Convenient, Inconvenient

CONVENIENT, INCONVENIENT

My apartment is spotless. The dishes are done; my laundry is clean and folded on the couch. There’s a bouquet of fresh flowers on the coffee table. Fat-petaled roses and orange chrysanthemums in full bloom.

Resting on the lip of my bathtub is an assortment of bar soaps and jars of thick, buttery lotion. There is a small candle on the top of the toilet in a bronze tin.

Sophie.

I light the candle and take a long, hot shower. I use one of my new bars of soap and it feels like silk, smells like bergamot. After, I slather myself with the lotion. I watch as the persistent scales on my knees and elbows disappear in an instant. I watch in the mirror while I massage the lotion into my face, and my skin glows in its wake.

The marriage of fragrances between the soap and the lotion and the subtle lemony contribution from the candle have relaxed me into a state of complete dopey giddiness. I float around without a thought in my head, without a single fuck to give.

I get my bathing suit out of the bottom drawer of the dresser and pack it along with a pair of pajamas and a sweater in my large purse.

I go to blow out the candle in the bathroom, but it’s already been done for me. I go to get a drink of water, and there’s a glass on the counter waiting. Cold, with a lemon wedge.

I drink it down.

On the way out, by the door, there’s a spider.

I stop to say hello.

I watch as the spider lifts one of his legs and begins to wave it back and forth, back and forth.

---

—I meet Sophie outside of the Good Mug tent at the market.

“My Annie,” she says, hugging me tightly, and kisses me on the cheek. “How did you sleep?”

“Great, actually,” I say. “I feel amazing. Thank you for the soaps. And the flowers. And for cleaning my apartment.”

She puts a hand on my shoulder. “Please. For my Annie? Anything.”

“At least let me get you coffee. Are you hungry? What would you like?”

“Yes, coffee,” she says. “And yes, food. Maybe something sweet.”

I lean in close to her. “You said you don’t eat children, right?”

She laughs. “Right.”

“Just wanted to confirm.”

“Common misconception,” she says. “I was thinking more along the lines of a donut. Or muffin. We can go to the bakery after we get our coffee. Have you met Deirdre yet? She’s a singular talent.”

“I haven’t.”

“We’ll fix that.”

“What do you want for coffee? Latte?”

“Whatever you’re getting. Make things simple for Oskar,” she says. “Poor bloke.”

He looks up at us. He does have sad eyes. Or maybe they’re angry. I can’t tell.

“Good morning, Annie,” he says. “Good morning, Sophie.”

“Morning,” Sophie says.

“Two vanilla lattes, please,” I say. “Large.”

He grunts. He is significantly less friendly when Sophie is around.

To be fair, I think Sophie gets a kick out of making him uncomfortable. As he steams the milk, she begins to twirl her fingers, somehow contorting the steam cloud into a grumpy face. He pretends not to notice, but I know he does.

Sophie presses her lips together, trying not to laugh. I do. I laugh. I can’t help it.

“Here you go,” he says. “It’s eleven.”

I pay him, then allow Sophie to lead me away. We walk over to a tent where baked goods are sold. Rose is there talking to a woman wearing an apron over a mustard jumpsuit. She has a shaved head and wears big wooden earrings.

“Deirdre,” Sophie says.

Deirdre jumps a little at the sound of Sophie saying her name.

“Sophie!” she says, her voice shrill. “Good morning, Sophie. How are you? What can I get for you?”

“Have you met Annie?” she asks.

“No, I haven’t. Rose told me about you.”

“Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi, Rose.”

Rose is also less friendly with Sophie around. She gives a weak smile, then slips behind Deirdre.

“I made some strawberry-pistachio donuts,” Deirdre says. “Here, take some. I can throw in some muffins, too. I’ve got apple and carrot.”

She begins to fill a large box with pastries and donuts and muffins.

“The apple muffins are really scrumptious. We’ve had a wonderful crop of apples this year, Sophie. Really wonderful.”

“Yes,” Sophie says, “we have.”

