Her mother nibbled on a piece of crust. Then at last she reached for the remote and hit mute.
“Baby,” she said. “Galaxy.”
“Alex.”
“Alex, can you talk to me? Can we talk about what happened?”
Alex felt a hard burble of laughter pushing at her throat, making it ache. If it got free, would she laugh or cry? Can we talk about what happened? What was she supposed to say? A ghost tried to rape me? Maybe he did rape me? She wasn’t sure when it counted, how far inside he had to be. But it didn’t matter, because no one would believe her anyway.
Alex clutched the pocketknife in her pajama pocket. Her heart was suddenly racing. What could she say? Help me. Protect me. Except no one could. No one could see the things hurting her.
They might not even be real. That was the worst of it. What if she’d imagined it all? She might just be crazy, and then what? She wanted to start screaming and never stop.
“Baby?” Her mother’s eyes were filling with tears again. “Whatever happened, it’s not your fault. You know that, right? You—”
“I can’t go back to school.”
“Galaxy—”
“Mama,” Alex said, turning to her mother, grabbing her wrist, needing her to listen. “Mama, don’t make me go.”
Mira tried to draw Alex into her arms. “Oh, my little star.”
Alex did scream then. She kicked at her mom to keep her away. “You’re a fucking loser,” she shrieked again and again, until her mother was the one crying and Alex locked herself in her room, sick with shame.
Mira let Alex stay home for the rest of the week. She’d found a therapist to take Alex in for a session, but Alex had nothing to say.
Mira pleaded with Alex, tried to bribe her with junk food and TV hours, then at last said, “You talk to the therapist or you go back to school.”
So the following Monday, Alex had gone back to school. No one spoke to her. They barely looked at her, and when she found spaghetti sauce smeared on her gym locker, she knew that Meagan had told.
Alex got the nickname Bloody Mary. She ate lunch by herself. She was never picked for lab partner or field-trip buddy and had to be foisted on people. In desperation, Alex made the mistake of trying to tell Meagan what had really happened, of trying to explain. She knew it was stupid, even as she’d reeled off the things she’d seen, the things she knew, as she’d watched Meagan shift farther away from her, her eyes going distant, twirling a long curl of glossy brown hair around her forefinger. But the more Meagan drew away, the longer her silence stretched, the more Alex talked, as if somewhere in all of those words was a secret code, a key that would get back the glimmer of what she’d lost.
In the end, all Meagan said was, “Okay, I have to go now.” Then she’d done what Alex knew she would and repeated it all.
So when Sarah McKinney begged Alex to meet her at Tres Muchachos to talk to the ghost of her grandmother, Alex had known it was probably a setup, one big joke. But she went anyway, still hoping, and found herself sitting in the food court, trying not to cry.
That’s when Mosh had looked over from the counter at Hot Dog on a Stick and taken pity on her. Mosh was a senior with dyed black hair and a thousand silver rings on her corpse-white hands. She knew all about mean girls, and she invited Alex to hang out with her friends in the parking lot of the mall.
Alex hadn’t been sure how to act, so she stood with her hands in her pockets until Mosh’s boyfriend offered her the bong they were passing around.
“She’s twelve years old!” Mosh had said.
“She’s stressed, I can see it. And she’s cool, right?”
Alex had seen older kids at her school take drags on joints and cigarettes. She and Meagan had pretended to smoke, so she at least knew you weren’t supposed to blow it out like a cigarette.
She clamped her lips on the bong and drew in the smoke, tried to hold it, coughed loud and hard.
Mosh and her friends broke into applause.
“See?” said Mosh’s boyfriend. “This kid is cool. Pretty too.”
“Don’t be a creep,” said Mosh. “She’s just a kid.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to fuck her. What’s your name anyway?” “Alex.”
Mosh’s boyfriend held his hand out; he had leather bracelets on both wrists, a smattering of dark hair on his forearms. He didn’t look like the boys in her grade.
She shook his hand and he gave her a wink. “Nice to meet you, Alex. I’m Len.”
Hours later, crawling into bed, feeling both sleepy and invincible, she realized she hadn’t seen a single dead anything since the smoke first hit her lungs.
Alex learned it was a balance. Alcohol worked, oxy, anything that unwound her focus. Valium was the best. It made everything soft and wrapped her in cotton. Speed was a huge mistake, Adderall especially, but Molly was the worst of all. The one time Alex made that mistake, she not only saw Grays, she could feel them, their sadness and their hunger oozing toward her from every direction. Nothing like the incident in the grove bathroom had happened again. None of the Quiet Ones had been able to touch her, but she didn’t know why. And they were still everywhere.
The beautiful thing was that around her new friends, her high friends, she could freak out and they didn’t care. They thought it was hilarious. She was the youngest kid who got to hang with them, their mascot, and they all laughed when she talked to things that weren’t there. Mosh called girls like Meagan “the blond bitches” and “Mutant Cutes.” She said they were all “sad little fishes drinking their own piss in the mainstream.” She said she’d kill for Alex’s black hair, and when Alex said the world was full of ghosts trying to get in, Mosh just shook her head and said, “You should write this stuff down, Alex. I swear.”
Alex got held back a year. She got suspended. She took cash from her mom’s purse, then little things from around the house, then finally her grandfather’s silver kiddush cup. Mira cried and shouted and set new house rules. Alex broke them all, felt guilty for making her mom sad, felt furious at feeling guilty. It all made her tired, so eventually she stopped coming home.
When Alex turned fifteen, her mother used the last of her savings to try to send her to a scared-straight rehab for troubled teens. By then Mosh was long gone, off at art school, and she didn’t hang with Alex or Len or any of the other kids when she came home for the holidays. Alex had run into her at the beauty supply, still buying black hair dye. Mosh asked how school was, and when Alex just laughed, Mosh had started to offer her an apology.
“What are you talking about?” Alex said. “You saved me.”
Mosh had looked so sad and ashamed that Alex practically ran out of the store. She’d gone home that night, wanting to see her mom and sleep in her own bed. But she woke up to a pair of beefy men shining a flashlight in her eyes and dragging her out of her room as her mom looked on and cried, saying, “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t know what else to do.” Apparently it was a big day for apologies.
They bound her wrists with zip ties, tossed her in the back of an SUV, barefoot in pajamas. They screamed at her about respect and breaking her mother’s heart and that she was going to Idaho to learn the right way to live and she had a lesson coming. But Len had shown Alex how to snap zip ties and it only took her two tries to get herself free, quietly open the back door, and vanish between two apartment buildings before the meatheads in the front seat realized she was gone. She walked seven miles to where Len was working at Baskin-Robbins. After his shift, they put Alex’s blistered feet in a tub of bubble gum ice cream and got high and had sex on the storeroom floor.