We reached the cabin breathless and awake, with twigs caught in our shoes and scuffs on our knees from all the falling. But we were alone, except for the snores and unconscious shufflings of our roommates.

Cora and I climbed into the same bunk and yanked the covers over our heads, turning the flashlight on to illuminate our private little space beneath the blanket. For a few seconds, we panted back and forth, catching our breath and listening for the worst.

“What was that?” I asked, suspecting she didn’t have a much better idea than I did.

She shook her head to confirm it. “Dunno. But at least I can make it go away. And at least I know it’s really there, now. At least you saw it too.”

“Yeah, I saw it too. And you did—you did make it go away.”

“I told you. You’ve just got to say the rhyme.”

It was my turn to shake my head. “That’s the dumbest spell I’ve ever heard,” I said. “I can’t imagine why it worked, but I’m glad it did.”

Cora smiled wide and all the way, for the first time in the few days I’d known her.

“If we knew why it worked, it wouldn’t be magic, would it?”

The next day, when we returned from an hour’s worth of swimming, there was a message waiting for Cora from her mother. Her grandfather had died of a stroke sometime while we were doing cannonball leaps from the diving board.

Her parents came to pick her up that afternoon, and she did not return.

The next year when I came to Camp Lookout, I looked everywhere for her. I wanted to know what had happened with the mean white thing and if she’d ever learned how to make it go away completely.

But I never got to ask her. She wasn’t there.

II

That summer at Camp Lookout set the pattern for most of the rest of my youth: even the good parts were often overshadowed by omnipresent specters and knowledge of the insanity in my family woodpile. In time, curiosity and adolescent confidence outweighed my fear of Lulu’s wrath, and I came to watch her constantly for a moment of weakness, a time when I could pounce on her with my unwelcome questions. But I had to wait for that moment, long and patiently, and with faith. I waited until high school, miles and years removed from lonely train stations and tangible interactions with other girls’ ghosts.

My time came one night when I came home from school and found Lulu in her room, lying face up on her bed. A bottle of coconut rum lay on the floor beneath her hand, and her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. The phone on the nightstand was off the hook and shrieking a dull, whining busy signal.

She opened her eyes when I came in, then closed them again.

“Damn,” she said. “I thought you were Dave.”