Invisible Ghosts

“I don’t allow food or drinks in my classroom.” Mr. Ferrara frowned down at Jamie’s soda can.

  “It’s just an empty.” Jamie shook it to demonstrate. “I was waiting to find a recycle bin.”

  “There’s one in the corner,” our teacher said.

  Jamie got up and threw away the can. He did it properly, instead of trying to bank it from across the room, like most boys would have done.

  I watched as his gaze flickered to our teacher, checking that he’d smoothed the tension, and I realized it had been a calculated move. Just like the change of clothing after he saw that he’d unintentionally stood out on his first day. I didn’t get it. If he wanted to blend in, he should have picked a less-visible friend group.

  Jamie sat back down and took out a pair of round glasses. He hadn’t needed them when we were younger, and they made him look a little like Harry Potter. Mr. Ferrara gazed at us expectantly, and I wondered if he was going to ask for a volunteer to set up the SmartBoard.

  Instead, he uncapped a marker.

  “Art pushes boundaries. History creates them,” he said.

  He summarized it on the board like a math equation: History → Boundaries → Art. There was a scramble to copy this down.

  “Over the course of this semester, we’ll explore how and why that is,” Mr. Ferrara continued. “We’ll be looking at art, essays, and historical documents, and we’ll scrutinize the influence of history on artistic expression. This is a college-level course, and memorizing who painted Starry Night isn’t enough. In my classroom, we’ll ask difficult questions and attempt to answer them.”

  He paused, letting the full advanced-placementness of his class sink in, the way my other AP teachers had done. And then he smiled.

  “But since this is the first day, I guess it won’t hurt to have a little fun. Everyone take out your phones.”

  We stared at him, confused. Most teachers told you to put away your phone, not to do the opposite.

  “Now turn them off,” he said, once all our phones were out. “I don’t want any cheating. The assignment is simple: to fill in this packet with the answers you know, and to make me laugh with the ones you don’t.”

  He handed out a stapled packet thick with pictures of art. The first page featured a cave painting of horses and some classical sculpture. I honestly had no idea about either of them.

  Suddenly, my dream of traipsing through a museum and knowing its secrets seemed supremely stupid. And about a million years out of reach.

  “You have thirty minutes before I’m collecting these,” he said. “You can work alone, or together in pairs.”

  All around the room, desks scraped the floor as students moved into groups. Before I could even process what was happening, Jamie scooted his desk toward mine.

  “Ready to own this?” he asked, grinning at me from behind those nerdy glasses.

  Somehow, I managed a weak smile in return.

  The edges of our desks were touching. We weren’t just sitting next to each other anymore. We were sitting together. His right knee was inches from mine, and I could practically feel the heat radiating from it.

  J. Aldridge / R. Asher he scrawled at the top of his packet, a shorthand that felt impossibly foreign. He was using pen, too. I looked down at my mechanical pencil, which was bright yellow with cartoon eggs all over it. And then I glanced back at the packet, my stomach sinking. I was totally unprepared for a test in a subject I’d never studied.

  “Um,” I said, staring down at the page. “I have no clue about either of these.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” Jamie said absently, scrawling down the answers so fast that I didn’t even have time to read them.

  He flipped to the second page, which looked just as impossible. A painting of a girl in a scarf and a modern piece with gold stars. Without hesitating, he scribbled down Girl with a Pearl Earring—Vermeer and Jazz—Matisse.

  He went straight on to the third page, totally focused, like we were already taking the advanced placement exam. I sat there feeling like an idiot.

  I glanced around the room. At least none of our classmates were racing through the packet. Behind us, Maritza and Adam were arguing in a loud whisper over the cave painting.

  “Come on, Cleopatra, jump in.” Jamie flashed a grin and slid me the packet.

  It was an Egyptian sculpture. One that I actually recognized from those forever-ago library books.

  “The bust of Nefertiti,” I said, writing it down. And then I added, “You’re really good at this.”

