We Are the Ghosts

by Vicky Skinner

  I turn over, burying my face in the blanket. I want to sleep for a few days. I’m so tired that my body aches, and I feel a little sick to my stomach with the need to just close my eyes. “I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. I can’t tell him that I lost it. I can’t tell him that everything I’ve been holding in is clawing its way to the surface.

  My face heats, and I stare into the darkness out the window, the glass shimmering under the raindrops and the city lights. They blur, and tears leak out of my eyes, roll down my face, and I turn as far away from Cade as I can so that he can’t see. I can’t just go around crying in front of everyone. I cried back in the cathedral, and I’m crying here, and I’m so weak. I’m supposed to be stronger than this. I’m not supposed to feel anything. I have to be tough enough to get through this trip, to get all the way to Michigan, to face whoever sent me the map and whatever they have to tell me about Luke.

  What if it’s worse than what Wes told me?

  What if it’s nothing at all?

  “What did Wes tell you?” Cade asks gently, and I know if I answer, my words will be thick with tears.

  I clear my throat, take a deep breath. “That Luke told him he was going to leave and that he asked Wes to go with him.”

  There’s a stretch of silence, and I finally look over at him. He sits on the edge of the bed and laces his fingers in his lap. “I don’t really know what to say to that.”

  I choke on a laugh. “Yeah, well that makes two of us. I mean, why would he ask Wes to go and not me? I’m his sister. This trip, it was something the three of us planned.”

  Cade’s eyes move over to me slowly. “What’s the deal with the trip? The map?”

  I’m too exhausted to try and keep anything from Cade. If Gwen were here right now, I would tell her everything, too. Keeping secrets is exhausting, and I don’t have any energy left in me. “It was something we did with Luke years ago. And then Luke kept the map, and me and Wes forgot about the whole thing. But someone sent it to me, someone in Michigan.”

  Cade taps his fingers on his leg. “So that’s why we’re on this trip? To go to Michigan and find out who sent you the map?”

  I nod, my hair sliding along the comforter, and Cade just watches me. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, his eyes straight forward, his hands restless. So I just keep talking.

  “All this time I thought he didn’t tell anyone,” I say, my voice just a whisper over the sound of the air conditioner. “But he just didn’t tell me.” I have to suck in breath after I say this to keep from crying again. Now that Cade is looking right at me, I fight harder against the tears, even though it’s like waging war.

  Cade watches me, but he still doesn’t say anything.

  “I’ve spent a year trying not to think about what he did. But he left. He didn’t say one word to me. He just disappeared, and I was supposed to go on with my life like everything was normal.” My voice cracks; my breath trembles; my stomach twists.

  He looks down at his hands. “You were like a ghost. You were completely different. After. You were a totally different person.”

  I don’t know how to explain it. How do you explain that you’re full of something toxic? How do you explain that there’s a monster that’s threatening to break out of you, that the only person who might have been able to speak the same language as you is gone, and now what’s the point in ever trying to speak to anyone again?

  How do I explain that when Luke left, I spent all of my time trying to pretend I was okay when I knew for certain that I would never be okay again?

  I try to imagine the impression that Cade must have of Luke by now. He didn’t know Luke, only knew of him, only has an idea of him based on stories and rumors and gossip, the bite-size moments when they encountered each other in our living room or the library or the hallway, just like Luke had of him. I wish I could sit him down and tell him everything about Luke, the real Luke. Luke, who loved being the center of attention but hated it when people would swarm him after a track meet, when all he wanted to do was take a hot shower. Luke, who snuck out at night, but only because our mother was like Big Brother, surveilling him from every possible angle at all times. Luke, who took me to my first concert and taught me how to ride a bike and never left me behind, even when he was the most popular guy in school, even though I was two years younger than him.

  The hotel door opens, and Gwen and Wes come in. They’re talking in whispers, and when they see Cade sitting on the end of the bed, they stop talking altogether, and I wish there was some way I could hide. If I thought I could pull this blanket over my head and they would just let me be, I would do it.

