Ghosted

One minute Alice was there and the next minute she was gone. That’s how it felt.

Like magic. Now you see her, now you don’t.

Did she say something stupid? Something that hurt Lena’s feelings? Alice always knew that one wrong move with Lena and it would all be over.

She tried to remember everything she had said. Yesterday after school, they were all—Lena, Hayley, Liv, Alice—standing around Lena’s locker. They were looking at the photo of Lena’s brother. In the photo, her brother was standing next to two other soldiers, all of them leaning against an army truck. Alice had already seen the photo but now it was pasted inside Lena’s locker, stuck onto the door with heart stickers. Alice had said something about it but now she couldn’t remember what it was. She usually said a lot of things. Lena too. It was always the two of them doing most of the talking. “Time to turn off the Lena and Alice Show,” Ms. Garner once said when she was trying to get them to stop talking in class. After that, it was like everyone was watching, everyone was tuning in to see what would happen next.

Alice stopped outside Ms. Garner’s classroom. Lena always got to class before her so probably she was already inside. She had totally ignored Alice when they passed each other in the hall after second period. Well, it would be impossible for Lena to ignore her now because their desks were right next to each other—although if anyone could do it, Lena could. She had a special talent for ignoring people who wanted to be friends with her. The clingies, she called them.

Maybe she was only imagining that Lena wasn’t speaking to her anymore. Alice knew she could be paranoid sometimes. Like when Lena didn’t respond to her texts all weekend, but then it turned out that her parents had taken her phone away.

Should she smile all big and friendly like everything was cool between them?

Or maybe it was better to look all worried like she was sorry for whatever it was she did.

With a deep breath she stepped into the room, not daring to look up until she got to her desk.

Where another girl sat.

Paxton.

Alice stood there, unsure what to do. Paxton didn’t seem to see her at all, and Lena went fishing around inside her pencil pouch like she couldn’t decide which pencil she wanted. Like all of the sudden she cared about pencils.

“Lena,” Alice whispered.

Lena didn’t look up. She was testing the point of a pencil against her finger.

“Lena,” Alice tried again. But it was too late. Ms. Garner was calling for everyone to take their seats, and the only seat that wasn’t taken was Paxton’s, clear over by the window.

No one seemed to notice when Alice sat at the wrong desk. Not even Ms. Garner. And that’s when another possibility came to her. The possibility that Lena wasn’t ignoring her at all. The possibility that Lena couldn’t even see her. The possibility that she was gone. Dead. A ghost.

She would not be the only one. There were two other ghosts at the school—at least, that’s how the story went. Two girls died in a car accident. (This part was true.) It happened maybe twenty years ago and ever since then the Quintana sisters had been haunting the school. When the heater rattled and moaned, it was one of the Quintana sisters. If you couldn’t find your notebook, it was one of the Quintana sisters. No one ever went into the bathroom alone unless they absolutely had to, and then they did their business in record time. If someone came bursting out of the bathroom, all out of breath, it was because of the Quintana sisters.

This is what Alice was thinking about all through class, which didn’t really matter because for once Ms. Garner didn’t call on her, and when it was time to partner up to critique each other’s stories, no one picked Alice. No one even looked at Alice. No one, not even Ms. Garner, seemed to notice that she was just sitting there, alone.

According to the story, the girls had died instantly. Actually, that part was according to Lena, who didn’t even like to hear about a paper cut, let alone the stories some kids told about the accident. Lena said the Quintana sisters died so fast they didn’t even feel it, and so that’s the way it was. Lena’s words were truth, always, no matter what.

Alice’s death was sudden too, she figured. So sudden that she had no idea how it happened. And though it was true that she didn’t feel it in the way most people meant when they talked about dying, she felt it in another way. As if the accident, if that’s what it was, had happened inside her. A crash, an explosion, that left her heart aching for how things used to be. Maybe that’s how it was for the Quintana sisters too. Maybe that’s why they haunted the school. They weren’t trying to scare anyone, they were just looking for what they had lost. They just wanted things to go back to how they used to be.

When Alice looked up from her hands, which she had been studying, which did seem to be a little lighter than before, Lena and Paxton were bent down low over Lena’s desk, writing notes not on their stories but to each other. Alice knew that trick. You slip a piece of paper under your story for easy hiding when Ms. Garner came around.

Though Paxton looked nothing like Alice, still, it felt as if she were looking at herself. Just the day before, that had been her, she was Paxton—at least she thought it was the day before. Maybe it had been longer. Maybe it had been much longer.

She looked around the room, at each student, trying to remember if they had been in her class before her death. There were a few kids she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, including, over in the corner by the pencil sharpener, a boy who was also without a partner. He was wearing one of those button-up sweaters like Alice’s grandpa sometimes wore. Another ghost.

Alice looked down at her own clothing, then over at Lena, and was relieved to see that Lena was wearing a similar shirt, so she figured she hadn’t been dead too long. Another clue: She opened her binder to find her own story, and at the top right corner she had written Ms. Garner, third period, and a date. Stretching up so she could see down onto the desk to her right, she saw that the boy seated there had written the same date on his paper. That meant that she had died in the last twenty-four hours. Turning her own story over she took a pencil out of her pouch and began making a list of everything she could remember from the day before, beginning with yesterday afternoon:

Rode home with Hayley

Ate leftover Halloween candy

Found hair in pasta—disgusting!

