Title Page

Dedication

For Louisa and Lois

BEFORE

1

Shelly’s grandma teaches her about ghosts, how to carry them in her hair. If you carry your ghosts in your hair, you can cut them off when you don’t need them anymore. Otherwise, ghosts cling to your skin, dig their fingers in under your ribs, and stay with you long, long after you want them gone.

Shelly’s mother doesn’t like ghosts. She doesn’t like Grandma telling Shelly about them. It’s an old argument, one they have every time Grandma gives Shelly a lesson. “You’ll scare her,” she says, like Shelly isn’t in the room. “You’ll keep her up at night.”

“How is she going to take care of herself if she can’t take care of the dead?” Grandma asks, and Shelly’s mother never has much of an answer for that. So Grandma teaches Shelly about ghosts, how to keep them, and how to get rid of them—not just her own ghosts but other people’s, too. Shelly likes to think of herself as her grandma’s apprentice.

Today, Grandma’s client is a woman clad in expensive yoga pants with her hair in a high ponytail. “We burned sage,” the woman says. She tours Shelly and Grandma around her haunted apartment—it’s bright and airy, much bigger than the old duplex Shelly and her mom and grandma share. “To cleanse it, you know?”

Grandma smiles, all bland and pointed, and Shelly stifles a laugh with her hand at the image of this yoga lady waving her spice rack around, trying to exorcise her apartment. “To cleanse it?”

“From the . . . spirits. The demons. You know.” The woman gestures vaguely at Grandma, at her soft brown skin and warm brown eyes, at the little turtle earrings she wears every day. The things that make some people say Native, but Grandma corrects them and says Ililiw or Cree. “It’s cleansing. The smoke. We fanned it around the whole house and nothing. The spirits are still here.”

Shelly can see the ghost that haunts the lady’s apartment dancing around her feet. It’s a little dog with a constantly wagging tail, trotting around on tiny paws with nails that clack against the hardwood floors and echo through the hallways. It noses its way over to Shelly and Grandma like it wants to play.

Grandma keeps smiling, her eyes on the woman and not the ghost dog. “I don’t use sage to cleanse ghosts.”

“Oh. So it’s like . . . for other stuff? Bad juju?”

Grandma turns her back on the woman. “This is a tough case,” she says and winks at Shelly. “I might have to charge a little more for the work. Do you mind?”