“Maybe it’s because there’s no such thing as ghosts?” the reporter asked, smiling obligingly.
May let out a long, soft breath.
The reporter cleared his throat. “One more thing.” He looked like he could barely hold back laughter, and he gave the camera a conspiratorial glance. “As our resident expert on the undead, can you tell me what the chances are that zombies might come and take over our shopping malls sometime soon?” He made a dramatic spooky face at the camera and pretended to shiver.
Click. The TV went off.
“Zombies. Of all the ridiculous …” Mrs. Bird’s voice trailed off as she sat up, arranging her curly brown hair, which had shaped itself into a lopsided lump against the pillow. She shook her head.
May pulled the blankets tighter around herself.
Mrs. Bird looked at her and tilted her head slightly, sympathetic. “Oh, don’t look so worried, honey. People forget these things the minute they turn the channel. When you’re grown, it will all seem like a distant memory.” Mrs. Bird stared at her a moment longer, intently, the way she sometimes did. At times like these, May knew her mom was wishing she could see right into her brain and find the hidden threads of the lost three unbelievable months that were woven there. But to ask again would be to break an unspoken agreement they’d had for years: to never mention May’s disappearance—or May’s fantastical story of the Ever After—to each other again. It always ended up hurting them too much, because neither could give the other what they wanted.
“Finny Elway called again,” Mrs. Bird said, running a finger through May’s long hair and pulling it back to braid it, absently. “He certainly is a nice boy on the phone.”
May didn’t answer. Finny was a boy in her class. Out of all the boys at Hog Wallow Middle, he was probably the cutest and by far the most interesting. He had hazel eyes and brown hair that flopped down in such a way that made the other girls practically faint. And he didn’t eat his own boogers, which was a giant bonus. But whenever he called, May pretended to be sleeping, or to have laryngitis, or she would duck under the nearest piece of furniture so her mom wouldn’t be able to find her.
“Why don’t you go for a walk, honey? It’s a beautiful day out.”
Mrs. Bird nodded to the window, where pure, white winter sunshine was pouring through. But May only shook her head. She wanted to stay under the blankets with her mom, where it was warm.
Many things had changed for May since she was ten. She had stopped telling bedtime stories to her cat. She had stopped coming home with leaves in her hair and rocks in her pockets, stopped trying to fly by attaching herself to bunches of balloons, stopped dressing Somber Kitty as a warrior cat. And though, truly, she sometimes felt like something inside her had disappeared, it seemed that that must be a natural part of growing up. Standing out too much made one feel too alone to do it forever.
Sometimes, though, when she least expected it, while she was biking to school or out in the car with her mom, watching the woods roll past, or sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch, it came: the feeling that she had let something big and important slip away. And May would whisper to Somber Kitty her deepest secret of all: that sometimes she wished she had never come back from the Ever After at all.
“I’m in the mood for Peanut Butter Kiss cookies,” Mrs. Bird said, standing and stretching. She waggled her eyebrows.
May leaped from the couch, sending Somber Kitty tumbling. Naturally, he landed on all fours and yawned, as if he were always getting tumbled off couches.
“Don’t mind if we do,” May replied. Sometimes, like when she and her mom baked cookies together, May was sure of every reason in the world she had come home.
In the kitchen they turned on the radio and listened to Christmas music, shaking back and forth in unison. Mrs. Bird measured out all the ingredients for the cookies, and May stirred. Some of the batter ended up on May’s fingers. She pretended to yawn, wiping it on her mom’s rosy right cheek. Her mom stuck a finger in the batter and pretended to fall forward, her battered finger landing on May’s nose. Somber Kitty sat on the linoleum floor, swatting his reflection in the glass window of the oven. When the news reports interrupted the music, May grew quiet and looked at her feet, because the news always made her worry—about people who didn’t have enough or trees that were being knocked down to build stores. But then the Christmas music was back, and they were dancing again, in a cloud of the scent of baking sugar.
Half an hour later, they had two batches—one of them burnt because they had been too busy pantomiming dashing through the snow to hear the buzzer. May was just putting on the oven mitts to load the third batch when the phone rang.
