On Friday they went to a house that a kid in English class said was haunted.
They stood before the dark property, armed only with scuffed-up flashlights powered by batteries scavenged from the backs of a couple of Kate’s less-essential remote controls. Kate crumpled a long-abandoned Mountain Dew under her heel intentionally, nervous to throw some noise on the too-quiet scene. Ryan stood still, trying to make the moment as significant in his mind as possible. He swung the glowing beam of his flashlight around to the path before them and looked over at Kate. They both knew he wouldn’t take a step until she did.
A long-repeated urban legend had the house as the site of a grisly suicide generations before, though, of course, every detail had the blurry vagueness customary to ghost stories. Ryan had heard about it for the first time in his third-period class, offered up too urgently by the pale-ish boy who sat to his left. The boy, an excitable theater kid with a flair for drama that a role as Ensemble Cowboy in the school production of Crazy For You hadn’t quite satisfied, had seen an opportunity for attention and had latched onto it.
“She was the ugliest girl in school, in, like, 1950 or whatever,” he was shouting to nobody in particular, “She was sad because she never got any dates.” At this point he was interrupted by a bored girl with heavy eyelids paging through a volume of Dracula as she spoke:
“Oh, yeah, and that’s totally enough reason for someone to be suicidal.”
“Yeah, she was ugly as hell,” continued the boy, not one to pick up on tones. “So, anyway, it was prom night, and the quarterback of the football team asked her to prom. It was her dream come true. She got all dressed up-”
“He asked her the night of, and she still had time to get a dress? That’s incredible.”
“You’re ruining the story,” he snapped at her. She somehow managed to roll her eyes without looking up from her book. “Yeah, so, anyway, it was a prank, and the quarterback stood her up. And she was so distraught-”
“Distraught?”
“She was, shut up, so she was so distraught that she ran up to her attic, still all dressed up in her prom clothes, and she hung herself.”
Ryan had been listening to this all, angry about the empty seat on his other side that he was so accustomed to turning towards when there was anything of interest to discuss.
“Where is this place?” he asked. Ensemble Cowboy seemed genuinely thankful for Ryan’s interest, and turned the full force of his attention onto him.
“It’s over on Maple. I’ve been there myself.”
Ryan tapped his fingers on the desk, rattling off the percussionary rhythm of the theme from Ghostbusters, which no one either noticed or appreciated. “Did you see anything?”
This was obviously the question the Cowboy had hoped for most fervently. His eyes widened and his posture became intentionally bent toward Ryan, like a spring coiling specifically to release this piece of information.
“We saw... her.”
“Who?”
The reverent act came clattering down. “The ugly dead girl, who do you think,” He turned back to face the front of the room as the teacher entered, forcing Ryan to save his additional questions. Ryan wondered whether the kid had called her ugly to her face. His sight was again drawn to that empty chair. This was exactly the thing that he knew Kate would love.
Kate was the one who was always spending spare change on secondhand books about Bigfoot and researching local hauntings anytime she went on a trip. It’s not that she believed in the stuff; she just loved a good ghost story. Except for the past few months, when she had become kind of a ghost herself. Kate was determined, it seemed, to apply to every good college in the continental U.S. before Christmas break. Everything that was not printed on college letterhead, Ryan included, had been put on the back burner. As far as he could remember, more or less every afternoon during the school year had always been full of Kate, making Ben and Jerry’s runs or hiding out in the used book store or sitting out on Kate’s magnificently easy-to-climb roof. They were never dating ... But they hadn’t dated anyone else, either. Kate’s self-imposed imprisonment had broken every unspoken agreement they had; namely, that while the two of them were in the same place neither had to worry about being lonely or bored. And in Kate’s absence, Ryan had become both.
He didn’t know what he was expecting when he showed up on her doorstep with two empty flashlights just as dark was beginning to fall. She’d been locked in her room writing essays for weeks, leaving only for class, and lately, not even that. Ryan knew the odds of prying her away from her bright future in academia were slim at best, but weeks without seeing more of her than a messy ponytail three desks away had driven him to desperation. Though he had spent the walk over to her house debating pitches, by the time he had reached her door all he had composed was “I hear there’s a ghost in a house up on Maple.”
