Page 29 of All Her Ghosts

As he waves us hurriedly past, Mom drives through a gap so small the car folds its mirrors in self-preservation. A strange pressure growing in my chest, I watch in the rearview mirror as the guard tugs the gate shut as soon as our bumper crosses the threshold. We wind up thedriveway under the pressure of a hundred little eyes watching from the woods, so many it looks like someone strung the bushes with fairy lights, a haunted Christmas glittering from every heavy poison pokeberry and briar patch.

“They can’t even keep the gates open, but they’re not gonna call a ghost day?” I spit bitterly, arms crossed tight over my chest. “Really tossing us to the wolves, huh?”

Mom sucks in a deep breath through her nose. She still won’t look at me.

“When the wolves are circling, better a fort than a log cabin.”

“Except wolves don’t have thumbs,” I snap. “They can’t open doors.” I dig my knuckles into my aching breastbone, still tight and throbbing from whatever the hell happened last night. “Just say what you mean. You don’t want me around.”

“Believe it or not, you’re safer here,” she says. “Residential properties don’t have the same level of protection as a school building.”

I can’t help it—I snort. Mom whips around, looking at me for the first time since we left, staring hard. I stare right back, silently daring.

Schools have a single iron defense gate, a random collection of art class ghost scares littering the parking lot and sports fields. What theydon’thave is entire walls studded with railroad spikes in an all-metal room with all-metal furniture, iron dust deploying from the rafters like a messed-up undead sprinkler system.

I want her to say it. Go on, Mom. Ask me if I broke it; admit that youbuilt it. Look me in the face and tell me I was right, that something is rotten between us—that something in me ismissing—and has been for a long time. Tell me the truth,I dare you.

Strained, my mother looks away.

She says, “Learn something new today.”

Once again, I already have. And not from this farce of a school system. I climb out of the car and into a wall of pressure so intense I damn near face-plant onto the ground. Walking the short distance to the front doors feels like wading through gelatin, the air unbreathable, a physical weight climbing my shoulders and shoving me down. I’ve weathered ghost storms before, but none of them hurt like this, every nerve in my body blazing with a searing, desperate awareness, ears pricked and straining for every rustle and whisper.

I can hear them. All of them. There are hundreds—maybe more. Ghost lights in the woods. Muted sobbing from the weeds, an anxious stirring.Suffering.

The strange pressure barely alleviates inside the building, once I’m supposedly safe within its lackluster wards. I stumble through the entryway, hyper-aware of every eye on me, the distant gaze from the woods tracking my progress, the impatient neediness of a hundred waiting ghosts a cold current down my spine.

I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t think. I can’tsee. I need to find Bas. I stagger forward, groping toward the stairs—maybe he’ll be waiting for me in the library?—but before I can reach the door, I collide straight into the vice principal. He laughs at my look of surprise when he leads me to the in-school suspension room. Blinking between dreams, I find I’m the only one assigned there.

“Did you think you were going to spend the day sitting with your boyfriend?” he asks, chuckling at his own dumb self. “Obviously not.”

Idiotic bullying, designed to make me feel smaller—but infuriatingly,it works. I shuffle to my seat, red to my burning ears, feeling every mortifying inch of my flesh-and-bone body. Last night I shed my mortal body, thwarted an entire basement designed to kill me, and sucked power from the power grid like a milkshake, but today I’m just a helpless teenager, small and limited and in-school suspended.

All because a middle-aged man who peaked in high school mentioned myboyfriend.

God, it’s such an ugly word. All sharp edges and expectations and mockery. Too small for the thing we have and, at the same time, way too big. So I kissed Bas yesterday—that doesn’t mean I expect anything. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

But then, how could it not meaneverythingwhen our lips touch and the world folds itself inside out? When I remember another self, another time? When I put my hand on his bare, empty chest and a flower bloomed in the ground between us?

Sullen, I shove the thoughts away. Mad he brought it up and mad I’m still thinking about it, I yank my books out of my carpetbag and pretend to start the work my teachers assigned me in crooked handwriting on the whiteboard. I refuse to sit here worried whether a boy likes me back or thinks I’m weird. Won’t catch me writing his name in hearts in the margins of my notebook.

Still, even staring at algebra—the most unromantic homework possible—I can’t concentrate. A nauseous headache gums up my gears. My head feels swollen, ready to pop. Every time I manage to focus for a second, it shatters on the next whisper, the next distant stirring. I glance at the substitute, Mr. Snider, whose problem I am today, but he sits unmoving, squinting through big aviator bifocals at an old paperbackwith his feet up on the desk; he clearly doesn’t hear a thing. So why do I keep hearing someone calling?

Dropping my pencil, I close my eyes, press my hands to my head, and concentrate. I try to listen, to track where the noise is coming from, whatever it’s saying, but all I feel ispressure—and a sudden alarm.

My phone screams from my bra. I scramble for it, swearing. Did I hit snooze so many times it’s going off now?

Luckily, the teacher doesn’t seem to care.

“Turn off your phone,” he drones without looking up, frowning when his starts screaming too.

I look at my screen. It’s not an alarm at all—it’s the dull, pulsing drone of the Remnant Alert System, reporting we’re at a Level 4 and advising an immediate order to shelter in place. Distantly, I hear Mr. Snider’s loafers hit the linoleum, his hand snatching for the telephone on his desk.

This is bad. They usually don’t ever call a Level 4 for the ghosts of animals. Even two schools ago when the meat-packing plant near Columbus, Ohio, missed its monthly iron salting and a whole herd of ex-cows went wandering the countryside, they only called a 3 and a ghost day off school.

The classroom door creeps open, the school nurse sidling inside. She flashes me a smile as she crosses the room. At Mr. Snider’s desk, she leans down to murmur something low and urgent to him, glancing once at me, like she’s afraid I’ll leave.

I’d be offended, if I could think straight. My ears ring with the pressure, head pounding with that calling-calling-callingsensation, the words I can’t make out. I stand up while the adults are distracted, slidingout of my seat and drifting over to the window. Before I mean to, I’m pressing my overheated forehead to the glass, staring out into a sea of roiling thunderheads, as violent as the storm inside of me.