Shelly laughs and undoes her ponytail, scooting across the rug to the nearest vent. She carefully lowers her hair down through the grate and then looks up at Grandma and Mrs. Potts. “Do I just sit and wait?” she asks. “How many mice do you think—”

“Shelly!” Shelly turns her head, looking at her mom standing in the doorway of the room with Jenny. “What are you doing? Mom, what?”

“It’s mice,” says Shelly, trying not to frown. She knows what she’s doing. She’s carried around bigger ghosts than mice before. “I’m just getting them out.”

“Your hair is going to be full of ghosts and cat hair. Shell, pull back please. There’s got to be another way.”

“I was going to do it myself,” Grandma says. “Shelly wanted to try.”

“You shouldn’t be sticking your hair down vents either, Mom,” Shelly’s mother says. “This is a bad plan.”

Shelly feels a tug on the ends of her hair—one tug, followed by a bunch more all at once. She lifts her head up carefully and the ghosts come out with her, passing easily through the grate. Ghosts are spirits and spirits don’t care about things like barriers unless they want to care about them. Ghosts can touch people and things, but people and things can’t touch ghosts—not unless they’re like Shelly and her family.

Shelly lifts her head up with her hair full of little wisps of ghost mice, and her mother, across the room, shudders and looks away. “Mom, please—help Shelly outside?”

“They’re just mice,” Grandma says, amused. “Come on, Shelly. Let’s get rid of them.”

Grandma and Shelly walk out of the house, Shelly’s hair writhing with little ghost mice, and Grandma opens the front door so Shelly can step into the yard and comb out her hair with her fingers. It feels good doing the whole job start to finish on her own, especially with her mother there. Usually Shelly watches or just gets to help out a little, but this time it was all her.

“Those cats earn their keep,” Grandma says, as the ghosts scamper into the bushes lining the driveway. “Come on, Shelly. Let’s go show your mom the mice are gone.”

When they walk back into the living room, Shelly’s mom is sitting as far away from the vent in the floor as possible with a cat in her lap.

“All gone,” Shelly says. “No more ghosts in your floor, Mrs. Potts.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Potts says. “Let me get you some money.”

“Oh no,” says Grandma. “Edna, don’t worry about it. We’re friends and you’re feeding us dinner. That’s more than enough.”

Mom glances up, briefly, at the ceiling then looks at Shelly as she takes a seat beside her. Shelly’s worried she’ll be mad, but she smiles.