Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chin up, it could be worse, love

I'll be thinking of you

Always thinking of you

Take care of yourself, love

I'll be dreaming of you

Always dreaming of you

—

She’s able to keep it together until that night, until the lights are off and the door is closed and the room is quiet, and she’s alone in her small, sterile room at the hospital.

The doctor had ordered a barrage of tests to determine why she was found in the state she was found in, but of course the tests were inconclusive, since there isn’t a test for if you’re bodysnatched, so the doctor had insisted she stay in the hospital overnight for observation, just in case.

She is supposed to rest.

But she can’t just turn her brain off.

She wonders what they’re doing right now, where they are. She pictures them in the library maybe, sprawled on the sofas, or sitting at a table in the cafeteria. She wonders if they’re quiet, if they’re angry, if they’re okay.

She squeezes her eyes shut.

She can’t think about them right now.

Her father is a ghost in the hospital. 

She doesn’t know what to do with that. She just can’t quite comprehend it, even after everything she’s been through, and she doesn’t even know what she’d say to him. She just can’t bring herself to accept it.

She should be thrilled at the idea of getting to talk to him again, but she has no idea what she’d even say.

She’d made peace years ago with the fact that she’d never speak to him again.

Is he here right now, watching her, and wishing he was visible to her? 

She doesn’t want it to be true.

She doesn’t want him to be trapped in this hospital and tethered to this world, unable to move on. She doesn’t want him to be sad or bitter or angry, watching the people in the hospital wistfully, year after year. She doesn’t want him to be lost, to be alone, to be left to linger in limbo forever.

She, fuck.

She wishes Simon were here.

She had waited for hours for him to appear with Nicole and Claire, but she had given up eventually, when she had realized the ward was about to close to visitors for the night.

She wonders if he hadn’t wanted to come, if the girls had found him, and he had told them he wasn’t interested.

She’d understand, if that’s the case.

She knows she upset him earlier when she refused to return to her body right away. But he has to understand that she’d been leaving behind a world she’d never be able to return to, and she’d needed to do it right . She gets it, if he’s mad at her, because she knows she’d put him through so much.

She just really needs him to forgive her.

It had all worked out.

She’s in her body again, breathing in and out, alive, a future in front of her.

She can graduate high school and go to college. She can change her clothes, change her hair. She can travel the world, go skydiving or rock climbing or snorkeling.

She can live.

She sucks in a sob, and covers her face with her hand, shaking. She is supposed to be happy , but she isn’t ready for this, isn’t ready to face the future, to carry on, to learn to live without them, but she has to, it’s over, she has to. She curls up, presses her face into her pillow, and cries, cries, cries.

She’ll never see him again.

At 6:00 am, a nurse comes in to check on her.

She has not slept at all.

The nurse sees the tears on Maddie’s cheeks, and her eyes go soft. “Are you in pain?” she asks gently, and Maddie shakes her head. The nurse picks up Maddie’s chart, probably to check if it’s time for more medicine.

“I’m fine,” Maddie says.

—

She doesn’t go back to school immediately. She’s released from the hospital after a day, but she chooses to hole up in her house, avoiding the world she wanted to rejoin. She isn’t ready to be at the school yet.

She has no idea that her friends are keeping a secret from her.

Simon is missing.

She is stunned.

They hadn’t wanted to bother her when she was at the hospital, or when she was home at last. They didn’t tell her for a week that Simon had disappeared, but, apparently, they had only been thinking of what was best for her. They didn’t want to upset her when she was recovering, when she was readjusting. 

She can’t even look at Nicole after she finds out.

She has to go to school.

Her mother asks her if she’s sure, and there’s something hopeful in her mother’s gaze, as if she’s been waiting for this. “I’m sure,” Maddie says, with a small, quick smile. Her mother exhales in relief and hugs her tightly, whispering that she loves her. 

She doesn’t like how attentive her mother has become. 

It’s weird.

She can’t think about that right now.

Simon is missing .

Only, when she gets to school, there he is, standing at the small, sheltered bus stop bench, and all the breath leaves her in a rush.

“You’re okay,” she says.

He stares at her and closes his eyes suddenly, breathing in deeply, and when he opens his eyes again, he smiles at her widely, but there are tears in his eyes.

She frowns.

“I wasn’t sure it’d work the other way around,” he explains.

“What?” 

“I’m sorry.”

She runs her eyes over his face, and steps in closer. She doesn’t know what’s going on, only that something is going on, but it’s okay, because she’s here, and she’s going to help. She reaches out to lay a hand on his arm.

“Maddie, I’m a ghost,” he says.

“What?"

“I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head.

He explains how he gone into the school to get her and ended up in Mr. Martin’s scar. He has no idea how, or why. He explains how he's trapped in the world of ghosts now, and he's attempted repeatedly to leave the grounds of the school, but he was returned to Mr. Martin’s scar every single time.

“Your body?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

A small, scrawny kid walks by with a look on his face.

She doesn’t know what his deal is, but Simon smiles tearfully, and tells her “you should get out your phone so people don’t think you’re crazy,” and she laughs when she gets it, but she is crying, too.

Things are reversed.

“We’ll figure it out,” she tells him.

It’s quiet.

“You should get in there,” Simon says.

She doesn’t really care if she’s late. People are streaming by now, and the bell is going to ring in a couple of minutes, but it's irrelevant. She isn’t at school today for an education.

“Hey, um.” She hesitates.

“They aren’t here right now,” he says.

“You’re able to talk to them?”

“Yeah, I mean, I’m a ghost now, so, yeah.”

“Cool.”

He sighs. 

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s alright.”

“I know I—I’m being totally cruel right now, but, I promise, I am going to get you out of this, because I know this is my fault, and even if it weren’t, you’re my best friend, and I want to help you figure this out, but I—I miss them.”

“I get it,” he says, gentle.

She doesn’t know what she’s done to deserve a friend like him.

“Heads up,” he says.

She turns and there’s Mr. Hartman in front of her, a small, awkward smile on his face. She tries to think of an excuse, but Simon says “we’ll talk at lunch, okay?” and she remembers how this works, as much as she hates it. She gets to her feet and smiles tightly at Mr. Hartman.

“Ready?” Mr. Hartman asks.

“Yup.”

It’s a shitshow.

She is stared at shamelessly in the hallways, sneered at, and snickered at. 

All of her classes are derailed by conversations about where she was, and what happened to her, and people actually point their phones at her, recording her openly.

She can’t even go to the bathroom.

She emerges from a stall to find a wall of cheerleaders in front of the sink. She does not want to do this right now. She tries to step to the side of the cheerleaders, to get to the sinks.

“Maddie, oh, my god, ” Tira says.

She grits her teeth.

“We have been so worried about you,” Tira continues.

“I bet,” she says.

“But I guess you’re okay now?”

“I need to wash my hands,” she says.

“Come on, what’s the deal?” Tira presses. “Like, was it for attention? Were you pulling some pathetic, teenage Gone Girl thing? What, with the blood on the boiler and everything?”

“Sure,” Maddie says.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, so, you can go tell everyone that, and leave me alone. Okay? Awesome, glad we had this talk.”

“Freak,” Tira says.

She is here for Simon. She just has to keep reminding herself of that, over and over. She is here for Simon.

A lot of kids are trying to be kind to her, smiling at her, and saying stupid, sappy things to her, but she isn’t really a fan of the smiling, sappy thing either.

“I prayed for you,” says a girl.

“Okay?” she says.

She just wants people to leave her alone.

She is thinking of leaving after lunch, just as soon as she updates Nicole, Xavier, and Claire on Simon.

They’ve claimed a table in the corner of the cafeteria, they’re all together, and they’ve got the time to talk.

Simon is there, too.

She tells them how Simon was waiting for her when she got to school, and what he said, how he’s trapped.

“And he has no idea how he got into the scar?” Claire asks.

“None,” Maddie says.

“I have a theory,” Janet says.

She chokes.

“We know that trauma is able to thin the veil between the living and the dead. The fact that Maddie became involved in any of this is proof of that. And we know there was a lot of trauma that night, which means we know the veil was thin.”

“And, what, you think that allowed me just to pass through it completely?” Simon says.

“Yes, actually,” Janet says.

“What about my body?”

“Maddie?” Nicole says.

She’s frozen.

The voice had come from behind her, but it was her imagination, it had to be. 

She needs to turn around.

What if—?

She knew Xavier could still see the ghosts in the hospital sometimes, but she hadn’t thought about what that meant for her, if Xavier could still see the ghosts in the place where he was close to death sometimes.

“Maddie?” Simon says.

She whips around to look.

She can see her. Janet Hamilton, a ghost from the 1950s, with a starched collar, a knit cardigan, and a plaid skirt, is standing in front of her, as clear as day. She can see her.

“Oh,” Janet says, startled.

She can see her.

She shoves to her feet, looks up and around. She doesn’t know if they’re in here but she searches the sea of faces anyway, and her breath is punched from her lungs when she sees them, there, by the windows. She breaks into a run.

“Maddie!” Nicole calls.

She stumbles to a stop in front of them.

“Maddie?” Wally says, hesitant.

She is going to cry.

“Hey, so, you’re kind of making a scene,” Simon says.

She drags her gaze to Simon, and it’s beat before she’s able to process his words, but she glances around the cafeteria, taking in the fact kids are starting to stand up to get a look at her. “Right,” she says.

“Why don’t we try the, um, the greenhouse, maybe?” Simon says.

She looks at Wally, Rhonda, and Charley.

“We’ll meet you there,” Charley says.

She nods.

“Come on,” Simon says.

People are pointing their phones at her.

She tries to keep her eyes ahead of her, on the doors of the cafeteria, tries to keep her excitement to herself. “So, like, you can see us right now, right?” Wally says, suddenly at her side and in step with her. She sneaks a look at him, nods, and looks away again quickly, suppressing a smile.

She is sure that everyone in the cafeteria thinks she’s a psycho.

She just can’t bring herself to care.

They don’t immediately disappear in the hallway.

She can still see them.

“How is this possible?” Charley says.

“I think—I think because I was dead in the school, for a second? I don’t know. I guess—how does anything in this place work?” She shrugs. “I just— can .” 

“Unbelievable,” Rhonda says.

She laughs.

“We really should get somewhere more private than this,” Simon says.

“Yeah,” Maddie says, beaming.

She can still see them.

She feels like anything is possible in that moment, like she’ll figure everything out, like things are finally going to go her way, finally , for the very first time in her life.

She can still see them.

—

She’s sitting in the gym for group with Mr. Martin. And, suddenly, Wally is dying in a tackle, over and over, she hears the snap of his neck, and she needs to get to him, but she can’t, she can’t get to him, she can’t. She’s stuck in the gym for group with Mr. Martin.

Simon is shouting for her.

She is running, and it’s Charley with her, it’s Simon with her, it’s Charley with her.

She wakes up.

The clock by her bed reads 3:47 am in red, glowing letters.

She hasn’t had a nightmare since she was a kid, since she was afraid of things like spiders, tornadoes, and math.

She wipes at the tears in her eyes.

Some of the details are starting to fade already. She isn’t sure what she was afraid of in the dream, what she was running from, and she doesn’t really want to know. It’s probably for the best if she forgets.

She’d heard Wally’s neck snap.

She wants to talk to him.

She isn’t worried that he’s in trouble, as if her nightmare was prescient, or something, and she needs to hear his voice to be reassured that he isn't hurt.

She just feels weird right now, shaky, and thrown off.

She’d gotten used to talking to him about stuff. He’d always just understood somehow, or maybe it was the fact that he was dead, so it didn’t feel like she was burdening him if she spilled her guts, and he’d encouraged that, encouraged her . She’d been spoiled by it, how nice it was to talk to him.

She shifts onto her side.

She wishes that Wally had a phone, that she was able to curl up under her covers right now and call him.

He’d have that slurred, sleepy voice when he answered.

She closes her eyes.

It’s fine.

She can handle a silly, stupid nightmare.

—

She steals a key to the school from Mr. South’s office after she learns the doors are locked at 4 pm.

She needs to be able to get in at night.

They have no idea the amount of danger that Simon is really in right now, trapped the way that he is. 

What if there’s a limit on how long his body can survive in this state? 

She can’t just sit on her ass at home.

She doesn't know how they’re going to get him out, doesn’t even know where to start , but she isn’t going to give up until they do, until they fix this, and they get him out.

She’ll spend 24/7 at the school if she has to.

That’s not the way things go.

She’s in the greenhouse with the ghosts at lunch on Friday when she learns it’s already all figured out. 

They’re discussing the fact that Maddie brought a can of Pringles that expired in 2019 for lunch. It’s Wally who notices, who is snacking on the chips, only to see the can is stamped April 17, 2019, and announce it loudly to everyone. They can’t get off the topic after that because, like, what the fuck, Maddie, you brought a can of Pringles that expired in 2019 for lunch.

“It was in the back of the pantry, I don’t know,” she says

“2019?” Rhonda says, with a raise of her eyebrows.

“It’s not like I’ve had a lot of time for grocery shopping lately!” she says.

“True,” Simon says. 

She’d rather have a can of Pringles from 2019 than deal with the cafeteria at lunch again. “I’m sure they still taste okay,” she says.

“They’re actually not terrible,” Wally says. 

He’s straddling his chair backwards, right by the table she’s sitting on. If she stretched her leg, her foot could touch his thigh. He’s been close like that all morning, always near wherever she is.

But her foot can’t actually touch his thigh.

She can’t touch him at all.

She wants to lean into his side, hook her chin over his shoulder, and push her fingers into his hair. To knock his knee with her foot, or bump her elbow into his arm. She wants to take his hand and play with his fingers, feel the calluses, and brush her thumb over his knuckles. 

She wants to touch him, and it doesn’t matter where, or how, just a touch, just for a minute, just for a second.

“Like I’m kinda digging the chewiness,” Wally says.

She grabs the can to try a chip.

“Do we know if chips can expire?” Charley asks.

“Hey, Janet,” Quinn says.

She’s standing in the doorway, hesitant, but when everyone looks at her, she smiles awkwardly, and she steps in.

“You want a Pringle from 2019?” Quinn asks.

“Um, no,” Janet says.

“Are you okay?” Simon asks.

“I told you yesterday that I have a theory about what happened to you. And I’ve been working through it all, and I think I know how to get you out of here. If I’m right, if my theory is correct, I know what to do.”

“You’re serious right now?” Simon asks.

Everybody is kind of stunned.

“Well, what’s the theory?” Rhonda asks.

“We overwhelmed the veil between the living and dead that night, when we experienced the trauma of our scars, to the point that you were able to cross the veil completely, body and soul.”

“Yeah,” Simon says, frowning.

“If we want you to cross it again,” Janet says, and her eyes are bright now, excited, “we need to recreate the conditions that allowed you to cross it before.”

“So you’re saying we need to go back into our scars?” Charley says.

“Yes,” Janet says.

“And then Simon can just, like, walk right back through, and be alive again?” Wally says.

“Theoretically.”

Could it really be that simple? 

It won’t be easy for everyone to go into their scars again. She hadn’t thought she’d survive her own, until Wally had pulled her from it. It’s asking a lot for everyone to go back into their scars.

But they’ve done it before.

“So when are we gonna do this?” Yuri asks.

“Tonight?” Janet says.

There’s a pause.

“Yeah, um,” Charley says, clearing his throat. “No reason to put it off, right?” He looks at Simon and softens a little, smiling in reassurance. “We’re gonna get you out of here.” 

“Thanks, man,” Simon says.

“And if this works, if I’ve understood this correctly, and this works, we may be able to manipulate the veil in other ways, too,” Janet says.

“Whoopee,” Rhonda says, flat.

“Let’s do it,” Wally says.

They decide they’ll do it tonight, after the school is deserted. They’ll go into their scars together, like they had before, and they’ll face the horrors of the scars one by one, the way they had that night. They debate how long they’ll need to stay in the scars, if it’ll help to linger.

They have to be traumatized, remember.

She can’t be there for it.

There’s a chance Mr. Martin is going to use the chaos to escape his scar, and they can’t have Maddie nearby when that happens, in case Mr. Martin decides to use the opportunity to steal her body.

She can’t really argue with that.

They just have to figure out how Simon will know when the moment is right to cross. 

She isn’t able to help with that. Mr. Hartman sticks his head into the greenhouse, sighs with relief at the sight of her, and says that lunch is over, and he is happy to walk to calculus with her. She can’t think of an excuse not to be ushered out.

The rest of the day is a slow, miserable slog, and she’s glad when Simon finds her, updates her on the plan.

He is going to go into Mr. Martin’s scar before it begins. Janet is going to stay in the hallway right outside the scar until the school is bathed in red, then she’ll go into the scar, too. He’ll leave Mr. Martin’s scar as soon as he sees her.

And, hopefully, he’ll walk from Mr. Martin’s scar into the land of the living.

“She says she’ll handle Mr. Martin,” he adds.

They’ve got it all worked out.

She waits with Nicole that night, sitting in Nicole’s car. Around 11 pm, Mrs. Tabbs, the custodian who cleans the classrooms at night, locks up and leaves. She shifts in her seat, and Nicole exhales softly beside her.

“It’s gonna work,” Nicole says.

“Yeah,” she says.

She doesn’t know how much time passes before she sees it suddenly.

An awful, glowing red light is flickering in the windows.

She’s out of the car immediately, starting forward. But she can’t actually go anywhere, or she risks being the reason for the next disaster. She stops and stands there uselessly, swaying on her feet. 

There’s a shout, and she sees them suddenly, tumbling out of nowhere into the grass in front of the school.

Quinn is crying.

“Maddie?” Nicole says.

She shakes her head. “It’s—the ghosts, they were in Quinn’s scar, but they’re out now, and they—it’s over, I guess.” She doesn't know what happened.

The ghosts are looking up and around.

She catches Rhonda’s gaze and takes a step toward her because it’s over now, regardless of whether it worked, and Mr. Martin isn’t here, and the ghosts need her, she can see it on Rhonda’s face.

And that’s when Simon bursts from the building at a run.

He’s headed right for her, and there’s a wild look on his face, something desperate and frightened and determined, and she realizes he has no idea if it’s worked either, but he’s about to find out.

“Simon,” Nicole says, breathless. “Simon! Oh, my god! Simon!”

It worked.

She runs to get to him, they collide in the middle and almost fall over together, clutching at each other they way they are, and she doesn’t realize she’s crying until she’s gasping for breath, holding him tightly.

“You’re alive!” Nicole says, and when they break apart, Nicole is there, crying, and hugging him.

She can’t believe it really worked.

She isn’t expecting Janet to sprint from the school next, or to make a beeline for them. She stiffens, and Simon notices and turns, but he can’t see Janet now, judging by the way he glances at Maddie with a furrow in his brow. She starts to tell him that Janet is on the way, but there isn’t time.

“You need to get out of here,” Janet says, breathless.

“What?”

“I wasn’t able to keep Mr. Martin in his scar, I—he outsmarted me, and I—I’m sorry, I have no idea where is.”

Shit.

“Go,” Janet says.

“We have to get out of here,” Maddie says.

“Mr. Martin?” Simon guesses.

“Yup.”

They clamber into the car together.

She catches sight of the ghosts before Nicole peels out of the parking lot. Janet is talking to them, but they all look at Nicole’s car when it drives by, all of them; they all look at her. She has the urge to shove open the door and tumble out and run to the ghosts, but Nicole hits the gas.

They pull out on the road.

“It worked,” Simon says, awe in his voice.

She swipes at her cheeks, turning from the window, and smiles at him, and the school disappears into the dark behind them.

—

She spends the weekend on the internet in search of something about ghosts. Simon is stuck with his parents, so she can’t really spend any time with him, and as much as she wants to go to the school, she has no car to drive, no friends to take her, and no excuse to give her mother. She has no options except to scour the internet in hopes of finding a hint of information on ghosts.

She doesn’t really know what she’s looking for. 

There has to be stuff out there that’s legit. There’s a whole world out there, and what, nobody except a couple of teenagers in Split River have discovered ghosts for real? There have got to be others who know what’s going on.

She just wants to know more about all of it.

“I called Northwestern.”

“What?” she says, her eyes on her screen.

“They are going to reschedule your interview. I explained—I explained what happened, or, well, I made up a story, and, anyway, I—I got them to agree. They are coming to the school in December to interview you.”

She glances up.

Her mother is standing in the doorway of her room with the start of a hesitant, hopeful smile on her face.

“Um, okay.”

“I thought you’d be excited,” her mother says.

She sighs. “I just don’t really have time for this right now,” she says.

Her mother comes in hesitantly, sits on the edge of her bed. “Simon?” she guesses, and Maddie takes a breath, reminding herself that she wants this, wants a mother who is present, who pays attention, who asks her questions. Her mother’s gaze searches her face.

“Simon is okay,” she says.

“He was with his cousin in Milwaukee?”

“Yeah.”

That’s the story that Simon came up with. 

Simon had called Benny in the car to check with him about it, and Benny Elroy, 27 years old, a college dropout, and the black sheep of the family, had assumed Simon he was cool with it, that he didn’t need to know what Simon was actually up to, and he didn’t care if Simon’s parents were pissed at him because of it, so Simon had told Benny his plan, and that was that.

They’re saying that Simon was overwhelmed by everything, Maddie’s disappearance, his suspension, the interview with Northwestern, so Simon had gone to hang out at Benny’s for a week and a half.

They had dropped Simon off at the bus station, and he’d called his parents to pick him up from there.

“I’m so glad he’s okay,” says her mother.

“Me, too.”

“I, um.” Her mother swallows visibly. “You know, I still don’t know what happened to you. And I get that you just want to move on from it, I so get that. But I just want to, baby, I just want to be there for you, I want to support you and protect you and help you move forward, be your mom, you know.”

She does not want to do this right now.

“You can’t tell me anything?” asks her mother.

“It’s complicated,” she says.

“I can—Maddie, I can do complicated!”

“Mom.”

“You haven’t always been able to count on me, I know that! I own that. But you can count on me now, I’m telling you!”

“How am I going to pay for Northwestern if I get in?” she asks.

That slaps the earnestness right off her mother’s face.

She shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have reminded her mother of that, when she knows how sorry her mother is, but she can’t have this conversation right now. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I messed up,” says her mother.

“I just really want you to focus on staying sober right now, okay?”

“Maddie—”

“The college thing, I’ll figure that out myself. It was really nice of you to call Northwestern for me, but I can do that stuff myself, okay? Just, please, let me deal with all the college stuff myself.”

“If that’s what you want,” says her mother, quieter.

“It is,” she says. 

“Okay.”

“And you don’t have to worry about what happened to me. I just—I don’t want to talk about it, and I know that isn’t fair to you, I know , but I just need you to believe me when I say I’m okay. And you don’t have to worry about me, or worry that I’ll disappear again, or whatever.”

“It’s my job to worry about you.”

“Mom.”

“Okay,” says her mother, lifting up her hands in retreat.

She nods.

Her mother gets up, goes to the door. She looks at her computer, tries to remember what she was looking at before her mother interrupted. Her mother doesn’t leave immediately, lingering in the door.

She pretends not to notice.

“I’m working on it,” her mother says.

She glances up.

“I’m gonna be somebody you can count on. I’ve let you down before, and you have no reason to trust me, but that’s going to change. I’m gonna do better, and I’m going to be the mother you deserve.”

“I can’t wait,” she says, encouraging.

She’s on the internet until three in the morning, on livejournal and on reddit and on discord, on everything.

She doesn’t find anything that helps.

—

She asks her mother to drive her to school early on Monday with the excuse that she needs to work on an English paper in the library.

She isn’t sure where everyone will be. And when she walks into the building and realizes that, she’s kind of floored by it. She has no idea where everyone spends their time when she isn’t around. 

They had always just found her. 

She walks down the hallway with a kind of purpose for a moment, unsure if Mrs. Jones in the office is watching her, and waits for an idea to occur to her.

She remembers when she passes the teacher’s lounge that she knows where at least one of her friends likes to start the day.

She can’t go in, but she glances through the window, and sees that Rhonda is sprawled on a sofa. There are a couple of teachers in the lounge, too. She hovers, and when she has a chance, she waves at Rhonda through the window, getting her attention.

She’s glad when Rhonda comes out of the lounge with a cup of coffee in hand.

“Hey!” she says, soft.

“Hey, Cherry Pop,” Rhonda says.

She starts down the hallway, away from the lounge, and the teachers she does not want to hear her.

“Is there a reason you’re here at the crack of dawn?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“You’re wondering about Mr. Martin,” Rhonda says, nodding. “We haven’t found him. He’s probably in our scars again, but, whatever, we’re not going back in there after him. We’ll just deal with him when we have to.”

“Are you okay?” Maddie asks.

“He didn’t do anything to us,” Rhonda says.

“No, I just meant you went in your scar again.” She stops in the hallway, looks Rhonda in the eye, and shrugs a shoulder at her. “I just wanted to check if you were okay.”

“I’m okay,” Rhonda says, and her voice is softer.

“Good.”

Quinn rounds the corner, and her face lights up. “Maddie!” Quinn’s smile is big and bright and real, like her day has just gotten way better.

“Hey, Quinn.”

“I like your shirt!”

She glances at what she’d put on, sees a My Chemical Romance tour shirt she’d gotten at Goodwill, and looks up again with a smile. “Thanks,” she says.

