Notes from Ghost Town (5 page)

“No,” I whisper, still shaky, realizing it’s true—my purse is up there, where the cops are still patrolling with their flashlight beams. Double shit. “Nothing.”

“Nothing
chica
? Nada?” she asks, gazing at me through dark cloudy eyes.

“Nothing,” I whisper. “Please—please be quiet.”

“Over here, Tom!” That’s one of the cops. As the flashlights sweep in our direction, some barely submerged instinct to
run
bubbles to the surface and I do—straight into the water. I slosh into the angry waves, a shock of cold drumming through my whole body; I put my head under and swim.

When I surface, I’m fifty feet from the shore. I cough out salty water as the waves rise, wondering how long it’ll be until the cops go away. The surf is rough tonight; the ocean ink-black. One cop’s voice reaches me like a faraway gurgle and when I see his flashlight shining toward me in the waves, I duck back under, swim even further out, holding my breath underwater until the very last second.

Bursting, needing badly to breathe, I lift my head and try for air. But as soon as I do, the tide surges, waves rising over my head. Salty water fills my mouth, my lungs; I spit and cough and try to lift my head back up but the current
pulls me back, lassoing me beneath the surface. Dragging harder.

I kick against the water, try to lift even my lips above it, my nostrils, anything. Anything. My body begins to weaken as I thrash, exhausted, fighting for a single second of air. All I hear is the punch of my own heart against the crush of water as it devours me. It’s big, so big, and I can’t stop it now. And Stern pops into my head right then: that suspended, honeyed version of him in the light from the shed. His mouth, his lips, his tongue forming the words he’d sing.
Oh! Susannah I froze to death Susannah don’t you cry don’t you cry
.

It occurs to me just then in my vodka haze: Stern died here. Right around here. Where his body was dumped. The ocean took him; it will take me. It
is
taking me. No point in fighting. Can’t stop it. Can’t stop. Can’t …

I froze to death Susannah froze to death don’t you cry don’t you cry for me
.

And then, out of the tug and tumble of the water, something grips me: arms, around my waist. Drag me. Pull me up. My heart clicks back on—air—I’m lifted above the waves, coughing the water from my lungs, everything burning. I don’t struggle, don’t question. I’m not sure if I’m coming back to life or on my way out.

Moments later, these arms lay me out on the shore, while I gasp and sob, figuring out how to breathe again. Everything feels raw, painful. Finally, I open my eyes, squint at the figure beside me through the fog of my tears.

A
boy
.

I try to make out his features, silhouetted against the bright of the moon. But I’m still so dizzy and blurry and I can’t see anything until the high beams of a passing motorboat sweep across us as it turns, flashing momentarily bright on his face.

And the world goes still, deathly quiet.

No. No
.

Impossible
.

My heart does a triple-flip in my chest. My whole body turns to ice. I’m going to faint.

When he finally turns to me, a smile spreads across his face—that brilliant, honeyed smile of his that always made me smile back.

Stern
.

I
can’t take my eyes off him—his deep black curls, the cream of his skin, the little cleft in the chin. My Stern. I have to be dreaming. I clench my eyes shut, feeling the cool wet sand against the back of my neck.
Wake up, Olivia. Wake UP
. I pinch myself, hard, and blink several times, but nothing changes.

Okay. Not dreaming. Dead, then. Must be.

The Gray Space
. Mom’s words skip sharp across my skull.
The place of the dead
.

My breath comes in short, shallow bursts and my head feels so light when I finally manage to gasp: “Stern.”

To say his name out loud makes all of my insides feel suddenly pummeled by heavy stones.

“Liver.”

There it is: the familiar curve of his lips as he says this word—this nickname that sits in a locked box inside me. There they are: his perfect, very soft lips inches from my face, forming this word. I am dreaming. I am dreaming of something magnificent, terrifying, and impossible.

“You’re not here.” I must confront it. This is fact.

“Really?” He stares at his long, white hands, the skin of his arms beneath his rolled-up flannel. “Where am I?” he asks.

“You’re dead.” This, too, is fact. Stern is dead. Stern is dead, because my mother killed him.

