Page 31 of All Her Ghosts

From up high, I catch Bas doing the same. He shoves between people, headed unerringly my way, following the compass that only ever points at each other. We slam together like magnets meeting, hands gripping forearms. I melt back into my body. The anxiety from before—boyfriend, and the small-bigness of that word—stops mattering when his black eyes meet mine. All my messy fear and insecurities are just human residue, some little teenage thing; but I’m more than that. I’m something bigger, somethingworse. I’m a monster in sheep’s clothing and barely wearing my skin.

In the din of the crowd, our voices lost in the current, I ask him, “Am I crazy? I think they’re calling me.”

And Bas says, “I hear it too.”

CHAPTER 10

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“Wonderboy” by Tenacious D

They pack every kid in the building into the second-floor classrooms, thirty bodies to a room, sorted by last name. Up here, the classrooms all sport iron runners on the walls, bars on the windows, and every state-sponsored semireligious talisman a nondenominational public school could afford dangling by acrylic yarn from the drop ceiling.

Bas and I slip into the first room to get away from the nurse still yelling my name and the teacher screaming his. TheL’s andG’s aren’t even inneighboringrooms and we can’t risk getting separated now. We tuck ourselves into the corner as Mr. Snider rushes around closing the windows, metal venetian blinds clattering against the iron-hashed windows. Plotting his trajectory, I slip over to the last window on his route. It looks over the far side of the building, opposite the road where the ghosts broke through, but even here, the grounds glow like a rave in the uneasy dark and roiling sky, ghost lights burning through the shadowy woods.

Lightning slices the clouds. I can’t hear the answering thunderclap. I can’t hear anything. My head throbs, my whole body and soul bending toward the eyes watching from the trees.

A hand lands on my arm, turning me away from the window. I jump, but Bas snarls, “Don’t touch her,” before I can find my mouth, snagging me from Mr. Snider with a tight spin that tucks me into his side. Instinctual. Moths riot in my empty rib cage at the way his calloused fingers span my shoulder, the fluorescent lights playing oddly in his dark eyes, painting them with an almost golden shimmer. He looks like a stranger in that moment.

He looks more familiar than anyone I know.

Mr. Snider purses his lips.

“Keep away from the windows,” he barks, spinning off to deal with the next impending crisis in a roomful of panicking teens. I barely hear him. My ears crowd with voices, living and present. Dead and otherwise.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I smash my palms into my ears, but even with all the iron blinds down, and boxed inside an iron-locked room, the pressure still threatens to grind me into paste. My head screams like a whistling kettle, boiling water about to burst.

“How many are there?” Bas asks, his lips so close to my ear I feel them brush my skin.

“So many,” I whisper. “How are they here? Why now? What are they looking for?”

Did my mother expect this? Is this what she was tracking in her basement lair, marking every remnant flare and ghost sighting? Was she waiting for a travesty? A ghost storm this big, with all her equipment—she must have seen it coming. So why send me to weather it here? Is hiding her government toys really more important to her than her own daughter?

My stomach turns. Thunder rattles the building. The lights flicker to a chorus of screams.

“It’s just the storm!” Mr. Snider yells, hands lifted in aquiet downgesture. It’d be more convincing if he looked like he believed it. Instead, his jaw clenched like a man headed to the front lines, he strides to the closet and chucks out everything he lays his hands on. An old projector gets wheeled aside, sun-bleached paper decorations flutter to the linoleum. A couple old first aid boxes land in a pile, followed by a single ghost kit.

Piranhas descend in a flurry. Plastic cracks. A couple meaty punches land with wheezy grunts. Wrestling kids corkscrew the lids apart until the plastic whitens and shatters, guts spilling out on the floor for others to scavenge. Ghost spray and iron salts and dusty handfuls of lavender burst like an artery. A mean boy wins the bundle of sage, but after a short scuffle, the sobbing girl who scratched my arms earlier displays a willingness to bite that wins her the lighter.

Meanwhile, two big football players join Mr. Snider at the closet, helping him to heave out a massive, iron-banded crossbeam. Shaped like a crucifix, the thing stands taller than the door, etched with a ton of symbols, bible verses sketched in shorthand, runes and Celtic knots and other marks I don’t recognize. Between the three of them, they lift it into place across the door, slotting it into the waiting joists at either side.

I watch in a dull kind of horror. It won’t help them. I know it in my bones, deeper than my missing heartbeat. After all—an entire room of ghost traps and iron couldn’t stopme, only left me sore and irritated, popping ibuprofen in the morning.

Somewhere in a knot of kids, the local news blares from cellphone speakers. A perfectly manicured voice tells us not to worry, that ghosts feel nothing and know nothing and want nothing. That they’re onlycaught in the eddies of an electromagnetic tide, and when the storm passes, so will they.

“Remnants no longer retain the means to process outside stimuli,” the newscaster recites. Like clockwork, the usual refrain, so deadpan it must be government mandated: “Everything they appear to experience is only an echo of their own life.”

My head throbs louder, pressure increasing by the second, and even my knuckles grinding into my temple can’t abate it. They’re wrong. God, they’resowrong—can’t they see? Why didn’tIsee it? I’ve been fighting with iron all my life, slipping out of my body and into trouble, flouting security alarms and breaking down doors. I should have known. I should have done the math.

We’ve only been safe this long because the ghosts let us believe it. Because we had nothing they wanted… yet.

They clearly want something now. The lights brown again. This time, they flicker out to a chorus of gasps, a collective inheld breath, the only sound in the sudden silence the tinny phone speakers droning out local traffic—

And, very distantly, the sound of an alarm blaring. The Klaxon screams twice, strong and confident, before choking off in an electronic wheeze.

“The new girl was right.” Hollow-eyed, the girl with the lighter stares at me. Throat tight, she whispers, “They’re inside.”

Suddenly a whole lot of kids spin to stare at me, the lit match of their horror burning quickly into anger. Screw them—I don’t have the spoons to mitigate their assumptions and expectations. I can’t take thisthrobbingin my head anymore.