QUEEN OF THE DEAD GIRLS

It wasn’t a title you inherited or an office you ran for; you simply emerged if you were the one for the job. You had to be kind enough to comfort the others, diplomatic enough to settle any territorial disputes, and wise enough to prioritize which of the living most needed to be haunted. Edna had held the throne for 102 years—no one could remember a longer reign—and she was liked by all and well-regarded as a leader. She had increased living memory of the dead girls by over 30 percent and had significantly decreased both afterlife dissatisfaction and between-worlds confusion.

Most of all, you had to have patience to be queen of the dead girls. New arrivals appeared constantly, and they usually had the same questions.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in the afterlife.”

“Where do the boys go? And the grownups?”

“Nobody knows. Just like we didn’t know about this place when we were alive.”

Almost everyone asked these questions, in all their many languages that filtered into Edna’s mind as pure thought and meaning. With the infants, the questions came across as vague impressions, and Edna kept her answers simple, projecting as much softness and love as she could into them. Some of the toddlers asked these questions repeatedly, and Edna answered with kindness each time. Had she finished growing up, she might have become a schoolteacher.

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Vivian entered the afterlife with a big jolt of energy, as girls who crossed over unexpectedly often did. She had died suddenly, murdered at the age of thirteen, and when she arrived, she was still scratching at her neck, trying to remove her teacher’s heavy fingers from around it.

She tore around the afterlife, taking stock of her surroundings and everyone in them. The place itself was like being lost in a dust storm, a blur of whisper and texture all around her. And all around were girls of every age from infancy to near-adulthood, of all nationalities and ethnicities. Countless scores of them everywhere. “Who’s in charge here?” Vivian demanded.

She found herself in front of an older teenage girl, thin with pale lips and dark shadows under her eyes, wearing an old-fashioned cotton dress and a crown of braids around her head. “I am,” said the girl. “My name is Edna. I’m here to help you.”

“Where am I? Is he gone?” Though Vivian no longer had a physical voice, her tone was panicky and sharp as it entered the minds of Edna and the other girls around her.

“You’re in the afterlife,” said Edna. “He’s gone now.”

Vivian’s spectral hands steadied and drifted down to her sides, though her stance remained alert. “The after.... So, I’m dead?” Her tone was a mix of incredulity and fear.

“Yes, but you’re safe here. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

Vivian pulled herself up straight, and her voice flattened. “He can’t hurt me anymore.”

“That’s right.”

“But, what about what he did?”

Edna gave her a gentle smile. This girl was going to be tough, but Edna knew she would eventually get through to her. “Don’t worry. He will be punished. We’re going to show you how to haunt him.”

Vivian looked skeptical. Edna explained how to find her way back to the land of the living using her memories, how to project her voice and change the air temperature. As it turned out, Vivian didn’t need much instruction. She returned to her teacher’s house—the scene of the crime—and did the things Edna had shown her. Vivian dropped the temperature in the teacher’s bedroom and gave him goose bumps, but all he did was pull on a sweater. She flickered the lights, but he checked the bulbs and appeared otherwise unbothered. She screamed in his face, but he didn’t seem to notice over the sound of the television. After a while, she gave up and wandered around his house, coming first to the living room, where he had offered her a soda, and then to the spare bedroom, where she’d awoken, groggy, sometime later. She could feel his hands on her neck again in that room, and the shock of it pushed her out of the house to somewhere else.

She was standing on a dark back road in the woods with no streetlights and no one else in sight. Where was she? Why was she here? She looked around until she noticed, among the tree trunks, something pale gleaming in the moonlight. Drifting closer, she saw that it was a human form, lifeless and twisted. Closer still and she saw the bruises around the neck. She was looking at her own body, dead in the woods. No one had even found her yet.

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Edna was singing to some of the younger girls when Vivian reappeared in the afterlife almost as suddenly as she had first materialized. “How did it go?” asked Edna.