Rose holds open a bag for Deirdre to set the box inside. It’s difficult for them because their hands are trembling.

“Thank you,” Sophie says, taking the bag. “Enjoy your day. Annie, let’s go.”

“Thank you!” I tell Deirdre.

“You’re welcome. Come by the store anytime!” she says. Rose is still cowering behind her.

“Do we need anything else?” Sophie asks me.

“I don’t think so,” I say. I shrug.

Sophie shrugs. “Let’s go home and eat treats and run around like maniacs.”

“Let’s do it!”

I follow her through the woods. This time, when we get to the well, to the graves, to the hut, Sophie explains them to me.

“I used to get my water from that well,” she says. “They were always threatening to throw me down it. And they did a few times! But I could always get back up. That’s the thing about me. I’m quite resilient.

“I didn’t mind the hut,” she says. “Would be hard to go back now, though.”

At the circle of headstones, she simply says, “Old friends.”

I leave it alone.

When we get to her house, it looks even bigger than I remember. Like there’s an extra turret or an extra wing. Sophie holds the door open for me, then leads me into the dining room.

“Let’s eat our donuts on fine china,” she says, “like proper adults.”

The dining room is distinctly medieval. There’s a behemoth wooden table surrounded by too many chairs to count. Intricate tapestries hang on the stone walls, and there’s a fireplace at the other end of the room. Actually, there are two fireplaces, identical twins, standing side by side. Above the table, chandeliers hang from long chains. Each one is wrought iron with multiple tiers holding what I assume are fake candles. Maybe not. I stand around for a moment bewildered by the room’s extravagance.

Sophie sets the table with porcelain plates, linen napkins and large glass goblets etched with roses. She fills the goblets from a decanter that looks like a snake.

“It’s cider,” she says as she pours. She sets the decanter aside and pulls out a chair for me.

“You sure know how to treat a lady.”

She raises an eyebrow. She sits across from me, then offers me the box of baked goods. I select a blueberry donut.

“Our first course,” Sophie says, choosing a muffin.

Just as I’m about to take a bite, my phone dings.

Text message.

I take it out of my pocket to check.

“No,” Sophie says. The phone is plucked from my grasp by an invisible hand and set screen down on the table. “It’ll spoil our fun.”

“I want to see who it’s from,” I say. I flip my phone over. It’s a text from Sam. It reads Hey.

I go to unlock my phone with my thumb, but before I can, it slides across the table out of my reach.

“Annie,” Sophie says with a reprimanding intonation, “I told you.”

“It’s Sam,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “Here you are having a perfectly lovely Saturday morning, and here he is ruining it.”

“He didn’t ruin it,” I say. “It was just a text.”

“Reminding you of his existence and the pain he caused you. Continues to cause you,” she says. “Look, pet, I understand it must be hard to sever ties with someone you loved for so long. But he’s not in your life anymore. You’re building a new life. Why let him poison the well? Take it from me, who has actually poisoned a well. From inside that well.”

I don’t like the way she’s looking at me. I turn away, shoving some donut into my mouth.

“I was kidding about the well. Well, sort of. I don’t want you to think I’m being insensitive.”

She puts her hand on my hand. When she pulls it back, there’s a ring on my index finger. Silver with a rough pink stone.

“Look,” she says. “Something shiny.”

“Sophie! It’s so pretty!” I hold it up to the light.

“You like pink, yes?”

“I like pink.”

“Thought so,” she says. “It doesn’t really suit me.”

“Every color suits you,” I say.

She basks in the compliment. I decide one of the things I like most about Sophie is how much she enjoys a compliment. I wouldn’t think someone so beautiful would feed on compliments the way she does. It makes me feel less pathetic for my need, to know that someone could be so completely self-possessed and still savor validation.

“This muffin tastes bad,” she says, pushing her plate away. “What in this world is more disappointing than a bad muffin?”

“A lot, Sophie. A lot of things.”

She sulks, dramatically slouching in her seat.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s very, very disappointing. You want some of my donut?”

