"Girls" by Fiona Stewart, 2020 JBWC Youth Fellow

GIRLS

A SHORT STORY BY FIONA STEWART

I wrote a short story about a girl and a ghost to explore different themes of pressure and silence. In the beginning, I imagined Alexandra more as a physical ghost—several early outlines had Jesse guiding her towards the afterlife, but it felt flat, and the characters didn’t respond. I decided to try magical realism and blur the lines between real and supernatural, so I ended up flipping the story and having Alexandra attempting to guide Jesse through her (Jesse’s!) life.

During the fellowship, I learned how to present my work and process feedback in order to revise my ideas. For me, it was very helpful to ask people to read my story and respond with their takeaways in order to understand where my vision translated into my work and where it did not, and also to embrace the things I had not previously anticipated. Thank you so much for reading my story, I hope you enjoy.

- FIONA STEWART 2020 JBWC YOUTH FELLOW

COVER ART BY ANGEL BARBER 2

GIRLS Jesse Kim was having a terrible day. Firstly, the weather wasn’t in her favor: she’d stupidly believed the promised forecast of “chilly with light showers” and dressed accordingly, only to be simultaneously frozen and drenched by a classic late-March blizzard-like torrent of sleet, hail, and occasional slaps of snow. Then, she’d lost her favorite pencil, bombed a chemistry quiz, been broken up with again (by text, no less) by her kindof-ex-girlfriend, and now, she didn’t even have the pleasure of throwing herself on her unmade bed and bawling her eyes out because there was a woman she’d never seen before standing next to the headboard.

The woman pursed her lips and tucked a stray lock of black hair behind her ears, the movement sending a faint wave of a perfume she knew wafting towards Jesse. There was something familiar in the gesture, Jesse knew. I should know you, she thought, but didn’t dwell on the topic; her mind started playing Leah’s texts back: I just need some space. We can be friends again, later, maybe, never. Okay?

She didn’t realize the woman had been speaking until she repeated herself. “Do they talk about me?”

“I don’t know who you are,” Jesse found herself replying.

“You wouldn’t remember,” the woman agreed, and Jesse scowled. In the ensuing silence, she studied the woman again, noting a mole high on her forehead, a sprinkling of freckles, the same nose as her aunt, the amused eyes of her grandfather. Family, Jesse thought.

“And you need to tell them,” the woman replied, placid, as if she’d just requested for Jesse to pass her the salt. The woman twirled a lock of hair around her fingers and stared at the space above Jesse’s head.

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FIONA STEWART “Your girlfriend broke it off again.” She paused. “Well, asked for space.

Same thing, isn’t it?”

Jesse stared at her in shock, at the someone who looked like her and sounded like anything but. Her parents skirted anniversaries and engagements and breakups and weddings; from her aunt’s Facebook, Jesse knew that the family planned birthdays, New Year’s, and the occasional video call to her grandmother’s sister in Germany. Their small talk was strictly about the weather.

The woman held out her palm, as if to shake in an agreement Jesse didn’t understand, but the woman's solid-looking yet intangible hand passed through Jesse’s hoodie-encased arm. The woman retracted her hand quickly, and Jesse leaped backwards, heart thudding.

She offered a smooth apology, no explanation. Jesse didn’t reply.

A thoughtful frown filled the woman’s face. “You should go downstairs,” she mused. “Your father’s waiting.”

Before she could disagree, Jesse found herself seated on the couch wedged in between her father and stepfather, Dave, included in a conversation about her grandfather’s upcoming birthday that she didn’t remember starting.

“—so just pick the best photos, okay?” her dad was saying, and Dave was nodding.

“What?” Jesse asked, and almost tuned out the explanation. Jesse’s dad had been tasked with creating a slideshow of the family. He’d put it off—“Research project,” he explained—and needed to find photos as fast as possible. The birthday party would be the first family reunion he, Jesse, and Dave would attend together on any side since 2008. From her father’s file cabinet, Jesse learned that 2008 was the year that her dad agreed to testify against his brother in court, and from an album of ripped photos she surmised that Dave and his family had a falling out.

She knew her grandparents—Dave’s parents and her dad’s parents—in brief phone calls, birthday cards, residents on the other side of the hotel in a few family vacations.

Dave ruffled her hair. “You agreed to this too,” he teased, but Jesse knew that if she glanced at him he wouldn’t be smiling. “Don’t try to back out of this.” He snagged a perfectly ripened mandarin off the living room table and tossed it in Jesse’s lap. “Fuel.”

