Doll Bones by Holly Black

stuck up as though he’d been electrocuted, except where it crawled down his cheeks into sideburns. “Get you kids something?” he asked as the bell on the door rang. “The wasabi donuts just came out of the fryer. They’re still hot.”
    They were also a muted green color and smelled spicy, like hot peppers.
    “Uh,” Zach said, glancing at the menu. “Can I have a hot chocolate? A big one.”
    He took his warm cup with its spirals of whipped cream to one of the small plastic tables. Alice headed to the bathroom in the back while Poppy ordered two more hot chocolates. They sat for a while, letting the heat of the paper cups warm their fingers.
    Then they each ordered a donut. Zach got Pop Rocks, Alice got maple cream, and Poppy got Froot Loops. The crumbling cake was delicious, and there were real Pop Rocks inside that fizzed against Zach’s tongue. He licked his fingers when he was done, forgetting that he hadn’t washed his hands in a very long time.
    The hot chocolates had been two fifty a piece and the donuts were a dollar twenty-five, costing them each three seventy-five and leaving Zach with four twenty-five that he could spend for the whole rest of the trip. Poppy had even less. He hoped she had at least twenty-five pennies, or she wasn’t going to be able to pay her bus fare home.
    Poppy sat the Queen on a nearby chair. The doll slumped, her head twisted on an angle, her hair rumpled as though she’d really been sleeping on it. Her half-closed eyes were bright with reflected light.
    “If you died,” Poppy said, keeping her voice low. “Do you think you’d want to be a ghost?”
    “If I was murdered, then yeah, definitely,” Zach said. “So I could haunt my killer and get revenge.”
    “Get revenge by doing what?” Alice asked, laughing. “You would be a disembodied spirit. What are you going to do? Yell ‘boo!’ at them? Try to convince them to go on a stupid road trip?”

    “I could throw stuff around,” Zach reminded her.
    “Maybe,” Alice said. “I’d do it if I could be me, but see-through. The whole world would be like my television. I could visit the people I loved. But not if I had to repeat the same thing over and over again, like haunting some stretch of road or going up and down stairs.”
    “Even if you couldn’t talk to anyone?” Zach asked.
    Alice looked briefly uncomfortable. “I’d definitely want there to be a ghost society with ghost friends.”
    Poppy pushed her hair back. “Well, what if you decided you wanted to come back from the dead and then changed your mind, but you were stuck?”
    “You mean like how I’m stuck here in East Rochester?” said Alice, and then she took a big swallow of hot chocolate.
    Zach thought he’d better interrupt that line of conversation. “Would you want to be a ghost, Poppy?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. Lingering around, whooshing past people who’d never see me? It’s scary to imagine things happening and me not being able to affect them. I keep thinking about the dream I had. It was like I was really her—I was climbing around on the slate tiles of the roof of this giant house, trying to keep away from the windows while I waited for my father to get home. I had something really important to tell him. Up there, I could see for what seemed to be miles—I could see the river and boats and the iceman’s truck in front of a house down the street—but I kept slipping and catching myself on the copper gutters. And I heard this woman’s voice from behind me, whispering to me, telling me I better get inside or she was going to make me sorry. She had a broom, and she was sticking it out the window, trying to hit me.”
    Zach thought about his own dream of the pinch-faced woman and the big Victorian house of flawed pottery. He wanted to tell her about the dream, but he felt a little silly about it. When he’d woken, it had seemed so obvious that the dream was real, that it had been given to him by their ghost. But now, in