I watch from across the street as workers gut my high school; the building will be transformed into a brand-new suite of condos by the end of next year. They carry desks scratched with initials and barnacled with gum, blackboards grey with phantom equations and essay topics, and skinny lockers in puke orange and pale mint green. It’s been nearly thirty years since I kicked my locker so hard the door jammed and the custodian had to pry it open with an extra-long screwdriver. I don’t even remember why.
Watching the constant stream of activity, I wonder which of the lockers in which of the workers’ hands used to be mine. It’s such a small and stupid thing. I wonder if anything being carried out of the building now still remembers a time when I was a student there, and if anything will remember me when it’s all gone.
Guilt settles against my spine.
Finally, when I can’t avoid the question any longer—bigger than all my trivial wonderings until now—I wonder if Natalie is still there. I wonder if any of the workers have seen her ghost.
“Sara, you’ll be with Natalie,” Ms. Robles says, a brief, pointed look at me before addressing the class as a whole. “Be prepared to share your topic and thesis statement by the end of the week. The essays themselves are due at the end of the month.”
Natalie tries to catch my eye. I pretend not to notice until she looks down at her hands. At the desk ahead of mine, Laurel glances back, smirks, and whispers something to Samara beside her. Their shoulders curl around contained laughter, and unfairness prickles cold and hot along my skin. It’s not like I chose to partner with Natalie; it’s not like Laurel and Samara don’t know it’s Ms. Robles’ fault, but they don’t care. Tainted by association. Natalie’s chair scrapes, shifting closer to mine.
“Maybe after lunch we could meet in the library to pick our topic?”
There’s a painful note of hope in her voice. One small mercy—she doesn’t suggest lunchtime itself. Lisa, Kelly, Laura and I always sit together, like we have since seventh grade, and Natalie joining us would be painfully awkward. We both know that.
“Fine. Let’s meet in the balcony,” I say.
The tentative spark of hope migrates to her eyes, and I duck my head, pretending to look through my bag until the bell rings. When it does, I bolt, a hurried mumble trailing behind me.
“See you then.”
The lights are off in my mother’s apartment. Except it’s not her apartment anymore. I have to keep reminding myself. I’m here to clean it out, get it ready to sell before I go back home. Or what passes for home—the apartment where I spent two hazy years of pandemic time staring at the same blah-grey walls. Home in name only, because there’s nothing to return to—no job, no relationship, both of those unraveled during the pandemic as well.
It’s why I’m thinking about Natalie—a shitty reason if there ever was one. Natalie was lonely, and thirty years too late, I finally understand what loneliness means.
I could have been kinder, but I tell myself at least I wasn’t cruel. Not like Laurel and Samara. Kelly, Lisa, Laura and I mostly ignored Natalie, just like everyone else in our grade. Those three are the only friends I’m still in touch with from Eddington, and only because I’ve known them since elementary school. We all live in different cities and only see each other every few years at most. If I’m being honest, we’re acquaintances these days, not friends.
When I went away to college, my mother converted my former bedroom into a home office with a pull-out couch for guests. It’s where I’m sleeping while I’m here, a weird liminal space for a weird, liminal not-quite-guest, but I can’t bear the thought of sleeping in my mother’s room. She kept the things I left behind neatly labeled and stacked in the closet. A cigar box, collaged and glittered within an inch of its life, sits at the front of the topmost shelf. I pull it down and sit cross-legged on the bed. Inside are passed notes full of inside jokes I no longer understand and a loose stack of photographs, the ones I took on graduation day.
There’s always one girl in any all-girls school, that girl, and ours was Natalie. Maybe it’s the same at any school, all-girls or not, because we had one girl and one boy all through elementary school as well. The ones who were just off enough that we felt justified in picking on them. Kerry always had greasy hair, and Brendan either accidentally or on purpose didn’t wear underwear beneath his gym shorts once. It was all the fuel we needed to torment and exclude them from kindergarten to sixth grade.
There was nothing so overt about Natalie; she never really did anything wrong. But on the very first at Eddington School for Girls, we collectively decided Natalie was the one. We did it without talking. We did it without thinking about it too much. We did it because we all understood if we wanted to stay safe and survive high school, someone had to take the fall.
In that first week, that first year, when we were all getting to know each other and deciding who we were going to be for the next five years, whenever we would run out of other things to say, inevitably what would come out was, “Did you hear that Natalie . . . ”
And we’d say some ridiculous thing that none of us really believed (except it plausibly could be true) and we’d all laugh and feel better about ourselves. Whatever we had going on—bad grades, bad skin, bad hair day—at least we were better than her.