Stern frowns. “I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive then, are they?”

“Yes. They are. They are
definitely
mutually exclusive.” I rub my head, trying slowly to sit up.

“Evidently not.”

“Evidently
yes
.” Dead, dreaming, or crazy. One of the three. “You cannot English me into believing something that I know is not possible.”

“Admit it: what’s both impossible and true
isn’t
impossible.” He covers his mouth when he smiles. As he always did. To hide that little gap between his teeth. He shifts closer to me in the sand, his hand only inches from mine.

But when he does, the parts of him closest to me—right hand, arm, then the whole right side of his body—go unsolid again. Like he’s made of water, but just half of him. He winces like he’s in pain and shifts away.

He closes his eyes. “I
felt
you, Liver. I felt you come close to me. And I reached for you, and I ended up back here. On this beach. In front of Oh Susannah. And you were here.” He shakes his head, opens his eyes, staring ahead beyond the pier and the dunes to my old crumbling purple house. It’s still unlived in, even after ten months. Can’t sell it. Dad says it’s
the damned market
, but I suspect it’s the murder
that happened just yards away. The blood soaked invisibly into the sand, creeping back toward it like thorny vines. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “I drowned, didn’t I? I remember that. Nothing else. Just the water.”

“Yes.” My throat is squeezing up. I shiver beside him—there’s a coldness radiating from him, from his fingertips—like how it feels to poke your hand into the freezer on a very hot day.

“I remember,” he says, quietly. “Oh Susannah was the last thing I saw. The only thing I remember.” He looks right at me, the whites of his eyes seeming to glow.

Dead. He’s dead. A dream, or a
ghost
. The word tunnels to some back part of my brain,
ping
ing some invisible button that makes everything suddenly seem very real and very unreal all at once. An in-between, a teetering between worlds.

The Gray Space
. Am I trapped somehow in this otherworldly dimension, without color, inhabited by the dead?

No. She
invented
it. It’s not a real place, not a real thing
. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, anti-feeling, the cold dark place that
felt
like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible.

It isn’t real.

I’m shaking all over, clutching my arms over my chest. I have to stay calm. I have to think logically. “I’m dreaming.” Saying the words out loud makes them feel more
true. “I’m dreaming of you because I miss you, because you’re always in my head. We learned about that last year in psych, when we had a lucid dreaming unit.” I pound at my head, trying to wake myself up.

“Liver. Stop. Listen to me.” Stern’s voice is urgent.

I open my eyes.

His basketball shorts fall just above his knees and seem more solid than his entire body, the new height he’d cultivated going on seventeen that summer, last summer, the summer he died. He’s wearing a plaid shirt. Stop-sign-red gray. Sleeves rolled up.

I try to grip onto the sand for support, but it whittles away between my fingers.

We’d found that flannel together at the mall, over Christmas break. He’d tried on at least ten others before finding this one; he wore it almost every night it was cold enough to wear a flannel. Stop-sign-red and cut-grass-green gray. White between the blocks of color I cannot see.

Stern was cremated, after his body was hauled from the ocean, bloated and foreign. His body is ash. Stern’s body is ash. Stern doesn’t have a body. Stern does not exist anymore. I’m staring at a boy made of ash. No.

“You have to help me, Liver,” he says in a cut-up voice—a voice that puts an instant lump in my throat. Hearing the ghost of my best friend in pain—even if it’s all in my own head—is horrible. “I’m stuck. I’m in a place I’m not supposed to be. You have to help unstick me. I think I’m here now, with
you
, for a reason.”

“I can’t help you. You—you aren’t real.” I’m freezing. My dress is wet, plastered to my skin, the back of it coated in sand. I refuse to meet his eye, though all I really want to do is look right at him and have him be real and living and wrapped around me, with cheap beer in our hands and a fire and a surfboard at our side. I pinch myself again, harder than ever.
Why can’t I just wake up?

He frowns. “You’re so stubborn when you think you’re right.” He shakes his head, his thick, dark curls swaying along. His skin shines. “You were always so stubborn.”

