Page 4 of Magic for Nothing

“Yeah?” asked Tyler again. He seemed more solid, and almost hopeful. Then he flickered, becoming a cellophane boy. “What about my parents?”

“Not everyone becomes a ghost,” said Mary. “Mostly only people who feel like they’re leaving something behind. Because you died so young, they’re likely to hurry on to whatever comes after this world, looking for you. I’m sorry. You probably won’t see them until you decide to move past haunting. But maybe you will. Sticking around to see can’t hurt anything, and it might make you feel less like you got cheated out of everything you should have had.”

“But I did get cheated,” said Tyler. That horror movie mask was starting to ooze around the edges of his face again, darkening the whole room. “That man shouldn’t have been driving. I was being good. I was following the rules. I just wanted to go home.”

The game board began to shake. Artie looked alarmed. Right. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being the youngest of three, it’s how to throw a good tantrum—and how to defuse one.

“You got screwed,” I said amiably. Tyler’s face stopped shifting toward the horrific and snapped back into little boy innocence as he turned to gape at me. I shrugged. “It’s true. You got screwed over. That asshole stole every year you should have had. Your high school, dating, college, kids if that’s what you wanted, everything, he took it, because he couldn’t take a taxi home after slamming back a few beers. God, that sucks. I’d be mad, too. I don’t know if I’d be ‘haunt the house I lived in, throwing the furniture at people’ mad, but who knows? It didn’t happen to me. Even if you brought the roof down on my head right now—”

“Uh, maybe don’t give him ideas?” said Artie, with a nervous glance at the ceiling.

“—I would still have lived longer and done more than you ever got to, and I am sorry, and that is fucked up, but throwing shit at us is not going to make it better, and it’s not going to make you alive again.” I gestured to Mary. “She wants to take you someplace where you can meet other kids who got screwed like you did. You can make friends. You can do stuff. And, yeah, you can wait to see if your parents come to join you. You’re a ghost. You’ve got time. Maybe this isn’t what you would have chosen, but it’s what you’ve got, so make the best of it.”

Tyler gaped at me for several seconds before he turned to Mary and asked, “You can really take me someplace better?”

She nodded. “I can. It’s why I’m here.”

“And I can wait to see if my parents come?”

“You can. I can’t promise they will, but Annie’s right: you can at least have a good time while you’re waiting. You’ve been alone for too long. You don’t have to be alone anymore.”

Tyler bit his lip and nodded. I realized he was trying not to cry, screwing his eyes tight the way my brother always used to when he was upset but didn’t want to show it.

“Hey.” I leaned over, putting my hand on the air where his shoulder seemed to be. It was a little chilly there, but there was nothing for me to rest against. Ghosts are not always concrete companions. “It’s okay to cry. Like I said, you got screwed.”

Tyler sniffled, tears starting to roll down his cheeks, and turned to offer Mary his hand. “Can you take me?” he asked.

“I can,” said Mary, and took his hand, and they were both gone. There was no flash or displacement of air: one moment they were there; the next they weren’t.

I looked at Artie. Artie looked at me.

“Wasn’t she our ride home?” asked Artie.

“Yeah,” I said, and leaned forward, starting to reset the board. “Guess we’re going to play another round.”

“I want to be the yellow one.”

Mary came back just before dawn. As usual, she didn’t want to talk about where she’d been. Despite being with my family for three generations, she’s managed to do a remarkable job of not spilling secret ghost business. My Aunt Rose isn’t as good at keeping her mouth shut, but she’s a different sort of ghost, so maybe she doesn’t have secrets that are quite as important.

(Aunt Rose is a hitchhiker, the ghost of someone who died on the road and is still trying, in her own idiosyncratic fashion, to find her way home. She’s harmless, as the dead go. Aunt Mary, on the other hand, is a crossroads ghost. She serves something greater than most of the dead, and none of her gifts comes without a price. We can love her. We can offer her a place at the table and a profile on the family Netflix account. We can be her family forever. But we can’t ask her for favors, because that’s when the crossroads come into play. If we ask, if her little internal counter deems the request to be big and important enough, she might have to call her bosses. No Price has gone down to the crossroads since Grandpa Thomas, and we’re all pretty determined to keep the streak going.)

“You two ready?” Mary asked, prodding me with the toe of her foot. I opened my eyes and smiled sleepily up at her. I had fallen asleep with my head on Artie’s leg; he was using the RoboRally box as a pillow, which was as adorable as it was impractical. Sometimes family is awesome.

“Do you feel like making a stop for donuts?” I asked.

She laughed.

This is my life.

I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Two

“It’s important to have things you care about outside of the family. Insularity is always a risk, and it’s the first step toward total isolation. Be an island, but build bridges, not walls.”

—Evelyn Baker

A nondescript warehouse in Northeast Portland, Oregon, three days later