I flip through the stack of photographs, looking for one in particular. Anna was the ghost, but it anyone is haunting Eddington now, it’s got to be Natalie. The school’s history extends at least 150 years before my class and I first got there. It used to be a boarding school back in the day. Even if it was brand-spanking new thirty years ago though, it would still be haunted. Pack thirty to forty girls into each class, multiplied across five grades, all of us trying to survive by tearing each other apart and of course you’re going to end up with ghosts. What is a haunting, after all, but pain remembered? If anyone is trapped there, repeating the worst five years of her life, it’s Natalie. It’s got to be. Even if she isn’t dead.
I find the picture I’m looking for and tilt it into the light. I remember the image being clearer, a perfect slice of time like an insect in amber, capturing the moment Natalie changed. In reality, it barely shows anything—taken with a disposable camera, three rows back from the stage. If I didn’t know it was a picture of Natalie, I wouldn’t be able to tell.
It could be any girl with an impossibly arched back, long brown hair hanging straight down toward the stage. It isn’t proof of anything. Natalie might be standing on her toes rather than lifting off them; the dark stain on her white graduation robe might be a shadow, not blood.
Except bodies aren’t meant to do what Natalie’s is doing in the photograph, blurry though it may be. She’s leaning so far back that her spine should crack. I was a stagehand my senior year, when we did Into the Woods, so I know there was no rigging above the stage, nothing from which Natalie could have been suspended.
My yearbooks are boxed in the closet as well, and I find the one from 1997, graduation year. On the class picture page, I find myself and Natalie, miniaturized in black and white, side by side. Westmore and Whitten—we spent five years of high school paired by our last names, but we were never really friends. I was nice to her, until I wasn’t. Nice to her when I had to be, face-to-face, when we were paired together in Ms. Robles class. I didn’t help her when it could have made a difference, before she stepped onto the graduation stage, and I didn’t help her when she hovered above it and it was already far too late.
I took this picture instead.
EMTs carried Natalie out of the gymnasium, and the rest of the graduation ceremony cancelled. I never saw her again.
We weren’t a huge class; we weren’t a big school. Five grades, seven to eleven, 230 students in all. Signatures and messages crowd the back inside pages of my yearbook. On the page before that, the Most Likely To page, Natalie and I are stacked one on top of the other again. A printing error I never noticed before creates the illusion of a fold in the page, truncating the letters and overlapping them so I can’t tell what it’s meant to say, what the rest of our classmates thought either of us was most likely to do.
I pull out my phone and search for Natalie Westmore. She might have changed her name. She might be among the results that turn up, but I don’t know enough about her to be able to tell. We were in every single class together for five years. We spent a handful of hours huddled on the balcony above the library, scrunched down where we couldn’t be seen. She told me things she never told anyone else. All I have to show for it is a photograph I tucked it away in a box and didn’t bother to look at for thirty years.
I don’t know what I believe, looking back now, but I know what I believed then and what I picture when I remember that day. Natalie screaming. Her back arched. Her white gown turning red. Her feet lifting off the ground, the taut, painful bow of her body floating above the stage.
“We could write about Anne Boleyn,” Natalie says.
We’re sitting on the floor of the balcony that overlooks the library with our backs against the lowest level seats. Back when it was a boarding school, the library used to be a gym. Pennants and wooden trophy shields decorate the walls; the seats behind us were where students used to watch games. Like box seats in a theater, the front wall of the balcony is solid, making us invisible from below. The shadows are deep up here, something about the carpeting and the dark paneled wood drinking the light. If someone opened the door and only gave the space the most cursory glance, we might not even be seen.
“Isn’t that kind of too obvious?”
“Who do you want to do, then?” she asks.
“I don’t care. Anne Boleyn is fine. Whatever.” I’m keeping one eye on the door, ready to—what? Hide my face, duck and bolt past whoever enters lest I get caught hanging out with Natalie?
“We could make our paper really different,” Natalie says after a moment of uncertain silence. “We could do a séance.”
“What?” I yank my gaze away and turn to her.
There’s no real chance of anyone catching us, which is why I suggested meeting here in the first place. You can’t even get to the balcony from the library itself. There’s a small door tucked away beside the main steps leading to a tight, spiraling staircase. The school is full of weird half-floors and rooms that make no sense, compensating for the steep hill the building sits upon.
