That’s objectively unhinged, but healthier than my usual coping mechanisms. I’ve done way stupider things to quiet the noise in my head.
His chest is still heaving, hair plastered to his forehead. He lifts his head. Our eyes meet. In place of last night’s anger, there’s something raw and unguarded. He looks how I feel, as though he’s trapped inside his head with nowhere to go.
I emerge from my room, bathing Nico in warm light. “I can’t sleep either,” I say, with a self-deprecating smile.
Nico straightens and brushes past me, and I catch the smell of cold air and sweat before he disappears into his room at the end of the hall.
I stare at his closed door for a couple of seconds.
I climb back into bed, yanking the covers up to my chin. Bob shifts against my leg.
Annoyance sits in my chest for a couple of seconds before I force myself to think through this. What would Mom say?
Lead with kindness even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.
I press Dad’s dog tags against my lips, thinking.
Whatever Nico’s running from, it’s bigger than me. Having a new person here is probably adding to his stress.
It must be hard, trying to keep everyone safe after losing one of the team. It’s clear they’re like a family. My stomach drops. What if he watched them die? I know what it’s like to carry that weight. To wake up every day wondering if they’d still be here if you’d done something differently, and the wondering eats me alive.
In the morning, I knock on DJ’s door, and she answers wearing pajama pants with a cartoon sushi pattern.
“Want to come to the grocery store with me?” I ask. I won’t have the chance to go once I start work tomorrow.
Forty-five minutes later, DJ and I are pushing carts through the produce section of the closest big-chain supermarket. I grab some basics, and DJ works through a shared list on her phone for the others.
DJ tosses a bag of frozen peas into the cart, adding it to a growing pile of comfort foods—mac and cheese, ice cream, chocolate chip cookies.
“Can I ask you something?” I say. “The team member who died, what was their name?”
DJ’s easy smile vanishes. She studies the grocery list.
“Bonnie,” she says, eyes firmly on her phone.
I feel like Ray as I figure out how to approach my next question, all the wrong words churning in my mind. I decide to be direct. “What happened to her?”
“Six months ago, Nico and I were hunting a Fragment through an old movie theater,” DJ says. “It’s important when hunting Fragments to establish their boundaries, and we thought it was confined to the building.” DJ throws a glass jug of milk into the cart a little too hard, crushing a loaf of bread. “We were wrong. Bonnie was running comms from the van parked outside. We lost contact with her, and when we got back to the van… she was slumped over in the passenger seat. Her eyes had gone milky white.” DJ struggles to get the next part out and picks up a juice carton, examining the label, obviously pretending to read it. “The entity got so deep inside her head that she thought she was someone else. She kept asking where her husband was, but Bonnie was never married. The intrusion permanently blinded her. She lives in a facility upstate now, and still has no idea who she is. I visit her sometimes.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, because what else can you say? I understand now why they talk about her as though she died. She did. In the ways that count.
My annoyance with Nico evaporates. I can’t take any of what he’s doing personally. He sees me as another Bonnie.
DJ breathes out a long sigh on a lip trill and replaces the juice carton on the fridge shelf. “Oh—hold on—I need to grab something.”
She veers toward the seafood counter before I can ask what. I follow her, watching as she points to a whole fish sitting on ice, its glassy eye staring up at nothing. “That one.”
The guy behind the counter wraps it up.
“Are you meal prepping?” I ask as we walk away.
DJ shakes her head. “This is for Peggy.”
“Peggy?”
“She’s a Poltergeist who lives just outside our property line.” DJ tucks the fish under her arm. “She can’t cross the fence, but she hangs out near the edge sometimes, and she loves fish.”
I blink at her. “Ghosts can eat?”