Is it weird for the ghosts to see her in clothes that aren’t a tank top, flannel, and a pair of jeans?

“What are you guys up to now?” she asks.

“Breakfast,” Quinn says.

“You want to come to the cafeteria with us?” Rhonda asks.

She hesitates. “Isn’t Mrs. Bernstein going to be there already?” She wants to hang out with them, but she can’t do that properly if people are around.

“Yeah, and I’ll tell you what to say to her to get her to give you some snacks for free,” Rhonda says. “Of course, the snacks aren’t going to be from 2019, so you’ll probably hate them, but you never know.”

“I think I can handle some fresh snacks,” she says.

“Are you sure about that?”

She huffs.

They end up in a corner of the cafeteria with a pile of Fruit Loops, Honey Buns, and Frito Lays, but they aren’t by themselves for long.

“Aww, yeah, Honey Buns are back on the menu!” Wally says, slipping into a chair and smiling at her, snagging the package of smushed, half-eaten sticky bun from in front of her

“Didn’t realize you were such a Honey Buns guy,” Maddie says.

“Oh, I’m a fan of all of Little Debbie’s work. Nutty Buddys, Fancy Cakes, Swiss Rolls. That Little Debbie knows her shit.”

She grins.

“You’re here early,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“How’s Simon doing?”

“Good, I think. He’s been holed up with his parents all weekend, so I haven’t seen him. But alive, definitely.”

He nods. “Cool.”

There’s a pause.

He tears a chunk off the honey bun and shovels into his mouth. “Yeah, that’s the stuff,” he says, sighing. He licks the icing off his thumb, but there’s some on his chin, too.

She wants to wipe it off.

“You get the latest on Mr. Martin?” he asks.

“Yup.”

“We’ve actually moved on to Janet now,” Rhonda says.

He sucks his teeth. “Ooh, yeah. That shit’s awkward as hell. For sure.”

“I like Janet,” Quinn offers.

“It’s not about if we like her,” Rhonda says. “It’s about the fact that we were stuck in this school with her for decades, and as much as we liked her, she was lying to us for literally all of that time.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“And, oh, how about the fact that she stole Maddie’s body, and was gonna run off with it, or something?”

“She didn’t, though,” Quinn says.

“I’d never have met you guys if it wasn’t for her,” Maddie says. 

“Guess we gotta thank her for that,” Wally says.

“And, yeah, she was in my body and that kind of weirds me out to think about, how she was out there in the world as me and with my mom and everything, and it made me really angry before, but she did the right thing in the end, so there’s that.”

“Jesus,” Rhonda says, shoving her bowl of Fruit Loops away from her.

“What?” Maddie says.

“Why will you people never let me complain about anyone?”

She laughs.

They spend the next half hour complaining about Jerry, who died in auto shop class, and who Wally’s had beef with since “the incident with the pencil sharpener” in 2010, and they start in on Brandy and Kayla, too, who “if you can believe it, Mads, if you can fucking believe it” sided with Jerry after.

“And why wasn’t Mr. Martin keeping journals on them ?” Rhonda says.

“That is weird,” Quinn says.

“Like, what, is Jerry bashing his head in on a bumper not traumatic enough for Mr. Martin to care about?” Rhonda says.

The bell rings on the dot at 7:45 am, and she wants so badly to ignore it, but that’s not really an option.

She would have stayed there all day with them if she could have.

—

Things are supposed to be normal again. She’s been waiting for this, hoping for this, working so hard to get back to this, but now that it’s happened, now that she’s alive, and Simon is, too, she’s kind of at a loss. Things are supposed to be normal again.

She just doesn’t know what normal is now.

People lose interest in her.

The rumor has spread that she had run off, that the blood on the boiler was staged, and she had wanted to get her ex-boyfriend into trouble, and as much as she hates the way that makes her look, she’s glad that she isn’t the center of attention now.

She can just live her life again.

A woman from Northwestern comes to the school again to interview her, and it goes really, really well.

She cries in the bathroom after. 

“You’re gonna do such amazing things with your life,” Charley says.

She knows it’s not fair to be crying about something like this in front of him, about having a future , when Charley is going to stay in this school for the rest of his existence, never aging, never changing, never living, but she can’t stop it.

“And we’re all gonna be so proud of you,” Charley says.

He is sitting on a sink, trying to catch her eye in the mirror, and he is smiling at her in that kind, gentle, encouraging way of his.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

She’s alive.

She can go wherever she wants and she can do whatever she wants and she can be whoever she wants.

Why isn’t she happy about that?

She tries to do things. 

She goes to the mall with Nicole, hangs out in Simon’s basement with everyone for a marathon of Wes Craven movies, goes to a concert with Claire.

She dyes streaks of red in her hair because she can, because she sees the hair dye at CVS when she’s picking up snacks with Xavier for a night at Simon’s house, and she’s always kind of wanted to dye her hair. 

She goes with her mom to visit her dad’s aunt in Madison for a weekend.

She catches up on all of her work for school, turns in assignments she’s missed, and is assured by all of her teachers that she’s good to go, as far as school is concerned, and she celebrates with Simon after at a new, fancy grilled cheese restaurant that opened up downtown.

She lives the life of a happy, healthy living person.

She just can’t go very long without time at the school, too.

She doesn’t want to be normal right now.

She has the rest of her life to spend with Simon, with Nicole and Xavier and Claire, and that’s great.

But she hasn’t got forever with the ghosts.

She’s going to graduate in the spring, leave town, and go to college, and she’ll be able to visit the ghosts once in a while, if she’s lucky, but she’ll get older and older and older, and things will change, and she may end up leaving this town entirely in the past, like she’d planned to once upon a time.

She has to be with them now while she still can.

—

She sneaks into the school on Saturday with a carton of eggnog, a bottle of rum, and a box of cookies from Pick ‘n Save.

It’s a couple of weeks ‘til Christmas, but that’s okay.

She’d found the bottle of rum in the back of her closet, and rather than think about when her mom had hidden it there, or if her mom, who claimed to be sober, knew it was still there, she’d decided it was her bottle of rum now, and she’d gift it to people who’d appreciate a pick-me-up at this time of year.

She logs into Nicole’s account on Spotify on her laptop, and she makes a playlist with everybody’s input.

They end up just kind of lounging after that, listening to music, and drinking the eggnog with rum.

She is sprawled on the couch, and Wally is sitting on the floor, his back an inch from her calf, and she is determined not to imagine what it would be like if she shifted her leg, and it worked, and she touched him.

“What are you looking at?” He nods his chin at her phone.

“Jobs.”

“For real?” He turns and tries to get a peek at the screen.

“I’m kind of short on cash at the moment.”

He frowns.

“I was working at AMC before all of this, which was miserable but also, I got to see pretty much every movie out there, but, ah, yeah, my boss at AMC made it clear that my job wasn’t still waiting for me after everything, so I’ve gotta find something new.”

“To pay for college?” Rhonda asks.

“Well, there’s no way I’ll find a job that’ll pay for college,” she says.

“Then . . . ?”

“I just need money to, like, live. I used the last of what I had saved from AMC to fix the belt in my mom's car, plus the eggnog and those cookies. I can’t rely on my mom for money.”

They’re all just kind of looking at her now, and it occurs to her belatedly that money probably wasn’t something they worried about when they were alive, and they don’t know how to react to the topic now.

She shouldn’t have unloaded on them.

She’s self-conscious suddenly, the way she is when Nicole wants to buy her clothes at the mall, or when Simon says the tickets to the festival are on him.

“For college, I was thinking I’d look into scholarships,” she says.

She does have to figure out the college thing soon. Her life is suddenly in front of her again, and if she’s going to live it, she wants to live it right. She knows that college isn’t everything, but it’s what she wants, and she isn’t thrilled at the idea of putting it off.

“Do you like to write?” Rhonda asks. 

“Why?”

“There’s a scholarship in my name. The Rhonda Rosen Memorial Scholarship. It gives you a full ride in my honor. Marjorie set it up actually, which I used to hate, but, anyway. It’s only for kids who go to Split River High, want to be writers, and would be the first in their family to go to college.”

She sits up.

“Aren’t they making you meet with your guidance counselor like twice a week?” Rhonda says.

“We don’t really talk about college. She usually just asks me how I’m feeling and tries to get a glance at my wrists without me noticing, which she is not subtle enough to do. We’ve only talked about college once.”

“Well, do you write?”

“Sometimes,” she says.

“Really?” Quinn asks.

“Just, like, short stories. Horror, usually. Really, just like outlines. And, no, you can’t read them. I don’t like to—they’re not good, or anything. So I don’t really share them. But I can write a pretty killer essay for the scholarship if I have to. And I do want to be a writer, even if I doubt it’ll ever actually happen, so I wouldn’t be lying.

“How do you know they’re not good if you’ve never let anybody read them?” Charley asks.

“Because.”

“I want to read one,” Wally asks.

“No.”

“One,” Wally says, holding up a finger.

“No.”

“I don’t read stuff so I’ll think it’s awesome no matter what! I got like C pluses on every paper I ever wrote, and that’s only ‘cause the teachers were afraid to fail me and get me kicked off the team. I am so easy to impress, you have no idea!”

“It’s not gonna happen,” she says.

“Please.” He’s got his big brown puppy dog eyes on her now, and he puts a hand on her shoe, and she can’t feel the weight of it, but she can see it, his hand on her. “Please. A paragraph of one? Please.”

She is so not good at saying no to him.

“I’m your man, Maddie.”

“Fine,” she says.

She rustles around in her backpack, glad that she’s able to hide her blush that way, and pulls out her notebook for U.S. Government, where she’d been working on something in the back just yesterday.

She puts the notebook beside her on the sofa.

He picks it up.

“Wait, I want to read it, too!” Quinn says.

He jumps up and away goes around to the back of the sofa and kneels there, his elbows on the back of the sofa.

She watches his face for a moment, looks away, and can’t help but let her eyes creep back to his face again.

His mouth is moving slightly while he reads the words, which is kind of really fucking adorable. But there’s also a crease in his forehead that gets deeper and deeper, and she doesn’t know what that means. His jerks back suddenly, and his eyes go wide.

“Okay, I want to read it now, too,” Rhonda says.

He looks up from her notebook, and for a moment, his expression is unreadable.

“See, it’s not that—”

“This is creepy,” he says. “This is, like, really, really fucking creepy.”

“It’s horror,” Maddie says, defensive.

“I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight!”

She laughs.

“It’s amazing, Maddie,” he says, softer.

“You have to say that now, after you made such a big deal about how you’d like it before,” she says, but she’s pleased, and she can’t really shove the feeling out of sight. “You can’t be trusted now.”

“Well, I’m not gonna lie to you,” Rhonda says.

“You’re not reading it,” Maddie says.

“What, only people you have sex with are allowed to read your stories?”

She gapes.

“Oh, my God,” Charley says.

“I—that is not why—”

Rhonda makes a gimmie hand motion at Wally and he looks at Maddie apologetically before he hands it over. “You gotta let her read it, Mads,” he says in explanation. Rhonda turns away slightly while she reads it, elbows up, as if expecting Maddie to make Wally grab it away from her.

“Traitor,” Maddie mutters.

Rhonda lowers the notebook after a moment and looks at her. “Cherry Pop, you have to go for my scholarship.” Rhonda isn’t the type to give out compliments, but the expression on her face, it feels like one.

“I’ve actually been working on that one for a while,” Maddie confesses.

“It’s good.”

“Is it my turn to read it yet?” Quinn asks.

Rhonda passes the notebook to her.

“I want to read it, too,” Charley says. 

“Did you hear the part about how it’s creepy?” Yuri says.

“But how scary are we talking? On a scale of, I don’t know, Beethoven to IT ? Like, will it give me nightmares?”

“I’m getting more IT vibes, babe.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I can do that,” Charley says.

“This is Stephen King stuff right here,” Quinn says, glancing up. “You’re giving me goosebumps. It’s fun! You should totally put this up to be published in one of those magazines for short horror stories.”

“Can we talk about something else now?” Maddie says.

“Seriously!” Quinn says.

“No, you know what, I can do it,” Charley says.

The rest of the night is fun, easy, eggnog-with-rum blur.

She isn’t sure when she falls asleep but she wakes up to Wally saying her name, over and over, and she blinks at him blearily for a moment.

“You gotta go home,” he says, gentle. He’s kneeling on the ground in front of her.

She sits up, checks her phone.

It’s 1:42 am.

“Shit,” she says, rubbing her eyes.

“Are you okay to drive?” he asks.

She nods.

She’d get in loads of trouble if she were caught sleeping at the school.

“I’m fine,” she says, standing up.

—

Nicole asks her to hang out, just the two of them. They get fries and shakes from McDonald’s and drive around for a while, stopping by the factory, where Nicole gives Maddie tips on how to photograph the snow, and they end up finally at Nicole’s house for dinner. It’s nice to hang out with just Nicole sometimes.

“So I kind of wanted to talk to you about something,” Nicole says.

“Yeah?”

“Xavier kissed me.”

She stares. They’re in Nicole’s bedroom, lounging, and listening to Spotify, and she doesn’t know what she expected Nicole to say, but it definitely was not that . She has no idea how to answer.

“I really like him,” Nicole says earnestly.

“The guy who cheated on me?”

Nicole’s eyes shutter slightly and she looks down, nods. “He hasn’t always been the greatest guy. And, Maddie, I swear, I didn’t see this coming at all. When I realized that he and I had been chatting online without realizing it, I was pissed . Because I never thought of him that way when you were together and especially not after I found out what he did to you. He’s definitely done some really shitty stuff.” Nicole looks at her again, and there’s something pleading in her gaze.

“You really want to go out with him?” Maddie says.

“He can actually be really sweet sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know, I dated him, remember?”

“Maddie.” 

“He was really sweet, when he wanted to be. And funny and cool and sometimes I thought he was so profound, you know? He was definitely sweet, though. And then when he couldn’t pressure me into having sex with him, he started having sex with someone else. So, that was kind of less sweet.”

It’s quiet.

“Are you ready to sleep with him?”

Nicole doesn’t answer, just slams her laptop closed, cutting off the music coming from it.

“Because you know you’re gonna have to, right?”

“I thought you’d forgiven him for that,” Nicole says.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“But I’m still supposed to hold it against him?”

She shakes her head.

“Do you know how hard he worked to find you when you were missing? And he was so good to your mom, Maddie—he, he was better than I was, or than Simon was. Or how about the fact that after he thought you hit him with his car, he didn’t want to press charges against you?”

“It’s not about him,” Maddie says.

“Then what’s it about?”

“It’s—Nicole, you’re supposed my friend, and you’re—”

“And you’re supposed to be my friend!” Nicole says.

“Look, if you want to get together with him, go ahead. I don’t have feelings for him anymore, so you don’t have to worry about that, if you even are worried about that. So, if he’s really the guy you want, go for it. I was just trying to be sure you knew what you were getting into. But I’ll shut about it now.”

“You really think he’s that bad?”

“I think you could do better.”

“What, like I’d be better off if I fell for a dead football player?” 

She feels like she’s been punched. And immediately Nicole’s face changes, and the apology is written all over it, but she can’t look at Nicole right now. She pulls her arms tightly around herself.

“I—shit, I’m sorry, Maddie, I shouldn’t have . . . seriously, I’m sorry.”

“That dead football player is the actual sweetest person I’ve ever met,” she says.

“Yeah, I—I know, I . . .”

“And I am better off for having met him and fallen for him and for having gotten to be with him, and I have no regrets about sleeping with him, even if—” She swallows, afraid that she’s going to start crying. “Even if I’ll never get to do it again.”

“You slept with him?” Nicole asks softly.

“Yeah.”

Nicole shifts, slides down her bed to sit at the end, closer to Maddie. “Why didn’t you tell me?” The words aren’t accusatory, and Nicole’s expression is open, encouraging.

She shrugs. It had felt secret, somehow—not like something to be ashamed of, but something special.

“How was it?”

It was—

It was warm, wet kisses, his mouth on her shoulders, her belly, her thighs. It was scary. It was fun. It was overwhelming. It was laughter and awkwardness and comfort, her hands on the soft, bare skin of his back.

It was—

It was sweet, the way he’d nosed at her cheek playfully after he'd gotten her off with his fingers, and the way he’d asked if she was sure, the way he’d covered her face in kisses after he'd pushed into her.

And she’d never actually, you know. That was the first time, when his fingers were inside her, that was the first time she’d ever actually—finished. Because she’d always been too anxious before, thinking about it too much.

But with him, it was different.

It was Wally.

“Maddie?”

“It was better than sex with Xavier in the back of a car at school would have been,” she says.

“Okay,” Nicole says, clamping up. 

She feels bad suddenly, at how mean she’s being. “I’m sorry,” she adds, and she wills Nicole to look up. “I don’t really want to talk about it, but it was good.” She smiles a little, shrugs her shoulders.

“Maybe . . . Xavier just wasn’t the right person for you?” Nicole offers.

“And maybe he’s the right person for you?” Maddie says.

“I don’t know, but, yeah, maybe.”

“Then I’m happy for you because I am your friend, and I . . . I trust you. And Xavier is pretty cute, so there’s that. Just . . . know that I am on your side, and I hope that he has grown up for you.”

“Thanks,” Nicole says.

They had planned on watching a movie, but they call it a night pretty soon after that. Things are just kind of weird after all of that, and both of them are kind of in their heads, or at least Maddie feels like she is. They’ve been hanging out for hours already, so they don’t make a big deal of it.

Nicole drives her home, and that’s that.

She can’t fall asleep for a while.

She wants to talk to Rhonda.

It’s not like she and Rhonda are that close of friends, or anything. 

She just knows how Rhonda would react to the news that Nicole wants to date Xavier. “The piece of shit who cheated on you?” Rhonda would say, scornful. She wants that right now, wants Rhonda to pull her lollipop from her mouth and gape in disgust at the idea that Nicole is into Xavier.

It’s whatever.

She really doesn’t care about Xavier’s love life. That’s gone now, like it had never been there to begin with, and she doesn’t know what did it, nearly dying for real, or sex with Wally, or the fact that it’s been a few months now, but, regardless, it’s gone, and she has forgiven him for being an ass. She couldn’t care less if Xavier is hooking up left and right.

But it’s crazy that someone she’s been friends with for years wants to be with the guy who cheated on her.

Right?

“It’s unbelievable,” Rhonda would say, emphatic.

Whatever.

Nicole can do what she wants.

—

She loads up her mom’s car with the groceries on the list, picks up slurpees from 7/11, and heads to the school.

It’s a Saturday, so they’ve got the school to themselves.

She has to do all of the cooking herself, since Wally can’t actually interact with the food in a way that affects her, but she really doesn’t mind cooking this way, since it’s kind of fun, having Wally hovering over her, talking her through how to make his personal, perfected style of nachos.

“There’s such a thing as too much sour cream,” Rhonda says.

“See, you’re just wrong,” Wally says.

“I’m not eating that if you make her put that much sour cream in it.”

“Boohoo,” Wally says.

“I gotta say I’m more worried about the amount of olives,” Yuri says.

“The olives are like the—” Wally is incensed. “—like the piece da whatever!”

“Piece de resistance?” Rhonda says, arching a brow at him, and sucking on the straw of her slurpee as loudly as possible.

“Maddie, don’t listen to them.” Wally turns to block her view of Rhonda on the counter and Yuri at a table. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” He waves a hand at them like he’s swatting at them. “They couldn’t make good nachos if their lives depended on it.”

She hums at him, suppressing a smile.

“I thought the jalapenos were the piece da whatever?” Quinn says.

“This is bullying,” Wally says, crossing his arms. “This is bullying that’s happening right now.” 

He’s standing so close and looks so annoyed, and Maddie just wants to push up on her tiptoes and smack a kiss to his lips. She turns away quickly and clears her throat, but the feeling doesn’t go away. He’s still right there, in her space, a pout on his face, and Maddie feels kind of crazy with how much she wants one stupid little kiss.

She needs to focus on making the nachos.

The dish turns out to be a monstrosity, with layers of nachos amid pounds of ground beef, cheese, sour cream, salsa, olives, beans, jalapenos, and, weirdly, mac ‘n cheese. It's amazing the thing can even fit in the oven, as tall as it is.

But when the oven dings, she takes it out, and everybody pulls off pieces to try, she has to hand it to him.

“This is good,” Charley says, stunned.

It’s a salty, cheesy, spicy mess, and she can’t stop eating it, shoveling the chips into her mouth, and winding up with beans and cheese and salsa on her chin and her hands and her lap, but it’s worth it.

“It isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever had,” Rhonda says.

“You love it,” Wally says.

Maddie is stuffed in minutes.

She’s made herself nachos plenty of times, but usually she puts shredded cheese on top of chips, sticks it in the microwave for a minute, and calls it a day.

This is better by a mile.

She starts in on the dishes, filling a sink at the back with hot, soapy water, and Wall sidles up beside her, sitting on a stool at her side. “Sorry I can’t help,” he says, sheepish. She smiles and shrugs her shoulders, dunking her plate into the water.

“You’re keeping me company,” she says.

He tugs on the end of one of her bracelets, and she can’t feel it, but she pretends to herself that she can.

“You’re a pretty good cook,” she tells him.

He grins. “Yeah, I am.”

“It’s actually really attractive.” She isn’t looking at him when she says it, and she keeps not looking at him, even when he doesn’t immediately reply. “In case you didn’t know.”

“Maddie Nears,” he says, delight in his voice, “are you flirting with me?”

“No.”

He scoots his stool closer to her.

“Shut up,” she says.

“Have I told you that I like your hair?” His voice has gotten lower, huskier, and it should make her want to laugh, but it makes her heart pick up instead. “Because I really like your hair.”

“I picked up on that, actually,” she says, swallowing.

She’d been so stupidly pleased at how he’d reacted when he’d first seen the streaks of red. His lips had parted, and his Adam’s apple had bobbed in his throat, and he’d just kind of stared at her for a second, stunned. She’d been unable to think of much else the rest of the day.

She doesn’t know when she became the girl who cares what a guy thinks, but she is definitely that girl.

“You’re just really fucking beautiful,” he says, soft.

She squeezes the sponge in her hand.

“And you’re the coolest girl I’ve ever met.”

She snorts and glances at him, only to get caught in his gaze. His eyes dart to her mouth and away again quickly, and there goes his Adam’s apple again, bobbing in his throat. She looks away, too, feeling slightly shaky.

She’ll never kiss him again.

How did this happen?

She thought he was cute when she met him, sure, but she wasn’t into him, not really, and she started to like him more and more, to like his company, thought he was nice and earnest and loyal.

How did it become like this suddenly, where she thinks about him constantly, and she wants so desperately to be closer to him, to feel the warmth of him, to hug him and kiss him and breathe in the scent of him, sweat and deodorant and boy? 

It’s just so easy with him. 

To talk to him. To trust him. To be herself with him.

But actually nothing about this is easy. They’re on opposite sides of a veil between life and death. That’s so far from easy it’s immeasurable.

She can’t touch him but somehow she’s still holding onto him, and she doesn’t know how to let go.

He clears his throat. “I’ve thought about it before, actually,” he says.

“What?”

“Mixing up my look. Growing my hair out, getting some highlights, maybe doing something with my brows."

"Some fosted tips?” she suggests.

“Sure, if you’re into that.”

She eyes him. “Wally, nobody is into that.”

“I could pull it off.”

She shakes her head.

He stays with her for the rest of the night, as close as he’s able to be, sitting at her side, and keeping her company.

They talk about watching a movie together, “something you like, Maddie, like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, or something,” Charley says, but they don’t actually get their act together enough to make it happen.

She has to take all of the slurpees with her when she leaves. 

They’ve melted into warm, flavored water by the end of the night, untouched, despite the fact that they were enjoyed, that Rhonda had drunk two of them, Charley’s lips had ended up bright blue, and Quinn had gone as far as dipping a nacho into hers. 

She dumps them in the trash outside her house.

—

She doesn’t really know what to think when Mr. Anderson starts to swing by her house twice a week for dinner. 

She isn’t against it necessarily, since she likes Mr. Anderson, and dinner with him is fun. He was one of her favorite teachers for a lot of reasons, including that he’s kind of cool to hang out with. She just really isn’t interested in thinking about why Mr. Anderson is coming around constantly for dinner.

They don’t usually talk about their time among the ghosts.

He asks her once if she’s told her mom about what really happened to you, but when she tells him flatly that she hasn’t and that she isn’t going to, he doesn’t argue with her, just nods and lets it go.

They’ve just mutually decided that they aren’t going to acknowledge their knowledge of ghosts.

She’s startled at dinner on Sunday, therefore, when Mr. Anderson asks if she’s spending a lot of time with the ghosts.

She blinks.

Her mother has left the room to take a call for work.

“Your mom says you’re always off something with your friends, and I wondered—”

“You talk about me with my mom?”

“Uh, sometimes, yeah. You’re important to your mom, obviously, so you come up just in regular conversation. But, like, not a lot.”

“Sure,” she says.

“Anyway, I was wondering if some of that time with friends was with, you know, them,” he says. “I figure you can still see ‘em, right? I could, even after I got my body back. Or am I totally off?”

“Yeah, no, I, um, I hang out with them sometimes,” she says. She isn’t sure she likes where this is going.

“They doing okay?”

“I guess.”

