Page 2 of All Her Ghosts

“Why are you still here?” she answers the second time, waspish. “The bus comes in five minutes.”

“There’s a strange man outside. I tried yelling for you, but you were too busy to bother. I’m assuming you want me to get abducted?”

Mom pauses long enough that I check the screen to make sure she hasn’t hung up on me again.

“A strange man?”

“Yeah, he wants to talk to you. Says you work together.” I hate the way his gaze moves, a methodical calculation in the way he eyes the yard, the darkened hallway just past the kitchen, the distance between the houses and the street. Still, he stands right where I left him, his hands where I can see them. Safe enough for now, anyway. I can’t resist an opportunity to nettle.

Keeping a wary eye on him, I gasp in fake horror. “Mom, are you dating?”

She hangs up. A minute later, I hear her exasperated footsteps pounding up the stairs. The door ricochets open.

“I guarantee you we are not dating,” she says, jaw tight.

“You haven’t even seen him.”

“Go catch the bus.”

“And walk outside saying what?” I protest, glaring. “Excuse me, Mr. Kidnapper, my mom says I have to go to school today? No panel vans for me, thanks?”

That earns a sharp inhale. A flicker crosses my mom’s face, a spark about to ignite, but she freezes in the middle of the kitchen, eyes locked on the man framed in the bare lattice window of the back door. Her breathing goes jagged, too quick, like somebody punched her in the chest and she can’t catch her breath. I abandon my quest to annoy her, anxiety squeezing my own chest.

“Mom? Who is he?”

“Don’t worry about it. Go to school.” Slowly, she turns, stares me full in the eyes. She says, “We’ll talk about it later.”

Anger evaporates my worry. Instant and white-hot, it burns my nerves until I can’t feel my arms at all, pins and needles; then numb, gone. I hold myself very still, clamp my fury between my teeth, and force my voice even, so she can’t say I’m emotional and ignore me.

“You’re lying. You only ever bother to look me in the eyes when you lie. Do you think I’m so desperate for attention I’ll believe it better that way?”

“Persephone,”my mother says. “This discussion is over. Don’t forget your ghost salt. It’s—”

“Hanging beside the door you’re kicking me out of,” I snarl. “Sameplace it’s been in the last six goddamned houses—and God forbid you share a room with me for more than a minute in any of them!”

Snatching my thrift store–carpetbag up from the hall, I storm across the house. I might as well stomp across a tomb. Nothing rattles. Nothing moves. There’s nothingtomove; no pictures on the dead white walls, no souvenir shelves, barely any furniture and what there is of that still in its funerary shrouds. Only my keys make a noise, jangling as I grab them from the hook beside the door, the little blue-glass spray bottle clanking bitterly against the only other key ring hanging on the rack.

That single key on its tattered Mothman key chain beckons me, tempting, singing a siren song about the old RV in the driveway and its full tank of gas. What if I just… left? Snatched up that dented little scrap of plastic advertising MothmanMotel,Room 13and left behind my house key and the rotating never-really-home it belongs to, drove off into anywhere but here? What if I stared down the barrel of that bad decision and finally pulled the trigger?

“Persephone!” my mother bellows from the kitchen.“Now.”

“I’m going!” Only my own stupid keys carving lines in my palm, I wrench the door open. At the same time, my mother must open the back. The cold autumn breeze kites through our empty house, a hollow moan so loud I almost miss her icy accusation.

“What are you doing here?”

You know what? Screw the bus. I don’t care. I prowl around the side of the house instead, bundled up against the cutting cold, following the stranger’s dimpled footsteps in the frost-capped grass. Six houses, six schools, three years—I refuse to let her ignore me and lie anymore. If she wants to treat me like a ghost so bad, I’d rather justbeone.

Time for my party trick.

Not that I go to parties.

Slamming my thrifted carpetbag down on the lichen-stained lawn table left behind by the previous owner, I crumple into the nearest chair. My vision shutters. My mind winks out, the gossamer exhale of a soap bubble popping. LikeThe Wizard of Ozcoming into Technicolor, I billow into the waking wind, coaxing my spiderweb sticky soul from reluctant flesh until I’m standing metaphysically naked on the garden path beside my own empty bean pod of a body.

Mom hates my party trick. The one time she caught me, she called my left-behind body “catatonic disassociation,” and before I could figure out how to stop digging myself a deeper hole with my fumbling, crazy-sounding attempts to reassure her, I was three months deep in painfully awkward Thursday-afternoon mother-daughter tea times. Her homemade attempt at therapy, I guess, because God forbid she ever take me to a real doctor.

Anyway, I’m not doing that again. I diagnosed myself instead with a little help from Dr. Google. I found out the internet calls it astral projection. I way prefer that. It’s more accurate than “catatonic disassociation,” and less terrifying than my own theory—that the Ghost War bombs that went off when I was born blasted me with enough freaky radiation to cause my ghost to fall out. So yeah, I’ll stick with calling it astral projection and just steadily keep on ignoring how…deadmy body looks without me in it. There’s something so unsettlingly wrong about the way my left-behind meat sits there, breathing slowed and eyes glassy, staring out into the quickly darkening middle distance of a storm blowing in.

With my weight left behind in my body, my army surplus bootsmake no sound on the broken brick of the overgrown garden path. I circle the house, find the stranger and my mother bent toward each other like springs about to fire, almost nose to nose with the storm door, ready to bite through the thin pane of glass between them.