Up All Night

by Laura Silverman

  My next few words ease out of me. “And I’m gay.”

  Arash’s eyes brighten. “That is . . .” Slowly, his expression begins to unwind. “I wasn’t sure. I mean, earlier when I—”

  “Dude,” I say, laughing. “You’re flailing.”

  “Sorry.” He smiles. “You’re gay. Cool.”

  “This isn’t a big deal?” I ask, realizing I’ve just come out twice to him in less than three minutes.

  “What? That you’re my favorite hero?”

  Heat rises up the back of my neck. “I’m not a hero. Just an above-average teenager.”

  “A friend of mine seems to think being better-than-average is pretty cool,” Arash says.

  “Yeah, yeah.” I sigh. “But what about . . . the gay part?”

  “What about it? You’re Tristan Jackson. Just Tris,” he says, inching a little closer. “The Raven part? So boss. The gay part? A major plus for the guy who’s been casually trying to, I dunno, kiss you since last year.”

  “My dude.” I smack a hand against my forehead. “We don’t even hang out like that. How would I know?”

  “You’re the hero. Follow the clues.”

  “That’s not even how that works.” I chuckle, then my brain recycles all his words. “Wait. You want to kiss me?”

  “Yes. But not now,” he says. “Because I’ve kind of been up all night, drinking soda and eating sour candies and—”

  “Stealing my basmati rice when you thought I wasn’t looking?” I accuse with a smile.

  “That too.”

  I nod. “That’d probably be bad. Not the kissing—our breaths thing.”

  “Yeah,” he says quietly, looking at his feet. “So, we can wait on that.”

  “We do a lot of waiting, huh?”

  “I think we’re pretty good at it.” Then Arash steps back, turns as if we’ve come to some agreed-upon resolution. Which I suppose we have but it’s not enough for me.

  With reflexes half as quick as Nana’s, I grab Arash’s arm and spin him back to me. I brush my fingers against his jaw, lifting it before bending down to kiss him.

  There’s a little hesitation, but he kisses back.

  His cool palms hug my cheeks and he steps on my shoes to get closer. Our mouths open, his tongue teasing my teeth, and I almost lose it because this is happening. We’re really kissing.

  Arash is right. His breath tastes sour from candy and spicy from the rice but it’s sweet with cola and not bad.

  Definitely worth a repeat performance after we’ve brushed our teeth.

  “Oh, Tris,” he whispers against my mouth. “You taste like hot wings.”

  I think I’ve found another superpower—my cheeks catch fire in a blink, probably singeing the skin off Arash’s hands.

  He steps off my shoes, almost tripping as he moves back. “I’d really like to do that again, soonish,” he says with a lopsided smile and squinted eyes.

  “Same.”

  We stand there, painted gold and pink from the sunrise, watching each other. Eventually, I grab his hand. He squeezes back. We walk side by side toward the rooftop’s exit.

  “If you want,” Arash says when we’re downstairs on the street, “I can take you for that cup of espresso. Just to try it.” We’re not holding hands anymore but we’re still standing close.

  I snort, shaking my head. “That’d be nice. But first,” I motion down the street toward Nana’s building, “I need to check on my nana. Usually, I would’ve already but . . .”

  Arash’s eyebrows furrow, then it clicks. His eyes widen. “That’s why you’re—” he pauses, looking around. There’s no one nearby; it’s too early. “That’s why Raven’s always skulking—”

  “Hold up. I don’t skulk.”

  “You so skulk,” he teases. “I get it. Why you spend so much time around here.”

  “Yeah. So.”

  “Later?” he offers.

  We agree to meet at this coffee shop downtown. One that is far enough away from Juniper Road High, so we don’t have familiar eyes on us. A place where we can stretch out, laugh, and talk without having to make any declarations. I’m glad I told Arash the truth, but for now, I don’t want to share it with our classmates. I want to keep this warm, secure feeling between us.

