Invisible Ghosts

by Robyn Schneider

  Maybe it would have been different if Logan had died of something that’s supposed to kill you, like cancer or a car accident. Or maybe it was because I’d been the one to find his body. But somehow, I’d become tainted by association. That first day back, no one asked me about my summer. They were too busy whispering about it instead.

  I didn’t know how to be a spectacle. And I didn’t know how to be an only child. After we finished sitting shiva, my parents never cried in front of me, but I’d hear their shower running at odd hours, and I pretended not to notice when dinner was late or laundry went forgotten. The landmarks we’d used to navigate our lives had vanished without warning. And somehow, we were expected to find new ones.

  You mourn and then you move on in the Jewish faith, but it’s harder than it sounds to let go of someone so easily. As the months ticked by, I watched my parents gather up their pieces and glue themselves back together. I watched as they got dressed, went back to work, and, at the urging of the family therapist, joined a gym.

  When September rolled around, Logan had been gone for nearly three months, and I was the only Asher who was still lost. The only one without a new landmark.

  And on that first day of seventh grade, when I came home to an empty house, it occurred to me that I might never find one.

  What I wanted were my old landmarks back. I wanted Mom to wave up at my window from the backyard on Sunday mornings, when she sat in the sunshine doing the crossword puzzle. I wanted Logan to come back from sci-fi club the way he used to, all keyed up and doing goofy impressions. I wanted Dad to make a big production over the arrival of a Netflix DVD, going around the dinner table and making us guess the movie.

  Except I didn’t have any of that. What I had were whispered rumors about how I’d found my brother’s body, and too much math homework, and no idea where to sit at lunch.

  So I put my head down on the kitchen table and started to cry. And then, impossibly, Logan was there, asking if I wanted to marathon our favorite show.

  I didn’t question it. I didn’t even think it was weird that he was kind of see-through. I’d just burst out laughing at the hole in his sock, and he’d told me to shut up about it, and it was the first normal thing that had happened in a long time. So I’d wiped away my tears and turned on the TV. It became our routine. And it became my secret, since no one else could see him.

  Sometimes, when we were hanging out in the living room, Mom would walk right past him without even realizing. Logan would frown and go sullen, and I’d pretend everything was fine. Which was hard at first, but not as hard as if I’d been sitting on the sofa alone.

  I read somewhere that ghosts come back for a reason, and since Logan’s probably wasn’t to rewatch episodes of Doctor Who, I guessed he came back because of me. Because Mom and Dad had told us to look out for each other. And no matter how many times I figured it, I always arrived at the same conclusion: that looking out for a ghost was much better than having to let go of my brother.

  3

  MY PARENTS AND I ate dinner in a parallel universe, where everyone except me was having a normal day. And I could usually play along, but that night, I was having trouble.

  It was Logan’s fault. He’d faded away after less than an hour, when I’d been looking forward to an entire afternoon. And while Dad’s attention was elsewhere—he kept sneakily checking the baseball score on his phone—Mom definitely sensed something was up.

  “Sweetie, is everything okay?” she asked, frowning at me over her salad.

  She was still wearing her scrubs. Purple with white piping, to match her nail wraps. I don’t know why she bothers, since she has to wear gloves. But if there’s any way to glam up a dentist’s uniform, you can bet my mom has found it.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, wondering what had betrayed me. “Just tired.”

  I took a huge bite of salad and attempted to look cheerful, but I probably just looked like one of those bizarre stock photos.

  Thankfully, Mom’s cell phone rang, sparing me. She dug it out of her pocket and sighed.

  “It’s work,” she apologized, already pushing back her chair.

  As she disappeared upstairs, I could hear her asking, “Which patient? No, we ordered those X-rays this afternoon.”

  This happened a lot. You’d think there was no such thing as a dental emergency, but you’d be wrong. The moment Mom was out of range, Dad immediately went for the remote. He flicked on the ball game and lowered the volume, like that made it more polite.

  “Our little secret,” he said, winking at me from behind his accidentally hip glasses. He had about five different pairs, since he was an optometrist, but these were the ones I liked best. They were horn rimmed and retro and made him look like a character from an old spy movie.

  We sat there watching a slow-motion recap of the last play. Dad glanced at me every so often, smiling like we were coconspirators. He was like that, my dad. Always made you feel like you were getting away with some big heist, even if you were just taking double samples at Costco.

  Mom came back downstairs, and Dad fumbled to turn off the TV but didn’t make it in time.

  “Roger,” she scolded.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “It’s the end of the game.”

  He flashed a smile, trying to charm his way out of it. Mom sighed, instantly defeated.

  “That’s no excuse,” she said, softening. “We’re having a family dinner.”

  I waited for the wrongness of that statement to land, but it never did. Because this was family dinner now. On days when Logan was around, it was hard for me to remember how things were for everyone else. It had only been a few hours since I’d last seen him, but for my parents, it had been more than four years.

  “Everything okay at work?” Dad asked, trying to get back into her good graces.

  “Fine, fine,” Mom said, even though it clearly wasn’t. “The new computer system keeps freezing and—”

  “Take a deep breath, honey,” my dad told her. “It’s just your job that’s causing you stress, not your life.”

