She seeks out secrets like shadows seek their objects, until she finds the shadows’ secrets, until she knows how to be shadow when she needs to be.
The world of first cars and first fucks and first drinks is different than the awkward world of first kisses. All anyone wants is to be seen. But to be seen is to give away your power. To be hidden is to be known. Her first day of school, the ghost girl disappears, a shadow fleeing from the light. Everyone talks about her for a week, until she becomes a secret. Until she becomes so infamous, she is given credit for secrets she doesn’t spill, for wrongs she doesn’t commit. The football player’s jockey cup is filled with ketchup, and her name is signed to the note: Ghost Girl. The capital letters their own new rank. The English teacher’s book is shredded in her chair. Ghost Girl. Every tire in the parking lot is slashed. Ghost Girl.
Though that one was her. It hurts to laugh, so she moans as she watches her classmates fail to flee the school in the rain.
They say she creeps through the ceiling. They say she gets a report card, the same as anyone, and that the teachers are too scared to give her anything but A’s. They say she and the gym coach are having an affair; they meet beneath the bleachers every morning. Sometimes, late at night, they hear a voice belting a song only one girl recognizes from her parents’ record collection: “Pissing in a River.”
But the ghost girl is all alone, for one, two, three years of school. The ghost girl won’t earn a high school degree. The ghost girl doesn’t creep through the rafters. She prefers the home she has built beneath the theater stage, in the drained pool where the swim team used to practice, before the school’s swim budget was slashed. Her favorite season: the spring musical, when she falls asleep in the daylight dark to the struggling pitches of budding singers, most of whom will never sing after their high school tenure. The teacher favors the girl with the highest voice, the one who leaves your ears ringing: Aimee. The ghost girl plugs her ears when Aimee sings. Her world beneath the stage is too dark for such shrillness. The ghost girl knows the limit of her own talent. Though she could out-sing every one of these girls, she cannot stand in front of an audience, cannot let that much of her outside her body. She waits and listens, but does not hear anything that makes her shiver the way that Patti Smith record does.
Then, a new girl sings. Her name, she speaks softly into the mic, is Chrissie. When Chrissie sings, the ghost girl’s chest throbs with a particular empty ache. From the rafters, the ghost girl watches her: Chrissie with her short dark curls, her beautiful face bereft of makeup, her bright yellow smiley-face shirt and torn jeans. She is kind, the ghost girl notices, to everyone.
The ghost girl follows Chrissie to class, moving in shadows the other students don’t see. She has become good at seeing shadows, at inhabiting them. The ghost girl doesn’t slash Chrissie’s tires when she pulls the prank a second time. When Chrissie is called into the principal, blamed, the ghost girl slips an alibi into Chrissie’s files: a psychiatrist’s appointment in another city, for a condition Chrissie doesn’t like to talk about. The ghost girl has done her homework; the condition is the same one that Chrissie was treated for as a little girl. Though she was pronounced healed, the school buys the excuse.
The ghost girl tracks Chrissie’s every move.
A new girl finds it hard to make friends. A new girl eats lunch alone in a bathroom stall. It is there that the ghost girl comes to her, hiding in the walls and speaking in her ghostly secret keeper voice.
“Chrissie,” calls the ghost girl, singing her own song. She has had years with little to do but practice. “I am your angel of music.”
The ghost girl has been thorough. From Chrissie’s files, she found two facts that will make it easier to be a friend. 1. Chrissie’s mother died when Chrissie was a little girl. 2. After her death, Chrissie heard voices. These voices? Chrissie called them her angel of music. A ghost girl can be an angel of music; the name seems to fit her better than all the names she has ever clutched in her palms. The Devil, after all, was an angel fallen.
At first Chrissie says nothing in response. Then: “No,” she says. “Please, not again.”
“I’m not in your head. I am here, with you.”
The ghost girl presses her hand against the wall until the wall turns cold beneath her skin.
“Do you feel me, Chrissie?”
Chrissie shivers and runs her hands up and down her arms. “You’re really here?” she says. “Has it been you all along?”
“I’m here, your angel of music.”
“My AoM. Your voice is beautiful,” Chrissie says. “Where did you learn to sing?”
The ghost girl has never heard a compliment as sweet as this. “I have listened,” she says. Her belly warms with pride. “I can teach you.”
“Would you?”
“I would love nothing more,” the ghost girl says.
Their lessons begin. Every lunch hour, Chrissie hides in her bathroom stall while the ghost girl gives her lessons in strengthening her voice. Chrissie is a good singer. With the ghost girl’s help, she is great. When Chrissie sings, the ghost girl hears her own inflections, her own tones. When Chrissie surpasses the ghost girl, it’s time for Chrissie to play the lead.
The theater auditions The Secret Lives of Fairytale Princesses, a play written by the theater teacher. Chrissie auditions for the lead of Sleeping Beauty, but is given the supporting role of Snow White. The ghost girl fumes in her underground lair, where she paces back and forth until her feet bleed. She misses the next day’s lessons with Chrissie. Chrissie cries in the bathroom, thinking she has disappointed her AoM. The ghost girl hears her tears, but cannot go to her, so badly injured are her feet, her ego.
She hears, instead, a young boy enter the bathroom, crying for himself.
“What are you doing in here?” Chrissie asks.
“Oh please,” says the boy. “Look at me. I can’t use the men’s. If anyone has the right to cry in the girl’s bathroom, it’s me.”
The boy’s voice is familiar: the theater teacher’s second favorite, Trevor.
“What happened to you?” Chrissie asks.
“That role was supposed to be mine,” the boy says. “I’m the best. But I don’t ‘look the part.’ You know what she means by that? She means I’m too gay for it. Stupid fucking hick town.” The boy kicks the trash can; the ring of boot on meal reverberates into the ghost girl’s walls. It is a dissonant sound, not altogether unappealing. The ghost girl scribbles some notes on her sheet music.
“And you know the only reason you didn’t get Sleeping Beauty is because you have short hair. Mrs. Logan isn’t very imaginative. If she can’t see the exact look she had in mind, then forget it. I’ve been sucking up to her for, what, two years now? That part should’ve been mine.”
“It was just because of my hair?” Chrissie asks.
“You better believe it.” Trevor laughs. “If you think for a second you’re not the most talented in the class, you’re in extreme need of a wake-up call.”
“I’m taking lessons,” Chrissie says. “From a great teacher.”
“Well, you must give me her number.”
“It’s complicated,” Chrissie says. “She doesn’t take new clients? She’s a friend of the family.”
“Shit,” Trevor says. “Well, drop a good word for me? Now let’s clean ourselves up and get back out there and make the most of this utmost shitty situation.”