Page 27 of Paper Ghosts

“I can’t have friends?” she asked, alarmed. “What about Tasha?”

“You can do whatever you want to do. I won’t stop you. Just…” She hesitated, as if trying to figure out how to word this. “Be careful who you let in.”

Mim only ever said important things, so Bailey considered that as she ate the cookie. “Like how you don’t let people in the house?”

“It’s similar.”

There seemed to be a choice she had to make here, one Mim was trying very hard not to frame as one. The only thing Bailey knew for sure was that Mim might not be a witch, but she had still conjured a life where she didn’t have any holes, so she never had to search for something to fill them. A life complete with a haunted house, beautiful clothes, tea, and now cookies. She had what she wanted, so she didn’t need anything else. Until now all the belonging and happiness Bailey had ever experienced came from the outside world, not from inside her own home. But the Wester House was different. Here, she had Mim. And she was certain if she had her love, her approval, it would be enough. So she didn’t really need friends, did she?

Later, at a different time and a much different place in her life, Bailey would wonder, if she hadn’t ever met Mim, would she have become someone else entirely? Someone good? Or had her nature been formed long before she was born?

But whether nature or nurture, one thing was certain.

That was the day she truly began to feel like a Wester.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A peculiar aspect to Hen Town that newcomers remarked on was how time moved differently here. Tourists who stayed for any duration began to imagine themselves younger than they were. They bought kitschy hen-shaped souvenirs for their mothers, then remembered their mothers died twenty-five years ago. It was attributed to how history shaped the place, making it feel like the past and present were commingling. Old buildings weren’t torn down, but restored. And historical markers were everywhere, reminding people that if it weren’t for the Wester family, none of this would be here. The Westers had the oldest house in town. The Westers first built the shops downtown, creating an economy. And by selling those buildings, Willamena Wester had assured that economy would continue.

Bailey was so young when she moved here that there were long stretches of time when she forgot she even had an origin story before Mim. Mim was the beginning, the middle, and the end. All Bailey wanted was to emulate her. Mim was adamant about not wanting any part in shaping her, but her passive force still managed to, the way tiny drips form stalagmites over eons.

She was always the first person Bailey wanted to share major moments with as she grew up. She would eventually tell her dad, of course, but she would first wait for her weekly tea with Mim to share an end-of-school-year award, a good grade, her first period, or a boy she thought was cute but would never talk to her, because boys never talked to her and she wished they would. Her dad was unfailingly supportive, but Mim was inscrutable.

The only thing to ever get an immediate reaction from Mim was Bailey telling her about the odd things she experienced. Like how, when she started driving at sixteen, she always thought she saw someone out of the corner of her eye at the intersection of Orange and Simmons Streets, where there was a big tree with a terrific scar from an old car crash. But when she would turn, no one was there. Or the fact that her curtains were always open before she woke in the mornings, waking her to sunlight, when she was sure she had closed them. Or that the doors in the house seemed to lock and unlock just to tease her (Tug blamed this on the damp), or she thought there was a haunted feeling of fear floating through the rooms every time it rained. She had long ago forgotten the name Jack.

“It’s not unusual,” Mim would say quickly, almost urgently. “You are not unusual. A strange feeling or a sparkle in the corner of the eye happens to everyone. Don’t look for things that aren’t there. Put it out of your mind.” It was the single time she ever explicitly told Bailey what to do, not even framing it in the form of a suggestion. Bailey actually appreciated it, because it was something concrete she could do, something she knew Mim wanted. Even if that something was to believe that, even though she was a Wester, she wasn’t the special sort.

She was reasonably sure that Mim loved her. It couldn’t be quantified, but there was a fierceness to her grandmother that made her feel both safer than she’d ever felt, and terrified of ever getting on her bad side. Feelings her father obviously didn’t share.

