"Looks like we're going to be here for a while, ladies," she says, drawing theatrical groans punctuated with giggling from the cheerleaders, who seem incapable of taking anything seriously for more than a few minutes. I can barely remember ever being that young. "Since the kitchen's closed and the rain's likely to knock out the power any minute now, I'm going to go grab some candles--and the ice cream. No sense letting it all melt."
This earns her a round of applause from the cheerleaders. Everyone likes free ice cream, even girls who probably spend half their lives on diets. Emma winks my way as she walks toward the kitchen. "Rose, you're in charge until I get back," she says, and then she's gone, leaving me with a dozen cheerleaders staring at me like wolves staring at a wounded deer.
This is going to be a long night. I can already tell.
***
The hours tick by like seasons, endlessly long and strange. The cheerleaders fell on the ice cream with terrifying enthusiasm, leaving nothing but smears at the bottom of their bowls and smug smiles on their faces, like they'd somehow managed to get away with something. Emma and I had barely finished clearing away the dishes when lightning illuminated the sky, turning the world brilliantly white for a few seconds before fading away and leaving us in darkness.
"Right on cue," said Emma cheerfully, and struck a match. The tiny flame was a signal flare in the darkness, one that spread from candle to candle as she made her way around the room. "Chuck will get the generator on when he comes back from his errands. Until then, who's up for ghost stories?"
I hate ghost stories. Too many of them are autobiographical. That's why I'm still sitting at the counter, nursing a glass of flat, warm Coke, watching as the circle of stories goes around and around the room. The call comes from inside the house, the hook is left on the door handle, the roommate was dead all along. The beautiful dress in the thrift store came from the funeral home, the husband who stole the golden arm is punished for his sins...the girl in the white prom dress is just looking for someone to drive her home.
She only ever wanted to go home.
I stare off into space, trying not to listen, trying to focus on the rain. Then Emma's voice cuts through my self-imposed haze, saying, "Your turn, Rosie-my-girl. It's time to pay off a few of those milkshakes and tell us a ghost story."
"What?" I snap back into the present, blinking at her. Emma only smiles, cat-green eyes reflecting the dim light the way that human eyes just never do. Bean sidhe bitch. "I don't know any ghost stories."
"Oh, I think you do," she says. "Come on, Rose. Tell us a story."
The cheerleaders pick up the request, cat-calling it across the room like I would be somehow susceptible to peer pressure; like the opinion of a bunch of teenage girls I've never seen before and never will again somehow matters. But the candlelight turns their red and gold uniforms black and yellow, blurs the outlines of their mascot until the Oxville Knights become the Buckley Buccaneers. The tattoo at the small of my back is itching again, making it impossible not to move.
So I move. I slide down from my stool and walk over to the circle of cheerleaders and Emma, taking a seat in the space that opens up for me. The air seems too thick, smells like candlewax and ice cream...feels like summer in Michigan, when the sky presses down like a blanket, and the trees are almost too green to believe in. I take a breath. It rasps against the back of my throat, so I take another one, close my eyes, and begin. "This is a true story, and it happened in the summer of 1945, in a place called Buckley Township, in the state of Michigan. Rose Marshall was sixteen years old that summer..."
***
Rose Marshall was sixteen years old the summer that she died.
It had been an unusually hot year in Buckley Township. The leaves were already starting to brown from the want of water, and while the lawns in the nicer parts of town were still lush and green, the scrubby grass outside the house Rose shared with her parents and brother had long since died, leaving the yard embarrassed by its own nakedness. The skeleton hedges seemed to huddle in, like the house was trying to cover itself against the shame. Rose didn't mind. The less of the house that was visible to the casual onlooker, the happier she'd be; they weren't the only poor folks in Buckley--not by a long shot, not when it seemed that everyone who lived along the Mill Road was just this side of starvation more than half the time--but she didn't have to live in all those other houses. She only had to live in her own.
Rose Marshall was sixteen years old the summer that she died, and she wanted out of her parents' house, out of Buckley, out of her entire life, more than she wanted anything else in the world.