Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“I’ve had friends.” Chrissie shrugs. “I had to leave them all back where I came from. And my AoM. She talked to me when no one else would. She’s been there for me, from the beginning.”

Trevor sighs and leans across the table, tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I’m your friend. Don’t you forget that. If you want me, I’m here.”

Chrissie untucks the strand. “You shouldn’t touch me,” she says. She presses her palm to the wall, checking for the chill. “It’s not entirely safe.”

The performance is everything the ghost girl ever hoped it would be. Chrissie hits the high notes as though her voice were breaking out of its shell: revelation over shrill insistence. The ghost girl watches from the back row, the shadow of a seat. The theater is half-empty. The male lead, Chrissie’s Prince Charming, is unworthy but beautiful with his beach boy hair and thick lips.

“It’s nearly a shame to wake such a sleeping beauty,” he sings, “but if her brains are as big as her bonnet, I’ll have made the right decision.”

The ghost girl ignores the words. She makes up her own: lonely girls rule the lonely world. Bossy girls rule the bossy world. A ghost girl writes the story she wants to read across the blank slate of her burnt skin.

Everyone claps. Chrissie bows. Prince Charming holds her hand a little too tightly. The ghost girl disappears back underground, where she belongs.

Chrissie goes home that first night, and the second, and the third. On their penultimate night, when Trevor demands she join them at the after-party, Chrissie glances around the room as though checking for the AoM she knows will not be there. She smiles. “Why the hell not?” she says. “If my teacher’s mad about it, I’ll just quit!”

“That’s the rebel I want to know.” Trevor links his arm in hers. “Your Prince Charming will be there. Let’s see which one of us he likes more.”

The ghost girl races along the walls to follow them out, but they go too far from the school, out past where she can follow them underground, along long country roads with no shadows to seep into. She seethes in the abandoned theater, stomping her feet until they ache all the way up to her knees. She wanders the halls, ripping the BOOZE IS BAD posters from the walls. DEATH TO THEATER, she scrawls over the front doors. Downstairs, she sets her traps. Chrissie won’t go again where she can’t follow. She is so lost in her fury, her planning, that she doesn’t hear Chrissie and her friends sneak back in through the loading door to the theater. Finally, their drunken giggling breaks through.

The ghost girl makes her way to the theater. They are so busy laughing on the stage in the dark—Chrissie, Trevor, and the Prince Charming—that they don’t hear her enter, though, in her anger, she keeps only a tenuous hold on staying shadow, moving in and out of skin, of bone. She watches them as she would watch a show—and what a performance! The ghost girl studies each mess of hormones. They hold wine coolers in their hands; the ghost girl can smell the cheap sugary stuff from the front row. Neither Trevor nor Chrissie is the obvious winner of Prince Charming’s affections. They sit on either side of him and talk about their families: hard lives for soft children. They weren’t granted the power of invisibility. Their scars are hidden beneath more than masks.

“I don’t think my father loves me,” Chrissie says.

“My parents love me two inches in,” Trevor says. “They don’t care that I’m gay, but if I don’t end up married with babies, I’m useless to them.”

“Mine love me too much,” Prince Charming says. “If I’m a step out of line—”

Who can say who is hurt the deepest? It’s a game to compare horror. The stories the ghost girl could tell, if she had people with which to share stories.

“Enough pity party,” Trevor says, pulling out his iPhone. He plays music with no lyrics, incomprehensibly simple beats. They dance and laugh and finish their wine coolers, leaving the empty bottles in the wings. The ghost girl picks them up and smells them, careful not to make a sound. The smell makes her stomach ache with want: fake fruit and the kind of sugar that leaves your teeth grainy. Calmed by their useless bickering, the ghost girl allows herself entrance into their shadows. She moves around their feet, around their mouths. The human body is full of dark spaces, shadows in their own right. She slips, soundlessly, into Prince Charming’s warm mouth. She gleans all his secrets. When Chrissie kisses him, the ghost girl is a shadow that passes from his lips to hers.

From inside Chrissie, the ghost girl speaks. “You disobeyed your Angel of Music,” she says. Chrissie shrinks back into the dark, a headache taking hold.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” Chrissie says. If pressed, she might chalk her newfound courage up to 3% ABV, but the ghost girl scans her chemistry, her biology. Though she’d never tasted it for herself, she has read of the effect weak booze might have on a girl like Chrissie. It isn’t enough to change her kindness into cruelty. There is only one explanation, then: Chrissie was never who she pretended to be. She is an actress to her core.

“Chrissie, who are you talking to?” Trevor kneels beside her and places his hand on her knee.

“Can’t you hear her?”

“I don’t hear anything,” Trevor says. “Chrissie, have you been taking your pills?”

“What pills?” Chrissie says. “I haven’t taken those since I was little.”

Trevor blushes. “That’s not what everyone else says. Chrissie, you can tell me anything.”

Prince Charming stands back behind them. “What’s going on?” he asks. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Not now,” Trevor says.

“Don’t listen to them,” the ghost girl says. “I’m real as you are. Realer, in fact, because I’m not a liar like you. I’m not a pretender.”

“What’s she saying to you?” Trevor says.

“Tell him to stop interfering,” the ghost girl says. She spreads her arms through Chrissie’s arms and stretches the shadow inside her until the skin hurts like it’s burning, like it’s soon-to-break.

“Stop,” Chrissie screams. Her voice echoes the way only a performer’s can. “Both of you, stop.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Prince Charming says.

Chrissie stands, knocking a wine cooler over. The blue spreads across the stage like a burst vein bruise. “I’ll go with you, I will,” she says to the ghost girl. She pushes past Trevor, past Prince Charming. The ghost girl leads her only friend into the darkness underground.

Underground, the ghost girl has faked two prescription bottles full of the pills Chrissie took when she was a little girl, dated for the present. The clothes scattered throughout the ghost girl’s lair are inscribed with Chrissie’s name, black ink on every tag. The ghost girl has been thorough. She’s been cunning. She is an actress too. If she can convince Chrissie that they’re one, then they’ll be one. She whispers untrue secrets: Chrissie never moved to a new town, never met a new friend. The ghost girl has been here, inside Chrissie, all along. A ghost girl is part of you always. She stretches to fit the new body. She sings through the new voice. Her mouth moves in a face that she will never have to hide again.

Girls without friends make ghosts all the time , the ghost girl says. It’s not the worst you could have done.

A ghost girl keeps her own secrets best of all.

I was twelve the first time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room.