Invisible Ghosts

by Robyn Schneider

  I stared at the stack of unanswered messages, feeling horrible.

  And then I typed back a response: Omg. No one uses this app. No one. Unless you’re secretly a dad?

  The reply came immediately: Such a dad.

  Just saw your messages this second, I wrote. Was your popcorn very lonely?

  The loneliest popcorn in the movie theater.

  I snorted when I read that. And then I messaged him my phone number, because the ridiculous app kept trying to get me to send a sticker of a weird cartoon dog.

  “Facebook. Messenger,” I told him, picking up on the first ring.

  “In retrospect, not my finest idea,” he said. “Everyone used it at my old school. Our teachers figured out how to block literally everything else. I swear to god, there were cell service dampeners hidden in our clock tower.”

  “You had a clock tower,” I told him, “which leads me to believe that your old school was like Hogwarts.”

  Jamie laughed.

  “You’ve figured it out. I’m secretly a wizard.”

  “Knew it,” I teased. “It’s the glasses. They give you away.”

  I climbed into bed, snuggling under the covers with my phone and trying to imagine Jamie in his room, wearing his pajamas. Or maybe just his boxers.

  “Sorry about the movie, by the way,” Jamie said. “No one had your number, so I said I’d handle it. But apparently not.”

  “Hey look, you failed at something,” I teased.

  “The world may never be the same,” Jamie said. His mouth sounded full.

  “What are you eating?” I asked.

  “Ugh, you can tell?” he asked. “It’s pad thai. Again. Because it turns out my dad doesn’t cook. Meanwhile, I bet you got a delicious homemade dinner.”

  “We had pizza,” I said.

  Jamie snorted.

  “At least you know I’m not psychic,” he pointed out.

  “Wait, are there any other superpowers I should be worried about?” I teased.

  A plate clattered on the other end, and I heard a sink turn on.

  “My only frequency is ghost,” he promised. “How about you, Cleo?”

  “Well, it’s not a superpower so much as a superstition,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter. Lay it on me.”

  “Whenever I’m having a really good hair day, I know something bad’s going to happen.”

  Jamie snorted.

  “That’s not a superstition, it’s a spurious correlation,” he accused.

  “A what?”

  “It’s a false mathematical conclusion. You’re assuming that one thing causes another just because you can graph them together,” he explained. “But you can graph lots of things and claim they’re related. Say there’s been an increase in ice-cream consumption over the past few years. And the rate of people being struck by lightning has also gone up. You can chart that and be like, ‘See? Eating ice cream causes you to be struck by lightning!’”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

  “A spurious correlation,” I said, trying out the phrase.

  “There’s a bunch of really funny ones on the internet,” Jamie went on, encouraged. “I’ll text them to you.”

  And then I spent the next twenty minutes giggling over ridiculous graphs.

  A decrease in pirates causes an increase in lawyers. The correlation between people eating cheese and people who died getting tangled in their bedsheets. The last graph was one he’d made himself:

  Reading books about ancient Egypt causes ability to see ghosts.

  I laughed.

  I refuse to believe that one isn’t real, I typed back.

  By the time I went to sleep, it was very late. The soft thrum of the TV in my parents’ bedroom had long since been replaced by the rattle of my dad’s snores.

  I’d heard them talking earlier, whispering about me. While Mom held me pizza-hostage, I’d told her it was nothing. That he hadn’t invited me to the movies after all. That we were just friends who had worked together on a class project, and Claudia was mistaken, and to please, please forget about it and also to order extra garlic knots.

  Jamie had said it was a group thing. That no one had my number, and he’d volunteered to invite me. It wasn’t like he’d asked me on a date. Or that he’d ever said anything about being more than friends. Even if I wished he would.

  Because I had such a crush on that boy. Such a stupid, giddy, heart-racing crush—on Jamie Aldridge, of all people. On glasses-wearing Jamie, who cuffed his jeans and called me Cleopatra and knew the answer to every question in our art history packet. Jamie, who saw ghosts but didn’t know why and sprawled on my bedroom carpet like we were still eight years old and obsessed with the Valley of the Kings.

