The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

  “I am,” I agree, and slide to my feet. They tingle with the act of moving after spending so long still. “I need to go to the . . . ” My cheeks redden at the thought of where I’m going. Steady on, Rose. You can do this. “To the ladies’ room. Can you let the waitress know I’ll be right back, I’m not skipping out on the check?”

  “You’re not skipping out on me, are you?” Her amazement turns into suspicion in an instant. It would be impressive, if I weren’t so damn tired.

  “I’m not. I promise. This isn’t a trick and it isn’t a game, and I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t genuinely need your help. But right now, I genuinely need to pee.” My bladder feels like it’s going to burst. Can bladders do that? Sweet Persephone, I don’t want to find out.

  Laura starts to laugh as I spin on my heel and walk away from her. There’s a hysterical edge to it, like she can’t believe any of this is really happening, and I don’t care. I hit the bathroom door already unbuttoning my jeans and rush myself into the nearest stall.

  The seat is cold when it hits my butt. I yelp, surprise and offense, and realize that while I still remember how to hold it in, I no longer remember how to relax and let it go. I try unclenching. All I succeed in doing is making myself hurt more.

  “Rose?” The voice is Laura’s. “You still in here?”

  “I asked you to wait!”

  “I paid for your sandwich. I’m not letting you get away.”

  So she thinks this is all some kind of game for me. Great. Cheeks burning again, I say, “Now that you’re here . . . how do you pee?”

  The pause is long enough to become worrisome. Finally, flatly, Laura says, “What?”

  “I can’t remember how to pee.”

  She laughs again, unsteadily. She’s starting to believe me. That’s good. I don’t know how well this would work if she refused. “You just do.”

  “It hurts and I can’t figure out how to start.”

  “Oh my God . . . okay. Okay. Take a deep breath, and when you exhale, you just let go. Of everything. Stop holding any tension in your body.”

  “You try coming back from the dead and see how relaxed you are,” I grumble. Then I close my eyes and inhale, filling my lungs with all the terrible scents this bathroom has to offer. When I can’t take any more, I breathe out, and just as I finish expelling air, I start peeing.

  The sensation of relief is indescribable. I can’t remember whether peeing was this awesome the first time I was alive or not, but if it was, I’d expect the bathrooms at the Last Dance to see a lot more use. I pee and pee for what seems like forever, until it finally tapers off.

  “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but you remember how toilet paper works, right?” asks Laura.

  “Of course I do,” I say, stung. The paper here is cheap and scratchy, and I have less than no desire to rub it on myself. I also don’t want to spend the ride back to Laura’s place smelling like urine. I wonder if she realizes she’s going to be taking me home with her. Oh, isn’t this going to be fun.

  I emerge from the stall feeling better than I would have believed. Is this new, some side effect of my resurrection? Or was I just so accustomed to the feeling of elimination before that I never noticed how it hollowed me out and left me breathing easier? It’s a disgusting reason for an improved physical condition.

  Laura clears her throat when I reach for the door. “You’re forgetting something.”

  “What?” I look back at her in confusion. I don’t have a purse. Laura paid for my food. Everything I currently own is on my person, and I’m not forgetting any of it.

  She makes a face, holds up her hands, and wiggles her fingers. “You need to wash your hands,” she says. “That’s what people do. They go to the bathroom and then they wash their hands.”

  My cheeks burn with mortification. I should have remembered that. Washing your hands after you touch your genitals is kindergarten-level stuff.

  Being alive is going to be a barrel of laughs. I can already tell.

  Naturally, there are no paper towels in the bathroom. After looking vainly around for one of those weird air-dryer things, I give up and wipe my hands on my jeans. Laura makes a frustrated sound.

  “All right,” she says. “I believe you. You are, against all logic, all reason, and all common sense, back among the living. I honestly can’t imagine you committing this hard to a stupid prank.”

  “Oh, thank Persephone,” I say. “I wasn’t sure how I was going to convince you.”

