And the home of the Kingston Ghost Town.
They didn’t invite me on a trip I planned.
Three
I only live five minutes from the Mystic Museum, yet I consider looking at my phone at least three times on the drive home. Once Beck left, I scurried away like an awkward, skittish cat, leaving Amari and his ghost to fend for themselves.
It’s not that I have any reason to not believe Beck, but god do I wish she were mistaken somehow. For hours I’ve been desperate to find out what Paisley was lying about, but now all I want to do is prove that she was telling the truth all along. If I just find that, everything will be okay. I won’t have to fear the only friends I’ve had for over three years are about to dump me. I can’t face our nepo-baby-ridden private high school alone, and I can’t transfer when my parents are so proud of Hastings, busting their asses to put me and my brother through.
I manage to hold off checking my phone until I’m parked along the curb in front of my house. I kill the engine and hunch over the too-bright light of my screen as my car descends into darkness. I check Paisley’s handle across every platform we use. Nothing.
I move on to Opal. Nothing. She even has a post of her in herbedroom with the captionAM I THE PRETTIEST PRISONER?with a poll attached. I ignore the poll, despite my usual instinct to always reply to the little games she posts.
I move on to Harlow. Nothing but a selfie of her showing off her tan skin in the golden hour light and the video of us all at lunch today, everyone tagged like usual. Right now, though, I can’t help but notice the order in which we’re all tagged, how our names stack. Always me at the bottom.
There’s no hard evidence to support what Beck said, but I just know she was telling me the truth. I can feel it. I could feel it from the moment we stepped into the diner earlier. Do my friends even like me?
I didn’t do anything different, yet they excluded menow. In fact, they made a whole intricate plan to exclude me. The second this gets to everyone in our grade, they’re going to look like grade-A assholes. And it’s not like we’re evenpopular. Our love language is making fun of each other’s nerdy interests. My horror obsession. Opal’s cultlike buy-in to almond mom health advice. Harlow’s insistence on buying everything she owns vintage, even when that means she’s incurred permanent foot damage from old shoes, and her saying she’s going to get a tattoo of a luxury laundry detergent logo. Paisley’s weird older parents and their outrageous life advice. Paisley is beautiful, yes, but her parents are an actress who hasn’t had a huge hit since the ’80s and a financial advisor. There are people at our school who are the children of A-list actors, directors, and producers. None of my friends are the richest, most popular, or sports champions; a move like this if you’re not that popular is just cruel.
So, it must’ve seemed really fucking worth it to them to exclude me from the group.
And where do we even go from there? Do I pretend I didn’t talk to Beck? Am I being quietly shut out of the group? What…
I try to inhale, but my breath catches in my swollen throat.
What did I do to them?
The world tilts under my seat as I sink into the steering wheel, wheezing and staining my shorts with teardrops. This can’t be real. I’ve had anxious thoughts about social rejection, but therapists and my parents always said those are irrational. They would never really happen. But my so-called friends didn’t invite me. They teamed up to lie to me. I have such a hard time making friends, reading their emotional cues. I thought I understood them. I thought we were all nerds who loved movies and needed one another. When did they move on without me?
Someone knocks on my window.
I slam my head back on my seat, flailing for a weapon I won’t find.
My dad stands outside the car door. I wipe the tearstains away as I get out of the car.
“You planning on sleeping in there?” Dad asks, breaking into a smile.
Still, I see the way his lips, nearly covered by his facial hair, wobble. Dad’s the parent who’s good at getting smiles. Carnivals, arcades, and playing make-believe, cheering the loudest at Owen’s baseball games and hanging my art on his side of the office he shares with Mom. But when it comes to anything less than joy, he’s at odds.
“No, sorry,” I say, rubbing my eyes just in case a stray tear fell. “I’m coming inside.”
My dad’s fumbling would be acceptable if my mom were any better. She’s a neurosurgeon, more versed in how the brain works than bothering to figure out how to fix the self-doubt and occasional self-loathing thoughts that have a stranglehold on me and my brothers. She pays fortherapy, sure, but to actually sayI hear you; you don’t deserve that; you’re a great person? Not quite in her vocabulary.
I don’t elaborate for my dad. By the time I realize I should or it’d be weird, we’re already inside. In the living room, my brothers play video games next to each other, silent. Owen is on his Xbox playing some zombie game, and our thirteen-year-old brother Liam is playing on his Switch. The jury’s still out on how Liam’s and my relationship will turn out beyond him only asking to hang out with me so I can help him with his math homework. But Owen and I have always been more…complicated. As siblings born barely ten months apart who both got the wavy honey-brown hair, freckles across our noses, and brains that store too much information, I think people wanted us to be glued at the hip. Best friend siblings. When we were kids, we were. I followed him around like a lost puppy, loving the music, movies, and girls he loved. But at some point in middle school, he stopped liking it. The last time we had a serious conversation was when I comforted him after his latest girlfriend broke up with him at the start of his junior year. Over a year now. We grew apart, I guess.
I hate that we even have that memory. It gives me too much hope.
Dad clears his throat. “If something’s upsetting you, kid, let me know.”
Liam looks up, frowning. A pity look from a middle schooler.
“I’m okay,” I reply.
Now, Owen’s eyes fall on me barely a moment before returning to his game.
“There’s always tomorrow for things to get better,” Dad says. I give a nod; for someone who wants to be a writer, he mostly sticks to parenting cliches. “I’ll be in my office working on my screenplay.”
Dad: a public school history teacher by day, screenwriter by night, father in the pockets in between. Dad rubs my back as he passes, but his touch burns with the memory of how Paisley did the exact same thing just hours ago. It already feels like another lifetime.