Vivian stood there in shock.

Edna drifted toward her and asked, “Are you all right? The first time back to the land of the living can be difficult.”

Vivian was still for another minute before she spoke again, her voice fast and quiet.

“What are we going to do about this?”

“About what, dear?”

Vivian’s gaze lifted slowly to Edna. “It didn’t work. He didn’t even notice.”

“It’s going to take time. You’ll learn more—”

“No!” A fire was growing inside Vivian now. She stared intently at Edna, an especially dramatic look because of her pale moon-blue complexion that contrasted with her dark waves of hair, the forest green of her sweater, and the ring of violet bruises around her neck. “We don’t have time. They’re going to keep hurting us. No one will protect us. And what’s going to happen to them? They get a little scared? If they notice us at all? We have to do something else!”

A faint unpleasantness bloomed at the center of Edna’s being. She had dealt with angry and impatient girls before, but something felt different with Vivian. Still, she tried to keep her voice calm. “Listen, I’m here to help you. Your haunting will become more effective. You have a very strong energy. But it takes time.”

“I told you, we don’t have time!” Vivian’s spectral body was buzzing and pulsing, and her voice was attracting the attention of every girl in the area. “Look at the way we were all treated when we were alive!”

Edna gave her a gentle smile. It was how she calmed all the sudden arrivals. But it only seemed to agitate Vivian more, so Edna said, “I know the way you got here was terrible. It was an awful act of cruelty, and I promise your assailant will be dealt with. But I’m not sure it’s fair to say that all of us were mistreated.”

Vivian looked Edna in the eyes. If Edna had been alive, she would have felt a chill. “No one ever treated you like less than a boy?” asked Vivian. “You didn’t ever have a neighbor or an uncle or a teacher,” she said, pausing to collect herself after that last word, “who hurt you, or seemed like he might?”

Edna blinked. The crowd around them was beginning to murmur.

“And if you said anything about it, people didn’t believe you? They made you feel like you were just imagining it? Until it was too late.” Vivian became lost in herself as she continued, but as the others spoke up, her attention returned to the crowd. He said it was just a joke and I should lighten up. They told me I must be remembering it wrong. He told everyone I made it up. And then he found me after school.... And then they kicked me out.... And then he grabbed me....And then.... And then.... And then....

“Listen,” Vivian said to Edna. Her voice was hushed now. The others quieted down to hear her. “I can’t just sit here and let this keep happening. I have to do something.” The others shuffled and murmured around her.

Edna felt she was losing her grasp on the situation, a feeling she hadn’t experienced before. “Now hold on,” she said, her tone more desperate than she intended. “We have processes here. We have rules we have to follow. We haunt the people who need to be haunted. We punish the ones who deserve it. Who knows what would happen if we all started doing whatever we liked? Just take a moment and we’ll figure this out.”

“I can’t,” said Vivian. “I don’t know how, but I have to do something.” She looked around at the other girls, the hordes of dead girls. “Who’s coming with me?” A few nodded their heads and mumbled their assent, then a few more.

“Wait,” said Edna, but the crowd was beginning to drown her out. And then, suddenly, she found herself alone.

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There was another question many of the girls asked at some point: “Will I be here forever?” Sometimes this came up soon after their arrival as the girls wondered if they would get to go home again. To these inquiries, Edna replied diplomatically, “This place is your home now. You can visit the land of the living, but your evolution will continue here.” But many girls asked privately, after they felt the changes beginning. They couldn’t move as freely between the afterlife and the land of the living anymore, they told her. When they spoke, their voices sounded more like whispers. What was happening to them?

It was hard to tell these girls the truth, but Edna believed it was the humane thing to do. The reality was that the strength of your presence in the afterlife was based partly on how well remembered you were among the living, and partly on your own emotional connection to the world. As time went on and the people who remembered you died out themselves, you lost strength. And as any anger, grief, or other feelings you had about your life and your passing subsided, your connection to the living world dwindled. Your spectral body grew dimmer, your voice softer, until eventually you became dust and shadow, part of the texture of the afterlife.

