2003
By the time I was six, I had developed what I privately considered to be a very reasonable philosophy about the dead.
They were there. They were always going to be there. Fighting that fact was about as useful as arguing with weather - you could be as upset about rain as you wanted, and the rain would continue to happen regardless of your feelings on the matter. So you learned to carry an umbrella. You learned the particular way the sky looked an hour before a storm. You learned, above everything else, not to stand in open fields during lightning.
The dead were my lightning. And I was very good at finding cover.
The system had refined itself considerably in the two years since Margaret Ellison had walked through our kitchen wall. What had started as a loose collection of instincts - don't look directly, wait it out, night light on - had evolved into something more structured. More deliberate. The kind of thing that a six-year-old probably shouldn't have needed to develop but that a six-year-old with my particular set of circumstances had found absolutely essential to getting through a school day without incident.
Rule one: peripheral awareness only. Looking directly at a ghost sharpened it. Made it more present, more solid, more insistent. The same way that staring at something in the dark makes it harder to see while looking slightly to the side of it resolves the shape - the dead responded to direct attention the way fire responds to oxygen. So I learned to see them the way you see stage magicians: with the part of your vision that notices without confirming.
Rule two: even breathing. Fear had a smell to it, or something close enough to a smell that the distinction didn't matter. The worse ones - the ones with too much presence left, too much need, too much of whatever it was that kept them anchored here instead of wherever they were supposed to go - responded to fear the way dogs respond to running. Not always with aggression. Sometimes just with pursuit. Either way, you didn't want to invite it.
Rule three: never be the last one in a room.
That last one had less to do with the dead and more to do with basic situational awareness, but it had served me well on both fronts.
My grandmother Ruth had taught me the formal version of some of these things during her visits - she came every few months now, always bringing something from her kitchen, always sitting across from me with that sharp-eyed patience that made me feel simultaneously seen and evaluated. She had a vocabulary for what I was experiencing that my father didn't quite have and my mother definitely didn't have, and talking to her was the closest I came to feeling like what was happening to me was a known quantity rather than a private malfunction.
She called them "anchored spirits." The ones with enough presence left to manifest visibly. She explained the difference between those and what she called "impressions" - the faint residual feeling of past occupation that I'd learned to filter out the way you filter out background noise. She told me that the ability to perceive both was unusual. That most people in our family line could do one or the other, not both.
She said this in a tone that was very carefully neutral.
I filed it under *things adults say carefully neutral things about for reasons they're not ready to share yet* and moved on.
What she didn't teach me - couldn't teach me, or wouldn't, and I still wasn't sure which - was how to handle the ones that didn't follow the patterns. The outliers. The ones that didn't behave the way anchored spirits were supposed to behave, that didn't respond to the standard toolkit, that seemed to operate according to a different set of rules entirely.
I met my first outlier in the spring of 2003.
His name, I eventually learned, was Calvin Marsh. He had been eleven years old. He had died in 1987, which meant he had been dead for sixteen years by the time he decided that the second-grade classroom of Eastwick Elementary was a good place to spend his Tuesday afternoons.
I noticed him on a Wednesday, actually. He was sitting in the reading corner.
---
The reading corner was exactly what it sounded like - a section of the classroom with a small bookshelf, two beanbag chairs in faded primary colors, and a rug with a map of the United States printed on it that had been there long enough that Florida's colors had worn away entirely. It was the part of the room where you went during free reading period, which was the last twenty minutes of the school day, and it was generally considered the best real estate in Mrs. Alderman's second-grade class.
Calvin Marsh was sitting in the blue beanbag chair.
I knew immediately he wasn't supposed to be there. Not because he looked particularly wrong - he was less obviously *off* than some of the ones I'd encountered, his edges sharper, his presence more solid than I'd come to expect from the anchored dead. He looked, at first glance, like a kid. Dark skin, close-cropped hair, a striped shirt that was slightly too big for him, the specific expression of someone who was doing their best to look like they belonged somewhere they'd decided to occupy without invitation.
What gave him away was the rug.
He was sitting in the beanbag chair, and his feet, dangling toward the floor, weren't quite touching it. Not floating - nothing so dramatic as that. Just not *touching*. Like there was a half inch of air between his sneakers and the United States of America, and gravity had simply chosen not to enforce itself in his particular case.
I stopped walking toward the reading corner.
The kid in the girl sitting next to me - a relentlessly cheerful person named Becca who had decided in September that we were best friends and had been conducting that friendship largely unilaterally ever since - walked past me and took the red beanbag chair without incident.
She did not appear to notice Calvin Marsh.
Calvin Marsh, however, appeared to notice me.
He looked up from the book he was holding - and the book was wrong too, I realized, because it wasn't one of Mrs. Alderman's books, wasn't anything I recognized from the shelf, was older and more worn and had no title visible on its spine - and he looked at me with an expression that was not the confused exhaustion of Margaret Ellison or the blank wrongness of the man near our back door.
He looked at me like he'd been waiting.
Specifically, like he'd been waiting for me.