When he finally decided to leave the company he worked remotely for and start his own small wealth-management company, what followed was an epic campaign to get Mim to allow him to convert the butler’s pantry into his office. He argued with her about it relentlessly, in a way no one else ever could. He never seemed to fear losing what little affection Mim managed to outwardly show, as if he’d long ago let go of the hope that she would ever be who he needed her to be. He finally got his way by proposing the office have an outside door so workers would never have to set foot inside the rest of the house. And not letting people inside, as they all knew, was Wester Rule number one. He pointed out that Mim had an entire sunroom built when he was a boy, her sanctuary where she spent most of her time, and it had been done without anyone coming in. Mim gave in, or so it seemed.

These days, to most people, they seemed happy, though none of them had much of a social life. Tug sometimes went to Chapel Hill for drinks with clients, but he didn’t date at all. Sometimes Bailey thought she herself wasn’t the only one Mim had worn down, then built back up in the shape she wanted. It had just taken a little longer with her son. The Wester way was to be solitary and composed. To not make friends or form connections that didn’t benefit them in some way. And marriage, if it ever happened, meant finding someone easy, like Mim did, not someone you were attracted to.

As her teens wore on, Bailey began to amass a very secret collection of romance novels, including boxes full of old Harlequin romances she found in the attic, just trying to figure out what romantic love really meant in the absence of any example inside the Wester House. She wasn’t entirely sure why she considered her collection a secret, it just seemed like the kind of thing Mim wouldn’t like—a messy, complicated life outside the self-contained one she’d created. It was the way Bailey thought Mim had always lived her life.

But everything she thought she knew about Mim changed—and nothing would ever be the same—the day Bailey found out about the Feathers.

By the time Bailey turned eighteen, ennui had draped over her like a veil, even though there were several things making for a fairly interesting senior year, by Hen Town standards, anyway.

The first was Clutch Vallow.

He’d come in at the beginning of term, a transfer student from another county high school where he’d been kicked out. He’d been flunked twice, so he was nearly twenty, and the only reason he was still finding new schools to go to was because his grandfather, who had taken him in when Clutch’s dad went to prison, said he would have to move out and find his own way in life if he didn’t stay in school. There was something alluring, but menacing, about him. He was outrageously handsome, his hair black, his cheekbones mile-high, and his eyes as pale as moonlight. The first time Bailey saw him, she thought he looked like he’d stepped out of a dark romance. Girls gravitated to him, but later there were the warnings overheard in the restroom about not finding yourself alone with him, because his darkness would settle over you and you could never, ever tell another soul because he knew how to hurt where no one would see. Most of the girls he dated were older and tougher, and they knew how to handle him. You could see, though, when they were with Clutch at convenience stores, how their eyes never left him, alert to every move he made, ready to soothe or duck.

The second was, in a town historically too small to have its own high school football team, Hen Town High finally achieved a population of student athletes large enough for its own Friday Night Lights. The students would get to choose the team name, so a slotted box decorated with crepe paper had been set up in the high school rotunda and was currently being stuffed with joke suggestions ranging from the Hen Town Cocks to the Hen Town Cluckers.

But the biggest thing by far to happen, the thing that ended up changing Bailey’s life by the end of the year, started with finding the yearbook.

Her lit class was doing a timed paper on a chosen poem in the library, where they had to write an essay by hand and use books for ancillary research instead of the internet. Their teacher, Mr. Reynolds, was raging against the machine and said he’d had it with take-home papers being written by AI.

Bailey had gotten up to search the stacks for a biography on Tennyson in order to include his birth and death dates in her essay. That’s when she heard two of her classmates, Silas and Cody, snickering one row over.

“The band was called Andy Smooth and the Silks,” Cody was saying. “Can you believe it?”

“It was the 1970s. They didn’t know any better. If they’d really wanted to be cool, they should have gone by their acronym—ASS.”

“Nice one,” Cody said. “Anyway, my grandmother said the Witch of Wester House was actually their groupie, or something.”

That made Bailey go still, as it always did, with a tingling sensation that precipitated learning something new about Mim. Secondhand stories about her grandmother were still delicious to her, and they were her only source of a rounded picture of who Mim really was and, in turn, who Bailey thought Mim wanted her to be. She no longer had Tasha to tell her things, and she didn’t dare let anyone think that the Westers were anything less than a united front.