GhostsofNamelessIsland_epub

“On edge” is a bit of an understatement. Mom left for Tacoma an hour ago, and I’ve been pressed against the etched glass window for the past hour waiting for Miles to drive up.

“So, um, where did you say Tavi was tonight?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

“Researching,” Miles says vaguely.

“I still don’t understand how you managed to send my mom a video message from your mom that didn’t actually involve your mom,” I say. “I saw it myself. If that was you in a wig, you should try out for the school musical.”

“Actually,” Miles says proudly, “most of it was my mom.”

“I don’t get it.”

Miles explains as he lugs his equipment to the living room. “Mom is basically the face of Park’s on Park. She’s like a Rhodi celebrity.”

I laugh, but Miles isn’t kidding. “Dude, you’ll see what I mean if you’re ever out walking with us on the pier. It’s all ‘Hey, Mrs. Park!’ ‘What’s up, Young-Sook!’ She takes her selfie stick and videos herself every morning in the kitchen showing off the daily specials on the restaurant’s SeeMe page, and Jimin edits and posts it.”

“Jimin?”

“My older brother,” says Miles. “Who’s really good at editing videos but also really good at getting into trouble, so he owes me a bunch of favors for keeping my mouth shut.”

“Which is how you got him to edit a video from daily SeeMe clips into a message for my mom.”

Miles grins. “For the words we didn’t have, that was Jimin in a wig out of frame. I gotta admit it. He does a pretty good impression of Mom.”

I shake my head. “Imagine if you both used your powers for good.”

Miles looks genuinely offended as he points to his equipment. “What do you call this?”

After we devour some microwave ramen and set up the sofas for bed, we’re ready to get down to ghost business. I point Miles to the nearest outlet in the living room so he can set up.

“So let me get all the facts straight,” I say. “You’ve never seen a ghost.”

“Never once,” says Miles.

“Never heard a ghost.”

“Not a peep.”

“Never been haunted in any way.”

“Nope.”

“But you want to be.”

“I’d consider sacrificing a toe for it.”

I’m trying to see it from his perspective; I really am.

“Okay,” I say, “have you ever dislocated your kneecap?”

“Gross,” Miles says, flinching. “No.”

“Well, I have, and it was the worst pain I’ve felt in my entire life.”

That’s not true. The worst pain I’ve felt was the day they closed the missing person file on my dad, but physical pain is much easier to explain.

“What’s your point?” says Miles.

“My point,” I say, “is that you’ve never felt that either, but you know you don’t want to.”

Miles’s forehead crinkles. “So being haunted hurts?”

“No,” I say. Well, not until recently. “It . . . it’s like . . .”

How do you explain being “gifted” with a gift you never wanted, one that takes pieces away from you and never gives anything in return?

I’m trying to figure out a different way to explain when I realize that Miles’s “equipment” looks like old stereo dials and toaster parts plugged into thermometers, which are plugged into extension cords, which he’s now plugging into the living room outlet.

“I’m so glad Mom isn’t here to witness this,” I whisper.

He’s just donned an honest-to-toads tinfoil hat that has a little antenna bobbing from its pointed tip. He looks like an anglerfish.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“All the things are wrong, Miles,” I say. “But I’m gonna go with the homemade fire hazard,” I say, pointing to the outlet.

“It’s not as low tech as you think,” he says.

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” I say. “I don’t know where the breaker box is.”

“Calm down,” he chuckles. “I’ve done this a million times, and that one electrical fire was a complete fluke.”

“Uhhh.”

“Besides, this is only to charge the electromagnetic field recorder.”

“Electromana-wha?”

Miles unplugs the master plug, but all his bleeps and bloops keep blinking and humming.

“One hundred percent battery powered,” he says, beaming. It’s hard to take him seriously with the hat. He bends the antenna to a dramatic right angle; his electro-whatever lights up like a torch, and he springs to his feet.

“We’re in business!”

The hat comes off, and we begin in the foyer, his electromagnetic field recorder (or EFR—whatever, it’s the thing that records sounds we can’t hear) in hand. He takes a slow scan of the hallway before moving on to the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors.

“So is your whole family into ghosts too?” I ask.

Miles sneaks a smile over his shoulder. “They believe in them, if that’s what you mean. But my mom would kill me if she knew what I was doing here. She doesn’t like me messing around with this stuff. She thinks people who die the wrong way are the only ones who leave ghosts behind, so you’re inviting trouble when you go looking for them.”

“My mom’s the opposite,” I say. “If I breathe the word ‘ghost,’ she’ll try to get me to believe it’s literally anything else. Shadows, bad dreams, gas, you name it. I mean, even my therapist was willing to believe me when I told him.”

“Sounds like my kind of therapist,” Miles says, slowly leading us upstairs.“My mom used to scare the pee out of Jimin and me when we were little, telling us all these stories about different ghosts. Like, there’s this toilet ghost.”

“That might be the ramen,” I say, holding my gut.

“Cheukshin,” Miles says, ignoring me as he runs his gadget over the closed door of what Mom thinks is an upstairs bathroom.

“Chook-what?” I ask.

He says it slower, like chook-shin.

“She was a goddess banished to the outhouse in ancient times, and she had this really long hair she’d use to kill people who didn’t cough three times to warn her when they were coming. And no one could go to the outhouse on dates that had the number six, or she’d kill you. Or Mul Gwishin—that’s the water ghost. She drowned, and she’s really mad about that, so she pulls you into the water if you get too close.”

