Hidebehind

Thirty-Six

"Penny!" I raced into our room, shook her, woke her with my freezing cold hands. "Get up!"

My sister was always too nice. Rather than gripe at me for waking her, she smiled. "What are you so excited about?"

"Jay! You know him, right? You know Jay, my friend?"

She rubbed an eye and sat up a little more. "Course I do. Why? Did something happen to him? Is he okay?"

My excitement drained like air from a leaking balloon. I suddenly didn't know what to tell her. She knew a lot less than I did about everything with Grandpa . . . did I really want to lay all that stuff on my sister? Especially when I hadn't made much sense of it myself? Monsters, disappearing kids, weird messages, and now . . . this? It was taking me all my wits to keep myself from losing it, so did I really want to burden my eight-year-old sister with my own crazy ideas?

"Get dressed for church and come get some breakfast!" Great Grandma bellowed from the kitchen.

Church? No! I groaned. Church was the last thing I needed right now.

"He's okay, right?" Penny looked genuinely worried, and I remembered what she'd asked me.

"Oh, uh, yeah. Jay's fine. Sorry. I . . . ugh, I don't want to go to church!"

"I love church."

I started pacing the room anxiously. "Of course you do. Perfect child. Always have been."

Who knew why I said it? Thankfully, my sister ignored my rudeness and went to the bathroom. How could I go to church with all this in my brain?

Then I remembered that pretty much everybody who was churchgoing went to the same church, here. The Francises went there. I'd see Alex.

A knot formed in my stomach. He was the only person I could tell, now. The only person I knew.

Oh, it was torture itself to sit through church and then some Christmas singing practice. I was a mess the whole time, not sure what was even happening around me for all the chaos going on inside of me. I just wanted to talk to Alex, but he seemed to keep his distance from me, and Maisie wasn't even there. But the minute that it all ended, I practically rushed him and blabbered something about needing to talk to him. Something about him coming over. He was having none of it, seemed to just want to get away from me, and I was totally at the point of entirely embarrassing myself when, out of the blue, his mother descended like an angel and asked whether I would enjoy going to their house for lunch.

Great Grandma was pleased as a fat cat when I asked her permission. No doubt she thought I was turning around or something. But before I knew it I was heading home with the Francis family in their car, me and Alex in back, his parents up front. And though the familiarity of such a situation crept a little painfully into my heart, I pushed it aside to whisper an apology as well as an urgent message to Alex.

"I promise I can explain everything."

He responded only with, "Maisie doesn't feel well. Neither do I. So we'll make it short."

There wasn't really a way to say more in front of his parents, so I had to keep it all bottled up a little longer until we reached their house, and though the drive was pretty short, it gave me the chance to think about how I could say what I needed to say.

The Francis house was normal. Normal in a way unlike Great Grandma's house. Normal like my old house had been. It was two floors, a front yard, and a back yard of normalcy, in a row with other houses that looked a lot like it, in a neighborhood where probably most of the kids from school lived. There was a big barking dog out back, the kind that you weren't afraid to pet, and the yard had sleeping flowerbeds, a tree swing, a couple of soccer goals, and some old sporting equipment lying around. The house itself was decorated the way a mother would decorate—cozy and livable; the place wasn't a museum of strange glass or the only refuge on a dusty piece of property where the only things keeping within walking distance were a shack-of-a-henhouse, some barns, and a ginormous rusting silo. I bet there weren't any snakes around, either. But most of all . . . most of all . . . there weren't any woods within immediate sight. Behind the Francis house was someone else's backyard, and to its sides and front were more houses. Why couldn't Great Grandma and Grandpa have lived here? Where it was normal? Where I could picture my own parents?

"Come on. Let's go downstairs," Alex ordered as his parents wandered into other parts of the house.

I followed him into a basement den, where some big leather couches made perfect seats for movie watching or video gaming—and there was Maisie, sitting in some sweats, playing some game I didn't quite recognize.

She was surprised to see me and sat up kind of awkwardly, pausing her game. She put together some kind of greeting and then looked questioningly at her brother.

"Mom invited him over," was all he said.

The two looked at me. "You don't seem sick," I said stupidly to Maisie, not really sure what else to say in that moment.

She bit her cheek. "Yeah, well, after yesterday, neither of us really slept too well."

I swallowed the lump that was forming in my throat. "I'm sorry," was what came out. "I don't know what else to say except that I'm sorry. I didn't mean for you guys to get freaked out like that. I don't know what happened any more than you do."

"Sit down," Maisie said, and so I did, though not next to her . . . I was unable to do that. She shifted position. "There really was something out there, wasn't there?"

I shrugged. "I guess. It's what happened to me when I was alone that night they left me. I can't explain it any more than you can; I just know something was after me, but I couldn't see it. At least . . . at least now I know it's not my imagination."

"Is that why you wanted to come here?" Alex asked, and his expression was flat so that I couldn't tell how he felt.

"No," I was loath to admit. "Not exactly. But I do think all of this stuff that's happening is tied together, and I was hoping you could help me figure it out."

"Can't your friend help you?" Alex asked sarcastically.

"Who?"

"Jay?"

I let out a big breath. "No. See . . . that's why I'm here. Jay . . . he isn't real, but not like you think. He's . . . he's a ghost."