“No, that’s all right. I wanted all of this,” she says, tapping the box, “but I think I wanted for the sake of wanting.”

“So you are human.”

“Bleh,” she says, sticking out her tongue. “Don’t insult me.”

“Hey!” I say. “I’m human.”

She retracts her tongue and sits up. “Are you?”

“Last I checked.”

“Mm. Would you like to swim?”

“Yes! Yeah, that’ll be fun.”

“You can change upstairs in your room. I’ll meet you down here.”

“Are you going to swim?”

She shakes her head no.

“Why not?”

“I don’t care for it,” she says, sighing. “Not at all.”

“Okay. You know, we could always get you a blow-up raft. They make fun ones now. Shaped like swans. And unicorns!”

She cringes. “I hate unicorns.”

“What do you mean, you hate unicorns?”

“Another time,” she says. “You go change. I’ll make us lemonade and meet you on the steps.”

“All right, all right,” I say, heading off to “my room.”

Being with Sophie in the house is a very different experience from being alone in the house. Without her presence, the house becomes cold and unnerving. I walk through the mirror hallway haunted by the memory of the face I saw in the bathroom upstairs. I clench my fists, my palms slick with nervous sweat. With each mirror I pass, I have to fight off momentary panic and reassure myself that the only reflection I see in my peripheral vision is my own.

This, of course, isn’t true. There’s a pale disembodied face hovering somewhere over my shoulder, behind my back. It appears for a second, but as soon as I turn to verify its presence, it slips out of view.

Sophie said this place isn’t haunted, and she’s been nothing but honest with me so far. So I shake it off. Must be my imagination.

Upstairs in my room, there are several bouquets of fresh flowers. There are clean sheets on the bed, which is made so neatly I’m hesitant to ever disturb it. There are even mints on the pillows.

It’s so nice to be somewhere you’re wanted.

I drop my bag on the floor and start to undress. I have my pants off when the bathroom door begins to move. It was wide open, but now it’s closing. All by itself.

And here I am, standing defenseless in the middle of the room, stark naked below the waist like Donald fucking Duck.

“I’m naked!” I shout for some reason. If it’s a murderer, that’s more of an advertisement than a warning, and if it’s a ghost, not really sure it would care?

I’ve gone from lifelong steady-handed skeptic to half-naked and shouting at unseen beings within a span of two weeks. The logic I’ve always relied on has become so slippery, impossible to grip.

The door closes. Shuts completely. I hear the click of the latch.

Maybe I’m being given some privacy?

Or maybe it’s a draft. It’s probably a draft.

I change quickly, put my pajama pants and sweater on over my swimsuit, then run down the stairs.

Sophie sits at the bottom with a tray of lemonade.

“What is it?” she asks. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I say. Suppression is a useful tool. Honestly, it’s underrated.

“Follow me,” she says. “To the swimming pool!”

She leads me down what she calls the gallery, the long hallway with all of her paintings.

“If you go right here, you’ll find the conservatory. It’s my little lair. Smells divine with all of the flowers. Now, through here . . . I don’t really know what this space is meant to be used for.”

We enter a hexagonal room. The ceiling is a skylight, glass angling up to an intense point in the center. There’s no furniture in this room, no accents on the walls. We walk across it and the echoes of our footsteps seem to run circles around us before fading away.

Sophie opens a door that leads to a rickety spiral staircase. It’s steep and narrow, and by the time we get to the bottom, I’m so dizzy I can almost feel my eyeballs knocking together inside my skull.

The pool room is not what I was expecting. An indoor pool is a luxury, but nothing about this room is luxurious. It’s like a tiled cave.

The tiles were likely white at some point, but they’ve yellowed with age. They line the pool, the walls, the ceiling, though there’s not really any distinction between the surfaces, since every one is curved. I imagine this is what it feels like inside a submarine. Acutely claustrophobic.

Sophie sets the lemonade tray down on a small glass table. She sits along the ledge, her dress fanning around her.

“Are you comfortable?” I ask. “You’re really just going to watch me swim?”