I redirected to the bookshelf. Selected a book with the careful casualness of someone who had not just made eye contact with a dead child in the reading corner. Sat down on the rug - on Michigan, specifically, which had always seemed like a reasonable state to sit on - and opened the book to a random page and stared at it without reading a single word.
The peripheral awareness system told me that Calvin Marsh had not looked away.
I turned a page I hadn't read.
"You can see me," Calvin Marsh said.
His voice was different from what I'd expected. Not the resonant pressure-sensation of Margaret Ellison's not-quite-sound. Actual words. Actual voice - slightly thin, slightly distant, like hearing someone speak from the other side of a closed door, but words. Recognizable, specific, directed.
I turned another page.
"I know you can," he said. "You looked right at me."
Rule one, I reminded myself. Peripheral awareness only. Do not confirm. Do not engage.
"I've been here for three weeks," Calvin said. He didn't sound distressed about this, particularly. He sounded like someone reporting a fact. "You're the first one who's noticed."
I was six years old and had approximately four months of formal schooling behind me and a personal policy of not engaging with the dead, and I sat on Michigan and stared at my unread book and did not say a single word, and I want it noted that this required a level of discipline that most adults I've since met could not have managed.
"That's okay," Calvin said, after a moment. "I can wait."
He went back to his book.
I went back to pretending to read mine.
This continued for two weeks.
---
The thing about Calvin Marsh was that he was patient in a way that the other ones hadn't been. The others had wanted things - attention, acknowledgment, the specific relief of being seen by someone who could see. They'd pressed. They'd made their sounds and sharpened their edges and done the various things that the dead do when they are trying very hard to exist in a world that has largely decided to stop making room for them.
Calvin sat in the blue beanbag chair and read his book.
He was there every free reading period. Sometimes I arrived to find him already settled, book open, feet not-quite-touching Michigan. Sometimes he arrived after me, moving through the classroom with the slightly wrong quality of motion that I'd learned to catalog - too smooth, corners taken too precisely, the absence of the small inefficiencies that living bodies accumulate without noticing.
He never pushed. Never pressed. Occasionally said something, quietly, into the space between us - an observation about the book he was reading, a comment about something that had happened in the classroom that day - and then went back to his book without waiting for a response.
By the end of the second week I was absolutely furious with him, which was not an emotion I'd previously associated with the dead.
"Fine," I said, on a Thursday, very quietly, while Becca was arguing with someone about whose turn it was on the beanbag. "What do you want?"
Calvin looked up from his book. If he was surprised, he hid it well. "I'm not sure yet," he said.
I stared at him. "What does that mean?"
"It means I don't know what I want," he said. "I know I'm supposed to want something. That seems to be how it works. But I've been trying to figure out what it is for" - he paused, in the way that people pause when they're doing mental math - "a while now. And I haven't worked it out."
This was, in my experience, a new development. The ones I'd encountered before had all seemed to know exactly what they wanted, even if they couldn't articulate it. Margaret Ellison had wanted to be seen. The child at the end of my bed had wanted - something, something specific and urgent that I'd been too small to help with. The wanting had always been the whole point.
"So you're just... here," I said.
"I'm just here," Calvin agreed.
"That seems inefficient," I said.
Something shifted in his expression - not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "Yeah," he said. "Probably."
I thought about this for a moment. Looked at my book. Looked back at him. "Are you scared?" I asked, because it was the question I actually wanted answered, the one that had been sitting at the back of my mind since the first morning I'd found him in the reading corner - not *what do you want* but *is this as bad as it looks from the outside.*
Calvin considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "No," he said, finally. "It's more like being - in between. Like waiting for something to happen that you can't quite see yet."
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
I filed this away. It was the most useful information I'd received about death from a direct source, which was a sentence that would have required a lot of contextualizing if I'd tried to explain it to anyone at school.
"I'm Ashe," I said.
"I know," Calvin said. "Mrs. Alderman uses your name a lot. You ask too many questions apparently."
"I have a lot of questions."
"Yeah," he said. "I noticed."
---
We talked every free reading period for the rest of the school year.
Not about anything particularly significant, mostly. Calvin had died in 1987 of something he described as "my heart being wrong from the start," which he seemed to have made a reasonable peace with in the intervening sixteen years. He had liked baseball and a specific kind of comic book that I'd never heard of and the way the classroom looked in afternoon light, which was why he'd stayed - not the classroom specifically, but the light, the angle of it through the south-facing windows in the late afternoon. He'd been trying to remember something about a day that had had that same light, and staying here was the closest he could get to it.
"What day?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "That's the problem."
He moved on at the end of May, between the Thursday and Friday of the last week of school. I came to free reading period on Friday and the blue beanbag chair was empty in the specific way that empty things are when they've been occupied recently enough that you can still feel it.
I sat on Michigan and read my book, and the light came through the south-facing windows at its late-afternoon angle, and I thought about Calvin Marsh trying to remember a day that had looked like this.
I hoped, in the vague and slightly helpless way that you hope things when you are six and don't have a lot of leverage over the universe, that he'd found it.