“You know, you can talk to me about that stuff if you want. It’s a lot—I should know. You ever want to just remember it all, or rant about it all, whatever, I’m around.” 

“Thanks.”

He shrugs.

She expects him to continue, to ask her if it’s smart to spend that much time with ghosts, or something like that. But he reaches for the salt, coats his helping of the cold, undercooked mashed potatoes her mother had made, and shovels a forkful until his mouth. She decides it wouldn’t be like him to push her, regardless of how he feels about her hanging out with ghosts.

“Hey, what about that one little guy, is he okay?”

“Who?” She frowns.

“The one with the, you know?” He waves his hand around his torso. “The overalls, or whatever?”

“Jerry?” she guesses, since she supposes you could say he’s wearing overalls. She can’t think of who else it could be.

“Kind of got a sad face?” Mr. Anderson says.

She nods. “Jerry, I bet. I don’t really hang out with him, but he’s okay, as far as I know.”

“Cool.”

She pushes her asparagus around her plate. Her mother always overcooks them.

“I was worried about him looking like that, I gotta say. All that blood in his hair? I know that ghosts can feel things and do things and everything, at least temporarily, but, oof, it looked bad.”

“He had blood in his hair?” she says, surprised.

“Yeah, it was bad, dripping into his face and everything. I tried to ask him if he was okay, but he, like, hissed at me and ran off. By the way you’re looking at me right now, I’m guessing you never saw the bloody head.”

She shakes her head. “I can actually count on my hand the number of times I’ve seen him. He and Wally have beef, or something, so. I don’t think I’ve ever had a single conversation with him.” She’s just never had the bandwidth to think about it before.

“Huh, well, I—”

Her mother chooses that moment to bustle in. “Okay, I am done with work, I promise!”

“No problem,” Mr. Anderson says, smiling.

They end up watching TV for a couple of hours after dinner, like they do most nights when Mr. Anderson comes over.

She spends most of the time on the chair in the corner, texting with Simon, and ignoring the fact that her mother is sitting as close as possible to Mr. Anderson on the sofa.

Of course, she is happy to partake in the coconut, caramel bars that Mr. Anderson grabbed from the store on his way over. 

The fact that he has a tendency to bring a good, sugary grocery store dessert with him when he joins them is definitely a plus to Mr. Anderson’s many, many dinners at their house. 

—

She sees it when she’s thrifting with Simon, sitting innocently on a shelf of DVDs, and she buys it immediately.

She goes to the school early in the morning that Saturday. The varsity basketball team is practicing in the gym, but she isn’t worried about that, since she plans to spend the day in the library. She gets a screen set up by herself, hooks up a DVD player, and is ready by 10 a.m.

She finds Wally, Quinn, and Rhonda in the teacher’s lounge.

“Why are you smiling like that?” Rhonda asks.

“I have a surprise,” she says, and she pulls Veronica Mars: the Complete First Season on DVD from behind her back.

“Oh, my God,” Quinn says, scrambling to her feet.

“I thought maybe you’d want to—”

“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!”

“I think you broke her,” Rhonda says.

“I haven’t seen past the Christmas episode!” Quinn grabs the DVD from her.

“I just thought you’d want to re-watch it,” Maddie says. “I didn’t realize you hadn’t actually seen it all.”

“I died!”

“Yeah, that’ll throw a wrench in your TV plans,” Wally says.

“Oh, my God!”

They watch it basically all day, sprawled in the library. She hadn’t brought anything to eat, but she orders pizza for delivery around lunch, and they raid the vending machines, too. They all get into it, watching until the windows in the library are dark.

Charley and Yuri are there, too, of course, and she hides her surprise when Janet wanders in, sits primly on a sofa by herself, and watches, too.

She invites Simon to join them at lunch when he texts her to ask what she’s up to, but he says it’s weird to be around the ghosts when he knows they’re there but he isn’t able to see them, and she gets that.

She wonders suddenly what it would be like if she weren’t able to see the ghosts.

She glances at where Wally is propped up against the sofa she is lying on. 

She can’t run her fingers through his hair the way she wants to. But she can look at him. She can hear the cadence of his voice when he exclaims “I’m telling you, it’s Duncan, he killed his sister!” And she can be content with the certainty that he is there with her.

What if she hadn’t heard Janet’s voice that day in the cafeteria? What if she hadn’t seen Wally for months now? What if she hadn’t talked to any of her friends since the day she sprinted away from them?

She hasn’t ever thought about it.

Would she think of them when she came to school, when she was sitting in classes, and walking in the hallways, wondering if they were near, or if they were thinking of her, too?

Would she have just left the Veronica Mars DVD for them to find on this sofa in the library, or would that have been too hard for her, to think of things like that, and to leave gifts for them, trying to be close to them?

Would she have already started to adjust to a world without them?

She sits up.

It gets Wally’s attention, and he glances over her his shoulder at her. “You okay?” he asks.

“Just . . . wanted another slice of pizza,” she says.

“Oh, I got you.” He pushes up onto his knees and grabs a pizza box from the stool it was balanced on, turning to her, and holding it out, and that’s when he remembers. “Shit, I, ah.”

“It’s fine,” she assures.

The look on his face breaks her heart a little.

She hurries off to the table where she left the pizza that exists in the actual, physical world.

He is watching the show again when she returns with a slice of pizza in hand, but he glances at her for a second, and he smiles.

She’d watched him fold his pizza to eat it earlier. She hadn’t known he did that before today, and she never would have known it, if she weren’t able to see the ghosts, but that isn’t what happened, and she knows it now. She’ll get to keep the knowledge of how he likes to eat his pizza for the rest of her life, along with all of this time with him and with the others.

That’s what matters.

They call it quits after the episode where Adam Scott plays a teacher who impregnated one of his students. 

“You guys can keep watching without me if you want,” she says. 

“No way,” Wally says. 

“Are you sure?”

“Can you come back tomorrow?” Quinn asks.

She has a test she’s supposed to study for, but, what the hell, she applied to college already, and she can always stay up late to study for the test.

“Sure,” she says.

—

Nicole and Xavier are dating in earnest now, an actual, official couple, and neither Nicole nor Xavier is subtle about it.

They snuggle on the sofa together when the group watches movies in Simon’s basement, intertwined, and whispering to each other, and they say “we” and “ours” and “us” about everything, and they sit together at lunch, sharing a pair of headphones and listening to music on his phone, ignoring the rest of them.

It’s cute, kind of.

“I want to tell you about it,” Nicole says, hesitant.

They’re in Nicole’s car on their way to school. 

Nicole had volunteered to drive Maddie today, even though it’s fifteen minutes out of her way to do it. Maddie had been a bitch to her when she’d brought up her first kiss with Xavier, and she feels bad about it now, has for a while. Nicole had even brought Maddie a dirty chai latte this morning, just because.

They’re friends, and they have been for years, and a boy isn’t going to get in the way of that.

“You can tell me about it,” Maddie says, encouraging.

“Can I complain about how boys are gross?”

She snorts.

“Seriously, though! We went out for burgers and fries last night, and he kept wiping his hands on his jeans, and, like, I could see the grease stains he was smearing on there, and it’s like, come on, napkins are a thing! It was ridiculous!”

“Yeah, that’s a guy for you,” Maddie says, grinning.

“But things are going really well.”

“Good.”

“You know you can—if you want, you tell me about Wally. I know you don’t really like to talk about him. But I hope you know that you can—that I want to hear about Wally, if you want to tell me.” 

She swirls her latte in the cup.

“No pressure.”

“He’s not like Xavier,” she says, and she realizes how that sounds and goes on hastily, trying to explain. “And I’m not trying to be mean. I just mean, like, he’s not the kind of guy I thought I’d be into, because I’ve always been interested in guys like Xavier. And that’s not good or bad, it’s just like a fact.”

“Relax,” Nicole says, amused.

“He’s earnest,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“And I am so into it, it’s embarrassing. Like, he tries so hard, and at first I was just like, okay, that’s kind of cute, but now it’s one of the things I like most about him. And I can’t even pretend I’m not into it at this point.”

“Aww,” Nicole says.

“Like you’re not sappy about Xavier.”

“Okay, I’m not that bad,” Nicole says.

They keep talking about the guys, about the time that Wally offered to fill her holes for her, about Xavier’s obsession with Wes Anderson, about the way that Wally bobs his head when he hears a song he likes.

It’s nice to talk about Wally with someone.

“Have you, um, or I guess, did you . . .?” Nicole’s hands flex on the wheel. “Did you and Wally ever . . . did you ever give him a blowjob?”

“No, actually,” she says.

Nicole is quiet.

“We didn’t really have a lot of time. There was always some new horror to uncover or deal with. We didn’t get to do a lot of things.”

“I’m sorry.

“Wait.” She turns in her seat to face Nicole properly. “Why are you asking me about blowjobs?”

Nicole’s nose scrunches. “I . . . maybe gave Xavier a blowjob last night?”

“Oh, my God!”

“Is that TMI?”

“Depends,” Maddie says, biting her lip.

“On?”

“Did you have to touch his gross, greasy jeans?”

Nicole swats a hand at her, and she jerks away. “Eyes on the road!” she laughs. Nicole sucks her teeth and shakes her head, and she can’t stop grinning in reply.

“I hate you,” Nicole says.

“Well, did it . . . go okay, or whatever?” She isn’t sure how to be supportive. “Was it good for . . . both of you?”

“He seemed to like it,” Nicole says, shrugging.

“That is the goal.”

“Have you ever . . . ?”

“Nope.”

“Never?”

“The furthest I ever got with Xavier was making out and hands under clothes stuff, and Xavier is pretty much the only person I’ve dated, if you don’t count that date with Martin Kettler in sophomore year, which I don’t.”

There’s a pause.

“I feel like my stuff with Xavier is TMI now,” she says.

“Yeah, kind of,” Nicole admits.

“Does it make it better if I say I just never really felt that urge with Xavier? I don’t know how to phrase it. But it’s like as much as I liked Xavier, all I really wanted was to kiss and cuddle and the idea of more just didn’t appeal to me, if that’s not offensive to say?”

“You think maybe you just weren’t ready yet?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, when did you realize you wanted more with Wally?”

She considers it. “Actually, it was pretty early on.” She hasn’t really analyzed it before, but looking back, she was into him physically faster than she’s ever really been interested in anyone ever. “Like, at homecoming I was already thinking about it.” She shrugs.

“Seriously?”

“He’s cute!” she defends.

“Hey, I’m not judging!”

“He has this, like, this swoop wave thing in his hair.” She sweeps her hand over her hand, trying to shape it. “It’s a really nice swoop wave thing.”

“A lot of people are into jocks, it’s cool,” Nicole says, smirking.

She huffs.

“Hey, can I ask a question that you might not like? No judgement or anything. But I’m kind of curious about something, if it’s okay?” Nicole’s eyes dart from the road to her for a second. “Or I can not.”

“Ask,” Maddie says. 

“Is the age thing weird? I know he’s eighteen physically and forever, or whatever, but also isn’t he like actually in his fifties now? Is that weird, to be with someone that much older?”

She bites her lip. 

“No judgement,” Nicole says again.

“Honestly, I’ve never really thought about it.” And maybe that’s weird, that it had never occurred to her to consider the fact that, technically, Wally is an old man. “I guess it just doesn’t feel accurate.” 

She thinks of that little, dorky jump skip thing he’d done, after she’d said she’d go to the dance with him. 

“I think it’s because your age isn’t just about how long you’ve physically been around,” she decides. “It’s about your experiences. And Wally’s never known anything but being a teenager. His body hasn’t, his mind hasn’t. So Wally is just a teenager, still, even after decades. That’s all he’s experienced.”

“That makes sense,” Nicole says.

She tilts her head. “Maybe he’s wiser for all the years he’s been around?” she says.

“Do we want to say a football player is wise?”

“He can be!”

“Uh-huh.”

They pull into the parking lot at school.

Xavier is already there, leaning on the outside of his car. He smiles and straightens as soon as he sees Nicole climb from her car, and when he greets her with a kiss, Nicole flushes a little, fumbling and dropping her keys. Xavier plucks them up immediately and presents them to her with a little jangle, grinning at her.

It’s cute, no kind of about it. 

She wishes it didn’t make her so sad to see it.

—

The school hosts a Sadie Hawkins Dance in January. It isn’t the time of year for a Sadie Hawkins dance, but that has never stopped Split River in the past. There isn’t a lot happening in January, so the school slips a Sadie Hawkins Dance in

“Do you guys usually go to Sadie Hawkins?” Maddie asks.

“Of course,” Charley says.

“We can’t miss spiked punch, pop music, and sheet cake,” Rhonda says, “and, oh, of course, we can’t miss the regular, annual reminiscences from Wally on all of the girls who asked him over the years.”

“Ah, memories,” Charley says.

She looks at Wally in amusement.

They’re in the library late at night, sitting around the tables since she is supposed to be studying for a Spanish test.

“I mean, yeah, I got asked, you know, a couple of times,” Wally says.

“Ooh, that’s not how you usually tell it,” Rhonda says.

“Well, okay, but—”

“A bunch of girls asked freshman year, but Stephanie Houser was the lucky one who got a yes. Then sophomore year, he was pretty into Abigail Webster at the time, so of course he said yes to her. Competition was stiff his junior year, but it was Jenny King who got a yes.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Wally says

“Am I getting the names wrong?”

“You’re just making me sound a little, you know.”

“Slutty?” Rhonda says, innocent.

“That is not the word I was going to use.”

“You had a lot of girlfriends, huh,” Maddie says.

“Dates,” he corrects.

She isn’t upset. 

And she isn’t shocked to discover that Wally had his pick of girls at Split River High once upon a time. It makes sense, if you add it all up, his looks, his popularity, and his big goofy boy energy, on top of the fact that he was literally the star of the football team. And she's not gonna hold his popularity against him, or stomp her feet at the fact that Wally existed before she came around.

She does find it kind of funny how he’s freaking out that she’s hearing this.

“To be clear, I never really had, like, and official girlfriend ‘cause my mom was big on no distractions,” he says. “Yeah, I dated, like any regular, red-blooded American guy, but I never gave a girl my letterman or anything, ‘cause it was only ever dating.”

“What about Cindy Anderson?” Rhonda asks.

“Well—okay, yeah, so we definitely were dating for longer, and we went to prom together, but—”

“You did a lot more than go to prom together,” Rhonda says.

His eyes bulge.

“Wait, I want to see these girls,” Maddie says.

They get the yearbooks from the back of the library, and Wally is pacing, and shaking his head, saying it’s stupid, but they ignore him, spreading the yearbooks across the table.

“It’s actually kind of fun to look through these,” Quinn says.

“Yeah, fun, sure,” Wally says, flat.

They were gorgeous, the girls that Wally went out with. She’d just been teasing him when she’d said she wanted to see the yearbooks, just messing with him a little, but she kind of regrets it now. These girls, Wally’s girls, they’re all so perky and cute and put together

Stephanie Houser is small and slim, wearing a pair of pearls and pink lipstick in her pictures. Abigail Webster looks like a Disney princess, with curly brown hair tied up with a ribbon and big, pretty blue eyes. Jenny King is laughing a little in her picture, freckles on her nose and dimples in her cheek. 

Cindy Anderson is a cheerleader with big, bouncy yellow curls and a lot of cleavage.

There’s a big, full-spread picture of Wally with her, taken beside a tree with leaves turned lovely, autumn gold, and Wally is beaming at the camera with his arm around her.

These are the girls who’d chased after him?

What would Wally have thought of Maddie in 1983? If they’d been at this school together for real, alive and growing up together? What would Wally have done if Maddie had asked him to the Sadie Hawkins Dance in 1983?

Laughed his ass off, probably.

“They never really cared about me,” he says.

She glances up.

He slips into the seat beside her.

The others have kind of disappeared.

Charley and Yuri are sitting on a couch in the corner of the library together with a yearbook that says 1975 on it, and Quinn and Rhonda have drifted to the end of the table, where they're murmuring to each other softly and laughing at something in a yearbook from 2002.

“I doubt that’s true,” she says.

“They liked that I was a football star. But they didn’t really know anything about me, and they didn’t want to. They were just interested in the cool, popular football player.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t really care.” He shrugs. “Back then, I didn’t know what it could be like, how much better it could be when you’re—when you’re with something who knows you, and who—someone you actually care about.” His eyes are soft, clinging to her. “I didn’t realize what I was missing.”

“Wally.” 

“I was dead for forty years before I knew.”

She wants to touch him so badly that it hurts.

“Maddie—”

“You’d have probably fallen for any girl who died,” she says, swallowing. “Somebody new, somebody different, and you’d have been just as happy.” She shrugs at him, smiles a little. “And, hey, you could still fall for the next girl who dies.”

“You’re wrong,” he says.

She looks away from him.

It’s not like they’d even known each other all that well, or spent all that much time together. And they’re teenagers. It’s silly to imagine they have some big, special thing between them.

She can feel his gaze on her.

“I might have fallen for another girl, you’re right, but it wouldn’t have been like it is with you. I know. I’ve tried before to fall for the girls that are here, I’ve wanted to fall for them, and it just never really worked out.”

“Wally.”

“I won’t say it if you don’t want me to, but I know what’s between us.”

“I just . . .” She blinks at the tears that burn her eyes. “It’s not fair,” she whispers, and she looks at him again, has to suck in a breath at the understanding in his gaze. “I can’t . . .”

“I know,” he murmurs.

“We can never—we can never go for a road trip, or see a movie in theaters, or—I can’t even hug you, and we can never even have a picture together, and—"

She’s rambling.

“I’m sorry. We’re supposed to be hanging out, having fun. I’ll shut up.” 

“You want my letterman jacket?”

“What?” She’s startled.

“You want my letterman jacket?”

She doesn’t understand what he’s suggesting. “There isn’t a way for me to wear your jacket,” she says slowly, but the excitement in his ideas doesn’t immediately dim. “It’s not really here, on my side of the veil, or whatever.” She feels like she’s missing something.

“Yeah, it is,” Yuri says.

She snaps her gaze to him in surprise.

“Isn’t there a display with his stuff in the hallway by the gym? That’s literally been gathering dust since the 1980s? His football helmet, a picture of him in a frame, the homecoming crown that he’d have won?”

“And his letterman,” Charley says, lighting up.

“Exactly.”

“See?” Wally says, grinning.

“I . . .” 

“So what do you say?” 

“You want me to steal your letterman jacket from the school?”

“It’s not stealing when it’s his jacket,” Rhonda says. 

“Do you want it?” Wally asks.

“Yeah, I do, actually.” She’s starting to smile for real now. “Let’s do it, I want it.”

They all know everything about the school, including where to find the key that unlocks a display in honor of Wally that nobody has touched since 1983.

She pulls the jacket out carefully. It doesn’t smell like him or anything like that, but when she hugs the jacket to her, the feeling of the material on her cheek is familiar, and she might actually cry again. She slips the jacket on.

“How do I look?” 

“Good,” Wally says, swallowing. “Like—good.” His eyes are darker. 

“Down, boy,” Rhonda says.

She laughs.

She isn’t ever going to wear it around the school, or anywhere, really. Even if nobody would recognize it and she wouldn’t get in a world of trouble for stealing it, wearing a jacket that marks her as “his” isn’t really her style. She would have rolled her eyes at the idea if circumstances were different.

But this jacket is something real of his, something that she gets to keep forever, and she plans to.

She doesn’t go to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.

—

She still does things outside of the school. It isn’t like all she does is hide away with ghosts, even if she does spend at least two or three nights a week with them. She’s got a life outside the ghosts, too.

Things are actually the best they’ve ever been right now.

Her mother has been sober for months now.

It’s amazing.

Her mother is doing the laundry and brushing her hair and keeping a schedule. She isn’t spending her paycheck on liquor, so Maddie’s given up her stupid, fruitless search for a job, since her mother is paying for things now. Her mother is asking her about her homework and going to PTO meetings and offering to edit her papers for her.

Her mother is calmer and happier and kinder.

Maddie is happier, too.

She’s hopeful about Northwestern, and she’s hopeful about the Rhonda Rosen Memorial Scholarship, too.

She’s got a group of friends she loves, all of whom are making their own, awesome plans for the future.

She goes out with everyone to the movies on Friday and for ice cream after, and when Simon says they have to go back and see the movie again tomorrow, since it was a shitshow that deserves to be seen again and again, she laughs, and she agrees that they definitely have to see the movie again soon.

“I can’t actually go tomorrow, though,” she says.

“You’ve got other plans?” he says.

“Yeah, actually, I’m gonna go to the school, and I’m gonna make everybody watch Rear Window with me.” The smile has slipped off his face, she carries on anyway, as if she hasn’t noticed. “I was told I wasn’t allowed to pick anything scary, gory, or creepy, so I figured suspense was the way to go, and Rear Window is a classic.”

“Are you serious right now?”

She sets her cup of ice cream on the table. Judging by the look on Simon’s face, the fun, happy part of the night is over. She has a feeling her ice cream is going to be left to melt.

“You spend all your time holed up with them,” Simon says.

“I’m literally here with you right now.”

“This is the first time we’ve hung out in a month!”

She shakes her head.

“You’re alive , Maddie.”

“I’m aware,” she snaps.

“You could have fooled me.”

The rest of the table has gone quiet. 

Nicole is staring at her ice cream, and Claire has pulled her phone from her pocket. Xavier is looking back and forth between them, but when he sees Maddie’s gaze, he clears his throat, says “oh, um, I,” and starts to drink his smoothie loudly. Nicole shifts a little in her seat, and Claire frowns at her phone, as if something on her screen is very, very important.

They aren’t going to get in the middle.

“I don’t want to do this right now,” she says.

“Well, I do!”

She knows he doesn’t like how much time she spends at the school. It isn’t even that much time, but it bothers him. She’s seen the look on his face when she’s told him about a night at the school.

But he’s never actually confronted her about it before.

“I’m allowed to have other friends.”

“That’s not the problem!” 

“So what’s the problem then?”

“He can move on now. Wally. He can move on now. His door appeared in his scar, but I guess he hasn’t told you, has he? It was the night you got your body back, actually. His door is there in his scar at this moment, waiting. But he hasn’t gone through it yet.”

She stares.

“He claims he isn’t ready,” Simon says.

She wants to argue with him, but her heart is racing, and she doesn’t know what to say, what to think.

“You’re keeping him trapped here, Maddie.”

“Don’t,” she says. 

“Look, I get it. I was a ghost, too, remember? And I spent time with them, and it sucks, that their lives were short, because they are really cool people, and I’d love to spend more time with them, all of them, I’d love it if they were alive, and they could be here with us now, but they aren’t, and they can’t be. I hate it, too, okay? It sucks, I get it.”

“You don’t get it at all.”

“I—”

“You have no idea what it’s like to lose someone.”

“I thought I lost you,” Simon says.

“That’s what I’m saying! The only person you’ve lost wasn’t really lost, and you don’t—! It’s not the same!”

“It hurt pretty bad.”

“You don’t know what it’s like when someone you love’s been dead for years , and still, you wake up sometimes, and for a second, you forget, and then you remember a second later, and it’s like you’ve lost them all over again.” She sucks in a breath. “You don’t know it’s like for it to hit you in waves over and over, even when everybody says you’re supposed to be over it. Or to . . .  You don’t know what it’s like to miss someone you will never, ever see again, never hug again, never hear laugh again, and to just live with that, day after day, month after month, year after year.” She looks away, crying openly now. “You have no idea what it’s like to exist with this hole in your chest.”

“Maddie.” All of the fight is gone from his voice.

“And I know that they’re already dead,” she says, “that they were dead when I met them, and that they’re never not gonna be dead, and I know I just have to learn to live with that.” She sniffs. “But I’m not ready to lose them yet.”

She’s done.

She grabs her phone off the table, and Claire gets the message quickly, sliding out of the booth and standing, so she can get out of there.

“Maddie, hold on,” Simon says.

“I’m gonna call an Uber.”

“Maddie!”

She stops when she goes to the sidewalk outside. It’s dark and cold, flurries in the air, and she’d left her jacket inside, but she’s sure Nicole will grab it for her. She closes her eyes, tries to get it together.

“Sometimes,” Xavier says, “I wonder if my mom is a ghost on the street where her car got t-boned.”

She opens her eyes.

“I’ve actually started avoiding driving on that road, just, ah, just in case, you know.”

It’s something they’ve always had in common. They’re members of the Dead Parents Club, both of them, and they have been for years. They’ve never really talked about it, but it’s always been there.

“It’s like you’re supposed to move on after they die ‘cause you have no choice, right? They’re gone, and they’re never coming back. And now suddenly maybe they’re dead but they aren’t really gone and there’s a chance of seeing them, talking to them, and like what are you supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Me, neither.”

She hasn’t gone to the hospital to talk to her dad. 

She knows most people would jump at the chance to talk to someone they’d lost, even if only for an afternoon. But that’s the thing: she had lost him, and it had been so hard, learning to live without him, and she can’t go through that again. She’s heard people say they would do anything for five more minutes with someone who died.

Wouldn’t it hurt to talk to someone you love so much when you know you’d have to say goodbye to them after, and move on from them all over again?

She wraps her arms around herself. 

What happens when she leaves for college?

What happens when she starts to live her life without Wally, Rhonda, and Charley, and suddenly, she is scared to think of them, because it hurts to open up that box, and to acknowledge the loss, so she finds herself just staying away? 