  And I had no idea what to do about it or if he felt the same way. All I knew was, the vaguely flirty texts we were sending back and forth from our bedrooms weren’t like anything I’d experienced before. They were electric, and I was pretty sure the glow of my phone screen wasn’t some connection made of pixels and microchips. That it was us, lighting up the darkness, together.

  13

  WE KEPT TEXTING all weekend, and by the time Monday morning rolled around, I felt horribly nervous about seeing Jamie in school. I was worried that whatever it was between us was limited to text messages and late-night phone bravery, and that, when we saw each other in person, our connection would drop.

  Except I shouldn’t have worried. Jamie broke into a grin when he spotted me walking over at lunch. He raised his hand in a wave, and my heart sped up. Stop that, I scolded it. Calm down.

  Before I could join him, Claudia bounded over, dragging me off to buy iced tea.

  “So the ice-cream expedition was a disaster,” she said as we waited in line at the snack window. “But that’s what I get for wearing pink suede boots to babysit a six-year-old.”

  “Not your boots!”

  “Thirty-one flavors of stained,” she said with a sigh.

  The boys in front of us let two of their friends cut, making the wait even longer. Claudia rolled her eyes.

  “Do me a favor,” she said. “Please, please keep sitting with us. You don’t even know what it’s like, holding down the fort by myself. I’m Wendy with the Lost Boys.”

  I laughed at her description.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Picture going to the movies with five boys.”

  Okay, she had a point.

  “Funny story about that,” I said, explaining the texting mishap.

  “Jamie told me,” she said. “We have bio together.”

  “Oh, right.” I remembered how he’d said Claudia had been the one to tell him about Logan.

  “He gave me your number. I hope you don’t mind. I said it was for shopping purposes.”

  “Those are excellent purposes,” I replied.

  “Yes, well, it was a lie.” Claudia smiled wide and ordered her iced tea, handing two dollars to the lunch lady. “I was really checking to see whether you’d given it to him yet.”

  When we got back to the slope of grass, I saw what Claudia meant about Wendy and the Lost Boys. It really was a lot of boys, all together like that. And left to their own devices, they’d started a heated and hugely embarrassing debate over the director who’d just been announced for the latest Marvel movie.

  Claudia made a disgusted noise and unwound the scarf from around her neck, spreading it out like a picnic blanket.

  “Step into my tiny patch of civilization,” she said with a sweep of her arm.

  I bit into my bagel, and Claudia took out her phone, scrolling the hashtag for Paris Fashion Week and showing me her favorites. The way she chattered about all the designers and their collections reminded me of Mr. Ferrara in art history, unable to contain his enthusiasm for vases.

  “Hi,” Jamie interrupted, flopping down next to me on the grass.

  I felt a little thrill run through me as he did that. And I realized just how intimate it was, sitting on the grass instead of at a lunch
table.

  “You must think I’m a terrible nerd,” he said.

  Actually, I thought he was terribly adorable, with his shoes off and his sunglasses on, and the way his smile sharpened the soft curve of his jaw.

  “How do you say ‘yes’ in Elvish?” I asked, frowning.

  Jamie opened his mouth to tell me, before getting the joke.

  “Ugh,” he complained. “No fair.”

  THAT AFTERNOON IN drama, I didn’t even hesitate as I passed the empty seat next to Kate. She glanced up at me, her face a storm of resentment, and I had this sudden realization that she didn’t like me. She’d only liked having me around so she got the occasional day off from Delia’s wrath.

  Delia had blocked me on all her social media that morning, and when I’d checked again during passing, so had Emmy. Kate had actually unfriended me, like she was secretly hoping I’d send her a request, and she could run and show Delia.

  I wished I cared, but I really didn’t. Sometimes you outgrow your friends, and sometimes you just outgrow the version of yourself that’s willing to put up with them.