---
My father noticed the change in me that year.
Not in a dramatic way - James Calder was not a man given to dramatic confrontations when quieter alternatives existed. But over a Sunday dinner in late March, he watched me for a moment longer than necessary and then said, casually, "You seem like you're handling things better."
I considered this. "I've been practicing," I said.
He nodded. Cut a piece of his chicken. "Anything specific?"
"Talking to one," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. Nora - my mother, who still didn't know the full scope of what was happening, who had accepted the explanation of "James's family has a thing about intuition" with the slightly resigned grace of a woman who had married into a complicated family - was in the other room, and her absence made the kitchen feel like a pocket of honesty.
"How'd that go?" my father asked.
"Okay," I said. "He was just in between. Not scary."
"Not all of them are," my father said. "Most of them aren't."
This was new information delivered with the casualness of something he'd been waiting to introduce when the moment was right. I looked at him. He had the expression of a man choosing his words with care - not hiding, exactly, just measuring.
"You've seen them too," I said. It wasn't a question. I wasn't sure why it had taken me this long to ask.
"When I was young," he said. "Less than you do. And it faded." He paused. "For most of us in the family, it fades. Becomes more like a feeling than a sight."
"Did it fade for Grandma Ruth?"
The pause before he answered was a fraction of a second too long. "No," he said. "Not for her."
I thought about Ruth Calder, small and sharp-eyed, driving three hours with cookies and lavender and a vocabulary for things that didn't have common words. I thought about the careful neutral tone she used sometimes, the deliberate omissions I'd catalogued without fully understanding.
"Is there something she's not telling me?" I asked.
My father looked at me across the dinner table with the expression of a man who respected his child enough not to lie to him and loved his child enough to want to.
"Yes," he said. "But it's not mine to tell. And you're not ready yet."
I wanted to argue with this. I was six, and I had been managing a private supernatural life for two years, and the idea that there was something I wasn't ready for felt, in that specific way that things feel when you're six and very serious about yourself, deeply unfair.
But I thought about Calvin Marsh, who had spent sixteen years sitting with an uncertainty he couldn't resolve, and who had managed to be patient anyway.
"Okay," I said.
My father's expression did something complicated. "You're a good kid, Ashe," he said.
"I know," I said, because I was six and humility was a lesson still in progress.
He laughed - a real one, surprised out of him - and it was one of the better sounds I'd heard that year, and I stored it in the part of my memory reserved for things that were straightforwardly good, uncomplicated by the weight of everything else.
---
The thing in the back of my chest had been quiet since December.
Not gone - I'd learned the difference between absence and dormancy by then, the way you learn the difference between a room that's empty and a room where someone is holding very still. It was there. It was always there. It was simply not, for reasons I didn't fully understand, engaged.
I had a theory about this. The theory was that it was watching. That the same patience it had demonstrated in that December backyard - the geological stillness of something that had been waiting long enough that a little more waiting cost it nothing - was still operational. That it was filing things away the same way I was. Building a picture.
I didn't love this theory. But I preferred it to the alternatives, which mostly involved it biding its time for reasons I wouldn't like.
It stirred once, in the spring of that year, during a moment that didn't seem to warrant it.
I was walking home from school. Ordinary Tuesday. The kind of afternoon that had nothing particularly wrong with it - mild, slightly overcast, the street quiet in the after-school way that streets get quiet when kids have dispersed to their respective homes. I was thinking about Calvin Marsh and the light through south-facing windows and the baseball team he'd mentioned that had apparently been very important to him when he was alive.
I walked past an alley.
There was something in the alley.
Not a ghost - or not only a ghost. Something else. Something that registered on the system I'd developed the way a sudden temperature drop registers: not sight, not sound, but a full-body knowledge that something had changed and the change was not good. The thing in the alley was looking at me the way the anchored dead sometimes looked - with attention, with intent - but with a quality underneath it that I hadn't encountered before.
Hunger was the closest word I had for it, though I was six and my vocabulary for existential threat was still developing.
I did not stop walking.
I did not look.
I kept my breathing even and my pace steady and I walked past the alley with the absolute focused calm of someone who had been practicing not running from things for two years and was very grateful for that practice.
The thing in the alley watched me pass.
The something in my chest - dormant, patient, geological - shifted.
It was very small. A minute adjustment, like a compass needle responding to a nearby magnet. But it was there, and it was directed outward, toward the alley, toward the thing with hunger underneath it, and there was a quality to the shift that I didn't have a word for at six but that I would eventually come to understand as the closest thing the entity had to a warning system.
Something in the alley had looked at me like it was considering its options.
Something in my chest had looked back like: *try it.*
I walked home. Made it to my front door. Stood on the porch for a minute in the mild overcast afternoon and waited for my heart rate to go back to something reasonable.
Then I went inside and didn't tell anyone.
The drawer labeled *problems for later* was getting full.
At six years old, I was already starting to understand that later had a way of becoming now when you least expected it.
But for today, I had made it home.
For today, that was enough.