“You’ve got to let the dead move on when it’s their time. The living and the dead both need that.” Grandma reaches for Shelly’s shoulder and Shelly flinches. Grandma pauses then drops her hand. “I know I told you that you needed to know how to care for the dead, but you’ve got to take care of yourself, too. You can’t surround yourself with the dead all the time. You’re still alive, Shelly.”

Shelly scowls. Grandma is the one who breaks her own rules now. She’s a hypocrite. “You’re always with the dead.”

“No, Shelly,” Grandma says, her voice all soft and full of pity “I’m always with you.”

All of Shelly’s anger rises to the surface. “That’s not true!” she says. “You leave me behind when you go on jobs. You’re so busy worrying about money and rent you didn’t even notice me hiding ghosts. You didn’t go looking for them, and you didn’t—” Her chest heaves. “You didn’t go looking for Mom. You just left her.”

Nothing is the same as the way it was before her mom died and Shelly hates it. She just wants her mom to come back and be her mother again. The dead don’t change, but the living do, and Shelly’s sick of it.

She turns on her heel and runs out of the house.

• • •

Shelly goes to the cemetery. She has her bus pass and doesn’t know where else to go. Her ghosts are gone and her mother is dead and she’s maybe not coming back after all. The cemetery is the only place she might find the answers that nobody else will give her.

She spends the bus ride with her hands clenched in her lap and her face hot with anger, thinking about Grandma clearing out her room. Her ponytail feels like a live wire on top of her head, buzzing with possibility and hanging too close to her neck.

When she reaches the cemetery, she storms up to Joseph’s grave. He’s sitting and murmuring to himself in French as a soothing female voice plays from his headphones. “Where is she?” Shelly demands. “Where’s my mom?”

Joseph looks up with his black eyes and frowns. “Your mom’s not here, Little Shell. I promised I’d tell you if she were.”

“No,” Shelly says. “This is where she’s buried. This is where she’d be.”

“Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re a ghost,” Joseph says. “Look at all these graves, and still—just me.”

“Why?” Shelly demands. “Why you and not her? If a bird can be a ghost, why not her? Where did she go? Where does anyone go?”

Joseph looks terribly, terribly sad for a dead teenager who talks through a Walkman. “I don’t know,” he says. “This place is all I know. I’ve always been here.”