  I took a seat next to Jamie, and this time Gardner knew exactly where to find me when he took attendance. He put on an old movie version of Dracula, and we sat there in the dark, a horror movie on the projector screen. On my right, I saw Darren reach for Max’s hand during a particularly scary part, and I wished I could do that with Jamie. Except it seemed silly for a girl who saw ghosts to act scared of a movie vampire.

  Instead, I watched Darren and Max, the way they swirled their fingers around each other’s palms, and I imagined what it would feel like if a boy were doing it to me.

  After the movie, Gardner passed out copies of the play, telling us to take them home and give them a read. I stashed my script in my backpack, but my friends all kept theirs out, scribbling notes on the backs as Gardner started walking us through the protocol for Friday’s auditions.

  “We should all read this tonight,” Sam said as we were packing up. “That way we can strategize tomorrow.”

  “I’m calling Dracula right now, no apologies,” Max said.

  “Slow your roll,” Claudia told him.

  “Yeah dude, it isn’t shotgun,” Nima said, whacking at Max with his script.

  In about two seconds, all the boys had rolled their scripts and were using them in a ridiculous swordfight.

  Claudia sighed.

  “You’d think Gardner could have chosen a play with more girls’ roles, so we wouldn’t have to deal with these idiots,” she said. I must have looked blank, because she added, “You know, at rehearsal?”

  “Oh, right,” I said weakly, because that was when it hit me. I wasn’t sitting in the back of the theater with Kate anymore. I was front and center with Sam’s crowd, and now everyone assumed that I was auditioning for the play, too.

  THE DRACULA AUDITIONS became the only thing my friends could talk about. And every time they came up, I felt my stomach twist at the prospect. I was afraid I’d be rejected while the rest of my friends were cast. And if I wasn’t good enough for the play, I had no business sitting with everyone who starred in it.

  It wasn’t like the girls who’d been cut during cheer tryouts sat with the cheerleaders. Or the kids who’d lost the student government elections hung around the spirit wheel with the SGA.

  “Picture this,” Max said at lunch on Wednesday, leaning back with an evil grin. “Seth Bostwick as Dracula.”

  Everyone cracked up.

  “He wouldn’t make a bad Renfield,” Sam said.

  “Actually,” Claudia said, glancing up from her bio homework, “he’d make the perfect Renfield. Now I hate to ask, but does anyone know anything about mast cells?”

  “Jamie,” Sam and Nima said in unison.

  “When I said I’d donate my brain to science, this wasn’t what I meant,” Jamie announced, scooting across the grass to see what Claudia wanted.

  I watched them for a while, dark heads bent together over the textbook, both of them lying on their stomachs. It was like they didn’t even notice that we were sitting on a small grassy island in the middle of the school quad, surrounded by metal lunch tables. Like it never occurred to them that people were staring, or that they were worth staring at.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t help but imagine rolling around in the grass with Jamie, our mouths and bodies pressed together, my hands in his hair, his shirt riding up above his belt, my legs wrapped around his. I’d never had a thought like that before, and it shocked me. I felt my cheeks heat up, and I only belatedly realized someone was calling my name.

  It was Sam.

  “What part are you trying out for?” he asked.

  “Um, I’m not sure yet,” I said, which seemed safe. I’d never said I was auditioning, but everyone just seemed to assume. And I hadn’t corrected them. And now the auditions were two days away. Which meant that every time someone said “Dracula,” I pretty much wanted to crawl into bed and hide.

  “We could be Lucy and Mina!” Claudia said, glancing up from her homework. “It would be like a reunion from our days as pirates in Peter Pan.”

  Sam snorted.

  “By far your best role,” he said, and Claudia stuck out her tongue.

  “At least I wasn’t the crocodile,” she retorted.

  “Hey! Max was Nana the dog!” Sam accused.

  Max shrugged.

  “I worked that dog costume,” he said.