“Is that strange?”

“A little.”

She pulls a small leather-bound book out from behind her. No idea where it came from.

“I’ll read,” she says. “Or write. Or draw you.”

“Very funny,” I say.

I hope she was kidding. Most of the time, I can tell when Sophie’s kidding. Most of the time.

I shimmy out of my pants and sweater, dip a toe in to check the temperature of the water. It’s warm.

I step into the shallow end, which isn’t actually that shallow. I dunk myself under and begin to do the backstroke. When I get to the other side of the pool, I let myself float there.

“How is it?” Sophie asks.

“It’s great,” I say. “What are you reading?”

“Some book of alchemy,” she says. She fakes snoring.

“That bad?”

“No,” she says. “I’m melodramatic.”

“You? No.”

“Sarcasm, darling.”

I begin to swim around, do some laps. I was on the swim team throughout middle school but decided to quit freshmen year after Kim Schulman made a comment about my flat chest. I’d spent three years trying to convince myself that no one cared about my lack of boobs except me, only to have my paranoia validated.

I wonder what Kim is up to now. I bet she’s married. I make a mental note to Internet-stalk her later.

And while I’m envisioning what her wedding dress might have looked like, if she wore a ball gown or something more fitted, I’m able to ignore the sensation working its way up my foot, around my ankle.

But as it becomes tighter, colder, more aggressive, I’m forced to open my eyes and look beneath me, directly under the spot where I’m treading water in the deep end.

At first, I think it’s my shadow, until I see the distinct fingers.

With a single violent tug, I’m underwater.

The sting of water up my nose, inside my lungs, shocks me into complete stasis. I’m being dragged down to the bottom of the pool. The whirring in my ears is vicious.

I make the mistake of turning. There’s a person there. Kind of. A person with grayish pocked skin and bulging eyes, the color in them like melted wax. I scream and water punches down my throat.

I thrash around, trying to get the thing away. I fight for the surface, but it becomes very clear to me very quickly that it will not let me go. I manage to move us over to the side, and with everything I have, I kick, smashing it into the wall.

But it’s gone. It’s my foot that absorbs the impact.

I float up to the surface. I throw myself onto the ledge, coughing up pool water and probably my lungs along with the rest of my internal organs. The gum I swallowed when I was six.

“Annie, what happened? Are you okay?”

Sophie reaches out and pulls me up over the ledge.

“Your foot!” she says.

I look down. It’s mangled. Bleeding. I can’t feel it.

“What the fuck, Sophie?!”

“What?” she asks, looking confused, hurt by my anger.

“There was a . . . a . . . a thing! A guy! A person in your pool! It just tried to drown me!”

She inches toward the edge, carefully craning her neck to see into the pool.

“It’s gone now,” I say. “It’s . . . it’s a ghost! It looked like a ghost!”

“Hmm,” she says, tapping her lip.

“I thought you said your house wasn’t haunted.”

She doesn’t answer. She won’t look at me.

“I almost drowned,” I say. “Is your house haunted?”

Without raising her eyes to meet mine, she mumbles, “Maybe a little.”

“Sophie!”

“If I had told you, you would have never wanted to come over again!” she says. “You’re not in any danger. They’re just . . . inconvenient.”

“Who are they? And I’d say almost drowning isn’t an inconvenience. Death isn’t an inconvenience.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d agree, but . . .”

“Sophie!”

“I didn’t realize they could swim,” she says. “I apologize. Please, please don’t be angry with me.”

She grabs my hands and kisses them. “Please? I’ll fix your foot.”

I can’t bring myself to look at it again. I know it’s broken.

“I need to go to a doctor,” I say.

“Pshh,” she says. “I can fix it. And I promise I’ll do something about the ghosts. They’re just excited because you’re new.”

“Excited?”

She sighs. “I should have been honest with you. I thought it would be too much if I told you everything all at once. I didn’t want to scare you away. I wanted you to still want to be my friend and to come over and for us to have a normal experience. As friends. Who can, you know, hang out.”