Math homework

YouTube videos in bed

Fell asleep in clothes

Took shower, got dressed

Texted Lena—no text back

Cereal

And then the bell rang. Out of habit she looked at Lena. Lena, maybe out of habit too, looked back. Kind of. It was more like Alice’s head was a window that Lena was looking through. And then, without a word, without any sign that she had seen Alice at all, she turned and left.

The halls seemed extra crowded, filled with students that Alice had never noticed before. Their clothes were so out of style that she figured they were ghosts too. Ghosts from 2020 or 2019, or much longer ago than that—2000, 1980—it was hard to tell, but the thought of being surrounded by ghosts filled her with a hot panic and she had to run into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face.

Someone was watching her. She could feel their presence as she bent her head down over the sink. They were standing behind her, their eyes looking out at her from the mirror. When she looked up, though, no one was there.

The Quintana sisters.

Before she could grab a paper towel, she was out of the bathroom. Shaking water from her hands and lifting one shoulder at a time up to pat-dry her cheeks, she searched the halls for Lena. She had to find Lena. She had to find Lena before she got to the lunchroom, before Paxton could take her place there too. Her heart was a hammer pounding on her ribs, pounding on every wall of her. This, though, was a good sign. Surely ghosts did not feel their hearts.

Her eyes swept the halls as she rushed toward the cafeteria. Kids moved out of her path, some meeting her eyes, some of those eyes strangely familiar, as if from another lifetime.

Meatloaf, that would be her guess if Lena were here and they were playing the lunch game. Yesterday she correctly identified not only lasagna but tacos for a double win. Was that the last time Lena talked to her? No, because after school they were looking at the photo of her brother.

A chill ran through her as two girls looked up and smiled at her. They smiled in a way that felt at once friendly and menacing. Had she seen these girls before? There was something familiar about them. Their long straight hair, their bangs—yes, she had seen them! In the newspaper, after the accident. No but the Quintana sisters had darker hair, she was almost sure of it, and they looked younger, shorter, than the girls who just passed her. Still, by the time she got to the cafeteria her heart had taken over her body, her legs so wobbly it was a miracle she didn’t fall to the ground.

And she was too late.

Lena was already sitting at their table. Next to her was Paxton. On the other side, across from them, Liv and Hayley.

Without moving her feet, without even realizing it, Alice had floated up to them and now stood at the end of the table, looking down on Lena’s buttered hair. That was her secret, how she got her hair so shiny: butter.

“Lena,” Alice said.

There was no sign from any of the girls that they had heard her and so she said it again, louder, her eyes stinging from both the hurt and anger. “Lena.”

She wished she had something to leave with her. A gift. Something that would make Lena remember her—remember them. The Lena and Alice Show.

Again she had that feeling that she was being watched and, turning her head quickly to check, found a girl sitting at the next table over. She wore a sweater that Lena, if she saw it, would say she wouldn’t be caught dead in. And now the thought occurred to Alice that perhaps this girl had been caught, on her dying day, in that very sweater. It had a duck on the front of it. A mallard. It reminded Alice of times spent at the duck pond when she was little.

And then the girl smiled. It was a small smile but enough to remind Alice that she had been staring at the girl. Thanks to Lena, she had gotten used to the idea that she was invisible. A ghost. A figment of her own imagination.

She wanted to look away but something about the girl—her smile. It was so familiar. Had they been friends? When they were both—alive?

Talia! It was all coming back to her. Yes, they were friends—they were good friends—and then, what had happened? Lena happened, probably. Lena had chosen Alice and when you were chosen by Lena you were hers. You wore what Lena wore. You did what Lena did.

She was closer to the girl now, standing at the end of the table where she sat, alone, looking cautiously up at Alice and then down again at her meatloaf, which she softly poked with her fork. It was all that was left on her plate.

Her family lived in a bus. Did it used to be a school bus? Had they painted over it? That part Alice couldn’t remember, only that she loved it. Back then, she couldn’t imagine a more magical house. Yes, that’s right! She remembered now. She had even begged her parents to move them to a bus. Talia seemed like the richest girl in the world to Alice. It was Lena who had told her she was poor.

And now Alice found herself no longer standing but sitting across from the girl, who looked uncomfortable but smiled nonetheless as the memories rolled across Alice’s mind. Most of the seats inside the bus had been removed. In the front, behind the driver’s seat, there was a couch and table and tiny stove, and in the back of the bus, behind a curtain, that’s where they all slept. Talia’s bed was up by the back window, the mattress so narrow her parents had put a railing on the outside so she wouldn’t roll off.

They were so little then that the two of them, if they bunched themselves up, could fit together in Talia’s tiny bed and pretend they were birds in a nest. Talia’s mother would sometimes play along, dropping noodles into their open beaks.

“You were,” Alice whispered. To say my friend would have sounded too strange and so she left it at that. Thinking of it all, though, she was filled with a warmth that made her wish she could go back to those days, when everything was so simple.

This time Alice caught herself staring not at Talia but at her meatloaf, and she knew this because Talia whispered, “Do you want my meatloaf?”

It sounded so ridiculous, after so many years of not being friends, that Alice, once she started laughing, couldn’t stop. Talia too. The two of them howling for no real reason, which was the best kind of hilarious. And had Alice looked up in that moment, if she had looked over at Lena’s table, if she had cared at all in that moment what Lena thought, she would have found Lena looking back at her, seeing her, alive, more alive than she had felt in a very long time.