Page 7 of All Her Ghosts

That’s a reference—Scary Stories to Tell in the Darkby Alvin Schwartz,a floppy little paperback with the creepiest black cover a nine-year-old could find. I used to obsess about that story—the woman who wore a ribbon around her neck every day of her life until her husband removed it and her head fell off. I’d hide under the bed to read it, huddled in the monster’s den for safety in numbers, imagining how it would feel to fall off my own body, the stomach-dropping sensation of left-behind meat, the wood floor hard against the broken knot of my spine.

Out in the real world, beyond our little monster’s den, the bell rings.

The boy clambers out from under the table, offering me a hand up. Flattered by the vintage chivalry, I take it—

Calluses.

God, it hits me like a freight train and suddenly I know exactly what falling off your own body feels like. It feels like my party trick. It feels likethis—holding a hand I know as well as my own when I don’t even know the name of the boy it belongs to.

Before I can ask, before I can shove my soul back in my skin like an errant sleeping bag and relearn how to work my traitorous mouth, he snags my dangling headphone cord and pops one in his ear. He smiles at me, tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear—doesn’t even mind that it’s wet—and gently slots the other earbud in mine.

I swear I feel my rib cage cracking, whatever windblown seed landed there exploding out in fiery foliage and glossy roots. I suck in a shaky breath and his chest rises too—one long inhale strung between us and David Bowie.

“Come on,” he says, tangling our fingers, and his smile is just for me. Like I’ve given him something more than a moment and a shared song. “Us dead kids gotta stick together.”

“Oh yeah?” I ask, swallowing twice to keep my voice from shaking. “How’d you die then?”

“Well, I was invited to this party—pretty girl, dark hair, maybe you know her? She had this killer playlist…”

“Shut up,” I protest, laughing.

Tethered together, he plunges us into the rushing torrent of students, swimming us between bodies like a boat he was born to steer.

“Hey,” he says, head tipped, black eyes twinkling with mischief. “Don’t invite me to your suicide party if you don’t want me to dance.”

CHAPTER 3

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“Strangers When We Meet” by David Bowie

If teachers could mind their own business, that’d be great. One glance at me and an unshakable compulsion grips them: my spiderwebbed mascara desperately pleads with them to tell me I’ll never get a job looking like this; my gashed neck tells them I need a lecture about respect.

“It’s a silent protest” works for the first two periods, male teachers and their general allergy to activism buying my way out of the rest of a tedious conversation. But in third period, Mrs. Wilson jumps me at the door like she’s been waiting.

“That is an extremely tasteless joke, young lady,” she informs me, gripping me by the arm before I can grab a seat. “Especially considering the day’s lecture. Go wash it off in the bathroom.”

A cold, hateful calm swallows me. I swear I hear a bell—ding ding, round one—and it takes a monumental force of willpower to swallow down my knee-jerk fight response.

I stop blinking. A sharp little voice in my head whispers,Mom willhaveto let me sit the GED if I get expelled. I smother it. Eyes wide, I stareher dead in the face, then drop my gaze to her talon clutching at my sweater. Her hand falls away.

“No, thank you,” I tell her, every word unfailingly polite. If walking with purpose casts invisibility, weaponized politeness casts a shield. Any fight she picks now will reflect worse on her than me and she knows it. Quietly, I slink toward my seat, stubbornly in the middle of the room where I can keep a low profile.

Pulling books from my bag, I summon up a single corner of my party trick, craning my head out of my body just enough to look around. Mrs. Wilson glares at the back of my head, aggravation warring across her features while she decides if she gets paid enough to pick this fight.

She doesn’t. Rural schools don’t pay a lot, especially new ones in the back end of nowhere that checked three times for forgotten graveyards or Civil War battlefields before they built so much as a football field. No hazard pay where the ghosts don’t play, as they say, and I’m just enough of a nuisance—or, at least, my IEP-wielding, school-board intruding mother is—that, after exhaling a pointed sigh, Mrs. Wilson stalks back to her desk.

Satisfied, I return to my body, sucking my hands into my sleeves to try to trap a little heat around my icicle fingers. A sea of desks surrounds my shipwrecked self; the other students file in. They almost all choose to sit in civilization on the far end of the room. The last two days, they stayed that way—away from me, that is—leaving me to stare out the window contemplating a twenty-foot drop and sudden stop in peace. But right as the bell rings, in sneaker-squealing burnout, a body drops down into the desk beside me.

I jump in surprise. The boy from the library grins at me, popping me a wink.

“Hey,” he starts.

My stomach twists. I fumble for an answer, tongue sticking to the back of my teeth, but my brain stalls out. My cheeks flare with heat and I know even without my party trick that my ears are flaming red. God, gross, whatisthis? Digging my fingernails into my palms, I get my shit together enough to answer, “Hey.”

Shakespearean.I squeeze my eyes shut in mortification. Before I can rally, the bell rings. Mrs. Wilson leaps on her cue, clapping her dry hands together with a mummified rasp.

“All right, personal conversations over, class has started,” she announces. “As it’s October first today, it’s time for us to review Remnant Safety leading up to Halloween.”