Invisible Ghosts

by Robyn Schneider

  I climbed into the back, and Claudia sat up front.

  “Didn’t we used to carpool in this thing?” I asked.

  “We still do,” Claudia said. “Just without parents.”

  She fiddled with the radio hookup, plugging in her phone. The opening bars of a Hamilton song spilled through the speakers, and Sam groaned, theatrically banging his head against the back of his seat.

  “Not this,” he moaned. “Not again.”

  “I’ll make you like it,” Claudia insisted.

  Sam made a face at her. But his protest was only for show, because he turned up the volume and sang along with us until he pulled into my driveway.

  I was still singing when I opened the front door.

  “Who’s Alexander Hamilton?” Logan asked. He was slouched on the sofa, glaring at me.

  “Oh, um. One of America’s founding fathers?” I said.

  “Whatever,” Logan said. “I thought you were going to come home after school. Both of you.”

  “Sorry.” I dropped my bag onto the bench. “A bunch of us went to Billz.”

  Logan stared at me accusingly.

  “I thought you said you were never going back there.”

  “Things changed,” I explained.

  “You mean Jamie,” Logan said. “Jamie with his own car and his awesome, cool friends.”

  It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t even try to answer it.

  “Whatever,” Logan snapped. “Go out with your new friends to your favorite coffee shop and leave me here all afternoon with nothing to do. I don’t care.”

  But he clearly did, because the front door slammed shut behind me. Logan flew upward, his arms folded, his mouth set in a thin, angry line. He was a storm of resentment, all temper and gloom. And I had half a notion of what he was planning.

  “Don’t you dare!” I warned.

  “Oops,” Logan said, dripping sarcasm. And then, with surprising force, he rocketed through the ceiling.

  Somewhere deep in the walls, the pipes gurgled ominously.

  THANKS TO LOGAN’S temper tantrum, our plumbing was erratic over the next few days. My bathroom sink kept whistling like a teakettle, and on more than one occasion, I heard my mom swear from the shower. My dad got out his toolbox, insisting he could fix it himself. But all he succeeded in doing was messing up the water pressure and forcing my mom to call in a professional.

  While my mom hovered over the handyman, I spent the weekend agonizing over where to sit at lunch on Monday. But it turned out I didn’t need to worry, because I’d forgotten Darren was in my French class.

  “Hey, Rose,” he said, leaning across the aisle when the bell rang. “Want to do Swap-Tarts?”

  I told him I had no idea what that was, and he grinned.

  “Claudia made it up,” he said, and explained that all you did was get a packet of Pop-Tarts from the vending machine. Except you needed another person to get a different flavor so you could trade. That way you wound up with one of each.

  It was actually a pretty genius idea.

  “Okay,” I said, “but I hate the cinnamon ones.”

  “Yeah, those are gross.” Darren made a face. “Like if someone’s car accidentally ran over a Cinnabon.”

  I laughed.

  “I bet that’s how the flavor got invented,” I said. “Some poor taste engineer had a really bad morning on his way into the office.”

  Darren let out a surprisingly high-pitched giggle at that one. I glanced over at him, with his oversized denim jacket and black skinny jeans. His hipster art-kid vibe was a total contrast to Max’s old-man cardigans and fifties haircut. The two of them were perfectly mismatched, personalities included.

  It was strange to realize he’d been there all along, just across the aisle, my partner in eye-rolling. I’d overlooked him, somehow, because he was quiet and used our advisement period to study. Because I hadn’t known him very well before I left the group. And I had a feeling he’d done the same thing to me.

  “Ooh, are you guys doing Swap-Tarts?” Claudia asked when we got to the table.

  “That isn’t a thing,” Sam complained.

  “Shut up, yes it is,” Claudia said, throwing a piece of her sandwich crust at him. “You’re just mad because I came up with a cleverer name for it than you.”

  Sam picked up the piece of sandwich crust and ate it.

  “If I make you really mad, will you throw the whole sandwich at me?” he asked hopefully.

  Jamie arrived at our spot then, looking thrilled when he saw me.

