What page are you on?

I’ve been attending this boarding school, The Admiral’s School for Girls, for years. Its people are putrid, its facilities ancient, and the food was on the brink of being poison. I had two best friends, Kris and Josephine—whom I loved dearly—who died in an accident in the B-Wing last spring.

Life has been bitterly empty without them.

We were always together, in school and out. When we were allowed to go home and visit, we would go together. We’d take turns going to each other’s house on holiday. We’d usually skip mine, because my family wasn’t so good. Momma always hit the sauce too much after my dad died in the war.

The accident that killed them was a sudden flash flood. The dorms of Admiral’s were situated in not much more than a hole in the ground; when the dams broke during a bad spring storm, the water filled the valley. They were the only people not able to get out in time.

When I dream at night, they are nightmares. I see funeral precessions and evil spirits crawling on grave stones, beckoning I join them. I see Mandy, Kris’s mother in tears over the death of her daughter. I see Josephine’s mom and dad silently grieving, their eyes glazed over, as if they didn’t care. They never cared enough about her. Reliving the funeral is bad enough, but the apparitions plaguing the crowd unbeknownst to them is the worst. The demons mocking them, waiting to claim the souls of the dead.

I awake in a sweat every night, alone. No one sleeps in B-Wing except me.

I was placed in this rusted-out, unsanitary wing as a punishment for breaking curfew. They put me here for a night and then the forgot to take me out. I keep leaving notes in the main office, but they don’t seem to care too much about putting me back with the rest of the world.

There are thirty bunks besides my own, all reeking of mildew and mold from the flood. The barracks are all build like long houses; one side holds beds, the other sinks. Every three bunks shares a sink, and a dirty, foggy mirror. The place is so filthy that I can’t even see my reflection in the mirror.

- - -

I had always been forgettable. I am mousy and hide in oversized clothes. I am too meek for military school, they always said. Too meek—too weak for military school. I sit in the back of the class, in the corner, and no one disturbs me. When I walk through the halls, its like I’m not even there at all. Nobody bothers me because I just don’t stand out enough to be seen.

Kris and Josephine—they were different though. They were always together, and they saw me all alone and included me. We as a group were never as close as they as a duo were, but I was happy to be a third wheel. I was happy to belong at last, even if it didn’t last.

I miss them so much.

- - -

One night, when I was trying not to sleep, I heard them—their laughter, their giggles and their “shhhs” as the pushed the rusty doors to my tomb of a sleeping place open. I knew it was them; I knew their laughs anywhere. Were they haunting the B-Wing? Had they come to visit? Did they mean trouble, or would they be friendly poltergeists?

They carried candles as they crept closer. They were looking at the rusty belly of the B-Wing in awe.

“I can’t believe they didn’t fix this up after our vacation,” Josephine remarked. She would be the one who referred to her own death as a vacation.

“I know! Somebody died here, for Christ’s sake. They should at least care enough to clean up the debris, set up a memorial, something!” Kris replied, disgust marring her face. She continued the joke with perfection, as always. She was the funnier one.

“I miss her,” Josephine said quietly.

“I miss her, too,” Kris replied in a whisper.

“You guys!” I exclaimed, tears swelling in my ears. They were back! They were back, and they missed me! They weren’t gone after all!

Kris and Josephine both focused on me in the dark.

“Did you hear that?” asked one girl.

“Did you?” the other replied.

“Kris! Josephine! I’m here!” I said, kicking off my blankets and running towards them. I wanted to embrace them and never let them go.

“We should go,” Kris said firmly.

“Please don’t leave!” I cried.

“We’ll come back,” Josephine said just as firmly.

There was nothing I could do to stop them.

The candles in their hands flickered until they were both gone.

- - -

After that, I started hearing and seeing them everywhere. Always together, even in death, Josephine and Kris appeared. Nobody else paid them any mind, probably because I was the only one who could see them. Even in life, nobody cared for them. That’s probably why we got along so well; all three of us were unwanted here.

“Can you get me a soda?” Kris asked. I turned around to serve her, but Josephine had beat me to it.

“Grape flavor, right?” she said, placing the can into Kris’s waiting hands.

“Thanks,” Kris replied, their hands lingering just enough to perplex me.

“You know, it sorta feels like she’s with us,” Kris said after a while, opening the can and taking a long drink. We were in town, watching the river flow beneath the bridge below us in the twilight. People rushed past us without even realizing we were there.

“I know what you mean,” Josephine replied.

“You guys don’t have to tease me,” I said quietly, pretending to be cross. In reality, I was so happy to have company again that it didn’t matter if they were turning my ears pink with praise or ripping them off.

- - -

As we walked in school, people still swerved to avoid them. I think it had to do with the fact you can feel a ghost, and nobody wanted to disrespect the dead.

- - -

The drill instructor came to B-Wing one night. I had thought for sure she was here to let me join everyone else again, but I had gotten used to a life of disappointment. She was a burly woman who I had never seen had any emotion in all my years here.

“I’m sorry,” she said, barely a whisper. She feel to her knees in the sand and rot and began to weep with such ferocity I was stunned into silence. I wanted to tell her that Kris and Josephine were okay, that they had been visiting me quite often. There was no reason to cry, I wanted to say, but I was too frightened of her to say anything at all.