Her eyes are wide and sweet and pleading. Most of the time, with Sophie, I feel like the clueless, uncool little sister, but every once in a while, I’m the big sister with the allowance money and the jeans she wants to borrow.

I don’t know. I’m an only child.

“You can get rid of them?” I ask. “The ghosts?”

“Oh, yes. It’s much easier since they’re already dead.”

I find this disturbing on multiple levels. First, I don’t appreciate her nonchalant attitude toward literal ghosts. Second, it implies she’s familiar with the difficulties related to disposing of living people.

She gathers up my pants and sweater. “Let’s talk about this upstairs.”

“How am I getting upstairs?” I ask.

She leans down and lifts my arm over her head so it’s draped across her back. She shuts her eyes hard, and a moment later, I’m weightless. She opens the door to the spiral staircase, and I whimper at the sight of it. There’s no way we’re getting up it side by side, and there’s no way I’m getting up alone.

Sophie reaches out and touches the wall. We climb the first step, her anchoring me as I float along beside her, and somehow we fit. It’s like the stairs expand for us to accommodate us.

I hear a rattling sound and peer behind us to see the lemonade tray following us up the stairs. Carrying itself.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll take care of the ghosts, I promise. I didn’t think they would bother you. I understand if you don’t want to come here anymore.”

There’s such sadness in her voice, such defeat.

“Maybe not for a swim,” I say.

Her smile is bright as a firework. “Really?”

“And I don’t want to sleep in that room,” I say. “There’s a ghost in there.”

“Is there really?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry, pet. Truly, I am.”

“It’s okay.” I’m not capable of staying mad at anyone. I don’t have the stamina.

She carries me to the conservatory. It’s basically a fancy greenhouse, a giant glass room brimming with plants. It’s balmy and smells incredible. There’s a gorgeous array of colors from all of the flowers. There are rows and rows of herbs. Vines hang from the ceiling.

I’m reminded.

“Hey,” I ask her, “did you put up a plant in my stairway?”

“Hmm?” She sets me down on a stool in a corner, next to a workbench. She wastes no time busying herself, grinding away with a stone and pestle.

“I noticed there was a plant hanging above the stairs up to my apartment,” I say. I gesture to the room around us. “Wondering if maybe you had something to do with that.”

“Hm . . . oh, yes,” she says. “Mistletoe. It’s often misunderstood and absurdly misused. It brings peace. When we met, I sensed you were in need of peace.”

“Oh. Okay.” I’m not sure how I feel about her sneaking into my stairway to hang a plant, but I know her well enough by now to know that her intentions were good.

“Is that weird?” she asks me after a minute of silence. “Was that a strange thing to do? Be honest with me, please.”

“Kind of, yeah,” I say.

“It’s been so long since I . . .” She sighs. “I don’t know how to be any other way. I suppose I’m out of touch. Terribly uncool.”

“Are you about to heal my foot with magic?” I ask her. “Because that’s pretty fucking cool.”

She giggles. Her cheeks go pink and she hides them with her hands.

“I am!” she says. “I am about to do exactly that! Close your eyes.”

I do. There’s a moment of pain as she covers my foot in some kind of cold, wet paste. I hear her walking away from me, and when she returns, I hear the sound of running water and feel the spray of liquid passing gently across my foot.

“All done,” she says. “You can open your eyes now.”

My toes are straight; there’s no blood, no swelling. And more than that, there’s no more dead skin or calluses. It’s like I just got a pedicure.

“Wow,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” she says. “I feel too guilty to be thanked. You’re not still mad, are you?”

“No,” I say. “But honestly, I don’t think I’ve really accepted what just happened.”

I don’t think I’m digesting any of this information. About Sophie, about the town, about the fact that I was just almost drowned by a ghost that could somehow manifest in physical form. My brain doesn’t know what to do with any of this. It’s like being a doctor stumped on a diagnosis. It’s probably fine. Monitor the symptoms.

“I can walk you home if you like,” she says.

I shrug. “I don’t have anything to do at home.”