  “You could have let me stab you,” suggests Laura easily. “Dead people generally don’t bleed.”

  I eye her. “I don’t remember you being this violent.”

  “It’s a four-hour drive from Boulder to here, which I only made because I was hoping to have a chance to scream at you before you disappeared back into the spirit world,” says Laura. “I’m tired, I’m cranky, and I have no clue why you called me instead of someone who actually likes you.”

  “I called you because you’re the world’s leading expert on the story of the phantom prom date.” When all else fails, flattery. “You probably know things about how I work that even I don’t know. And I need your help. I think you may be the only person who can help me.”

  “Help you what?”

  I look at her earnestly, hoping she can see the sincerity in my eyes, hoping I won’t have to grovel. I will, if that’s what it takes, but I still don’t want to touch this bathroom floor if I can help it.

  “I need to find a way back to the afterlife.”

  Laura blinks. “Jump in front of a truck. Problem solved.”

  “No, problem not solved. For one thing, I would never do that to a trucker. They have enough problems without people using them in place of razor blades.” Laura has the grace to look faintly abashed at that. Good. I would hate to think I was allying myself with someone who didn’t know right from wrong. “For another thing . . . I need to get back to what I’m supposed to be. Suicides never become hitchers.”

  “Wait . . . what?”

  I sigh. “Can I explain in the car?”

  Laura blinks again, harder this time, before she frowns. “Why would we be getting in the car?”

  I offer her my most winsome smile, the one I’ve honed for decades. “Because I’m going home with you.”

  Laura puts her hand over her face. I’m still smiling when she lowers it.

  “You’re serious,” she says.

  “As a six-car pileup,” I reply.

  She shakes her head and keeps shaking it as we walk toward the door. I wave to the waitress, who nods in reply, relief in her expression. From where she’s standing, I’m one more potential victim of the road being saved from a fate worse than death. If only she knew.

  Everything is a matter of perspective. I’m still thinking about that as Laura and I walk on, and the door closes behind us, and the time for peace and pie is done.

  Chapter 7

  Unlikely Bedfellows

  LAURA DRIVES A PERFECTLY SAFE, perfectly solid recent-model Prius, painted silver-beige, with a matching interior and self-warming seats. It is the least offensive, least noticeable car I’ve ever been in. This car could commit crimes and no one would remember enough about it to describe it to the police. It’s like slipping into the very definition of “boring.”

  I touch the dashboard as I get settled, trying to feel the car’s personality, the heart that keeps it driving instead of taking the easy road and breaking down. Cars are a constructed chaos, hundreds of small, delicate systems working in harmony when they should be flying apart. But when you bring that many pieces into one place, a sort of life will inevitably follow. All cars live, in their own way. That’s what keeps them running.

  When I touch the dashboard, all I feel is the grain of the synthetic leather. Nothing more, nothing less. I jerk my hand away, feeling almost scalded. One
more thing I can’t reach, here in my mortal state. The world keeps narrowing around me.

  Laura slides into the driver’s seat, shooting me a narrow-eyed, measuring look. “Seatbelt,” she says. “I don’t start this car until everyone is wearing a seatbelt.”

  It’s a reasonable request. I usually wear a seatbelt when I’m riding with the living, both for their comfort and to avoid awkward encounters with the police. Most seatbelt laws don’t care whether or not the person who isn’t wearing the seatbelt is already dead. I still flush red and refuse to make eye contact as I yank on the strap. There are so many steps to being alive, so many little tricks that have been optional for me for years, assuming I noticed them at all. I don’t like any of this.

  The engine turns over without so much as a growl, only the sudden brightness of the dash betraying the fact that the car is on. “All right,” says Laura. “What the hell happened?”

  “Not yet,” I reply, scanning the parking lot through the window, looking for any sign we’re being followed. I am suddenly, absolutely sure that Bobby has been toying with me this whole time. That he saw me before I could hide in the bathroom, that he didn’t believe Molly for an instant when she told him I wasn’t there. He’s here, he’s parked in some shadow or around some corner, and he’s here, he’s going to come roaring out into the open and drive us off the road.

