“My parents love me two inches in,” Trevor says. “They don’t care that I’m gay, but if I don’t end up married with babies, I’m useless to them.”
“Mine love me too much,” Prince Charming says. “If I’m a step out of line—”
Who can say who is hurt the deepest? It’s a game to compare horror. The stories the ghost girl could tell, if she had people with which to share stories.
“Enough pity party,” Trevor says, pulling out his iPhone. He plays music with no lyrics, incomprehensibly simple beats. They dance and laugh and finish their wine coolers, leaving the empty bottles in the wings. The ghost girl picks them up and smells them, careful not to make a sound. The smell makes her stomach ache with want: fake fruit and the kind of sugar that leaves your teeth grainy. Calmed by their useless bickering, the ghost girl allows herself entrance into their shadows. She moves around their feet, around their mouths. The human body is full of dark spaces, shadows in their own right. She slips, soundlessly, into Prince Charming’s warm mouth. She gleans all his secrets. When Chrissie kisses him, the ghost girl is a shadow that passes from his lips to hers.
From inside Chrissie, the ghost girl speaks. “You disobeyed your Angel of Music,” she says. Chrissie shrinks back into the dark, a headache taking hold.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Chrissie says. If pressed, she might chalk her newfound courage up to 3% ABV, but the ghost girl scans her chemistry, her biology. Though she’d never tasted it for herself, she has read of the effect weak booze might have on a girl like Chrissie. It isn’t enough to change her kindness into cruelty. There is only one explanation, then: Chrissie was never who she pretended to be. She is an actress to her core.
“Chrissie, who are you talking to?” Trevor kneels beside her and places his hand on her knee.
“Can’t you hear her?”
“I don’t hear anything,” Trevor says. “Chrissie, have you been taking your pills?”
“What pills?” Chrissie says. “I haven’t taken those since I was little.”
Trevor blushes. “That’s not what everyone else says. Chrissie, you can tell me anything.”
Prince Charming stands back behind them. “What’s going on?” he asks. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Not now,” Trevor says.
“Don’t listen to them,” the ghost girl says. “I’m real as you are. Realer, in fact, because I’m not a liar like you. I’m not a pretender.”
“What’s she saying to you?” Trevor says.
“Tell him to stop interfering,” the ghost girl says. She spreads her arms through Chrissie’s arms and stretches the shadow inside her until the skin hurts like it’s burning, like it’s soon-to-break.
“Stop,” Chrissie screams. Her voice echoes the way only a performer’s can. “Both of you, stop.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Prince Charming says.
Chrissie stands, knocking a wine cooler over. The blue spreads across the stage like a burst vein bruise. “I’ll go with you, I will,” she says to the ghost girl. She pushes past Trevor, past Prince Charming. The ghost girl leads her only friend into the darkness underground.
Underground, the ghost girl has faked two prescription bottles full of the pills Chrissie took when she was a little girl, dated for the present. The clothes scattered throughout the ghost girl’s lair are inscribed with Chrissie’s name, black ink on every tag. The ghost girl has been thorough. She’s been cunning. She is an actress too. If she can convince Chrissie that they’re one, then they’ll be one. She whispers untrue secrets: Chrissie never moved to a new town, never met a new friend. The ghost girl has been here, inside Chrissie, all along. A ghost girl is part of you always. She stretches to fit the new body. She sings through the new voice. Her mouth moves in a face that she will never have to hide again.
Girls without friends make ghosts all the time, the ghost girl says. It’s not the worst you could have done.
A ghost girl keeps her own secrets best of all.
Mapping the Interior
Stephen Graham Jones
I was twelve the first time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room.
It was 2:49 in the morning, as near as I could reconstruct.
I was standing alongside the dusty curtain pulled across the front window of the living room. I wasn’t standing there on purpose. I was in only my underwear. No lights were on.
My best guess is that, moments before, I’d been looking out the front window, into all the scrub and nothing spread out in front of our house. The reason for thinking that was I had the taste of dust in the back of my throat, and the window had a fine coat of that dust on it. Probably. I’d breathed it in through my nose, because sleepwalkers are goal oriented, not concerned with details or consequences.
If sleepwalkers cared about that kind of stuff, I’d have at least had my gym shorts on, and, if I was in fact trying to see something outside, then my glasses, too.
To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it’s under any real compulsion to, finally. If anything, being inhabited by yourself like that, what it tells you is that there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. But it can only get that done when your defenses are down. When you’re sleeping.
The following morning—this was my usual procedure, after a night of shuffling around dead to the world—would find me out in the sun, poring over the stunted grass and packed dirt for eighty or a hundred feet past the front window. Mom would be at work, and my little brother, Dino, would be glued to one of his cartoons, so there would be nobody there to call out from the porch, ask me what was I doing.
If I’d had to answer, I’d have said I was looking for whatever it was I’d been looking for last night. My hope was that my waking self had cued on some regularity to the packed dirt’s contour, or registered a dull old pull tab that was actually the lifting ring for a dry old plywood door that opened onto… what? I didn’t care. Just something. Anything. An old stash of fireworks, a buried body, a capped-off well; it didn’t matter.
The day I found something, that would mean that my nighttime ramblings, they had purpose.
Otherwise, I was just broken, right? Otherwise, I was just a toy waking up in the night, bumping into walls.
That next morning, though, my probing fingers turned up nothing of any consequence. Just the usual trash—little glass bottles, a few bolts with nuts and washers rusted to the thread, part of a dog collar, either the half-buried wheel of a car long gone or the still-attached wheel of a car now buried upside down.
I wanted the latter, of course, but, to allow that possibility, I had to resist digging around the edges of that wheel.
When I looked back to the front window of our modular house, I half-expected to see the shape of my dead father again, standing in the window. Watching me.
The window was just the window, the curtain drawn like Mom said, to keep the heat out.
Still, I watched it.
How I’d know it was him from a house length out, it wasn’t that I would recognize his face or his build. He’d died when I was four and nearly dying from pneumonia myself, when Dino was one and staying with an aunt so he couldn’t catch pneumonia, when Mom was still working just one shift. All I had to go on as far as how he looked, it was pretty much just snapshots and a blurry memory or two.
No, the way I’d recognized him the night before, when he was walking from the kitchen doorway back to the utility room, it was his silhouette. There were spikes coming out from his lower back, and the tops of his calves bulged out in an unnatural way, and his head was top-heavy and kind of undulating, so he was going to have to duck to make it into the utility room.