I was disappointed he hadn’t said anything about my scary experiences, but maybe he hadn’t known what to say. What would I have said if he’d told me he thought he was being haunted?

“I guess?” I didn’t move either.

“Is it because you don’t feel the same or because you’re embarrassed?”

I didn’t have to think about it. “The second one.”

I heard him exhale. “Okay, good.” He waited a couple seconds, then asked, “What does the old man look like?”

I bit the edge of my fingernail and pulled, talking around it, describing the man to Izzy. “And he wears a yellow scarf, just like the man in the ghost story I told Colette last year.”

“You mean a gold scarf?” Izzy asked, rolling onto his side, seemingly okay to look at me now. He propped his head in his palm.

“I’d call it more of a mustard, but some people might think it’s gold, why?”

He pushed himself up. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

My legs felt wobbly after jumping as I followed Izzy across the lawn to his house. We went in, and no one was around: not his mom, who I’d met earlier, or Seb, who’d been watching TV when we’d gotten here.

Izzy led me through the living room toward a door I assumed was the garage, but when he opened it, I saw that it was a stairway leading down to a basement. We don’t have basements in Long Beach, so it felt weird following him down the plush carpeted stairs to a room under the house. This one was a rec room—a chilly one covered in brown and gold everything. I looked at the pennants and framed jerseys on the wall, the alternating brown and yellow pillows on the beige couch, the bright gold throw blanket tossed over one side.

“What is all this?” I asked.

“Cowboy pride,” he said, pumping his fist in the air.

“I assume the Cowboys are a sports team?”

“The best sports team: the University of Wyoming. Go, Pokes!”

“Um . . .”

“Hey, we don’t have any pro sports here,” he said. “The college teams are all we’ve got. Anyway, was the scarf brown and gold, like this stuff?”

“Just gold,” I said, frowning. “But about the same shade.”

Izzy scratched his head. “I’m not sure, but the man you’re describing sounds a lot like my friend Casey’s great-grandpa. He’s like a hundred years old, and he wears scarves all the time, even in the summer, because he’s hella old and freezing all the time. Casey said his house was like a sauna. He lives at a nursing home now.”

“He’s not really a hundred, though, right?” I asked.

“No really, he is!”

My heart was pounding. “Your friend’s great-grandpa’s name is William? William Longley?”