“Hey,” Xavier says.

She glances at him.

The tips of his fingers touch her shoulder, and there’s an invitation on his face.

She accepts.

He hugs her, and she clings to him, smothering her tears in his shoulder. He isn’t bothered by the way she shakes and sobs in his arms, just holds her and rubs her back, presses a kiss to the top of her head. He’s warm and familiar and comforting, and she doesn’t want to step away.

But, oh.

He’s not who she wants to hug right now.

She becomes aware of the others around her, and she slips out of Xavier’s arms, wiping at her cheeks, and smiling at him shyly in thanks. 

He tilts the corner of his mouth up in half a smile, reassuring.

She looks at her friends and shrugs her shoulders helplessly. 

She’s embarrassed that she lost it in front of them like that. She’s not someone who does that, just breaks down in front of people. She’s usually got better control of herself.

“You want me to drive you home?” Xavier asks.

“I mean, Simon is going to, right?” She glances at Simon, unsure, but, also, he’s her best friend, and she is sure, because that’s just who Simon is. “Since I came with him?”

“For sure,” Simon says immediately.

“He just got car privileges back, so we gotta take advantage before he loses them again.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” Simon says.

She smiles.

They don’t talk for a few minutes after they get in the car.

“I’m sorry,” Simon says finally.

“You don’t have to apologize,” she tells him.

“I’m pretty sure I do, actually.”

“I shouldn’t have lost it on you in there. I just—I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know that I’m not ready to move on, and I will , when I have to but—I just can’t face that right now, and I hope you know it has nothing to do with you. I’m sorry I took it all out on you.”

“It’s okay.”

“We’re good?”

“Definitely,” he says.

“And as far as the time I spend at the school instead of with you guys, I—”

“I just worry about you. That’s all, I swear. I know we’ve got our whole lives to hang out, so you spending time with them, it’s not about—I’m not jealous, or anything. We’re friends for life. I just worry about you.”

“Don’t ever stop, okay?”

“Deal.”

She spends the night at his house. His parents don’t make him keep the bedroom door open, since they know it’s not like that with Simon and Maddie. She borrows sweatpants from him, curls up in his bed, and watches TV with him until she falls asleep.

Some things will never change.

—

She can’t stop thinking about her dad, to the point that when they have President’s Day off school, she asks Xavier if he’s up for a trip to the hospital. He agrees easily, offering to drive her. She has him pick her up early, before she can chicken out, because she needs to do this, needs to deal with the ghost of her dad.

She sits in a small, secluded corner with a cup of coffee and waits.

It doesn’t take Xavier long to reappear, and he keeps glancing to the side, at nothing. There are a couple of chairs in front of her, and he sits in one, turns slightly, and nods his head at the other, empty chair. It’s weird to be on this end of things, to know that Xavier is looking at someone who is invisible to her.

“Hi, Dad,” she says.

“He says it’s really good to see you,” Xavier says.

She feels weird, as if she’s on display. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands all of sudden, and is self-conscious of the way she’s sitting. She hates that she can’t see him, when she’s sure his eyes are pinned on her.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here sooner,” she says.

There’s a pause.

She rubs her palms on her jeans.

“He’s glad you haven’t. You’re supposed to be out living your life, not slouching around a hospital with your old man. He hopes you’re doing okay.”

That sounds just like her dad.

“Are you thinking about going to college?” Xavier asks.

“Northwestern, if I get in. But I applied to a handful of places, just in case, and I’m supposed to start hearing back in March. Northwestern is definitely the dream, though.”

“That’s really great,” Xavier says. 

She nods.

“He’s asking if you can tell him about your friends and your life. All the stuff he’s missed out on. He says he wants you to tell him everything, if you’re up for it.”

“Well, Simon is still in the picture.”

“He isn’t surprised.”

“I actually have a pretty great group of friends right now. There’s Simon, and Xavier is a friend, obviously, and there’s Nicole and Claire, who—you never got to meet them, but they’re both really great. I’m pretty close to everybody, so that’s good.”

She keeps talking, tells him about her friends, and the stuff they like to do, and she starts in on movies, some of her favorites, and how she’s thought about writing screenplays someday, as crazy as that is.

“I, um, I guess I should tell you that I have a boyfriend, too.” She’s never actually called him that before, but it’s what he would be, if she weren’t talking about a ghost, and she’s not going to tell her dad that she’s talking about a ghost. “Wally.”

“Would I like him?” Xavier asks.

“Yeah.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s cute and funny and loyal. I’ve never met someone who just puts it all out there, you know, and wears his heart on his sleeve. He makes me really happy.”

“I’m so glad,” Xavier says. 

There’s another pause.

“Can he ask you how you ended up in the hospital? I actually told him a little before, but I didn’t really know how much you wanted me to share, so I didn’t really say a lot. So he’s wondering if you could tell him now?”

“I’ll try.”

She doesn’t mention that Xavier is the boyfriend who cheated on her, or why she was upset with her mother.

She describes the rest in detail.

How she woke up a ghost, only she had no idea how she’d died. How the ghosts in the school helped her figure out what happened, her body being snatched, and all of that. How she was able to jump back into her body just in time, and she was brought to the hospital.

“He says he can’t imagine how you managed to make it through all of that,” Xavier says.

She nods.

“He says . . . he’s says he’s really proud of you, and he—he loves you. He loves you so much, um, Squirt. And he says . . . he’s sorry that he couldn’t have been there for you through all of this, but he—he hopes you know how much he loves you.”

“I, um.” She sniffs. “I love you, too.”

It’s quiet.

“Can I ask you a question now?”

“Of course,” Xavier says.

“Does everyone who dies become a ghost?”

“No.”

There’s a pause.

“The people who become ghosts, it’s because they have a reason to linger. There’s something they need to make peace with, or a question they need answered. They linger, these ghosts, because they aren’t ready for the beyond.”

“What about you?” she asks.

“He needed to know that . . . that you were okay, before he moved on,” Xavier says. “He needed to know that everything had worked out okay for you, because he could never . . . he could never be at peace otherwise.”

“ Dad .”

“He didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“I’m okay,” she says, and she laughs a little at herself, wipes at her cheeks.

Xavier takes her hand.

“You don’t have to stay here for me.” She looks at the chair, tries to look up slightly at where she thinks his face ought to be. “You deserve to go to the beyond, or whatever.”

“Don’t you worry about it, Squirt,” Xavier says.

They don’t stay too much longer after that. The hospital is getting busier, and she’s kind of wrung out after all of this, even if they hadn’t actually talked that long. They tell him that they’ll be back when they can.

“I’ll be here,” Xavier says.

She watches The Lord of the Rings by herself in bed that afternoon. 

Her dad was always a dork about the books and the movies, dressing up like Boromir for Halloween every single year. 

She’d talked to her dad. She hadn’t been able to see him, but, somehow, she’d found herself hearing the things Xavier said in her dad’s voice, a voice she’d thought she’d forgotten. She’d talked to her dad.

She isn’t as sad as she thought she’d be.

She wonders if she’s supposed to be upset that her dad has lingered for a decade because of her, because of how much he loves her, if she’s supposed to feel guilty, but she just feels kind of soft about it.

Loved.

—

She makes Claire a cake for her birthday. It’s the kind they used to make together when they were kids, just a mix from a box combined with a can of Dr. Pepper, baked for half an hour, and drowned in frosting from a tub. She presents it to Claire at school on the morning of her birthday.

She isn’t nervous about it until she is waiting in front of Claire’s locker with the large, lopsided cake on a plate.

“Can we eat it right now?” Claire asks.

They skip class to go to Claire’s car, eating the cake from the pan with forks they steal from the cafeteria.

“I’m so glad we’re friends again,” Claire says.

She gives her a thumbs up in answer, since she can’t say anything with a mouthful of cake. She’s glad, too. She wipes at the frosting on her chin and digs her fork in again for more.

“Hey, Maddie?”

She hums.

“There’s, um, there’s something I have to say,” Claire says, hesitant.

“Okay . . . ?”

“I think I went after Xavier the way I did because I—I wanted to get your attention. And that sounds pretty terrible, I know, and I actually ended up really liking him, but, yeah, it started out as me trying to mess with you. I knew that Xavier was with you, and I—I wanted you to notice me.”

She gets it.

She’d looked at Claire more than once over the years and been struck with this urge to march up to her, get in her face, and yell at her, desperate for Claire just to look at her, just to acknowledge her.

“I missed you, too,” Maddie says.

Claire is avoiding her gaze. “You don’t think I’m a terrible person?”

“I mean, this is kind of weird to admit, but I don’t, um, I don’t usually bake cakes for people I think are terrible.”

“Shut up,” Claire says, shaking her head, and smiling.

She grins.

She could just leave it at that. The song on the radio changes, and Claire bobs her head, singing a line softly, as if the conversation is over. She could just let the past be the past.

“My mom was drunk that day,” she says. 

Claire’s gaze snaps to her.

“That’s why I didn’t let you in when you begged me to. My mom was drunk. And I couldn’t let you see that, I couldn’t let anyone see that.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire says.

“I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t . . .”

“I get it.”

It’s quiet.

“You think we can eat this whole cake right now?” Maddie asks.

“Absolutely,” Claire says.

They celebrate Claire’s birthday with the rest of the gang on Saturday, piling into Claire’s SUV, and driving to Milwaukee for the day. 

They see a movie at this big, beautiful historical theater, have dinner at a Thai place, and spend half an hour in a Rage Room destroying a bunch of stuff with hammers, baseball bats, and crowbars.

It’s fun.

She just can’t make herself completely enjoy it.

Because, well.

Because Charley would have loved seeing The Princess Bride in the theater with them. Because Rhonda would have wanted seconds of the pad kee mao. Because Wally would have had the time of his life destroying a table of electronics with a baseball bat. 

All day long, she’s reminded of them, over and over.

It isn’t fair.

There’s a whole big world out there full of amazing places and food and experiences.

Why aren’t they allowed to be a part of it?

She thinks of Wally, of their date, and those images of the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal and Big Ben. We’re there right now, he’d said, soft and sweet. She wishes suddenly that she were with Wally right now. 

They could watch movies and eat Thai and destroy things at the school, and it wouldn’t be quite the same, but they’d be together.

“Maddie?” Simon says.

“Hmm?”

“What do you think?”

She hasn’t been paying attention. They’re driving home, blasting the heat in the car, and blasting the music, too, and in the dark of the car, it’d been easy to tune out, but she glances around at her friends now, and they’re all looking at her, waiting. She has no idea what she’s supposed to have an opinion on.

“You want to stop for ice cream?” Simon asks.

“Oh, yeah. If the birthday girl wants to. Sure.” She glances up to the front of the car, and Claire smiles at her. “I’m always up for ice cream.”

They start debating where.

“What about Culver’s?” Nicole says.

“You’re the only person in the world who wants a sundae with cashews ,” Xavier says.

“They wouldn’t have it on the menu if people didn’t like it!” Nicole says.

She can feel Simon’s gaze on her face.

“Are you okay?” he asks, quiet.

“I’m fine.”

It’s after midnight when they get back to Claire’s at last. 

She invites them all to spend the night, since she’s got the basement to herself and it’s giant, with a bedroom, a rec room, and a bathroom, and she says her parents don’t really care what she does down there, including if she invites a bunch of people over to spend the night.

Simon and Xavier head for the foosball table immediately.

“You guys want to borrow pajamas?” Claire asks.

She hesitates.

She kind of wants to go to the school, actually. 

She is sure she’d have fun staying over with everybody, but they’ve been hanging out all day already, and she is happy to come back over in the morning for breakfast, or whatever.

But she isn’t sure how to say it.

She doesn’t want to hurt their feelings.

Claire pulls a plate of something under foil from the fridge. It’s the remains of the cake Maddie had made her two days ago. Claire presents it with a flourish, setting it on the table, and grabbing a handful of forks from a drawer.

She shoves the thought of the ghosts to the back of her head.

It’s Claire’s birthday.

“Yeah, actually, pajamas sound great,” she says.

—

She’s surprised to learn on Wednesday that she’s out of the loop as far as the mysteries of the school are concerned.

She is working on a lab for A.P. Chem after school, looking at Wally out of the corner of her eye a lot, because she likes to look at him, and, also, she is always, 100 percent ready to be distracted from the headache of A.P. Chem.

She’s gotten into the habit of staying after school in the afternoons to study with Wally. It’s been a thing since after Christmas, and she doesn’t really know how it became a thing, but she doesn’t mind. She likes the routine, and she likes having Wally around while she works.

He’s happy to quiz her if she wants, or to listen to her ideas for a paper, to correct her math for her.

He’s a fan of playing on her phone, too.

“What’re you watching?” she asks.

“Cats,” he says.

“Really?”

He shows her the screen, only to remember the phone in his hand is only an echo of her phone, and he can’t really show her what he’s looking at. “Really,” he says.

“Are you saying when I get home tonight my feed on Instagram is going to be full of cats?”

“You gotta watch the one with the cat on the piano!” he says.

“I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be into cats.”

“I love cats!" he exclaims. "My gran had this old, long-haired white cat, Marvin. He was such an asshole, but I was obsessed with him. Like, Marvin would scratch the shit out of me when I was a kid, and I didn’t even care.”

“You’re a cat guy,” she says, grinning.

“I think I actually have a scar from Marvin.” He starts to pull up the leg of sweats. “I walked by him once and said Hey, Marvin and he took that personally, so I got side-swiped by a paw full of knives.”

She laughs.

“Am I interrupting?” Janet asks.

She snaps her gaze to the door of the classroom in surprise.

Janet is standing in the doorway with a smile pinned in place. “I was hoping to talk to you, Wally,” she says, and there’s something in the way she says it, an emphasis. Janet is amazing at keeping her expression under control, but it’s clear her hackles are up right now.

“Are you okay?” Maddie asks.

“I was hoping to speak with Wally for a moment,” Janet says.

“Can it wait?” Wally says, with a gesture at the table in front of them, where his leg is splayed on top of Maddie's notebook.

“I suppose,” Janet says.

“Are you sure we can’t help you with something?” Maddie asks.

“No, thank you. I’ll have to chat with Wally later. Excuse me.” She turns on her heel, and leaves, and Maddie is left to stare at the spot where she stood.

That was weird, right? 

“You doing okay over there?” Wally asks.

“What’s up with Janet?”

“Nothing?” 

She looks at him. “She was being weird because I was here. Things have always been kind of awkward between us, but we usually get along okay, and she was being—is she mad at me or something? She acted like she was annoyed I was here.” She searches his face.

“It’s me,” he says, sighing, and he sets his foot on the floor again.

“You?”

“She’s told me a hundred times not to involve you in stuff because you need to go live your life, and I’m not involving you, but she’s convinced that I am, and I can’t get her off my back about it.”

She frowns.

“She must have decided to follow me around now.”

“There’s stuff you could be involving me in?”

He blinks. “No?”

“I want to be involved in stuff.”

“There’s no stuff,” he says.

“Wally!”

“I’m telling you, there’s no stuff.”

She eyes him. 

He isn’t a liar. He’s made his eyes go especially wide, and he’s cleared his throat about three and a half times in a second. He’s terrible at this.

“Is it Mr. Martin?” she guesses.

He hesitates.

She turns her chair to face him and scoots it forward slightly, catching his gaze. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Nobody’s seen him,” he admits.

“At all?”

“It’s really not a big deal. But I guess Mr. Martin talked about how there was something, like, dangerous in the school, and Janet is still trying to figure out what he was talking about because she’s convinced that if we don’t figure it out, he’ll use it to his advantage. It’s nothing, seriously.”

“Okay,” she says slowly, thinking.

“She just really hates the guy, which, obviously, she’s got a reason to, but—”

“Does she have a theory about the danger?”

“Yeah, ah, she thinks something evil must have happened here in the past, and that, ah, this evil thing that happened has made the school, like, a source of evil, or something.”

“Creepy,” she says.

“I think maybe her brain is just scrambled after all the time she spent in her scar.”

She has no idea what to think of that latest, insane theory. What would it mean for the school to be a source of evil ? She’s already got a pretty tenuous grasp on how all of this ghost stuff works.

Is it just an explanation for why kids die at this school so often?

She doesn’t see how knowing that really helps anyone, unless she wants to worry about who might die next.

“You really don’t have to worry about it,” Wally says.

“Yeah.”

His eyes are kind, reassuring. He has this way of looking at her sometimes, soft and with the start of a smile, and it makes her smile, too. His heart’s too big to ignore it when it’s there on his face.

She hasn’t asked him about his door. 

He’s always done so much for her. He’s been a mushy shoulder, in his words, and been a white knight, too, facing the nightmares of his scar for her, repeatedly , and rescuing her from her own. He’s always done everything for her.

She has no doubt that he’d put off his happy, peaceful whatever for her, too, especially if he thinks she needs him

“And, remember, if anyone asks you about it,” he says, “I am totally not involving you in any stuff.”

“Got it,” she says.

—

She isn’t able to find anything online about a tragedy in the spot where Split River High sits, though she is at it for hours that weekend. 

A lady in a subreddit on Cool Wisconsin Facts recommends that she go to her town’s library, since there’s bound to be a shelf with stuff on the town, and she ought to talk to the librarian, too. 

There’s a part of her that thinks it isn’t worth the effort.

She goes to the Split River Public Library after school on Monday.

There’s a corner with local history books, just like the lady on reddit had said, and she starts rooting through them. Nothing. It isn’t a very big corner, so she’s able to go through it pretty quickly.

It’s a bust.

The librarian asks her if there’s something in particular she’s hoping to find. “Anything that’s happened here that’s weird, or . . . bad?” she says, hesitant. The librarian doesn’t seem bothered at the idea, just nods, holds up a finger, and bustles off, returning a few minutes later with a book.

The Weird, Wretched History of Wisconsin by Bobby Olson Jr.

“There isn’t a bibliography of sources for any of these stories,” the librarian says, “so keep in mind that we’re using the word history pretty liberally, but if you’re just looking for some good, creepy local tales, this is the one you want.”

“Thanks.”

She flips it open and finds what she wants quickly. Chapter Three: The Children of Split River. She starts reading right away, and she can’t stop once she starts.

From the 1850s to the 1920s, orphans from crowded Eastern cities were loaded onto trains to be adopted in the midwest. 

She remembers learning that in elementary school, maybe.

Although most people know that the majority of these orphans were claimed for labor and treated very badly in general, the book says, only a few know the horror of the orphans who were adopted in Split River, Wisconsin, by a man named John James Tarland. 

She finds herself sinking to the floor to sit.

Over a period of decades, from approximately 1867 to 1892, Mr. Tarland adopted a handful of orphans whenever the train came through town, amounting to what was most likely over 100 children.

None of these children were ever seen again, says the book.

And, ironically, in the 1950s, after the state took possession of the land where Mr. Tarland’s small cabin stood, a school was built on the property.

She stops reading for a second at that. 

She found it.

She doesn’t know what the ghosts will do with the information, but she can give it to them now regardless.

The chapter isn’t finished.

What are the chances that Bobby Olson Jr. has something to say about some of the weird, wretched deaths at Split River High over the years?

The memory of Mr. Tarland’s depravity haunts the school to this day , says the book.

Yup.

But the story that follows isn’t about a fire in the school.

She isn’t sure when her heart starts to beat faster, or when her palms start to sweat. It’s as if her body processes what she’s reading before her mind does. She has no idea when the realization starts creeping in, little by little.

In 1956, Annabelle Mueller, known to be a bright, happy young woman, killed herself in the bathroom. Soon, a rumor began to spread that Annabelle was raped by a teacher the week before her death, but the school was quick to squash it, unwilling to ruin Split River High’s reputation. By 1957, Annabelle, such a bright, happy young woman, was made to be forgotten.

But this is where things get fascinating , says the book.

After a fire at the school in 1958, there were reports that a girl with Annabelle Mueller’s red curls and round, freckled face was seen around town.

The police visited Mrs. Mueller at the insistence of a local who claimed he saw Annabelle’s ghost, only they found Mrs. Mueller was gone. It looked as if she had packed her things hastily, and it looked as if she had packed her daughter’s things, too. The police attempted to locate Mrs. Mueller to solve the mystery, for the talk of Annabelle’s ghost was rampant around town, but they were never able to discover where Mrs. Mueller wound up.

That isn’t the end.

In 1960, a woman by the name of Mrs. Jane Cotton registered her daughter, Annabelle Cotton, at Trinity High School in Chicago, Illinois.

Cotton, of course, was Mrs. Mueller’s maiden name.

And the picture of Annabelle Cotton in the Trinity High School yearbook from 1960 shows a bright, happy young woman with red curls and a round, freckled face.

“Dear, are you alright?” asks the librarian.

She looks up.

If she’s understanding this right, if this story is true, and she’s put the pieces of the puzzle together correctly, then—

“Dear?” asks the librarian.

“I need to borrow this book,” Maddie says, breathless.

—

She slams her mother’s car a stop in the parking lot of the school and sprints in. Her heart is pounding, and she has to talk to Janet now, or she’ll lose her mind. She finds her friends in the teacher’s lounge, playing a game of cards.

They all jump when she barges in.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s the matter?” Wally says, looking her up and down in alarm, already on his feet.

“I need to talk to Janet,” she says.

“ Janet ?” Rhonda says.

“It’s important.”

“We’ll go get here for you,” Charley says, raising a hand slightly as if to placate her, and heading for the door.

The boys go in search of Janet.

“You wanna take a seat?” Rhonda asks.

She shakes her head. “I’m good.” She’s too full of energy, and she’d rather pace the lounge, clutching the book to her chest. 

The boys return with Janet in tow.

“Janet!”

“Hello, Maddie,” Janet says, hesitant.

“I need to—” She stops. Charley, Rhonda, and Wally are all standing around, staring. She can’t tell them yet, in case, well, in case she’s wrong. She clears her throat. “I, um—”

“What’s going on?” Wally asks.

“I actually need to speak to Janet alone,” she says.

“Oh." Wally’s eyes widen. “Okay. Um. Sure.”

“We’ll be out in the hallway if you need us,” Charley says kindly.

“Just like right out there,” Wally says.

She nods.

As soon as the door shuts behind them, she turns to Janet and takes a breath. Janet’s expression is polite, but her eyes are darting over Maddie’s face, trying to figure out what’s going on. She hadn’t actually thought about where to start, but she wants to explain this right.

“Do you know who Annabelle Mueller is?” she asks.

“Should I?”

“You never crossed paths with her, dead or alive?”

“Never,” Janet says.

“She died in this school in 1956, the year it opened,” Maddie says.

“We don’t know that everyone who dies in the school becomes a ghost,” Janet says. “We haven’t had anyone die who didn’t, as far as we know, but that doesn’t mean we can say definitively that if you die in this school, you become a ghost.”

“You said that trauma causes the veil between the living and the dead to thin.”

“Right,” Janet says, a wrinkle in her brow.

“And that’s why Simon was able to pass between the two.”

“Where are you going with this?” 

“What if the rest of you could do it, too? And I know what you’re going to say, that you don’t have bodies, and you need a body to be among the living, but what if you’re wrong about that? What if the rest of you could do it, too?

“You need a body,” Janet says.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Positive.”

She shoves the book at Janet. 

“What is this?”

“Read it. Chapter Three, and start at page 57, the story of Annabelle Mueller. Read it.”

Janet sits down on the sofa, and opens the book in her lap, glancing at Maddie a couple of times in concern before she finds page 57 and starts to read. Maddie starts pacing again while she waits. When Janet looks up again, she’s gone pale, and she stares at Maddie with her mouth open slightly.

“So?” Maddie says.

“This is . . .” Janet shakes her head. “This is—”

“What if you don’t need a body to get through?” Maddie says. “What if—what if when the trauma is huge, like a fire that kills a student and a teacher, what if that kind of trauma makes it possible for a ghost to pass through for real, and a body, I don’t know, a body appears?”

“That isn’t possible.”

“Are you sure about that?”

She’s never imagined it before. What if there were a way to give Wally, Rhonda, and Charley another chance at life? And Quinn? And Yuri? And Janet? She had never even let herself think it before.

They could be alive again.

She has no idea how it would work to have a bunch of dead teenagers come to life again, but she doesn’t care.

They could be alive again.

“This is a single outlandish, unsubstantiated account,” Janet says, her hand fisted in the material of her skirt. “You can’t rely on that. Have you looked up if Annabelle Mueller really was a student at the school and died in the way this book describes? You have to think this through.”

“I’ll go look it up right now!”

“You’re going to need more sources than this.”

“I can get more sources,” Maddie says.

“What about proof?”

“I’ll get that, too.”

“You can’t tell anyone about this in the meantime.”

She doesn’t want to keep things from them.

“You can’t.” Janet takes a step toward her. “You know that I’m right. It’s why you wanted to speak to me alone. You know it’s better to keep it between us, at least for now. It’s kinder, Maddie.”

“For now,” Maddie says.

She isn’t sure what to say when she walks from the teacher’s lounge and Wally, Rhonda, and Charley step in close immediately, but she makes up something about how she thought she discovered the source of evil in the school and how she wanted Janet to know as soon as possible. 

“That’s it?” Rhonda says, a wrinkle in her brow. 

She nods and smiles and leaves, claiming she needs to get home before her mother starts to worry.

