Dead Girl Walking

The first time you ever see a ghost, you’re fourteen and she’s your dead sister.

You’re sitting cross-legged on the dock, sweating. The summer heat is obscene, so thick and rich and suffocating, you close your eyes in defense against the sun. When you open them, a girl floats past you on the water.

She is translucent, opaque-eyed, her hair a matted silver clump threaded through with lake gunk. You don’t recognize her until she straightens, treading water, and eyes you. Your sister used to wear that same calculating, biting stare. Your sister used to wear that same Pandora leather necklace too, with its assortment of infinity symbols and Deathly Hallows charms. No predictable daisies and hearts for your sister. She had a quote from Fight Club tattooed in tiny script just below the jutted plane of her hip bone: I don’t want to die without any scars. Beneath her nimbus of golden hair, she’d had a molten heart and a stare that could solder metal.

“Why haven’t you avenged me, Calla?” The girl in the lake is still treading water, still staring at you with your sister’s face.

The air is hot enough to discourage even the bugs from circling, but your legs are suddenly goose-bumping. A fist constricts your heart, pumping ice into your bloodstream, making you gasp for air. “Emma? No. You’re dead.”

She scoffs and swims closer. “Mm. Are you going to do anything about it? I don’t want to be stuck treading water forever.”

You nod stupidly and then keep on nodding. Apparently, shock has turned you into a goddamn bobblehead. “Of course I’ll help you.”

Emma bares her teeth. She is so insubstantial, backlit against the bright sun, that you have to squint against the glare to see the details of her face. “Not help, Calla. Avenge me.”

+

Technically, your ability to see and talk to dead people has landed you on payroll with the FBI, but you make the bulk of your money working with the local Wellington police force. Officer Whitman calls you ghost girl and Sergeant Anders refers to you as his boo and even Chief Hastings shudders away from you most days, but you don’t blame them.

You wouldn’t want to be friends with you either.

Every morning, you drive down to the station, where Superintendent Shea shuffles through stacks of missing persons posters. You get briefed on the cold cases, the dead-end kidnappings or anything high-profile. Then, you’re essentially left alone to retrace the victim’s last steps in a bid to track down their ghosts. Just like your dead sister stuck treading water in the lake, a ghost is bound to the place in which it was killed. 

Sometimes, the murder sites are obvious: the victim’s house, their place of work, a sketchy back alleyway. Other times, they’re not. Once, you stomped four miles in wet sneakers through woodlands masquerading as a swamp to find the ghost of a forty-year-old woman who’d been shot in a log cabin, like something out of a horror flick.

On this particular Tuesday, Shea pushes a picture of a girl with cornflower blue eyes across the desk. 

You pause in the middle of eating your glazed doughnut. (You’ve been working with the force for so long, it was only inevitable that you’d become a cliché).

The girl looks like she’s around seventeen, the same age as Emma was. She looks like Emma too, with curling, blonde hair and big blue eyes that swallow up her heart-shaped face. She looks like you. You could all be sisters. It makes you wonder why the two of them are gone or missing, and you’re still here, downing deep-fried sugar in a second-rate police station.

“Celine Cassel,” Shea says dramatically, like her name is the tagline of a trailer.

“Cassel. Isn’t that…”

“Yeah. The mayor’s daughter. Went missing over the weekend. Last seen at cheer practice on Friday. We found her Jeep on Saturday morning, in the back of the parking lot.”

“Any signs of a struggle?”

“None. We swabbed for DNA. The car was full of prints, too many to be helpful.”

“Tell me about her.” You lick glaze from your fingertips and stare at the photo. Celine beams in a green tasseled cheerleader uniform, straddling the razor thin line between sexy and wholesome. Emma was a cheerleader too. She was beautiful and vivacious and alive, until she wasn’t. 

“Eighteen years old. Popular. Good looking, obviously.” Shea makes it sound sleazy, even though you know he doesn’t mean it that way. He has a wife he adores and two little girls he worships. But whenever any man over thirty comments on a teenage girl’s looks, there’s an unavoidable element of sleaze.

“Boyfriend?”

“No.”

That surprises you. Emma’s boyfriend Drew drowned her. Her ghost told you how, when she tried to break up with him that day at the lake, he held her down. She told you that the last thing she ever saw was underwater algae scum. Tell the police he did it, she’d said. Make the bastard pay. And for god’s sake, get me out of this disgusting lake.

“What did she like? What kind of stuff was she into?”

“Gymnastics,” Shea says heavily. “Cheerleading. Apparently, she loved astronomy. Wanted to be a scientist when she grew up.”

“Aha. A Renaissance woman.”

You respect that.You’re also trying to carve out new identities for yourself. For instance, you’ve taken five years of art classes and now you’re trying your hand at graphic novels. Fictional ghosts don’t seem that exciting when actual ghosts are a part of your day job - so you’ve been mapping out a plot involving ninjas and time dimension.

