by Laura Ruby
“Lily, why don’t you take Julep upstairs with you?” her mother said.
“Yes,” said Uncle Wes. “I’m sure it’s getting close to your bedtime.”
Lily could clearly see his breath now, she was sure of it, and it made her shudder though she wasn’t cold. She gave her mother a kiss good night and then turned to Uncle Wes.
“It was nice meeting you, Uncle Wes,” she said. She stepped closer to him, right into a wall of frigid air, air that smelled of ash, of soot.
“It’s cold!” she said.
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” he said, irritably now. “It’s very cold.”
Yes, Lily thought, but why only around you?
Jamarama
Lola watched Steffie sleep curled up in an itty bitty ball, her itchy witchy hair hanging off the edge of the bed.
Dweeb-o-rama goes to dreamland.
Lola strolled around the room. Where was the geek stuff? Geeks always had crazy little machines to smash. Model airplanes or gizmos that converted sugar to gasoline or whatever. Tiny working volcanoes. But Steffie didn’t have any of that kind of stuff. Steffie didn’t have any of anything.
Lola been planning to arrange all of Steffie’s shoes into a room-sized smiley face — a weird little surprise for when she woke up — but the gackmonster had only three pairs. What kind of loser had just three pairs of shoes? She opened the closet to pull all the clothes off the hangers, but the hangers were empty. All the clothes seemed to be in a couple of skanky duffel bags on the floor. And then there were only a few sweatshirts, a few pairs of jeans.
If Lola were her, she’d just grab a handful of silverware and take it to the junk shop for some cash. Buy something decent to wear. Legwarmers. Pumps. A bitchin’ miniskirt or two.
Lola herself had grabbed a silver spoon from the dining room and now she plunged it into a jumbo jar of strawberry jam. Steffie didn’t make a sound as Lola filled all three pairs of her shoes with Nature’s Best Fruit Preserves. Then she reached into one of the duffels and pulled out a flannel shirt. She wrapped the jelly jar with the shirt and buried it at the bottom of the bag. Mold city.
She was bored again.
She’d been bored all night, mostly because Sir Flame-a-Lot wouldn’t let her get near Steffie. No, he had to hog the hauntings, pasting himself to that tall old guy with the mismatched eyes, Steffie’s grandpop or whatever, getting in the old guy’s face, freezing him with frigid ghostie ectoplasm. Lame. (Though, she had to admit the trick with the water was pretty gnarly.)
Really, if he weren’t such a meanie, Lola probably would have helped him fulfill his every malicious wish. But every time she came near he’d start waving his torch hands around and doing his crazy dance, and Lola wasn’t going to be a part of that loco little show, no way! She was stuck chasing the cat for entertainment. Of course Mr.-No-Fun-For-Anyone-Else had put the kibosh on that, too, when he gave the cat the coin to play with.
Oh, well. A party is what you make it, right? Lola dove back into the duffel bag. She unearthed the jam jar, still a quarter full, and turned back to Steffie, who slumbered away.
Lola grinned. Sweets to the sweet!
Chapter Eight
Lily woke up to the sound of voices and bolted upright, imagining dolls and cascading water and gaping mouths like broken windows. The moon was high in her window, casting an eerie light around the room. The air was thick with the smell of strawberries.
And there was something wrong with her face.
She stumbled out of bed and ran for the door, wiping her hands across her cheeks. A gritty, sticky paste came away in her palms. She opened the door and heard her mother and Uncle Wes.
“Arden, you must! I insist. She’s only a child.”
“Yes, she’s only a child. My child.”
“At least let me give you something. Buy her some decent clothes. Some books. Whatever she needs.”
Her mother’s voice was ragged. “We just need a place to stay for a while, that’s all. I don’t need your money. We don’t need your money.”
“Well, if you’re certain,” he said. “All you have to do is ask, you know.”
“Thank you,” said Lily’s mother, sounding not very thankful at all.
“Good night, Arden.”
