“That’s for demons,” he says, “but got you. Loud and clear.”
The subject of an exorcism does beg an obvious question. Whether there’s a way to make him disappear and take his goofy smile and that familiar grief that hangs in his eyes with him before it becomes something to lose.
There is a knock on the door, and Finn and I turn toward it.The second the knob turns he vanishes, and my sister pokes her head in.
“Hey,” she says. She slips inside and closes the door behind her. “I heard you scream. Are you okay?”
“Define okay.”
“In your case? It’s debatable,” she says. She shifts her weight, as if gauging how welcome her intrusion is, and eventually makes her way over to the bed. She sinks into the mattress beside me. “Want to talk about it?”
“Nope,” I say. I was so caught up in the dead guy in my room, I momentarily forgot about the nightmare—and the new addition to it. It all comes back in a rush. “It was the usual.”
Margot nods. “Want me to go?”
I shake my head.
She nods again and leans over, flipping off the lamp. We settle onto our backs, side by side. I wouldn’t have been able to ask, but Margot knows me well enough to stay anyway. I’m glad she did. The dark is never as foreboding when you’re not facing it alone.
“I found one of Harper’s shirts when I was unpacking,” Margot says eventually.
I struggle to swallow the lump that forms in my throat. I don’t fight the tears when they burn the backs of my eyes. They slide down my cheek, tickling my nose, falling onto the pillow.
“Her dads gave me a box of her stuff,” I say. “Clothes and whatever else. Said I could do what I wanted with it.” The box is still in my closet, next to sheet music and all the other things I pretend don’t exist. “I haven’t opened it.”
“I miss her,” Margot whispers, voice small.
“So do I,” I say. A sob bubbles up in my chest, and though I try to shove it back, it slips past my lips. A pitiful, broken sound.
Margot slips her arms around me. Her tears dampen my hair.
We stay that way for a long time, the Griffin sisters holding each other too tight for the ghosts to sneak between.
I assume she’s fallen asleep until she breaks the silence.
“I miss you, too, you know,” she says. It comes out hesitant—not a common attribute in my sister. It knocks over the stack of bricks before I get the chance to form a wall.
“I’m here,” I say.
“You’re not,” Margot says. “Not really. It’s like…like you’re some kind of ghost. Like you and Harper both died that day, but only she got buried.”
The words are sharp, and coming from anyone else, they’d shut me down. Cut the power and leave me in the dark. But from Margot, they gain purchase, and they sting.
I don’t try to lie. She’d call me out on it. That’s the shitty part about shedding your armor, even if only for a minute. You don’t get to control what spills out. Don’t get to shove it back in before someone sees.
“I don’t know how to…be without her. Like, every day I’m still here, every time I laugh at a joke or feel even the tiniest bit okay, I’m betraying her. Rubbing life in her face.”
“But she’s not here.”
“What, so you’re a skeptic now?”
Margot cranes her head my way.
“Oh, no, this house is still haunted. I’m just saying, if Harper is out there somewhere, ghosting it up, she’d be damn pissed at you. You know that, right? That she’d kill you if she knew you refused to live your life because she can’t?”
I clamp my eyes shut to prevent more tears from slipping out.
Harper would be livid. She’d give me that pursed-lip look of hers, lecture me, and shove me out of the cage I’ve made a home in. But she isn’t here to do any of that. And I was always the sidekick,anyway. Never learned how to push because I had someone else to do it.
