Evie wasn’t alone. I’d thought it would end up being just the two of us keeping each other company, the rest of the ghosts busy on Halloween. But the wallflowers had found each other after all. Carlos might not have counted, but Evie and Danny sure did. They were huddled together in a quiet suburban street, hiding in someone’s well-manicured bushes as if someone might see them.
“Trick-or-treating?” I asked.
They all cried out, loud enough to nearly scare me right back.
Evie clutched her chest, like she’d really been spooked. “Mal!”
“You’re here,” said Danny, with a shy smile.
Carlos waved me over. “Come join us!”
I crept closer, like I also had to hide. “What are you doing?”
“It’s a Halloween tradition,” said Carlos.
“At least, on this side, according to some of the other ghosts,” Danny added.
“We go to see our folks,” said Evie. She had her hair piled gorgeously high with her scarf knotted in a bow, though no one aside from us would see her for the occasion. “All together, so we stay safe.”
“And we ring the doorbell, so it’s not intruding, either,” Danny added.
“Hold up,” I said. “You’re ding-dong ditching your own families?”
“If we make a game of it, it’s less sad,” said Carlos.
Evie gave an uncharacteristically mischievous smile. “Sometimes they see you.”
I shook my head. “No way.”
“I don’t believe that bit,” said Danny.
Carlos practically bounced on his heels. “We’ll have to find out.”
“So whose place is this?” I asked.
“Mine,” said Danny. “I grew up here.”
Her eyes were wide and glinting, despite her nervous smile. So that’s why we were hiding.
She must’ve had a suburban childhood, like mine. Unlike me, she must’ve gotten along with her folks. She probably came home every holiday for dinner with all the relatives, surrounded by love. That only made it harder to lose them.
Carlos put his hand on her shoulder. “Second thoughts?”
“I already said goodbye, sort of,” she admitted, between taps to her lips. “That’s not so usual, at our age. But I had some time to prepare, come to terms.”
“Uh, how?” asked Evie.
“I got diagnosed,” said Danny, her voice swelling, still having trouble conveying the words even afterwards. “Big C.”
“For real?” I asked. “You look good.”
“Well, that’s not how I died.” Her hands shook as she waved them in agitated flaps. “I supposedly had six months to a year. Then I dropped some notes crossing the street to class, and I needed those, so I stopped, but the shuttle didn’t. Everybody always jokes they’ll pay your tuition if that happens, so you want to get hit, but, well… you have to live through it.” She’d talked fast, even faster than usual, as if she wasn’t sure she could tell the whole story without breaking down. “So I died a couple months before my prognosis. But before that, I still had more time for goodbyes than most.”
“Not enough,” I said.
She nodded.
Carlos took her hand and swung it, back and forth. “Let’s go see them.”
We went slowly, like little kids approaching a house with a whole yard full of zombies and skeletons and grown-ups dressed to terrorize, rather than a tame porch with nothing but uncarved pumpkins and a scarecrow.
Danny rang the doorbell with a shaking finger, before bringing it to her mouth to nibble the fingernail.
The door swung open. “Hello?” called a well-fed, middle-aged white lady, with a kind red face and comforting Midwestern accent, holding a bowl of treats at the ready.
“Hi, Mom,” said Danny. For once, she was worryingly still.
“Hello?” her mother said again. “Anyone there?”
“Come on, hon,” called a man from inside, most likely her dad. “It’s probably just some pranksters who ran out of eggs already.”
But Danny’s mom looked wistful, staring through us and blinking mist from her eyes, before she turned and shut the door.
Danny burst into motion, flapping her hands as she tried to breathe, faster and faster until she began to sob, unable to take in any air but still going through the motions as she cried.
“You did it,” said Carlos.
He pulled her close, not minding the way she fluttered her hands against his chest. Not hard enough to push him away, just bouncing her anxiety off him. She went quiet soon enough. Maybe it had been worth it, filling her more with relief than regret.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
Carlos spirited us to another house. From the wild, weedy grass, and bikes covered in stickers on the porch, not to mention all the empty beer cans scattered all over the place, I guessed we weren’t here to see his parents.
“Is this where your folks live?” asked Evie, rather doubtfully.
“Fuck my folks,” he said. “They left me to rot in the street. Or, well, couch to couch, but still. I got my own family, and my own house. At least I died real comfy at home.”
“How’d you go?” I asked.
He answered fairly easily. “I mixed the wrong meds.”
“Were you trying to get high, or get better?”
“Same difference, am I right?” he said, with a grin.