  This is dangerous. This is so dangerous. I’ve been able to evade Bobby for as long as I have because I’m fast, I’m flexible, and I can feel him coming, taste the ashes and wormwood and decay hanging in the air like some horrible perfume. But now there’s nothing. I have no early warning system, no way to know whether he’s ten feet or twenty miles away.

  I shiver. The shiver turns into a shudder, and I’m shaking so hard that it feels like I might come apart, huddling down in the seat of Laura’s car and putting my hands over my eyes and trying to make the world stop spinning. There’s a feeling in my chest like concrete, so heavy it weighs me down, dragging me toward the bottom of some impossible sea where I’m going to drown, I’m going to drown, I’ve never felt like this before and I’m going to shake myself to pieces, like a flawed engine, and there won’t be anything left of me—

  “Breathe.” A hand is on my shoulder; a voice is in my ear. “I know it’s hard, but breathe. Do you know any poems?”

  I manage a vague nod, still shaking, still falling.

  “Recite a poem for me. Breathe, and give me a poem.” The hand tightens as I continue to shake. “Come on, Rose. You’re the phantom prom date. A panic attack is nothing.”

  A panic attack? Is that what this is? Panic suddenly seems like the most terrifying enemy in the world. I force myself to breathe, shallowly at first, and then with more force. “H-homecomer, hitcher, phantom rider,” I manage, between breaths. It’s almost impossible at first. The words don’t want to come; don’t want anything to do with me.

  I keep breathing. The words get a little easier. “White lady wants what’s been denied her,” I said, and take a deep breath, feeling my lungs expand. The drowning sensation is gone. “Gather-grim knows what you fear the most,” I say, and stop, lifting my head.

  Laura is looking at me with a concern that I never thought I’d see on her face. “Well?” she says. “Finish the quatrain. Don’t leave me hanging.”

  “Best keep away from the crossroads ghost,” I say, and sag in my seat, closing my eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. I’m essentially in shock right now. My worst enemy—the woman I spent years figuring out how to capture and destroy—is a teenage girl sitting in my car, having panic attacks. Alive. Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m helping you.”

  “You’re still helping.” I muster a weak smile. We’re still in the parking lot, but it no longer feels quite so much like the sort of place where ambushes happen. Just a parking lot, well-lit and open and glittering with a dusting of broken glass.

  Thinking of parking lots reminds me of Gary, and I have to swallow to keep the panic from surging back. Do he and Emma even know yet what’s happened to me? The sun will be down soon. Apple will realize something’s wrong when I don’t return from the Halloween fields, but . . .

  There’s always a risk to becoming incarnate on Halloween. If the Barrowmans are clever, they can lie to the Queen of the Routewitches, tell her I took a bullet to the throat while I was running for the barn, tell her there was nothing they could have done, and maybe she’ll believe them. I haven’t considered this outcome before, and it’s enough to make me fight not to open the door and lose my grilled cheese sandwich on the pavement. If they’re good liars, if they’re clever and quick and determined to avoid punishment for the oaths they broke, they could convince my friends and allies that I’m truly dead, not just haunting a different kind of house.

  Will Gary stay in the twilight if he thinks I’m really gone? Will Emma keep the green lights burning at the Last Dance? Or will he let go and drop into the afterlife he should have had all along, while she lights the red neon and becomes the kind of monster that everyone in the twilight has the potential to be?

  “Hey.” Laura’s voice is sharp, the crack of a whip in the quiet of the car. “Wherever your mind is going right now, stop it. You don’t need to go there. You need to stay here with me, the woman who’s going to help you. Focus on me.”

  I focus on her. She’s glaring, determined and stubborn, and for the first time I can understand what Tommy saw in her—what he still sees in her, if his ongoing presence on the ghostroads is anything to go by. She’s the woman he’s willing to delay his eternal reward for.

  “Sorry,” I say, my voice timid and raspy from the strain of not screaming. “I just . . . sorry.”