“Good night, Wesley.”
Lily was creeping across the hallway to the bathroom when she heard her mother crying.
* * *
Her face had been slathered with some kind of fruit preserve that took fifteen minutes to get off. And she’d stumbled back into her room to find her shoes filled with more of the same. Who would have done such a thing? Who could have? It didn’t make any sense. She crouched in bed all night until the shadows dancing along the walls seemed to gather and roil into a single humpbacked shape that waddled like an oversized possum in the corners of her room.
The next morning, she ran downstairs to tell her mother about the jam, but she saw her mother’s red-rimmed eyes and quivering mouth, and felt the words dying on her tongue. How could she tell her mother, upsetting her more, when she hardly believed it herself?
Left alone in the creepy house, Lily distracted herself with activity. She played with the cat. She did two math chapters. She swept the floors and scrubbed the sink. She watched a TV special on poison jellyfish and another on Captain Kidd. She avoided the basement.
As she warmed up some leftover Thai for lunch, Lily thought that what bothered her most wasn’t that weird stuff was happening, but that it was happening to her. Lily hadn’t had a nightmare since she was five years old, and she yawned at scary books and movies. Her mother sometimes accused her of having no imagination at all; Lily had been pleased by the comment. It meant that she wouldn’t — couldn’t — be fooled.
Julep jumped up on the kitchen table, trying to get a whiff of the noodles, but Lily shooed her away. The cat managed to produce a look so aggrieved and human that Lily said, “Oh, get over it. You don’t even like spicy food. And it will just give you bad kitty breath.”
The doorbell chirped. Lily felt a tiny burst of hope in her chest, and she quashed it down. It could just be the mailman, you know. She pressed her eye to the peephole.
It wasn’t the mailman. It was Vaz.
She threw open the door. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Vaz said. He was carrying a backpack and a basketball. “I just wanted to see if you were around.”
“I’m around.” She stepped aside so that he could come in.
He wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”
She covered her mouth with her hand as they walked to the kitchen. “We had pad Thai for dinner last night,” she said. “I was just eating the leftovers.”
He took off his jacket and looked curiously at the food. “It looks a little like Chinese. Is it good?”
“Yeah,” said Lily. “I like it, anyway. You’ve never had Thai?”
“I didn’t even know that we had a Thai restaurant,” Vaz said, spinning the basketball on the tip of his finger. “I thought this town was strictly fish and steak and baked potatoes. My dad used to make great souvlaki — it’s lamb. Like a shish kebob. I bet you never had souvlaki.”
“Sure I have.”
He stopped spinning the basketball. “You have?”
“Yeah,” she said, happy that she knew what souvlaki was, that she had tried it. “There was a Greek place around the corner from me when I lived in Chicago. We went there all the time.”
“Chicago. Right.” he said, the look on his face half surprise, half admiration. “I’ve never been to Chicago.” He peered at the food again.
“Do you want to try it?”
“Uh…I don’t know.” He set the basketball on the chair.
“Yes, you do.” Lily got a saucer and a fork. She put a little bit of the pad Thai on the plate and watched him take a bite.
“It’s good,” he said. “What’s in here? Peanuts?” He scooped up another bite and swallowed. In two minutes, the saucer was clean.
/> “Do you want the rest?” Lily asked.
“No,” he said. “That’s OK. I know you were eating.”
“I was just going to throw it out.”
“In that case…” He grabbed the little white container and grinned. “I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.”
He finished the leftovers in four or five large bites. “Thanks. That was really good.” He put the container down on the table, gestured at Julep, who was eyeing him from a chair.
“Your cat’s giving me a dirty look.”
“Oh, well. That’s because I wouldn’t let her have some.” Lily finished her fruit punch and pointed to the basketball. “I was right. You do play basketball.”
“Yup,” Vaz said. “But not that well.”
Lily didn’t like doing things she didn’t do well. “So why do you play?”