“What are you talking about?”
“I have a Ouija board. I talk to ghosts all the time. We could talk to Anne Boleyn.”
Natalie’s eyes shine, despite the dim lighting. Even though the rest of the library is brightly lit, this is the part of the school that every other part of the school forgot. It’s a place built for secrets. One of the finials on the low wall that boxes the balcony in is even loose enough to unscrew and girls leave notes for each other sometimes.
“That’s—” I start to say.
I’m about to say it’s a stupid idea. Believing in ghosts was fine in elementary school, but we’re in high school now.
“It’s safe,” Natalie says, mistaking my hesitation. “I’ve done it loads of times. I’ve even talked to a girl who used to go here when it was a boarding her. Her name is Anna.”
Natalie’s voice changes when she says Anna’s name. It softens, her smile shy and genuine, and I swallow back the sharp words on my tongue.
Kelly, Lisa, Laura, and I used to play Ouija all the time in sixth grade. We would recite Bloody Mary in the mirror in the teacher’s bathroom, the only one where we could turn off the lights. We played light as a feather, stiff as a board at every sleepover, always hoping we’d be the one to finally lift off the ground.
There’s a part of me that’s curious, that isn’t buried deep enough, and it’s not like anyone else can hear us up here anyway.
“Tell me about Anna,” I say.
I don’t find Natalie Westmore searching online, but I do find Ange Porter—class president, head of the alumni association, voted most likely to succeed. She still lives in town, and she runs the commercial real estate firm handling the sale of the school to the condo developers. Even though we weren’t ever friends, she answers almost immediately with a “when and where?” to my suggestion of drinks.
We meet in a bar a few blocks from the school that used to be a dive and now charges $15 for a single glass of mediocre Chardonnay. Ange gushes about how good it is to see me and gives me a big hug. She’s neat and put together, but with barely any prompting, she tells me about her recent divorce and how she’s worried that her kids hate her as a result.
Ange was one of the popular girls, like Laurel and Samara. She never had to pretend not to want things, or worry they weren’t the right things to want. It shows, the ragged edges, the hunger—barely disguised—to be accepted and understood. It’s almost too easy to get what I want by giving her what she needs.
“We should go see the school,” I say. “For old time’s sake.”
Back to the place where she was a big fish in a tiny pond and everything was easy compared to her life now. Ange’s eyes go wide.
“You must have keys?”
She admits she does. But she couldn’t, we shouldn’t, it’s an active construction zone.
“I could lose my job.”
“You own the firm,” I say. “Who’s going to fire you?”
I drop my voice to a whisper. “I promise I won’t tell.”
I’m trying to match her energy, pretending to be worse at holding my alcohol than I am. The thrill of being on the inside of a secret works just as well as it did back in high school.
It’s only two blocks; we walk it arm in arm, giggling like we’re seventeen and sneaking out of the house. Except I was never invited anywhere sneaking out would be required, unlike Ange. She shushes me and unlocks the door.
“It’s smaller than I remember,” I say as we step inside.
It’s bigger, too, because all the furniture is gone. Classroom after empty classroom. Even the metal stall dividers have been torn out of the bathrooms, the sinks and toilets removed, and they’ve started taking up the ugly beige-grey tiles. The gym is largely untouched, but the basketball goals have come down. The stage where Natalie may or may not have lifted into the air remains, but everything else is gone.
It was my idea to vote Natalie as Valedictorian. I tell myself I wanted to do something kind, after everything else, though it was far too late by then.
“Let’s go look at the cafeteria,” I say.
There’s a mural I don’t recognize covering the back wall—silhouetted girls in uniform skirts wielding paintbrushes, beakers, clarinets, and tennis rackets against a bright geometric clash of colors. Without the chairs and tables, the room looks vast. By contrast, the counter where they served muffins, bowls of soup, and cartons of milk, looks tiny. It’s the small bathroom across from the locker rooms, on the way out of the cafeteria that I really want to see though.
“One second,” I tell Ange.
“What are you—” I ignore her push through the door.
The soft sound of crying comes from the far stall. It’s one of only two, an intimate space with nowhere to hide. The tiles are off-white, speckled brown. One sink, one paper towel dispenser, one trashcan next to the blue-painted door.
I should turn around and leave before whoever’s crying notices I’m here. Except her grief is deep enough that my presence doesn’t register. Under any other circumstances, the girl would try to hide the sound, pretend she wasn’t crying, push back out through the door angrily to hide the embarrassment of being caught.