  “Stop being sorry and tell me what happened.”

  “Can we get on the road first?” I give the parking lot one last look. “There’s someone looking for me. I’d rather he didn’t find us here.”

  Laura gives me a long, assessing look before she puts the car into gear and starts for the exit. The Prius runs without making a sound. It’s unnerving, even for me, and I’m usually the one unnerving people.

  She’s a good driver. Cautious, maybe, but who wouldn’t be after the way her lover died? Tommy was a cautionary tale waiting to happen, and Laura read him cover to cover. She turns, she merges, she slides smoothly onto the freeway, and I relax a little more with every turn, every time Bobby doesn’t come lunging out of a concealed hole and strike. Then we’re on the freeway, the merciful freeway, running hard and fast and clean, with a clear line of sight all the way to the horizon.

  Laura doesn’t take her eyes off of the horizon. “All right,” she says. “Now’s where you tell me what the hell happened. The dead don’t rise every day. If they did, I’d know about it.”

  True enough. Some people are born to magic, routewitches and sorcerers and the like pulling on the gifts the universe has decided, for whatever reason, they deserve. Others, like Laura, go out and take magic, ripping it out of the walls of the world, codifying and ritualizing it until it works for them, until it has no choice but to obey. Power belongs to those who take it.

  Laura took it. After Tommy died—after she decided blaming me was easier and safer than grieving or moving on with her life—she’d thrown herself into scholarship, learning every trick and every ritual that doesn’t require some innate tie to one of the greater powers, like the road or the sky or fortune. She’s still not a witch, but that’s mostly because she doesn’t want to be. She’s happier being a folklore professor who sometimes hunts ghosts on the side.

  “Do you know about the Halloween rites?” I ask.

  She takes her eyes off the road long enough to glance at me, assessing. “I’ve heard rumors,” she says. “But Halloween’s over.”

  “No. It’s not.” I take a deep breath, hating how it stings my throat, hating the idea that I might have time to get used to it even more. Eve
rything is awful. “The man who killed me has been trying to do it again, but this time for keeps. He got a routewitch to summon me, and used her death to damage the protection that normally keeps him from touching me. The only way to repair it was for me to become incarnate on Halloween, and let my own symbolic ‘death’ wash her willing sacrifice away. But the people who were supposed to be protecting me during the holiday double-crossed me. They locked me in a modified Seal of Solomon, setting me outside the flow of normal time, so when the Halloween candle blew out, I didn’t go back to being dead.”

  “And now whatever mechanism recognizes ‘people who shouldn’t be alive right now’ doesn’t see you, because you didn’t register when it did the count,” says Laura thoughtfully. “Elegant.”

  “Awful,” I correct.

  “Who killed you? I ask as much out of scholarly interest as anything else, you understand. People have been arguing about the cause of your death ever since we figured out that the phantom prom date legend was tied to a real person.” Laura smiles, slow and almost predatory. “I could get a few papers out of it.”

  “No, you couldn’t, because no one will believe you,” I say. “I was killed by Bobby Cross.”

  It’s a good thing there isn’t much traffic, because Laura swerves across two lanes in her shock. I yelp and grip the dashboard, feeling what must be a toxic quantity of adrenaline drop straight into my bloodstream. My heart is pounding like it’s going to give out, and I’m trying not to do the math on what a heart attack on the highway would make me, because here’s a hint: it wouldn’t be a hitcher. I’d be lucky to go homecomer. I am very rarely lucky.

  “Bobby Cross?” Laura demands, finding her voice again. “Diamond Bobby Cross? The actor, the one who disappeared in the desert?”

  “Yes,” I say, closing my eyes, trying to will my heart calm, steady, anything other than it currently is. “Bobby Cross didn’t disappear. He sold his freedom to the crossroads in order to live forever. He kills people, people like me, people who’ll leave ghosts behind that he can use. I don’t know how he knows. I don’t always know, and I’m a psychopomp, normally. That means I’m—”