Page 10 of All Her Ghosts

But the words get tangled in my mouth. So angry I don’t even know where to start, I miss my chance entirely. Somebody beats me to it, actually raising her hand to ask, “But if they were poking at ghosts for fun, how arewehere? Like, how did they not all just… die?”

My attention pricks. Goose bumps pimple down my arms. I lean sideways out of my too-small desk to stare at her, peripherally aware Sebastian does the same out of the corner of my eye.

God, she’s so close. She’s literallyrightthere. She just has to do the math.

No, this isn’t normal. Ghosts used to be so rare we called themmyths. I’ve peeled the labels off old library books; the ones about ghosts were labeledFantasy. The dead stayed in their graves, streetlights were electric, and salt was for seasoning. We used to have summers that didn’t burn the grass brown, winters where it actually snowed.

Do the math, I whisper in my head, every muscle taut.Please, somebody, do the math.So tense I’m almost vibrating, I crane back around to stare at Mrs. Wilson, but she turns her back on the room, erasing the board with a shrug.

“Ghosts were not as prevalent or as severe as they are in our current climate.”

Current climate?Current climate, like the roving electrical storms are a minor inconvenience? The scorching summers and wet winters just one-off occurrences we have the misfortune of experiencingevery single year? Global warming, we’re working on it, sip your paper straws and don’t worry about the damage.

I dig my fingernails so hard into my arms I’m probably drawing blood but if I don’t do something to ground myself, I swear, I’ll fly out of this seat. Current climate? Is that really what the government tells her to call it—what they expect us to swallow without question—when thisclimatehas beencurrentfor the last seventeen years? Seventeen years when it didn’t used to be like this. Seventeen years without a solution.

And yet, we can’t acknowledge either reality: not the lack of solution in nearly two decades, not even the fact that a solution is needed at all. Never mind that kids die every day by ghost drain and then just… never go away. Everybody knows which playgrounds to avoid—which childhood friends are still on the swing set waiting for them, frozen in timeuntil everyone forgets them, until they forget the shape of their own face, their height, their own name, and wander, lost, little more than light.

But that’s justcurrent climate. That’s justweather.

God, it must be so easy for Mrs. Wilson to spout their propaganda. She can see ghosts, sure, but the ghosts don’t seeher. They don’t stare, don’t follow, don’t haunt her like they haunt me. She has no idea what it’s like to live every moment under the weight of those indistinct eyes, ghostly faces pained, hazy fingers always reaching,pleading. She can’t feel them suffering, silently begging for help she can’t give.

She doesn’t know what it’s like to fall out of her own body, to wander through the world untethered and aching.

To her, death is just a distant inconvenience. To me, it’s everywhere, every day, in everything.

“Now, with that covered, we can move on to today’s actual lesson,” she announces. I can’t hear her. I can’t blink. I can’t breathe. My blood fizzes in my ears. Distantly, I’m aware Sebastian’s watching me, and I know I should smile, I shouldact normal, you freak, but I can’t make my body respond. “Now, in 1848, Andrew Carnegie—”

The pressure of Sebastian’s attention pivots.

“You’re not even going to talk about why?”

Lightning strikes me in the chest. I spin to look at him, shocked that someone finally said it. Finally, someone is tossing the truth down like a gauntlet they can’t ignore.

Finally, someone who sees it.

Mrs. Wilson’s shoulders tighten. The marker in her hand squeaks, tip flattening on the board.

“We are moving on,” she says, and her tone threatens another kindof everyday magic, an impatient spell for obedience. “If you have further questions, you’re welcome to stay after school to discuss them.”

“That’s it?” Sebastian insists and my nerves sizzle, hyper-aware and floating. With every word he speaks, I feel an invisible camera zooming in. “The world broke seventeen years ago and you’re not even going to mention the cause? You’re really just going to pretend the Ghost Wars didn’t even happen?”

Mrs. Wilson’s mouth tightens. “That is an ugly conspiracy theory with no place in my classroom.”

“What about the creation of the Department for Necromantic Research? You don’t think it’s the slightest bit weird that our government mumble-coughed ‘hey, we’re gonna study ghost magic now’ into the footnote of a funding bill forclimate research?”

“The official government stance—” she starts, but Sebastian grins without humor, shaking his head.

“Oh, please,” he says before she can finish. “You’re too smart to embarrass yourself like this. Pretending you actually believe that ghosts boiled up out of the dirt one day because we ‘put too much plastic in it’?” He glances back at me—a match strike of his dark eyes against mine—before finishing, quieter, as if speaking to me alone now. “That’s an insult to us both.”

The marker cracks into its tray below the board.

“This is world history,” Mrs. Wilson says in the tone of a last warning. “We do not indulge in internet propaganda.”

Sebastian laughs and I don’t know him, but somehow, Iknowhe’s… furious. Under the smile and sparkle, something seethes in him, a twin to the fire ravaging my lungs.

Hidden in my hoodie pocket, I curl a fist into my suddenly aching stomach. I can’t explain why, but just that—his vehemence in the defense of the dead, digging up their inconsistencies and propaganda to toss their rotten bodies into the light—strikes me asunspeakablyimportant.

He sees it. He seesthem.