The mandarin orange was a completely arbitrary and consequentially necessary ongoing joke in her family she took pains to maintain, because if she asked for the story when her parents were in the right mood they’d mention her mother, and it made passing an orange together feel silly, intimate; like they had keys to a world only

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GIRLS they understood where nothing else had to matter. The story didn’t make much sense to anyone else, but it ran like this: Jesse’s dad and her mom were Korean-American, but Jesse’s dad was the kind of Korean-American who’d grown up the great-grandson of long-dead immigrants and never seen an Asian outside of his family until he moved to a large, coastal city; Jesse’s mom was the kind of Korean-American whose parents arrived in 1970, who ate oranges for dessert, who attended schools where the only non-Koreans among her peers were Chinese. This difference in upbringing came to a head on their first disastrous dinner date at a Korean BBQ. Her dad, thinking the bulgogi was steak tartare, swallowed two strips raw; their conversation fizzled. After the table was bussed, a server placed a dish of sliced oranges on the table.

Feeling like he’d ruined the evening, Jesse’s dad attempted one last time to connect with the woman who’d watched him eat raw beef.

“You want to go get some dessert?” he finally asked.

She gestured at the oranges. “It’s already here.” They then looked at each other, equally confused and unsure, until the mutual awkwardness caved into helpless laughter.

Shortly after her mother and her father had split, Dave met her dad in the produce section of a grocery store. Her dad was in a stained shirt, trying to comfort a squalling toddler with fruit: Jesse loved their sunny colors and usually would soothe at the grocery store’s mountain of citrus. He selected mandarins, tangerines, navel, satsumas, blood oranges, even Sevilles. Dave, by means of introduction, commented on the assortment fruit.

Her dad smiled for the first time since the split. “It’s a Korean thing,” her dad replied, with a hint of joking. “I have a lot of catching up to do.”

Dave, Korean-American himself, was both intrigued and mystified.

His parents—a lawyer from Korea and neurosurgeon from Puerto Rico, respectively—had always kept the fruit in their drawer well-stocked, but he’d never considered it a chiefly Korean thing. To him, it was just one of his constants, like having shoes off in the house, that he never thought to examine.

So, in the grocery store, when Jesse’s dad cracked that joke, Dave frowned. That’s a thing? he wondered, and decided to ask the tired dad more.

Jesse’s chubby and ineffective arms flailed for the closest orange on the display; when her attempts failed, she wailed even louder, preventing any further conversation. Harried, Jesse’s dad fumbled for the orange, but he knocked it off the display and into Dave’s chest, where it bounced off and landed wetly in Jesse’s cart seat. Delighted at

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FIONA STEWART the unexpected turn of events, Jesse reverently patted the battered citrus, and Dave and her father began to talk as if they weren’t strangers united by a toddler sated by an orange but as friends with a long, comfortable history.

They were friends first, for over eight years, and when Jesse was fifteen Dave and her dad married in satsuma-orange-colored suits.

Jesse ate a wedge of mandarin and she rifled aimlessly through family shots from the 1970s and vacation pictures from the 1980s, tossing photos randomly into the “digitize” box. After a particular stack of terribly angled snapshots from the 90s, Jesse came across a professional portrait of her family. Positioned neatly on a marbled blue backdrop, her father and her mother were smiling stiffly—the way she’d only ever known—at the camera.

A toddler that must’ve been herself was crammed into a pale green dress and black stockings, slung awkwardly against her mother’s chest.

Her father had an arm around her mother and another resting on thin air, poised as if touching a shoulder. Curious, Jesse held up the photo to the light, where, for a moment, the empty space became filled by a tall teenager, a girl, wearing a white blouse tucked into high-waisted, navy blue pants, with an impossibly familiar face. With her aunt’s nose and grandfather's eyes.

Chattering about the grief he planned to give Aunt Minji over her college-days perm, her dad plucked the photo she was studying out of her hands.“What’s the photo you have here?” he asked. The laugh slipped off his face, replaced by a frown.

She began to ask, “Da—?” but she got nothing out, because he dropped the photo on the table, and commanded, in a fierce whisper, four confusing words: “Don’t. Talk. About. Alexandra.”

“Dad…?” Jesse asked again, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he kissed her on the forehead and marched off, back stiff, radiating an anger she never thought him capable to hold.

It was too much for her: the sort-of-breakup, the woman on her bed, and now her dad breaking the only constant he’d ever had. (Besides the oranges.) The dad Jesse knew didn’t believe in setting anything in stone; a psychology professor, he firmly believed in the indirect. “Context clues,” he was fond of telling Jesse. “Use context clues.” She’d never had a bedtime, her dad told her to listen to her body and sleep when she was tired. “If I want to teach you something, I’ll give you a lesson,” her dad liked to say, but then he’d always remind Jesse to follow rules, anyways.