At least here, I have Sophie. I have company. I don’t want to be alone, sad and thinking about Sam, about why he texted me this morning.

I wonder why he texted me this morning.

“What should we do?” she asks. “Are you hungry? Should I make the goulash? Do you want to read? Watch a movie?”

I notice a wet stain on her dress. I realize, in total horror, that it’s my blood.

“Sophie,” I say, “I think I bled on you.”

I point.

“Oh,” she says. A grin splits across her face. “Human blood. My favorite!”

That was definitely a joke.

“Come upstairs with me. We can go into my closet. Play dress-up,” she says.

“Okay!”

I put my pajama pants back on, my sweater, my socks. My bathing suit is still damp, and now my clothes are damp, too. It’s uncomfortable, and I look like a slouch compared to Sophie, who is the epitome of elegance despite her dress being stained with blood.

We go upstairs, to the east wing. Sophie opens a set of French doors and announces, “This is my room.”

It’s very black. Black-and-silver damask wallpaper, a monumental four-poster bed with black velvet curtains, a black crystal chandelier. There are bouquets of black roses in black vases all around the room. It’s intense, severe, but somehow beautiful in its severity.

“Closet is through here,” she says. She opens another set of French doors.

The closet is almost as big as the bedroom. We’re surrounded by dresses, mostly black. They seem to sway on their own, to dance in a nonexistent breeze.

Sophie walks with purpose all the way to the back of the closet. She pulls some dresses aside to reveal an armoire. She opens the bottom drawer and begins sifting through it.

“You like to wear pants, yes?” she asks. “I’m going to find some pants for you.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “I can wear these.”

“They’re wet,” she says. “And besides, it’s dress-up. You agreed.”

“Okay, okay,” I say. “Your pants will all be too short on me.”

“Maybe,” she says. “I can make you some.”

“Make them?”

“I made all these,” she says, gesturing to the rest of the closet, to what must be over a hundred dresses. “Don’t be impressed. As I’ve said, I have a lot of free time. Here, catch!”

She throws me a pair of silky gray pants, then opens the top drawer and throws me a black cashmere sweater. “Try those.”

She turns around.

I’m not getting naked right here in the closet.

“I’m going back to my room,” I say. “My underwear is in there.”

“All right, darling,” she says. “But come right back. I want to see how they look.”

As I walk back out through her bedroom, I again remember what’s so easy to forget when I’m around Sophie.

This house is very, very scary.

I break into a light jog, hurrying to my room, where I can change quickly and get back to her.

I close the door, undress as fast as I possibly can, flinging my wet bathing suit across the room. It lands on top of the canopy. A problem for later. I put on my underwear, my bra, then the pants and sweater. They’re both incredibly soft. The pants are too short.

I’m too afraid to check my reflection. I don’t know whom else I’ll see in the mirror.

As I go to power walk past the staircase, I remember that my phone is still downstairs on the dining room table.

Retrieving it would mean journeying solo through the ghost house. But it would also mean I can text Sam back. See what he wants.

Maybe he’ll apologize for our last conversation.

Maybe he misses me.

I turn and travel quietly down the steps. I don’t want Sophie to hear me. I don’t think she would approve.

I run on tiptoes through the mirror hallway, looking only at the floor. When I get to the dining room, I see my phone on the table. I pick it up. The text from Sam hangs there on my home screen. Hey.

I lower my thumb down to unlock my phone.

“Annie.”

I drop my phone.

Sophie is sitting at the table, looking thoroughly unamused.

“Sophie! You startled me!”

“Well,” she says. She opens her hand and my phone flies into it.

“I was just getting my phone,” I say.

She raises an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t going to text him back.”

She raises the other eyebrow.

“Sophie.”

“Annie.”

“I’m being honest,” I say. “I just like to have my phone. I feel weird without it.”

“I’ve heard that happens,” she says. She hands me my phone. “As long as you’re not tempted.”

