This was why he never talked to girls: it was like following a maze where the walls were always shifting. “Keep what?”

She rolled her eyes. “The rope. I mean, you weren’t using it, right?” Her eyes flashed on his again—eyes that held a challenge—and he looked away. “Didn’t think so. Besides, if you wanted to off yourself, you could do a lot better than hanging. I mean, if you break your neck, that’s all right. Otherwise you could be swinging there for ages. You know how many suicides end up clawing their fingernails to shreds, trying to take off the noose?” He didn’t think she really wanted an answer so he didn’t give her one. She plunged on, “So you sure you don’t mind if I keep it?”

Trenton did mind, kind of. But he didn’t see how he could say no, and what she’d said about suicides clawing their fingernails to bits had turned his stomach. He would probably have screwed it up with a rope, anyway. He shook his head.

“Awesome.” Katie smiled, showing off her crooked teeth. He wondered, just for a second, what it would be like to kiss her and whether she’d taste like cigarettes. “Hey, listen. You gonna be sticking around for a while? I’m having a few friends over on Saturday. You should come.”

Trenton couldn’t tell whether she really meant it. “Thanks,” he said carefully. “But I’m not really . . . I mean, parties aren’t really my thing.”

“It’ll be fun, I promise.” For a second, she looked much younger.

“What about your parents?” Trenton said, and then he immediately hated himself.

“My parents are away,” Katie said. “They don’t care what I do, anyway.” Trenton nearly contradicted her but realized it might be the truth. “It’s the big-ass farmhouse at the end of County Lane 8. Only house on the road. You can’t miss it. Just go around to the back.”

“I haven’t said I would come,” Trenton pointed out.

“You’ll come,” she said. “There’s nothing else to do.” She smiled; she knew she had him. “Just don’t tell anyone. The cops are insane around here. You are old enough to drink, right? You’re not like, fifteen?”

“I’m seventeen,” Trenton lied. He’d be seventeen in a few months.

Katie waved a hand. “Close enough. I’ll be eighteen next month. So . . . Saturday?”

“Yeah.” Trenton could feel himself relenting. “Yeah, okay.”

“Great. Eight or nine or any time after.” Katie took a step toward the stairs, and Trenton had to call her back.

“I’ll let you know about Fritz,” he said.

“What?” She had the rope coiled around her wrist.

“Fritz,” he said. “If I see him, I’ll let you know.”

She smiled wide again. “Careful,” she said. “He bites.”

Then she turned and darted up the stairs.

ALICE

In my day, people knew how to keep secrets. They minded their mouths and their manners.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I remember my mother repeating that like a mantra—remember the taste of the words, like curls of soap and an ache in my jaw—remember my mother’s hands wrapped thickly around my neck, and the light of the bathroom, bright as a halo.

I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.

We kept our secrets for confession. For the priests.

The new ghost is praying. She is whispering to herself, repeating Psalm 23, over and over: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

I never told anyone, not even Father Donovan, about Thomas.

He died very young. Aneurysm: a burst bubble in the brain. I read about the funeral in the local paper. It had been fifteen years since we’d last spoken, but I went and sat in the very last pew. I’d told Ed that I was going to the store and had to change into my good black dress, and a pair of heeled black shoes, in the woods that stretched along the road to Coral River, planting my stockinged feet in the soft dirt, feeling the wind touch my armpits as I wrestled the dress over my head.

I hardly remember the memorial, the speeches, the wreaths of flowers. I do remember his widow: pale and pretty, though heavy around the jaws; dark-eyed with grief, sitting in the first pew with her children. With Thomas’s children. Ian and Joseph.

Halfway through the service, a woman next to me whispered, quite loudly: “Who was it who died? I can’t hear.” And I realized she had only come to watch, that she hadn’t known Thomas at all.

I left early. I couldn’t bear it. The church smelled like a basement, like things locked up and forgotten. And perhaps they should be.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Trenton hasn’t moved since the girl—Katie—left. He sinks down on a sealed cardboard box as though exhausted by the exchange.

Go away, I want to tell him. Leave, and never come back. I want them out. All of them. Even Trenton, who isn’t Trenton anymore, but some horrible version of a boy, twisted and deformed like in some Frankenstein story. Playing with ropes and guns, whispering to us in the darkness.

I don’t care what Sandra says. It’s obvious he can hear us.

“I knew he’d never go through with it,” Sandra says. “That boy’s got the balls of a bunny rabbit. What does he have to be unhappy about, anyway? He’s—what?—sixteen? Seventeen? He just came into money, for Christ’s sake.”

“Money never solved anything,” I say.

“Spoken like a true rich kid,” Sandra says, even though she knows I turned my back on my family to marry Ed.

“He maketh me to lie in green pastures,” the new ghost whispers.

“For Christ’s sake, I’m begging you,” Sandra says to her. “You’ll drive me up the wall.”

“What about you?” I say. I don’t know where the anger comes from but it’s there, immediate and overpowering. I’m sick of Sandra, sick of the way she acts and has always acted—as though everything, all of life, is there to be shrugged off, shaved away, ridiculed and minimized. She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small. “What did you have to be so unhappy about?”

Sandra says shortly, “That’s different.”

“He leadeth me beside still waters.”

“You drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol.” I know I’m overstepping my bounds. “You lost your job—”