“Not everyone thinks like us,” he’d add, with a wink. Sometimes she

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GIRLS wondered if it was an excuse—he sent her Post-Its for reminders, greetings, I love yous.

Holding up the photo to the light, Jesse saw the girl wink into existence again. Alexandra? She heard her father’s voice in her head: Don’t talk about Alexandra. Use context clues.

Her favorite context clue was Google, and she hopped onto her aunt’s Facebook, scrolling through reunions and promotions and family vacations and listicle links and the occasional ghost story. She created a new tab and searched for an Alexandra Kim and its variants—Alexa Kim, Lexie Kim, Alexandra Kim-Park, Ana Park, Ana Kim—in all the places she knew where her father and mother had lived. She plundered through her uncle’s Facebook, then a cousin’s, a college friend of her mother’s, and finally ended back up on her aunt’s wall: no one else in her family used social media. They resided on the Internet as ghosts. Her father’s footprint was his many psychology studies; Dave had a headshot and a bio on his firm’s website, and her grandparents’ names appeared in the obituary of her great-grandparents.

Jesse, admitting defeat, clicked on her aunt’s best friend’s profile as a matter of casual interest and the clues she’d been searching for hit her right in the face: A photo of a family vacation with her father and mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in disconcertingly pink T-shirts emblazoned with KIM FAMILY 2001 positioned against the bland wall of a hotel, or perhaps a convention center. And in the center of it all, a familiar woman: a teenager who shared Jesse’s dark hair, curving eyebrows, open-mouthed smile. Alexandra.

Jesse moved only when her computer threatened to sleep. She downloaded the photo and opened it on full screen, squinting through the pixels, analyzing everything she thought she could understand.

When she shut off her computer, at 3:46:21 AM, to a pitch-black room, the ghosts of her relatives’ smiles seemed to linger in the air. Unnaturally bright, relaxed, happy; paired with their faces flushed with wine, or maybe laughter, a relic of a family Jesse would never get to know.

Jesse went to sleep at four in the morning and woke up two and a half hours later, feeling achy and energized and unsure of her senses. Her maybe-officially-ex-girlfriend Leah acted as if Jesse didn’t exist, or maybe Jesse was too tired to focus. She didn’t say “Hello” in homeroom, sit next to her in math, or even look at her during lunch; but maybe it was because Jesse was doodling in a notebook all day, the same

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FIONA STEWART drawing, over and over, of a hand resting on thin air.

Leah didn’t meet Jesse by the lockers after school, or even say “goodbye.”

Jesse did her best to take it stoically. Maybe this is what space looks like, she thought. We’ll be friends again, eventually. She couldn’t help but feel surprised; she knew that her relationship wouldn’t last forever, but thought it would last until prom, at least, or summer vacations. They didn’t have many disagreements: when they were girlfriends, silence was the only thing Leah and Jesse fought about. Their friends joked that Jesse was half-ghost herself, but Leah didn’t find it as funny. “You never tell me anything,” Leah would complain, and then quieted when Jesse didn’t reply.

In the way of freshly unwanted breakups, she tried to place all the things that bothered her about Leah out of her mind. Like this.

Jesse tried to comfort herself: We’ll be friends, again, eventually. She repeated it to herself throughout the rest of the school and on the way home, shut out to the world around her. Eventually. She let herself into the house and stomped up to her room, ready to throw herself on the bed and listen to the saddest music she had. She was so shut out that she didn’t notice the woman on her bed until the woman said, “You need to tell them.”

It was the same woman as the day before: in white blouse tucked into dark blue pants, comfortably slumped on Jesse’s bed as if she already knew the best way to lounge on her pillows. She wasn’t smiling, instead, she wore an expression of concentration--the same expression, Jesse realized, as the girl in the family portrait. Alexandra. The ghost.

“I thought your father told you not to talk about me,” the woman said, and Jesse started; she hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud.

“My father doesn’t make rules.”

“That’s not a rule, it’s a given,” Alexandra replied. “Families hide their ghosts.” She sighed and twiddled with her fingers, tapping her right thumb on her left knuckles in the same manner Jesse used to help herself focus, the same quirk Leah used to gently tease. Alexandra sounded forceful, but desperate. “I’m wasting time. You need to tell them.”

What happened to you? Jesse wanted to ask, but what came out of her mouth was, “Tell who what?”

“Your parents. About your ex.”

Jesse laughed, equally shocked and incredulous. “As if.”

