Cackle(41)

“Some book of alchemy,” she says. She fakes snoring.

“That bad?”

“No,” she says. “I’m melodramatic.”

“You? No.”

“Sarcasm, darling.”

I begin to swim around, do some laps. I was on the swim team throughout middle school but decided to quit freshmen year after Kim Schulman made a comment about my flat chest. I’d spent three years trying to convince myself that no one cared about my lack of boobs except me, only to have my paranoia validated.

I wonder what Kim is up to now. I bet she’s married. I make a mental note to Internet-stalk her later.

And while I’m envisioning what her wedding dress might have looked like, if she wore a ball gown or something more fitted, I’m able to ignore the sensation working its way up my foot, around my ankle.

But as it becomes tighter, colder, more aggressive, I’m forced to open my eyes and look beneath me, directly under the spot where I’m treading water in the deep end.

At first, I think it’s my shadow, until I see the distinct fingers.

With a single violent tug, I’m underwater.

The sting of water up my nose, inside my lungs, shocks me into complete stasis. I’m being dragged down to the bottom of the pool. The whirring in my ears is vicious.

I make the mistake of turning. There’s a person there. Kind of. A person with grayish pocked skin and bulging eyes, the color in them like melted wax. I scream and water punches down my throat.

I thrash around, trying to get the thing away. I fight for the surface, but it becomes very clear to me very quickly that it will not let me go. I manage to move us over to the side, and with everything I have, I kick, smashing it into the wall.

But it’s gone. It’s my foot that absorbs the impact.

I float up to the surface. I throw myself onto the ledge, coughing up pool water and probably my lungs along with the rest of my internal organs. The gum I swallowed when I was six.

“Annie, what happened? Are you okay?”

Sophie reaches out and pulls me up over the ledge.

“Your foot!” she says.

I look down. It’s mangled. Bleeding. I can’t feel it.

“What the fuck, Sophie?!”

“What?” she asks, looking confused, hurt by my anger.

“There was a . . . a . . . a thing! A guy! A person in your pool! It just tried to drown me!”

She inches toward the edge, carefully craning her neck to see into the pool.

“It’s gone now,” I say. “It’s . . . it’s a ghost! It looked like a ghost!”

“Hmm,” she says, tapping her lip.

“I thought you said your house wasn’t haunted.”

She doesn’t answer. She won’t look at me.

“I almost drowned,” I say. “Is your house haunted?”

Without raising her eyes to meet mine, she mumbles, “Maybe a little.”

“Sophie!”

“If I had told you, you would have never wanted to come over again!” she says. “You’re not in any danger. They’re just . . . inconvenient.”

“Who are they? And I’d say almost drowning isn’t an inconvenience. Death isn’t an inconvenience.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d agree, but . . .”

“Sophie!”

“I didn’t realize they could swim,” she says. “I apologize. Please, please don’t be angry with me.”

She grabs my hands and kisses them. “Please? I’ll fix your foot.”

I can’t bring myself to look at it again. I know it’s broken.

“I need to go to a doctor,” I say.

“Pshh,” she says. “I can fix it. And I promise I’ll do something about the ghosts. They’re just excited because you’re new.”

“Excited?”

She sighs. “I should have been honest with you. I thought it would be too much if I told you everything all at once. I didn’t want to scare you away. I wanted you to still want to be my friend and to come over and for us to have a normal experience. As friends. Who can, you know, hang out.”

Her eyes are wide and sweet and pleading. Most of the time, with Sophie, I feel like the clueless, uncool little sister, but every once in a while, I’m the big sister with the allowance money and the jeans she wants to borrow.

I don’t know. I’m an only child.

“You can get rid of them?” I ask. “The ghosts?”

“Oh, yes. It’s much easier since they’re already dead.”

I find this disturbing on multiple levels. First, I don’t appreciate her nonchalant attitude toward literal ghosts. Second, it implies she’s familiar with the difficulties related to disposing of living people.

She gathers up my pants and sweater. “Let’s talk about this upstairs.”

“How am I getting upstairs?” I ask.

She leans down and lifts my arm over her head so it’s draped across her back. She shuts her eyes hard, and a moment later, I’m weightless. She opens the door to the spiral staircase, and I whimper at the sight of it. There’s no way we’re getting up it side by side, and there’s no way I’m getting up alone.

Sophie reaches out and touches the wall. We climb the first step, her anchoring me as I float along beside her, and somehow we fit. It’s like the stairs expand for us to accommodate us.