“Nothing better to do, I guess. I’d like to play tennis, but it’s too cold. Do you play tennis?”
“Badly. Very badly.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “When it gets warmer, I’ll teach you.” He grabbed at the collar of his shirt and tugged at it. “Speaking of warmer, does it feel kinda hot in here?”
“I guess,” Lily said. But then, it did feel warmer. Steamy, too, like the air before a storm. Why would it be so humid all of a sudden? “The food,” she said, annoyed when she heard the relief in her own voice. “The spicy food always does that.” A thought simmered up: Last night, Uncle Wes had been freezing.
“The food was spicy,” Vaz said. He pressed his napkin to his upper lip, where sweat had begun to bead.
“How about water,” Lily said, her brain chattering, water, yeah, that’s what we need, water will fix it. Her head felt woozy, as if she had a fever.
She got up and threw her punch cup in the sink, opened a cabinet, and fumbled with water glasses that weighed as much as small dumb bells, almost pitching them to the floor. Vaz was making her nervous, that’s all. She filled the glasses, sloshing water over her forearm, wondering if she should just stick her whole head under the spigot, wake herself up.
She brought the glasses to the table, and Vaz downed his in one long pull. She sipped at hers. The air felt dense somehow, thick, and her own movements were slow and clumsy. What was wrong with her? The sun shone through the windows, the cat washed her face with her paw, everything in the room looked the same, so why was her skin prickling? What did her skin know that her brain didn’t? Her nose filled with a sweet, waxy scent.
“Do you smell lipstick?” she blurted out.
“I didn’t know lipstick had a smell.”
“It does,” she said lamely. “Sort of.” Seeing, hearing, and now smelling things. She got up and put their glasses in the dishwasher, then came back to the table. Julep stopped washing in midstream, paw up, ears twitching. Her shiny pupils had widened to swallow most of her irises, and for a moment Lily thought she saw tiny blue flames reflected in the deep black pools.
Lily’s lips felt slick and greasy, and she wiped at them with her hand. “The food —” she began, but Vaz’s shocked expression killed the words in the back of her throat. “What?”
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, then said, “What…what did you do to your face?”
“Huh? What are you talking about?” She glanced behind him to the mirrored cabinets. Some kind of bright pink color was smeared around her mouth, making it look raw and burned.
Lily grabbed her napkin and tried to wipe the mess off her face as her mind jabbered, How did the lipstick get on my face? How? How? How? For a second the air got even warmer, thicker, before a stiff chill wind swept through the room, bringing with it a sooty, acrid scent, like a barbecue doused by rain.
“Did you feel that?” Vaz said. “Is a window open or something?”
“No,” Lily said. “No windows.”
A cold puff of air filled Lily’s ear, and she flinched against it as if it were a knife. She could feel her skin tensing into gooseflesh, her stomach twisting into a chemical knot. Somewhere, somebody moaned.
“Is that you?” Vaz asked, alarm pinching his face. “Who is that?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said. There was another chill and ragged breath, and another, and another. Lily twisted away, frantically rubbing her earlobe.
Vaz dropped the basketball. “Is that breathing? Are you breathing like that?”
“No,” Lily whispered. The sound was slow and hushed at first, like the low sighing of someone sleeping in the next room, but then it gathered momentum: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. The fur on Julep’s back bristled and her tail grew twice the size. She hissed before she tore out of the room, claws scratching for purchase on the wood floor.
Lily threw her napkin on the table, suddenly furious. She would not be scared. She would not. “Who’s breathing like that?” Lily demanded. She twisted in her chair, then got up and charged around the kitchen. “Who are you? Where are you?”
But the breathing got louder and louder and louder, huffing into panting, panting into roaring, until she had to clap her hands over her ears to drown it out. Vaz grabbed one of her wrists and dragged her out the back door to the deck, slamming the door shut with his foot.
“Oh, man,” he said, shaking his head. “You got ghosts.”
Chapter Nine
Lily glared at the wrist where Vaz held her, and he let go as if she were in danger of exploding.