“You have to!” The urgency of Alexandra’s voice cut through Jesse’s attempt at nonchalance, and she couldn’t make her next words land lightly. She tapped her thumb on her knuckles and bit the inside of her

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GIRLS cheek. Leah used to cajole Jesse into opening up. They’d cuddle and she’d poke Jesse with questions about the weather and her daydreams and their schoolwork and her visions, an arm encircling Jesse’s waist, a hand playing with her hair, her heart’s pulse blending into Jesse’s breath.

“Why?” Jesse asked, and her voice cracked. Leah always smelled like sage. Jesse missed it. But she’d smell it again, one day, when she and Leah were friends again, one day, and they’d hug each other hello again, one day.

“You don’t want to be like me,” Alexandra told Jesse’s pillow. She tried to pick it up, place it in her lap perhaps, but her fingers fell through the fabric and she sighed heavily, and her face started to crumple: eyebrows wobbling, eyes glistening, mouth twisting.

Jesse swallowed. “Maybe I’m not ready to talk about it,” she found herself admitting, in a pathetic attempt to placate her sister.

Alexandra pondered her statement for a moment, allowing a slow smile to creep over her face. “Fine,” she conceded. “But then let me talk to you.”

Jesse’s family did and didn’t talk about ghosts. Her aunt dropped twinewrapped packages of salt into her lunch; her dad teased her about walking home after dark. Her dad said that ghosts exclusively dressed in long white sheets; her aunt would glare at him and inform Jesse that ghosts looked almost like they had in life, except they were smudged around the edges, blurring like memories, and they were only safe to come out at dark, where they could blend in with any sort of trick of the light. Her aunt asserted that they traded your soul for theirs, that they were hungry, that they haunted you until you were one of them. Her dad’s were kinder: ghosts were lost, he said, or they helped someone in a way they wish they had been helped.

Jesse supposed that Alexandra was one of the ghosts from her dad’s story: a helper, although she couldn’t imagine what Alexandra wished for help with. She’d never heard about an Alexandra, ever, not even at family reunions after too much wine and the assumption that the children were sleeping in another room.

But her family didn’t talk about why her uncle never came to events; once, she’d overheard her aunt comforting her grandfather when he’d failed to show up for their jesa. Her family didn’t talk about her mother, either, unless it was about the oranges. When her father grabbed the photo and revealed a family she never knew, Jesse resigned herself to

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FIONA STEWART supposing that Alexandra was just one more thing to not talk about, discuss, remember.

So Jesse tried to not remember. She placed the family portrait in a desk drawer next to the husk of a rose Leah had given her after their second date. She blocked Leah’s number and replied to the Post-Its from her parents with a check or an “x”.

She felt groundless: before, she could always rely on her favorite labels. She was Jesse Kim, daughter of two fathers, of a family that had no feuds and no secrets. Jesse Kim, girlfriend to Leah Wells, second clarinet in marching band.

And then Leah had broken up with her via text during history class while Jesse was secretly using her phone instead of reading quietly after a test, and she had to pretend to be allergic to her pencil shavings so she could go to the bathroom and cry. And then Alexandra parted her lips and blew everything else apart. Alexandra knew why Uncle Thomas stopped drinking. She knew why Aunt Minji chose to stop going by “Lily” and why Dave never introduced himself to Jesse as “Dad”. She knew why their mother’s parents didn’t call on Jesse’s birthday (although Jesse knew this one too: it was because they were dead. She’d had to Google it). She knew why Uncle Mark had been arrested.

Alexandra left around midnight that night, but she returned every evening. She followed Jesse on late-night walks and relatives that she’d only known on Facebook or in passing stretched and bent and clawed into life before her eyes. The hatched-at-midnight plots and violent fights and petty rifts hit Jesse like a gust of cold wind: slamming her eyes shut and forcing them open again, giving her a reason to shiver, look around, and keep moving for a better place. She didn’t give Jesse breaks: she haunted her at friends’ houses, at restaurants, even at her grandfather’s anniversary party. The stories made Jesse shiver and cry and bite her lip to keep from stomping downstairs and demanding why her parents had painted the Kim clan as placid people from Hawaii and once, if histories were to be believed, up near Manchuria; and Dave’s line as restless wanderers who were too busy backpacking and travel blogging to remember birthdays and anniversaries and phone numbers.

They kept her brain buzzing, legs pumping.

Alexandra followed Jesse to class, and lectured on the Great AlmostDivorce of Halmoni and Haraboji while Jesse’s chemistry teacher reviewed isotopes and her pre calculus teacher droned on limits. When Jesse picked at her lunch, Alexandra pointed out the cousins and siblings and children of the people that she knew, as friends of the family, acquaintances, the guy who knew a guy who always offered

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GIRLS middling-quality edibles for free. In gym, Jesse lounged on the bleachers and tuned out her classmates bouncing basketballs, the gym teacher’s whistle, even Leah’s victory whoop when her team scored a point.

