Page 25 of All Her Ghosts

Stupid—the word slaps me across the face. I want to spit blood but settle for venom. “Oh, right, yeah, of course. Because you wouldn’tlieabout that, right? You wouldn’t do all my school physicals to hide that abnormality, right? Just like you wouldn’t lie about why we keep moving. What was it this time, you said? You just had to come help a little nonprofit?”

Her fingernails dig into the arms of her scrub coat, then rip away, balling into fists. She bares her teeth, voice rising. “That is enough.Don’t you dare speak to me that way. You self-centered, short-sighted little—thing.”

The word falls hard and heavy.

“Thing?” I repeat, cold. “That’s an interesting choice of words.Thing.”

Mom’s eyes widen. A flicker of something I’d like to think is regret tugs down the corners of her lips. But whatever it is, she squashes it, doubling down. “Would you preferbitch? Because that’s the way you’re acting.”

“I’d prefer the truth,” I say. “For fucking once! Why do we keep moving? What are yourunning from?”

“You better check that entitlement and do it fast,” Mom yells back, leaning close enough I can feel her breath on my face. “You are not the parent here, Persephone Green. I owe you a roof over your head. I owe you the clothes on your back and the food in your belly. I do not owe you a goddamned ounce of explanation.”

I don’t flinch. I’m toobigto flinch, the ocean inside me battering my seams. I lean in.

“What about the man that came today? What do you owehim?”

Mom lurches away, retreating.

“Nothing.I don’t owe him a goddamned thing. He had no business coming here and that’s all you need to know,” she says, turning away and striding into the kitchen so she doesn’t have to meet my stare.

“Oh, big surprise!” I throw up my hands, hot on her heels. “Hiding and lying, just like always—just like he said.” My rib cage swells around a trapped scream. I can’t breathe so I stop trying, my body turned to furious stone. The storm roars, wind screaming down the chimney,digging icy fingernails into the windowpanes when I ask, “What signs was he talking about? What can’t you outrun?”

My mother won’t look at me. Suddenly the moving boxes require her full attention, and she’s cracking them open to get at serving dishes and tablecloths older than I am but somehow, at this moment, critically more important.

Distantly, I feel my body shaking. My vision burns too bright, strange and hyper-saturated, narrowed down to this single moment—my mother rendered in high definition. Every gray hair, every crow’s-foot, the curl of her snarl and the bright spark in her eyes, staring down into a box of thrift store reject garbage so she doesn’t have to look at me.

“I am your mother,” she insists, almost gentle, almost a knife in the gut. She glances at me, eyes darting past me, never landing on anything other than my flaws and failures. “Everything I do, I do for your own good.”

Rage fills my mouth with copper. I won’t go quietly. I won’t let her dismiss me, belittle me, make me a kid so she can parent the legitimate fucking questions out of me. I rip the box from her hands, flinging it away.

“What happens next year?” I demand and thunder rends the sky open, a blistering crash close enough to rattle the windows, the floor vibrating through my feet. “What haven’t you told me?”

Mom lurches forward.

“Enough!” Her hand flies back and freezes. It trembles there, upraised in the space between us. I stare, eyes tracking from my mother’s fist to her horrified face, staring—daring—hurting in a heart that doesn’t beat.

Do it, I want to whisper.Everything would be so much easier if I couldhateyou.

White-faced and trembling, my mother gathers herself. She turns away, arms wrapped tight around her chest—won’t evenlookat me. She says, “I’m done entertaining this. Go to your room. You’re grounded, Persephone.”

Cheeks burning, skin over-hot and overfull, I’ve never felt more like an idiot child. Fury squeezes my throat so tight I can’t speak through it, a hundred insults and rejoinders crowding my head, but none of them are good enough.Iam not good enough. There’s nothing I will ever say that will make my mothersee me.

Screw this. Why bother? I’m done trying. Spinning on my heel, I snatch up my bag and my boots and fly up the stairs. Blasting into my room, I shove the door shut behind me, my back against the wall. My whole body trembles, eyes stinging, my skin somehow clammy and overheated at the same time and oh my god, I want to peel my meat off.

I dig my fingernails into my jaw, scratching fiery trails down my neck, my chest, into my arms; but I can’t scratch the poison ivy welting up my soul. Nothing fits. Not this body, not these thrift store clothes, not even this room—gray and beige and nothing, just an empty box with me inside it, safely packaged away. So she can forget about me.

I throw my boots at the wall just to hear them connect. Shuck off my coat and whip it into the closet. I fling my bag onto the bed, even though it’s sopping wet and still stinks like wet animal. Would have flung myself down next except a pine cone tumbles out onto the mattress.

Something about it seizes me, freezing me in place with one hand still raised to bash open the closet door. My world narrows to that single,stupid pine cone teetering off the bed, falling with a clatter to the fake-wood linoleum. I can’t tear my eyes away. My body throbs. My palm aches with the ghost imprints of its spines, burns with the memory of Bas’s empty chest beneath my palm. My lungs clamp down so tight I can’t breathe, even grinding knuckles into my sternum, clawing at my throat.

Outside my room, footsteps climb the stairs, pacing the hallway. A prison warden on patrol: every five minutes the shadow of her feet stripes the gap beneath the door. I can’tdothis anymore. I can’t stand this awful nothing room in this awful nothing house. I don’t want to be choked down like a fish bone, digested into somethingappropriate. I can’t be the kind of daughter she wishes she had, the kind of girl who fits here. I’m a monster in girl skin, a feral dead kid—I’m protesting my reintroduction to this oppressive, un-wild world.

Slapping off the lights, I throw myself underneath the bed. Army crawling elbow over elbow, I drag myself under, scrabbling with breaking claws, pushing with knees and toes until a run pops in my tights. What came easy as a kid shoves me so flat my hair sweeps the floor now, low-hung bed stringers scraping across my shoulders. But once there, side by side with my childhood monsters, I can finally breathe.

Sucking in big, unsteady lungfuls of air, I grope for my phone, its blue glow illuminating the undercroft beneath my bed. Somehow, though I only met him this morning—and kissed him by lunch, I can’t help reliving with a blush—I know with bone-deep certainty that Bas will understand.

I text him:I think my mom is hiding something big.