—

She searches the yearbooks in the library when nobody is around. Annabelle Mueller was a student at Split River High the year that it opened, and there is a page “In Memoriam” to her at the back. She tucks the yearbook away quickly, as if she isn’t allowed to be caught with it.

So far, so good.

She looks up Annabelle Cotton on the internet. And while most of her attempts to find information online have been fruitless, she’s flooded with information, starting with her graduation from Trinity High School in 1961. She discovers everything she needs to know about Annabelle Cotton.

Annabelle married Tom Powell in 1968, had a son, and taught at a high school in Chicago for over forty years.

She is 83 years old now, widowed, and lives in a home in Chicago.

“I need the car this weekend,” Maddie says, skidding into the kitchen, and smiling hopefully at her mother.

She is planning to go by herself until Simon asks her if she wants to hang out that weekend, catch a movie, or try that place downtown where you throw axes, and she looks at his open, eager face, and decides she doesn’t want to go by herself.

“I have plans this weekend,” she says.

“You’re gonna be at the school all weekend? Literally the whole time? You can’t squeeze me in for an afternoon? 

“I’m going to Chicago,” she says.

“Oh, cool.”

“You’re welcome to come along, and actually I’d like the company.” She digs in her backpack for the sandwich she brought for lunch, instead of looking at him. “But if you come, you aren’t allowed to complain about why we’re going.”

“Why are we going?” he asks.

“Deal is, you have to agree to come and not complain before I tell you.”

“So I’m guessing it’s not college stuff?”

She unwraps her sandwich, looks at him innocently, takes a bite of her sandwich.

“ Fine, ” he says, exaggerated.

“You’re in?”

He smiles. “I’m in.”

She waits until they’re on the highway, he’s hooked up his phone to play his Spotify, and they’ve reached a lull in the conversation before she says “there’s a book in the back” with a glance at him.

He contorts his body to reach between the seat and grab the book. “ The Weird, Wretched History of Wisconsin, ” he reads. He looks at her curiously then at the book again, flips it open.

“Chapter Three,” she says.

He reads it quickly.

“This is some messed up shit,” he murmurs. “Nobody stopped him from taking these orphans, knowing they were gonna get killed?” He shakes his head. “Good to know people have always been terrible.”

He frowns.

She doesn’t know why her heart is racing while she waits for him to get to the end.

“You found out where Annabelle Cotton is now,” he says, after a beat.

“Yup.”

“Because you think she was a ghost in the school, and her body was gone, but when the fire killed Mr. Martin and Janet, she was able to escape through the veil that separates living from the dead despite her lack of a body, and she was alive again?”

“Basically.”

“And now you have this totally insane, impossible idea that you can bring Wally, Rhonda, and Charley back to life, too?”

She flexes her hands on the wheel.

“You’re going to be disappointed,” he says, quieter.

“Maybe.”

The lady at the desk in St. Ignatius Retirement Home is easy to fool. She eats up the lie that Maddie and Simon are students at the school across the street and Mrs. Powell’s name was on a list of people to interview for a Career Day assignment, and she invites them in, saying she’ll call Mrs. Powell’s room for them.

They only have to wait on overstuffed couches in a large, recreational area for a few minutes before they see her.

Mrs. Powell is tiny, with a head of thin, frosty white hair and a soft, gentle smile.

“They told me that you’re doing a project for school on how the profession of teaching has changed over the years?” she says, bright. “I taught for 46 years, and I saw a lot of changes. It’s a completely different career these days, I can tell you that! I’m happy to answer any questions you have.”

“That’s not actually why we’re here,” Maddie says.

“No?”

“We’re students at Split River High.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Powell says. The smile is gone from her face.

“A few months ago, something bad happened to me.” She brought one of the “Missing” posters her mother had made with her, and she pulls it from her backpack now. “I woke up, and I was a ghost. Tapped at the school. I had no idea what was going on.”

Mrs. Powell hasn’t taken the poster.

“I learned that Split River High is full of ghosts. A lot of students have died at the school over the years, and their spirits are trapped there now. I got to know them, and the ghosts, they’re just regular kids.”

She can’t tell what Mrs. Powell is thinking.

“I was able to return to my body. I wasn’t really dead, just . . . in a coma, kind of. I had a body to return to.”

“Dear,” Mrs. Powell says.

“I thought it was impossible for the ghosts to cross the veil between the living and the dead. I hated that the ghosts at Split River had their lives cut short, that they were stuck in the school for eternity, but I thought I couldn’t do anything to help. I thought it was impossible for them to come to life again, like I had.”

Mrs. Powell’s chin trembles.

“But a few days ago, I read about a girl named Annabelle Mueller, who died at Split River High in 1956, and her story, it’s unbelievable, but it gave me hope.”

She can’t get Mrs. Powell to look at her.

“Mrs. Powell?”

“I don’t know what this has got to do with me,” Mrs. Powell says.

“I think it is possible for a ghost at Split River High to cross the veil and live again, even if that ghost hasn’t got a body to return to.”

“Dear—”

She pulls out the articles. She’d gotten them off the internet, scans from the newspaper about Wally, Rhonda, and Charley, the reports of their deaths, and their obituaries, with pictures of them. She spreads the articles across the table.“These are the kids I’m trying to save,” she says.

It’s quiet.

“Can you look at them for just a minute?” she pleads.

“Of course,” Mrs. Powell says. She clears her throat and leans forward, looks at the articles for a beat. She glances up at Maddie for a moment and away again quickly, staring at the articles unseeingly, nodding her head. She starts to lean back again, only to pause. “This girl,” Mrs. Powell says.

“Rhonda?” Maddie says.

“She was murdered by her counselor?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, my.” Her eyes fall on the article again, on Rhonda’s picture.

“There are more,” Maddie says, pulling out articles on the fire, Yuri’s death, the bus crash, and piling them on top of the table.

“Janet Hamilton,” Mrs. Powell says, stunned, her eyes stuck on the sweet, smiling picture of Janet.

“Do you remember her?” Simon asks.

Mrs. Powell’s eyes fly up to look at him. “I . . .”

“She’s been trapped in the school all this time,” Maddie says. “She’s been sixteen years old since 1958, unable to grow up, to follow her dreams, to become a scientist, or fall in love, or anything.”

“She—” Mrs. Powell stops.

Maddie is about to push, but Simon touches a couple of fingers to her wrist.

“A man came to see me once years ago. Came to my house, and my son was only twelve years old at the time and was sitting right there at the table. And this man, he was talking about all of this, questioning me, and saying he was writing a book.” She shakes her head. “My husband had to chase him off.”

“We’re not trying to—expose you, or anything like that,” Maddie says. “We won’t tell anyone what you say, we won’t—write it down, or try to put it online, I promise.”

Mrs. Powell’s eyes fall on the articles, on Rhonda’s picture.

“I just want to know if there’s a way I can help my friends,” Maddie says, pleading.

“I . . .” Mrs. Powell draws her arms in close. “I made a mistake, when I took my life. I was—I was in a dark, dark place, and I thought I had no choice. I wanted to take it back after.” 

There was a part of Maddie that was afraid to believe it until that moment.

“I thought I was doomed to haunt the halls of that school for eternity,” Mrs. Powell says, tears in her eyes.

“You . . . ?” Maddie says.

“My mother was actually at the school that day,” Mrs. Powell says, looking up.

Maddie isn’t able to breathe for a moment.

“She got this letter that my friend, Kathryn, slipped under her door. Kathryn hadn’t intended for her to see the letter until later, when she got home from work, but she had taken that day off. She read the letter, and she came to the school right away to try to help Kathryn.” 

“What did the letter say?

“Kathryn hadn’t believed me, when I told what Mr. Gabbert had done to me, and she felt so badly for it after that she, Kathryn, she was in a dark place, too.”

“She was going to . . . ?”

“She had a bottle of pills she’d stolen from her grandfather, and she went to the bathroom where I died. I was there, too, though Kathryn didn’t know. She swallowed the pills and I was helpless to stop her.” 

Maddie can’t even imagine how awful that would’ve been. There hadn’t ever been a moment like that for her and Simon, a moment when Simon was in danger , and Maddie was helpless to step in, but it could very easily have happened when she was a ghost. The thought will probably haunt Maddie’s nightmares.

“It was alright.” Mrs. Powell smiles faintly. “Mother got there. And she was a nurse, so as soon she barged in and saw what had happened, she knew what to do, how to make Kathryn throw up. Mother saved her.”

There’s a pause, and Mrs. Powell’s eyes are unfocused suddenly, looking at nothing in the distance.

“And then it happened,” Mrs. Powell says.

“What?” Maddie asks.

“There was this flood of—of red, and Mother looked right at me, right at me, and—” A tear slips down her cheek. “And, the next thing I knew, Mother was—Mother was hugging me.”

“You were alive?”

“I was alive,” Mrs. Powell says.

The words hang there in the air.

It’s real. There was a ghost in the school, and that ghost was dead and buried and gone, only the ghost became alive again, just like that. It’s real.

It’s possible .

“The rest of the day is a blur. There was a fire, I think, I don’t—I never bothered to learn the details, only I remember the alarm going off, and in all of the chaos, Mother put her coat on me, and rushed me out, with Kathryn on her heels. It all happened so quickly.”

The fire, Maddie thinks, and when she glances at Simon, the thought is written on his face, too.

“We decided we had to leave town. Nobody could know what had happened, how I was alive again; we were afraid of what people would do, if they knew. We had to get out of town while we could.”

“Smart,” Simon says, quiet.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Powell says, pulling a tissue from her pocket.

“For what?” Maddie asks.

“All of these children, I want to help them, I do, but I don’t know how it worked, how I came to life again.”

“It’s okay,” Maddie says.

“I wish I knew how it happened.” She dabs at her eyes, at her nose. “I’ve never . . . I had to get on living eventually, without an answer. Mother said it was God’s will, but that isn’t going to help you. I would tell you if I knew, I would.”

“I just needed to be sure it had happened,” Maddie says.

They don’t stay much longer after that. Mrs. Powell needs to rest, though before she heads off, she grips Maddie’s hand and says “I hope you can help them,” and Maddie nods, squeezing her hand in answer. They sign out at the desk, and they leave.

They don’t talk on the walk to her car, or when they climb in, buckle their seat belts.

She just can’t believe it.

“Shit,” Simon says.

It’s possible.

“Shit, shit, shit, holy fucking shit!”

She laughs.

He looks at her. “Are we going to address the elephant in the car?”

“What?”

“Who are you going to kill to cause the trauma you’d have to cause to get them out?”

She hadn’t gotten quite that far. 

She’s still reeling from the fact that this has happened at all, that the book was right, that Annabelle Mueller lived, that there’s hope, that Wally and Rhonda and Charley and Quinn and Yuri can live. 

She has no idea what she’s supposed to do next.

—

She sees Janet in the hallway at school on Monday and gets her attention immediately, leading her to a stairwell where nobody will bother them, and waiting until the bell rings to be sure, because she wants to keep this as private as possible.

“I found her,” she says.

“Annabelle?”

“She told me what happened. She admitted that she was a ghost in the school, and the day of Mr. Martin’s fire, she came to life again. She told me everything.”

“Maddie . . .”

“She had no idea how it had happened,” Maddie says.

“The fire.” 

“Exactly,” Maddie says.

Janet’s excited, an emotion Maddie has never seen on her. Her eyes are darting about in thought, and she’s rocking on her heels a little, nodding to herself. And if Janet’s excited, that’s very, very good, as far as Maddie is concerned.

“What’re you thinking?” Maddie asks.

“There’s so much we still don’t know,” Janet says.

“We can figure it out.”

“Is that a limit on how long after a person dies that they can return, since it was only a couple of years after Annabelle’s death? Is there a ratio—do two people have to die to bring one person back, or is one to one, or can a single, solitary death allow a dozen of the dead to return? Is the type of trauma relevant, considering I died at a teacher’s hand, and Annabelle was betrayed by a teacher she trusted, too, or is that simply a coincidence?”

Maddie hadn’t been thinking about any of that.

“It’s—but we have no way to test any of it,” Janet says, with a hint of frustration.

“We’re gonna figure it out.”

She isn’t going to back down.

I can bring them back. 

We’ll find some way to help them start over in the 21st century. Claim their birth certificates were lost in a fire, or that they were born at home, or something, and get them SSNs, and Mr. Anderson can help them get their GEDs. We’ll figure it all out, get them brand new lives. 

I can bring them back. 

She can’t stop the hope that’s sprung up inside her.

I can keep them, she thinks.

“And there’s the question of how to manufacture the amount of trauma equal to the fire that killed me,” Janet says.

“We can figure it out.”

A boy walks by and looks Maddie up and down, muttering “weirdo” under his breath.

“We need to be smart about this,” Janet says. “We need to take our time, think everything through, and see what answers we can get before we jump into anything.”

“Agreed,” Maddie says.

She can see the wheels turning in Janet’s head. She has no idea where they go from here, but she’s pretty sure of everyone she knows, the living and the dead, Janet is probably the person most likely to find a way to figure this out. She just has to hope she can actually trust Janet.

She’s late to class, but she really doesn’t care.

She hides the book in a cabinet in the A.P. Chem lab that afternoon with a bunch of old, forgotten textbooks from 2008. Janet wants to read it again, more slowly, and with time to consider it properly, so needs it somewhere in the school. She is kind of loath to let it out of her sight, as if the book possesses some special, magical element, but she assures herself it’ll be safe in the A.P. Chem lab for a week.

She’ll do anything she has to do.

—

She does a couple of deep, deep dives on the Internet, re-reads Chapter Three: The Children of Split River over and over, checks out a bunch of books from the library on metaphysics.

It’s useless.

She checks in with Janet constantly, but Janet is yet to come up with anything.

She hates that things have stalled. For a week, she was in drive, speeding from clue to clue, but she’s stuck in park now, revving the engine uselessly. She wants to go, go, go.

There just isn’t any road in front of her.

She’s a ball of tension now, anxious and frustrated and angry, unable to focus on anything happening around her.

There’s a burst of warm, sunny weather in the middle of March, and everyone at Split River High is excited about what’s to come now that spring is on the way, letters from colleges and prom and high school graduation.

She does not care about any of it.

She forgets to turn in a paper in English, and when Ms. Fields offers to give her an extension, she snaps that she doesn’t have time for papers right now. Immediately, the whole class goes quiet. She knows right away that she’s fucked up, and she apologizes to Ms. Fields, promising she’ll have the paper ready tomorrow.

She’s lucky that Ms. Fields likes her.

“You’ve got to get it together,” Simon says.

“I know, I just . . .”

“You’re disappointed,” Simon says.

They’re in the hallway after class, working their way through a sea of people to her locker. She was wrong to lose it like that on Ms. Fields, but she’s just so . . . restless , like her skin has gotten too tight, and she wants to leap out of it. They reach her locker.

“That’s not the word I’d use,” she says.

He sighs.

“I’m not ready to give up.”

“I don’t think you have a choice.”

They’ve had this conversation before.

She needs to maim, torture, or murder someone if she wants to save her friends. That’s the only thing they know for certain in all of this—they need trauma. She can’t lower the veil between the living and the dead significantly unless she hurts someone.

As far as Simon is concerned, that means they’re at an impasse.

She hasn’t told him that she’s started to consider another, undeniable option. 

What if she were to bear the burden of the trauma? 

She could take on the suffering herself, could maim, torture, or murder herself, instead of inflicting any pain on anyone else.

The problem is just she isn’t sure how long the veil would be down for. 

If she were to go as far as to die to lower it, she has no idea if she’d have time to cross it again, or if she’d wind up trapped.

“You told me Janet doesn’t think the trauma of all of the ghosts in their scars is enough,” Simon says. “You told me Janet thinks it has to be trauma on our side of the veil that does it.”

She takes her U.S. Government notebook from her locker. “I’m aware of what I told you,” she says.

“Okay, so what’s your plan?”

She closes her locker, turns to look at him.

“You hoping to off a cheerleader?” 

“I’m about to off you if you keep talking to me in that tone of voice.”

“I’m just . . . you’re acting like it’s up to you to find a way to save them and if you don’t, you’ll have failed them. And I need you to see that it’s not up to you. It’s possible for them to live again, technically,  but it’s not . . . you can’t make it happen, nobody can, and that’s not your fault.”

“I get it,” she says.

“Do you?”

“I’m just not ready to give up trying yet.”

He stares at her silently. She knows she’s frustrating him, and she’s put him through so much this year, but this isn’t about him. He nods, glances away from her.

“Si, you might be right, and it might not be up to me, but I need to be sure of that before I walk away, okay?”

“How long is it gonna take you to be sure?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“September 24. That’s when the fall semester at Northwestern starts, Maddie. September 24.”

“I’ll be there with you,” she says.

She’s frustrated with the way things are going right now, or, rather, the fact that things aren’t going at all.

But there’s no way that it’ll stay this way for long.

She just has to keep at it.

—

He’s sitting on the bus stop bench, and she stops at the sight of him. It’s Friday night, and she’s on her way to spend the evening with the ghosts, but there’s Mr. Martin, right in front of her, after nobody’s seen him for months. As soon as he notices her, he straightens, and he smiles at her.

“Hello, Maddie.”

She crosses her arms.

“Have a seat,” he says.

“What do you want?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer her immediately, just sits there with his stupid, “I’ll wait” teacher face, and she gives in, sitting on the bench. He turns slightly to face her and takes a breath. “I read your book,” he says.

She tenses.

“As soon as I saw Janet sneaking into the lab, I knew I ought to investigate.”

“Congratulations,” she says, flat.

“I’ve known for years the evil the school was built on. I grew up here, and I loved local history, even the stories that most people had forgotten. I’ve always suspected the reason so many kids died so brutally in this school was due to that evil.”

“You claimed you were protecting everyone from it,” she says.

“I read about Annabelle Mueller, too,” he says.

She doesn’t say anything.

“I taught her that year, you know. And I remember her death, the rumors of what Mr. Gabbert had done, how desperate her mother was for justice. I searched for her after the fire, and I decided she must have moved on immediately.”

“What do you want?” she asks. She isn’t interested in chatting with him.

“I want to help.”

She scoffs.

“I care about the students in this school. And I know I haven’t been the teacher to them that I should’ve been, but that’s why I’m here now. I mean it when I say I want to help my students.” He’s wearing a sad, wounded expression. “I’m a teacher , Maddie.”

“You’re full of crap,” she says.

He glances away from her.

“You kept them here with you. You told them you wanted to help them, but you hid the fact that if they wanted to move on, they’d have to face their fears in their scars because you were scared, and you didn’t want them to move on. You trapped them.”

“Is that what you want?” he asks. 

“What I—?”

“For Wally and Rhonda and Charley to leave you?”

She presses her lips together.

“There’s something you don’t know,” he says, sighing.

“Is that because you’ve been keeping it secret?”

“We aren’t alone in the school. The children, they’re here, too, and they—they haunt the students, and there’s no way to get rid of them. Believe me. I’ve tried to expel them many times over the years, but these children, they always return. We’re trapped in this school with them.”

She has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. “The children?”

“I don’t know what they want. I’ve never gotten them to talk to me. I can’t imagine what they’re after. But I’ve seen them, when they think I’m not looking. And they’re frightened of me, I think, but the students, oh, they watch the students, and they follow them, haunt them.”

“What are you—?”

“The orphans,” he says.

She stares.

“I saw a child with Janet, a couple of weeks after we died. This child, it was—there was something wrong with it , and when I yanked Janet away, it disappeared immediately, as if it were frightened of me. I realized Janet hadn’t seen the child, and I told her not to worry.” His chin trembles. “I protected her.”

“Hold on,” Maddie says. “You’re saying the orphans from the train, the orphans that Tarland killed, those orphans, who died in the 1800s, are ghosts in the school, too?”

“They aren’t ghosts,” he says, shaking his head.

“You—”

“They have this glow about them, this awful, unnatural glow. And they aren’t—you look at them, and you know they aren’t meant to exist. They are like something from a nightmare, bruised, and bloodied.” He shakes his head, a look of horror on his face, as if he is able to see the children in front of him now. “They’re ghouls ,” he says.

It’s unbelievable, but his expression, the tone of his voice, it doesn’t feel like a lie.

“I tried to talk to one of them once, early on, when I saw it creeping up behind Janet again, but it lunged at me, with—with bulging eyes and sharp teeth and a bloody mouth. It was terrifying. I knew at that moment, I knew , I had to keep it away from the students.”

“And you’re the only one who’s ever seen them?” Maddie asks.

“I’ve never understood why that was,” he says. “I’ve never understood a lot of how they operate.”

She’s struggling to wrap her mind around it.

“In particular, I’ve always been curious about the fact that the children haunt only some of the students. I noticed it after Dawn died, and it’s part of why I encouraged Janet to help me study her peers. It fascinated me, and I wanted to understand what, in the eyes of the children, separated the students.”

“Wait, does Janet know about this?” Maddie asks.

“I didn’t want to scare her.”

She isn’t sure she believes him. What if Janet has still been working with him all this time, and that’s how he knows about the book, about Annabelle? She’d be stupid to believe him, with so much at risk.

“I was able eventually to figure out the difference,” he continues.

“The difference?”

“The difference between students like Rhonda, who I have watched the children slink closer and closer to in crowds of three or four or five, and those like Mina, who I have never seen any of the children go near.”

There’s a pause.

“Are you going to tell me?” she asks.

“I believe that Annabelle Mueller’s ability to come to life again—it’s related.”

She glares at him.

“You can’t bring back all of the students, Maddie, but you can bring back some of them, and I want to help you.”

“How?” Maddie says.

He pushes his glasses up his nose. “I have a theory of how Annabelle was able to live again,” he says.

Maddie frowns. “She was freed because of the fire.”

“Partially.”

“Is it impossible for you to be straightforward?”

“I believe that some of the students aren’t supposed to be here,” he says.

She tenses.

“No, see, some of the students, they are here because the children wanted them. The children saw themselves in these students, saw that these students were hurting, too, were failed by the adults in their lives, were traumatized already, before their deaths, so the children stole these students from the world. And because of that, those students the children took, they can be brought to life again.”

It makes a lot of sense, in a twisted, horror movie kind of way.

“It is trauma that will free them, you have that right, like it was trauma that brought them here. But it can’t be your trauma, Maddie. It can’t be the trauma of a child, and regardless of how you feel about yourself that is what you are.”

She understands, finally , what he’s getting at.

“I want to help you,” he says. “And I’m the only one who can.”

“You sound like you have a plan,” she says.

He tells her his idea, holding her gaze throughout. It’s batshit, and she starts to shake her head at him immediately, because there’s no way she’s going to trust him that way, and she can’t believe he really expects her to be that naive, but he isn’t deterred. He looks at her plainly, as if he’s never been more certain of anything in his life.

“Think about it,” he says.

“You’re making me question if anything you’ve just said to me is true.”

“You can question it as much as you like, but, Maddie, there’s no other way, and you’re going to realize that sooner or later.” He smiles at her sadly. “If you want to save your friends, you’re going to have to trust me to help you.”

She pushes to her feet.

“You can find me here,” he says, “if you change your mind.”

“Great.”

He can talk to her in that calm, condescending voice as much as he likes, but she isn’t stupid, and he isn’t going to convince her to trust him.

—

She corners Janet in the cafeteria before school. “We need to talk,” she says. She needs to know if Janet is talking to Mr. Martin.

He claimed he knew everything because he saw her with the book and decided to read it himself, but he talked about Annabelle as if he was certain it was true, as if he knew she’d confirmed the story.

She hadn’t even left the book in that cabinet for long. He would have had to see Janet with it, stolen it, and replaced it within a week. She had taken the book home again as soon as she could.

“You’re right,” Janet says.

There’s something in her voice.

“You ask me every day if I’ve figured things out, and you . . .” Janet’s eyes turn anguished, apologetic. “I never have answers for you, and, Maddie, I think it’s time I admit that I . . . that I’m not going to have answers for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“To figure out how it all works, we need data. And there’s just no way to get that. I’ve gone through it in my head a hundred times, but we can’t run experiments, we can’t gather evidence. I’m sorry. It’s just not possible.”

“So you’re giving up?” Maddie says, incredulous.

“I’m choosing to hope that, eventually, circumstances will arise that allow me to put the pieces together.”

“So you’re going to . . . wait for a tragedy to occur?”

“I’m certainly not about to cause a tragedy,” Janet says.

She can’t believe this. “I just . . . don’t you—don’t you want to live?” She feels as if she’s been totally blindsided.

“Of course I do, and you’ve given me hope that, maybe, in the future, maybe I will, maybe I’ll have another chance at life.”

“In the future,” Maddie says, flat.

“And that means you probably aren’t going to be a part of it, but that’s okay. You’ve done everything you can for us, and now it’s time for you to go live your life. Because what happens to us, our future, that’s out of your control.”

She’s getting angry now. “I’m not just going to walk away.”

“You’ll be wasting your life if you don’t,” Janet says. And I can’t say I won’t resent you for it, if you, with a whole big, wonderful life in front of you, throw everything away just like that.”

“Mr. Martin—”

“He hasn’t got anything to do with this,” Janet says.

“He knows about all of this. That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. He knows everything. He found me yesterday, told me he’d seen you with the book, and he’d read it for himself.”