Alexandra was chattering about an early fight between Dave and her dad; Jesse drank in every word, but when the bell rang for math class she couldn’t lift herself up. A classmate rushed over and breathlessly asked, Are you okay are you okay? and lifted Jesse to her feet, but she barely noticed: when Alexandra talked, the rest of the world would begin to blur, starting at the corners of her eyes and worming through the rest of her head.

People began skirting Jesse in the halls. They’d walk through Alexandra by mistake, shiver, and throw Jesse a disgusted look, but by the end of May her classmates would give Jesse and Alexandra a wide berth without looking at either of them at all.

June blew in and before Jesse could blink her senior friends had graduated, her junior friends were scrambling for out-of-state internships, and her sophomore friends were at summer jobs. If they were her friends anymore. She’d learned this through Instagram: she didn’t talk to her friends when she and Leah broke up, afraid her voice would crack and reveal that the breakup wasn’t mutual. Alexandra didn’t leave spaces in the conversation, and her parents stuck Post-It notes to her door to inform her of events, plans, the odd news article.

One day Jesse flipped on the speaker during her shower, listening to her favorite song as she scrubbed her hair with orange-scented soap. As she toweled off, she tried to hum along, but every note scraped along her throat like rusty hinges being forced to bend for the first time in years.

She couldn’t recall the last time she’d said a single word out loud. On the day of her history exam, no one handed her a test, and when she checked her grades she didn’t find anything incomplete.

On June 22nd, Alexandra started asking Jesse questions about her first date. Why they’d broken up. So she told Alexandra about their four months of friendship, two months of flirting, and year plus six days of dating. How they banded together as the school’s only Asians— especially since their peers assumed Jesse was Chinese and Leah was Latina when Jesse was Korean and Leah was an adopted half-white, half-Korean girl born in Seoul and from Miami—as well as the lone lesbians. “It’s us or the world,” Leah liked to say, and Jesse liked to kiss her in response.

Alexandra asked a follow up, something about how Leah made her feel, and Jesse couldn’t make her response sound human. “Happy,” she said, flatly, because she couldn’t remember the real word. It was

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FIONA STEWART something heavy, energetic, euphoric; she repeated “happy” over and over but still could not turn out the real phrase from the recesses of her mind.

Alexandra launched into the full story of her mom and dad, starting with the date at the barbecue and continuing through an engagement that lasted for close to twenty years, and Jesse realized she hadn’t answered Alexandra’s questions aloud. As the ups and downs of a set of parents she never knew washed through Jesse, she didn’t feel the usual invigorating kick. This time, the petty rifts and the violent (not physically) fights didn’t motivate her to live her life and spite her family.

Alexandra’s perfume felt thicker than normal, even though Jesse didn’t recognize the scent. Was it cinnamon? Sugar? Spice?

Jesse was still thinking of the word. Happy. Happy. Happy. Ten-yearold Alexandra and her mom moved to Vancouver for three months, away from her dad. Happy. Happy. What was the word? Alexandra sat on Jesse’s chair, which emitted a squeak.

Jesse’s phone buzzed, in a tiptaptip, a special vibration that could only belong to one person. She and Leah had picked each other’s ringtones and text tones and vibrations and social media pictures and outfits and lunches. Leah. Happy. Leah.

Alive. That was the word. Leah made her feel alive.

Jesse’s heart beat once and then twice. Alexandra cut off mid sentence with a gasp of pain. “What are you doing?” she groaned, bending over. “Stop!” Alexandra flickered, and the shirt Jesse had loaned her started to seep into her shoulders.

Jesse’s heart flopped again. Stopped. Picked up a rhythm, an awkward waltz, then slowly progressed into a march, a steady beat, baboom, ba-boom.

Blood rushed into her head and filled her with emotions she’d forgotten existed: pity, frustration, relief, hate, anger.

“What are you doing?” Jesse screamed, pleased to note that her vocal cords hummed and purred like a carefully curated machine, like they hadn’t been left to rot.

“I didn’t ask for—” Jesse paused, uncertain of what to call her suspension in between her world and Alexandras, but only for a moment “—this,” she roared. “I thought you wanted to help me,” she murmured, and her voice cracked on me.

“I did,” Alexandra replied, defensive and petulant. “I tried!”

Jesse’s heart thumped loudly. “Go haunt someone else!” she screamed. “Go home or get lost!”

The shirt fell through Alexandra, who stumbled backwards with a confused and not-quite-yet wounded expression that Jesse knew too

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GIRLS well. It was the expression she’d worn during her first year of middle school in Western Massachusetts—three thousand miles and many more cultures away from her primary school in San Francisco where half her class had two moms or two dads or two moms and a dad or one dad— when her new best friend Marcus asked her how she could claim to have a family since she had no mom.