How much consciousness did you have left at that point? Even Edna didn’t know, though she had watched a century’s worth of girls pass through this place. The ones who died peacefully tended to fade quickly, and the infants, who had barely known the world well enough to hold onto it, often started fading as soon as they arrived.

Edna had rescued a small child from a well during a rainstorm when she was seventeen, dying shortly thereafter from a fever. This made her something of a local legend in her small town and gave her a level of post-life memory most girls didn’t have. It was why she’d had such a long reign. But she was starting to feel the changes now herself. Her spectral body didn’t move as quickly as it once had, and finding her way back to the land of the living was becoming more challenging. It was only a matter of time until she faded completely and was replaced by a new queen. She accepted this as the natural order of things. But the idea of fading away before she resolved the Vivian situation troubled her. It had never occurred to her to break the rules, and so she had never considered what might happen if someone did.

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Countless dead girls were back in the land of the living. Some of them had heard that there were enough spiders on earth to eat every human within a year, and that’s what it was like: scores of dead girls for every living person. The girls were spread around the globe, in places familiar to each of them, yet they were able to communicate with each other through their thoughts. “Haunt them,” said Vivian in all of their minds, and they started off with their usual pranks: interfering with electronic signals, making floors creak. But Vivian told the girls to think bigger, that they could do more. It wasn’t easy, but if they focused, they were able to hide people’s keys, ring their doorbells, tune their radios to the music they found most annoying.

Days passed, weeks, and the girls kept going. With Vivian egging them on, they let out their anger and allowed their haunting to grow deeper, more psychological. And it felt good. One girl found her former schoolyard bully, all grown up to be a control freak, and she tilted all the furniture and artwork in his apartment, disrupting the perfect angles, day after day. Another girl learned how to charm animals and insects, and she sent swarms of mosquitos to plague the guy who still sat on the same stoop from which he used to catcall her. The dead girls changed the livings’ email passwords, flipped the channels while they were watching TV, woke them up every fifteen minutes to deprive them of dreams and make them feel like they were losing their minds.

Vivian herself went back home and wandered along the road between her school and her house. She came upon a crowd near her front yard, all of them burning candles in the autumn night. It took her a moment to see the pictures of herself among the mountains of flowers piled everywhere. They must have finally found her body. People had brought her favorite candy and tiny stuffed tigers and formed them into little shrines all up and down the sidewalk with notes tucked in among them. “I’ll always remember that day at the beach with Lizzy and Sarah.” “Thanks for being my friend.” “You always wrote the best notes in class.” Everyone was talking about her, their faces flickering in the candlelight, all of her secrets exposed for the world to hear. It was like seeing her own viscera spread over the street.

As the speeches went on, Vivian noticed a familiar face standing at one edge of the crowd, nodding along earnestly. “That’s the man who killed me,” she said, her voice a flat whistling noise. All the other dead girls in the area whipped their heads toward him in unison like a pack of predators catching the scent of prey. They drifted toward him, moving through the living bodies and making them pull their coats tighter around their shivering flesh. Vivian stood in front of her teacher, but of course he didn’t see her. Someone in the distance finished their speech, and the crowd grew quiet. The teacher, the very man who had stolen her life with his bare hands, began talking about what a wonderful girl Vivian had been, what a fine student, what a warm personality and a bright young mind. The crowd of the living nodded and hummed with appreciation. Vivian, just inches from his face, gave off a long moaning sound that evolved into a howl and then a piercing shriek, and for the barest hint of a moment, the teacher paused in his recollection, a startled look passing across his face.