  “Well, my mom’s an anthropology professor,” he reminded me. “If she heard I couldn’t identify the Chauvet cave paintings, she’d probably drop dead.”

  There it was: the smallest wince, followed by the panic in his eyes that he’d said the absolute wrong thing.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, mortified. “Shit, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to joke about that.”

  I stared at him, waiting for him to stop. Desperate for him to stop.

  “Claudia told me,” he went on, “about Logan, I mean. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like. She said he died from a beesting?”

  He kept going, rambling about how sorry he was, and how great Logan had been. At some point, I must have closed my eyes, as though I could eclipse his words by plunging myself into darkness. The next thing I knew, Jamie was gently touching my shoulder.

  “Hey, Cleopatra. You okay?”

  “Fine,” I snapped, glaring at him. “And for the record? My name’s not Cleopatra.”

  Jamie looked like he was about to say something else, but he swallowed it down.

  “I’ll finish this,” he said, gingerly reaching for the packet as though it had transformed into something fragile just from sitting on my desk.

  Before I could stop him, he filled in the rest of the packet like it was an act of charity. Like it was a freezer meal he was generously dropping off on our doorstep, four years too late. It was exactly what I’d been afraid would happen yesterday, in Gardner’s class, except somehow it was worse. No matter how many years had passed, and no matter how much had changed, my brother’s disaster was still the one thing that defined me.

  I stared down at my notebook, at the line I’d copied about history creating boundaries, and I thought about how, sometimes, those boundaries exist for a reason.

  5

  “YOU SHOULD IMAGINE your audience naked,” Logan suggested, snickering. “Naked, and extremely cold.”

  It was Thursday evening, and he was draped across my bed, watching me practice my monologue. When he stretched out like that, with his feet hanging off the edge, the hole in his sock looked even more ridiculous.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I told him, rolling my eyes.

  He was wrong, though. The trick wasn’t to imagine your audience any specific way; it was to forget they were there entirely. Which was a lot easier in front of a nameless crowd, and a lot harder in front of a particular group of classmates.

  “You’ll be fine,” Logan said. “You’re a great actress. Remember all those skits you used to put on with your friends?”

  I wished he hadn’t brought that up.

  “Yeah, in elementary school,” I said. “And then I was pity-cast in our sixth-grade play as a stupid pirate with one line. But in summer rep, against actual competition? I wasn’t even good enough for the ensemble.”

  “You’re the one who keeps taking drama,” Logan pointed out.

  “To do costumes, not monologues,” I said with a sigh. “I would have taken theater tech, but it conflicts with French.”

  I glared at my monologue, wishing it would transform into something else, like a table read other people could do while I watched.

  “Do you want me to come?” Logan asked. “For moral support and mockery?”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Besides, I think those two things are mutually exclusive.”

  “Hey now, I can be mockingly supportive,” Logan insisted. “I am filled with contradictions.”
>
  “Oh, you’re filled with something all right. Now shut up. I need to memorize this.”

  Before I had a chance to read it all the way through, I was interrupted again.

  “Rose?”

  “I told you, not now,” I snapped, looking up.

  My dad stood in the doorway, wearing his wire-frame glasses and a goofy grin. He’d traded his work clothes for workout clothes, even though he never went to the gym anymore, so they’d basically become pajamas.

  “Oh, sorry,” I mumbled. “I thought you were . . .”

  There was no good explanation, so I didn’t even try.

  “Dinner?” I asked, putting down my script.

  “Yep. And there’s a surprise for dessert.”

  He mouthed the word cheesecake.

  “Chocolate or plain?” I asked. We both preferred chocolate, but Mom insisted on original.

  “Can’t tell you.” Dad winked. “That would ruin the surprise.”

  Chocolate. Definitely.

  “I’ll be right down,” I promised, glancing over at my bed.

  But Logan had disappeared.

  THE THEATER WAS freezing. I’d forgotten how the air-conditioning blasted everyone who wasn’t under the hot stage lights. I folded my arms across the paper-thin fabric of my T-shirt, wishing I’d brought a sweater, or worn a thicker bra.