  “Hey there, Cleo,” he said. “What’s for lunch?”

  “Sarcasm, apparently. And squabbling,” I said, nodding at Sam and Claudia.

  Jamie laughed.

  “Ignore them, they just want an audience,” he told me.

  “We do not,” Sam protested.

  “Correction: you want a full house, standing room only.” Jamie’s grin stretched wider, and this time, the sandwich crust was thrown in his direction.

  Some music started up over by the SGA building, where a group of kids in neon orange shirts were setting up a spirit wheel, and everyone sighed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He could have run for anything,” Max said, rolling his eyes. “But it had to be the spirit committee.”

  “What’s wrong with the spirit committee?” Jamie asked, frowning.

  There was a collective snort. And then Sam explained, filling Jamie in on how our school’s cheer team was an actual competitive sport and refused to waste their time selling dance tickets or taking orders for class sweatshirts. Which meant that kind of drudgery fell to the student government association. Specifically, to the spirit committee.

  It was a thankless job, and no one particularly wanted it. Last year, we’d had Meghan Watts as our spirit chair. Meghan, who had a huge Kate Middleton obsession, had cheerfully attempted to murder us with charity teas and croquet lawn parties. It was so dire that Nima had stepped in to make sure she didn’t run unopposed.

  “It was a noble but very annoying sacrifice,” Max added.

  “So now we’re stuck having to step up our class spirit out of support.” Sam sighed. “Which means we’re going over there. To spin that stupid prize wheel and win a class keychain.”

  “Go Juniors,” Claudia said, sounding completely bored. She stood up, brushing grass off her dress. “Shall we get it over with?”

  Everyone agreed that, yeah, it was probably best. And so I found myself crossing the quad with the five of them, heading toward the same spirit wheel that I’d avoided almost two weeks earlier.

  I could feel our classmates’ eyes watching, questioning why I was there. At least Jamie was an unknown quantity, but I wasn’t any puzzle worth solving: I’d already proven myself to be insignificant. Nima was thrilled when we came over.

  Rescue me, he pleaded silently.

  Sam pushed up his sleeves and swaggered over to the SGA booth, acting like it was the cool thing to do, instead of something corny and vaguely embarrassing. He spun the spirit wheel with aplomb.

  “A keychain!” he exclaimed loudly, overselling it. “Just what I’ve always wanted!”

  Max snorted. Jamie looked like he didn’t know whether to roll his eyes or laugh. Darren gave a halfhearted cheer, laughing at his own ridiculousness halfway through.

  But it worked, because, before long, there was a line of students waiting to spin the wheel.

  Nima mouthed a thank-you.

  “These are the memories we’ll treasure forever,” Max said dryly, as Kayla Ashby enthusiastically bounced over to spin the spirit wheel, her dress riding up to reveal a significant flash of butt cheek.

  “And the moments nightmares are made of,” Darren added.

  “Maybe for you,” Sam said. “But I’ll sleep well tonight, knowing I did my part in making this school a greater place.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that sarcasm is a crutch, not a cure?” Jamie asked.

  Everyone cracked up except for Sa
m, who shot us a mutinous glare.

  “Unfunny,” he grumbled.

  I glanced across the quad, toward the math building. Delia, Kate, and Emmy were there, at the table under the overhang, staring back at me. And I wasn’t sure who I recognized less: them, or myself.

  12

  I SAT WITH Sam’s crowd for the rest of the week, although I made excuses about hanging out with them after school. I felt bad for ditching Logan, and I wanted to make it up to him. He finally turned up on Wednesday afternoon, acting as though our squabble had never happened.

  “We should have a Buffy marathon,” he announced while I toasted bread for a sandwich. “Season three.”

  And I agreed, since I was so relieved to see him. Except I’d forgotten what season three was about—in it, Buffy struggles to accept her fate as a vampire slayer after a new slayer comes to town.

  By Friday evening, we’d made it to the part where the new slayer turned out to be kind of evil when my dad came home, carrying bags of Chinese takeout.

  “Rose, quick,” he said. “Set the table with chopsticks and hide all the forks.”

