We keep walking, down a small hill and eventually into a clearing, which I know, not because I see it (it’s too dark to see) but because I feel the change in the terrain, the scrub no longer reaching out to touch my knees. The trees widen so that, all of a sudden, there’s space. Breathing room. The air around us changes too, becoming heavy, moist, and the temperature drops.
He says, “This is it. We’re here,” and I stop dead, holding my breath, squinting and trying to see through the darkness.
“What is this place?” I ask.
I shiver, an actual chill moving up my spine, everything all of a sudden more acute. My shoulders jerk, which he notices, asking, “You feel that too? Not everyone does. I thought it was just me.”
For the first time, I feel scared.
“Feel what?” I ask, though I do feel it. The sense that we’re not alone. That someone, or something, is here with us, just beyond reach, just beyond what we can see.
He says, “The cold.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I feel it.” I wrap my arms around myself, afraid to turn around and see if someone’s behind me, because there’s a different energy at my back all of a sudden. A felt presence, like someone is there. “What is it?” I ask, about the cold, thinking of the lake effect back home and how we must be close to the lake, and that’s what’s causing the change in temperature.
Daniel doesn’t tell me, not in words. Instead, he shines his phone’s flashlight just out in front of him and I make out names and dates on stone tablets before me. Millie Green. 1889–1925. Dorothy Frank. August 19, 1902–June 1, 1919. Janice George. 1912–1968.
A cemetery.
The chill in the air has nothing to do with the lake.
“They say it’s haunted,” he says, his voice toned down, doomy, so that I start to shake. “They say that sometimes, late at night, you can hear the sound of someone crying. And that some nights there’s a girl in white, holding a baby and asking for help.” I can feel his eyes on me in the darkness. “Are you scared?” he asks, and I know that’s what he wants.
He wants to scare me.
He wants me to be scared.
“No,” I say, except I am. “Because there’s no such thing as ghosts.” But as I say it, a sound like gnashing teeth, like driving on gravel, comes from behind and I flinch, spinning, crying quietly out as we both turn at the same time, staring into the darkness, searching but seeing nothing.
It doesn’t matter.
I don’t have to see it to know. Someone or something is there.
I picture her with long, flowing hair like cobwebs, a gaping mouth, hollowed-out eyes.
But then no one and nothing emerges from the woods and I start to second-guess myself. Maybe I didn’t hear anything. Maybe nothing is there. Maybe it was just my imagination.
Except that he heard it too.
“How do you know?” he asks after a minute.
“Know what?” I ask with my back to him.
“That there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“I just do.”
Except I don’t. Because after Grandpa died, I was pretty sure he came back and that he left coins for me on my dresser. I didn’t know him, not really, because he had dementia for most of my life and half the time thought I was Emily and the other half that I was her mom, my grandma. Emily used to say how he collected coins his whole life, how he hunted flea markets for them, how he went to coin shows and auctions, how he kept them in hard plastic storage cases at home. She thought it was a dumb hobby, a waste of time. I thought it was cool. He always wanted to tell me about his coin collection and it was like the only thing he ever talked about that made sense. He couldn’t remember my name or who I was—that I was his granddaughter even—but he remembered everything about his coins, like where he got them and what they were worth.
And then one day after he died, I came home from school to find three silver dollars waiting for me on my dresser, including a Morgan silver dollar, which, when I googled, was actually worth something, not anything life-changing, but something.
If he didn’t put them there, then who did?
“Then what are you looking for, if there’s no such thing as ghosts?” Daniel asks. He doesn’t wait for me to say. “Don’t be scared,” he says then, like he knows I am, even though I saidI’m not. Like he can see through me, even in the darkness. He comes up from behind, standing so close that I feel his breath on my hair, moving it, the sensation making my stomach flip like when you’re on a roller coaster, coasting out of control down the first big hill, free-falling, and my heart and stomach are somehow detached from the rest of my body, floating in space. That’s how it feels. His arms wrap around me. He leans in, breathes into my ear, “They’re not going to hurt you. They’re harmless. They’re just lonely and looking for someone to vibe with, like me.”
He turns me around, putting his hands on either side of my face. He leans down, bringing his face closer to mine, and as he kisses me, it feels like getting caught in a rip current, like it’s pulling me in, pulling me under, and all I can think about is don’t fuck this up. Don’t do something stupid.
Because girls like me don’t get second chances.