Though he had hoped for it more than he’d admit, what he had never expected was for her to quietly close her extensive Vassar application with a tidy snap, throw on a ragged grey hoodie, and step outside with him.
On the walk over, Ryan was surprised to find that he had no idea what he wanted to talk to her about. He knew he didn’t want to talk about colleges. He feared that the subject would cause her to run back to her dungeon of applications and he would never see her again, or worse, that she would direct conversation toward the pile of applications that Ryan had entirely failed to open yet. He couldn’t yet muster up the energy to pretend that he cared at all where he ended up, or to believe in the future as a real place that he would soon be. Because he didn’t know what to talk about, he talked about the ghost.
“There’s a stop sign across the street from the house,” he said, “that’s supposed to bleed every night, because of the ghost girl. They’ve replaced the sign three times, but the blood always comes back.”
Kate pondered this. “Does it bleed, or is it covered in blood?”
“Is there a difference?”
“I mean, one of them makes more sense ... How would a sign be capable of bleeding?”
Ryan decided to let her train of thought continue, knowing that any attempt to derail it would be pointless.
“And you said she hanged herself, didn’t you?”
Ryan nodded, noting her correct use of the past tense of hang, because of course she would.
“Then why all the blood?” She continued. “Hanging is a super bloodless way to go. It’s not like the splatter or whatever from her grisly death is still hanging around.”
“I think it’s more of a generally ghostly thing to do.” He liked that she was being playful. That she had come here at all was nothing short of divine intervention.
“Like, I think ghosts are more abstract than that,” he continued. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be a direct result of the actual grisly death. Call it creative ghostly license.”
“But why the stop sign? How is that remotely related to the rest of the story? Did she have a particular passion for stopping?” She slapped a mosquito that had perched on her arm.
“You know, if you’re too much of a dick about it she probably won’t come out at all.” Kate met this comment with silence, half mocking the situation and half respecting it. Ryan smiled, knowing that there was a part of Kate that really just wanted to see a ghost.
They came to stand at the edge of the house, which stood slightly away from the rest of the road at the end of a grass-coated gravel driveway. It was almost invisible from the road; the house itself looked to be in relatively good condition, but the grass and plants had been given permission to grow where they pleased. The house was hidden beneath generations of ivy and knee-high grass. They stood and looked for a moment.
“How abandoned did you say this place is?” Kate asked.
“Super abandoned. Since the 50s--”
“Since the 50s?” Kate questioned. “How is it still standing?”
“Okay,” Jake responded, worrying that her suspension of disbelief was running low, “The legend says that it’s been abandoned since the grisly- ness, which was in the 50s or something. Don’t think too hard about the details,” he continued, stopping her short of what he was sure would be a burning retort. “That’s what makes it fun. Look. Kids come here all the time. It’s totally safe.”
They continued to stand, Kate not completely hooked.
But, “ he continued, “if you don’t feel comfortable, we can just go home ...”
This was a total gamble, a phrase they used to throw at each other in the face of any risky or stupid decision. This was a reference to Mrs. Gunderson, the middle-aged teacher tasked with teaching Ryan and Kate’s class a catch-all Sex Ed course halfway through the eighth grade, far after the time that it would have been remotely useful. Before every visually graphic yet anatomically correct diagram, the woman would take a too-long pause to reiterate that students who felt uncomfortable could leave at any time, a process that was more painful than the lesson itself. During these pauses Ryan and Kate made it a sport to try and force the other to leave the room. It was a covert war fought with kicks and pinches beneath the desk, safely out of Mrs. Gunderson’s sight.
The words struck home in exactly the way Ryan was most hoping. Maintaining eye contact, Kate took a dramatically big step onto the gravel. Ryan followed. They fought their way through the bristles to the front porch, pausing briefly to sort out a very unpleasant encounter with a spiderweb.
“How do we get in?” It wasn’t until Kate asked that Ryan realized that he had no idea. The door was boarded up and looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a decade.
“Um ... windows.” He approached the nearest one and attempted to push it inwards as slowly as he dared, having no semblance of a backup plan. He was so focused on the task that he barely heard Kate say his name. He looked over to see her beaming out at him from another window. She disappeared before he had even made it through the window himself.