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Edna drifted through the windy, shadowy expanses of the afterlife, which seemed so empty even with the new arrivals that streamed in as they always did. She waited a while for Vivian and the others to return, thinking that surely they’d be back in no time at all. But they stayed gone. Edna tried calling to them. Nothing. She centered her spiritual energy and focused intently on a particular sensitive eight-year-old who followed her around like a little sister. But even she couldn’t be reached. Was it because the girl didn’t want to answer, or because Edna had grown too weak to be heard? Would she still be queen by the time they all came back, if they ever did?

After a long while waiting in vain for the others to reappear, Edna decided she better see what was going on in the land of the living. She was still the leader, after all. Even if it took all the strength she had left to get back, she needed to fulfill her duties. She had to restore order.

The thing about being dead for a long time was that it kept getting harder to remember things from your life. Mostly, you called up the same few emotionally charged memories over and over again, hung around the places associated with those memories, looked for the people you’d made the memories with. And as the places changed and the people grew older and died, it got harder to recall what your life had been like. Edna thought back on her memories. They used to be so crisp, but now they blurred and faded like ink drawings left out in the rain. Her family—she must have had one, but she couldn’t call them to mind. Friends? A suitor? A big fight? An

accident? A celebration? When did it all get so jumbled, so distant?

After a time, the barest hint of an image came to her: a gentle curve in the road, and a

house on the right. She held fast to it and willed herself, as strongly as she had ever willed

anything, to be there. She didn’t even know where “there” was, but it was all she had to hold

onto. Focusing until she felt like her entire being was compressed to the size of a point, until she

could scream, until she felt she might implode, she found herself standing in the road where it

curved. She was back in the land of the living, and she suspected it was the last time she would

ever make the trip.

There were dead girls everywhere. As Edna wandered down the street, she saw them

swarming any live person who happened to be around. The living swatted the air around them,

broke out into a run, cried, “Please stop! Leave me alone!” It took a moment for the shock of this

sight to wear off and for Edna to remember her purpose in coming here. “Where is Vivian?” she

thought at all the girls she passed, but they were too caught up in the frenzy of the terror they

were causing, and no one answered.

Edna continued down the road until she found that house she’d seen in her vision. It

looked different, painted gray instead of red, with a large addition on the side, yet she recognized

it. “I lived here,” she said to herself, realizing it was true as she said it. She found herself

standing outside her own front door, and being there helped fill in a few of the gaps in her

memory. The yard was so shady now, the trees mature, and there weren’t any chickens roaming

around as there had been in her day. But the porch was still there, and the door was the same, and

the front bay window where she used to sit and read or watch the world go by was still intact.

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She moved through a cluster of dead girls spelling out messages with blades of grass on

the front porch: “WE ARE COMING FOR YOU” and “BLOOD EVERYWHERE” and “DIE

FLESHIES.” In the front hallway of the house, a terrified teenage boy stared at a framed mirror

on the wall, watching his hair blow around in the nonexistent breeze, a giggling dead toddler

mussing it from the shoulders of a smirking dead preteen. Edna moved through the kitchen, all

redone and reoriented since her time, but there was a familiar view of the hills in the distance out

the back window, and it brought her comfort.

She meandered upstairs and looked in her old bedroom, strangely the one room in the

house that hadn’t changed much. There was an old brass bed with a quilt on it, just like hers. And

the window seat was still there, looking out over those same far hills. She sat and stared for a

while, the day changing to night and back again. The light came in waves, like the ocean. The

living came and went through the room, but she stayed on the window seat. Maybe she could

simply remain here until she faded away forever. What difference would it make? Her powers

were going, if they weren’t entirely gone already.

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Vivian pulled herself back to her teacher’s house, again and again. She had screamed at

the vigil. He had heard her. There had to be something she could do to him. Each time she

arrived at his house, she yelled, pounded him with her fists, knocked glasses onto the floor and

shattered them, turned up the volume on the television, everything she could possibly think of,

but if he noticed at all, he didn’t seem to care. And anytime she thought too hard about his hands

on her throat, she found herself somewhere else: her bedroom, the mall, that dark place in the

woods.

