• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“No,” I said.

After a long time, I covered his translucent fingers with mine. He looked down, smiled.

You really suck at rummy, he said.

I pulled a face. “Quit spying!”

I was in the kitchen, he said. You could have seen me. You just didn’t look.

“I was concentrating on not sucking at rummy,” I said.

Yeah, he said, that worked out great.

19. Jiang-shi must seek the earth when the sun is bright. (“It’s just the pain,” said Grandmother. “You won’t burn.” Like that was comforting.)

I went back to school; it was cloudy enough that I could bear the pain, if I tried. No one mentioned that I had the shakes.

My acceptance letter came from Seattle. I sat on the empty benches at lunch and read it twice. Then I stuffed it into my backpack, grinding it into the bottom.

You should go, Jake said from beside me. He sounded more excited than I’d ever heard him. I’ve always wanted to see the West Coast.

“Sure,” I said. “Crawl out of the mud in time for night class and learn things that don’t matter for a life I’m never going to lead. Brilliant plan.”

You just need a couple of fake IDs and some shade, he said. He was the freaking pep squad, suddenly. He grinned at me. You’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll be an adventure. You can totally handle it.

I turned to face him. “You think I can get through college hoping they don’t notice I only take night classes and wildlife goes missing? What sort of life is that? How can I do that?” I shook my head. “I can’t even live at home for long. But where else can I go? I’m trapped.”

His glasses gleamed in front of the blank sockets. He snorted, his mouth twisting. Wow. I didn’t realize you were such a coward, Suyin. You’re just going to run?

Blood filled my vision.

“Coward?” I turned to face him. “And you knew so much more about how to handle life than I do, before you killed yourself?”

Shut up, he said, so raspy I could hardly hear him.

I couldn’t shut up, though, couldn’t stop. “You couldn’t even take being dead! You caught a ride with the first person who could come back on her own because you couldn’t hack it in the afterlife, and you’re telling me when I’m being a coward?”

There was a horrible silence. The words settled in between us, and still nothing happened. I was frozen. Behind his almost-there glasses, his eye sockets filled with tears, like a crack in a rock weeps.

Then he was gone, plumes of smoke that disappeared into the afternoon sky.

And that’s how you take care of a lingering spirit, I thought. Annoy it until it goes back to the afterlife just to avoid you. Then you get to be alone, just like you wanted.

Go, me.

20. The school has no outside broadcast system. If you’re not in the building, you don’t know that you’re being paged to the main office, and you’re an hour late getting the news that your grandmother has died.

* * *

My parents had left a note with the address of the funeral home.

I went into Grandmother’s room like I didn’t believe it; like she would be there if I just opened the door fast enough.

The room was thick with smells: the bamboo in a vase on the windowsill, the detergent smell of her dresser. The bed smelled like her skin, as much as if she were still in it, sleeping, and I could reach out and wake her up.

The little nightstand next to her bed was a pile of vitamin bottles and eye drops and insulin. It seemed wrong in the room, like weapons, and I opened the top drawer to sweep them in, to leave the room the way she’d meant it.

Inside the top drawer was a needle and a plastic tube and a small glass jar with a narrow neck, like an ink bottle. Everything was clean, but the smell of blood was so powerful, I sank onto the bed.

After the animal blood stopped working, she had found something that would save me. She hadn’t told me I needed human blood; I would have found some other way if I had known. Why hadn’t she told me?

(“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “You’re mine.”)

I wondered, if I tried, if I could bring her back. I could reach into the afterlife, I was sure—if