felt so lost. She flunked her classes, then began indulging in the thing depression whispers will make it better, yet never does, something remarkably easy to do on a college campus: drink. Mim never drank, so it felt like a delicious rebellion at the time. She met Justin at a frat party. They were both smashed. He walked her back to her room and, for a reason that must have made sense to them at the time, they eloped two days later. Then the alcohol wore off and there were a couple of embarrassed phone calls to their parents. Next, the annulment.

It was a turning point for Bailey, one with just enough of an arc that she was able to admit to her dad that she was crumbling. He wanted her to come home, but she refused. At that point, even if Mim begged, Bailey never wanted to go home. So she dropped out of school and started therapy, both in equal measure teaching her that isolating while waiting for people to save her was like not screaming and expecting others to hear anyway.

She and Justin stayed close, which was miraculous to her. He saw her at her worst, and still managed to like her, something she could never say about Mim. When he got a job in Fort Lauderdale after he graduated, he even asked her to move there with him, and they were roommates for two years. Tug would visit often, to see with his own eyes that she was okay. She also suspected there were secret conversations between him and Justin about her progress, too. Justin adored her dad, and he assumed Mim was just as charming, like they were characters in a Southern play. It was easier to let him believe that.

At her continued silence, Justin said, “Talk to me.”

“My bedroom looks exactly the same. It’s spooky. It’s like running into your teenage self on the street.”

“Oh, God, I would run in the other direction if that happened to me,” he said. “Teenage me would tell me to lose weight and that my shoes are ugly.”

That made Bailey laugh.

“How’s your dad holding up?”

“He’s seeing someone.”

“No way. Who? What’s her name?” he asked. “Or his name?”

“‘His name’?”

“I’m open-minded.”

“He doesn’t want to talk about it right now. So he’s getting through this the way he always does, by taking care of everyone else first.”

“So how’s your love life?”

“You don’t think I would have told you if I’d met someone?”

“Knowing you? Of course not. Which is why I peck at you like a duck. Plus, you don’t have social media. You barely text. You insist on catching up by actually talking. And no one uses their phone to talk anymore. Cool kids like me use Instagram.” She heard a toddler’s voice in the background say, You’re not cool, Dada. Justin responded, “Yes, I am. I’m too cool for school.”

“I forgot you were solo parenting this week with Jeanette out of town. I’ll let you go.” He’d met his wife in Fort Lauderdale while he and Bailey were still roommates. That’s when Bailey knew it was time to leave and find her own way in the world, to let him fall in love and have a family and do all the things that normal people do. So she did a random search online one day, made a quick decision so she would stick to it, and moved to Arizona.

“It’s going to be okay,” Justin said. “Whatever happened, that thing you never talk about, has passed. I think there’s more than one goodbye you need to say while you’re there.”

“Thanks for being my friend.”

“Stop thinking it’s that hard.”

After they hung up, Bailey cued an episode of the Stuff You Should Know podcast, this one explaining chaos theory, which seemed appropriate, then got to work on her bedroom. She mercilessly filled donation bags with clothes, shoes, stuffed animals, and dozens and dozens of paperback romances, not stopping to reminisce, or this would take days.

The only thing that made her hesitate was when she found two photo albums in her closet—the pink one with photos of her mother, and the black one with photos of Tug and his father and Mim. She hadn’t thought about these in years. She flipped through them quickly, then slapped them shut and bagged them. But it didn’t take long to feel guilty and turn around to dig them out. As time passes and stories fade, photos are the only things left still speaking for people who are gone, saying simply, I was here.

The Great Bedroom Purge took several hours, but she finally looked around and saw real progress. That’s when she made her way quietly downstairs for something to drink. She crossed the kitchen to the fridge, but she caught sight of her reflection in the window above the sink and stopped to stare. She’d forgotten she still had on the teddy bear hat. She slowly pulled it off and scrubbed her short, bright blue hair with her hand, causing it to stand up in spikes.

Over the years, her impulsive behavior had been whittled down so that it only manifested itself now in changing jobs, and dyeing her hair on a whim. Her dad’s call about Mim had been so unexpected that there hadn’t been time to bleach out this current experiment before she left.

While she was looking at herself, she thought she saw a blurry movement in the dark outside. She leaned forward and cupped her hands over the glass to see what it was.