“There was this one time my dad wouldn’t buy a box from an antique dealer. It would have been perfect for a house we were restoring. It was from the same time period and everything. But he wouldn’t touch it. The dealer was practically giving it away, Dad told me to wait in the car, and we never went back to that place again. Later that night, I heard him mention it to my mom. He said something about a dybbuk. Even my mom who doesn’t do ghosts was glad he didn’t bring it home.”

“Tavi has talked about those,” Miles says, deadly serious. “Jewish folklore. Not to be messed with. Maybe your dad was trying to give you some lessons on Jewish mythology or something. Do you even learn Jewish mythology in Hebrew School? I guess I wouldn’t know. My parents could never afford to send me to hagwon, not that they have any on the islands anyway.”

“Huh?”

“Korean school,” he says. “Like school after school.”

“Sounds fun,” I smirk.

“Yeah, well, it’s pretty much required for kids in Korea, but since my parents can’t send me, they try to fill me up with all the cultural stuff they can—like telling me cultural ghost stories and making me learn Hangul in my free time at the restaurant. Like they’re afraid I’ll lose my culture or something.”

Miles slowly raises the EFR up and down each locked door of the upper floor until we make it to the end of the hall. We both see Cat sitting in her usual spot, facing the arched door.

“Well, she’s not running to snuggle with me, so that’s a good sign.”

Miles gives me a quizzical look.

“Oh yeah. She loves on me only when there’s a ghost around. She’s complicated.”

Miles inches past Cat to approach the little arched door, running his handheld device up and down in front of it. The green lines jump wildly.

“Well, her radar might be a little off. Even if you manage to unlock it, you might want to stay out of wherever that leads to,” he says.

“You think?”

Miles switches off the EFR as he brushes past me, and we head back downstairs where he begins packing up his equipment.

“Wait, that’s it?” I ask.

Miles nods. “Until I can analyze my findings, pretty much.” He can tell I’m not satisfied with his answer, though, so he puts his hands on my shoulders.

“Gus, I hate to break it to you,” he says, “but I think your house might be haunted.”

“I think you might be right, Miles.”

I slump to the couch and slap my hands over my face. “Why can’t this ghost be like all the others? Why does this one have to be—”

“Messed up?” Miles finishes, sitting across from me on the other couch. “Because this is Nameless. Nothing here is normal. Haven’t you figured that out by now, Portland?”

“I’m a slow learner,” I grumble.

“You know,” Miles says carefully, “not everyone here thinks you’re freaks or whatever. It’s just . . . nobody moves to Nameless, you know? Not on purpose, not anymore.”

“Yeah, well we had to,” I blurt, but I immediately regret it when I see Miles flinch. This is his home. “I didn’t mean . . . it’s not that I didn’t want to move here. I didn’t want to move at all. With my dad gone . . . my parents’ business wasn’t going to last. My dad was the one who drummed up all of the new jobs. He knew the antique dealers and people in that world. My mom couldn’t keep it going.”

Miles looks down at his hands.

“I used to go ‘treasure hunting’ with him,” I tell Miles after a long silence. “That’s what we called it. He’d take me to the antique shops while he hunted for furniture, and he’d let me dig through the bins for old junk. They sort of became my protectors. Against the ghosts, I mean. I know it sounds stupid.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Miles says.

I walk over to the hat rack and retrieve the medallion the broken boy showed me the first night I arrived. “I keep finding this around the manor. The broken boy was holding it the first night I saw him. I think it meant something to him when he was alive.”

I place the medallion in Miles’s palm, and he squints at it, holds it up to the light, shakes his head, and returns it to me. “I can’t make out the letters.”

“Me neither,” I say, returning the charm to the hat rack. “Anyway, that would’ve been like something I’d buy for our protector box: a broken watch or a jade elephant or a coin. None of them meant anything, but I bet I could name every single stupid piece of junk from that box.”

“So let’s see it,” Miles says.

My throat goes dry. “It’s gone. Disappeared when he did. Anyway,” I say after another long silence, “that’s why we Miles chuckles. “She’s gonna leave you on read, dude. She’s in the zone.”

“So why’d she text?” I ask, irritated.

Miles shrugs. “She does that.”

I try to hide my disappointment, but Miles is still grinning at me. It’s like he’s told himself a really funny joke. Maybe a ghost has. Who knows.

“What?”

“I knew it,” he smirks.

came here, and now that it’s just her and me, we need to stay. She can’t lose this job.”

Miles holds up the EFR. “Between my readings and Tavi’s research, there’s no way we won’t get to the bottom of this.”

BUZZ! BUZZ! BUZZ! Both of our phones vibrate at the same time.

“Spooky,” he says. “It’s like she heard us.”

“Tavi?” I ask.

Miles grins at me.

“What? I don’t like her,” I blurt. “Besides, I know you two are a thing, so—”

“Whoa, no!” he cuts me off. “NO, nononono. Gross, no.”

“She’s not gross,” I say, looking for something to throw at him.

“I didn’t say she was gross,” Miles says. “Relax. Tavi’s rad. She’s wicked smart and funny and weird and all that. It’s just that I’ve known her forever. She’s like a sister.”

“Oh,” I say, wishing I could hide my ears because they feel like they’re on fire. Why does embarrassment have to burn so hard?