Boom!
Fireworks explode suddenly above us. I always loved fireworks—just last year, Stern and Raina and I would have been lying on the deck of Uncle P’s boat now, staring up at them, opening our mouths to the sky like they might land on our tongues and melt down our throats like sugar. They look like ash to me now. I try to stand. My stomach churns, and when I bend my chest into my knees, I gag up a stream of saltwater.

It’s happening. You’re turning. Schizo schizo schizo
.

I straighten up. I can’t bear to look back again to see if he’s there or not, if he was ever there, as I grab my purse and race away through the sand.

“Liv!” I hear his voice in the distance, though it somehow feels like a whisper in my ear at the same time.

His voice fades as the hopeful part of my brain keeps saying:
this isn’t real. It’ll be over soon. Dreams always feel long, and then they end. They
end.
You’re not crazy. You’re dreaming. Just dreaming
.

But another part of my brain says:

The Gray Space. Maybe it
is
real. How did it find me?

I run, dizzy, along the empty stretch of beach, past the rotted piers, flanks of sand kicking up behind me, spattering the backs of my calves. My breath is fast and short, chest dry-heaving. I feel the final blur of vodka-drunk melt away.

Drunk. I was drunk. Wasted. I hadn’t eaten much of anything, and I was upset, and scared, and so I had a little vodka-dream about my dead BFF rising to save me. I probably wasn’t as far out as I thought I was, must have been thrust back onshore by an incoming current.

I press my palm firmly into my forehead like I’m trying to keep my brain from frothing out, staring into the headlights spearing the dark road before me.
I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy
.

I repeat this mantra over and over again as my breathing calms. I retrieve my bike from the parking lot of Elysian Fields. I put my feet back on the pedals, inch slowly home on sidewalks, off the main roads, trying to keep my eyes focused, trying to shut off my brain.

Plumeria cloaks the streets and the sidewalk starts to even out before me, even as my heart pounds, ticking out the words I will continue to repeat inside my head until I believe them.

Ghosts aren’t real.

I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy
.

T
hey’re not real. I know this for a fact,” Raina says, leaning closer to me, her dark hair in its trademark braid down her back, her big eyes glinting in the sunlight. “Cassidy ended junior year president of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and now she’s got, like,
jugs
. It’s so obvious. Something like this—” she says, making mountainous circle-arcs from the top of her chest to the bottom of her ribcage—“doesn’t just happen overnight.”

Raina continues to judge Cassidy’s inflated side-profile from several hundred feet away. Cassidy, along with several other girls I knew in middle school, sit on a blanket in the grass, smoking clove cigarettes. I can smell the bittersweet bite of them from here. Raina and I were close, weekly-sleepover-type friends with Cassidy in sixth grade, before she dumped us for a “cooler” group of friends who take pills and razor-shave shapes into the sides of their heads. Raina’s competitive streak has been in hyper mode ever since.

Sometimes I even think Raina’s competing with me:
to be cooler, funnier, more unique. I don’t know why she bothers. There’s no contest. Raina’s effortlessly cool. Her mother’s Cuban, Dad’s Minnesotan, and wherever she goes, and whatever she does, people stare at her. She’s a hard person to disagree with; when she says something, it sticks.

A spurt of hyena laughter explodes from their circle.

“Silicone, right?” My head throbs when I speak. Every sound—Raina’s voice, the achy creak of the swing set, the thrum-buzz of insects—feels like a little knife blade to the back of my skull. The tiniest vibrations make me feel a little bit like hurling.

Eight days until Mom’s sentencing. Eight days until she leaves the holding cell where she’s been caged for the past ten months like some snarling animal. Eight days until she pleads insanity before the judge and she’s shuffled off to the coldness of a different cage.

I scan the park, keeping an eye out for people who might try for a free ride on the carousel I’ve been charged with monitoring. Most of the kids who hang around here try at least once—leap right past me and onto one of the ancient porcelain horses hoping I won’t notice they’re freeloading. It’s my sole job this summer—collecting the two-dollar-and-fifty-cent charge, ripping tickets, and yelling at people who violate the Miami-Dade Parks and Rec rules. That should have been the job description when Dad encouraged me to apply:
Carousel Bitch
.