Shelly lashes out and kicks her foot through Joseph’s immaterial body and he topples over from the force of it, coming uprooted from his spot on the ground by his grave. Joseph looks startled—at moving, at being suddenly unmoored, suddenly ghostly in a way he wasn’t before. He flickers, like the man who Grandma once dredged up from the river.

“Little Shell, what did you do to me?” Joseph asks, mournful as he twists in place and tries to claw his way back toward his grave, his spot. “Where have you put me?”

Panic claws at Shelly’s throat. She didn’t mean to—this isn’t what she planned. For all she’s been taking ghosts and bringing them home with her, she’s never taken someone who didn’t want to come—she hasn’t broken a rule like this before.

She doesn’t know how to fix it.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry, Joseph.”

Shelly does the only thing she can think to do and catches Joseph up in her hair. She turns and runs from the cemetery. She runs home, back to Grandma, who will know what to do.

20

When Shelly gets home, Grandma is sweeping the last of the ghosts out of the kitchen. Her hair is pulled up into a tight bun and she’s wearing an apron over her jeans and sweatshirt. Grandma clearing out her ghosts doesn’t seem so bad now. Not when panic is thrumming inside Shelly’s chest like a hummingbird trapped in a cage.

“Grandma,” Shelly says. “I didn’t do it on purpose. I just got so mad.”

Grandma takes one look at Shelly’s frightened face and Joseph in her hair and puts her broom down. She looks sad, tired. “There’s nothing to do, Joseph,” she says, voice gentle. “We’ll give you some milk and help you get to where you’re going.”

Shelly carries Joseph into the kitchen and sits with him at the table, trembling and quiet and sorry, while Grandma pours his milk. Grandma sticks the mug in the microwave and turns to look at them, rubbing a hand over her face. “How did this happen?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Shelly says quickly. “It was a mistake.”

“I made her mad,” says Joseph. “I told her I was scared.”

Shelly’s panic has calmed, but now all she feels is crushing guilt. Joseph wasn’t supposed to be uprooted. He was supposed to be allowed to stay until he decided to leave. Even if she and Grandma have both been breaking other rules, this one is going too far. Joseph isn’t an angry shade or confused wisp of a thing. He’s not floorboards full of mice or a raccoon in the chimney. He’s a person with thoughts and feelings and he’s scared—like Shelly’s scared—of the big unknown waiting for him.