  I’m not like Nana. I’m not like my parents. I can share my secret. I have someone I can talk to about feeling like less than a hero. And I get to choose how and why. I don’t need to peel my mask off for everyone.

  We yawn in unison, blinking way too many times.

  “I should go,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  Before Arash walks away, he shows me his own superpower: hyper-boldness. In the middle of the sidewalk, he kisses me one more time.

  For the record—we need a lot of practice.

  But there’s time for that.

  The Ghost of Goon Creek

  by Francesca Zappia

  “I came to ask you for a favor,” Grace said.

  I set down my pen and my breadstick and closed my notebook. I was not the person who was approached in the cafeteria. I was not, generally, the person who was approached anywhere. When you know more about the local ghosts than you do about your classmates, people—especially the popular ones—learn to avoid you. Grace Chang, poster child for societal expectations, talking to me out of the blue was weird enough; Grace Chang asking me for a favor was downright concerning.

  Grace always talked with her hands, and they were up now, moving fast. “The October issue of the newspaper is coming out in two weeks, and this year the feature section is completely Halloween-themed. We’re reviewing haunted houses and horror movies, we’ve got a history of Halloween candy, and we’re starting an annual two-page spread covering a local urban legend.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You know where I’m going with this?”

  I did. I wished I didn’t. “What do you want to know about?”

  “The ghost.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Ghost of Goon Creek. I heard that you go every year to find it.”

  I kept my expression even. Everyone in school knew Sydney Endrizzi collected local ghost stories, but usually no one brought it up except to make jokes. “Google knows as much about it as I do.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t looking for information.” Grace gave me a winning smile. “I was hoping you’d take me with you.”

  I paused sipping my chocolate milk, coughed lightly, and said, “Excuse me?”

  “I’d love to come with you. I could interview you about it, if you’d be okay with that, and I could write about the experience and give the readers a sense of being there.”

  “I’m not going this year,” I said stiffly. My brother, Tony, was in California now, so my days of physically hunting ghosts were over. Generally, it’s not a great idea to go out alone late at night when you’re a teenage girl, and my dad wouldn’t let me unless I had someone along. Grace’s smile faded. “Feel free to go yourself, though. No one will stop you. Just like, take a friend or two.”

  “Oh,” Grace said, and she looked so crestfallen that I almost cared. “That’s okay. I thought I’d ask because you’re the resident expert on the paranormal, and it would be cool to showcase you as the experienced guide who’s unraveling the mysteries of Goon Creek. You’re kind of mysterious yourself. People would be interested.”

  My whole body went still, the tips of my fingers tingling, a knotted feeling in my gut.

  “Mysterious?” I asked.

  Grace nodded and shrugged.

  People thought I was mysterious?

  Mysterious, and not just weird? Sydney Endrizzi, friendless after her brother went to college, with her urban legends and her ghost hunts?

  “And I’d seem mysterious in this article?” I asked. “Like, you wouldn’
t just tell the whole school all about my life?”

  “No! Not if you don’t want me to. Mysterious all the way.”

  I sat back, drumming my fingers on the edge of the lunch table. “There is no ghost, you know that, right?”

  “The story exists, even if the ghost itself doesn’t, and that’s what the article is really about.”

  At least she wouldn’t be asking me constantly if we were going to see something. “When I go, I stay out all night. That’s part of the story. You have to stay until sunrise.”

  Grace’s expression lit up. She nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  “Your parents would be fine with it?”

  “If it’s for the newspaper, yes.”

  “You have to bring your own snacks.”

  “No problem.”

  “And bug spray.”

  “Already got it.”

  “I get to read your article before it gets published, and you’ll let me veto anything that makes me sound like a creep.”

  Grace held her hand over her heart. “I swear, I would never do anything to make you sound like a creep.”

  I stared at her.

  “Yes,” she said, “you can veto.”