  She nodded and actually took a couple of deep breaths, centering herself or something.

  That was the other alternate-universe thing about my parents. After Logan died, they’d become obsessed with self-help books. An obsession that showed no sign of ending. A few weeks ago, Mom had told me to fold my socks vertically, because it would give me joy, and I’d thought she was joking.

  “So, Rose,” Dad said excitedly, “how was your first day?”

  I rolled my eyes over his enthusiasm, but my parents looked so hopeful that I knew I couldn’t disappoint. So I told them about the disaster of Kate’s backpack.

  I made it funny, rather than sad, stretching out the situation at lunch until it was practically a comedy routine. Dad laughed at my overhead-compartment line, and Mom grinned at my impression of Delia’s displeasure. And then, I don’t know why I said it, but I told my parents that Jamie had moved back.

  “Really?” Mom looked surprised.

  “He showed up in my drama class this afternoon.”

  Mom frowned. “I thought Angela liked living in Palo Alto—”

  “Actually,” my dad interrupted, “her husband got transferred to Shanghai for his job at—some bank, I think.”

  Mom and I both stared at him, wondering where this information had come from.

  “Tom Aldridge came by the shop to pick up his new frames today.” Dad shrugged. “Said Jamie’s living with him down in University Village.”

  Mom shook her head, murmuring that it had to be tough on all of them. She turned to me, suddenly inspired.

  “You should make sure he doesn’t have trouble settling in,” she said.

  “I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” I said dryly, remembering how easily Sam and Claudia had reclaimed him.

  “Just try, Rose,” Mom insisted, mistaking my contempt for disinterest. “You adored each other when you were kids. Remember the Egypt books?”

  In c
ase I did not, in fact, remember the Egypt books, my dad helpfully reminded me how Jamie and I had both gotten obsessed with ancient Egypt at the same time. Except he’d beat me to the library and had checked out all the books. We got locked into a full-on war over interlibrary loan until Mom decided enough was enough and marched over to his house to make him share.

  “Oh my god, we were eight,” I said.

  “And you were the cutest Cleopatra and King Tut that Halloween.” Dad grinned.

  “By accident!” I said, but it was no use.

  My parents were smiling at each other across the kitchen table, having one of those silent conversations about me like they thought I couldn’t tell. Like they thought we lived in the same universe.

  By some miracle, I’d convinced them that I was normal and well-adjusted. And maybe I was, on paper: I had a group of friends, and an extracurricular activity, and a place on the honor roll. No one knew the truth—that I spent my afternoons with a ghost, who was either a figment of my imagination or a supernatural condolence card from the great beyond.

  “I bet I have a photo of you two somewhere,” my dad teased.

  “Honey,” Mom said, her voice low with warning. “I don’t think we really need to go through the old albums.”

  I stabbed at my chicken, wishing we didn’t have to tiptoe around so many fragile things, but mostly wishing I knew what to say to fix dinner.

  Logan would have known. He would have done some spot-on impression or turned his napkin into a costume or found a weird gif on his phone to show around until we were all laughing.

  As for me, I just sat there chewing.

  Because only child was a role I’d never auditioned for. A role that was never meant to be in the script. I felt so guilty, and so exhausted, trying to be enough for all of us and constantly falling short. It wasn’t easy filling the empty seat at the table along with my own.

  And maybe I had been Cleopatra once, but I wasn’t anymore. I was a broken potsherd in someone else’s funerary urn, and the girl my parents thought I was—the girl Jamie had been looking for across Gardner’s classroom—didn’t exist.

  4

  OF COURSE JAMIE sat with our old friends at lunch the next day. And of course it was the topic of conversation at my table.

  It’s hard to explain, but Sam’s crowd wasn’t just some collection of popular kids. They weren’t even the only theater group in our year. There were other offshoots—the musical-theater kids, the student filmmakers, the boys who made terrible sketches for their YouTube channel—but something about Sam’s crowd was magnetic. You’d find yourself watching while they waited in line at a vending machine or opened a locker, drawn to them without quite knowing why.

  I’d lost my own charisma that summer before seventh grade. Maybe it had been redistributed among the group the moment I left, making them shine even brighter. Or maybe I’d only lit up in the reflection of everyone else, the way the moon becomes visible when it crosses the path of the sun.

  But Jamie’s glow was intact. And it definitely wasn’t a reflection. There was something half-remembered about him, and that made him even more interesting.

  “I still can’t believe that’s Jamie Aldridge,” Kate said, staring shamelessly. “I wonder why he moved back.”

  I looked down at my bagel, not quite daring to chime in. And then Delia leaned forward, lowering her voice to an excited whisper like she knew everything.

  “Well I heard he had to move back,” she said, “because he got kicked out of art school for turning in a portfolio of nudes.”

  I didn’t mean to snort, but it slipped out.

  “What?” Delia demanded.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled.

  “God, I’m just saying what I heard.” Delia narrowed her eyes. “You don’t have to be so savage.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Forget it.”

  Except that was the problem with Delia. She wouldn’t forget it. I hunched forward, trying to make myself smaller, as though that would undo the damage.

