Page 4 of All Her Ghosts

“Persephone,” she says. Just that. Just the literal worst name shecould have saddled me with, all my flaws and nuisance weighing down those four fat syllables.

I walked over here meaning to tell her the bus never came. I had an excuse ready, an argument prepared. But the way she can’t evenlookat me, my name in her mouth like a disgusting thing—here it comes—the delayed explosion, the boiling water finally filling up my broken cup. The porcelain inside me pops.

Black-chipped fingernails denting the rubber window seal, I explode.

“Was that mydad?”

My mom’s beige fingernails leave dents of their own in the steering wheel.

“Get in the car.”

CHAPTER 2

Sopping wet, I flip down the visor, ripping the mirror open. Clawing my hair off my neck hard enough to welt, I force it into a ruthless braid. It improves nothing. A drowned rat glares back at me, pretty as a haunted well, black baby hairs plastered to my forehead and mascara spindling spiderwebs down my cheeks. Nice. Very funeral chic. Great impression for the third day at a new school.

Screw it. I could try to fix it, but what’s the point? They say dress for the job you want, right? Well, I’ve got dibs on hitchhiking ghost. Maybe if I’m lucky a tractor trailer will swipe off the passenger side before we get to school. There’s been more than the usual number of ghosts cluttering the gutters lately—it’s not like anyone will notice an extra. Maybe I’ll get real lucky and call dibs on a cozy little culvert.

Failing that, I rub a little salt in the wound. “So, are we going to talk about it, or…?”

Mom slaps on the turn signal with a crack so sharp I check to see if she left any broken plastic behind.

“That man isnotyour father.”

“You guys clearly have a history.”

“Whether we do or not is none of your business, Persephone,” shesnaps. “Believe it or not, I do occasionally have a life outside the care and keeping of a recalcitrant teenager.”

“Occasionally?” I bark a startled laugh. “Occasionallyyou have a life? When we move two, three times a year, chasing after—what, Mom? My dreams? My ‘care and keeping’? If you’re going to lie to me, at least do a better job.”

“I do not lie,” she bites. Her eyes flare wide, mouth tight, warning me to drop it. “And he had no business speaking to you at all.”

I can’t. I can’t leave it alone any more than I can stop picking a scab—and this is an old scab, covering a festering wound full of pus and unanswered questions.

“Well, you sure don’t tell the truth.” Spinning in my seat, I stare hard at the side of her head, bitterly tempted to grab the wheel and force her to look at me, toanswer me. For once. “Since you’re so honest—tell me, then. Why do we keep moving? Every time I dare to get comfortable, you uproot me. So, what? What are we running from?”

Mom shakes her head, her fists restless on the wheel. “What did he say to you?”

“It doesn’t matter what he said to me! I’m talking toyou. What were you supposed to deal with seventeen years ago?”

My mother presses her lips into a thin, pale line and falls silent. I know that look. God, I loathe that look. I’ve seen abandoned buildings more hospitable, more alive with ghosts in every window than the cold, closed-off look in her eyes. I know I’ll never force her to answer, but I can’t help trying.

“Mom, look at me. Tell me he didn’t come here for me.”

Through her teeth, biting every word, she says, “I am driving.”

Cold water hisses on the fire in my gut. Disgusted, I turn away.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “That’s what I thought.”

Heaving my carpetbag into my lap, I squeeze it close, ignoring the damp seeping through my tights, the wet animal stink of the antique wool. My fingers know its interior cartography by heart, tracking through the catalog of cluttered pockets with library precision. I locate my left earbud by the knot I tied in the cord, queue up my playlist by touch alone. If the blasting music can’t fill up my hollow spaces, at least they’ll echo with a better tune while I wait for my death row march into yet another new school.

Pressing my overheated forehead against the cool window, I stare out at the blurry street, counting all the ghosts along the route. Most people try not to look at them; I can’t stop. Something in those hazy blue wisps demands my attention. Staring dead-eyed through the dash at the dark-dappled morning, I track every little ghost light burning in the gutters and berms, scouring their flickering outlines for some clue of what animal they used to be. I lose the game more often than I win. After death, ghosts lose themselves, burn down to their memories of what mattered. Claws and teeth. The outline of a head if someone used to scratch it.

Call it a compulsion, I don’t know. It just… itmatters, okay? Their lives, their deaths—a whole unique spark snuffed out by a careless car tire—and now they’re trapped, lost, maybe hurting, unable to move forward or back. Hell is empty and all its ghosts are here. Somebody should at least witness it. Acknowledge that they’re suffering.

I know they’re suffering. I can… Listen, I know it’s crazy, but I swear I canfeelit.

Nobody believes me. According to the science—and my mother—I’m an idiot kid playing make-believe. Some people can’t even see them. For the rest of us who can, the government’s official stance is to ignore them, don’t worry about it, they don’t feel a thing, they’re basically just a new kind of weather, same as spring’s rolling blackouts, summer’s searing droughts, or winter floods. Just another fun souvenir of the Ghost Wars or climate change, pick whichever equally made-up poison you prefer in your Kool-Aid. Mom takes it to a religious extreme so strict it’d make a priest weep. The only way I know for sure she can see them at all is that she ignores them the same way she ignores me.