“You should stop apologizing,” Peter said.

  Jessica snickered. “Well, I’ve got a lot to be sorry for, so . . .”

  Peter cracked a smile. It was so small, but so perfect. “You weren’t the one who decided to fight me.”

  “All I do is fight you.”

  Peter opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by a tapping at the window. The sound wasn’t a hollow ping made by thrown stones, but more like a softer thud.

  A ripple of fear went all the way down Jessica’s right arm, from her shoulder and out through her fingers. She closed her eyes and waited for the hard cluck of Ana’s laughter.

  “The tree?” Peter asked.

  Jessica shook her head. “Too far away.”

  The tapping continued. It was rhythmic and controlled—not like branches being tossed against glass by the unpredictable wind. Jessica opened her eyes and saw that Peter didn’t seem scared. He hadn’t blanched, and his eyes weren’t wide. He went over to the window and pulled back the curtain. The tapping stopped. Peter looked down, to the lawn and to the street, and then turned to face Jessica.

  “Ana,” she said.

  “What does she want?” Peter asked, in an echo of the question Iridian had asked the day before. When Iridian had asked it, Jessica hadn’t answered. She hadn’t answered because she didn’t have an answer. She still didn’t.

  “I don’t know.” Jessica sat down on the edge of her unmade bed. “We don’t know. It started when I . . . I saw her hand. Then she wrote on the wall. Today, we heard her laughing. I don’t know what it means. All these little tricks. It’s like . . . why would she do this to us?”

  “Do you think she’s sending a message?”

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” Jessica cocked her head. “Do you really believe all this?”

  “Sure,” Peter said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  The way Peter was acting—the way he was standing all easy-like with his hands in his pockets and without his shoulders all tense and hiked up around his ears—it was strange. He’d just been in a street fight and had just been told the room he was standing in was haunted, but somehow that was all no big deal, water off his back.

  How, Jessica wondered, can a person not absorb all the cruel and painful and scary things about life? How did Peter not itch every day? How was that possible?

  “I haven’t told John,” Jessica said. “I don’t even . . . I don’t even know where to start.”

  Peter didn’t respond. Maybe it was because of the mention of John’s name.

  For a long moment, it was quiet. There was nothing, not the tapping against windows or the rushing hum of the air conditioner. Jessica thought maybe she heard something from downstairs, like Iridian snoring faintly, but then that stopped, too.

  “I can’t believe you’re leaving,” Jessica said.

  “You can leave too, you know.” Peter leaned against the side of Jessica’s dresser. “Not many people would choose to stay in a haunted house.”

  This is what Jessica had wanted: someone to tell her to fly away. And now, here she was, recycling the words that John had spoken a few days ago that had sent her heart plummeting. She was nothing but a mimic.

  “I can’t leave Southtown. I have a job. My family.”

  Peter pushed off the dresser and came forward. Jessica wanted so badly to lean forward and do something simple, like lift the edge of his shirt and kiss the skin of his stomach.

  “I don’t know what it’s like to live in this house,” Peter said, “and I’m in no position to tell you how to live your life.”

  “But?”

  “But . . .” Peter began. “If I was the ghost of someone who had always, in life, looked out her window with an expression on her face like she was desperate to escape, and I had come back to send a message, it would be to tell her sisters to get out of this house and never look back.”

  Jessica waited—for the sound against the window to return more urgently, for the light bulbs in her room to burn bright then blow out, for anything big and bold to tell her Peter was right.

  “There’s one more thing,” Peter went on to say, “and I don’t care if you repeat it to your boyfriend.”

  “I won’t tell—”

  “I don’t care if you tell him,” Peter said, interrupting. “There are two huge tragedies here. The first is that you are legions better than John Chavez, and he doesn’t deserve you.”

  Jessica’s hands balled into fists.

  “And the second?” she urged.