“Did he offer to help you?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“You can’t trust him. Even if he’s in earnest, and he wants to help, he’ll take things too far, and if you’re not the one to pay the price, then it’ll be one of us, me or—to Wally or Rhonda or Charley, or it’ll be a person who isn’t involved in any of this, a student at the school, an innocent. You’ll regret it”

“He had some pretty crazy stuff to say,” Maddie says.

“And I’m sure it was convincing, because he knows what he’s doing. But, Maddie, you know as well as I do that he is narcissistic, manipulative, and cruel , and he isn’t going to be honest with you if it doesn’t benefit him. And I bet he told you something you wanted to hear, something that gave you hope.”

That was exactly what he’d done.

“Did he give you a way to find him?” Janet asks.

“He told me I’d realize I needed his help eventually, but he didn’t say where he’d be when eventually came.” She isn’t planning to lie, but she’s doing it before she’s able to think it through. “He’ll probably just show up again when he deems I’ve had enough time to come to my senses.”

“That does sound like him, unfortunately,” Janet says.

“Janet, I—”

“Hello, Rhonda.”

Maddie turns around in surprise.

“Am I interrupting?” Rhonda asks, approaching them slowly, a look of suspicion on her face.

“I saw Mr. Martin yesterday,” Maddie says.

Rhonda’s face changes. “Where?”

“Bus stop bench.”

“He ran off before Maddie was able to catch him,” Janet says.

“God, I hate him,” Rhonda says.

That’s the end of the conversation. 

There’s a part of Maddie that’s tempted in that moment to spill everything to Rhonda because she knows without a doubt that Rhonda wouldn’t tell her just to give up, just to walk away, but a bigger, better part of Maddie know that it’d be cruel to do that now, to give Rhonda hope when she was struggling to keep her own, stupid hope alive.

It’s fine.

She’ll carry on by herself. She doesn’t care if Janet has decided it can’t be done; she’s gotten this far without Janet anyway. She’ll find a way to do it all on her own.

—

She decides she needs to talk to Mr. Martin again, to corner him, and to have a conversation on her terms.

She can’t let go of what he told her. Had he made it all up, or only parts? What if he was right about everything, and it was only his solution to everything that she needed to be wary of? Was there a way to prove any of what he said? She needs to sort out the truth.

If she could just question him again, she could do it right, ask the questions she needs to ask, and get to the bottom of this.

The problem is that he’s never actually there at the bench like he said he’d be.

She checks it again and again, in the morning, at lunch, in the evening.

Nothing.

She is accepted into Northwestern.

She’s supposed to scream and cry and dance around her room when she reads the email, that’s how she’s pictured it, because this is her dream , and she’s supposed to be excited, overjoyed, ready.

But, instead, the words of the email swim in front of her eyes, and she is happy and sad and afraid, altogether at once.

Her mother takes her to dinner at Split River’s favorite, fancy Italian restaurant to celebrate. “I’m so proud of you, Baby,” her mother says, tears in her eyes. Her mother wants to take her shopping at Target for her dorm, wants to split a slice of Tiramisu with her, wants to take a roadtrip to Evanston with her.

It’s nice.

“We’re gonna find a way to pay for it, I promise,” her mother says.

She’s really, really hoping that she’ll be awarded the Rhonda Rosen Memorial Scholarship, but she’s researching the options for aid from Northwestern, too, and she can always take out loans if she has to.

Simon is accepted, too.

She isn’t hesitant to reveal to Wally, Rhonda, and Charley that she got in, but of course, that’s stupid, and there isn’t a way for them not to know, and when she tells them, they cheer and smile and congratulate her, and she loves them.

The children saw themselves in these students, so the children stole these students from the world.

She needs to talk to Mr. Martin again.

She takes a day off school to go to “Wildcat Day” with Simon. It’s an admitted students thing, and it’s supposed to convince you to attend now that you’ve been accepted. She isn’t sure the point of going to something with a name like “Wildcat Day” and a bunch of stuff for parents, but Simon wants to.

They leave at 6:30 in the morning so they can get there in plenty of time.

It’s a lot of fun, actually.

They take a tour of campus, have lunch in Sargent Hall, meet with professors who teach classes for Radio/Television/Film majors, attend this big, dorky tailgate thing with games and food and raffles, and attend a student activities fair.

She can’t stop talking about everything with Simon after, when they’re driving home in the evening, and she doubts she’s going to sleep tonight, as energized as she is, buzzing with the day and Dr. Pepper and the future.

“It’s gonna be awesome,” Simon says.

She realizes in the morning that she hasn’t gone that long without thinking of the ghosts since she was a ghost.

She isn’t able to find Wally at first when she looks for him after school. They haven’t been studying together as often as they used to, and she is hit with a wave of guilt over that now. She loves her time after school with Wally, but she’s cancelled on him again and again lately.

She searches for nearly half an hour before she hears the sound of squawking from the hallway where the choir room, theater entrance, and band rooms are.

She stops in the doorway when she sees them. 

Wally is trying to play Hot Cross Buns on a clarinet.

Quinn is tearing up with laughter, Charley is singing the words to Hot Cross Buns in a loud, off-key voice while Yuri picks at keys on a piano to accompany his attempt, and Rhonda is sprawled on a row of chairs, sucking on her lollipop, and smirking at them.

They’re happy.

What, were they supposed to be sitting around, sighing and sad, waiting for her to return to them?

She feels out of place suddenly, and she backs away, leaving before they notice her.

It’d become all about her, if she went in there. 

They’d stop playing around, and they’d want to talk to her about Northwestern, and they’d be kind and earnest and supportive, like they always are, as if they didn’t care at all that she’s on her way to a future that they were never going to have.

She texts her mother that she needs to be picked up earlier than she planned.

She goes outside to wait. Mr. Martin isn’t at the bus stop bench, but she takes a seat there anyway, brushing off her annoyance at the reminder that he’d lied to her when he’d said she’d be able to find him here. She doesn’t have to wait long, thankfully. 

She shoves to her feet as soon as her mother rolls to a stop.

She’s just buckled her seat belt when she sees Mr. Martin at the bench, and she stills, staring at him in shock. 

Her mother pulls away from the curb.

She glances at her mother and swallows, slumps in her seat, looking away from the small, surprised frown on Mr. Martin’s face.

What’s the point?

She is lying to herself if she thinks she can somehow come up with some perfect, special question to ask Mr. Martin that will force him to reveal if she ought to trust him. 

If she tries to talk to him again, she’ll just end up going in circles with him, and it won’t help anyone. 

“Are you okay?” asks her mother.

“I'm fine,” she says.

—

She hears Charley complain that the Yahtzee in the library only has three dice, smells like mildew, and ran out of scorecards about ten years ago, so she rescues her game of Yahtzee from a pile of old, forgotten games at the back of her closet.

They play after school on a table by the windows in the cafeteria.

She hasn’t spent a lot of time with Yuri, since the guy tends to avoid the rest of them unless Charley drags him into things, but that’s exactly what Charley does for this, and she discovers that Yuri is funny.

She has no idea how he died.

Would she be able to bring him back?

She glances at Charley and wonders what would happen, if she learned Charley could live again, and Yuri couldn’t.

She isn’t supposed to be thinking about this right now. 

She’s supposed to be laughing at the way that Wally jumps to his feet when he rolls a Yahtzee, pumps a fist in the air, and runs a circle around the table.

They play round after round, snacking on a pack of Twizzlers that Maddie brought, and sipping from a flask that they found in Mr. Abberfort’s desk, until they’re all tipsy.

She finds herself scooting in closer to Wally, until she is nearly hip to hip with him. He’s determined to win a round, since Yuri is thrashing all of them every single time, so he’s started to take the game seriously, and she kind of loves it. She decides to form an alliance, and she leans into Wally’s side as close as she can, advising him.

She loves the way he nods at her, loves the flush in his cheek from the flask, loves the way he grins that big, unabashed grin when he totals up his points.

She’s never really been into playing board games, but she’s willing to play tonight as long as the boys want to.

They call it a night eventually, of course, once they determine that yet again, with 430 points, Yuri is the winner. 

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Wally says, already on his feet.

She smiles and she heads out with him, hugging the game to her chest to keep from trying to take his hand.

She is struck with the thought of how it could be. 

If Wally were a student at Split River in her time, alive, and at her side, where would they be off to now? 

Her house, where they’d park around the corner and make out in the car, and he’d breathe her name and trail kisses down her neck, his hands squeezing her hips? Out for ice cream, after she says she isn’t ready for the night to end, and they’d sit side by side in the booth like dorks? His house, where he’d help her through the window of his bedroom to avoid his mother, and she’d toe off her shoes and climb in a messy, unmade bed that smelled of him, laughing when he peeled off her shirt only to blow a raspberry on her belly?

She wants all of that, and more.

She’s never really imagined stories that aren’t horror before, but, suddenly, she wants to live in a corny, teen romance.

“Hey, so.”

She glances at him.

“You’ve been kind of weird lately,” he says.

“I have?”

“It’s okay,” he says quickly. “It’s—that’s what I wanted to tell you that, I—I get it, and it’s okay, so don’t—don’t feel bad, or anything.” 

She slows to a stop in front of her mother’s car. It’s parked under one of the automatic, parking lot light poles, and the glare of the light pales his face when he looks at her anxiously. She crosses her arms, uncertain.

“I want you to be happy, Maddie,” he says.

She frowns. “Okay . . .”

“You’ve been different with us—and I thought it was just me at first, but it’s not. We’ve all noticed. You’re . . . you’re pulling away from us, from all of us. And I’m trying to say that if you’re feeling guilty about that, you totally shouldn’t be. Things can’t stay the same for you forever.”

She has been different with them lately, keeping a big, big secret, and busy a lot. “Wally,” she says.

“You’re gonna do awesome things with your life, Maddie Nears.”

She doesn’t want to have this conversation with him.

“I know it,” he says, earnest.

“You’re going to be a part of that life,” she tells him.

He shakes his head. 

“Wally—”

“You can’t come back here after you graduate. I love—spending time with you, and I’m so glad, fuck, Maddie, I’m so glad that you can still see me, but I know that all this, it’s gonna come to an end. You’re gonna graduate, and you’re gonna go live your life.”

She steps in closer to him. “Wally—”

“It’s how it’s supposed to be,” he insists.

“You’re wrong.”

“Maddie.”

“You really want me just to cut off all contact? Walk away and never look back, never visit you? You want me to forget about you entirely?”

“No, of course, I don’t want —”

“I love you,” she says.

His eyes go wide.

“I love you.” Her heart is pounding wildly in her chest. “I love how you listen to me and you’re—you’re so nice to me. I love how funny you are and how fun you are. I love how you treat me, how you get me. I’ve never—I’ve lost so much in my life, and I . . . I didn’t think someone like you—existed for me. I love everything about you, Wally Clark.” She ignores the tears in her eyes. “I love you.”

“Maddie, I . . .”

“I’m not ready to give up on you,” she tells him.

“That’s no what I—”

“Why are you doing this?” she asks. “Why are saying this stuff to me, and acting like I have to forget about you?”

“Because,” he says, pained.

“Because?”

“Because it’ll hurt if you come back, Maddie! It’ll hurt!”

She’s startled.

“I know that’s fucked up. But I can’t do it. See you grown up and married and a mom and with a job and a life, and—and all of that. I just can’t do it. Because I love you, too. I love you so fucking much—you’re the first thing I’ve ever really wanted for myself. You have no idea how much I love you. And it’ll hurt too much to know that it doesn’t fucking matter, that I can’t keep you, and that you’re better off without me.” He clenches his jaw, tears in his eyes. “But you deserve to live your life.”

“Wally,” she says.

“So you’re gonna go off after you graduate, and you’re gonna forget about me, and you’re gonna have the best life.”

“I don’t want to,” she says.

He is closed off now, his arms over his chest, and a set to his face, like he isn’t going to be talked around.

She turns away from him, stares at her car, and whirls around again.

“Maddie—”

“I read once that when Guillermo del Toro was a kid, he saw The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and he wanted the Gill-man and Kay to be together.” 

He frowns. “I’ve never . . .”

“They don’t end up together. Gill-man and Kay. They’re not supposed to. So, Guillermo del Toro, when he grew up, he wrote a movie of his own, The Shape of Water, and in his movie, his version of Gill-man and his version of Kay, they live happily ever after.”

“Maddie.”

“I’m not just gonna walk away,” she says.

“You don’t have a choice.”

She shakes her head.

“You can’t change our ending.”

“Are you going to go through your door after I graduate?” she asks.

He doesn’t ask her how she knows. His eyes don’t go wide, and he doesn’t fumble to answer her. He doesn’t try to deny it, or to change the subject. “Maybe,” he says.

She isn’t going to cry.

“I . . . it was different, all those months ago, when I found the door. Now, Rhonda and Charley, they’ve both got someone, so they don’t need me like they did before, and the last few months, having you around there was no way I was going through it, but you aren’t going to be here for much longer—and you shouldn’t be. I . . . soon I’m not gonna have the reasons I had before, and it’ll be time.”

“Right.” She swallows.

“Maddie—”

“It's fine,” she says.

Except it's not. She tells herself that constantly. It's fine. She can handle it. It's fine. She's fine. It's fine. She tells her mom that, tells her friends that, tells the world that over and over. And it's a lie.

"I'm gonna go."

He nods. “Okay.”

She opens the door, grabs her game, and climbs in the car. Her hands are shaking when she puts the key in the ignition, but she grits her teeth, and she gets the car on. She peels out of the lot, and she doesn’t look at him when she goes.

She’d get it, if Charley learned that Yuri wasn’t able to live again, so Charley decided to stay a ghost. It’s an awful, unhealthy dynamic, the kind of relationship she’d told herself she’d never, ever end up in. She’d get it, though, if Charley wanted to stay with the boy he loved, and that meant Charley had to give up everything else.

She gets about half a mile from the school before she pulls over to cry on the side of the road.

—

She asks her mother to take her to school early with an excuse about meeting for a project, and her mother says that’s crazy, that teenagers want to meet at six in the morning, but she shrugs her shoulders in response until her mother agrees to drive her in early.

She sits on the bus stop bench.

Mr. Martin approaches her after only half an hour and sits with her, quiet.

“I’m in,” she says.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“No.”

He is staring at her steadily, but she doesn’t look at him, preferring to keep her gaze on the road in front of her, and he sighs. “Okay,” he says.

“The orphans,” she says.

“Yes?”

“They haunt Wally, right?”

He hesitates.

She snaps her gaze to him, and her throat closes up at the sight of an apology on his face. “You kept a notebook on him,” she reminds him. She searches his face frantically, feeling a wave of panic rise up inside her.

“There are a few that I’ve seen watching him, trailing him. But, compared to the others, I have to admit that the children aren’t very interested in him. That might not mean anything, but, well, in the interest of honesty, I’m afraid I’ve really only seen a few around him.” 

She presses her nails into her palm, looking away from him again, and tries to get it together, to keep her emotions off her face.

“Does this change things for you?” he asks, in his kind, caring teacher voice.

“No.”

“Good.”

“Janet was asking a lot of questions, after we found out. Is there a ratio to how many people can cross over, or a limit to how long a person can be dead, does there need to be a connection between the traumas? Janet seemed to think we needed to figure all that out.”

“That’s the brilliance of this plan, Maddie,” Mr. Martin says.

She glances at him.

“We can try again, if things don’t go the way we want at the start, and we can figure out what the rules are.”

She really doesn’t like the sound of that.

It doesn’t matter now. 

She’s made her choice, and she won’t change her mind, even if that’s what Simon and Janet and Wally want her to do, because that’s what Simon and Janet and Wally want her to do.

This is going to happen.

“What do we need to do first?” she asks.

—

She heads to the offices at the front of the building that night when she is sure the school is empty.

There are a couple of lamps on, and it feels warm, homey.

It’s a nice place for ghosts to hang out, actually, with couches in the guidance office, a water cooler in the copy room, and a coffee maker, a fridge, and a microwave in the principal’s office, but of course, it’s not where her ghosts hang out.

It belongs to Jerry, Brandy, and Kayla.

She’d asked Rhonda about them this afternoon, claiming she was curious, since she’d never even spoken to them before, and she’d gotten Rhonda to give her a handful of details.

Jerry tripped on a wrench in auto shop class, hit his head on the taillight of a car at an angle, and died instantly. 

Brandy had an aneurysm in the gym a week before her graduation. 

Kayla was born with a defect in her heart, wasn’t supposed to survive a month, and made it instead to seventeen.

It’s the confirmation she needs that what she’s about to do isn’t cruel. As sad as their deaths were, they were ordinary, not the kind of deaths that evil, orphan ghouls had orchestrated. There isn’t a way for her to help them live again, but she can still help them.

She finds Jerry in the principal’s chair, his feet on the table, and his eyes closed, and she clears her throat.

He snaps immediately to attention.

“Hey, Jerry.”

She realizes the girls are here, too, sitting in the shadows of the room. It’s . . . weird. She can understand how her eager, friendly Wally would not want to hang out with them, although she wants to give the girls the benefit of the doubt.

She’s kind of weird, too.

She offers a small, tentative smile.

“Who is this?” Brandy asks.

“It’s Maggie,” Kayla says.

“Why do we care?” Brandy asks.

“It’s Maddie, actually.” She doesn’t really know what to do with the way they’re all staring at her blankly, a hint of judgement in their eyes but blank, bored looks on their faces. “My name, it’s Maddie.”

“Okay,” Brandy says.

“You’re Wally’s girl,” Jerry says.

She blinks. “Um, yeah.”

“So what are you doing talking to us? ”

She should’ve realized that was the problem. “Okay, I’m aware of the incident with the pencil sharpener, and I’m . . . sorry, I guess? But that’s not why I’m here, and if it helps, Wally has no idea I’m here, and I have no intention of telling him. I just need to talk to you about something, so can you . . . forget the pencil sharpener thing for a second?” She doesn’t have time to deal with their stupid, random ghost drama.

Jerry crosses his arms over his chest.

“You don’t get along with Wally, Rhonda, and Charley, but you went to group with them for years,” she says.

“So?”

“Is that because you were hoping to find a way to move on?”

“Obviously,” he says.

“We’re not about to do another stupid, waste-of-time group thing with Mr. Martin, if that’s what you’re here for,” Brandy says.

“It helped Mr. Martin to move on,” Kayla points out.

“Who gives a shit what happened to Mr. Martin?” Brandy says.

“That’s not why I’m here,” Maddie says, loud.

They all look at her.

“There’s a way to move on. It doesn’t involve going to a group, but it does involve facing your fears, and it isn’t going to be fun. In fact, it’ll probably be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But if you want to move on, this is the way to do it.”

“We’re listening,” Jerry says.

She sits in the chair in front of the desk. “There’s a scar in the place where you died,” she starts. She looks at each of them to be sure she’s got their attention.

They don’t say anything during her explanation.

She tells them that they don’t have to go into their scars if they don’t want to. 

After all, Dawn hadn’t known about her scar but had moved on, and it’s likely the scar appeared to Dawn with a door already in place when Dawn was ready to move on. 

But if they aren’t sure why they aren’t ready yet to move on, the scar will help them figure that out.

She tells them that they ought to go in together, like Wally, Rhonda, and Charley had, that in her experience, the nightmares they will face are bearable only if they have their friends with them.

“Why haven’t Wally, Rhonda, and Charley moved on, if they’ve done this?” Jerry asks.

“They don’t want to,” she says.

“Are you kidding me?”

She tells them about Annabelle, and the orphans, and about what she wants to try with Mr. Martin. 

She can’t not tell them. 

They aren’t immediately angry with her, which is good. 

She doesn’t know what she would have done if they’d been offended, if they’d told her to take a hike, since she needs them.

“We’re going to need to think about it,” Jerry says finally.

She nods.

They’re going to agree. It’s not just wishful thinking on her part. They’re going to agree.

She’s been thinking about them a lot. 

About their disinterest in everything and everyone. About their blank, bored faces. About their habit of sitting in silence for days at a time, instead of doing a single, solitary thing to live their deaths. 

About why they don’t get along with her friends.

And she thinks the thing that divides them from Wally, Rhonda, and Charley isn’t simply an incident with a pencil sharpener in 2010.

She just has to hope she’s right.

—

She is partnered with Claire to create a bill to submit to Model Congress, and despite the fact that the very last thing she cares about right now is Model Congress, she can’t think of an excuse not to work on the bill with Claire that weekend.

And, anyway, things with Mr. Martin are on pause until she talks to Jerry again.

She invites Claire over to her house.

It feels like she’s a kid again, hanging out in her bedroom with Claire.

They’re able to decide what they want their bill to be within an hour, and she starts to type up an outline.

“Have you talked with Nicole about the break up?” Claire asks.

She glances at her. “A little,” she says.

Nicole hadn’t really wanted to talk about it yet. And, well, Maddie’s had so much going on, she hasn’t really had the chance to console her friend properly, or to learn the details of what went wrong. Nicole had just told her that it was over for good.

They were both accepted into UW-Madison, but, apparently, they aren’t going to ride off into the sunset of college together.

“Did she tell you why she broke up with him?”

“Just that there wasn’t a future there,” Maddie says.

She has a feeling that Simon knows more of the details from Xavier. The two of them have gotten surprisingly close this year, to the point that they hang out on their own constantly now. She wonders suddenly if Simon is going to side with Xavier in all of this.

“Yeah, see, I feel like you should know why that is. And I’m probably not supposed to tell you so maybe don’t mention that you found out from me. But I just, I really think you need to know the truth.”

“You’re kind of freaking me out a little,” Maddie says.

“Xavier is still in love with you.”

She gapes.

“That surprises you?”

“He is not— ”

“They got in this big fight, right?” Claire says. 

“Right,” she says slowly.

“And she brought up the fact that he hadn’t said I love you back to her yet, and she asked him if that was because he was still in love with you. He said he just wasn't there yet. But when she kept pushing him about it, he admitted that she was right, and he wasn't over you.”

There’s no way.

“I thought about telling her that before they got together,” Claire says.

“That he was in love with me?” Maddie says, incredulous.

“But I was worried I’d sound like a bitter, jealous ex.”

“Claire, he is not in love with me.”

“You really don’t see it? How he’s . . . softer with you? You think he treats everyone the way he treats you?” She shakes her head. “But I guess you’re not able to see the way he smiles at his phone when you text, or drops everything to run to your side as soon as you snap your fingers.”

“He cheated on me!”

“Yeah, because he’s a dumb, horny teenage boy who didn’t know how to deal with a really good thing.”

“You . . .”

“I’m not trying to upset you,” Claire says.

She honestly can’t believe this. She hasn’t been paying a lot of attention to her friends lately, not since she found the book, but she had no idea she was missing this much. She doesn’t even know where to begin.

“I just figured that you’re Nicole’s best friend so you should know what really happened.”

“You’ve been a better friend to Nicole this year than I have,” Maddie says.

“You’ve had a lot on your plate,” Claire says.

It's quiet.

“Do you think you’d ever get back together with him?”

“With—?”

“Xavier.”

“Are you kidding?”

“It’s not such a crazy thought,” Claire says.

“It’s a completely crazy thought! I haven’t thought about him like that in months, not since I was a ghost. And I was never in love with him to begin with! I’m not suddenly going to fall for him again, harder. Xavier and I, we're done."

“Okay.” Claire holds up her hands. “Okay.”

There’s a pause.

“Is it over because of your hunky, ‘80s football star boyfriend?”

She bites her lip.

“It totally is,” Claire says, amused.

“Shut up.”

She is expecting the mood to change. In a moment, Claire is going to sigh at her, and say, but, Maddie, you know that you can’t really be with him, is going to look at her with sad, sorry eyes, and she steels herself for it. But there isn’t a hint of anything like that on Claire’s face. She’s hit with a rush of affection for her friend.

“We should probably focus, huh,” Claire says.

She looks at her computer and away again, uninterested. “You want a snack?” she asks. She is already on her feet, eager for an excuse to avoid the outline a little while longer.

In the kitchen, she goes immediately for the Bagel Bites in the freezer.

They’d eaten them constantly when they were kids, whenever Claire was at Maddie’s house, and they’d played this game where they’d dip the bites into random, weird stuff. Pickle juice and yogurt and cottage cheese and jam and cool whip. 

She puts the Bagel Bites in the microwave.

It still kind of stuns her, the idea that Xavier is in love with her. And, honestly, what is the matter with him? It’s annoying, the thought of Xavier wanting her that way after everything.

What, he dated her friend while he was in love with her?

She wonders suddenly if Nicole resents her for it. She tries to imagine how she’d feel if the situation were reversed, but the idea of Wally and Nicole is so ridiculous, she can’t even go there. She really hopes Nicole knows that she isn’t happy about this.

She’s about to head upstairs with the Bagel Bites in hand when she decides she wants to find something to dip them in.

There aren’t a lot of options they haven’t already tried. 

She’s pretty damn pleased with herself when she spots an old, half-eaten jar of hot fridge at the back of the fridge.

She isn’t prepared to discover that Claire was busy in her absence. She walks into the room, excited to reveal her choice of snacks, and stops up short at the sight that greets her: Claire is reading the book. She has no idea how to respond when Claire lifts her gaze to look at her in shock.

“Can the ghosts come back to life?” Claire asks.

She can't really deny it. “Yeah, maybe,” she says.

“What the fuck?”