It was the disappointed expression of Oh, you too? Of the realization that someone can understand you and still do exactly what you wish they would know not to.

Alexandra grimaced again and disappeared.

Alexandra didn’t appear the next day, or the day after that; by the end of the week, Jesse stopped looking for the flash of a white blouse. Her father rarely appeared; he claimed to be busy: he’d started a new research project with a colleague, Dr. Stenk, that was eating up his time.

Most days, she didn’t hear him come home until after midnight. She wondered what type of busy he meant: the one where work piled up each time he filled a task, or the one where his thoughts were too loud to process anything else. Dave seemed occupied, too: from the Post-It notes to her father, Jesse learned that there’d been an influx of clients and he was working far too many cases.

Her parents away, they stopped appearing to her, and she began to wonder if she stopped appearing to them. Sometimes her parents left her a note with a $20 bill. Dinner, it said, and there’d be a takeout menu as a suggestion. Jesse would order pad Thai--her favorite--and eat in front of the TV, ignoring her friends’ texts, hoping they’d talk to her anyways. Leah stopped texting her: she was dating someone else, someone who preferred not to contact exes.

Jesse liked being in group chats she didn’t have to answer, able to read the messages like they were pieces of someone else’s story, but after she and Leah broke up their mutual friend group drifted apart. She set Leah’s number to a special ringtone so it would always go off, no matter the hour, but her phone was silent and Leah never sent her anything anymore, texts or links or jokes or photos. She didn’t talk to her friends about the breakup because she didn’t know what to say. There was no one to blame, really, no one to side with. Leah and her had decided to make it a good breakup. No third parties. No crying. Just space, and then friendship. Talking about it, she figured, would make things awkward. So she’d set her phone down and continue eating her noodles in silence.

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FIONA STEWART She stared at the calendar and let July melt into August. She forgot to breathe a breath once, then twice, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t need to speak anymore. She didn’t need to breathe anymore. She didn’t look at her reading lists or her school supplies. She spent her summer waiting for the sunset so she could poke around for food (if she remembered) and watch TV and, if she remembered to stay awake, eavesdrop on her parents’ brief conversation before nodding off, cushioned by the ample couch, and waking in the stuffiness of the midafternoon sun and no AC. At the tail end of August, there was no money on the counter (and no texts from parents or friends or enemies) but instead of resigning herself to an evening of cooking shows for dinner, Jesse felt something squirming in her belly. Hunger? She didn’t remember what hungry felt like. So she opened the freezer and found it bare. The fridge was in a similar state of neglect: the door groaned with half-finished sauces and salad dressings, but the shelves contained scattered, empty takeout boxes and the odd lump of cheese. There was no fruit on the counter.

The oranges had all gone bad the day before. In the cabinet she found a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of stale bread and in the mini-fridge by Dave’s desk there was an unopened can of Coke.

As she made her way downstairs, Jesse felt a brief flash of—of something. An impulse. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Before the impulse faded into a gray nothingness, Jesse had whipped out her phone and texted Leah.

Leah? she asked.

Alexandra was sitting in her dining room, the room nobody used, because Dave didn’t host dinner parties anymore and the good china broke when her father placed it in the dishwasher. At first, Jesse assumed her to be a pile of just-washed sheets: sitting in the semi darkness, the white blouse made Alexandra appear appear no more threatening than a quilt. But then Jesse flipped on the lights and the blankets exclaimed, “Why didn’t you tell them?”, startling Jesse so much that she dropped her sandwich.

“You needed to tell them,” Alexandra repeated, and stood up. Jesse decided that her dad and aunt weren’t actually that wrong; in the dim light reaching from the kitchen she seemed to flicker in and out.

“Why?” Jesse asked.

“Try and pick up the sandwich,” Alexandra said—no, pleaded. She sounded desperate, as if Jesse were running out of time for some invisible deadline.

Jesse scoffed and reached down, but the bread somehow managed to evade her grasp. Frowning, she reached again, and missed. She swore

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GIRLS and lunged, finally scooping it up. She flashed her best victorious smirk at Alexandra, but the ghost didn’t smile back; if anything, she seemed to grow sadder.

Alexandra said, “You’re letting it eat you alive.” She sighed. “You can’t live like this.”

Jesse bristled. “Don’t tell me how to live my life.” She placed the dusty sandwich on the table and opened the hutch to fetch the okayquality china.