You think it might have potential. You’ve lumped it into the secret life you envision for yourself, the one sans ectoplasm where you eat Khao Pad Sapparot in Thailand and backpack the Appalachian Trail and jump out of airplanes and visit Park Güell in Barcelona. The girl in that life is braver than you. Happier, too.

“Yeah.” The skin under Shea’s eyes is marred by dark circles. His fingers join yours, skimming the photo of Celine’s perfect, poreless face. “Her parents are devastated, obviously. Everyone is. Finding her should be your first priority, got it?”

“If I can’t find her,” you tell him, “then maybe she’s still alive.”

+

You spend the day scouring Celine’s usual haunts: her home, the gym where she cheered, the mall, South Florida Science Center & Aquarium. There are no ghosts anywhere. By the time you pull into the high school parking lot, hope has hot air ballooned through your ribcage into your throat, fragile enough to be popped at any moment, dangerous enough to have you choking on the belief that maybe she’s not dead. 

Maybe the pressure of being perfect got to her and she ran away from home. Or maybe, she wanted something bigger and better for herself. A girl with her looks could hawk designer bikinis on Instagram, star as the token hot girl in C-list movies, or teach yoga to celebrities in Santa Monica. No one is famous in Wellington, Florida, and no one gets famous here either. It was swampland up until the 1950s. Everyone considers the international Polo Club to be the height of culture.

You yank your keys from the ignition. In a mere thirty seconds without AC, your Jeep has already begun to fill with heat. It’s 4:25 PM. You purposefully saved your visit to Celine’s high school last, because it’s your alma mater too, and coming here still hurts. Any pleasure you might have derived from a high school experience was pulverized by the fact your older sister should have been here with you, and wasn’t. 

Gravel crunches underfoot as you walk through the main entrance. The hallways are deserted, bits of scribbled notebook paper and abused textbooks littering the floor by the locker bays. You try not to look at anything for too long, as everything here is a dangerous minefield of memories: David kissed you for the first time against that pillar; that’s the senior courtyard where you sat and ate Ritz crackers with your friend Carolina; there’s the hallway where Emma walked you to math class during your first week of high school, the same year she died.

Through the window, you spy what looks like the soccer team practicing on the lacrosse fields, tiny white blurs converging around a speckled ball. Outside the English classroom, you walk past a collage of Celine’s pixelated face. Underneath the poster board, people have deposited flowers, petals desiccating in the heat, and taped colored post-its: Stay strong C! We’re thinking of you, Celine. You remember how after Emma died, there was a small shrine erected in her honor in the gym. One of her fellow cheerleaders, a girl with waist-length frizzy hair and a halo of perpetually smeared eyeliner, cried whenever she looked at you. It’s your face, she used to say, you look so much like Emma. You guys could have been twins. 

You walk on, rounding out a full lap of the campus. You pass a janitor mopping outside the girl’s bathroom and a teacher you don’t recognize, arms full of papers, heels clacking against the concrete.

No ghost. 

You head back to your car, meandering through the science building on your way out and tapping a text to Shea: Can’t find her. I think C’s still alive.

Your phone dings. You think or you hope? Sure you checked everywhere?

You’ve typed out half of a sarcastic response, when your forearm suddenly goose-pimples. The humid swath of air around you has tightened, like a rope or a shoelace, tugging at your attention. Static pulses inside your skull. Sometimes it’s like this - like the ghosts want you to find them, like they’re calling to you before you can even see them. Abandoning your text, you push open the nearest door. It’s the physics classroom.

The first thing you see is a man with a white streak in his jet black hair, wearing tortoiseshell glasses and grading papers behind a desk. Poliosis, you think automatically. Lack of melanin.

The second thing you see is a girl hovering in the back of the classroom, eyes cloudy with vivid emotion, blonde hair floating in tangles around her pale, heart-shaped face.

Shock hits you first, realization jackhammering you just a half second later: this is Celine and this is where she died. Your heart sinks, pulling you with it, like you’re actually falling in place. Your mouth opens, as if with the impact, breath accelerating, vision narrowing.

Celine’s ghost frowns at you, her anger momentarily eclipsed by confusion. “Can you see me?”

You could be forgiven for thinking she’s still alive. In death, the strongest souls hold the brightest power. Weak, dead girls are only shadows. Just as Emma had, Celine throbs with life. In the pictures Shea showed you at the station, there’d been no deeper mystery beneath her smooth, guileless face - but now you see what still life can’t capture: the bite behind her smile, the milky blue fire of her eyes.

“Hello. Can I help you?” 

In the wake of your shock, you’d almost forgotten the teacher behind the desk. “Oh,” you sputter. “Sorry. I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”

This was a mistake. Normally, there aren’t people at the murder sites. 