I ease open the door of the second stall as quietly as I can and step up onto the toilet. On the other side of the divider, Natalie hunches on the floor, crammed awkwardly between the toilet and the door. Her head is down, pressed against her knees. All I can see from here is the back of her uniform and her long, straight brown hair. Her arms wrap around her body like a hug and for one dizzying moment, it looks like someone else is holding her, even though she’s alone.
“Please,” Natalie whispers.
I panic, thinking she’s talking to me, and almost slip. But in the next moment, it’s clear she’s not.
“Anna, please.” Natalie rocks back and forth, though there’s scarcely any room.
She unwraps her arms from her body and digs her fingers into her hair. It’s like she’s trying to crunch herself even smaller, like she’s trying to pull herself apart. I should sneak away before she realizes she isn’t alone. Except she isn’t alone. A second voice beneath her sobs says shhhhh. Other fingers thread between Natalie’s, pale and translucent, stroking her hair.
There’s a ghost inside Natalie’s skin and curled around her, holding her so close there’s no space between them. The shape their bodies make together is tender and raw, beautiful and horrifying at the same time. Ghostly fingers continue stroking Natalie’s hair, her sobs relenting under words too soft for me to hear. How? Did Natalie invite Anna to share her body, breath, and blood or did Anna slip inside when Natalie let her guard down. Natalie’s sobs taper off. She shudders, but it doesn’t look like pain or fear. Unlike any horror movie I’ve ever seen, this possession looks like love.
I scramble down from the toilet and out through the bathroom door, my skin flushed. It feels wrong, witnessing something so personal and at the same time, a weird pang of jealousy follows on my heels. Natalie and I aren’t friends, but she told me about Anna and she didn’t tell anyone else. Tucked away in the balcony, she needed me with me needing her. Except Anna is real. I’m not Natalie’s only confident; she doesn’t need me at all.
I nearly collide with Laurel as she comes out of the locker room, Samara behind her.
“What were you doing in there with Natalie?” Laurel asks.
Her tone is all innocence, but her expression is that of a hungry cat watching a bird. She and Samara must have changed just as quickly as I did after gym, but stayed watching the bathroom from across the hall.
“Is she okay?” The false concern is cloying. “She’s been in there for so long. We saw her go in and she never came out.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” I say, too fast. “I just went to wash my hands. I didn’t even know she was there.”
Laurel and Samara’s gazes dig at the edges of my words, looking for flaws.
“I heard her talking to herself,” I say, because they demand something, throwing meat to a ravenous dog to distract it while I run. “She was talking to someone, like an imaginary friend or something, even though she was alone.”
I don’t invoke Anna’s name. I don’t say the word ghost, but I could, pouring salt in the wound. I haven’t even told Kelly, Lisa, and Laura about Anna. I haven’t told anyone, but even saying this much makes Laurel’s eyes gleam. It’s such a small thing, such a stupid thing, but it’s exactly what Laurel and Samara want and it catches me up; I rush to give them what they need.
“Oh my god,” Laurel says, and Samara picks up the thread immediately, crowding against Laurel’s shoulders. “Tell us what you heard.”
And I do. But I’m careful, smart enough not to get caught in my own trap. If I give them Anna, the truth of her, then Laurel and Samara will want to know how I know. I’ll have to admit to spending time with Natalie, being something that looks very much like a friend. If I give them Anna, Natalie will know that I’m the one who told, so I lie.
When I’m done, Samara and Laurel rush off, their brief backward glance including me in their conspiracy. That look is enough to counterbalance my guilt, and it’s not like I told them anything real anyway, so it should be fine. Except by the end of the day, our favorite vicious game from five years ago has come back to life. Like now that we’ve reached the last year of high school, all our insecurities demand we revert to our most immature selves. Spreading rumors, no matter how ridiculous they are, because if everyone is talking about someone else then we’re not the target.
“Did you hear about Natalie? She thinks she’s possessed by a ghost. It’s because her family is part of some kind of weird cult and they make her do all these fucked up rituals. They’re not allowed to wear clothes in the house. They all eat dinner together naked. She has a ghost girlfriend because no one will touch her. Except her own brother. They sleep naked together too. Their parents make them.”
And so on, until the end of the year.
“We should go,” Ange calls, knocking on the bathroom door.
The sound echoes in the empty room. Where the tiles have been torn up, there are spots like picked scabs, the flesh underneath weeping. When I emerge, Ange looks jumpy. Her haunting isn’t mine, but the shadows do appear thicker in the hall.
