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“What the…?”
A girl in a pretty tea-length party dress stood a few feet in front of me. Girl probably wasn’t the right word. She had a rounded face and her hair was a mess of curls, which was probably how mine looked right now, but she also had boobs and hips, which marked her as a teenager and not a child. I couldn’t make out any of her coloring because she was, by and large, almost transparent. The blue-hued light was radiating off her, and she cast a glassy, opaque-eyed glance up to me.
“I’m dreaming, right?”
The ghost girl stared at me. I guess it’s pretty hard to speak if you have no lungs. She shimmered, fading from view before reforming back into something I could actually see. When she brushed against my front door I heard the knocking sound, a soft tapping, though she never raised her hands. Weird.
It had to be a dream. Only my dreams were fucked up enough to make the ghost of a dead teenage girl show up in my living room. The tiara was the kicker. This was the girl who’d died down the block and had been stowed away in the ceiling of the police station. I had to be dreaming.
Thanks a heap, overactive imagination.
If I was dreaming, the sword was sort of a moot point. Not to mention the ineffectuality of using one against a ghost. It’s not like you can cut a ghost in half, so I put the katana on the loveseat.
“All right, spirit guide,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “Dazzle me with your subconscious enlightenment. ”
She drifted towards the door and I followed. Must be nice to be dead—none of the pesky walking nonsense. The ghost passed through the door, and even in a dream I knew that wasn’t an option for me, so I opened it and trailed behind her as she moved up to street level.
In front of my building she hovered in the air, waiting for me with a dull, patient expression.
I walked into the middle of the street, my bare feet chilled by the cold December cement.
Wait. Cold?
I’d never experienced cold in a dream before. At least not so lucidly. In the past, the closest I’d come was knowing I should be cold, and reacting in kind. But the temperature of the night shot through my body as surely as if I’d been dropped into an ice-cold lake.
“Is this a dream?” I demanded.
The girl shook her head and continued to drift down the block, her spirit so weightless she could be carried on the whim of a winter draft.
Now I was torn. I’d followed her out here believing I was dreaming, but now that I was exposed to the cold and standing barefoot wearing only a chemise, I was pretty sure it was real. Which meant I could either go after her, or go back inside and pretend it hadn’t happened.
A gust blew down the street, rustling the hem of my nightgown and reminding me that in spite of my resistance to cold and the lack of snow outside, it was still December.
The girl had stopped moving a few apartments away and was staring at me with mute patience. Her dress billowed in the wind as if she were still real.
What the hell, I decided.
If Sig—who never seemed to wear shoes anywhere—could navigate the city barefoot, then I could as well. Behind me on 9th, traffic whisked past at a normal clip, but here on West 52nd we might as well have been alone in the universe.
“Okay,” I told her. “I’m coming. ”
A few of my neighbors had Christmas lights strung up on their fire escapes or balconies, or glinting from inside their windows, lending the street an eerie festive quality that didn’t mesh with what I was doing.
I traipsed after the ghost, but she didn’t stir. She waited for me near the stoop of the dark apartment, and when I reached her she motioned upwards. A zigzagging sprawl of rusted iron fire escape snaked up the front of the building.
When I looked back at her she was still pointing up and nodding.
I grumbled, chiding myself for not thinking to put on underwear, and then hopped up on the concrete handrail. The bottom rung of the fire escape was a good ten feet up, and it had been a long time since I’d needed to do anything quite so physical. In the last six months most of my athletics had been restricted to running or bleeding.
“Fuck. ”
It’s only ten feet. You can do this.
I crouched low, closing my eyes to concentrate. I pictured the fire escape, pictured myself hitting it, then with one last steadying breath I jumped.
The iron smashed into my ribs and I scrambled to get hold of the grated floor, my grasping hands snagging one of the rough bars before I fell. I was left dangling, holding the fire escape with one hand while I swayed beneath it catching my breath.
My ghost was on the platform now, staring down and motioning for me to follow her still.