  Wes is holding a brown paper sack, and he comes over to me, holding out a paper-wrapped hamburger. It has spots of grease all over it, and my stomach growls. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

  I take the burger and sit up, wiping at my face quick and hoping that the room is dark enough to keep them from seeing my swollen and wet face. “I’m not mad at you.” The monster inside argues a little, but I think I mean it. I don’t think I’m mad at Wes.

  “So what’s next?” he asks, sitting in the chair that Cade vacated earlier.

  I look over at Cade. “Indianapolis?”

  He purses his lips and nods. “Yeah. Indianapolis.”

  I unwrap my burger while Gwen and Wes try to find something to watch on TV. Cade digs through the bag Wes left on the comforter and pulls out another burger. I expect him to stay where he is, at the end of the bed, far from me. But he kicks off his shoes and scoots all the way back, until his back is against the headboard, right beside me.

  I take a bite of my burger, trying not to focus on the way he smells like fabric softener and slight traces of cologne. I stare at the TV, but I can feel Cade looking in my direction, and then his hand comes up, and he presses his thumb to my cheek, wiping away what’s left of a tear trail on my skin.

  I look up at him, just barely taller than me, and his hand drops back down to his lap. He looks away and makes quick work of the wrapping on his burger, but even with my eyes trained on the TV again, I can see Gwen out of the corner of my eye, watching us.

  * * *

  Cade and I lie back on the hood of his grandmother’s car and look up at the stars. His fingers brush mine, and I shiver, even though it’s hot enough outside that I’m sweating. The drive-in is empty; we’re the only ones left besides the crew cleaning up, and the huge screen at our feet is dark.

  “Do you remember field day, sixth grade?”

  I’m already laughing before he’s done speaking.

  “You were so pissed at me,” I say through my laughter.

  “You broke my nose!”

  I gulp in a breath. “Cade Matthews, I did not break your nose! It was just a nosebleed!”

  “Yeah, because you threw a kickball directly at my face!”

  “I thought you called me Ellie Belly!”

  He snorts and smiles up at the sky. “I would never call you Ellie Belly. I had way too big a crush on you.”

  I blush and focus on the sky, the stars spread across it. I think I’m ready for this, for feeling, for him to start saying sweet things, for us to move from friends to more, but I still can’t quite meet his eye, can’t quite take the way he looks at me when he says things like this.

  I watch a plane, with its little blinking red light, traveling through the clouds, disappearing somewhere around the moon.

  “How much do you know about astronomy?”

  He smiles up at the sky. “Astronomy is my favorite. It’s the kind of thing you can study your whole life and never know everything about. I mean, can you believe we’re just a speck in the grand scheme of things? There are countless galaxies, and here we are, acting like we matter, like we know everything.”

  I laugh and, in a bold move that I can only pull off because I’m tired and the stars are shining down on us, I scoot closer to him. He turns his head, his eyes drifting from my eyes to my mouth and back again.

  “With yo
u around, I can almost pretend the stars don’t exist.”

  He looks serious, but I laugh hard, holding my stomach. “Oh man, Cade. That was cheesy.”

  He laughs, his white teeth sparkling in the dark. “Sure, but did it work?”

  I bite my lip. “Maybe a little.”

  He leans close to me, and I close my eyes, waiting for the brush of his lips against mine, something I feel like I’ve been waiting for my whole life.

  And then the lights at the drive-in all turn off, plunging the world into utter darkness.

  An inch from me, Cade’s breath puffs against my mouth. “I should probably get you home.” He glances at his watch. “It’s almost one.”

  “Wow.” I look at my phone, surprised not to see a million texts from my mom. She said she would lay off the helicopter parenting for one night, but not a single message from her is pretty impressive.

  We hop off the hood, and my stomach sinks when I realize I’d give anything to stay here with Cade instead of going home to Eaton.