  “The second is worse. You know you’re better than him, but you refuse, for whatever reason, to do anything about it. I have no problem fighting him. I’ll do it over and over again, but you should figure out a way to fight him, too. You don’t have to do it alone, but you have to do it.”

  The words were on the tip of Jessica’s tongue: You don’t know me. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Things aren’t so fucking easy.

  But also these words: I still sing. I do it when I’m alone in my car in empty parking lots. My voice is better than it’s ever been.

  Jessica closed her eyes, and her ears tuned in to the wheezing rattle of her dad’s truck, coming up the street. Soon there was the sound of a steel door slamming shut, followed by a wet, uncovered cough. Jessica opened her eyes, and Peter was there, still hovering in front of her.

  “My dad’s home,” she said. “You should probably go.”

  Jessica walked Peter out of the house in silence, but once they were out in the yard, Peter stopped and turned.

  “I can’t hear,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t hear anymore,” Peter replied. “Not like I used to.”

  Jessica realized he was answering a question she’d asked when she’d been flat on her back on the floor of a church: Do you still sing?

  “I was in a fight,” Peter said. “I was drunk, and I picked a fight with my sister’s boyfriend over nothing, and he hit me in the ear and broke some bones behind my eardrum. I can’t find pitch anymore.”

  “I never heard about that,” Jessica said.

  “I’m glad.” Peter looked out to the empty street. “It’s not exactly my proudest moment. And I don’t want people thinking I’m a violent drunk, which apparently I am.”

  Jessica didn’t know what to think. She didn’t drink, but she knew what it was like to blow up and lash out and pick pieces of other people’s skin from beneath her finger­nails. On the other hand, she was getting really, really sick of sharing space with boys who were also capable of blowing up and lashing out. She was just so tired of pain. But what she wasn’t tired of, and what she was just starting to get a taste of, was honesty. Peter had shared something hard and true with her, and for that she was grateful.

  “I’m sorry about your ear,” Jessica said.

  Peter shrugged. “I deserved it.”

  “Maybe,” Jessica replied, smirking. “Too bad you won’t be around for me to teach you how to sing again.”

  When Jessica came back inside, her dad was sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, nursing a bottle of Negra Modelo.

  “Boys aren’t allowed in the house,” Rafe said.

  Jessica didn’t reply. She was too busy humming a little tune to herself.

  “There are rules here,” Rafe added.

  Jessica kept ignoring her father as she made her way back to the staircase. She’d just placed her hand on the banister when Rafe called out her name again. There was something, a pleading sadness in his voice, that made her stop—stop walking, stop humming.

  “Anything about that two hundred dollars you were gonna let me borrow?” he asked. “For the truck?”

  Jessica should’ve been mad. Her fingers should’ve gripped the banister with more force, but she just started up the stairs again and continued to hum.

  Iridian

  (Sunday, June 16th)

  The routine on Sunday was simple. Iridian ate chocolate puffs up on the kitchen counter while Rosa sat in the backyard and tried to talk to the animals. Jessica eventually strolled in wearing her work clothes, but this Sunday she didn’t look perfectly perfect. Her hair was thrown up in a clip, and her only makeup was a dash of mascara. She smelled weird, too sharp and sterile, like Lysol or air freshener.

  “Dad’s asleep in his room,” Iridian said.

  Jessica grabbed her keys off the kitchen table and left without a word.

  Rosa came in just as the Matas’ car outside started honking its horn.

  “See you later,” she said, hustling toward the front door.

  Iridian finished her cereal, put the bowl in the dishwater, and then went back to the couch. Once there, she wrote and wrote, page after page after page. She started with another page of I’m sorry I’m sorry, but then she tried to write down everything she could remember from her old notebooks upstairs into her new one. She wrote in the margins, in curves around the corners, in between the spiral holes, until her pen started running out of ink.