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Yet she kept going back. On one of her attempts, she was looking through a desk drawer

and found a picture of herself. Maybe this was it, the way she could terrify him. She put the

photograph on his pillow and waited for him to notice it. When he went to get ready for bed, he

saw it. He stopped and stared at it from the doorway, and Vivian buzzed with excitement in the

corner. He would know she was watching him. That he wasn’t in control anymore. But after a

long minute, he walked over to the bed, picked up the photo, and stared at it before hugging it to

his heart. Then he propped it up on the nightstand and got into bed.

Vivian thought she might combust. That disgusting animal actually liked finding the

picture. Maybe he did know she was still hanging around, and he liked that, too. Vivian felt her

spectral body vibrating with anger, the frequency growing higher and higher until there was a

sort of popping sensation and the light changed. She looked around. The teacher and the picture

were both gone, and the bed was made. It was daytime, overcast, and there were voices coming

from the living room.

There was a girl, probably the same age as Vivian, sitting on the couch holding a glass of

soda. The girl had pale, straight hair and a denim skirt. A backpack sat on the floor next to her.

She looked around without suspicion as the teacher chatted with her from the kitchen. Something

was off—what? Objects around the room. They were different than the last time Vivian messed

with them. The rug was different, the curtains. Had she been here that long, long enough for the

decor to have changed?

The teacher emerged from the kitchen with a plate of cookies, and Vivian was so shocked

she almost blinked off to a different place again, but this time, she managed to hold on. The

teacher was slimmer. He was balding, but not entirely bald on top. “He’s younger,” Vivian

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whispered to herself with awe. At least ten years younger, he had to have been. She had managed

to pull herself backward in time.

The girl on the couch cocked her head slightly. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” said the teacher.

The girl looked around with her brow furrowed, but after a moment, shrugged and

relaxed. “I thought I heard someone say something.” She yawned. “I’m getting really sleepy.

Maybe you should take me home.” Her words were beginning to slur.

Oh, no, thought Vivian. It was happening again. Or maybe this was the first time. It

didn’t matter, she had to do something. “Wake up,” she said. If the girl heard her once, maybe

she would again. “Wake up, wake up, WAKE UP!” But the girl didn’t hear, and as Vivian

screamed with everything she had, she once again found herself in the woods.

No! There had to be something she could do. She shook her head. She needed help. She

didn’t think Edna would like her breaking the rules of space and time, but maybe if Vivian told

her what they were capable of, she would get it. Maybe if she showed her. “Edna,” she thought

out in all directions. It was easiest to attach yourself to a place you remembered to help you

move through the afterlife, but it was possible to attach to a person, too. And if you could attach

to a living person, why not a dead one? “Edna, help me,” thought Vivian, closing her eyes and

focusing with all her might.

#

Edna was still sitting in the window seat gazing out toward the hills. As much as she had

done for the girls during her reign, she felt sorrow that she hadn’t been able to do more. And now

it was ending. She was ending.

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“Edna,” she almost thought she heard someone whisper. She’d never heard of a ghost

being haunted by another ghost, but that was how it felt. “Edna.” She looked around, trying to

find the source of the sound. And then, without warning, there stood Vivian, right next to the

brass bed.

Edna felt tired, almost ready to let it all go. Still, she couldn’t help but ask, “How did you

get here?”

“I think I found something we can use,” said Vivian, rushing over to her. “I want to show

you.”

Edna’s head lolled back toward the window. Maybe Vivian would be queen next, or

someone else entirely. It was all right. She didn’t need to worry about it anymore.

“Edna! Listen.”

She couldn’t blame Vivian for not understanding. Edna hadn’t explained it to her yet,

how they all faded away over time. She would have to figure it out on her own now.

Vivian paced, frustrated. “I have to show you,” she said, and when that got no response,

she asked in a gentler tone, “Edna, how did you die?”

She died. How did she die? She was in a bed. This bed. Or... this bed, but not this bed.