  NINE

  Cade watches me all the way to Indianapolis. I can feel his eyes on me, but I don’t look at him. I can’t. I can’t get distracted anymore. This trip isn’t about him and me. This trip is about getting to Michigan. This trip is about getting some kind of answers, even though I don’t even know the questions. All I can think about is what Wes told me. I can’t decide if it changes everything or changes absolutely nothing. We’re all quiet. It’s a four-hour drive, and the only time we speak is when Wes pulls into a gas station and asks Gwen to buy him an iced tea from inside.

  It’s not until we’re down there, in the shadows of Indianapolis, that Cade finally speaks. “How did I not know there are catacombs in Indianapolis, and why are we in them?”

  “Because of the article,” I say, like that’ll clear everything up. When we first planned the trip, and even when I was consulting the map before we set out from Eaton, the catacombs always seemed like a good idea. But now that we’re down here, I’m starting to wonder what the point of coming down here is. What the point in all of these stops is. What’s the point in chasing a ghost when we already know where he ended up?

  “What article?” Cade asks.

  The four of us walk through the empty catacombs, the walls made of brick and covered with about a hundred layers of dust. I reach out a hand to touch the wall, my fingertips coming away dirty, and I get a chill up my spine. Maybe there’s more than one reason why this was a bad idea.

  “Rolling Stone,” I answer. “Like three years ago. They did an interview with Jack Olsen, and he said that he and the other guys from Nova met down here. Apparently Jack used to come down here to play, and the Harper brothers heard him one day. The start of a beautiful friendship.”

  I remember how excited I was to hear the story then, but now it isn’t quite so cool. Luke thought it was amazing, three guys forming a band underground. “Hardcore,” he said that day when he brought me the article to read, his face the picture of exhilaration.

  “Is that true?” Gwen appears at my side, her eyes still roving. She can’t seem to make them stop. “Nova met down here?”

  I shrug. “That’s what the article said, so I guess it’s true.”

  Gwen and Wes walk together, away from Cade and me, and next thing I know, Cade has taken my hand and turned us in the opposite direction. I expect him to let go, but instead, he threads our fingers together, and everything in me goes warm in that way that it always seems to when Cade’s skin is against mine. I’ve lost track of whether I want to pull away, so I don’t.

  “This is so creepy,” I say as we walk down one of the dark hallways. The only lights in the catacombs come from lamps hanging intermittently from the ceiling. Arches line the walls, leading us in a mazelike formation, going on as far as the eye can see. “I feel like I just walked into a horror movie.”

  Cade smiles down at me, and some of the tension in me starts to ease. There’s nothing I can say, other than perhaps the complete and utter truth, that will get us to Michigan faster, so I should try to take in this trip the way I’m supposed to, like the grand adventure Luke always wanted it to be.

  “I don’t know. I think it’s pretty cool.” Cade’s eyes lose a little bit of their focus then. “I can’t believe I forgot about that day in chem. Feels like a million years ago.”

  I look over at him, confused, and then remember. The day Luke found the Rolling Stone article, he was so excited about it that he interrupted our chemistry class. Cade and I were partners, and our chemistry teacher wasn’t exactly thrilled about letting Luke into the room just to give his little sister a magazine, but Luke charmed him, just like he charmed everyone.

  “I liked you then,” I say because he still hasn’t said anything, and I’m so consumed by the heat of him against me that I’m ready to spill every secret I’ve ever had. What is it about Cade that makes me spit things out like this? I wiggle my hand out of his, mostly out of embarrassment.

  He lifts his head, his eyes finding mine, shadowed in the meager light. “When?”

  “That day in chemistry, and really pretty much ever since freshman year.”

  He tucks his hands in his pockets and nods in a weird way. “You should have told me that,” he says with a shy kind of smile. “I wouldn’t have been so self-conscious, and I would have asked you out a lot sooner.” His eyes meet mine again, soft and so full of him, even in the dark.

  “It wouldn’t have done any good,” I say. “It’s not like anything ever happened.”