  “Okay. This Friday. Meet me in the parking lot by the soccer field at ten.”

  Grace gasped and flapped her hands. “Oh my gosh, Sydney, thank you. I owe you so big. Friday at ten by the soccer field. Got it. Thank you!”

  For a moment I thought she was going to rush around the table to hug me, but instead she hurried back to the other side of the cafeteria. A few people looked my way, probably wondering why newspaper feature editor Grace Chang was speaking to me, of all people, and what I could have possibly said to make her so happy.

  I didn’t know what she and I were going to talk about for hours in a cemetery at night, but if it made my classmates think I was eccentric instead of a loser, I’d figure it out.

  Grace was waiting for me at the soccer field that Friday night. She leaned against the front of her car, backpack at her feet, typing on her phone. There were a concerning number of cars in the lot around her.

  “I thought I could interview you while we walked.” Grace had her phone out and waved it around. “Is that okay?”

  I glanced at the phone camera, then back at her. “Sure.” I’d never been interviewed before, and I had a bad feeling I would say something that would reveal how little I fit in. That was what usually happened. Having friends had been easy when I was little—the scarier or bloodier your stories were, the more other kids wanted to hear them—but middle school had changed everything. Scary stories lost their value to parties and fashion and kissing. Other girls weren’t usually impressed by Bloody Pete, the murdered mascot rumored to run the football track on the full moon. What they really wanted to know was my celebrity crush. If only I could skip this part altogether—just have people know who I was.

  We started across the field toward the woods, both of us with backpacks, me swinging my camping lantern. The lantern was more useful than a cell phone camera when looking for the ghost; it lasted longer, gave more light, and it didn’t kill your battery. The trees stretched behind the high school, hiding the pond, the running trails, and the cemetery.

  Grace started the recording on her phone. “Where are we going right now?”

  I glanced at the phone, then back at the path before us. “We have to go to the old cemetery off Markel Road.”

  “Why didn’t we drive there?”

  “There’s a specific set of rules you have to follow to get the ghost to appear. The first one is to walk through the woods until you reach the cemetery.”

  “How do you know these rules?”

  I trailed my hand over the rusted sidebar of the soccer goal as we passed. There was a story about the soccer team dying in a bus crash in the sixties, but it wasn’t true. “They’re online. A lot of the story is well known. My brother was the one who told me.”

  “Your brother Tony?”

  I bristled at the sound of someone else saying his name. She didn’t know him, and that made it feel like she was trampling even farther into our thing, mine and his. “Yep.”

  Grace, to her credit, steered around that topic. “How long have you been looking for the ghost?”

  “Since I was ten. So this’ll be seven years.”

  “Have you ever seen any evidence of the Goon Creek Ghost?”

  “My brother said he heard her speak once, but that was just my phone playing creepy noises behind a headstone.”

  Grace snorted. I decided she wasn’t so bad. We reached the path into the woods, an inviting dirt trail that arced down to the pond and passed the dock. The moon was out, reflecting on the water and lighting our way. Laughter and voices floated on the air, and dark forms danced across the dock. That explained the other cars in the parking lot. I recognized a few letter jackets and one oversized alligator mascot head.

  My insides knotted up with impending frustration.

  “Yo, Gray-SEE!” The alligator’s voice carried over the pond and the woods. Grace turned, already beaming. I went very still. A few others on the dock had turned to look. The alligator—the big cartoon head wobbled on top of a lanky teenage boy body—cut through the crowd to bound up the dock ramp toward us. “What are you doing here, newslady?”

  “Are you allowed to have that head outside school property?” Grace asked.

  The alligator reached up and pulled off his head. Inside was Sami Bitar, his shiny dark hair ruffled and a Cheshire Cat smile splitting his face. “It’ll be back in the morning, don’t worry. Oh, the phone’s out. An interview?” He glanced at me. I stared back. Since grade school, Sami’s voice had been a constant ice pick in my ear.