This time, we strode up through the yard faster, older and ready for mischief. The only decorations outside were pumpkins, carved with grown-up fears: STUDENT LOANS, GLOBAL WARMING, and GHOSTING, illustrated with a message bubble containing HEY, above a checkmark, and in smaller letters, READ AT 2:07 AM.
Inside, they were blasting “Thriller” on repeat. Through the thin curtains of the window, I could barely make out the music video on the TV. Closer to the door, as if to protect it above the others from any smashers, one last pumpkin rested, white and spectral, carved with DEAD FRIENDS, and, below, RIP CARLOS MIRANDA, along with his birth and death dates. Taped in between was a candid Polaroid portrait.
Carlos hit the doorbell with his fist.
Inside, someone yelled, “Kiddos!”
“Chil’ens!” another responded, in a funny voice.
“Fuck, where’s the candy?”
“Don’t say ‘fuck’ in front of the babies!”
Several guys scrabbled for the door at once, all young and uncostumed, one with a short blue mohawk, the rest plainly dressed, band tees and jeans, one carrying a huge bowl of mostly wrappers. They looked around, their excitement fizzling into confusion.
“You scared them off,” said one of them.
“Shouldn’t have said ‘fuck,’ ” added another.
We had to dodge as the one with the mohawk barreled down the yard to look out into the street.
“There’s nobody out here,” he said. “We got ditched.”
“Who still does that?”
“At least kids still go outside?”
They headed back in. We all turned to Carlos.
He grinned real wide, even as he wiped his moist eyes. “They’re still the best boys.”
Evie hesitated before taking our hands to spirit us off.
“My sister might not be home,” she said.
“We could still visit,” said Danny.
“We’ll just throw a rock or something,” said Carlos.
She shoved him. As they were laughing, and we joined hands, I wondered why she didn’t want to see her parents.
We blinked in the fluorescent light of a meeting room, possibly a church, all the tables plastic and chairs fold-up. There were verses on the wall alongside generic, inoffensive motivational posters. I recognized the crowd, a mix of old and young, tatted and pierced opposite starched and plain. It couldn’t be anything but a support group of some kind.
I recognized Leah from Evie’s memory. She looked like an older, worn-out version of her little sister, big eyes low-lidded, mouth frownier. She wore a red dress with some quick and cheap horns sticking out of her straightened hair.
“This feels so silly sober,” she said. “Must be why everyone out there’s getting fucked up.”
Her companion, a tatted Black guy around her age, rolled his shoulders at her. “You’ve got to loosen up, use your own courage, instead of the liquid kind.”
“I don’t have any of that,” she said.
“You’ve got enough to be here, instead of out there.”
Evie reached for my hand. I didn’t want her to see my own memories of this kind of place, the few times I’d bothered attending. I pretended not to notice, turning to the wall to read the posters instead.
LIVE AND LET LIVE.
ONE DAY AT A TIME.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
Carlos went to her instead, not shy about hugging. Danny hung back, but still rubbed a hand up and down her shoulder.
“I got in a crash under the influence,” Evie explained. “So we both went sober.”
She cried for a while. But the longer she did, the longer it would be until we got to my turn. After giving her the cold shoulder, I didn’t want to make it even worse by taking off, skipping my turn, even if that had definitely occurred to me.
When we all joined hands again, it made my head hurt, trying so hard to board up my walls.
We were in a bar. For a moment, I thought I’d spirited way too far of a courtesy distance. Cris could’ve been passing by in her car or something. Then, through the kaleidoscope of colorful costumes, she emerged, wearing a matching white button-down and pencil skirt to go with a pathetic little set of wings she’d had since childhood. We hadn’t been allowed to celebrate Halloween, or even Día de los Muertos, so those were Christmas pageant wings she’d appropriated for the occasion.
“I can’t do this,” I said.
I didn’t want them to see what I’d done to my sister. And I especially didn’t want to open up about how I’d died.
Evie surprised me with her answer. “You want to go?”
She reached for me, but I dodged her hand, again.
“It’s been fun,” I said, and meant it, even if it had also been sad. “But I really need to be alone right now.”
“Are you sure?” asked Danny.
“We’re not supposed to be,” said Carlos.
“This is why we’re here,” said Evie.
“Seriously, guys,” I said. “I’m not kidding.”
But they weren’t going to leave me alone. Because they weren’t bad friends. So I had to do—or say—something drastic. Something I almost didn’t mean.
“Please, just fuck off, would you?”
That did the trick. They were taken aback, and, after what we’d been through together tonight, vulnerable.
Danny began to flap, not in a good way.
“Let’s go,” Carlos muttered, taking one of her hands.
Evie stayed the longest, as if to give me the chance to change my mind. I just turned and went to grab a drink. When I got back, she’d gone, too.