“Meeeoooow,” Somber Kitty growled, staring at the phone, his tail going ramrod straight. May looked at him curiously as Mrs. Bird crossed the room to grab the phone.
“Hello?” she said, once she’d scooped up the receiver. “Hello?” She looked at May, shrugged, and hung up. “No one there. Be right back.”
She sashayed out of the kitchen door to the last strains of “Jingle Bells,” leaving May giggling behind her. May could hear her footsteps creaking up the old steps and down the hall above. The minute she turned back to the cookies, the phone rang again.
“May, will you get it?” Mrs. Bird called from upstairs. May looked at Kitty. Kitty’s tail was still standing straight up. He stared at the phone as if it had grown wings. For a moment, May’s heart thrummed. And then she realized how silly that was. Who was she hoping it was. The Bogeyman?
“Somebody would think you’d never heard a phone before,” May said, scratching his ears and then walking over to answer it. She pressed her ear against the handset.
She heard only three words … and then the line went dead.
May stood, staring at the receiver, a great chill sweeping up and down her body, her ears tingling and a thick lump in her throat. A movement drew her eyes to the doorway, and she jumped.
Mrs. Bird stood there, inquisitive. “Who was it?”
May swallowed. Standing in the doorway now, her mom looked relaxed, content, happy. She thought of before—of her mom’s worried looks, and the nights her mom held her so tight, scared of ever losing her again.
“No one,” May said, hanging up the phone. “Weird.”
Her mom shrugged and crossed the room, pulled the cookie tray off the counter, and loaded it into the hot oven. May watched her, trying to catch her breath.
It couldn’t be, of course, what she thought. it had been too long. It belonged to the things that were tucked away.
But the voice on the other end of the line had seemed just like the one that belonged to someone with a pumpkin-shaped head and a crooked, ghastly smile. It had seemed like the voice of a ghost named Pumpkin.
It had said, “We need you.”
Chapter Two
A (Bad) Breath from the Past
The most exceptional thing about the town of Hog Wallow, West Virginia—one town over from Briery Swamp—was that nothing exceptional ever happened there at all. Every morning, the Hog Wallow Get & Gallop opened at eight a.m. on the dot to welcome exactly three customers. Every afternoon, Bridey McDrummy sat on her front porch, scowling at her neighbor’s poodle, because his exuberant fluffiness seemed to her rather ornery. And every weekday, Hog Wallow Middle School—a long rectangular building perched on a dreary, droopy hill—opened its mud brown double doors to fifty-three students who entered with an air of irrepressible ennui.
The Friday before Christmas, May sat in last-period homeroom awaiting announcements and staring out the window. The school TV program, Channel Smarty, blared from the wall by the door, peppered with ads telling Sister Christopher’s eighth-grade class how to get their skin clearer and their hair glossier. Several of the more pimply students in class listened raptly.
May gazed at the lawn outside, thinking—as she had every day since—of that weekend’s phone call. More and more, she was convinced she had been mistaken. How would Pumpkin call
her from another galaxy? It had probably been a telemarketer. He had probably been saying something like “We need you … to check out this great deal on our new nosehair trimmer! Only $19.99!” She sighed, resigned. Yes, most likely, the call had been about something as boring as a nosehair trimmer.
May heard a thwap behind her and turned to see that a note had landed on her desk. She looked over at Claire Arneson, whose hair was combed in a perfect ponytail, who seemed to get prettier every day, who was always changing to turquoise nail polish when everyone else had just made the switch to fuschia. Claire gave her a secret wave. May smiled back and unfolded her note on her lap.
Will you sign this for my cousin? was all it said. May dug for a pen in her desk.
Being a celebrity had made May something of a sensation at her school, and after three years that still hadn’t faded. After all, the only other time anyone from Hog Wallow had made the news was when Jebediah Hickorybutte had gotten a moth stuck in his ear in 1987 and penned the fated-to-be-famous poem “What’s that you say? I could not hear. You see, I have a moth in my ear.”