  “I bet he starts dating some popular girl in, like, five seconds,” Emmy said with her mouth full of pasta. “He’s really cute.”

  “Isn’t he, like, half Chinese or something?” Kate asked, frowning.

  “I can kind of see it,” Delia said.

  “If he’s Asian, how come his last name is Aldridge?” Emmy countered.

  “His mom’s Filipino,” I explained, and then wished I hadn’t.

  Nothing good ever came from talking around my friends. If anything, it just gave them more ammunition to use against me. And sure enough, Delia’s claws were out, and waiting to swipe.

  “Wow, Rose, obsessed much?” she purred, sipping her juice.

  “Well, we used to be . . .” Friends, I’d almost said.

  “ . . . neighbors,” I finished. “About a million years ago.”

  I don’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to say it. That, a long ago, we used to be friends. Not just Jamie and me, but Sam and Claudia and Nima and Max. That, once upon a time, I’d had real friends, instead of just belonging to a friend group. Except it turned out they all had their own orbits, and without their gravitational pull, I was just drifting uselessly in space.

  I HAD AP Art History after lunch, which I was actually looking forward to. I’d signed up in secret after my friends had decided to take sociology. When we’d compared schedules over the summer, they’d freaked. I’d claimed that sociology must have filled up, except that wasn’t the truth.

  The truth was, I wanted some space. And I liked the idea of becoming someone who could walk through a museum one day and know what I was seeing, and why it was so important.

  I took a seat toward the back and glanced around the room, curious who had signed up. I recognized a few people, like Maritza Fernandez and Adam Kwong, the power couple of the Mock Trial crowd. And, annoyingly, Preston Rice. He was a senior, and president of the Anime Guild, and I only knew this because he’d asked me to prom out of nowhere last spring. I was on my way to a French test, and all of a sudden this total stranger was shoving a wilted carnation in my face during the passing bell. I probably could have been nicer about saying no, but I was frantically conjugating the imparfait in my head.

  Preston stiffened when he saw me, then took out his phone and started typing. A few seconds later, the curly-haired kid next to him also took out his phone, shooting me a look. It wasn’t hard to guess what they were texting about.

  I brought my phone out too, trying to look busy, even though I was just scrolling Instagram, which is probably the opposite of art history. The wall clock changed from 12:29 to 12:30, and then the door opened one last time.

  It was Jamie. He was draining a can of Coke. His head was tipped way back, and he looked so relaxed, like he hadn’t almost been late to class. Like being a new old student was the easiest thing in the world.

  Yesterday’s cuffed jeans and dad shoes were gone. Instead, he had on the same Adidas everyone owned and a plain black tee. He was one of those people, I noticed, who wore a T-shirt like it was an Olympic sport.

  He took a seat by the door, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. The seat in front of mine was empty, and I’d hoped he wouldn’t choose it.

  The bell rang, and Mr. Ferrara shuffled some papers around on his desk. He was older, with graying hair and a funny little bow tie that I couldn’t tell if he meant to be ironic. He mostly taught senior history, so I’d never had him before.

  “Excellent,” he said, surveying the room. “Looks like I can skip the lecture about not coming in late from lunch.”

  He was holding a sheet of paper with squares on it, and my stomach dropped as I realized what it was. Please, I hoped, not alphabetical order. Not alphabetical order.

  “The dreaded seating chart,” Mr. Ferrara joked. “Don’t worry, I’ll learn your names by the final exam. But until then: Jamie Aldridge, front and center.”

  I closed my eyes, as though that would help. But the shots had alr
eady been fired, and there was nothing to do but triage.

  “Next victims: Rose Asher, Michelle Avery, Jacob Bell . . .” It was like a cosmic joke. Except the joke was on me, because I was the one who’d signed up for art history.

  I grabbed my bag and moved to the front row, even though I would have given anything to stay where I was, sandwiched between a girl in a color-guard uniform and a boy who was quietly Googling his math homework.

  Jamie and I arrived at the same time, and he stepped back to let me sit first.

  “Hey there, stranger,” he said, smiling.

  He had a great smile, unfortunately. One dimple on the right side, like a punctuation mark. I stared at him, wondering if he knew about Logan, until I realized I’d let the silence stretch on a little too long.

  “You came back,” I said. It sounded awkward and charmless, and Jamie’s smile faltered a little as he sat down.

  “Well, yeah, I couldn’t let you have the monopoly on the best library books forever,” he joked.

  I shrugged. It was uncomfortable, being on the spot like this. He was staring at me like he’d been dying of thirst, and now he was drinking me in.

  “So what’s the excuse?” he went on, plugging the silence. “French Club? Mock Trial?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.

  “Just trying to figure out where you disappeared to,” he explained, still smiling.

  I wished he wouldn’t do that—try to make sense of me. Anyway, he was wrong about my departure from our old group: It wasn’t because I’d chosen a new destination. It was because I’d used an emergency exit.

  Jamie’s eyes danced, as though he’d thought of an amazing joke and couldn’t wait to tell me.

  “Can I guess?” he asked.

  Before he could, a shadow fell across our desks.