Page 39 of All Her Ghosts

“Timer’s at zero, Chloe.”

Mom’s lip curls. Her nails dig into my arm, dragging me behind her.

“Expect a restraining order on your doorstep by tomorrow.”

“Yeah, sure,” Cain snorts. “That’ll stop what’s coming.”

And then he goes. The heavy stairwell door bangs shut, leaving us in the hallway alone—a confused cop; my mother, pale-faced and shaking; and me. A feral dead girl percolating areallybad idea.

“Well?” I ask my mother, giving her one last chance.

Her hand grips me hard enough to bruise. She storms us past the cop, who ambles behind us with a resigned and tired kind of relief. Mom glances over her shoulder, sharp.

She says, “Not here.”

CHAPTER 13

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“This Is Why We Fight” by The Decemberists

I read once that the absence of evidence doesn’t mean evidence of absence—that you can’t prove something’s missing just by pointing at the empty place where it should have been, since you have no proof it ever existed in the first place. Fair, I guess. But in my case, isn’t the absence weird enough?

Steely-faced, my mother drags me outside. Sun beams down from a cheerful blue sky, dancing in mud puddles and on the wet grass. Eerie. Like some lost god pulled a sleeve over their divine fist and wiped away the storm, the army of ghosts, their suffering. Only the kicked ants’ nest of local police swarming along the drive prove anything’s happened at all.

Mom takes one look at the horde of flashing lights, a black van pulling up in defiance of a One Way sign, and grips my shoulder hard. She steers me down the side of the building, away from the crying, hiccupping crowd and stressed officers trying to cordon off the area and take statements at the same time. An officer rolling out crime scene tape shouts something in our direction, but Mom pretends not to hear him, striding toward the parking lot with official-looking purpose.

She also pretends not to hear the girl on the outskirts of the crowd wailing, “The room was so cold, and we couldn’t get away from them. The door was still barred; we had nowhere to go. But they were only interested inher. She just, like—atethem. She held out her arms and they walked right into her and disappeared.”

A muscle twitches in Mom’s jaw. The police officer calls again. With a frustrated wave, she slaps his concern out of the air, cuts us between two big police vans.

The voice trails after us, hiccupping but clear. “Why did she do that? Is she dead? She has to be dead, right?”

Mouth set in a thin, grim line, Mom yanks my hood up over my head and shucks out of her own coat, ripping it inside out.

“Put it on,” she says.

I start to protest—I have a hoodie; why is she giving me her coat when all she’s wearing is a silk blouse?—but the look on her face… Mom stares in the side mirror of the police van, angling it with one long finger so she can watch around the hood of the car behind her, and it reminds me ofCain. His craggy lighthouse gaze echoes in the way she scans her corners, gauging the distance between us and the car, then between us and the massive black vans, emblazoned with an upside-down caduceus and two dripping snakes: Department ofNecromanticResearchin tight, white font.

The school nurse stands in the middle of it all, funky scrubs at odds with the hard look on her face and the official black tablet in her hands. She barks out orders, carving ghost-drained kids from the herd of mildly shell-shocked ones with cold efficiency, slicing them off intoa knot of nearby ambulances or over to the queue of orange juice and Costco-cookie-laden folding tables.

Now, I know enough to know this is standard procedure for a Remnant Contact Event—on-site medical care right there in black-and-white government vans—and with that setup in our basement, I know my mom knows it too.

I was ghost-touched. I should be over there. Heck, I should bedead. And the fact that Mom’s here at all means someone from the school called her, told her at least some of what happened. Even if they didn’t, even if she only saw it on the news, that girl out front was screaming loud enough I’m sure passing cars a half mile away could hear. Momknowswhat happened to me.

What I did.

Yet she watches through the side mirror until the nurse turns away to talk to a paramedic. Steering me in front of her, she marches me across the parking lot, folds me into her car with a hand on my head, and practically jumps across the hood to climb in. She doesn’t even bother to back up, just throws the car in drive and inches out into the muddy field, cutting straight for the driveway.

The driveway, I can’t help noticing, is eerily free of ghosts. I scan the tree line but can’t find a single staring eye.

All this absence—tell me it’s not evidence of something. That it’s not evidence of what I did, what Iam.

It’s high time Mom told me what the hell that somethingis.

Awkward in my mom’s wool coat, I fold my arms, glaring at her rigid profile, willing her to open her mouth. God, can she not just admitit, evennow? Is the truth that bad? Is somethingthatwrong with me? Or is she just embarrassed? Am I some shameful thing, some old mistake she can’t even bear to look at? And every time I fuck up—every time I fail a test or “dissociate” or do something strange—she’s gotta run away again in shame?

I make it all the way to the corner gas station before my fragile patience cracks, an echo in my ears like boiling water in a broken glass.