Inside, Kate was standing, looking around. The window had entered into a living room. Puffy chairs with tacky upholstery encircled a wooden coffee table, all of it looking unused but intact. It looked very much like someone had lived there one day and had just forgotten about it the next.
“Spooky,” Kate said, just to have something to say. They wandered into the kitchen next. Kate stopped at the refrigerator, where faded photographs were held up by red and yellow magnets shaped like flowers.
“I missed adventuring.” Ill-lit as she was, Ryan heard the grin in her voice more than he saw it.
“Yeah,” he answered, sliding open a drawer. “Me too. Where have you been, Bakes?” He had hoped that using her nickname would make the question seem less loaded. He had been terribly mistaken. He had instead sounded even lamer than anticipated.
Kate was suddenly beside him, pushing the drawer shut again.
“Don’t mess anything up, okay, Boss?’’ She said softly. “This isn’t our place.”
And she was away from him, examining a thankfully empty fishbowl far too closely.
“So what are we supposed to do here? What are the ghost rules?”
“Well, I think she appears if you make fun of her.” This was the part he knew she would take issue with, and busied himself with a snow globe of a ridiculous cat on a sled so he wouldn’t have to see her indignation.
“People make fun of her?”
Ryan looked even closer at the cat. It was wearing a scarf.
“How is that okay? She killed herself because she was bullied, and we’re supposed to bully her more?”
“She’s just a ghost,” he tried. The cat was also somehow wearing mittens, even though there would be nothing to fill the thumbs.
“Ghost or not, that is an asshole move and I will have no part in it.”
“We don’t have to,” he responded.
They continued to explore the house. The first floor appeared to be largely musty and, apart from a sculpture of a toucan made from colored toothpicks which Kate adored, uninteresting. The opportunity to grab her hand as they moved from the den into the hallway was entirely missed by Ryan. They wandered into the bathroom and a small study, neither of which held particular interest. Upstairs, though, they found a room that looked unnervingly like one a teenage girl would have inhabited. The bed dressings were the requisite pink, and there was a white wrought-iron window seat lined with tattered stuffed animals. Kate eyed the books stacked haphazardly on the desk while Ryan peered into the closet, looking for anything that would signify the time period before realizing he might possibly be the least qualified person to do so.
“What are the odds that this is real?” Kate had asked the one question that was unequivocally forbidden on ghost hunts.
He turned towards her with solemn eyes.
“Oh, it’s definitely real.”
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh.” She looked at him for a moment longer than he was entirely sure he was comfortable with.
“Alright, then.”
She turned back to the desk and examined a bundle of paper held together with twine. They were postcards, decked out with the typical vintage exotic snapshots and colorful block lettering announcing different exciting places: Honolulu, Paris, Sydney. A cheerful beaver looked up sunnily from a card from Montreal, giving the impression of overcompensation next to the sunnier locales.
It was dawning on Ryan how strange it was to be in the upstairs of an abandoned house and rifling through the possessions of a possibly grisly suicided spirit when Kate spoke again. Still looking down at the cards, her voice was different, more faint.
“I’m so afraid that I’m never going to go anywhere. That I’m not going to matter.” Ryan had never heard Kate express fear about anything before. He’s seen her afraid, sure, but always cloaked under layers of sarcasm and shadowboxing. His nerves were struck by the stark sincerity of her voice as she looked over at him.
“Aren’t you?”
“Nope.” He knew his answer well enough to give it without hesitation.
“Why?” she asked.
“I just think there are more important things in life than where you end up, is all,” he answered, kicking a dust bunny toward the bed and watching it disappear behind the crinoline lining.
“Like?” she prompted him. When this was met with silence she set down the postcards and looked over. He was much closer than he had been, and he was looking at her with the full force of the things he couldn’t quite say. Kate wasn’t sure she liked the things Ryan wasn’t saying. There was a distinct possibility that the words that were as yet unspoken were nudging her heart, pulling it open in exactly the way she was trying so hard to prevent.
“We graduate so soon.” She attempted to drown out the silence, responding to the question that had not been asked. “We have no idea where we’re going to be.” The words hated leaving her mouth, true as they were. “There’s not enough time for this.”She was whispering now.
“But,” he whispered back, “There’s not enough time not to.”
She looked up at him.