  He stops walking, and I do, too, looking back at him. I know he wants to say something. I know he wants to talk about that night. I’ve been completely silent on the subject since then and now that we’re here, now that I’ve been unable to stay quiet around him, maybe he thinks this is his chance. But I can’t talk about it. I can’t even begin to explain why things happened the way they did. I don’t even understand it myself. It was like a bomb went off, and when the smoke cleared, I was the only one still standing.

  “What did the fortune-teller say to you?”

  He looks at me like I just asked him to recite the Book of Mormon. “What?”

  “The fortune-teller. On Bourbon Street.”

  His brow smooths. “Oh. Right. Um. It’s kind of stupid.”

  I shrug. “Well, sure. The whole thing is stupid. But tell me anyway.” I think about my own reading, the woman trying to decipher what kind of person I am based on a stack of cards, and it makes my face burn. It can’t work like that. I can’t work this hard to bury everything inside me just to have a complete stranger come along and expose it like it’s no big deal.

  “I, um, I asked her if she could communicate with the dead.”

  My eyes shoot to him. He’s rubbing the back of his neck, his head down, like he’s embarrassed, but what I feel toward him is less shame and just more shock.

  Cade shrugs. “She told me she doesn’t do that kind of thing. Which is fine. I don’t really believe in, like, spirits walking the earth anyway, so it’s probably for the best.” He says it with a reasonable amount of conviction, but I can see that he’s looking for hope somewhere. I never could have imagined this kind of desire in Cade, someone so easygoing, so unexcitable.

  “Who would you want to—” My attention is diverted by a sound, something far away, coming from the other end of the catacombs.

  “Is that music?” Cade asks, but I’m walking away from him, back the way we came, passing the point where we split, the music getting louder as we go, until we finally come upon Gwen and Wes. They stand close together, Wes’s arm wrapped around Gwen’s shoulder, her face pressed into his chest, tears falling across her skin and darkening the fabric of Wes’s shirt.

  Between them, Gwen holds her phone in the palm of her hand, a Nova song spilling out of it. A song I know so well, a song whose words are tattooed on my brain. They’re never going to fade, no matter how much I wish they would.

  I know I should feel something. Every time I’ve heard Nova
since Luke left, it’s felt like being ripped open, like someone pricking at my skin until I’m bleeding. But now, I hear the words, and I just stare at the phone. I don’t have anything left. I feel like I’ve been scraped raw.

  My eyes meet Wes’s, and he holds my gaze. I can’t fathom why they decided to do this, to listen to this song in the middle of these catacombs. I thought we were trying to keep Gwen away from Luke. I thought we were trying to act as if this trip had nothing to do with him. These catacombs aren’t even really about him. They’re about Nova.

  But I guess it doesn’t matter. Nova was Luke, always. They were his favorite band, and just bringing her down here, just mentioning that Jack Olsen met the Harper brothers down here was enough to turn her into this, and I have to look away because if I don’t, she might break me.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers against the fabric of Wes’s shirt, and I feel guilty that she even feels like she has to apologize, as if she’s not allowed to grieve. As if she’s not allowed to be sad, just because she’s moved on, if that’s what she’s done.

  How can I blame her for feeling what I don’t want to?

  * * *

  We’re walking down Monument Circle, trying to pretend that things haven’t gotten really awkward. Gwen and Wes don’t hold hands, and I try to keep my distance from Cade, and I feel like we’re a bunch of balloons that someone just let go of, floating off in different, completely undetermined, directions.

  “Are you hungry?” Cade asks, and I shake my head, even though I’m not positive it’s true. I can’t interpret the signals my body is sending me anymore, and so I can’t even really decide if I want to eat.

  “I’m going to run in here and get some water,” Wes says, stopping us and motioning toward a convenience store.

  “Yeah, me too,” Cade says, sending me a sad smile as he follows Wes in.

  “Are you okay?” I ask Gwen, and it’s so strange to be asking someone else the question that always gets under my skin. I know she’s not okay, but I guess I mean a new kind of not okay, something piled on top of the already very much not okay we all are.