Since the day she had first appeared on TV, May had been treated like Hog Wallow royalty—of a sort. She was always asked to sit with the other girls at lunch and was always included in parties. She was even asked, from time to time, to autograph notebooks, or lunch bags, or shirt collars.
But being popular also seemed to come with lots of rules May hadn’t anticipated. In gym class she had to make sure to run slower than all the boys, because Peter Kelly had insisted girls were supposed to be slow. In library class, Claire insisted she read books like Kissing Boys at the Beach when she really wanted to read about Egyptian mummies or space travel. May sometimes felt like she was fitting herself into a smaller and smaller box. But it seemed better than being a weirdo who used balloons to try to fly. It was easier, at least.
May Bird. May signed the note from Claire and looked up, just happening to meet the hazel eyes of Finny Elway. She frowned at him and looked away. She tried to look as bored as possible.
For the most part, boys were scared of May. It was the way she had grown over the years, into that kind of prettiness that wasn’t so easy to see. It was the way her dark hair glinted like a wild cat’s, and it was her mysterious connections—however little anyone actually believed in them—with ghosts. But truly, the fear was mutual. May knew she wanted a boyfriend one day. But how did you ask a boy out, anyway? How did you keep it together if one asked you out? How did people kiss? It made her think wistfully of how easy, in many ways, things were for ghosts. Life held so many challenges that the land of the dead did not.
“May, didn’t you have an announcement?”
Biting her lip, May stuffed Claire’s note into her desk quick as a flash and looked at Sister Christopher, standing in her brown nun’s habit and staring at her expectantly. She slid out of her desk and shuffled to the front of the room. “I just wanted to remind everyone about my birthday party tomorrow,” she said, feeling shy. It was her first ever real birthday party … aside from the ones attended only by cats named Legume or Somber Kitty. In fact, it was Somber Kitty who had talked her into this one by dragging his old party hat out of May’s closet and carrying it around like a kitten, meowing pitifully. If Somber Kitty didn’t have some fun soon, May feared he would be lost in a sea of melancholy forever.
Excited whispers rustled through the room—everyone wanted to get a glimpse inside her mysterious, rambling house after all this time. As Sister Christopher stepped forward to continue afternoon announcements, May drifted by the teacher’s desk on her way back to her seat. But halfway past, she froze.
On the middle of the nun’s desk was a newspaper. On the front page was an old, grainy black-and-white photo of someone May knew very well—a ghastly looking woman with rotted teeth. May reached out and pulled the paper to her, swimming in goose bumps. MYSTERY OF DISAPPEARANCES STILL UNSOLVED AFTER MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS. And under the photo, the caption: “One of the victims: Bertha Brettwaller, known for winning personality and bad breath, who disappeared shortly after the Hog Wallow hoedown in October 1897.”
There were other pictures beneath Bertha’s. One of a group of twelve miners who, the caption explained, had inexplicably drowned in a lake in the woods. One of three nuns who had disappeared after skipping off into the same woods twenty-five years before. And then May caught something else, out of the corner of her eye, that made her start. There, at the top right-hand corner of the paper, where the date was supposed to be, were these words: “Be ready.” And the unmistakeable eyes of the Lady of North Farm printed above them.
May dropped the paper. When she looked up at the corner again, the words were gone. If it hadn’t been for the phone call from a few days before, she would have thought she’d imagined it.
And then she heard the squeal of desks behind her. She turned to find the whole class chattering excitedly, running to the windows. May walked toward them slowly, afraid of what they were all looking at, of what she might see outside. Every child in the eighth grade had their noses pressed against the windows, looking at the sky. May leaned forward and looked up too, but she saw nothing but a gloomy sheet of white clouds.
“What’s going on?” she asked Peter Kelly.
“Didn’t you hear Sister Christopher?” Claire sang.
May shook her head. Claire nodded to the sky, a giant grin spreading over her face.
“It’s amazing.”
“What?” May asked, following Claire’s eyes, bewildered.
“Where have you been, May? In outer space? They’re predicting snow!”