  “Not again,” I groaned.

  Dad was on an endless quest to force Mom to use chopsticks, and her resistance was impressive. She was of the “ask for a fork when we sit down” camp at Jade Palace. And no dirty looks we sent her direction could shame her out of doing it.

  Unfortunately, the restaurant knew our order, so they’d added plastic utensils to the bag. Which only proves that the more you try to change someone against their will, the more the universe helps them resist.

  LOGAN TURNED UP again the next morning, climbing expectantly onto the sofa and chanting, “Episode ten, episode ten,” until I sat down next to him and turned on the TV.

  Dad was out hiking with some nature group he’d joined, but Mom, who was hanging around in her yoga pants and working her way through the pile up of laundry, kept popping in to check on me. I could tell she thought I was fifty shades of pathetic for spending Saturday on the couch. But I couldn’t exactly point to Logan, who was sprawled next to me, as an excuse.

  “Get dressed,” she said, somewhere around episode thirteen. “We’re having a girls’ day.”

  I glanced up at her. She looked so hopeful and so eager to spend time with me that I couldn’t say no.

  “Give me, like, ten minutes,” I said.

  I reached to switch off the TV, and Logan glared at me.

  “I was watching that!” he complained, and I shrugged. I couldn’t leave it on. And I couldn’t exactly refuse to go with Mom. Logan knew that, just like he knew that our parents couldn’t suspect there was anything going on with me.

  For years, I’d been terrified that they’d send me back to the family therapist and she’d figure out I was seeing my brother’s ghost. I imagined her trotting out some long clinical term for it, and off I’d go, down a white, astringent corridor, toward a room where I wasn’t allowed to wear shoelaces or blow-dry my hair.

  It didn’t matter that Logan’s ghost was real. If anything, that only made it worse, because at least mental illnesses can be managed and treated. I wasn’t so sure about paranormal abilities.

  So I twisted my hair into a side braid, threw on what I’d worn to school yesterday, and pretended to be psyched for an afternoon with Mom.

  She drove us over to Plaza Island, where we got milk shakes from the fancy gelato place and watched the koi swim around in their huge pond.

  “I always wanted koi,” Mom said wistfully.

  “Where would we put them?” I asked, trying to picture owning a fleet of puppy-sized fish.

  “I know.” Mom bit her straw. “We’d have to take out most of the grass in the backyard. Which we should do anyway, because of the drought. But I’d get so worried about wild animals eating them.”

  She seemed defeated when she said that. As though the stress of potentially losing a pet made it too risky to consider getting one. When Logan’s guinea pig had died a few years back, it had practically given Mom hysterics.

  “You could get them a cover,” I suggested. “Raccoon-proof and everything.”

  “Maybe,” Mom said, but I could tell she’d made up her mind already. “Come on, let’s see if there’s anything good in Sephora.”

  We poked around for a while, testing out makeup until our hands and lips were so stained that we couldn’t even tell if we liked the colors.

  “This is nice,” Mom said as we waited in line to pay for some lip crayons.

  “The nicest line I’ve waited in,” I joked, fiddling with a travel-sized perfume.

  “I mean it,” she insisted. “I feel like we’re all so caught up in our own things, we never just spend time together.”

  “If only we liked baseball more,” I said.

  She laughed darkly.

  “If only your father liked it a little less.”

  And then she treated me to the lip crayon and let me cash out all her points on samples from behind the glass case, like we were getting prizes in an arcade.

  “Shoes?” Mom asked, smiling mischievously.

  “We already did back-to-school shopping,” I reminded her.

  “There’s no harm in looking,” she said, and then fell silent for a second, staring at me. “I can’t believe how fast you’re growing up. I better get in all of my Rose time before you’re off at college.”

  “Mom,” I said. “That’s, like, a million years away.”

  Except it wasn’t. All of a sudden, high school wasn’t about high school anymore. It was about The Future, and being prepared for it, like college was an incoming storm, and we needed to sandbag the roads.