  Kate and I were planted strategically in the back row, since Mr. Gardner always started calling people up to perform from the front. Kate was convinced he might run out of time and spare us, but I doubted either of us had that kind of luck.

  Sam’s crowd was sprawled in the first row, making too much noise. Jamie sat with them, as he had all week, a now-permanent fixture.

  I’d ignored him in art history on Thursday, taking notes on Mr. Ferrara’s PowerPoint in the neatest version of my handwriting and sighing whenever Jamie tried to get my attention. He’d finally given up halfway through the period.

  “All right,” Gardner said. “Let’s get started. Who’s on first?”

  “WHAT ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR?” Sam bellowed.

  It was a terrible joke, and one he’d made a million times. But Gardner laughed as though he’d never heard it before, going red in the face. Which of course was the real joke, not Sam’s lame attempt at an ancient Abbott and Costello bit.

  “Very funny.” Gardner wheezed, trying to catch his breath. “Sam, get up there.”

  Sam stood, a strip of neon-blue underwear showing above his jeans. He wasn’t even embarrassed by it. Just tugged his shirt down and hopped onto the stage without using the stairs.

  The thing with Sam was that he didn’t look like he could act. His older brother had been a varsity athlete, and they looked so similar that you half expected Sam to lob a football into the wings or roll his eyes and make a joke of it. But acting was the one thing Sam had always taken seriously.

  “Yeah, what’s up?” he said, his voice booming across the auditorium as he slated his scene. “I’m Sam Donovan, performing a monologue from The Foreigner for Mr. Gardner’s Advanced Theater class.”

  He looked so relaxed up there, under the stage lights, with all of us watching. His gravitational pull made sense in the theater. The moment he started to speak, no one could look away.

  The rest of the group went after Sam, all of them in perfect planetary alignment. Their monologues seemed effortless, even though we’d only had a few days to practice, as though they’d played these roles forever.

  Jamie was the last of them. He’d chosen one of the Shakespeare pieces, and when he announced it, I wondered if he was going to pull a British accent, which Gardner hated. But someone had warned him, and of course his monologue was fantastic. I hated him a little bit then, for disappearing, and for coming back even better.

  I watched as the rest of my classmates went. No one was terrible, not even Seth Bostwick, who attempted the gravedigger speech from Hamlet with so much clowning and space work that Gardner probably wished he’d allowed props. The only disaster was Kate. She sped through the lines without pausing for breath, her hands fidgeting in the pockets of her cardigan.

  And then it was my turn. I was last, and I could feel everyone’s impatience as they realized that I was the only thing standing between them and getting to the parking lot before it jammed.

  The lights felt hot and bright in my face, and the stage was scuffed, up close, shabbier than it looked from the audience. There were tape marks everywhere, leftover blocking from a show that had long ended its run. A show that my former friends had starred in while I’d fussed with the costume rack, wishing so many things had turned out differently.

  I took a deep breath, steadying my nerves.

  “I’m Rose Asher,” I said.

  It came out too soft, and I frowned. I had no business commanding the attention of an entire theater, but I also had no choice. And I wasn’t about to go down in front of everyone. So I tried again, letting my voice carry to the back row the way I hadn’t done since my Annie audition.

  “I’ll be performing a monologue from Hamlet.”

  I closed my eyes, taking a moment to ready myself. And when I opened them, I was Ophelia. Broken, tragic Ophelia, quietly going mad.

  I’d forgotten what it was like, having words that came easily. Having an audience that wasn’t waiting to talk over you or embarrass you for what you’d just said. It was so freeing, becoming someone else, even without a costume. I didn’t want it to end.

  But it did, and I was me again, standing onstage in a too-thin shirt in front of thirty classmates who were being forced to applaud my homework.

  Except Sam and Claudia weren’t clapping politely along with everyone else. Instead, they were cheering and wolf-whistling the way they had for their friends.

  Gardner dismissed class before I’d even made it back to my seat. The theater emptied out as upperclassmen raced for the parking lot and sophomores hurried toward the drop-off zone.