“That didn’t make any sense.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“Okay.”
They stood before the dark property, armed only with scuffed-up flashlights powered by batteries scavenged from the backs of a couple of Kate’s less-essential remote controls. Kate crumpled a long-abandoned Mountain Dew under her heel intentionally, nervous to throw some noise on the too-quiet scene. Ryan stood still, trying to make the moment as significant in his mind as possible. He swung the glowing beam of his flashlight around to the path before them and looked over at Kate. They both knew he wouldn’t take a step until she did.
A long-repeated urban legend had the house as the site of a grisly suicide generations before, though, of course, every detail had the blurry vagueness customary to ghost stories. Ryan had heard about it for the first time in his third-period class, offered up too urgently by the pale-ish boy who sat to his left. The boy, an excitable theater kid with a flair for drama that a role as Ensemble Cowboy in the school production of Crazy For You hadn’t quite satisfied, had seen an opportunity for attention and had latched onto it.
“She was the ugliest girl in school, in, like, 1950 or whatever,” he was shouting to nobody in particular, “She was sad because she never got any dates.” At this point he was interrupted by a bored girl with heavy eyelids paging through a volume of Dracula as she spoke:
“Oh, yeah, and that’s totally enough reason for someone to be suicidal.”
“Yeah, she was ugly as hell,” continued the boy, not one to pick up on tones. “So, anyway, it was prom night, and the quarterback of the football team asked her to prom. It was her dream come true. She got all dressed up-”
“He asked her the night of, and she still had time to get a dress? That’s incredible.”
“You’re ruining the story,” he snapped at her. She somehow managed to roll her eyes without looking up from her book. “Yeah, so, anyway, it was a prank, and the quarterback stood her up. And she was so distraught-”
“Distraught?”
“She was, shut up, so she was so distraught that she ran up to her attic, still all dressed up in her prom clothes, and she hung herself.”
Ryan had been listening to this all, angry about the empty seat on his other side that he was so accustomed to turning towards when there was anything of interest to discuss.
“Where is this place?” he asked. Ensemble Cowboy seemed genuinely thankful for Ryan’s interest, and turned the full force of his attention onto him.
“It’s over on Maple. I’ve been there myself.”
Ryan tapped his fingers on the desk, rattling off the percussionary rhythm of the theme from Ghostbusters, which no one either noticed or appreciated. “Did you see anything?”
This was obviously the question the Cowboy had hoped for most fervently. His eyes widened and his posture became intentionally bent toward Ryan, like a spring coiling specifically to release this piece of information.
“We saw... her.”
“Who?”
The reverent act came clattering down. “The ugly dead girl, who do you think,” He turned back to face the front of the room as the teacher entered, forcing Ryan to save his additional questions. Ryan wondered whether the kid had called her ugly to her face. His sight was again drawn to that empty chair. This was exactly the thing that he knew Kate would love.
Kate was the one who was always spending spare change on secondhand books about Bigfoot and researching local hauntings anytime she went on a trip. It’s not that she believed in the stuff; she just loved a good ghost story. Except for the past few months, when she had become kind of a ghost herself. Kate was determined, it seemed, to apply to every good college in the continental U.S. before Christmas break. Everything that was not printed on college letterhead, Ryan included, had been put on the back burner. As far as he could remember, more or less every afternoon during the school year had always been full of Kate, making Ben and Jerry’s runs or hiding out in the used book store or sitting out on Kate’s magnificently easy-to-climb roof. They were never dating ... But they hadn’t dated anyone else, either. Kate’s self-imposed imprisonment had broken every unspoken agreement they had; namely, that while the two of them were in the same place neither had to worry about being lonely or bored. And in Kate’s absence, Ryan had become both.
He didn’t know what he was expecting when he showed up on her doorstep with two empty flashlights just as dark was beginning to fall. She’d been locked in her room writing essays for weeks, leaving only for class, and lately, not even that. Ryan knew the odds of prying her away from her bright future in academia were slim at best, but weeks without seeing more of her than a messy ponytail three desks away had driven him to desperation. Though he had spent the walk over to her house debating pitches, by the time he had reached her door all he had composed was “I hear there’s a ghost in a house up on Maple.”