  “I’m writing an article on the ghost, and Sydney agreed to be my guide,” Grace said.

  I shrugged by way of greeting.

  “The Goon Creek Ghost?” Sami twisted around and called, “Hey, Allegra! Didn’t you say you wanted to see the ghost?”

  There is no ghost, I shouted in my head.

  A girl split off from the group on the docks and my mood darkened. She wore black leggings and a Goon Creek crew neck, and her hair was up in a high ponytail. When she left the group, they lost their nucleus and had to shuffle around to re-form. They were all watching now.

  Allegra Ferraro, voted Most Likely to Win Life, came up and leaned against Sami’s side. “Hey, Grace. You’re looking for the ghost?”

  “With Sydney,” Grace said, oblivious to the fact that I was in the midst of a slow and painful death, and the only way to save myself was to get away from these popular kids before I dissolved into a puddle of humiliation. “You want to come? It’s going to be really fun. Overnighter.”

  I made a dying noise at the same time Allegra said, “Sure! My parents already think I’m spending the night at Kylie’s.” She turned back to the group. “You guys have fun without me, I’m going on an adventure.”

  Several people groaned. A few laughed. A large figure let out a startled cry and pushed his way from the group and toward us. Chris Maybank, in his custom-made letter jacket because the biggest size they made didn’t fit him, stalked up the ramp.

  “What the hell, Allegra,” he said, combing his short hair into order. “You can’t ditch me.”

  “Then come along,” she said, hands on her hips. “Tell your parents where you’re going, you know they’d be cool with it.” Maybank—everyone called him Maybank, or Mabes, because he was one of nine Chrises in our class—scowled at her, but didn’t retreat. Allegra said to us, “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Not at all,” Grace said. “Sydney?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Allegra and Sami laughed like it was a joke. But it was fine. They would all probably leave when they got bored, and while they were there, they could keep Grace occupied.


  “You coming too, Sami?” Allegra asked.

  Sami scoffed. “Hell no. I’m not stupid enough to hunt ghosts.” He shoved the alligator head back on. “See you fools Monday.” He pranced back down the dock.

  “It’s still a bit of a walk from here,” I said, pointing down the trail and into the woods. “Are you both okay with that?”

  “Walking’s good for you.” Allegra tightened her ponytail and started down the path. Maybank followed. Grace, looking ecstatic, restarted the recording on her phone and hurried along.

  I crossed myself, pressed my hands together, and looked at the dark sky.

  Grace was interviewing Allegra about her interest in the Goon Creek Ghost—she’d liked urban legends since she was little, and really loved scary movies, not something I would have attributed to the peppy track and field star—and while they walked ahead, I ended up next to Maybank. I wasn’t a small person, but Maybank could’ve picked me up with one hand and rattled all the loose change out of me. His burly shoulders were hunched around his ears, his hands were jammed in his pockets, and his eyes darted from one side of the path to the other, watching the trees. Out of the three of them, he bothered me the least. He was quiet and he didn’t seem to have any interest in me.

  An October breeze rustled the leaves and cut through my long sleeves. It had been nearly eighty earlier in the day, and I hadn’t thought a jacket would be necessary. I wrapped my arms around my middle.

  “You cold?” Maybank said.

  It took me a second to realize he was speaking to me. “I’ll be fine.”

  Several minutes later, when the breeze hadn’t let up and I felt my insides starting to shiver, Maybank shrugged off his letter jacket and held it out for me. He was only wearing a T-shirt underneath.

  “I’m f-fine,” I said.

  Allegra looked over her shoulder. “Take the jacket. He’s basically a human furnace.”

  “Yeah, I was sweating.” Maybank offered the jacket again. Reluctantly, pretty sure they would think I was weirder if I didn’t accept, I shed my backpack long enough to put on the jacket. Inside was toasty. Maybank stretched his arms over his head and yanked his T-shirt back down.