“Ghosts?” she said as soon as she could catch her breath. “You can’t be serious.”
“How else can you explain it?”
“What do you mean, how else can I explain it?” she said. “I can explain it in a thousand ways! There was somebody else in the house! There was somebody in the window! There was somebody in the kitchen or the hallway!” Yeah, but how did the jam get into your shoes? How did that pink get all over your face? She imagined the Kewpie doing a little soft-shoe shuffle in the closet.
He stared at her mouth. “We were the only people in the kitchen.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Lily wanted to cry in fear and confusion.
“My grandmother lived in a house with the ghost of a parrot,” he said. “Late at night, you could hear the parrot calling for its owner. Turtle Bunny.”
“Turtle Bunny.”
“That’s what the parrot called the guy who owned her. Turtle Bunny.”
Lily sat on the edge of the deck. “Are you sure you didn’t take a decongestant before you came over?”
Vaz laughed, but in a sad sort of way. “Hey, that was a joke, wasn’t it?” He sat down next to her. “Let’s think about it for a minute. There was lipstick. The freaky breathing. And your books moving around, right? And the phone calls. Anything else?”
Lily yanked the elastic from her hair, spilling the red waves down her back. “A doll that was in the basement somehow ended up on my bed. Weird stuff in the fridge. Cold spots. Somebody filled my shoes with jam.”
“That’s one I haven’t heard before,” said Vaz.
She dragged her fingers through the snarled strands of hair. “But that doesn’t mean that it was a ghost, right? I mean, it definitely wasn’t.”
Vaz gingerly touched the tip of his nose. “My dad talks to me sometimes.”
“Hmmm,” Lily said. She had something…panting in her house. Why the heck was Vaz talking about his dad?
“My dad is dead.”
Lily couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What?”
“He died in a storm just off the coast six years ago. He went out fishing and he didn’t come back. They found his boat bobbing on the water. They never found his body.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t…I mean, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well,” Vaz shoved his hands into his pockets. “Anyway, he talks to me sometimes.”
Lily felt a pang in her gut. “What do you mean, talks?”
“I don’t know. All of a sudden his voice is just…there, like he’s right next to me. Like you are. Like the breathing in the kitchen just n
ow. It’s almost like he never left, except that he can’t hear me.”
“What does he say?”
“He talks about fish, mostly. The right bait you use to catch bass. The best place to find sharks and stripers. Sometimes he talks about the water. How the spray feels on your face. The sun shining white on the wake.” Vaz zipped up his sweatshirt. “And then sometimes he talks about my mom. He loved my mom a lot.”
Lily had a sudden dim and grainy memory of her own father, strumming the guitar, singing low and sweet with her mother looking on, and something inside Lily’s throat lurched. “That’s good,” Lily said, before thinking about it, before stopping herself. “That’s nice that he tells you.”
“It’s like…nah, forget it.”
“What?”
“It’s like he’s been boiled down to the most essential parts of himself, you know? The most important parts are all that’s left. The sea, my mom, and me.” Vaz plucked at the folds in his jeans. “You think I’m crazy, right?”
She did, sort of. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do. I used to think I was. I’m not, though.”
“Okay.”
Vaz turned to look at the house behind them, then back to her. “Let’s pretend you don’t think I’m crazy. Who do you think the ghost is? Who died here?”
Immediately Lily thought of Uncle Max glowing green and nuclear in the closet. “Max,” she said finally.
“Who’s Max?”
“My mom’s uncle Max.”
“How many uncles do you have?”
“There was a creepy painting of him in the front room,” said Lily, ignoring his comment. “I took it down and hid it in the closet because I didn’t want to look at it. Mom said he was dead.”
“Did you ask your mom how he died?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think she wants to talk about it. As a matter of fact, I’m sure she doesn’t want to.”
Vaz tugged at the funny curl on his forehead. “Look, to get rid of the ghost, we have to figure out what he wants.”