Though he had hoped for it more than he’d admit, what he had never expected was for her to quietly close her extensive Vassar application with a tidy snap, throw on a ragged grey hoodie, and step outside with him.
On the walk over, Ryan was surprised to find that he had no idea what he wanted to talk to her about. He knew he didn’t want to talk about colleges. He feared that the subject would cause her to run back to her dungeon of applications and he would never see her again, or worse, that she would direct conversation toward the pile of applications that Ryan had entirely failed to open yet. He couldn’t yet muster up the energy to pretend that he cared at all where he ended up, or to believe in the future as a real place that he would soon be. Because he didn’t know what to talk about, he talked about the ghost.
“There’s a stop sign across the street from the house,” he said, “that’s supposed to bleed every night, because of the ghost girl. They’ve replaced the sign three times, but the blood always comes back.”
Kate pondered this. “Does it bleed, or is it covered in blood?”
“Is there a difference?”
“I mean, one of them makes more sense ... How would a sign be capable of bleeding?”
Ryan decided to let her train of thought continue, knowing that any attempt to derail it would be pointless.
“And you said she hanged herself, didn’t you?”
Ryan nodded, noting her correct use of the past tense of hang, because of course she would.
“Then why all the blood?” She continued. “Hanging is a super bloodless way to go. It’s not like the splatter or whatever from her grisly death is still hanging around.”
“I think it’s more of a generally ghostly thing to do.” He liked that she was being playful. That she had come here at all was nothing short of divine intervention.
“Like, I think ghosts are more abstract than that,” he continued. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be a direct result of the actual grisly death. Call it creative ghostly license.”
“But why the stop sign? How is that remotely related to the rest of the story? Did she have a particular passion for stopping?” She slapped a mosquito that had perched on her arm.
“You know, if you’re too much of a dick about it she probably won’t come out at all.” Kate met this comment with silence, half mocking the situation and half respecting it. Ryan smiled, knowing that there was a part of Kate that really just wanted to see a ghost.
They came to stand at the edge of the house, which stood slightly away from the rest of the road at the end of a grass-coated gravel driveway. It was almost invisible from the road; the house itself looked to be in relatively good condition, but the grass and plants had been given permission to grow where they pleased. The house was hidden beneath generations of ivy and knee-high grass. They stood and looked for a moment.
“How abandoned did you say this place is?” Kate asked.
“Super abandoned. Since the 50s--”
“Since the 50s?” Kate questioned. “How is it still standing?”
“Okay,” Jake responded, worrying that her suspension of disbelief was running low, “The legend says that it’s been abandoned since the grisly- ness, which was in the 50s or something. Don’t think too hard about the details,” he continued, stopping her short of what he was sure would be a burning retort. “That’s what makes it fun. Look. Kids come here all the time. It’s totally safe.”
They continued to stand, Kate not completely hooked.
But, “ he continued, “if you don’t feel comfortable, we can just go home ...”
This was a total gamble, a phrase they used to throw at each other in the face of any risky or stupid decision. This was a reference to Mrs. Gunderson, the middle-aged teacher tasked with teaching Ryan and Kate’s class a catch-all Sex Ed course halfway through the eighth grade, far after the time that it would have been remotely useful. Before every visually graphic yet anatomically correct diagram, the woman would take a too-long pause to reiterate that students who felt uncomfortable could leave at any time, a process that was more painful than the lesson itself. During these pauses Ryan and Kate made it a sport to try and force the other to leave the room. It was a covert war fought with kicks and pinches beneath the desk, safely out of Mrs. Gunderson’s sight.
The words struck home in exactly the way Ryan was most hoping. Maintaining eye contact, Kate took a dramatically big step onto the gravel. Ryan followed. They fought their way through the bristles to the front porch, pausing briefly to sort out a very unpleasant encounter with a spiderweb.
“How do we get in?” It wasn’t until Kate asked that Ryan realized that he had no idea. The door was boarded up and looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a decade.
“Um ... windows.” He approached the nearest one and attempted to push it inwards as slowly as he dared, having no semblance of a backup plan. He was so focused on the task that he barely heard Kate say his name. He looked over to see her beaming out at him from another window. She disappeared before he had even made it through the window himself.
