I closed my eyes against the blackness. There were sounds—the stairs creaking, furniture scraping against the floor, muffled voices—and one thought replaying over and over in my mind.
What if she didn’t come back?
Too terrified to see if I could get out from the inside, I kept my hand on the wood. I listened to my ragged breathing, convinced that whoever was in the house could hear it, too.
Eventually, the wood gave beneath my palm and a thin stream of light flooded the space. My mom reached for me, promising the intruders had fled. As she carried me out of her closet, I couldn’t hear anything beyond the pounding of my heart, and I couldn’t think about anything except the crushing weight of the dark.
I was only five when it happened, but I still remembered every minute in the crawl space. It made the air around me now feel suffocating. Part of me wanted to go home, with or without my cat.
“Elvis, get out here!”
Something shifted between the chipped headstones in front of me.
“Elvis?”
A silhouette emerged from behind a stone cross.
I jumped, a tiny gasp escaping my lips. “Sorry.” My voice wavered. “I’m looking for my cat.”
The stranger didn’t say a word.
Sounds intensified at a dizzying rate—branches breaking, leaves rustling, my pulse throbbing. I thought about the hundreds of unsolved crime shows I’d watched with my mom that began exactly like this—a girl standing alone somewhere she shouldn’t be, staring at the guy who was about to attack her.
I stepped back, thick mud pushing up around my ankles like a hand rooting me to the spot.
Please don’t hurt me.
The wind cut through the graveyard, lifting tangles of long hair off the stranger’s shoulders and the thin fabric of a white dress from her legs.
Her legs.
Relief washed over me. “Have you seen a gray and white Siamese cat? I’m going to kill him when I find him.”
Silence.
Her dress caught the moonlight, and I realized it wasn’t a dress at all. She was wearing a nightgown. Who wandered around a cemetery in their nightgown?
Someone crazy.
Or someone sleepwalking.
You aren’t supposed to wake a sleepwalker, but I couldn’t leave her out here alone at night either.
“Hey? Can you hear me?”
The girl didn’t move, gazing at me as if she could see my features in the darkness. An empty feeling unfolded in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to look at something else—anything but her unnerving stare.
My eyes drifted down to the base of the cross.
The girl’s feet were as bare as mine, and it looked like they weren’t touching the ground.
I blinked hard, unwilling to consider the other possibility. It had to be an effect of the moonlight and the shadows. I glanced at my own feet, caked in mud, and back to hers.
They were pale and spotless.
A flash of white fur darted in front of her and rushed toward me.
Elvis.
I grabbed him before he could get away. He hissed at me, clawing and twisting violently until I dropped him. My heart hammered in my chest as he darted across the grass and squeezed under the gate.
I looked back at the stone cross.
The girl was gone, the ground nothing but a smooth, untouched layer of mud.
Blood from the scratches trailed down my arm as I crossed the graveyard, trying to reason away the girl in the white nightgown.
Silently reminding myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts.
Scratching the Surface
When I stumbled back onto the well-lit sidewalk, there was no sign of Elvis. A guy with a backpack slung over his shoulder walked by and gave me a strange look when he noticed I was barefoot, and covered in mud up to my ankles. He probably thought I was a pledge.
My hands didn’t stop shaking until I hit O Street, where the shadows of the campus ended and the lights of the DC traffic began. Tonight, even the tourists posing for pictures at the top of The Exorcist stairs were somehow reassuring.
The cemetery suddenly felt miles away, and I started second-guessing myself.
The girl in the graveyard hadn’t been hazy or transparent like the ghosts in movies. She had looked like a regular girl.
Except she was floating.
Wasn’t she?
Maybe the moonlight had only made it appear that way. And maybe the girl’s feet weren’t muddy because the ground where she’d been standing was dry. By the time I reached my block, lined with row houses crushed together like sardines, I convinced myself there were dozens of explanations.
Elvis lounged on our front steps, looking docile and bored. I considered leaving him outside to teach him a lesson, but I loved that stupid cat.
I still remembered the day my mom bought him for me. I came home from school crying because we’d made Father’s Day gifts in class, and I was the only kid without a father. Mine had walked away when I was five and never looked back. My mom had wiped my tears and said, “I bet you’re also the only kid in your class getting a kitten today.”
Elvis had turned one of my worst days into one of my best.
I opened the door, and he darted inside. “You’re lucky I let you in.”
The house smelled like tomatoes and garlic, and my mom’s voice drifted into the hallway. “I’ve got plans this weekend. Next weekend, too. I’m sorry, but I have to run. I think my daughter just came home. Kennedy?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Were you at Elle’s? I was about to call you.”
I stepped into the doorway as she hung up the phone. “Not exactly.”
She threw me a quick glance, and the wooden spoon slipped out of her hand and hit the floor, sending a spray of red sauce across the white tile. “What happened?”
“I’m fine. Elvis ran off, and it took forever to catch him.”
Mom rushed over and examined the angry claw marks. “Elvis did this? He’s never scratched anyone before.”
“I guess he freaked out when I grabbed him.”
Her gaze dropped to my mud-caked feet. “Where were you?”
I prepared for the standard lecture Mom issued whenever I went out at night: always carry your cell phone, don’t walk alone, stay in well-lit areas, and her personal favorite—scream first and ask questions later. Tonight, I had violated them all.
“The old Jesuit cemetery?” My answer sounded more like a question—as in, exactly how upset was she going to be?
Mom stiffened and she drew in a sharp breath. “I’d never go into a graveyard at night,” she responded automatically, as though it was something she’d said a thousand times before. Except it wasn’t.
“Suddenly you’re superstitious?”
She shook her head and looked away. “Of course not. You don’t have to be superstitious to know that secluded places are dangerous at night.”
I waited for the lecture.
Instead, she handed me a wet towel. “Wipe off your feet and throw that away. I don’t want dirt from a cemetery in my washing machine.”
Mom rummaged through the junk drawer until she found a giant Band-Aid that looked like a leftover from my Big Wheel days.
“Who were you talking to on the phone?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Just someone from work.”
“Did that someone ask you out?”
She frowned, concentrating on my arm. “I’m not interested in dating. One broken heart is enough for me.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant.” My mom had cried herself to sleep for what felt like months after my dad left. I still heard her sometimes.
After she bandaged my arm, I sat on the counter while she finished the marinara sauce. Watching her cook was comforting. It made the cemetery feel even farther away.
She dipped her finger in the pot and tasted the sauce before taking the pan off the stove.
“Mom, you forgot th
e red pepper flakes.”
“Right.” She shook her head and forced a laugh.
My mom could’ve held her own with Julia Child, and marinara was her signature dish. She was more likely to forget her own name than the secret ingredient. I almost called her on it, but I felt guilty. Maybe she was imagining me in one of those unsolved crime shows.
I hopped down from the counter. “I’m going upstairs to draw.”