Chapter Three
First Snow
The day of her birthday party, May woke to a strange smell in the air. She blinked, sat up, and looked out the window. Great gray clouds draped the sky above. The trees stood gaggled together in the woods, perfectly still, as if in anticipation of something … big. The birds had disappeared, and the whole world seemed to be wrapped in a waiting sort of hush.
And then it happened. It drifted side to side like a feather, falling to the world below in slow motion. A snowflake.
May gasped. She leaned forward and pressed her face to the glass. Another tufty flake fell past her window, then another.
“They’re coming for us, Kitty,” she whispered. “They have to be.”
Beside her there was a rustle under the covers. Somber Kitty’s ears, poking out, tilted and turned like satellites. And then the rest of his body emerged, shaking and twisting itself and lengthening out in a long, taffylike stretch. He yawned, sneezed, and licked his chops, looking at May bemusedly. And then he placed his paws on the windowsill beside her. When he saw the tiny white crystals—several now—drifting through the sky like plummeting moths, he let out another yawn, clearly unimpressed.
“No time to waste,” May said.
She hopped out of bed and made her shivering way across the room to her closet, opening the door quietly so as not to wake her mom down the hall.
There, on the floor where it had sat collecting dust for years, was a cardboard box. She knelt beside it, pulling open the flaps and reaching inside. She took hold of a piece of fabric and lifted her black bathing suit into the air in front of her. In the Ever After, it had glowed with swirling galaxies and supernovas. Now it was just a plain black bathing suit with silver sparkles. But it was reassuring to May, just now, to know that it was still here, tucked safely away. She laid it down, next sinking her hands into the soft velvety fabric of a garment that looked a lot like a cape with a hood—her death shroud. In the Ever After, it had been the thing that made her—a vibrant, living girl, or “Live One” as the living were called—look as deceased, filmy, and gray as the next specter. It, too, looked like an ordinary lump of fabric now. May patted it gently and replaced it, lovingly, into the box.
She looked over her shoulder at Somber Kitty, who lay on the bed watching her, still as a stone sphinx.
“C’mon, Kitty,” she said, pulling him off
the bed like a string of spaghetti and hanging him over her shoulder. “We need to be ready.”
By that evening, Briery Swamp was blanketed by a thick layer of pure white snow. Through the windows, it looked like a whole different world—one coated in marshmallow frosting. May scurried about the Manor getting ready for her guests to arrive, just to have something to do for herself. Three years before, she would have paid the world’s riches to be having her very own well-attended birthday party. But suddenly she didn’t care very much about the party at all. She hung balloons, a disco ball her mom had bought in Hog Wallow, and two piñatas she and her mom had made, and then she started in on baking cookies—the whole while stopping at every window to gaze at the woods or peer into the clouds above, as if the Lady of North Farm herself might suddenly appear there. Across the front yard, under the canopies of trees, were dark spaces that seemed to beckon, promise, whisper. Somber Kitty lay draped around her neck, on guard, his tail clothes-hanger straight. Anticipation fluttered about the house like a clutch of butterflies. It landed on everything May touched.
Knock, knock, knock!
Both May and Kitty jumped at the sound of the door at three p.m. sharp. Mrs. Bird, who’d been helping in the kitchen, gave them both a look as she walked into the hall, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Nobody’s going to get that?” she said, shaking her head and pulling on the doorknob.
There, bathed in white, were Claire Arneson, Maribeth Stuller, and Mariruth LeTourneau, their cheeks rosy, snow bouncing off their hats and stuck to the fabric of their mittens. They burst inside, pouring gifts into May’s arms at the same time they poured out waves of chatter.
“Can you believe it’s snowing? How long do you think it will last? Do you think we’ll be off from school?”
After that the guests arrived in bucketfuls, all brimming with the same bright talk, all wide-eyed at their first glimpse inside White Moss Manor, though of course they had all seen it on TV. There was a great stamping of boots in the hallway, a loud shuffling of stockinged feet on the creaky old manor floors, a great clinking of mugs of hot cider in the kitchen, oohs and ahhs at the house’s great halls and staircases, at the disco ball, and at the cookies May and her mom had made: raspberry-chocolate, violet-mint, peanut butter-banana—all recipes May had created.
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