"Rose! Are you still lolling about in there?"
"I'll be out in a minute, Ma!" she shouted, dropping her hairbrush onto the dresser. It wasn't making a bit of difference one way or the other. All that lemon juice she'd used to lighten up her normally brown hair had left it brittle and dry, like straw that was somehow being forced into a parody of a wave. If they'd been better-off--if they'd been like all those other girls at school, the ones with new shoes every September and bag lunches every day--she could have bought real peroxide, and done her hair up proper without as much damage. But done was done, and wishing wouldn't make her hair lie smooth and pretty, no matter how much she wanted it to. Only reason she'd been able to afford the lemon juice was all that babysitting she did for the Healys, and if that wasn't enough to qualify her for a little hazard pay, nothing was. The Healys had money, but their house was coming down around their ears, and the walls were full of vermin.
Rose grabbed a ribbon off the top of the mirror and tied her hair quickly back into a half-ponytail, hiding the bulk of the damage while leaving the carefully-acquired gold as visible as possible. She was an expert at tying bows to hide tattered edges, just like she'd learned how to scrub out stains before they could set and mend clothes from the church cast-off boxes, darning and patching until they were just about as good as new. That didn't make wearing them to school any easier--not with girls who'd laugh behind their hands when they saw her wearing a sweater they'd donated to charity two seasons back, not when they saw her with her patched hems and her scuffed-up too-big shoes--but it made pretending pride a little less hard.
"Rose!"
"I'm coming, Ma!" she shouted, and jumped to her feet, running to the door. Her backpack was on the floor just outside, empty except for schoolbooks and notebooks filled with her semi-intelligible scrawl; she slung it over one shoulder, where it hung like a half-deflated balloon as she made her way down the hall to the living room. Her mother was still wearing her bathrobe, sitting at the scuffed old kitchen table her brothers dragged home one night (and she'd never been able to bring herself to ask where they'd found it; there was too much chance they'd tell her if she did) with a cup of coffee steaming in front of her. Her eyes swept along Rose's body from head to toe in a matter of seconds, assessing, calculating, measuring everything she saw against some secret scale where her only daughter was always found wanting, and always would be.
"You're late," she said. "That boy won't be waiting for you if you don't haul ass out to the curb."
"His name's Gary, Ma. He'll be waiting."
"If you say so," she replied, and picked up her coffee. "Don't you dawdle after school today. You've got chores to do, and I want to see you before I head for work."
"All right, Ma," said Rose, and walked--decorously, always decorously; better a little lost time than another lecture on how boys viewed girls who reached high school without learning to be ladylike--to the front door. Her mother didn't say goodbye. Neither did she.
Ruth Marshall waited at the table for the sound of the horn honking twice at the front of the house. Then she stood, faster than her daughter would have given her credit for, and crossed to the kitchen window, where she watched Rose get into the passenger seat of Gary Daniels's car. She didn't hate her only daughter, no matter what Rose would have said if asked; she just knew what it was to be sixteen and poor and have the boys looking at you with those falsely sweet eyes, the ones that said "I would never leave you." They could get you to do anything, when you were sixteen years old, and they looked at you with those eyes. And in the end, they always lied.
Ruth didn't know it, but she didn't need to worry about Rose and Gary going farther than a good girl would go; didn't need to worry about them doing much of anything she wouldn't approve of. There wasn't enough time for that. She watched the car pull away from the curb and turned from the window, walking slowly back to the kitchen table.
It was the summer of 1945, and Rose Marshall had less than three days left to live.
***
The cheerleaders shift and squirm on the vinyl seats of the diner, some frowning, some yawning, others just looking bored. One flips her hair and asks, "So, like, what the hell is this? Some Hallmark special about the Great Depression?"
I don't have the patience for a history lesson right now, and none of these girls would be likely to care if I tried. I narrow my eyes instead, and say, "This is the only ghost story I know. Do you want to hear it or not?"
I'm not lying, I'm not, because this is my story, my ghost story, and it contains every other story I've ever come across. There isn't room for another ghost story in my world. Not until the first one is finished, and it won't be over until Bobby Cross is in his grave, and the ghostroads are free of him forever.