The teacher uncoils himself from behind the desk. Standing, he’s well over six feet, the planes of his face angular and well-proportioned, his eyes dark green behind the glasses. Even the white streak suits him. When you were in school here, the physics teacher was pushing seventy and nursing a lisp that worsened with every semester. Your pulse oscillates wildly between attraction, fear and horror, as you’re putting the pieces together and realizing that he’s most likely - 

“Murderer,” Celine spits. Her whole body vibrates with rage, the force of it propelling her upwards, electrifying her hair into glimmering, golden filaments. “Murderer!” Her shriek echoes and splinters against the tiling, raising the tiny hairs on the back of your neck.

Yeah, this was a fucking terrible idea.

“What’s wrong?” The teacher smiles at you, and it’s a beautiful smile but it’s slick and wrong, too hungry. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

You force a laugh, looking everywhere but at Celine. Her ghost howls fragments of curses and threats behind you. Going to kill you myself. Going to haunt you until you go insane. “I was just picking up my niece from practice. Thought I’d check out the campus in the meantime. Sorry to bother you.”

“She’s here, isn’t she?”

You don’t know what to do, so you keep smiling. “My niece?”

“Celine.”

You’re shaking so much that your teeth graze the soft flesh of your lower lip. The tang of your blood seeps through your next word. “Who?”

“I know you can see her.” The teacher has stopped smiling now. Without the mask, his face is terrifying. He takes heavy, purposeful steps across the classroom, as you’re frozen with fear. There’s a poster on the far wall of a teenage boy with a megawatt smile and a thought bubble that says if you can believe it, you can achieve it! “Calla. I knew you’d come.”

The noise level in the classroom plummets. Celine has stopped screaming. It’s so quiet, you can hear the rapid-fire rattle of your own breath as if someone has suddenly strapped a mic to your chest. 

“How do you know my name? I don’t know you.”

“No, but you did know Robert Townsend. My cousin.”

Five years ago, when you were twenty and a sophomore at USF, a girl disappeared from a hair salon outside Wellington. Her car idled in the parking lot for a day and a half until the police showed. No one saw where eighteen-year-old Annie went after her hair appointment, and though they combed the surrounding woods, no one found her body either.

Until the police called you.You still have nightmares about the horrible details Annie’s ghost whispered to you about her death: how Robert used the knife, watched her bleed out, made her hurt, made her beg.

You’re dizzy even remembering it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think you do.” The teacher corners you between a desk and the wall. “Because you’re the one who turned my cousin in. He was so careful. No one would have ever caught him. But you can talk to the dead.”

“You’re insane.” 

He ignores you. “It took me years to figure out who you are and what you can do. Even longer to figure out how to get to you. Then I realized. It was so simple. A girl had to die. I knew you’d come looking for her ghost eventually - and when you did, I’d be ready.”

Horror washes over you in a tidal wave. Celine’s face spasms in anguish. This beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who wanted to grow up to be a scientist, who’d loved cheerleading and gymnastics, who’d had a world of opportunities at her fingertips, had died in a classroom because a sadistic killer wanted to enact his twisted revenge on you.

You’re shaking your head wordlessly, backing up. 

“Nowhere to run, bitch.”

No, that’s not true. The door is eight feet away. You make a dash for it. Six feet. Four. Pain lances through your skull as you’re tackled and slammed against the tiled floor. Green eyes glare down at you. Rough hands fasten around your neck, squeezing, choking. Pressure spears your windpipe. Black crowds the edges of your vision.

You bring your knee up between his legs, hard as you can. Not a direct hit. His hands loosen for a second, but he’s still pinning you and you can’t crawl. 

His laugh echoes in your ears. You hate that it’ll be the last sound you’ll hear.

“Calla?” Next to you, Celine’s face is pinched, desperate. “Can you hear me?”

“Help me,” you gurgle.

When she grabs for the hands around your neck, her fingers pass through uselessly. “I can’t.”

You’ve always viewed your power to see ghosts as a penance to be paid. You were the surviving child in your family. Your sister died. You lived, so you had a debt to pay. You were supposed to enact justice on behalf of all the dead, little girls. And you did, but you also dreamed up a thousand different scenarios where you lived more carefree lives. You’ve spent so much time swallowing down the words you wanted to say. You've spent so much time hanging your head, cutting yourself off. You’ve spent so much time with the dead, you’ve forgotten how to live. Maybe you never have. But you want to.

“Calla!”

You hold out your hand to the ghost of the girl who died for you. You think for a second she won’t understand or that she won’t want to, but then her face hardens as she rushes at you, dissolving into you.

Your body cleaves open to make space for the ferocity of Celine’s will, Celine’s mind, Celine’s heart. The full weight of her settles into your bones. She’s so strong it overwhelms you. She’s so angry it’s like a drug inside your bloodstream, pumping vengeance through you, setting you aflame.

You're alive and dead, all at once, full of the power of two different dimensions.

You push at the forearms pinning you down, untangle the hands wrapped around your neck.

And for the first time in your life, you do something for yourself. You squeeze back.