  The bell rang then, and we all went to class, only to have Gardner turn us loose in the quad to “work on our auditions.”

  Claudia held up her script, her mouth in a fierce line.

  “Mina and Lucy,” she demanded, making me read through the scenes with her, even the ones that weren’t part of the audition sides, in case Gardner surprised us with a cold reading.

  I’d forgotten so much about how it had been with Claudia, when we were little. From afar, she seemed so intimidating that it was hard to think of her as the same girl who had fishtail-braided my hair and dared me to play Bloody Mary at sleepovers.

  From afar, her life had looked so perfect, but from up close, it was obvious how much she wished there was another girl around.

  Until the end of freshman year, I’d seen her with Reyna Washington, who’d been dating Max when he came out. Reyna had started hanging around with the musical-theater crowd after that.

  It had never occurred to me that, maybe, Claudia was lonely, too. That things really could go back to the way they used to between us, with carpools and board games and swapping clothes.

  “You’d make the perfect Lucy,” Claudia said as we put away our scripts.

  “So would half the girls in our class,” I pointed out.

  Claudia shrugged, which meant that I was right.

  “All you need’s a little luck and a lot of red lipstick,” she said. “Trust me.”

  I used to think the same thing—that if you wanted something badly enough, the universe would come through. And maybe it did, for Claudia. But I was intimately familiar with what it was like to have the things you love taken from you.

  Still I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this time, things would be different. If I could borrow Jamie’s questions trick and Claudia’s lipstick and land a role.

  I biked home that afternoon thinking I’d go for it after all. I didn’t need to try out for a lead. There were a few small parts. I even let myself get excited about the idea of it.

  Logan wasn’t around, so I sprawled on the sofa, reading my Dracula script aloud and imagining myself being part of it all instead of hovering in the shadows watching.

  LOGAN TURNED UP on Thursday night, while I was trying on outfits to wear to my audition. I hadn’t seen him since Tuesday, and I wasn’t expecting him to pop in while I was half-dressed.

  “Agh!” I yelped, crossing my hands in front of my chest. “Eyes closed. Now.”

  “Rose?” my mom called from the other room. “Everything okay?”

  “Yep. Just stubbed my toe,” I ca
lled back, and then turned up my music to mask our conversation.

  Logan flopped onto the bed, which was piled with rejected audition outfits. I zipped my dress and glared at him.

  “Thanks for dropping in while Mom and Dad are home,” I whispered.

  “I came earlier,” he snipped back. “But you weren’t around.”

  A bunch of us had gone to Billz, where we’d reviewed our audition sides one last time together. I said as much, and Logan frowned.

  “Sides for what?” he asked, and then he took in my outfit, a blue shift dress that Mom had bought me for a cousin’s bar mitzvah.

  “I’m trying out for the play,” I said.

  Logan looked thoughtful. I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, until very softly he did.

  “So this play must have a lot of after-school rehearsals.”

  My stomach sank as I realized what he was implying.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

  I mean, I had, but I hadn’t put it together, realizing what it would mean for us. How little time I’d have to see Logan.

  “You didn’t even mention it,” he said, his voice small. “You were just going to do it, weren’t you?”

  “Gardner won’t even cast me,” I said, trying to be reassuring. Except now I didn’t know which was worse, if I got a role or if I didn’t.

  “Then why bother?” Logan asked.

  I didn’t say anything, but he seemed to guess.

  “What about Jamie?” he demanded. “Is he trying out for the play, too?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh,” Logan said, sounding strained. “I see.”

  “Logan,” I pleaded.

  “No! Go try out for the play with your cool theater friends,” he shot back.

  “You’re the one who said I needed new friends,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, to sit with at lunch. Not to hang out with every freaking afternoon!”

  “That’s what you do at sixteen!” I snapped, and then stopped myself, appalled.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Logan said coolly. “Do whatever you want about the stupid play. I’ll be here if you don’t make it. Just like I always am.”