Our Crooked Hearts(59)

I grabbed my stuff and was hustling toward the door when someone stopped me—physically, she sprang from her booth and got in my way.

“Hey. Nowak.”

I blinked at her: a face from another life. “Linh.”

Linh who worked at the Metro; Linh who could talk to the dead. I hadn’t seen her since I’d gone begging for help with Astrid a few years ago.

“That was awesome,” she said. “You could not have chosen a better asshole to pour hot coffee on.”

Linh was in her mid-twenties, bangs grazing her brows and eyeliner so hard-edged it could’ve been sprayed through a stencil. She wore a scissored-off sweatshirt that read GO TO HELL KITTY and her hair was black to the tops of her ears, fading at its ends to watered apricot.

I looked over my shoulder to see if Sergio was coming. “Thanks. I just got fired, though. I think I’m supposed to leave.”

“You should get promoted. That guy’s the neighborhood scumbag. He tried me at a bar once, asked if I dated white guys. I said sure, maybe, but I don’t date bright red guys.”

“Hah.” I was still bracing for Sergio’s meaty hand on my shoulder. “So I’m gonna go.”

“Wait.” She bit her lip, almost wistful. “Can I buy you breakfast? Not at this shithole, obviously. Boycott. I haven’t ordered yet, we could walk somewhere.”

I wondered what Linh was doing in this deeply uncool family restaurant, alone, instead of at some hip dirty-spoon diner with her actual friends. I let myself consider the possibility that she was lonely, too.

We walked to a Swedish pancake place a few blocks away. Linh put so much sugar in her coffee it seemed like a joke, then sipped and gave a nod of satisfaction.

“Coffee’s good here.”

“You can still taste coffee?”

She gave me a lofty look. “The dead love sugar. They’re more likely to talk to me when I’ve got it on my breath.”

“Really? That’s cool.” For the first time in ages, the thought of something supernatural didn’t wring my heart. “So, do ghosts—do they just come up and start talking to you? Or, how does it work?”

Linh put down her cup. “It’s never a good thing when a spirit comes looking for me. It’s way, way better when I’m the one doing the courting. And when one does find me, I’m never the point, you know? It’s always somebody else’s haunting. Most of the time the dead are doing their own thing, and it’s the living who are desperate to reach them.” She smiled at me faintly. “Here’s the part where you ask about your dead. If any ghosts are still hanging around you.”

An image hit me with the force of a sucker punch: Marion at my shoulder, running phantom fingers through my hair. I gripped the table so hard I rattled the dishes.

“Hey. No.” Linh put her elbow in a coffee spill, reaching across to grab my hand. “I didn’t mean to freak you out, that’s just the question everyone asks. Like people wanting free rash advice from a doctor. You’re clean, I promise you. No ghosts.”

I looked down, focused on dragging a triangle of crepe through a puddle of lingonberry without letting my fork shake. My mother and father joined Marion in my mind’s eye, gathering behind me like a bouquet of fog roses. It was almost soothing to imagine Marion in the dust tones of the dead. Too often she appeared to me in shades of mirror-world green, or—far worse—in the colors of a living lost girl.

Don’t don’t don’t, I told myself, the closest I ever got to prayer.

Linh kept her eyes pointed politely toward her plate. “It’s a funny thing,” she said, as if I weren’t unraveling. “No matter how much sugar I eat, my own ghosts won’t come near me. I can dig through three generations of someone else’s dead to find a long-lost recipe for jollof rice, but I can’t even ask my own—”

She cut herself off. Stared at her plate while drawing her nails through her bleach-and-apricot ends. Then she looked squarely at me. “Your problem with that spirit. It got worked out?”

I laughed unhappily. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“I felt bad about what I did. Sending you away. I should’ve at least listened.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. Nobody came out of that situation okay.”

“You’re not okay?”

The way she asked it, I think she actually wanted to know. So I told her.

“I have no job as of today, and even when I did I could barely afford my half of a studio. My parents are gone. I have one friend, and she’d never ever say it but I know I’m deadweight. And every morning when I open my eyes, I think, ‘Man, I can’t wait to go to bed tonight!’”

I laughed. Linh didn’t. She raised her cup of wet sugar to her mouth, and I could see her working out what she wanted to say.

“Do you need a job?” she asked.

“Really?” I leaned forward. “Hell yeah. Is the Metro hiring? I’ll be nineteen soon. Is that old enough?”

“Not the Metro. This would be more of a … freelance thing.”

It took a second to click. “Oh. Sorry, no. I don’t do magic anymore.”

That stopped her, fork halfway to her mouth with a hunk of smoked salmon. “Don’t, or can’t?”

“Don’t. Won’t.”