around in the drawer until she found the little red pocketknife. She took it with her into the shower, setting it on the soap dish. She didn’t know if it would do any good against one of the Quiet Ones, but it made her feel a little better. She washed quickly, dried off, and changed into pajamas, then went out into the living room to curl up on the couch, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Her mother must have heard the shower turn off, because she emerged from her bedroom a few moments later.
“Hey, baby,” she said softly. Her eyes were red. “Are you hungry?”
Alex kept her eyes on the TV screen. “Can we have real pizza?”
“I can make you pizza here. Don’t you want almond cheese?”
Alex said nothing. A few minutes later, she heard her mother on the phone, ordering from Amici’s. They ate watching TV, Mira pretending not to watch Alex.
Alex ate until her stomach hurt, then ate some more. It was too late for cartoons, and the shows had switched to the bright sitcom stories of teenage wizards and twins living in lofts, that everyone at school pretended they were too old for. Who are these people? Alex wondered. Who are these happy, frantic, funny people? How are they so unafraid?
Her mother nibbled on a piece of crust. Then at last she reached for the remote and hit mute.
“Baby,” she said. “Galaxy.”
“Alex.”
“Alex, can you talk to me? Can we talk about what happened?”
Alex felt a hard burble of laughter pushing at her throat, making it ache. If it got free, would she laugh or cry? Can we talk about what happened? What was she supposed to say? A ghost tried to rape me? Maybe he did rape me? She wasn’t sure when it counted, how far inside he had to be. But it didn’t matter, because no one would believe her anyway.
Alex clutched the pocketknife in her pajama pocket. Her heart was suddenly racing. What could she say? Help me. Protect me. Except no one could. No one could see the things hurting her.
They might not even be real. That was the worst of it. What if she’d imagined it all? She might just be crazy, and then what? She wanted to start screaming and never stop.
“Baby?” Her mother’s eyes were filling with tears again. “Whatever happened, it’s not your fault. You know that, right? You—”
“I can’t go back to school.”
“Galaxy—”
“Mama,” Alex said, turning to her mother, grabbing her wrist, needing her to listen. “Mama, don’t make me go.”
Mira tried to draw Alex into her arms. “Oh, my little star.”
Alex did scream then. She kicked at her mom to keep her away. “You’re a fucking loser,” she shrieked again and again, until her mother was the one crying and Alex locked herself in her room, sick with shame.
Mira let Alex stay home for the rest of the week. She’d found a therapist to take Alex in for a session, but Alex had nothing to say.
Mira pleaded with Alex, tried to bribe her with junk food and TV hours, then at last said, “You talk to the therapist or you go back to school.”
So the following Monday, Alex had gone back to school. No one spoke to her. They barely looked at her, and when she found spaghetti sauce smeared on her gym locker, she knew that Meagan had told.
Alex got the nickname Bloody Mary. She ate lunch by herself. She was never picked for lab partner or field-trip buddy and had to be foisted on people. In desperation, Alex made the mistake of trying to tell Meagan what had really happened, of trying to explain. She knew it was stupid, even as she’d reeled off the things she’d seen, the things she knew, as she’d watched Meagan shift farther away from her, her eyes going distant, twirling a long curl of glossy brown hair around her forefinger. But the more Meagan drew away, the longer her silence stretched, the more Alex talked, as if somewhere in all of those words was a secret code, a key that would get back the glimmer of what she’d lost.
In the end, all Meagan said was, “Okay, I have to go now.” Then she’d done what Alex knew she would and repeated it all.
So when Sarah McKinney begged Alex to meet her at Tres Muchachos to talk to the ghost of her grandmother, Alex had known it was probably a setup, one big joke. But she went anyway, still