She sets the food on top of the dresser. “It’s complicated. I’ve spent the last month trying to figure it all out, since the moment I found that book, but it—there’s not really a way to know how it works. Believe me, I’ve tried.” She sits on the edge of her bed.

“You can’t do it,” Claire says.

“Can't do what?”

Claire waves the book in her face.

“I don’t—”

“This woman who came to life again. It was because of the fire, right? That’s what allowed her to live again.”

“Probably,” Maddie says, hesitant.

“So there needs to be a big, deadly traumatic thing for it to work,” Claire says.

She nods. “Yeah.”

“What are you planning to do?” Claire asks.

“I can’t do anything, that’s the problem. It was awful to traumatize the dead in order to let a living person cross over, but it would be—there’s no way I can traumatize the living in order to let a dead person cross over. I’ve wracked my brain, but there’s no way around it.” She shakes her head. “That’s why I’ve been so out of it lately.”

“Bullshit,” Claire says.

She bristles.

“You have a plan. I know you, Maddie Nears. You have a plan.”

She’s always been a good liar. It’s how she kept the extent of things with her mom from everyone, Simon included. She knows how to lie. It helps if you get angry with the people you’re lying to. “I’m not gonna hurt someone to get my way, Claire,” she snaps.

“And I’m supposed to believe that you aren’t willing to hurt yourself ?” 

She stares.

She’s had this conversation with Simon several times now, or something like this conversation, and and the idea of her taking on the trauma had never, ever come up. It would never occur to Simon to think of something like that. She's taken it for granted, how Simon has always had a happy, healthy family and life and never thinks of terrible things like that.

“You can’t do it,” Claire says.

“I’m not going to do anything," she says.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’ve spent the last month trying to figure out what to do. I went to Chicago with Simon in search of Annabelle, and I found her, but all it meant was that I had confirmation it’s possible to bring them back. I didn’t give up then, but, Claire, I’ve gone down every avenue I can think of.”

“And you’ve landed on the stupidest, most dangerous plan,” Claire says, crossing her arms.

“And I’ve realized that it’s not gonna happen!” she exclaims.

“You—”

“Are you worried I’m going to kill myself? Is that it? Do you think I’m about to go slit my wrists in the bathroom at school? Because I’m not the world’s happiest person, but it hasn’t come to that. So if that’s what you’re worried about, can you fucking back off?” 

Claire’s anger seems to abate slightly. 

“And, yeah, if you want to know the truth, I wondered if there was a way to traumatize myself, you’re right, but when I floated the idea to the ghosts, they shut it down immediately.”

“Wally?” Claire says.

“Yes.” It isn’t entirely a lie.

“Good.”

“And, honestly, the things I was thinking of doing probably wouldn’t have been enough anyway.”

It’s quiet.

“Can we just get back to work?” Maddie asks, deflating. “I don’t really want to talk about this. It’s—I hate that I got so close to saving them, and now I have to walk away, so. I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah, okay,” Claire says.

They work quietly for a couple of minutes.

“Everything with Nicole and Xavier, you shouldn’t feel bad about not knowing. You are a good friend; you’re just dealing with a lot, and I . . . I’m sorry about how things are going with the ghosts. Just, as far as Nicole and Xavier are concerned, don’t feel bad.”

“Thanks.”

A little of the tension eases from the room.

They get their draft of the bill written, and they complete the worksheet on their process, so they are done for now.

She walks Claire downstairs to the door.

Mr. Anderson is walking in at just that moment, his arms loaded with groceries, and Claire’s mouth drops open at the sight of him, but Mr. Anderson isn’t bothered in the slightest.

“Hey, ladies! Hope you’re hungry. I’m making turkey burgers tonight!”

“Claire has this charity event thing with her mom tonight.”

“Oh, okay,” Mr. Anderson says, cheerful.

“Maybe another time,” Claire says, eyes very, very bright now.

Mr. Anderson heads into the kitchen with his groceries.

“Why is Mr. Anderson in your house making you turkey burgers?” Claire asks, a grin on her face.

She sighs. “Yeah, so, I’m pretty sure he and my mom are dating.”

“You’re pretty sure?”

“I try not to ask a lot of questions about it,” Maddie says.

“Smart.”

Claire heads out, and Maddie waits in the doorway ‘til her car pulls out, waves at her.

She closes the door and leans against it. Claire is going to be pissed when she learns that Maddie lied to her face, but there was no way Maddie could tell her the truth. She closes her eyes, takes a breath.

It’s going to work.

—

She closes her locker and jumps at the sight of Jerry in front of her. His expression is unreadable, but that doesn’t mean much, and her heart leaps into her throat, realizing he’s got an answer for her. She hugs her textbook to her chest and meets Jerry’s gaze.

“We want to do it,” he says.

She swallows.

She knew they’d be on board. They had just needed the weekend to think it over and decide for themselves. She wouldn’t be surprised if they’d actually decided the night she talked to them, only she hasn’t been at school since.

“When?” she asks.

“Tonight.”

“It’ll have to be late, after all of the living have left the school, including the custodians. Midnight? I can do a sweep of the school, make sure it’s empty, then come to the office.”

“Okay,” he says.

She feels like there’s more to say, but he turns on his heel, heading off, and she’s left alone to get herself together.

—

She acts as normally as possible for the rest of the day. Luckily, it isn’t out of the ordinary these days for her to be quiet and withdrawn at random, so when that’s how she behaves despite her efforts to be peppy, none of her friends call her out on it. She just needs to get through this day.

She feels Simon’s gaze on her a lot at lunch.

She finds it hard to look at him, which she has a feeling he has noticed. 

If this goes wrong, if Mr. Martin is manipulating her, and she ends up a ghost again, she hopes Simon can still see her. 

She can’t explain anything to him now, despite how badly she wants to, but she’s going to want to explain everything after.

And if this goes wrong, she’ll need to apologize, too.

She is going to look for Wally after school, only she doesn’t have to.

He is waiting by her locker when she goes to get her backpack, and he shuffles his feet awkwardly for a moment, eyes darting over her face. “Hey,” he says, quiet. He looks a little like a puppy that’s been kicked, and when she stops at her locker, he swallows visibly.

She puts her phone to her ear.

They hadn’t left things in a good place, what with the way she’d sped off that night, but they can fix that easily.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Me, too!”

“You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

He steps in closer to her. “I just don’t want the day to come when you’re sorry you met me because I held you back, or . . .”

“You don’t have to worry about that, I promise,” she tells him.

He doesn’t look convinced.

“Listen, I actually have to get home soon to spend the evening with my mom,” she says.

He nods.

“But I’m gonna come back tonight. There’s something I want to do, and I need you and everybody, Rhonda and Quinn and Charley and Yuri and Janet, to meet me in the A.P. Chem lab around one a.m—all of you, that’s important, it has to be all of you. But I can’t explain what for right now.”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be,” she says.

He frowns.

She’d talked about this with Mr. Martin.

It doesn’t seem realistic that the ghosts will simply be alive again the moment that Mr. Martin does his part. And after going over Annabelle’s story a couple of times, they’d decided that what had made the difference for Annabelle was that, at the moment the veil was lowered, Annabelle had been in that bathroom with her mother and her friend, and had wanted desperately to join them. If they follow that logic, it means the ghosts need to know what’s happening when it’s happening, what Mr. Martin is doing, and why.

They have to want to live in the instant when the veil is lowered, to know that there’s a chance to, and to beg for it.

But she can’t tell them about any of it in advance. 

They wouldn’t ever willingly let her put her life at risk like this.

“We’ll be there,” he says softly.

She wants to hug him. His soft eyes and his soft voice, the way his head is tilted down toward her, as if to be sure he is giving her all of his attention, it’s too much. She really, really wants to hug him.

Soon, she thinks.

She updates Mr. Martin before she leaves school that afternoon, sitting on the bus stop bench until he appears.

She really does want to spend the evening with her mother.

Her mother agrees immediately when Maddie says they ought to hang out, have dinner together just the two of them, and watch a movie.

They order pizza.

And when she tells her mother that she wants to watch  The Notebook , her mother’s eyes light up, and she doesn’t roll her eyes at her mother’s tears like she usually does, just leans her head on her mother’s shoulder.

“I’m really glad you’re my mom,” she tells her, before she heads to bed.

“Me, too,” says her mother, about to cry again.

She sneaks out around 11:15 p.m., tiptoeing her way through the house in the dark, and slipping out as quickly as possible.

It’s time.

—

She does a check of the school, careful to avoid the library when she hears Charley’s voice inside it, and determines that the school is clear of the living.

Jerry, Brandy, and Kayla are waiting for her in the office.

Mr. Martin has dropped off their keys for them.

She hopes this works for them. They’ll be tortured in their scars, and that’s all that she needs for her purposes, but they deserve to move on. She hopes it happens for them.

Mr. Martin is waiting for her in the lab.

She hesitates for only a moment when she sees him, but she has to do this, and she straightens, heading in.

“Ready?” he asks.

She nods.

She has no idea how long they’ll have to wait, and when the clock over the board reads 12:30 a.m., she starts to worry that the ghosts are going to arrive before she’s at the point of no return.

But, a couple of minutes after that, the lights in the room start to flicker.

“Now?” she says.

“Now,” he says.

She has to fight the urge not to flinch when Mr. Martin runs at her. 

He runs right through her. 

She can see that he’s just as confused as she is. But it makes no sense, because the moment is right, Jerry, Brandy, and Kayla have lowered the veil, and that means he ought to be able to steal her body. She has no idea why it isn’t working.

He tries it again and again and again.

“Damn it,” he breathes.

“We’re going to run out of time!”

“Think of things that upset you,” he says. “Think of—of how much pain you caused your friend, Simon. Think of your mother, of her drinking and all the things she’s done to you. Think of—of Wally, and how you left him behind, knowing he loved you.”

She can do that.

He runs through her again.

“Maddie!”

She spins around in shock.

“I’m not gonna let you do this!” Mr. Anderson is bent over slightly in the doorway, panting, his hands on his knees. “I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna let you sacrifice yourself like this!”

“How are you here right now?” she says.

“I tried to go back to sleep after I got the texts from your mom about how the two of you had such a special night, I tried ,” he says.

She shakes her head.

“But yesterday, what Claire told me, how she was worried that you were gonna do something stupid—”

“Are you kidding me right now?” Maddie says.

“I knew when I saw those texts from your mom, what with how you keep her at arm’s length usually, I knew what it meant,” he says.

“This has nothing to do with you.” She’s furious.

“You’re a kid, Maddie!” he exclaims.

“I know what I’m doing.”

He shakes his head at her, starting toward her slowly with his hands up, as if he’s afraid he’s going to spook her.

The lights in the ceiling flicker again. 

“You can’t throw your life away like this,” he says.

“That isn’t what I’m doing,” she snaps.

“Who’s in here with you? It’s that creepy ‘50s teacher who killed a kid, isn’t it? That’s who talked you into this?” He looks around the room. “You in here, Big Man, messing with another innocent kid, huh?”

“Ignore him,” she says.

“Maddie, listen to me,” Mr. Anderson says, pleading.

She looks at Mr. Martin, nods her head at him. She’s panicked now, and desperate, too, that’s got to count for something, has to be what they need. She needs Mr. Martin to stay on task, to get this done now.

They won’t have another chance.

He runs at her, and he runs right through her.

She doesn’t even have time to be upset about it, because Mr. Anderson grabs her suddenly, hoisting her off her feet, and she screams, but he’s six feet tall and in shape, and she can’t fight her way out of his grasp.

“—am not—” He is dragging her to the door. “—gonna let you—fuck—kill yourself—”

She elbows him in the gut.

He stumbles.

She hears the squeak of Mr. Martin’s shoes on the floor and she snaps her head up, sees him running at them, and she realizes what’s about to happen a second before it happens, but she isn’t able to stop it.

She is swung to the side at the impact.

She trips on the leg of a table, loses her balance completely, and pitches forward suddenly, the floor flying up at her.

She blinks.

Her head is pounding.

She touches her fingers to her temple, cringing. She doesn’t know where she is, or what happened, and it takes a moment for her brain to turn on, catch up, and assess the state of the world around her. She’s lying on the floor, and she is sick to her stomach.

What the fuck?

She shifts, and a wave of dizziness washes through her.

There is yelling.

She was knocked out, she remembers. Mr. Anderson was there, and that’s his voice now, it’s Mr. Anderson who’s yelling. She was thrown to the ground, she remembers.

It keeps trickling in slowly at first, then, in a blink, all the rest suddenly rushes in.

She remembers.

She looks up, around.

Mr. Anderson is standing at a table, a box of matches in his hand. One of the taps on the table is turned on; she can hear the gas that is rushing out, can smell it. Mr. Anderson is shaking, a look on his face that doesn’t fit there.

Because that isn’t Mr. Anderson.

The other, louder Mr. Anderson at his side, screaming at him, that is Mr. Anderson.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Mr. Martin stole Mr. Anderson’s body.

“How can you call yourself a teacher and do this, play on a kid’s devotion to her friends, try to kill her?”

She needs to get up. 

She can’t just stay on the ground, staring at them in a stupor. She has no idea how long she was unconscious, how much she’s missed already, and she needs to get up. She is going to lose everything if she can’t get herself off this floor.

She starts to sit up.

The stab of pain in her skull is blinding.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mr. Martin says.

“What happens now, huh, light the place on fire, and make a run for it, now that you’ve managed to get your hands on my body again? ”

“No!” Mr. Martin says.

“It worked out well for you, didn’t it? You thought you’d be spending the rest of your life in Maddie’s body, but you got mine instead, so perfect! Or, hell, did you mean for it to happen like this all along?”

“You were not supposed to be here.”

“Oh, yeah? You wanted to be in a teenage girl’s body?”

“I told you the plan already. Let me just get Maddie out of here, and you and I, we can finish this. She’s still in her body, so she’ll get hurt unless you let me get her to safety. Once I do, I can finish our plan, and if it goes the way it’s supposed to, you’ll get your body back after. I’ve explained all of this to you.”

“So you’re gonna walk out of here with her, then just come right back, is that it?”

Mr. Martin takes a step to the side of the table, Mr. Anderson moves in tandem, and Mr. Martin’s face screws up with frustration.

“I am trying to help my students!” Mr. Martin says.

“Like you helped that student of yours back in the 1950s?”

“The plan—”

“Is a load of crap!” Mr. Anderson shouts.

“You—”

“How was it going to help to steal a kid’s body?”

“You aren’t listening to me,” Mr. Martin says. “We had it all worked out. The sacrifice needs to be from an adult, so it had to be me, and the way we had it planned, yes, she was going to lose her body, but she was going to get it back after, while I remained a ghost. We weren’t going into this blindly.”

“You had to have known that wouldn’t fucking work!”

“I—”

“What kind of sacrifice was it gonna be? Your life or death or whatever, it wasn’t going to change at all. How the hell was using her body a sacrifice for you?”

There are shouts.

She can’t see them, but she can hear their hurried footsteps, and when they burst into the room, she can hear the explosion of their voices.

“We’re here! Maddie! We’re here!” Wally is frantic. “MADDIE!”

“What the hell?” Rhonda says.

“Where is she?”

“Oh, God,” Janet says.

“Maddie!”

“What is this?” Charley says.

“Stay back!” Mr. Anderson says, lifting an arm and waving it wildly. “Stay way, way back, you hear me?”

“Where is she?” Wally demands.

She wants to answer, to say here, I’m here, Wally, here, but all of the shouting is ringing in her ears, and she can only cringe, thinking her answer over and over. Behind the table, she thinks. I’m here. Just a few feet from Mr. Martin. I’m here. She needs to answer.

“What have you done with her?” There’s an anger in Wally’s voice that Maddie has never heard before. “Where the fuck is she?”

“You’re right,” Mr. Martin says, faint.

“I swear to God, Mr. Martin, I will fucking tear you limb from limb if you don’t tell me what the fuck you’ve done to her!”

“Stay fucking back!”

“Okay, someone needs to tell us what’s happening right now,” Charley says.

“You want to know what’s going on?” Mr. Anderson says. 

“Yes!”

“This miserable, manipulative jackass convinced Maddie that if he killed himself in her body, it would bring all of you guys back to life, and Maddie was so desperate for it to be true that she agreed to it, when, really, this piece of shit in the shape of a person just wanted to steal her body.”

“She wouldn’t fall for that,” Rhonda says.

“Maddie!” Quinn says. “Maddie! She’s right there! Maddie!” She can see Quinn suddenly, starting for her, only for Mr. Anderson to block Quinn with his arm. “Maddie, are you okay?”

“You can’t get near him,” Mr. Anderson says.

“She’s bleeding!” Wally says, furious.

“You can’t do anything about that,” Mr. Anderson says.

She starts to sit up, tearing up at the waves of pain in her head. “‘m’fine,” she mumbles. She tries to smile, only she vomits instead, suddenly, violently, and her head is splitting in two.

“MADDIE!”

She isn’t sure how long she’s out of it.

“It won’t work. I don’t know why I thought . . . I wanted it to be possible, but it’s a fool’s errand, you’re right. It won’t work.” There’s real, raw devastation in Mr. Martin’s voice. “I thought I could be the hero.”

“What evil, harebrained scheme did you come up with?” Janet asks.

“I wanted to help,” Mr. Martin says, tearful.

She can’t breathe right and she coughs, but it jars her head, and she coughs and coughs, tearing up.

“Maddie!”

“Let him go,” Rhonda says.

“Are you kidding me right now?” Mr. Anderson says.

“You have to,” Charley says. 

“I’m not just gonna—”

“You’ve let your body get stolen twice, so, obviously, you don’t really want to be alive,” Rhonda says.

“I’m gonna be honest with you, kid, I know my mental health is . . . not great, but I’d like to, you know, live, and—”

“Something is wrong with her,” Rhonda snarls. “She is lying on the floor, bleeding from the head, and choking on her vomit. And every fucking second we waste arguing with this pathetic, chicken-hearted waste of a man is a second less we have to help her. She can’t even speak right now.” 

She opens her eyes.

It hurts, all of her, the light, the noises, it hurts.

She sees Mr. Anderson’s gaze on her, and she’s filled suddenly with regret, looking at him. She was so stupid . She fucked up, and Mr. Anderson is paying the price, and she’s so, so sorry.

“Okay,” Mr. Anderson says.

She breathes in, blinks, breathes out.

“You have to take her with you,” Janet says. “You have to get her to a hospital immediately.”

“I will,” Mr. Martin says.

“You owe me.”

She doesn’t understand what’s happening. In all of the pain, has she missed something they’ve said, something important? She turns slightly, tries to get a look at them again.

She blinks.

Mr. Martin is there in front of her, leaning over her, and touching her cheek.

She wants to jerk away from him. “No.” She won’t let him take her away. That’s what they’re trying to do, isn’t it? She won’t go along with it.

“Is she—?” Wally asks.

“You’re s’pose t’save them,” she mutters.

His face changes at that. She can hear the others talking but it’s all a big, painful blur, except for him, she can see him clearly in front of her. His eyes are wet, but he presses his lips together.

“You’re right,” he says.

He’s gone.

“What’re you doing?” Mr. Anderson says.

“I’m fixing this.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you’re getting Maddie to a hospital, that’s how you fix it, you get Maddie to a hospital,” Wally says.

“I haven’t always been the teacher I should’ve been, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about my students.”

“Maddie is dying!” Rhonda says.

“There’s a way for you to live—Rhonda, Charley, Janet, all of you . It’s happened before; a student named Annabelle Mueller died in 1956, only to live again. That’s what’s going to happen to you now—get out of here, run, and live .”

“Wait!” Mr. Anderson says, panicked.

“Imagine it, what it would be like to live again, to grow up, and grow old,” Mr. Martin says. “Imagine it!”

“Maddie is still in the room!”

There’s an explosion of pain in her skull.

—

She is aware of the world little by little, the pain in her head, the feeling of the floor on her cheek, the beat, beat, beat of her heart.

She opens her eyes.

It’s silent.

She breathes in and out. There’s fire and heat and smoke, and she has to get up, has to get out, because the lab is burning, but she isn’t able to feel her limbs, is aware only of the throbbing in her head, the thudding of her heart. She breathes in and out.

There’s a girl with her, kneeling on the ground. 

She’s a tiny little thing, with a tangle of dark, dirty hair tied half back, and sad, sunken eyes, a nasty, purling bruise along the length of her jaw.

She’s a kid.

She motions at tucking her face into the bend of her elbow, and she nods her head at Maddie’s elbow.

Maddie lifts her arm, bends her head, and presses her mouth into the material of her sleeve.

The girl smiles at her softly.

Oh, Maddie thinks.

The girl reaches out a hand stroke Maddie’s hair with small, sweet fingers.

Mr. Martin was wrong about them. 

She’s startled when the girl looks away and rises up, steps to the side. The flames that circle them seem to surge in suddenly, as if they were lying in wait until the girl was gone. She struggles to sit up, keeping her eyes on the girl.

Wally is there.

She coughs.

Wally.

He is talking to her, but she can’t hear a word. All the sound in the world has disappeared in a vacuum, and the silence is pressing down painfully now. He is shouting at her, and she wants to shake her head at him.

He touches her shoulders, her face, and she understands.

She’s dead.

I’m sorry, Simon, she thinks.

She hadn’t wanted it to go this way.

He’s lifting her off the ground now, and she’s dizzy, but he’s holding her tightly to his chest, her head on his shoulder, and he’s carrying her through the silence, out of the fire and the heat and the smoke.

"Wait," she wants to say.

The girl is watching her go, waving at her, and a pair of small, strangely-dressed boys appear at the girl’s side.

She passes out.

—

She doesn’t know where she is at first, when she opens her eyes, and she doesn’t really care. It’s dark and warm and comfortable, a murmur of voices in the background. She turns her head to the side, taking in everything little by little.

She’s in the hospital.

There’s a lamp by her bed, casting a soft, golden glow.

“Maddie,” says her mother.

She looks at her mother and smiles a little, starts to speak.

Her mother shushes her quickly, hurrying to her side. “You can’t talk right now,” she says, sitting on the edge of the bed. “You inhaled a lot of smoke, and you need to give your throat time to heal, okay?” Her mother shushes her again softly, stroking her hair. 

The fire.

“Here,” says her mother, picking up a big, bulky cup with a lid, a bendy straw, and a handle, and putting the straw to Maddie’s lips.

She takes a couple of sips.

“You’re going to be okay. You’ve got a concussion, and chances are you’ll be on bed rest until graduation, but that’s no problem, we can do that. You’ll be okay.”

She can’t really remember what happened.

Mr. Martin changed the plan and stole Mr. Anderson’s body. She was on the ground, and the ghosts were there, trying to get to her. Mr. Martin turned on her, wanted to leave in Mr. Anderson’s body.

There was an explosion. 

What had happened after that?

“You can’t—no, Baby, please—you can’t talk,” says her mother.

She curls her hand into the stiff, scratchy hospital sheets.

Simon is there, too.

He smiles at her when she notices him, stepping forward slightly. “Hey,” he says. He is looking at her carefully, heartbreak in his eyes, and she doesn’t like that, doesn’t want to know what that means.

“I’ll get a nurse, okay?” says her mother.

She nods.

As soon as her mother is gone, she looks at Simon pleadingly. What had happened after the explosion? Simon wasn’t there, but she can see on his face that he knows, and her mother isn’t here now.

Please, she thinks.

“There was a fire at the school,” Simon says. 

And?

“It was bad—like, half the science hall is gone, bad. The firefighters got you out, said it was lucky you weren’t closer to the source of the fire. There’ll be an investigation, and, ah—school is closed for the rest of the week.”

No. That’s not right. No. She remembers. It was Wally who got her out.

“They got Mr. Anderson out, too.”

“What—?”

“Hey, no, you’re not supposed to talk, remember?”

“About—?”

He shushes her.

She pounds her fist against the bed.

“Maddie, I . . . I think I know what you’re asking me, but your plan, whatever it was, I’m sorry, but I—I don’t think it worked.”

No.

“You and Mr. Anderson,” Simon says, “you were alone when the firefighters got there.”

She turns her face away from him.

“It’s okay. Hey. It’s okay.”

Her mother returns with a nurse. 

The nurse is older, balding, and kind, explaining to her gently the state that she’s in, and how she needs to avoid light, noise, and speaking right now, as much as possible. She doesn’t really listen to the man, her mind on the fact that she failed abysmally, and Mr. Martin is out in the world now in a body that does not belong to him. The nurse says her name softly, and when she looks at him, he smiles, and he announces that she needs to rest now, and she ought to catch up with her family later.

They leave the lamp on.

She curls in on herself as soon as she’s alone.

She can’t believe how stupid she’s been. She’d lied to everyone, all of her friends, the living and the dead, putting all of her faith in Mr. Martin, and for what? She’s made a mess of everything.

What’s going to happen to her now?

She could be blamed for starting the fire. They might not let her graduate. She could wind up charged with a crime, put in prison. 

She’s most likely lost her acceptance to Northwestern. 

Even if she convinces Split River High that the fire was an accident, and she is allowed to graduate, admin at Northwestern are going to hear that she was involved in a fire at her school, and that isn’t exactly the kind of extracurriculars that colleges like to see.

She’s ruined her life.

And if she could have brought them back, it would have been worth it. She wouldn’t care if she’d lost her perfect life plan, if that was what it took to save her friends, and they were here with her now. Because if she could have brought them back, nothing else would have mattered.