  Eventually, Iridian fell asleep there, with the television on mute and her notebook open on her chest and pen dangling from her fingertips. She woke up a couple of times—once, briefly, when the air conditioner clicked on and she had to pull the blanket up tighter around her shoulders, and again when she heard soft thumps on the stairs and then in the rooms above her head, and she’d assumed that her little sister had come home from church and was trying not to make too much noise.

  “Rosa,” Iridian croaked. She shifted on the couch so that she was facing the ceiling and watched a spider spin a strand of web between two blades of the unmoving fan. The air conditioner clicked on once more, which was followed by the sound of more footstep-thuds coming from the stairs. The air, Iridian thought, smelled a little like oranges.

  Iridian called out her sister’s name again, but there was no reply.

  “Dad?” she whispered.

  Bracing one hand against the side of the couch, Iridian pushed herself to seated, peered toward the staircase, and made a noise—a strained little groan.

  Scattered down the staircase were the books—Iridian’s books, Ana’s books—that had once been stacked neatly in Iridian’s closet with their spines facing the wall. They were now spread out, some with their pages yawned open, and some with the pages missing, torn out and tossed around. There was paper everywhere. The cover of The Witching Hour was there, right in Iridian’s eyeline. Iridian’s notebooks— also once stacked neatly in her closet—were there, too, scattered. Like the books, some were still intact, but just barely. Some were in pieces, ripped—shredded. Others were spread open, hanging half on, half off the stairs, like mouths, like big mouths with jaws unhinged from screaming or laughing.

  Iridian tumbled off the couch just as she heard someone outside, in the front of the house. There was heavy breathing, grunts, the sound of someone rooting around in the earth by the bushes and bumping against the side of the house.

  Rafe, she thought.

  It was another bright day, and maybe he was outside doing yard work. That seemed possible. Iridian never ran to her dad in search of safety, but in this instance she didn’t know what else to do. She yanked open the front door, pushed against the screen door, and ran out barefoot into the grass.

  Rafe wasn’t out there doing yard work. What was there was an animal, crouched low on four bent legs. Those legs were black, but its body was spotted, black on tan. A strip of fur all the way down the length of its spine stood taller than the rest. Its dark muzzle was smeared with blood. And there, pinned under one of its front paws, were the remains of a squirrel. The dead animal’s bushy tail fluttered in the light breeze, the sunlight shining off its red fur. Iridian watched—still breathless, close to fainting—as that crouched-low animal opened its mouth and its throat started to bob. A sound came out—not a grunt, not breath. A laugh. Hyenas, they laugh like that. They sound like cruel people doubled over and cackling.

  Iridian started to shake—not just her hands, but her entire body. The tremors were so violent they caused her teeth to rattle.

  “Rosa,” she pled feebly.

  Rosa did not come, but the animal did. It abandoned the squirrel and stalked forward, its dark eyes pinned on Iridian. It stepped to the side and cut off the path to the front door, as if it somehow knew that Iridian’s escape was always inward, never outward.

  Iridian looked to the street for help, but she was alone.

  “It’s fine,” she whispered to herself.

  It was not fine. She was still shaking. The hyena, still laughing, took another step forward, and Iridian let out her own scream. It was a low guttural howl from the back of her raw throat that was like nothing she’d ever produced before.

  Again, Iridian looked to the street. Peter Rojas’s truck was parked in front of Hector’s house, along with a couple other of Hector’s friends’ cars. The front door to Hector’s house was open, but the screen door was closed. All Iridian could think was that she needed to get inside. Inside, anywhere.

  The hyena stepped forward, and Iridian took a matching step back. She stepped back again. And again. Light-headed, she gulped, forcing air down into her lungs. The cool grass crunched under her bare feet as she moved—this was good. She just needed to keep moving. She was on the sidewalk and then on the slick asphalt of the street and then on grass again, in Hector’s front yard. When she reached the house, she didn’t ring the bell, just pulled at the handle. The door was open, and Iridian stumbled inside. Hector’s mom was in the living room, sitting on the couch, doing something on her computer with her headphones in.

