“My name,” he whispered, “is Carson. Vaughn Carson. I lived all of twenty-five years and I died when I put my car into a tree and it killed the girl who was with me because all I could think about was showing off to her so maybe I could get laid that night and she said, Please slow down, you can’t control the car at this speed, so I went faster and I can’t . . . leave here. I don’t want to. I can’t go on because if I do I’ll have to face . . . what I did.”

  “You just faced it,” said Deeny. “Telling me.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t know. All I did was tell you. I can’t—I’m a coward. That’s what we are, the ones who linger here. Cowards. We just can’t go on. We’re too ashamed.”

  “So you haunt cellphones?” She couldn’t keep the derision out of her voice. Did he expect her to believe this? Of course, she did believe it, because it made more sense than any other possibility that had occurred to her. So the dead live on. And some of them can’t bear to take the next step, so here they are.

  “We never haunt things,” he said. “Not houses, not any thing. It’s people. We have to find some way to make ourselves . . . noticeable. To people. Somebody who knows how to look at other people and really see them. Somebody who’s willing to accept that a person might be where a person couldn’t be. Or a voice might be coming out of something that shouldn’t have a voice.”

  “Why me?” she said. “And besides, Lex heard you too.”

  “Lex heard what she expected you to hear. Not the same voice, but the idea of the same voice. The voice you were hungry for.”

  “I wasn’t ‘hungry’ for a man,” she said.

  “You were hungry to have people think of you differently at school. But what you chose, what you pretended, was a man. A lover on the phone. And I could do that. I remember it . . . not how it felt because I don’t even have the memory of my senses, but I remember that I once felt it, whatever it was, and I liked it, and so I talked about what I did that I knew made girls . . . shiver. And ask for more. And let me do more. I remembered that. It’s what you wanted. I couldn’t miss it—you were screaming it.”

  “No I wasn’t,” she said. “I never said it to anybody.”

  “I told you, I can’t hear. I can only know. You were like a siren, moving through the streets. You were so lonely and angry and hurt. And I—”

  You pitied me. She didn’t say it into the phone, because the battery was already dead, and anyway, he could hear her whether she spoke aloud or not.

  “No,” he said. “Not really. No, I was attracted to you. I thought, here’s what she needs, I could do that.”

  “Why bother?” she said.

  “I’ve got anything else to do?” he asked.

  “Granting wishes for sex-starved ugly teenage girls?”

  “See, that’s the thing,” he said. “You’re not ugly.”

  “I thought you couldn’t see.”

  “I can’t. But I know what you see, and you’re completely wrong, the very things that you hate about yourself are the things that seem most sweet to me. So young, fragile, so real, so kind.”

  Oh, right, Miss Bitch herself, let’s check this with Ms. Reymondo and see what she thinks.

  “Stop listening to Treadmarks,” said the voice. The man. Carson. Vaughn.

  “You really are raiding my brain,” she said.

  “You know what? Your father is really just doing the best he can to deal with the fact that he lusts for you. You haunt his dreams.”

  “Oh, make me puke,” she said. “That’s such a lie.”

  “He never actually thought it through, but by treating you so badly, he guarantees that you’ll hate him and so he’ll never be able to get near you and try the things he keeps dreaming of doing. He hates himself every time he sees you. It’s very complicated and it doesn’t make him a good father, but at least he’s not as bad a father as he could have been.”

  “What, were you a shrink?”

  “Come on, I’ve been dead for seventeen years, I’ve had time to figure out what makes people tick. Never had a clue while I was alive, no one ever does.”

  “So how many other girls have you talked dirty to.”

  “You’re the first.”

  “Come on.”

  “The first who ever heard me.”

  “Lex was first.”

  “She heard me because you wanted her to.”

  Deeny began to cry again. “I didn’t really. I didn’t know what I wanted.”

  “Nobody ever does. So we try for what we think we want and hope it works out. Like me and Dawn. I thought I wanted to impress her so she’d sleep with me. All I did was scare her and then kill her. That wasn’t what I wanted. What I really wanted was . . . to marry her and make babies with her and be a father and watch my kids grow up and if I’d married her, if I hadn’t killed us, then maybe our first child would have been a girl and maybe she would have looked like you and when she was so lost and angry and hungry and sad, then maybe I could have put my arms around her, not like your poor father wants to, but like a real father, my arms like a safe place for you to hide in, my words to you nothing but the truth, but the truth put in such a way that it could heal you. Show you yourself with different eyes, so you could see who you really are. The dreamer, the poet, the singer, the wit. The beauty—yes, don’t laugh at me, you don’t know how men see women. There are boys who only see whether you look like the right magazine covers, but men look for the whole woman, they really do, I did, and you are beautiful, exactly as you are, your body and mind and your kindness and loyalty and that sharp edge you have, and the light of life inside you, it’s so beautiful, if only you could see what I know you are.”

  “The only guy who sees it is a dead guy on the phone,” she said.

