Layla

“Who shot you?”

“Sable. The same girl who shot Layla.” I lift her hand and bring it to the scar on Layla’s head. “Feel that?” Willow touches Layla’s scar with her fingertips, running her fingers back and forth over it. Then she brings her hand back to my shoulder and runs her finger over my scar.

“Yours feels healed. Hers doesn’t.”

“She messes with hers a lot,” I say.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one inside her head. You tell me.”

She stares at me for several seconds, and I think maybe it’s because she’s sifting through Layla’s memories. I want to ask her what Layla remembers, but I don’t want to use Willow to pry into Layla’s mind without her permission. What we’re doing with Layla’s body is wrong enough.

Willow swims back to the ledge and rests against it. She drops her chin to her arms and looks out over the backyard. I swim up next to her and do the same. I watch her, but she doesn’t look at me. I’m not sure what she saw in Layla’s head—or if she even saw anything at all—but her quietness stirs up an uneasiness inside me.

She lays her cheek on her arm and looks at me. “She fell in love with you in this pool.”

“Did she?”

Willow nods, but the nod isn’t accompanied by a smile or a look of fondness while she thinks back on it. She just whispers, “Yes,” and then turns away from me. She lays her opposite cheek on her arm and looks in the other direction. I swim around her, wanting to see the look on her face. When we make eye contact, her eyes are rimmed with tears.

“What’s wrong?”

She laughs, embarrassed, and wipes at her eyes. “It’s just confusing. I have her feelings when I’m inside of her. I guess she’s sad right now.”

“How do you know the tears aren’t yours?”

Willow regards me with a stoic expression. “I guess I don’t.” She slips beneath the water, and when she comes back up, she wipes her burgeoning tears away along with the water.

I feel conflicted.

She’s inside Layla’s body, and if Layla is the one who is sad right now, I want to comfort her. Pull her against me and kiss away her pain.

But she isn’t Layla, so the need to comfort her and the knowledge that I can’t leave me feeling empty. It feels a little like longing, and I don’t like that feeling. This is all starting to become muddled.

“We should go back inside,” I say. “I’ll need to wash and dry her bathing suit before I go to sleep so she doesn’t notice it was used.”

Willow concedes, even though she seems like she isn’t ready to stop swimming yet. She swims to the edge of the pool and lifts herself out of the water. She grabs a towel and wraps herself in it, her back to me. Then she walks back toward the house, never checking to see if I’m following her. I’m still in the middle of the pool, watching as the door closes and she disappears inside.

I sigh heavily and then sink to the bottom of the pool, holding my breath until I can’t hold it anymore.Willow is wearing my T-shirt when I get back to the bedroom, but she’s not wearing the shorts this time. When I close the bedroom door, my eyes linger on her thighs for a moment.

“I put her shorts back in the drawer where I found them,” Willow says. “I don’t want her to question herself by waking up in something she didn’t fall asleep in.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “Where’s the bathing suit?”

She motions toward the bathroom door. “I hung it up on the shower door.”

I walk toward the bathroom, but pause before I go inside. I’m not sure Willow is ready to leave Layla’s body. “You want to watch TV while I shower?”

She nods, so I grab the remote and turn on the bedroom television. I toss the remote to the bed and then go inside the bathroom.

I take a long shower—not because I’m trying to avoid Willow, but because I need time to clear my head. This whole thing feels wrong, but how does one properly interact with a ghost? It’s not like there’s a handbook, or people who could tell me if what I’m doing is morally corrupt.

Who would I ask? A psychiatrist would tell me I’m schizophrenic. A doctor would send me to a psychiatrist. My mother would tell me the stress from all that’s happened is getting to my head, and she’d beg me to move back home.

Layla would probably leave me if she knew what was happening while she slept. Who wouldn’t? If she told me she was allowing some spirit from a different realm to inhabit my body to fulfill some gaping hole in her life, I’d have her committed and then I’d run in the opposite direction.