“We haven’t even been upstairs yet,” I say.
“It’s late.”
“I want to see the library.”
“They’re keeping the library intact when they convert the building,” Ange says, her voice a strained hush. “You can see it then. I’ll make sure you get a tour.”
She urges me toward the front door, the keys out in her hand to lock up as soon as we’re outside. I resist, not that hard, only stalling a moment. Just long enough that when I do move, Ange stumbles as she chivvies me forward and catches herself against the wall. Her keys drop, clattering against the school crest and its motto in Latin and English, embedded in the floor—Together We Succeed. I’m quicker than Ange, bending to pick them up. I don’t even really think about it, slipping a key off the ring before handing it back to her. There are so many, she won’t miss just one.
“Thank you for letting me see the place one last time,” I say and follow Ange out the door.
Before the end, before all the lies I told Laurel and Samara, there were the truths Natalie told me about Anna.
“She went here when it was a boarding school.”
Natalie scrunches down below the seats in the balcony, shoes pressed up against the low, wooden wall keeping us hidden. I give her half of my granola bar, even though we’re not supposed to have food up here. We should be putting the finishing touches on our paper, but instead she’s telling me about Anna, like we’re gossiping about someone we both know.
“The teachers were super strict back then,” Natalie says. She breaks off increasingly small pieces of the granola bar, making it last, covering her mouth with her hand when she chews. “They hit the girls whenever they felt like it. Anna used to sleep on her stomach because the backs of her thighs so bruised.
“They weren’t allowed to wear nail polish or lipstick,” Natalie goes on, looking at her own colorless nails. “The only thing they were allowed were hair ribbons and they had to be black, white, or navy blue. Girls used to trade ribbons to show they were friends.”
Natalie tucks her hair behind her ears. I catch myself touching my own hair in turn and put my hands carefully in my lap instead. Footsteps in the hall outside, voices echoing, and I flinch involuntarily.
“We’re going to be late for class.” I reach for my bag.
Natalie looks at her watch, her expression hard to read.
“We still have time,” she says. “English is only down the hall.”
I pull my bag onto my lap for a quick escape, hugging it against me.
“Every morning after assembly, the girls had to kneel in a line on the gym floor. The teachers would go along with a ruler, measuring to see how far their uniform skirts were above the floor. No one was allowed to talk or breathe or move, and if anyone did, the teachers would start all over again. The first time a girl’s skirt was too short, she would be punished. If it happened again, the entire class would be punished.”
Natalie lapses into silence, chewing on the inside of her cheek. Her gaze darts to the corner, the far one from where we’re sitting. I wonder how she came up with all this stuff, if she did research or just made it up. It almost feels true. The corner where her gaze fixes is dimmer than the rest of the balcony. A whole person could be folded up there on the topmost seat without being seen.
“Anna killed herself by climbing out of a window on the fourth floor,” Natalie says.
Her voice is so quiet, and I’m staring so hard at the other corner of the balcony, my body jerks involuntarily in surprise.
“What?” The back of my neck prickles. Now that I’m focused on Natalie, the far corner blurs and I can’t see what might be hidden there.
“The teachers said it was an accident, and her parents went along with it so she could be buried in the Catholic cemetery.”
I look again. Five years, and I never even noticed the depression in the wood paneling, like there used to be a window there, high and small and disappearing beyond the other side of the wall. Is that where the dorms used to be? Or is it just a weird dip in the paneling, never a window at all?
“We should go,” Natalie stands. The bell rings so I can’t tell if her voice is shaky, if she’s upset and on the edge of tears.
I stay where I am after she leaves. Anna isn’t real, but I can almost see her in the corner regardless. Her uniform is one of the old-fashioned ones; I’ve seen pictures in the hall outside the teachers’ lounge. I never thought to check for Anna’s picture there. In the dark, in the corner, she wears ribbons, but no other girl gave them to her, they’re only her own. She looks like a photograph just starting to fade, a page copied one too many times. She smiles, and there’s blood between her teeth. Her face does something that might be a wink, and she turns faster than should be possible to climb through what may or may not have been a window. The back of her head is caved in; I see it clearly as she vanishes through the wall.
I try several doors before I find the one that opens with Ange’s key. It’s the side door to the gym, the one leading out to the small square of asphalt where the teachers used to park. The last time I was here—not counting the brief visit with Ange—there was a podium up on the stage. Natalie stood behind it in her cap and gown, her head bowed, speaking to her feet rather than projecting toward the crowd.