  “Hey, Asher!” someone called while I was zipping my backpack.

  I glanced up and inexplicably found Sam loping toward me.

  “Nice job today,” he said, grinning.

  “Thanks.”

  It came out like a question, because what I really wanted to ask was why he was suddenly talking to me.

  “How come you never try out for the shows anymore?” Sam asked, leaning against a theater seat.

  “I do costumes,” I reminded him, in case he’d forgotten that part.

  Maybe he had. He was staring at me like we hadn’t been in Gardner’s class together for the past two years. Like every time Gardner had forced us to do scenes, he hadn’t watched as Kate and I fell flat.

  If only theater were like sports—no one ever asked the girls who didn’t make frosh-soph volleyball why they hadn’t tried out for varsity. But here Sam was, asking me just that, as though our summer rep director had been wrong about me and I’d been left behind by mistake.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. And then I noticed Sam wasn’t wearing a backpack. He didn’t have so much as a notebook on him, which couldn’t be right. They played it off like they were more artsy than academic, but everyone in Sam’s crowd took APs.

  “Where’s your stuff?” I asked.

  Sam grinned sheepishly.

  “Stashed my bag in my locker after lunch,” he admitted. “Otherwise I’d just read over my monologue all class and obsess.”

  It was the last thing I expected him to say. Sam always seemed so effortless on stage that it was strange to realize he was just as shaky off script as the rest of us.

  “Can I make an observation?” I blurted, unable to stop myself.

  “By all means.”

  “If you’re going to all that trouble about your script, doesn’t volunteering to go first kind of ruin it?”

  “Damn it, Asher.” Sam laughed. “Remind me never to tell you my strategy for math tests.”

  “Is it ‘study for the math test’?”

  “Solid guess. But no.”


  “Is it ‘sacrifice half-eaten baked goods to the exam gods’?” I blurted, feeling my cheeks go pink.

  Sam looked astonished.

  “How did you know?” He goggled at me for a moment, as though I’d actually gotten it right, then shrugged off the act as easily as a sweatshirt.

  I’d forgotten how we used to joke like this, just subtle enough to be convincing if you didn’t know the game. Our friends would jump in, going from audience to performance, while everyone else stared at us, confused.

  But there was no one else around. And Sam seemed to realize the same thing. He glanced toward the lobby, where his friends were waiting. And I realized that Kate was waiting for me too, by the sound booth, so we could walk over to the choir room.

  “Well, I’ll see you,” I said, grabbing my bag and hurrying to catch up with her.

  THAT NIGHT, I dreamed I was in a play. It was opening night, and I stood in the wings, my heart pounding as I waited for my cue.

  Delia was onstage, giving a monologue that seemed to go on forever. Suddenly the play switched, and instead of Delia, the spotlight was trained on Sam. The audience loved him, clapping so loudly that I couldn’t even hear his lines over the applause.

  “Where’s Rose? She’s almost on,” a techie said, rushing around with his clipboard and headset.

  “I’m right here,” I called.

  He looked straight through me.

  “Hello!” I said again, but no one was paying attention.

  Sam stood in the spotlight, silent and frozen. He wasn’t wearing a costume. None of us were. Sam glanced nervously toward the wings, and I knew it was my cue. But when I tried to walk onstage, I couldn’t, because the stage wasn’t there. It was on the other side of a mirror.

  I was trapped on the wrong side, missing my moment. I pounded against the glass, realizing the only way through was to break it. And then I hauled back and hit it. But when my fist connected, it wasn’t the mirror that shattered into a million pieces. It was me.

  6

  ON TUESDAY, LOGAN was waiting for me on the nature trail after school. He did that sometimes—camped out where he knew I’d turn up.

  Once, after the mile run in gym, I’d found him in the girls’ locker room, gleefully spying on my undressed classmates. I’d almost bitten my tongue off having to be quiet about it and had made him swear never to do it again. Even if I was the only one who could see him.