  He chuckled. “So far, maybe you’re right,” he said. “Because you’re still in high school, and the only males you know are just boys. Except a few. This Wu kid, he’s not bad. He saw you.”

  “Only after I got a reputation as a whore.”

  “No, I know better than that. I really know. He saw you before. Before me. He just took a while to work up the courage.”

  “Because his friends would make fun of him if he—”

  “The courage to face a woman in all her beauty and ask if she’d give a part of it to him, just for a few hours, and then a few hours more. You don’t know how hard that is. It’s why the assholes get all the best women—because they don’t understand either the women or themselves well enough to know how utterly undeserving they are. But look at the guys who did that to you today. Look what they confessed about themselves. They already knew that the only way they could get any part of your beauty and your pride was to take it by force, because a woman like you would never give it to trivial little animals like them. All they could do was tear at you, rip it up a little. But they could never have it, because a woman of true beauty would never even think of sharing it with them.”

  To her surprise, the words he said flowed into her like truth and even though they didn’t take away what had happened that afternoon on the bus, it took away some of the sting. It didn’t hurt so bad. She could breathe without gasping at the pain and shame of it.

  “Now I know what I wanted,” she said.

  “What?”

  “On the phone,” Deeny said. “What I wanted on the phone.”

  “Not a lover?”

  “No,” she said.

  And in her mind, she did not say the word aloud, but she thought it all the same, knowing he would hear.

  What I needed was a father.

  “Can I call you again?” she said. “Please?”

  “Whenever you want, Deeny,” he said.

  “Until you decide you can go on,” she said. “It’s OK with me if you go, whenever you want, that’s OK. But while you’re still here, I can call?”

  “Just pick up the phone. You don’t even have to press the buttons. It doesn’t even have to have any juice. Just pick up the phone and I’ll be there.”

  And he was.

  Six years later. Deeny was married. Not to Jake Wu, though they came close, until it became clear that his family really did expect that his career would swallow her up and she realized she couldn’t live that way, and couldn’t bear their disappointment if she didn’t. But the guy she married was just like Jake. Not in any obvious superficial way, but just like him all the same, in the way he treated her, in the things he wanted from her. Only he didn’t want her to become a support for his life. The man she married wanted them to support each other. And now she had his baby, their firstborn child, a girl, and she could see that he loved the baby, that he was going to be a great father.

  And that was why she came to the cemetery. She had finally found Vaughn Carson, even though he had never told her where his body was. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he simply didn’t notice how much she wondered. But she found him, anyway, in a cemetery two states away. How he got from where he lived and died to where she was as a teenager—maybe she really had been calling out like a siren. Or maybe it was one hunger calling to another.

  However he had found her, now she’d found him back, and here she was, standing at his grave, a single red rose in one hand, a cellphone in the other.

  “You’re so silly,” he said when she opened the phone. “It’s just dust now. Dust in a box.”

  “I just wanted to tell you,” she said. “That my husband is a wonderful father.”

  “I know,” he said. “I told you he would be when I gave you my permission to marry him.”

  “No, you’re not hearing me. It isn’t that he’s a wonderful father, it’s that I know he’s a wonderful father. How do you think I know what a wonderful father even is?”

  She didn’t have to say, Because I had you. She knew he heard what was in her heart.

  “So what I’m saying,” she said, “is that you’ve had that daughter. Not the way you wanted. Not with Dawn. But you found a fatherless girl and you led her out of despair and instead of marrying somebody like my own father because I thought that’s what I deserved, I married somebody . . . good.”

  “Good,” he said. His voice was only a whisper.

  “And so,” she said, “it’s done. You can go on.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “You can face whatever it is you have to face, because you’ve done the thing you hungered most to do. You’ve done it, and you can go on.”

  “Go on,” he whispered.

  “And I will love you forever, Vaughn Carson, even when you aren’t on the phone anymore. Because you were on the phone when I needed you.”

  “Needed you,” he echoed.

  She laid the rose on the engraved plate that was set in concrete at the head of the grave. It softened the stainless steel of death a little. Even though the rose, too, was dying now. It was still, for this brief moment, vivid and red as blood.

  She took the phone from her ear and kissed it. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll miss you. But I’m glad I had you for as long as I did.”

  “Long as I did,” he echoed. And then one last sigh. “Good-bye.” And she thought she heard something else as if he had laid it gently inside her heart instead of speaking it aloud. “My daughter.”

  Teacher’s Pest

  This was not the section of Human Community that John Paul Wiggin had tried to register for. It wasn’t even his third choice. The university computer had assigned it to him because of some algorithm involving his seniority, how many first-choice classes he had received during his time there, and a slew of other considerations that meant nothing to him except that instead of getting one of the top-notch faculty he had come to this school to study with, he was going to have to suffer through the fumbling of a graduate student who knew little about the subject and less about how to teach it.

  Maybe the algorithm’s main criterion was how much he needed the course in order to graduate. They put him here because they knew he couldn’t drop.