Very cold, but also very hot. But before that. Water. A well. A little girl. She didn’t put any of it

into words, but let Vivian see the images in her mind. “Okay,” said Vivian. “Okay, just focus on

me. And hang on.” And there was a whooshing sound, and the light changed, and Edna wasn’t

sure where she was, but it wasn’t her old room anymore.

“Help me,” something whispered from somewhere, and Edna realized she was standing

in front of a well. It was there and it wasn’t there. It was the well she’d rescued that little girl

from, the one that had been covered over not long after Edna’s death. It was raining and it wasn’t

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raining. It was then and it was now. And then the well was solidly there, and rain was steadily

falling, and it was the past. The little girl was crying from the well, and Edna was there. Again.

Edna was there, and so was Vivian.

“How are you doing this?” asked Edna, shocked into clarity. She had never gone back

through time before. She didn’t know it was possible.

Vivian stared at her a while, waiting for her to get it, and eventually shaking her head. “I

guess I have enough anger for the both of us.”

“What?”

“Don’t you understand what we could do? If we worked together and used all our

feelings? Think about how many more are going to join us. They don’t all have to.”

Edna stared at the well as the rain pounded it. Then Vivian closed her eyes, and the scene

around them changed again. The light was different. It wasn’t raining anymore. They were

watching the little girl Edna had saved playing in the dirt by the edge of the well. “Be careful,”

Edna said, though the girl couldn’t hear her. Vivian shook her head. There was a man there. The

little girl’s father, Edna realized. She had forgotten about him, but now she remembered: a mean

man, a gambler, prone to fits of blackout rage when he won enough to buy whiskey. She didn’t

remember this part, the little girl playing, the father stumbling and shouting. Edna had only heard

the girl crying out from inside the well after the fall, and once she rescued her, Edna got sick and

died within days. She’d never had the chance to find out how it happened. “How am I seeing

this?” asked Edna. “I wasn’t here.” But Vivian didn’t answer.

The father was pointing at the little girl, saying something Edna couldn’t make out, but

the girl looked scared, scrambling to her feet and inching backward to get away from him.

Toward the well. “No,” said Edna, but the man was still advancing upon the girl, who was now

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frozen at the edge of the well. His hands lifted up in slow motion and landed on her shoulders.

Time slowed to nothing as he began to push. Shock filled Edna, and then something else. “NO!”

she shouted, and she swore she saw his head beginning to turn toward her, but not quickly

enough. With all the strength she had left in her, with more ferocity than she’d ever known, she

lunged at the man, knocked him sideways to the ground, and hovered over him, her face a mask

of horror. Time returned to a normal pace. He looked at her and shrieked, and the little girl ran

home to her mother.

But in the meantime, the world was shifting. The well was once again there and not there,

and then it was only there. All the dead girls were gone, except Vivian, who gave Edna a slow

smile, waved, and vanished. The house was back to the way it was when Edna was alive.

Edna was alive.

The little girl had never fallen in the well, and Edna had never needed to rescue her. She

had never caught that fever, and she was alive, in her own time.

In her own bed. She was awake in her shiny brass bed and the sun was rising outside. She

remembered something about girls, young and old, everywhere. A vision of the future.

Something about a well and a crying child. It all receded like a dream as she pushed off the quilt

and lifted her body from the bed. She felt good today. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last

time she’d felt this great.

Her bare feet touched the cool wood floor, and she wiggled her toes and smiled. She put

on her favorite dress, its cotton fresh and clean against her skin, and she brushed her long, wheat-

colored hair and started to pull it into a braid, but then decided to let it flow wild over her

shoulders instead.

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In the kitchen, her mother was making breakfast. Edna hugged her, hard, and nearly cried

when she heard her mother’s sweet, familiar voice laugh and say, “My goodness, dear! Come on,

now, sit down and have some breakfast.” No meal had ever tasted as good as the one her mother

set before her. It was a meal fit for a queen: thick strips of bacon, crispy brown home fries,

perfect golden scrambled eggs from the chickens outside. She drank a steaming cup of coffee,

then another, and she stood and stretched, good and full, and went outside.

