Hereafter by Tara Hudson

made her seem unbreakable.
    Halfway across the kitchen, Ruth’s strange-colored eyes flickered toward me, and she froze.
    “Joshua?” she asked, her tone strained. “Who is that with—?”
    She didn’t finish the question but instead leaned forward to peer at the space beside Joshua. The space in which I currently stood.
    At that moment I froze, too.
    I had the instant, disconcerting notion that Joshua’s grandmother was about to ask him who was standing beside him. But that was impossible. Only Joshua and Eli could see me. I’d proved it today in Joshua’s classroom. Nonetheless, I itched with the impulse to run; and before I could give it any rational thought, I whispered, “Joshua, maybe I should come by some other—”
    The entire sentence hadn’t left my mouth when Ruth jerked upright, rigid-straight again. Her eyes riveted on mine. Her right hand, which had previously clutched the mail, dropped to her side, scattering paper in noisy flutters across the kitchen floor. Still facing me, she drew in one sharp breath.
    And with that breath, she told me all I needed to know.
    Ruth heard me. She saw me. There was no other explanation for her abrupt behavior. Ruth could hear and see me just as clearly as Joshua could. Realizing this, I couldn’t move. I was pretty sure I couldn’t even blink.
    From the corner of my eye, I shot a regretful look at the dark hallway leading out of the kitchen. If only I’d had the foresight to hide outside, maybe even to crawl underneath Joshua’s car, before this woman had seen me.
    I glanced at Joshua and saw him blanch. His eyes darted several times between his grandmother and me.
    “Grandma,” he asked, his voice shaking, “what’s wrong?”
    Joshua was speaking directly to her, so it stood to reason that Ruth should have looked at her grandson while she answered him. Yet her eyes remained locked onto mine. She held them as she spoke.
    “Who is that?” She pronounced the words carefully, enunciating their consonants in a way that made me flinch with each sharp sound. I tried in vain to blend into the cabinetry while Joshua answered her.
    “Who is who?” he said, and laughed. But he sounded too jumpy, too obviously aware of her odd behavior. His eyes flickered to mine for the briefest moment before refocusing on Ruth. “Are you sure you’re okay, Grandma?”
    At the sound of her grandson’s nervous laughter, Ruth finally pulled her eyes away from me. She looked up at Joshua with nothing less than a furious glare.
    “Don’t be condescending to me, Joshua. Tell me what made you think you could bring something from High Bridge into our home?”
    “Grandma, I didn’t—”
    “Don’t.” Ruth cut him off immediately. Joshua frowned, but she went on, her sharp eyes darting in my direction every few seconds. “Don’t say you ‘didn’t,’ because I can obviously see you did . I told you to stay away from that bridge—I’ve told you since you were little. But you go and wreck your car there and then bring this into our home? When I’ve tried so hard to protect you all from things like this?”
    Her eyes fell fully upon me as she spoke the last phrase. I couldn’t help but shiver and then shrink farther back, toward the hallway.
    “Come on, Grandma.” Joshua laughed again, although he seemed to have given up on masking the tension in his laugh. “All the stories about the bridge are just . . . stories.”
    “Yeah, Mom,” Joshua’s father called from behind us, sounding pretty nervous himself about his mother’s behavior. “You know those stories are just made up to scare kids away from an unsafe bridge.”
    I looked back to see Joshua’s father cast his eyes around the kitchen at the rest of his family. Like him, they all stared at Ruth in disbelief. As if they were afraid their matriarch—the family “pit bull,” as Joshua had called her—was losing it, taking her little ghost hobby way too far.
    Ruth, however, shook her head, her cheeks now