- - -

One day, I walked through the halls at school, and I found myself to be the only one there.

I suppose “one night” would have been more appropriate, because the clock said it was eight-fifteen and the sun was down. We weren’t supposed to be at school at any time past or before five, and if I was caught, there would be punishment. Wandering the halls at night is what got me in the B-Wing in the first place. I avoided the janitor at every turn, and ended up in the library.

There was a group of children circling a table. They were all variously dressed in period outfits. I figured it was a late-night meeting of the drama club. They all had bags under their eyes, like they had been studying their scripts for far too long. They all looked up at me when I entered, smiled, and said, “Join us,”

I politely turned them down. I shouldn’t have, probably. Nobody ever noticed me, and I should take any opportunity I get to belong, but something about them and their smiles really freaked me out.

- - -

I found Kris with Josephine outside one afternoon under a maple tree. They were otherwise alone, of course.

“Come with me,” Kris said.

“I don’t know...” Josephine hesitated. “I’m needed at home,”

“They don’t care about you. You know that,” Kris said hotly. What use did her family have for a ghost, anyway?

“I still love them,”

“And you don’t love me? Come home with me. Please,”

“What about...” I could sense it in her tone. She was talking about me.

“If she was here, I’d invite her too,”

They didn’t even realize I was eavesdropping. My skills in sneaking have always served me well.

- - -

That holiday, the three of us paid a visit on Mandy, Kris’s mother. When we entered, my two ghost friends and I, we found her in the den. She held a glass of wine in her hand, and was staring at the blackness of an unplugged television.

“Mother, I’m home,” Kris said dully. Mandy couldn’t hear her anyway.

“I’m excited to see more of Kris’s house,” I said hurriedly. “Every other time we visit we only get to see the guest room and her room, and there’s so much more to it than that! You live in a mansion, practically! I want to see everything this time, okay Kris?”

“Hi, Mandy,” Josephine said quietly. Them being ghosts and all, I didn’t see it very practical to be so tense.

“Its not like she can see you. I’m the only one that can see you,” I said.

“Is someone there?” Mandy asked, her voice bitter. “Has my daughter come home?”

None of us said anything.

- - -

I was put in the guest room while Josephine and Kris shared her bedroom. I snuck down the hall that night, peeked in the keyhole of her door, and spied on them.

What I saw was the two of them, lip-locked. They were peeling each other’s clothes off and running their hands over the expanses of each other’s bodies. I turned away immediately, my cheeks flushed, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave my spot at the door. Instead, I listened to the sound of the mattress squeaking and the moans escaping them, muffled by each other’s tongues.

- - -

When we returned to school, I couldn’t look my friends in the eye. They held hands like the other girls did and linked their arms, but there was an air to the way Kris and Josephine did it that was different. When they held hands, there was an electricity surging behind their palms. There was desire, and it coursed through them and every single movement of their bodies.

I didn’t feel like I wanted to be a third wheel any more.

- - -

B-Wing smelled of rot. Wood rot, metal rot, animal rot. If you could think of a rot, it was in B-Wing in abundance.

I couldn’t stand it any longer, living in such fetid quarters. The filth was beginning to consume my flesh; my skin when I looked down at my hands was covered in dirt and boils. I had to clean up the B-Wing, or B-Wing would take my life.

I started with sweeping the floor of all the muck that had accumulated there. I then beat the filth out of my mattress, sending clouds of dust into the air. I swiped some Rust-B-Gone from the janitor’s cart when he wasn’t looking and began to treat my bed frame and my sink with it. I realized the rot of the building would never completely go away, so the lingering stench didn’t bother me as much as you would think. When the rust began to chip away and reveal good, old iron beneath, I went to cleaning the mirror.

Once I had cleaned away the grime, I saw my reflection. My face was sunken in, like I had been rotting with the building I was living in. My eyes had freaky bags beneath them, sinking lower and lower down and into my face. My whole body was covered in black blotches and where there weren’t blotches, boils covered my greening skin. My hair was long and tangled, my nails curling in their obscene length. I blinked to hide the horror staring back at me, and found when I opened me eyes, I had no reflection at all.

I suddenly was overcome with visions of what had happened. Headlines talking about a flood, how an unconfirmed number of girls had died. How that unconfirmed number turned to one. I remembered watching my mother receive the word of my father dying in action when I was young, watching her fall to her knees. How she did the same thing when she saw the newspaper last spring. I remembered the funeral—the nightmare that plagued me. Kris and Josephine holding hands while attending the funeral with their families, grieving the loss of the only student to die.

Being left alone in a rotting dorm.

Nobody acknowledging my existence.

Nobody questioning me talking to ghosts that never directly spoke back.

They weren’t the ones who died in the flood: it was me.

I remembered the children who looked like I did in the library, and found my legs running. Running through the hallways of the school, no one there but me. I threw the doors to the library open, and they were still there in their study circle. They were once alive like I was.

But they weren’t anymore. Like me, they weren’t anymore.

They extended their hands once again, smiling, saying, “Join us,”

I grabbed their hands, mindful of the fact they could crumble away at any second and sat down.

“What page are we on?”

What page are you on?

Commentary:

A nightmare I had this morning, tweaked for your viewing pleasure.