She got up and ran to the kitchen, bringing me back a beer. Alex looked at me wide-eyed, as if for the first time. I wiped my nose, against my hand. The tears kept coming; I’d accepted the embarrassment, so now I couldn’t stop them. I clutched the cold can of beer in my hand—it was a Budweiser, Alex must’ve brought it. Lonnie cracked the can, but I couldn’t get the resistance right, my hand wavered and we spilled a fair amount on the rug. She rubbed it into the weave, like a child.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I wasn’t trying to be mean.”

I sucked beer down. I knew the appropriate thing to do was apologize for my overreaction, to tell Alex it wasn’t his fault, that my emotions were a mystery to me, but I couldn’t get any of that out.

“I think we all need more alcohol,” Lonnie said, swatting at the game so the planchette skidded across the rug and the board folded up on itself. I was hoping she would say, “I think you need to leave,” to Alex, but more alcohol would help too.

“Yeah,” Alex said, getting up. “I brought a lot of beer.”

I leaned against the couch and Lonnie put her head on my thigh, a move I guessed she wouldn’t have pulled if Alex weren’t watching. We used to do that in high school too—leaning on each other in hallways as if our bodies needed holding up, exemplifying the kind of touch we were capable of.

“So, have you ever seen a ghost?” Alex said, handing Lonnie a Budweiser. The way he said it, you could tell he expected her to say no.

“In my dad’s building,” she said, sitting up just enough to spill a little beer into her mouth. “Where I grew up. There are washing machines in the basement, and I’d sometimes go down there with my nanny. We used to wash the towels and sheets down there because we only had a small machine in our apartment, and the dryer took forever. Every time I was in that basement, since I was a kid, somebody tried to hold my hand. It was a kid—the hand was the same size as mine when I was little, but when I was twelve or thirteen I noticed it felt small.”

“And you looked and nobody was there?”

“I never looked.”

“Never?”

“I haven’t been down there since probably high school but no, I didn’t look at my hand, I always just stared straight ahead.”

“Because you were scared?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. I always had the feeling that was what I was supposed to do.”

“So, you think, what? People’s souls are just hanging around? Or, like, only when they can’t rest in peace?”