bedroom and put it on the windowsill where it could watch the world outside and spin. I figured it would eat flies and ants if any dared to come in, and, besides, it was almost kind of like a sign from Cissy. I know, signs are bullshit. But that’s how I felt—like maybe she didn’t blame me after all.
All of January it stayed by the window, and I was careful not to let my mother in the room since I knew she’d freak. She was pretty much always at church, anyway. And I watched it spin this enormous web that looked like frost on the pane, and finally I knew what Cissy had meant when she told me you could never really get away, just like the spiders.
Because it wasn’t just spinning, it was forced to spin, and so it was just as trapped as any of the bugs it managed to catch.
In early February, I came home and saw my mom scrubbing the kitchen, and without looking over her shoulder she said, “I cleared out a spiderweb in your room. I don’t know how it got so big.”
A week later I got a train to Raleigh, and from there to New York City. I don’t know what happened to any of the rest of them—Zulime, Cissy’s parents. Alls I know is I hope that Cissy isn’t stuck in that godforsaken place, trapped like residue on the lip of a glass.
That’s what we are now, me, Alice, and the new ghost, whoever the hell she is: smudges, crusty bits, fingerprints, like stains left over from a faulty dishwasher.
Who knows. Maybe this is the price we pay. Penance, like my mom believed in.
You want to know what we’re paying for?
Like that old song says: Go ask Alice.
TRENTON
T renton hadn’t thought that it would be so quiet . Whenever he’d pictured his suicide—which he had, many times, although he especially liked picturing the parts that came after: Minna thudding to her knees beside his body and wailing; the police swarming the house and filling the rooms with crisscrossed police tape; Caroline bloated with grief; everyone at school humbled, shaken, and girls crying in the halls, hugging themselves—he’d always imagined an accompanying soundtrack.
Now, as he fumbled and sweated in the basement and tried to figure out the fucking knot, he wished he’d thought to bring down his iPod dock. But maybe it was more tragic, more authentic, in silence. Like that old quote about the world ending with a whimper, not a bang.
Still, the silence was getting to him, because in the silence, he could hear .
Whispers. Mutters and coughs and the occasional hacking laugh, like a smoker was caught somewhere behind the walls.
Sometimes he thought he heard his name. Trenton . A bare, faint rustle, but definitely a word . Other times he heard, with sudden clarity, whole phrases, as though someone had turned up the volume in his mind. For example, he had very clearly heard a woman say: I tried talking to her already. Why don’t you try talking to her? Then the voice faded abruptly, as if whoever had spoken had passed out of earshot.
He’d spent an hour last night on his laptop, signing in again and again to the shitty Wi-Fi, researching different mental disorders. He was a little too young for schizophrenia but not that young; he thought it was probably that. Good thing he was never going back to school. Or he’d be Schizo Splooge.
He’d decided, finally, on a rope. He was still curious about the gun he’d found in his dad’s study, but he didn’t even know how to tell if it was loaded. Plus he kept thinking about what Minna had said, about the woman whose brains got splattered on the study wall.
That was the second possibility: that he wasn’t crazy. That the house was haunted. But ghosts didn’t exist, everyone knew that. Which meant that the fact he was even considering it was crazy.
Back to square one.
It was Thursday, almost twenty-four hours since he’d found out his dad had left him the house, and the first time he’d been alone since they arrived back in Coral River. His mom, who still could hardly look at
All of January it stayed by the window, and I was careful not to let my mother in the room since I knew she’d freak. She was pretty much always at church, anyway. And I watched it spin this enormous web that looked like frost on the pane, and finally I knew what Cissy had meant when she told me you could never really get away, just like the spiders.
Because it wasn’t just spinning, it was forced to spin, and so it was just as trapped as any of the bugs it managed to catch.
In early February, I came home and saw my mom scrubbing the kitchen, and without looking over her shoulder she said, “I cleared out a spiderweb in your room. I don’t know how it got so big.”
A week later I got a train to Raleigh, and from there to New York City. I don’t know what happened to any of the rest of them—Zulime, Cissy’s parents. Alls I know is I hope that Cissy isn’t stuck in that godforsaken place, trapped like residue on the lip of a glass.
That’s what we are now, me, Alice, and the new ghost, whoever the hell she is: smudges, crusty bits, fingerprints, like stains left over from a faulty dishwasher.
Who knows. Maybe this is the price we pay. Penance, like my mom believed in.
You want to know what we’re paying for?
Like that old song says: Go ask Alice.
TRENTON
T renton hadn’t thought that it would be so quiet . Whenever he’d pictured his suicide—which he had, many times, although he especially liked picturing the parts that came after: Minna thudding to her knees beside his body and wailing; the police swarming the house and filling the rooms with crisscrossed police tape; Caroline bloated with grief; everyone at school humbled, shaken, and girls crying in the halls, hugging themselves—he’d always imagined an accompanying soundtrack.
Now, as he fumbled and sweated in the basement and tried to figure out the fucking knot, he wished he’d thought to bring down his iPod dock. But maybe it was more tragic, more authentic, in silence. Like that old quote about the world ending with a whimper, not a bang.
Still, the silence was getting to him, because in the silence, he could hear .
Whispers. Mutters and coughs and the occasional hacking laugh, like a smoker was caught somewhere behind the walls.
Sometimes he thought he heard his name. Trenton . A bare, faint rustle, but definitely a word . Other times he heard, with sudden clarity, whole phrases, as though someone had turned up the volume in his mind. For example, he had very clearly heard a woman say: I tried talking to her already. Why don’t you try talking to her? Then the voice faded abruptly, as if whoever had spoken had passed out of earshot.
He’d spent an hour last night on his laptop, signing in again and again to the shitty Wi-Fi, researching different mental disorders. He was a little too young for schizophrenia but not that young; he thought it was probably that. Good thing he was never going back to school. Or he’d be Schizo Splooge.
He’d decided, finally, on a rope. He was still curious about the gun he’d found in his dad’s study, but he didn’t even know how to tell if it was loaded. Plus he kept thinking about what Minna had said, about the woman whose brains got splattered on the study wall.
That was the second possibility: that he wasn’t crazy. That the house was haunted. But ghosts didn’t exist, everyone knew that. Which meant that the fact he was even considering it was crazy.
Back to square one.
It was Thursday, almost twenty-four hours since he’d found out his dad had left him the house, and the first time he’d been alone since they arrived back in Coral River. His mom, who still could hardly look at
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