“I’m not,” I say. I feel bad lying to her. I feel even worse for my own weakness. “It’s just . . . I think the hardest part about a breakup is not talking to the one person you’ve always talked to. About everything.”

“Pet,” she says, softening. She stands up and puts her arms around me.

“It’s like breaking a habit. It’s hard.”

“It’s not something I’ve experienced,” she says. “But I can see that you’re struggling. Why don’t we go back upstairs? I can show you some of my old dresses from back when. Then maybe we can make dinner. Relax in the library.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“And I can walk you home after,” she says. “Or you can stay. Whatever you like.”

I really can’t imagine ever sleeping here again after what happened in the pool, but I don’t want to come out and say that to her.

I nod politely and follow her back to her closet, where we spend hours going through all of her dresses, some that date back to the seventeenth century. And her hats! She has an extensive collection of hats.

“Notice none of them are tall and pointy,” she says.

I did notice.

---

—Later that night, after we eat leftover pastries for dinner and drink gin cocktails and read each other poems in the library, I tell Sophie that I’m going to go home, and she doesn’t try to convince me to stay.

“I’ll walk you through the wood,” she says. She puts on a magnificent black feathered coat that she rediscovered in the back of her closet. She tells me that she’s going to make me one to match, even though I express my doubts at being able to pull it off.

We walk in silence for a while, which is unusual for us. We rarely have a substantial lull in conversation.

It begins to get uncomfortable.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask her.

“Just remembering something,” she says. “Something that happened in these woods a long time ago.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She runs her hand along my arm. “Not really. Not a pleasant memory.”

“I’m sorry, Sophie.”

“I’ve come a long way,” she says. “There’s no reason to be sorry for the things that make us better.”

“Yeah. But why do the things that make us better always have to suck so much? Can’t there be a route to self-improvement with—I don’t know—rainbows and cupcakes and, like, sitting on the couch?”

She laughs. “I think so! I believe it’s possible.”

“Good,” I say. “Sign me up for that.”

“Not everything can be easy. Not everything has to be so hard,” she says.

“Yeah.”

The silence rises again, putting space between us. I should let it be, allow it to exist, be content with it. Sam and I used to sit in silence, and it was fine. But something about this quiet I can’t trust. I fear it’ll continue to expand and expand until it swallows the promise of our friendship.

“Do you know those ghosts?” I ask. “In your house? Do you know who they are?”

Sophie sighs, and I know instantly it was the worst thing I could have said.

“No,” she says. “No idea.”

I find that hard to believe. She’s lived in Rowan for hundreds of years. She’s lived in that house for almost a hundred.

“No?” I ask.

“Annie,” she says, “the more thought and energy you give them, the more they’ll appear to you. They’re attracted to that energy. It’s quite similar to your ex-boyfriend. You give him power with your thoughts.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“We can put it in the past now, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she says. “I promise, no more ghosts.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “They won’t follow you home.”

I hadn’t considered that they might.

We come to the edge of the woods and she hugs me, rubs my back.

“Sweet dreams, darling,” she says.

“Will you come over this week? For dinner?”

“If you’ll have me,” she says, releasing me.

“Any night,” I tell her. “Whenever.”

“I’ll see you soon,” she says. And with that, she turns and begins to walk back through the woods.

When I get home, I stand in front of the mirror, admiring the clothes Sophie gave me. I have to admit, I look exceptional.

It’s late, but I’m not tired. I make myself a cup of tea and sit on the couch, examining my foot. There’s no evidence that it was ever injured. The events of the afternoon seem so far away, like they happened in another lifetime or to someone else.

Sophie seemed so concerned that I was mad at her, but for some reason, with the way we left things, I wonder if she’s mad at me. If I did something wrong.

I guess I shouldn’t have asked about the ghosts, though how could I not?

I don’t know how to navigate a new friendship, especially not with someone like Sophie.

I tap my finger against the mug, my new ring making a satisfying clink. It’s such a pretty ring. Such a lovely gift.

My phone chimes. It’s another text from Sam. This one reads You okay?

I adjust the ring on my finger. I don’t respond.