  “Iridian,” Mrs. Garcia said, trying to hide her surprise. “Is everything alright?”

  Iridian didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

  This was a nice house, so different from hers. She’d noticed that when she was here before, last summer. It wasn’t dusty. The furniture mostly matched. There was a shelf full of sports-related trophies, and everywhere—on the walls, on side tables—were pictures in frames of Hector and his older sister. They were together, posing and smiling. They were by themselves, posing and smiling. What a nice family.

  Iridian flew up the stairs, keeping her gaze on her feet. There was a blade of grass stuck to her big toenail. Pebbles from the road were wedged between her toes.

  She could hear the boys even before she reached the top of the stairs. The door to Hector’s room was slightly open, and Iridian could see Hector and four of his friends sitting on the floor at the foot of Hector’s bed, in front of an old television set. They were passing around a box of cornflakes, scooping out the dry cereal with their hands and shoveling it into their mouths.

  Jimmy was closest to the door, so he saw Iridian first, and froze, mid-chew. He nudged Hector, who ignored him. It was only when Iridian pushed open the door fully and stepped into the room that Hector turned his head and saw her.

  “Oh . . .” he said. “Uh . . .”

  The other boys—Calvin, Luis, and Peter—also turned to face Iridian. They said nothing, just stared.

  “There’s something outside my house,” Iridian choked out. “By the window.”

  The boys reacted as if they’d suddenly been set on fire. They sprang up, leaping over one another to get to Hector’s window. Calvin’s hand latched on to the curtains, but he lost his grip when Luis elbowed him in the face. Cornflakes flew from the box, scattering across the bed and floor. Hector tackled Luis, and then tossed him backward. Finally, it was Jimmy who stepped over his pile of friends to reach the window first. He yanked back the curtain and pulled the cord to raise the blinds. He held his breath, looking out and down.

  “She’s not there,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”

  Hector, Luis, and Calvin crowded around him to look.

  “There’s nothing fucking there, Iridian!” Hector shouted, spinning around. “What the fuck?”

  Iridian just stood there, mute and trembling. This was a mistake, a huge mistake. She shouldn’t have come here, and she had no idea why Hector was yelling at her.

  “Iridian,” Peter said.

  He was the only one who hadn’t wrestled his way across the room. He was standing at the foot of Hector’s bed, and the first thing Iridian noticed was how tall he was, taller than Iridian had remembered. He was dressed for work at the pharmacy, wearing a blue collared shirt and khaki pants. There was a small bruise above his eyebrow, and Iridian remembered how Rosa said he’d been in a fight with John.

  “Are you okay?” Peter started to reach for Iridian, but thought better of it and withdrew his hand. “What was it? What was there?” He glanced down to Iridian’s dirty feet.

  “The hyena,” she said.

  “No way,” Hector sneered.

  “It was there,” Iridian insisted. “In the yard. It was right there.”

  “There’s nothing there,” Jimmy whined. Both of his palms were spread out against the glass, and the tip of his nose was squashed flat against the pane.

  “I swear it,” Iridian said. “I heard something. I thought it was my dad, but when I went to check . . .”

  Iridian’s voice cracked. What a stupid thing to be doing, crying in a room full of boys she hardly knew, hardly ever spoke to, who she knew thought she was an awkward freak.

  “I believe you,” Peter replied, turning to face her. “Alright? Just ignore them. They thought it was—”

  He paused. Hector, Luis, and Calvin all turned, nearly in unison, away from the window.

  “You thought it was what?” Iridian asked.

  Peter glanced to Hector. “Ana,” he said. “We should probably tell you something.”

  Iridian listened to a story from a year ago about Ana standing outside, tapping on a window, and then Rafe stalking around the yard with a baseball bat. It wasn’t the best, most dramatic ghost story she’d ever heard, which is how she knew it was true.