Notes from Ghost Town by Kate Ellison Read Free Book Online Page A

something, you do it. No questions asked.
    “My what?”
    “Um. I—I was thinking of something else, sorry …” he answers, his cheeks darkening. Blushing, obviously—it’s good to know I can still tell.
    “Enjoy the rest of your visit today, here at beautiful Dovedale Park.” I paste a big fake smile on my face.
    They’re still looking at me with a mixture of fascination and fear, like I might suddenly lunge for their throats. “See you around,” the other dude—tall, slouchy, acne-ed—says, and then they turn and hurry away.
    The good thing about Michigan was that most people didn’t know about Mom. I told my closer friends—Ty, Ruby, Amanda—but only the bare minimum. I had to admit why I missed two weeks of school, for the funeral, for the grief that came afterward. And when I went a little crazy back at school—oscillating between sudden crying jags, total numbness, and drunken binges that kept me out of school for days—they treated me with gentle indifference. Lotsof encouragement to eat chocolate and cry in bed watching rom-coms.
    They had their own lives to focus on, assignments I couldn’t be bothered to do, classes I was too deep-dark-down to attend. Ruby made an entire oil painting of me over the course of a week that I knew nothing about. I was mostly sleeping.
    I’d wake up next to boys I’d passed in the halls before whose names I didn’t know. Sometimes, I didn’t remember how they’d come to wind up in my dorm room in the first place, or what we’d done. How far I’d let them go, though I was pretty sure I hadn’t actually gone all the way. Some crazy part of myself was saving it, though who knows why. I knew the only person I wanted to go all the way with was gone forever.
    I just didn’t want to think. There wasn’t room to think. Starting that machine meant it would never turn off again, meant it would spin so fast and loud it would just blow up inside my skull.
    I move back to Raina, steadying myself beside her on the bench. I feel wobbly.
    “Job well done,” she says, patting me on the shoulder. “It’s hard work you do, Olivia Jane Tithe, and there’s no one who does it quite like you.” She leans back on the bench, finishing off her Mountain Dew with an intentionally loud burp. Even her belches are cool. It’s annoying.
    “So, did you have fun last night?” Raina asks. “Did you talk to dickbrain Bryce?” She lifts her head suddenly;her eyes light up, go saucer-wide. “Wait a second … did you hook
up
with someone? Is that why you’re being so weird?”
    I groan, stare at my gray hands in my gray lap. My brain continues to shudder painfully in my skull. “No. Ew. Definitely not. Austin Morse was there, and we were drinking on the beach together, but the cops came…. He ran off. I had to hide by myself…. Whatever. It’s—it doesn’t even matter.”
    “He ran
off
on you?”
    I don’t have the energy to tell Raina that I
told
him to. She leans in toward me, planting both hands on my knees. “Well you be sure to let him know—let
all
those dumb-ass private school boys know—they can’t just mess with you and not suffer the consequences.”
    “It wasn’t a big deal. For real. I basically told him to go. But then, later …” I hesitate. Saying any of this out loud, to another person, will make me officially crazy. Raina will call Dad once she leaves the park today. Dad will call the hospital. I’ll go home to find a small army of orderlies standing just behind my bedroom door with a straight-jacket. They’ll load me into a van, lock me in a padded room in the psych ward. And then they’ll all find out that the world’s gone gray and never let me out. Ever again.
    “Later …?” She prompts, blinking into the sun.
    I inhale deeply, stare at the empty carousel. “Rain, do you believe in ghosts?”
    “Uh … random,” she laughs, swatting at a mosquito onher arm. “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “I don’t know…. I just had