Inside, Kate was standing, looking around. The window had entered into a living room. Puffy chairs with tacky upholstery encircled a wooden coffee table, all of it looking unused but intact. It looked very much like someone had lived there one day and had just forgotten about it the next.
“Spooky,” Kate said, just to have something to say. They wandered into the kitchen next. Kate stopped at the refrigerator, where faded photographs were held up by red and yellow magnets shaped like flowers.
“I missed adventuring.” Ill-lit as she was, Ryan heard the grin in her voice more than he saw it.
“Yeah,” he answered, sliding open a drawer. “Me too. Where have you been, Bakes?” He had hoped that using her nickname would make the question seem less loaded. He had been terribly mistaken. He had instead sounded even lamer than anticipated.
Kate was suddenly beside him, pushing the drawer shut again.
“Don’t mess anything up, okay, Boss?’’ She said softly. “This isn’t our place.”
And she was away from him, examining a thankfully empty fishbowl far too closely.
“So what are we supposed to do here? What are the ghost rules?”
“Well, I think she appears if you make fun of her.” This was the part he knew she would take issue with, and busied himself with a snow globe of a ridiculous cat on a sled so he wouldn’t have to see her indignation.
“People make fun of her?”
Ryan looked even closer at the cat. It was wearing a scarf.
“How is that okay? She killed herself because she was bullied, and we’re supposed to bully her more?”
“She’s just a ghost,” he tried. The cat was also somehow wearing mittens, even though there would be nothing to fill the thumbs.
“Ghost or not, that is an asshole move and I will have no part in it.”
“We don’t have to,” he responded.
They continued to explore the house. The first floor appeared to be largely musty and, apart from a sculpture of a toucan made from colored toothpicks which Kate adored, uninteresting. The opportunity to grab her hand as they moved from the den into the hallway was entirely missed by Ryan. They wandered into the bathroom and a small study, neither of which held particular interest. Upstairs, though, they found a room that looked unnervingly like one a teenage girl would have inhabited. The bed dressings were the requisite pink, and there was a white wrought-iron window seat lined with tattered stuffed animals. Kate eyed the books stacked haphazardly on the desk while Ryan peered into the closet, looking for anything that would signify the time period before realizing he might possibly be the least qualified person to do so.
“What are the odds that this is real?” Kate had asked the one question that was unequivocally forbidden on ghost hunts.
He turned towards her with solemn eyes.
“Oh, it’s definitely real.”
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh.” She looked at him for a moment longer than he was entirely sure he was comfortable with.
“Alright, then.”
She turned back to the desk and examined a bundle of paper held together with twine. They were postcards, decked out with the typical vintage exotic snapshots and colorful block lettering announcing different exciting places: Honolulu, Paris, Sydney. A cheerful beaver looked up sunnily from a card from Montreal, giving the impression of overcompensation next to the sunnier locales.
It was dawning on Ryan how strange it was to be in the upstairs of an abandoned house and rifling through the possessions of a possibly grisly suicided spirit when Kate spoke again. Still looking down at the cards, her voice was different, more faint.
“I’m so afraid that I’m never going to go anywhere. That I’m not going to matter.” Ryan had never heard Kate express fear about anything before. He’s seen her afraid, sure, but always cloaked under layers of sarcasm and shadowboxing. His nerves were struck by the stark sincerity of her voice as she looked over at him.
“Aren’t you?”
“Nope.” He knew his answer well enough to give it without hesitation.
“Why?” she asked.
“I just think there are more important things in life than where you end up, is all,” he answered, kicking a dust bunny toward the bed and watching it disappear behind the crinoline lining.
“Like?” she prompted him. When this was met with silence she set down the postcards and looked over. He was much closer than he had been, and he was looking at her with the full force of the things he couldn’t quite say. Kate wasn’t sure she liked the things Ryan wasn’t saying. There was a distinct possibility that the words that were as yet unspoken were nudging her heart, pulling it open in exactly the way she was trying so hard to prevent.
“We graduate so soon.” She attempted to drown out the silence, responding to the question that had not been asked. “We have no idea where we’re going to be.” The words hated leaving her mouth, true as they were. “There’s not enough time for this.”She was whispering now.
“But,” he whispered back, “There’s not enough time not to.”
She looked up at him.
“That didn’t make any sense.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“Okay.”
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