Alexandra laughed, awkwardly, bitterly. “Clinging to that dead rose in your desk isn’t living. Just ask your parents why they don’t talk about me. Or just admit to someone that you miss her!” When Jesse made no move to reply, tears rolled down Alexandra’s cheeks and dented the smile on her face.

“You can’t even do that…” she sniffled.

At that moment, the kitchen door swung open and shut. “I’m home!”

Jesse’s stepfather called, and before she could beg Alexandra to stay, the ghost had already disappeared.

Dave brought home takeout chicken wings and some news: her father was gone, off to a pitch meeting that he’d told Jesse repeatedly about, and, as she read the Post-It Dave slapped on the table—neon pink, clearly a carry-over from his work desk—she bit her lip.

She tore her peanut butter sandwich into little pieces, then balled up each one individually. Dave didn’t seem to notice; he steadily ate one chicken wing, and then another. She made a little chicken-wing-shapedpeanut-butter-jelly sandwich. Jesse attempted to pull out her phone— one of Dave’s pet peeves—but found it more of a struggle than she was used to.

“Who’s Alexandra?” Jesse blurted. Had her phone always been that heavy?

Dave ate a chicken wing in silence and placed it down carefully on his plate. He wiped his fingers clean of sauce and reached for another wing. With a jerk and a grunt, the phone flew clear of her pocket and landed on the far end of the table with a gentle thump.

“Why doesn’t Dad want me to talk about her?”

Dave chewed on the wing and didn’t answer. Jesse wondered if his parents were just as quiet and reserved, then realized with a start she’d never asked. She knew that Dave’s family still lived in Ontario and fought against his decision to change his name to Dave, insisting on a gender-neutral variant of his deadname instead. One of his sisters was a

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FIONA STEWART Rhodes scholar, but Jesse didn’t know what she was studying. Another sister was the author of a well-respected travel blog Jesse had never read.

“Who’s Alexandra?” Jesse asked, louder, and hit the table as hard as she could. There was a slight bang and the silverware bounced, making a clinking noise. Dave jumped and looked around, eyes unfocused, until they landed on Jesse. He smiled, as if seeing her for the first time, and his next few words confirmed it.

“I haven’t seen you all day,” he said, sounding both amused and absent. “Well, there’s chicken wings if you want them,” he added, and rose from his spot, dirty plate in hand. He leaned over the table and fondly kissed Jesse’s cheek. “You startled me a little. Don’t disappear on me and your dad,” he chuckled, a little too lightly, and took his plate to the dishwasher, humming a tune Jesse couldn’t follow.

Jesse’s dad swept in an hour later and didn’t comment at the sight of his daughter sitting at the dining room, staring at a bucket of congealing wings. He set a bag of oranges on the table and dropped in the seat next to her, humming to himself as he selected a fruit.

Jesse startled both him and herself when she spoke out loud.

“Alexandra,” she said. “Tell me about Alexandra.”

Her father froze at the name in a position that didn’t last long, for he stopped mid-chew and started choking as the orange slice slid down and lodged deep within his throat. He hacked and coughed and thumped his chest and spat into a napkin and coughed some more.

“Alexandra,” Jesse repeated forcefully.

Her dad’s hands and lips trembled and his eyes watered, but she couldn’t tell if the nascent tears were from the oranges or her words. She stared at her father, waiting for him to tell her something, anything. But he didn’t. He sat in the straight-backed chair, one fist still holding a balled-up napkin wet from partially-chewed orange, and refused to meet Jesse’s query.

She didn’t know how long they stayed in stasis, but as she waited, the sun set and the twilight withered. She heard the water running as Dave took a shower, heard the echo of his singing.

Then, Jesse’s phone—now permanently off mute, because she got no notifications anyways—pinged and broke the spell between her and her father. He leapt out of his seat and speed walked upstairs. She rushed towards the screen, excitement compounding when another ping sounded.

Leah? the text read. Then: Sorry, wrong number.

She didn’t have the energy to mark the message as read.

Upstairs, she wasn’t surprised at all to find Alexandra on her bed, this

16

GIRLS time slumped listlessly against the wall. She froze on the threshold: her bed was still her bed, but someone had swapped out her colorful, mismatched pillowcases for ones in a dark gray that matched sheets and a comforter she didn’t remember owning.

This time Jesse spoke first. “What’s happening to me?”

“You’re going to disappear,” Alexandra replied. “Don’t worry, you just have to let go.” She smiled warmly, brightly, and Jesse wavered. Go? Her aunt’s warnings floated back to her. Ghosts are hungry. They’ll take your soul— Let them have it, Jesse thought, and continued to waffle. It would be too easy to let go, to not have to think, to be able to pass Leah in the halls without spikes of longing piercing her thoughts. To sit at a dinner with her parents without having to weigh her statements and dance around what was truly in her mind. To comfort a lonely sister she was just starting to know.