  Max had finished a PSAT prep course. Jamie was already taking college classes. Meanwhile, I was terrified to think what my options were: live at home and attend notoriously shitty CSU Laguna or move away and abandon Logan.

  “Okaaayyyy,” Mom said. “I get it. I’m embarrassing you with all of this growing-up talk.”

  “I’m humiliated,” I deadpanned. “The only way to make it up to me is a new pair of boots.”

  “Nice try. And we’re browsing, not buying,” Mom reminded me, holding open the glass door to Bloomingdale’s.

  I followed her inside. Since there was a sale going on, the store was crowded. I poked around a display of ankle boots that were sold out in most sizes and watched as Mom perused a selection of practical work shoes with a fierce intensity.

  “These?” she asked, holding up a silver clog.

  I made a face.

  “Very Ziggy Stardust,” someone said.

  I turned around, and there was Claudia, wearing a floppy hat and one of those floaty bohemian dresses that I could never pull off. Meanwhile, I was in the same thing I’d worn to school yesterday, plus a ridiculous amount of sample makeup.

  “Hey, Rose. Hi, Mrs. Asher,” Claudia said. And my mom, who hadn’t seen Claudia in ages, lit up.

  “Claudiaaaa,” a little girl whined, looking up from a video game console. She was about six, and was wearing a pink tutu with a Wonder Woman T-shirt. A miniature version of Claudia, with the same brown skin and ridiculously long eyelashes. She was nothing like the screeching toddler I remembered who used to fling Cheerios at me in the carpool.

  “We’re getting ice cream in a minute, I promise,” Claudia said, unfazed.

  “Is that Sophia?” my mom said. “She’s so grown up!”

  Sophia had gone back to her game, making it clear she was on strike until she got ice cream. My mom exclaimed some more over how big Sophia had gotten and then started asking Claudia a million questions about school.

  I’d forgotten how nosy my mom could be, and I felt my cheeks heat up with embarrassment. Did she really need to know what level math class Claudia was taking, and if she’d also found the first precalc exam challenging? Claudia, thank god, took it all in stride, chatting politely.

  “Mom,” I whispered.

  But my mom just flapped her hand at me like I was interrupting her while she was
on the phone.

  “Claudiaaa,” Sophia whined, looking up from her video game. “You said we could have ice cream. You promised.”

  “We will. After you finish that level,” Claudia said. Then, as an afterthought, she added, “Oh, Rose, did Jamie ask you to that new Wes Anderson movie tonight?”

  “Um, no,” I said, wondering why she would think that.

  “Hmmm.” Claudia chewed her lip. “He said he would. A bunch of us are going.”

  “What time?” I asked.

  “Sam and I got our tickets this morning, and it was almost sold out,” Claudia said, making it sound like an apology.

  “That’s okay.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I meant the fact that Jamie hadn’t asked me, or that I wouldn’t have been able to get a ticket anyway.

  “Done!” Sophia interrupted. “Now can we go?”

  “I think I better get this munchkin some ice cream,” Claudia said, rolling her eyes. “See you.”

  The moment they were gone, my mom turned toward me, eyebrows raised, not saying a word.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Is that why you were hanging around the house? Because you were waiting for a boy to call?”

  I almost burst out laughing at her theory. I mean, had she forgotten about texting? But it was also a convenient excuse for any future afternoons I might spend seemingly alone on the sofa watching Netflix.

  “Maybe,” I lied.

  Mom lit up, pleased that she’d solved it. Or maybe just happy to have an explanation that didn’t point to my being an antisocial couch potato.

  “Let’s pick up a pizza on the way home,” she said. “Giordano’s, I think.”

  “Okay,” I said, confused why she was offering me pizza instead of giving me the third degree about Jamie. “Should I call it in?”

  Giordano’s took forever if you didn’t call in your order. But Mom shook her head.

  “Don’t bother,” she said triumphantly. “You can catch me up on everything while we wait.”

  IT WASN’T UNTIL late that night that I saw the messages. Nine of them, sent via Facebook Messenger, of all things. It turned out Jamie had invited me to the movie. He’d even offered to get my ticket before they sold out.