But she hadn’t brought them back.

What are the chances that Mr. Anderson was able to reclaim his body in all of the chaos?

She can still hope for that.

The door opens and closes quietly. She hadn’t realized that much time had passed but it must’ve been a while if the nurse is back to check on her again. There are footsteps.

“Hey, Cherry Pop.”

She stares.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Rhonda says, with a twitch of her lips.

“You’re—” She stares at Rhonda in shock, struggling to draw in breath, and starting to cough on the words caught in her throat. “You’re—”

“I’m here.”

She can’t tear her eyes away.

It could be that the boundary that traps the ghost in the school is broken now, so the ghosts are welcome to roam the world.

She can't jump to conclusions. She can’t just assume that this means what she really, really wants it to mean.

And as if Rhonda understands what she’s thinking, how her heart is racing with hope, and her mind is stumbling to keep up, Rhonda reaches out, takes Maddie’s hand, and squeezes it softly.

She sucks in a breath.

Rhonda is here.

Rhonda is holding her hand.

Rhonda is alive.

“We figured it’d be best if I were the one to check on you, since I’m the least likely to be recognized by anyone in this decade,” Rhonda says. “We’re holed up at Mr. Anderson’s house for now.”

“We?” Maddie rasps.

“We had to lock Wally in the bathroom to keep him from trying to come with me,” Rhonda says.

She covers her face with her hand.

“Quinn, Charley, and Yuri are keeping an eye on him, and Janet, of course, is scribbling in a notebook.”

They’d all made it. It had been too much to hope for before, that all of them would come back, but she’d pushed forward anyway, and it had worked. They’d all made it.

“Mr. Anderson is okay, too.”

She takes a few deep, deep breaths, trying to get a hold of herself.

“He gave us the keys to his house, said he was going to get you out of trouble, and told us to stay out of sight for now.”

They’re all alive.

“We weren’t about to wait any longer to find out what happened to you, though,” Rhonda says.

She wipes at her cheeks.

“I have no idea how you survived. The explosion knocked us all off our feet, and when we came to after, we realized that we were— alive , and we . . . we looked for you immediately, but the fire was spreading, and we couldn’t find you at first. I don’t understand how you weren’t burned to a crisp.”

She smiles.

There’s a lot she has to explain to her friends.

How the school is haunted by orphans. 

How once upon a time, all of the adults in Split River ignored what was happening to those orphans, allowing them to be taken and tortured and killed, over and over, for decades.

How the orphans try to protect the children of today from cruel, uncaring adults.

And, of course, how an orphan with shiny black hair and a bruise on her chin must’ve shielded Maddie from the explosion.

“Are you okay?” Rhonda asks.

She isn’t able to speak, has a low, unrelenting level of nausea right now, and wants to cringe when she looks at the lamp, but she really doesn't care.

They’re all alive.

She’s never been more okay in her life.

—

She hadn’t thought a whole lot about what would happen after she brought the ghosts to life again.

There are hurdles.

If they want to go to college, if they want to hold a job, if they want to travel the world, if they want to drive a car or marry or buy a house, they need proof on paper of their existence.

They need things like birth certificates and social security numbers and school records.

And getting their hands on that stuff isn’t exactly a breeze. 

They can’t just walk up to a courthouse, explain how they were dead for a while but they’re alive again now, and expect a clerk to produce a form for them to fill out in order for them to be reissued SSNs.

She can’t do much to help.

The doctor is concerned at the severity of Maddie’s concussion, saying a lot of big, scary things about traumatic brain injuries, and how if she’s had a concussion before this, that’s very, very bad, and insisting that Maddie’s head needs a chance to recover.

She is supposed to rest as much as possible for at least a couple of weeks.

She isn't worried.

She convinces her mother that she is capable of convalescing on a couch at Mr. Anderson’s house as easily as in her bed at home.

She wears a pair of sunglasses when her mother drives her over in the morning, claims the couch that isn’t saggy in the middle as soon as she arrives, and dozes on and off with her head in Wally’s lap until her mother drives her home again in the evening.

All of the adults are aware of the truth now, her mother, Mr. Anderson, and the sheriff.

They’ve become a kind of team, determined to sort through the whole, big mess that Maddie’s made, and they’re actually helpful.

They cook up a story about the fire.

A stalker set his sights on Maddie during her time away from home in October, if you can believe it. 

The night of the fire, the stalker lured her to the school by texting her from her ex-boyfriend’s phone with plans to kill her in a big, fiery explosion.

Luckily, Mr. Anderson, who is dating her mother, of course, saw her sneak out of her house and followed her, arriving at the school just in time to save her.

The stalker, though?

He’s dead, and they aren’t able to identify him, considering he was burned to a crisp in the explosive fire he caused.

She’s certain after she hears their plan that nobody is going to buy a story like that, but she’s wrong.

The town of Split River is immediately on board with it.

She isn’t blamed for the fire.

She’ll be allowed to graduate from Split River High. She’ll head off to Northwestern in the fall. She’ll be able to live her life without a charge of arson on her record.

And, on top of anything, she was awarded the Rhonda Rosen Memorial Scholarship a few days ago.

She’s just got to get her head back in shape now.

She wakes up when Wally shakes her shoulder gently, and she looks up, around. It’s Saturday, she remembers, which is why Claire is sitting on the couch across from her with Rhonda and Quinn. She shifts and sits up, smiling when Wally kisses her hair.

Xavier is unloading a bunch of white, grease-stained takeout bags onto the table between the couches.

She’s doing pretty well today.

She can sit up and stay up without immediate, overwhelming nausea, she isn’t bothered at the number of voices in the room, and she can actually focus on a conversation for longer than a couple of minutes.

She’s gonna be back to normal in no time.

Xavier got tacos.

None of the styrofoam takeout containers are labeled, so they're playing a game of guess and grab, having to take a bite to figure out what they've ended up with.

“Is this BBQ?” Wally asks.

She glances at him. “BBQ?”

“Here.”

She leans in, takes a bite, licks the sauce from the corner of her lip. “That’s actually good.”

“Right?”

“Yeah, it’s, ah, it’s from that place on the corner behind the Pick ‘n Save,” Xavier says. “They’ve got all sorts of crazy, random Americanized taco options.”

“Cool,” she says.

He nods and looks away quickly, clearing his throat. He’s been like that a lot since she brought the ghosts back, like he doesn’t quite know how to act with them around, and she’s starting to get the feeling that she knows why, since it happens the most in moments like this, when she’s plastered into Wally’s side. He glances at her out of the corner of his eyes, is caught, and smiles awkwardly, looking away again.

It’s Wally, for sure.

She wonders if this means he really is carrying a torch for her, like Claire said.

He’ll get over it.

“Are there napkins?” she asks, turning.

“I got you,” Wally says, and he stands up slightly and grabs a fistful of napkins from across the table.

She smiles.

“What about Letters of No Record?” Janet asks, in front of the computer.

“I looked into that,” the Sheriff says.

“What’s the problem? According to a man named Steve Bradley on www dot q-u-o-r-a dot com six years ago, if you don’t have a birth certificate, you can go to court, and you can be issued a Letter of No Record. Why wouldn’t that work?”

“How are we going to explain that you don’t have any records?” Mr. Anderson asks, salsa on his chin.

“What if we’re like that thing?” Wally says. “With the—the beards, you know? The religious thing? With the horses and the . . . the buggies?”

“The Amish?” Charley says.

“Yes!”

“That’s actually a really good idea,” Claire says.

“Surprisingly,” Rhonda says.

“You can’t just say you’re Amish,” the Sheriff says, a hint of exasperation in his voice.

A thudding is starting up in the back of Maddie's head at all of the conversation, now that the adults are squeezed in here, too, and she knows from experience that the thudding is going to get worse and worse.

She sinks into the couch, leans her head on Wally’s shoulder, and closes her eyes.

They’ll figure this out.

—

She can’t stop raving about Death Becomes Her for hours after the show. They’d gotten the tickets on a whim, since she thought a show on Broadway seemed like a must for New York City, and they’d grabbed dinner after, bracing Times Square for a stupid, touristy photo, too. She’s never been much of a theater person, but Death Becomes Her might have changed that.

There isn’t room to sit on the subway to the house at the end of the night.

She isn’t bothered, leaning on Wally, and listening absently to his conversation with a guy who’s wearing a Packers shirt.

They’re staying in Manhattan at Marjorie’s big, beautiful brownstone.

Rhonda had wanted to go in search of her friend at the start of the summer, after things had been sorted out some, and Rhonda had acted like it wasn’t that important, but Maddie, Wally, and Quinn had volunteered to go with her anyway. 

It had gone better than they could have imagined. 

Marjorie was stunned to see Rhonda. 

She’s 80 years old now, a millionaire after years of making pop music, and something of a recluse since the death of her partner, but she didn’t immediately chase them away, like Madde was worried she might.

Marjorie had invited them inside, listened to their story, and believed it.

She’s thrilled to have Rhonda in her life again. 

They are welcome to stay with her as long as they like.

It hadn’t really been Maddie’s plan to spend the summer in New York City, but they’re all having a pretty amazing time, and it’s not like Maddie’s got some other scheme for the summer.

All of her friends are off on adventures.

Simon and Xavier are on a road trip for the summer, which is kind of hilarious, the idea of the two of them traveling the country together in Simon’s old, shitty car, but, apparently, Simon and Xavier are friends now. 

Claire and Nicole are backpacking in Europe, paid for by Claire’s parents. 

Charley and Yuri are spending the summer in Virginia at a cabin in the mountains that belongs to Yuri’s sister.

A summer in New York City with Wally, Rhonda, and Quinn, well, that sounds pretty good to her.

The house is certainly big enough for all of them.

Maddie and Wally have snagged the bedroom at the end of the hallway, near the bathroom, and with a view of the skyline.

She gets ready for bed first, brushing her teeth, and washing her face, changing into her pajamas, and she leans in the doorway of the bathroom after, watching him while he brushes his teeth. 

Over a month, and she still can’t really wrap her head around the fact that she did it.

Wally is here in New York City right now, standing in front of her in a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, brushing his teeth, because Wally is alive.

They haven’t really talked about what they are now, if they’re together, or what they want from the future.

There’s just been a lot going on, okay?

She was recovering from a concussion, there was the whirlwind of graduation, and she had to help her mother sell the cabin. 

The ghosts have needed help adjusting to the fact that they aren’t ghosts.

Wally catches her eye in the mirror and smiles at her, his toothbrush clamped between his teeth, a ring of toothpaste around his mouth.

She comes up behind him and hugs his back, slipping her hand up under his shirt to touch his stomach. He’s warm and solid and alive. She presses a kiss to the cotton that covers his back. He turns in her arms and tugs her in closer, kisses her. It’s a short, sweet kiss, like all the kisses they’ve shared since the fire. He pulls away and smiles at her, kisses her again quickly. She slips her thumbs under the band of his boxers, toys with the material a little.

His hands squeeze her hips affectionately. 

“Thanks for coming with me tonight."

"I’ll go anywhere with you,” he says, earnest.

She kisses him, open-mouthed, and eager, insistent.

“Your head?” he murmurs.

“Good.”

“You’re sure?”

She draws away from and pulls her shirt up over her head, raising her eyebrows at him.

His eyes darken immediately. “Yeah, okay,” he says, surging in, and wrapping his arms around her, kissing her insistently. His hands run up her back, clutch her to his chest. 

She pushes her hands into his hair.

“I love you,” he murmurs.

She pulls away, grabbing his hand. They’re not doing this in the bathroom, and he gets it, grins at her. She has the sense to snag her shirt off the floor.

He closes the door to their room and locks it, and she presses up against him immediately, pulling at his shirt. His grin is infectious, and they strip off their clothes with greedy, groping hands, kissing and laughing and kissing. He lifts her up off the ground suddenly, and she squeals, hugs his shoulders.

“There’s so much I want to do with you,” he says, and they tumble onto the bed.

“Yeah?” She scoots back slightly towards the pillows.

“It was killing me all those months, when I couldn’t touch you anymore.” He comes after her, smoothing his hands up her thighs. “All I could think about was all the stuff we hadn’t gotten to do, all the stuff we’d never get to do.”

“We can do it now,” she says, and when he kisses her, she falls back against the bed, bringing him with her. 

He lowers his head and presses a kiss to her jaw, to her neck, to the top of her breast. “I’m gonna be so good to you, Maddie, I swear.” He nuzzles his nose against the swell of her breast, kisses her nipple.

She’s so stupidly in love with him.

“Can I go down on you?” He glances up.

She swallows. “Yeah.”

He pushes up and kisses her on the mouth again, murmurs that he loves her again, and she melts, combs her fingers in his hair when he works his way lower, kisses her belly, pushes her legs apart.

There isn’t a reason to be nervous when it’s Wally, just Wally, her Wally. 

His breath fans hotly between her legs, she clutches at his hair when a wave of want washes through her, and his tongue swirls against her.

She gasps.

He teases her, working her up with his lips and his tongue and his fingers, until she is desperate, until her hips are rocking into his face, and she is pleading with him.

“Wally, please."

She feels like she comes for hours when she comes at last.

She’s in a daze after, staring into space, and panting, shaking with little, lovely aftershocks of pleasure.

He’s smug.

She laughs a little at the look on his face.

He’s hard against her thigh, and she kisses him, snakes her hand in between their bodies to stroke him. “What do you want?” she asks.

“To be inside you?”

She squeezes him. “Condom?”

He blinks. “Ah, yeah. I mean, yeah! Of course, yeah.” He rolls off and starts to rummage in his suitcase, throwing a t-shirt into the air.

It makes her happy that he’d brought a condom because, well, it means he’s wanted this, too. And she knew that already, of course; he'd proved it pretty thoroughly just now. It still makes something in her heart turn over, the idea that he’d gone off sometime to grab a pack of condoms, hoping for right now to happen.

“Got it!”

She shifts up on her elbows. “I’m on birth control, but I figure it’s better safe than sorry, right?”

“Definitely.”

He clambers back onto the bed, tearing at the wrapper of the little foil package with his teeth, and he reminds her of a puppy in that moment, eager and energetic, excited.

“How do you want me?” he asks.

She feels shy suddenly. “On top again, if that’s okay?”

“If that’s okay,” he says.

She scrunches up her nose at him.

“Maddie, I’d wear a clown suit and fuck you on a unicycle if that’s what you wanted.”

“I do not want that,” she says. 

He grins, hikes her thighs up around his waist. 

She’s ready for him already, and when he pushes into her, she arches up, clutching at his back. 

He’s holding her gaze and she’s reminded of what he’d said before, how he thought they’d never get to do this again, and he must see the thought on her face because he leans in, kisses her sweetly. 

She isn’t sure when she loses the plot, 'til all she knows is the slide of him inside her over and over, his eyes on her, the way he hits that spot again and again and again.

She pleads with him. “Wally—”

“Yeah,” he pants. “Yeah, I know.” He slips a hand between them, touches his thumb to her clit.

She presses her head into the pillow. “Wally—”

“Fuck, you’re perfect. You feel so good, Mads, so good. You’re fucking perfect.”

She comes again.

He starts to lose his slow, steady rhythm after, and she watches him. His mouth is parted slightly, and his eyes are trained on the bouncing of her breasts, but when she clenches around him purposefully, his eyes fly to her face, and he groans, bucking into her wildly. 

“I love you,” she breathes.

He comes.

After, when they’ve cleaned up and dressed and they’re back in the bed, lights off, she snuggles into his side.

He'd pulled his boxers on again, but his chest is bare, and his skin is warm under her cheek. 

She's gonna fall asleep like this.

“Hey, Maddie?" He's toying with her hair.

She hums.

“You know how Marjorie is chomping at the bit to bankroll us?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Marjorie has made it clear that money isn’t an obstacle, that she’ll buy the ghosts anything they want, clothes and phones and cars, as if Marjorie wants to make up for years of missing Rhonda with money.

“Well, this morning, she was talking to Rhonda, and she brought up, like, our whole living situation. And she offered to buy Rhonda a house, and it didn’t even have to be in New York, like just name the place, she said. So, Rhonda, of course, said that’d actually be really great.”

“Okay . . .” She isn't sure where this is going.

“And me and Rhonda were talking after, and we thought maybe, I don’t know, a place in Chicago would be cool.”

“Are you serious?” she asks.

“Is that . . . not okay with you?” he says, a frown in his voice.

They need to talk about this stuff. They’ve been busy lately, yeah, and they have plenty of summer in front of them, but they can’t keep putting this off. They need to figure things out.

She’s just not sure she’s ready.

“No, it’s just . . .” She shifts to look at him. Her eyes have adjusted to the dark, and she can see the shape of his face now. She tries to find his gaze. “It’s just—”

He waits.

“You shouldn’t move to Chicago just because I’m there,” she says. 

“Oh.”

“You’ve got—you’ve got the whole world open to you now, and I love you, Wally, I love you so much, but you can—you can do anything now, go anywhere, be anyone, or—or be with anyone.”

It’s quiet.

“You deserve to live the life you want,” she says.

“What if what I want is . . . to move to Chicago to be close to you? Because, yeah, I’ve got some shit to figure out, and I have no idea where to start, except that I know that I want to be with you. Would it be so bad for us to go to Chicago . . . together?”

“I want to be with you, too,” she confesses.

“Yeah?” He reaches up and tucks her hair behind her ear, brushing his knuckles gently against her cheek.

“I just don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck with me.”

“Maddie, I’m never gonna feel that way.”

“We might not make it.” It feels wrong to say that right now, when she’s curled up on his chest, but it’s the truth. “We’re only eighteen, and we still have a lot of growing up to do, and chances are we’re not gonna stay together forever.”

“Maybe,” he says.

She wishes she could see him better, could see the look on his eyes, or the expression on his face.

“But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try.”

He’s right, and it’s such a Wally thing to say, honest and earnest. It’s not that he’s dismissing what she’s saying, that he’s telling her not to worry, or that they’ll be together forever. He’s just got hope for them, and of course he does, because he’s Wally, and that’s who he is.

“I want to try, Maddie.”

“Me, too,” she whispers, and she wipes at her cheek hastily, unsure why she’s crying over this.

“So, together in Chicago?”

She smiles. “If you’re okay with that, then, yeah, I’m okay with it, too.”

“Would you be okay with it if I said I wanted to be your boyfriend?”

She leans in, pressing a kiss to the corner of his lips.

“I’m gonna need to hear you say it.”

“You can be my boyfriend, Wally,” she says, a kind of stupid, childish giddiness swelling up inside her.

“Then I guess you can be my girlfriend,” he says, lofty.

“Gee, thanks.”

He flips them suddenly, rolling her under him, and she squeals in surprise, but he swallows the sound of her laughter with his mouth, kissing her soundly. 

He hugs her to his chest after, spooning her, and pressing a kiss to her hair.

She could get used to this.

—

She gets a call at two in the morning and groans, hides her face in Wally's back. But when she checks it after, she sees that it was Simon, and they haven’t talked in over a week. She stumbles down the stairs, leaving Wally sleeping soundly, and sits in the kitchen, calling him back.

“Hey, sorry, I didn’t think about how late it was, ” he says.  

“No worries,” she says.

“How are things? ”

“Quinn got her nose pierced yesterday.”

“That’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to you in New York City all week?”  

“She’s convinced that Rhonda and Marjorie are in love, despite the fact that we’re talking about an 18-year-old and an 80-year-old, and she is spiraling over it, which, admittedly, is kind of hilarious to watch.”

“Has anybody told Quinn that Rhonda is in love with her?”

“I think we need to start by having somebody tell Rhonda that Rhonda is in love with her,” Maddie says.

“That’ll be a fun conversation.”

“How’s California?”

He tells her that camping with Xavier is literally the worst, that a couple of days ago, he caught Xavier trying to use poison ivy leaves as kindling, and the idea of that happening again is going to haunt his nightmares for years to come, and that he is convinced that Xavier is trying to kill him.

“What would even happen if you burned poison ivy leaves?” she asks.

“Suffering. That’s what would happen, Maddie. Suffering. ”

She smiles. She always rolls her eyes at him when he says she needs to get an iphone so they can Facetime, but she kind of gets it right now, when she’s wishing she could see his face. She misses him.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“No. ”

“Are you still mad at me?”

There’s a pause.

She rubs her fingers against a water stain on the table.

“I was never mad at you.”

“Liar.”

“I was frustrated with you.”

“I couldn’t tell you what I was planning. But, I swear, lying to you—it was one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done, and I hated it; I still hate it, that I did that, that I hurt you. I just couldn’t tell you what I was gonna do.”

He sighs.

“You would have stopped me.”

“I get it, ” he says.

“Really?” Because things have been weird with them ever since. A lot's been going on, so she's tried to chalk the weirdness up to that, but she's scared. This weird, lingering tension between them can't spell their ending, not after everything they've been through.

“I didn’t want things to change. Between us, I mean. I didn’t want anyone messing us up. And, honestly, this is kind of awful to admit, but I think—I think maybe there was a part of me that wanted you to forget about the ghosts because I wanted things to go back to the way they were before them, when it was just us against the world. I was comfortable like that, and the idea of things being different, it scared me.”

“Si,” she says, soft.

“You and me, we did okay when it was just us.”

“Better than okay,” she says.

“But it’s not just us against the world anymore, and that’s okay, too.”

“You’re always gonna be my best friend,” she tells him.

“What about when I murder Xavier?”

“I’ll bring the shovel,” she says.

—

She is supposed to be packing up the last of her stuff that afternoon, since she’s leaving for Northwestern early in the morning, but she isn’t going to need a whole, entire afternoon to pack a couple of boxes.

She enters through the doors by the library.

It’s quiet.

She wanders the hallways. The floors have been freshly waxed, and the school smells overwhelmingly of cleaning products. She glances into the gym, wanders up the stairs, checks in a couple of classrooms.

Nothing.

“Hello, Maddie,” Mr. Martin says, smiling.

She stiffens. 

She wants to talk to him, but that stupid, condescending smile is like a punch to the face, reminding her that she really does not like this man, and she needs a second to get it together.

“You’re still here,” she says.

“I was hoping I’d be able to talk to you.”

“Really?”

“I wanted to say thank you. I was . . . a coward for a long, long time, and it wasn’t until you were here and you gave me the push I needed that I was able to—to do better, to be better. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you.”

“So you’re okay with being stuck here?” she asks.

He had the chance to run off in Mr. Anderson’s body and live again, and he chose not to.

She doesn’t know if that’s what did it, if his decision not to steal a body was what saved Wally and the others, or if it was Mr. Anderson’s decision to let him steal the body, and she doesn’t really care at this point, but it’s clear, regardless, that he made a sacrifice.

He could have abandoned all of them, kept Mr. Anderson’s body, and lived a long, full life, but he didn’t.

She can’t help but wonder if he regrets it now. There’s a lot of reasons the others have stayed far, far away from the school, and Mr. Martin is one of them. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was scheming to use them somehow.

“Actually, I’m able to move on now,” he says.

“Seriously?”

“My scar is a completely changed place, quiet and peaceful. I couldn’t believe it at first. And there’s a door with this lovely golden light, calling to me.” He shrugs his shoulders. “It’s really quiet beautiful.”

“Why haven’t you gone through it yet?”

“I’ve got a few more kids who need my help,” he says.

“Mina?”

He nods.

“What about Jerry, Brandy, and Kayla?”

“They’ve moved on already,” he says, as pleased as punch. “They struggled at first. And it took a couple of months, but they just needed a bit of help. They’re at peace now.”

She nods.

He could have helped them move on decades ago if he’d wanted to, only he had done the opposite. She'd talked through everything with her dad, and according to him, most ghosts don't linger for more than a couple of years at most before they make peace with things, and those who do are choosing to, so there's no doubt in her mind that Mr. Martin was keeping all of his students with him. He knew how to help them move on, and he used that knowledge to trap them.

“I’m gonna go,” she says.

She’s glad he did what he did. She got to meet Wally and Rhonda and Charley because of him, and she gets to have them in her life now—for the rest of her life, too—because of him. She’s glad that he trapped them with him,as crazy as that sounds to say. It’s the truth. She’s glad he did what he did.

Still.

She’s got boxes to pack.

“Goodbye, Mr. Martin.”

He smiles.

Outside, she stops in the green, grassy stretch in front of the school, and turns, looks at the school.

She had kind of been hoping she’d see them, but she had known the chances were slim.

They don’t like being seen.

She opens the bag she’d brought with her. 

She’d gone to the cutesy, old-fashioned candy store downtown for this stuff, peppermint sticks and molasses pulls and lemon drops, all the stuff that kids way back when might’ve wanted, and she’d spent way more money than she should’ve. 

She scatters it all in the grass.

Her car is parked on the street outside the grounds of the school. 

Wally is waiting for her, listening to the radio, and singing along softly, drumming his hands on the dashboard.

She climbs in and leans over immediately to kiss him, interrupting his greeting. “You wanna get out of here?” she asks, amused at the way he blinks in surprise. She touches his chin, brushing a smudge of her chapstick off the corner of his mouth, and raises her eyebrows at him.

“Let’s blow this popsicle stand,” he says.

She tosses her key to the school out the window.

Fin.

—

Yeah, it's a long way

I'd cross the world, it’s true

No ocean keeps me from you

Won't let your heart break

I'm gonna see this through

No ocean keeps me from you