The Truth About Keeping Secrets(34)

And then Olivia plucked the book from my hands and threw it into the fire.

I reached for it uselessly, watched the flames dance and lick and destroy, the man on the cover warping and convulsing until he was gone. I glared at Olivia. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘Why wouldn’t I? You don’t need to read that, Sydney. You really don’t even need to look at it any more.’

‘But what if it was …’

‘What?’

‘Evidence?’

Olivia tilted her head. ‘Evidence of what?’

‘That … I don’t know, that …’

‘Seriously. You don’t need to look at it. And there. It’s symbolic. Literally burning, because it doesn’t matter at all. OK?’

I wanted to fight with her, insist that it did matter. That everything mattered, all of this mattered, and still no one else noticed.

I thought about this for a while.

‘Hey,’ Olivia said finally, something charged in her voice. ‘Let’s play Ghosts.’

Ghosts? It was potentially the weirdest thing she could have said at that moment. Ghosts in the Graveyard was a game we’d played when we were little, scurrying through the wooded labyrinth behind my house. Actually, it wasn’t much of a labyrinth. But it was big enough to be disorienting at night, and that was all you needed for Ghosts. That and preferably more than two people. Dad would play, sometimes. Ghost would hide. Gravedigger would look. And if the ghost caught the gravedigger first, the gravedigger would become the ghost. ‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘Right now?’

‘Yeah. Come on. I’m trying to – I don’t know. You used to love to play. Scared the bejeebus out of me. Maybe it’d get your mind off things. You know? Do some dumb kid stuff.’ She headed for the tree line, started to shuffle through. ‘I’m ghost.’

‘Fine. Thirty seconds,’ I told her while she crept further in. The crunch of twigs grew more distant, and her black coat disappeared between the trees, and then it was just me, counting up to thirty, saying time’s up, and stalking in after her.

My footsteps were slow. When I was little the woods gave me the creeps at night, and even now a sharp pang of fear sat at the bottom of my belly, waiting to strike, but it wouldn’t. Not now. I had seen every scary thing in the world. I was every scary thing in the world.

I came to the dried-up scar in the earth where there used to be a creek, and flicked on my phone’s flashlight so I wouldn’t fall off the makeshift bridge Olivia and I had built over it with plywood we found in her garage. In the summer, there would sometimes be enough fireflies to light the way. By mid-June there’d normally be so many that it was hard to tell where the star-littered sky ended and where the forest began. They’d light up on the ground, even, so if you blurred your eyes just the right way it felt like you were walking through space.

And then I saw … someone.

Still distant, maybe twenty steps or so away, trying to hide behind a tree trunk that was too small to conceal them completely, and something in my gut ballooned and popped and told me that I knew them, and that actually, there was something sinister about them, and that I needed to run –

‘Ghost,’ I muttered under my breath.

I had to get out. I had to get out.

I turned and ran, hoping it was in the direction of my backyard – I couldn’t remember. But I ran, and ran, until a loose log skidded under my foot, and I flew forward. I smacked against the thick-rooted base of a tree and stuck there.

Coppery blood worked itself between my teeth and I sucked it down, the taste of it jolting some welcome life into me. Black soaked the corners of the world, and I tried to blink it away, to silence the ringing, and then there was Olivia, who crouched down to me and asked what happened, what did I see?

This was when I learned you can outrun the ghost.





Chapter 9


Grief and guilt came hand in hand. Guilt that followed smiling or laughing or getting any kind of mild enjoyment out of anything. Indulging in earthly pleasures seemed grossly hedonistic, somehow, after having experienced A Great Loss, so I learned to compartmentalize. The grief was always there; if not centre stage, then lurking in the wings, or hanging from the rafters, or pulsing beneath the floorboards. But it didn’t always need my attention. I could ignore it – for a little while, at least. I was always grieving, but sometimes I was grieving with an and.

So that morning, I lay stiffly beneath my sheets, hand edging along the elastic of my pyjama pants, and thought about June. June, who pulls the car over in the morning, who shows up in the middle of the night, who pulls me into the bathroom at school, who yanks me close and kisses me fast, like she’s been meaning to and has just remembered, who guides me in and kisses me slow, like this is the only thing we have to do for the rest of time, who’s all lips and hands and eyes while I’m all shakes and shakes and shakes – but then I thought about death. Death. Dad? No. June. Dead Dad. June. Dad …

Nope. That was enough of that. I felt stupid for even trying.

June who I hadn’t heard from since break began. June who’d promised to text.

It was New Year’s Eve, and I wasn’t up to much. I’d spent the past eleven New Years with Olivia, watching Ryan Seacrest host the countdown, and tonight, I assumed, wouldn’t be much different.