Amy was playing in the corner and they didn’t bother to be quiet because they thought she didn’t understand—but she did. Six feet under was where you went when you were dead like Grandpa or like Penelope in The Raven Heliotrope.
Amy wondered whether the girl who was six feet under who was upsetting Trenton would come back, like Penelope had in the book. Innocents don’t really die, so after she was buried six feet under beneath a tree, the tree started weeping and its tears spilled on the ground and Penelope woke up. And so she lived happily ever after and the tree was named a weeping willow like the kind they had outside in the front yard. Maybe that’s where the girl who was upsetting Trenton was buried.
Amy was thirsty. She would ask Trenton for a glass of water and he couldn’t be mad because everyone knew that without water you would die. Her feet felt strange on the floor, like they were full of tiny shivers. Mommy would tell her to put on socks but Mommy wasn’t here and it was just Amy and Trenton and maybe the girl six feet under.
In the hall, the noises in the attic were even louder, and Amy knew they weren’t just mice or creaks but footsteps and voices. The trapdoor in the ceiling was open, and the stairs were lolling out like a wide wood tongue, and there was light spilling onto the carpet and shadows moving back and forth.
“What about your sister?” someone was saying, and it was not Trenton but the girl.
“She’s out to dinner with my mom.”
“I meant your younger sister.”
“I told you, she’s my niece. And she’s asleep.”
They were talking about her, and Amy felt proud. She wanted to know what a dead girl looked like because she’d always wondered whether Penelope had bugs in her hair when she woke up and kissed Prince Thomas and he was just too nice to say anything.
“Where do you want the candles?” the dead girl was saying when Amy put her foot onto the first stair.
TRENTON
Trenton had been hoping Katie wouldn’t show—or even better, that she would show but forget about the séance idea. No such luck. He’d just managed to put Amy to bed when he heard the faintest tapping from downstairs, like Katie was using her fingernails to knock.
“I don’t think candles are such a good idea,” he said, squatting down and trying to fit his arms around a huge oak bureau that Katie insisted he move.
“Of course we need candles,” she said. She had two packages of tall white pillar candles and she was busy tearing at the plastic with her teeth. She looked like a deranged gerbil. The roof was so low they were bent nearly double. “I stole these just for you.”
“You stole them?” Trenton said.
She shrugged. “I’m broke.” She managed to get the first package open. She spit out a small square of plastic and shook a candle into her hand. “Voilà,” she said, brandishing it.
He was worried the séance wouldn’t work, and he was worried it would. He was worried that Katie would see the ghost and freak out, and also that he would freak out but Katie wouldn’t see her so she wouldn’t understand why he was freaking out. There were so many different things to worry about, he was having trouble keeping them straight in his head.
Trenton strained against the bureau and managed to move it about half an inch. Christ. The thing felt like it was made of molten lead.
“Put your back into it,” Katie said.
“You could help,” he pointed out.
“I am helping.” She was setting up the candles, arranging them in a circle in the middle of the floor, which they had cleared of boxes and trunks by stacking everything together in teetering piles, leaving only a narrow pathway to the stairs. When she was finished, Katie unrolled the blanket, which she’d carried up from the living room. (“It’s a séance,” he’d said, “not a picnic.” And she’d looked at him, head tilted to the side, fingering the side of her nostril where he could still see twin holes that must once have been nose rings, and said, “Ghosts don’t know the difference. For them a séance is a picnic. What the f**k else do they do all day?” He was halfway tempted to answer: I’ll ask.)
It was cold in the attic, and Trenton had the sudden feeling of a finger running lightly down his neck. Watched. That’s what it was. It was the sensation of dark eyes on him, concealed, hidden behind the jumble of stacked boxes and furniture. And now it occurred to him, of course, that that’s what ghosts did all day—was all they could do.
They watched.
He jammed his fists into the front pocket of his sweatshirt.
“You okay?” Katie asked. She shrugged off her sweatshirt—which was pink, and patterned with grinning skulls—and Trenton looked away quickly, so he wouldn’t be caught staring at her too-small tank top underneath, and the stripe of tan stomach above her jeans.
“Yeah,” Trenton said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“That’s the spirit.” She rolled her eyes, then sat down on the blanket and crossed her legs. When she leaned forward, he could see her cle**age. She patted the spot in front of her. “Park it.”
Trenton hadn’t thought about how difficult it would be for him to sit cross-legged. He sat down first sideways, with his legs pointed outward to the candles like the second hand in a giant clock. He bent one knee but couldn’t get the other to work. He was too stiff. It had been a long time since he’d done his PT.
The whole time, Katie observed him in silence. “What happened to you?” she asked finally.
Trenton had to settle for leaving one leg extended. “I was in an accident,” he said. “A car accident.”
“You said.” Katie narrowed her eyes. “Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“What?” Trenton stared at her. “No. No, of course not.”
“You can tell me,” Katie said. Her expression hadn’t changed.
“I wasn’t even driving,” he said, and immediately felt that old pain, a sharp pull of regret that he hadn’t died, that the warm soft hands hadn’t carried him off into the darkness, that instead he had woken up with his broken body straightened out and immobilized and pinned to a hospital bed like an insect pinned to soft cotton. “My friend was driving.”
“Was your friend trying to kill you?” she asked, unsmiling.
Trenton couldn’t help it. He laughed. The idea of Robbie Abramowicz, who weighed like three hundred pounds and was the only kid at Andover less popular than Trenton was, trying to kill anything was funny. “I hope not. He’s my only friend at school.” He was embarrassed, immediately, to have said it.