  So he sat there in his usual front-row seat, looking at the backside of a teacher who looked like she was fifteen and dressed like she had been allowed to play in her mother’s closet. She seemed to have a nice body and was probably trying to hide it behind frumpiness—but the fact that she knew she had something worth hiding suggested that she was no scientist. Probably not even a scholar.

  I don’t have time to help you work through your self-visualization problems, he said silently to the girl at the chalkboard. Nor to help you get past whatever weird method of teaching you’re going to try out on us. What will it be? Socratic questioning? Devil’s advocate? Therapy-group “discussion” ? Belligerent toughness?

  Give me a bored, worn-out wreck of a professor on the verge of retirement over a grad student every time.

  Oh well. It was only this semester, next semester, a senior thesis, and then on to a fascinating career in government. Preferably in a position where he could work for the downfall of the Hegemony and the restoration of sovereignty for all nations.

  Poland in particular, but he never said that to anyone, never even admitted that he had spent the first six years of his life in Poland. His documents all showed him and his whole family to be natural-born Americans. His parents’ unlosable Polish accents proved that to be a lie, but considering that it was the Hegemony that had moved them to America and given them their false papers, it wasn’t likely anybody was going to press the issue.

  So write your diagrams on the board, Little Miss I-Want-to-Grow-Up-to-Be-a-Perfesser. I’ll ace your tests and get my A and you’ll never have a clue that the most arrogant, ambitious, and intelligent student on this campus was in your class.

  At least that’s what they told him he was back when they were recruiting him. All except the arrogant part. They didn’t actually say that. He just read it in their eyes.

  “I wrote all this on the board,” said the grad student with chalk, “because I want you to memorize it and, with any luck, understand it, because it’s the basis of everything else we’ll discuss in this class.”

  John Paul had already memorized it, of course, just by reading it. Because it was stuff he hadn’t seen before in his outside reading, it was obvious her “method” was to try to be “cutting edge,” full of the latest—and most likely to be wrong—research.

  She looked right at him. “You seem particularly bored and contemptuous, Mr . . . . Wiggin, is it? Is that because you already know about the community selection model of evolution?”

  Oh, great. She was one of those “teachers” who had to have a goat in the class—someone to torment in order to score points.

  “No, ma’am,” said John Paul. “I came here hoping that you’d teach me everything about it.” He kept every trace of sarcasm out of his tone; but of course that made it even more barbed and condescending.

  He expected her to show annoyance at him, but instead she merely turned to another student and began a dialogue. So either John Paul had scared her off, or she had been oblivious to his sarcasm and therefore had no idea she had been challenged.

  The class wouldn’t even be interesting as a blood sport. Too bad.

  “ ‘Human evolution is driven by community needs,’ ” she read from the board. “How is that possible, since genetic information is passed only by and to individuals?”

  She was answered by the normal undergraduate silence. Fear of appearing stupid? Fear of seeming to care? Fear of seeming to be a suck-up? Of course, a few of the silent students were honestly stupid or apathetic, but most of them lived fear-driven lives.

  Finally a tentative hand went up.

  “Do communities, um, influence sexual selection? Like slanting eyes?”

  “They do,” said Miss Grad Student, “and the prevalence of the epicanthic fold in East Asia is a good example of that. But ultimately that’s trivial—there is no actual survival value in it. I’m talking about good old rock-solid survival of the fittest. How can that be controlled by the community?”

  “Killing people who don’t fit in?” suggested another student.

  John Paul slid down in his seat and stared at the ceiling. This far into their education, and they still had no understanding of basic principles.

  “Mr. Wiggin seems to be bored with our discussion,” said Miss Grad Student.

  John Paul opened his eyes and scanned the board again. Ah, she had written her name there. Theresa Brown. “Yes, Ms. Brown, I am,” he said.

  “Is this because you know the answer, or because you don’t care?”

  “I don’t know the answer,” said John Paul, “but neither does anyone else in the room except you, so until you decide to tell us instead of engaging in this enchanting voyage of discovery in which you let the passengers steer the ship, it’s naptime.”

  There were a few gasps and a couple of chuckles.

  “So you have no ideas about how the statement on the board might be either true or false?”

  “I suppose,” said John Paul, “that the theory you’re suggesting is that because living in communities makes humans far more likely to survive, and to have opportunities to mate, and to bring their children to adulthood, then whatever individual human traits strengthen the community will, in the long run, be the ones most likely to get passed along to each new generation.”

  She blinked. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.” And then she blinked again. Apparently he had interrupted her lesson plan by getting to the answer immediately.

  “But what I wonder,” said John Paul, “is this: Since human communities depend on adaptability in order to thrive, then it isn’t just one set of traits that strengthen the community. So community life should promote variety, not a narrow range of traits.”

  “That would be true,” said Ms. Brown, “and indeed is true in the main, except that there are only a few types of human communities that actually survive long enough to improve the chances of individual survival.”

  She walked to the board and wiped out a swath of material that John Paul had just blown through by cutting to the chase. In its place, she wrote two headings: TRIBAL and CIVIL.