To be invisible. Free.

Jesse accepted the hand Alexandra offered gratefully. She gave the bedroom that no longer felt like hers a sweeping glance, prepared to leave. When her gaze passed over her desk, she felt a sharp tug, like a pinprick on her finger. In her mind’s eye, she saw the figures: her father, hand resting on empty air; her mother, holding a toddler that was starting to blur out of existence.

She tried to remember the right words, which stuck in her memory.

“I thought...you didn’t want me to be like you?”

Alexandra grimaced. “It’s too late for you,” she whispered. “It won’t hurt, I promise.” Gazing into her eyes, Jesse nodded in acceptance. And then it did hurt, like Jesse had pulled a muscle she couldn’t name, or bumped the sensitive part of her elbow she forgot she had. The pain faded so fast it felt like perhaps there had never been any pain, and between her fingers Alexandra’s hand started to hum with a pulse that used to be hers. Jesse didn’t feel—she was empty. And, experimentally wiggling her toes, she found she didn’t mind. She was in her body but not in her body.

Alexandra leaned closer and for the first time, Jesse caught a full noseful of her scent: pressed laundry and a hint of tangerine that traveled up her nostril like a powerful hit. She picked tangerines once, with her father and Dave, so many that for the next few days they only ate oranges: key orange pie and orange chicken and fruit salad and alcohol-free-sangria that mostly tasted like orange juice with too much sugar. They waited for twilight on the beach in Hawaii and used satsumas to block out the sun. Her father kissed her on her forehead and said she had the same sense of humor as her mother, and she fell asleep

17

FIONA STEWART wedged between him and Dave, who reminisced together into the night, bathing Jesse in the gentle murmur of their love and swatting the mosquitoes who attempted to find one of her veins.

Jesse gasped, and, for the first time in months, inhaled clean air. Air free of Alexandra’s baggage, of an uneasy silence with her parents, of not hearing from Leah.

“No,! Jesse exclaimed. “I’m not like you.” She wrenched her arm free out of Alexandra’s grasp and fumbled for the portrait she’d kept in her desk, but flopped in her chair instead, exhausted. Freed from Alexandra’s grip, she felt like all of her bones had been snapped and set in a cast, like she’d drowned and the lake water had just been expelled from her lungs, scratching and sagging on her organs and bones.

When Jesse remembered how to hold up her head, she gazed on the blur of the bed in front of her and waited for her eyes to relearn how to focus. Gradually, she was able to discern two blue-panted legs leading to black shoes, a long-sleeve white blouse framing crossed arms. A woman with cascading, inky hair stared back at her, a woman whose expression Jesse didn’t recognize at all. Eyes watering with delight.

Sharpened lips. Gleaming, fangs. Cheeks pinched in hunger. Jesse’s heartbeat filled her ears: was she just waiting for Jesse to weaken again?

Would this ghost swallow her whole and leave nothing behind?

Jesse blinked and the woman’s face was remolded into something she could understand: a smile that teetered in the bittersweet swing between joy and regret. Tears that dribbled down her cheeks, reluctant to announce their existence.

Jesse opened her mouth to ask a question, perhaps, or to speak, but she never figured out what she intended to do for she expelled air that began to gust through the entire room, knocking posters off her walls, blankets off her bed, and causing her to blink.

“Alexandra?” Jesse asked, but the shape in front of her didn’t look quite right. As she focused, she realized that Alexandra was gone: a white sheet bunched like a blouse over a navy blue comforter with two rivets like legs hinted at a ghost that once might have been.

Jesse didn’t move. For the rest of the night, she kept her eyes locked on the blankets in front of her and dared not to blink, indulging in the folly that the blankets would shake themselves into the shape of a lively woman armed with answers that would tell Jesse exactly what not to do.

18

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

2020 JBWC Youth Fellow FIONA STEWART is a writer from Western New York who plans to pursue English and History in college. In addition to writing, she loves reading, green tea, and the rain.

The Just Buffalo Writing Center Youth Fellowship offers motivated young writers the opportunity to develop their craft and explore professional avenues within the literary arts each summer.

To learn more about the Youth Fellowship and Just Buffalo Writing Center’s full slate of programming for young writers, visit justbuffalo.org.

Just Buffalo Literary Center’s mission is to create and strengthen communities through the literary arts. For over 45 years, Just Buffalo has brought the world’s greatest writers to Buffalo, hosted poetry events and readings, and supported the development of young writers.

We believe in the love of reading, the art of writing, and the power of the literary arts to transform individual lives and communities.

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