The rain had stopped, and the smell of the damp earth was glorious. Wildflowers

bloomed throughout the meadow that stretched around the house, seas of Queen Anne’s lace and

black-eyed Susans waving in the gentle breeze, a light mist rising up from the earth. Edna stood

there and felt the warm air against her face. She closed her eyes and listened to the chorus of

birds and insects singing all around.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw a figure staggering around the curve in the

road. As he got closer, she saw it was a man she knew. A good-for-nothing who couldn’t be

bothered to take care of his wife and young daughter. He’d probably been out drinking and

gambling all night. As he passed Edna’s house, he turned to face her and froze. She stared back

at him. He was giving her the strangest look, a sort of shocked, haunted expression. That’s odd,

thought Edna. Then she went into the house, got her father’s shotgun, went back outside, and

shot the man dead in the street.

When they hanged her, the young daughter of the man she’d killed stood at the front of

the crowd with her mother. The girl looked up with wonder at Edna standing there on the

gallows. “Mama, that’s the one who saved me,” said the little girl just before the rope went taut.

When Edna found herself in the afterlife, something about it seemed familiar, comforting

even. All the other dead girls quickly embraced her as their queen, and she was liked by all and

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well-regarded as a leader. She held the throne for many years, her power strong thanks to the

international legend among the living about Edna, the girl who shot a man dead in cold blood.

She showed the others how to travel through time, how to help themselves if they could, how to

help each other. And a hundred and two years after she took the throne, a faint memory flashed

through her mind. But it wasn’t a memory, how could it have been? Yet there it was: a thirteen-

year-old living girl named Vivian, and she needed Edna’s help.

“Vivian.” Edna held the word in her mind, and the feeling that came with it, that pull.

“Vivian.” Some of the other dead girls gathered around her, and soon they were back in the land

of the living in a little house where a balding man was handing a glass of soda to a preteen girl

with dark waves of hair and a forest green sweater. Edna slapped the glass out of his hand and it

went crashing to the floor, liquid and shards of glass and ice spraying in all directions. The man

stared at his hand, wondering where the spasm of pain had come from. “Oops,” he said to the

girl. “I’ll go get another.”

But before he could, Edna slammed the door to the kitchen. Now she had his attention.

She held still for a moment, gazing at the startled girl on the couch. This must be Vivian. Edna

was here to help her, to save her, but as she watched Vivian on the couch, something gnawed at

her. Something wasn’t right. Edna squinted at the couch until Vivian flickered out of the picture

and a girl with pale, straight hair and a denim skirt appeared. The man was standing behind

Edna, and when she turned to look at him, she saw that he was younger now. “This is where it

starts,” she said, and all the other dead girls surrounded the man. One girl passed through him,

and he shuddered. Another girl passed into the space where his body was, and she stayed there.

Then another girl did the same, then another. Handfuls of dead girls, dozens, hundreds. Edna

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watched as the man gasped for breath, as he fell to the ground and convulsed, as his heart

stopped.

When it was all over, Edna held the name in her mind one more time. “Vivian.” She

found herself in a different room, in a different house, staring at that same girl with the dark

waves of hair. She was in her pajamas now, lying on her bed, reading. “Vivian,” Edna

whispered. The girl looked around, unable to place where the sound was coming from.

Edna drifted closer and gently kissed the top of the girl’s head.

For a moment, it almost seemed as if Vivian saw Edna, and she reached out a tentative

hand as though to touch her. But Vivian no longer belonged to the land of the dead girls, and she

shook her head, laughing at herself for believing in ghosts. As it should be, thought Edna. She

watched as Vivian eventually returned to her book, to whatever story she was reading, to

whatever story she would go on to live.