I sat in the third row. We were all in alphabetical order, waiting our turn to walk across the stage. I had a little disposable camera in my lap, and I lifted it partway as Natalie finally looked up, like I knew something was about to happen. She did it very slowly, staring out at the crowd long enough for us to get nervous, whisper and giggle. Long enough for the parents and teachers to exchange looks of sympathy and wonder if they should intervene.
I don’t know why Natalie agreed to be Valedictorian. We voted for her, but she could have said no. Maybe she did it to prove a point, letting us see how uncomfortable we’d made her, showing us what we’d done.
“You don’t care about her,” Natalie said.
She said it very clearly, unlike the rest of her speech. It was a weird thing for her to say, unless she wasn’t the one saying it.
I lifted the camera higher as Natalie stepped away from the podium. She turned to the side, her breathing loud and distorted, like she was struggling not to be sick. Then she whipped her head back and screamed. Her body stayed bent backward, like she was trying to expel something into the rafters of the gym. I took a picture instead of running up onto the stage.
I pull the photograph out of my bag, holding it up, superimposing then over now. I’m standing roughly where my seat would have been. If I hold the picture at arm’s length, it’s like I’m still there. Caught in the worst moment of Natalie’s five years at Eddington, living it all over again.
Natalie’s feet lift off the ground.
She hangs there for an impossibly long time and no one in the rest of the room breathes. Then her head whips forward, a violent motion that folds her nearly double. Her body shakes, shoulders and back hitching like she’s gagging, like she’s fighting to leave her body, fighting to hold on. When she straightens up again, the front of her gown is red with blood. She’s perfectly still, light as a feather stiff as a board.
Then she falls.
The photograph drifts from my hand, much more graceful than Natalie’s journey to the ground. It was like someone cut the strings holding a marionette aloft. Her limbs crumpled, she dropped straight down.
When we held the make-up graduation ceremony a week later, we did it outside on the lawn above the tennis courts. Instead of the whole school, it was just our class and our families, none of us happy to be there. By the time they got to the Ws they were really hurrying, like they could speed past Natalie’s absence and pretend nothing had happened. Just like if we all stayed on the lawn and ignored the gym, we wouldn’t have to acknowledge her pain.
I leave the gym and climb to the third floor, ignoring the main steps up to the library, going straight for the small door beside them. I follow the tightly spiraled staircase up, not even a full floor. Loneliness walks at my heels, a second set of footsteps so close against my own, we might as well share one skin.
The balcony is as dark as ever. The door closes behind me and I’m sealed away from the rest of the school, overlooking the library. As Ange promised, everything is untouched—beautiful wooden shelves lining the back wall and others free standing in the middle of the room. The same trophies and pennants; only the carpeting looks new.
Every shadow twitches, ready to unfold.
I descend to the lowest tier of seats, to the post at the far end of the balcony. The finial unscrews as easily as it did thirty years ago. I hold my breath, looking for a scrap of white, a piece of paper folded small. There’s an endorphin rush of hope, the idea that someone might leave something just for me. There’s nothing, there never was.
Lisa, Kelly, Laura and I were the kind of friends who stuck together through high school out of habit; we’d known each other since we were five years old. We grew up together, spent afternoons at each other’s houses, knew all the same people and shared all the same memories. By the end of high school, we didn’t have the same interests. We knew everything about each other and we knew nothing at all.
But at least we had each other. Natalie didn’t have anyone. Until she had Anna. Then Anna left her, too.
I take out the page torn from my yearbook. I still can’t read what is says between Natalie’s and my names.
Most likely to . . .
That gap could be filled with anything. I try to think of it as a space full of potential, promise—neither of us has to stay locked in the time we spent here. W could start all over again, and I could choose to be kind for real.
I stuff the folded page into the hollow inside the post and screw the finial back in place. I stretch to do it, leaning out over the library floor. A smudge of light flickers behind me, a voice up against my ear whispers what sounds like shhhh.
Is it possible to summon a haunting? To hate being alone in your skin so much that you manifest a ghost and make her real?
I turn, losing my balance, and I swear there are fingers, so pale they’re almost translucent, threading themselves through my hair.
My feet leave the ground. Or they don’t.
I lean back as far as I can, an impossible bend that should crack my spine. I open my mouth, scream, and hang there in the darkness, waiting and trying not to fall.
