We get to our lockers. I unpack the lunch I made, and scribble a quick note to myself on my lunch bag before putting it into my locker. (I write poems to myself on my lunch bag every day in my mom’s handwriting so that people will think my mom is really loving and no one will think I’m being neglected. Probably 89 percent of the energy I spend at school is on making it look like everything is normal at home so no one will ever have a reason to take me away.)

D’quan Daniels, who Germ used to crush on in fourth grade, passes us and waves at Germ, who picks at her hair before waving back. He looks at me as if he might wave to me, too, but then quickly breaks eye contact. Some of the boys are scared of me because last year I kicked a kid in the shins when he tried to tackle me in keep-away.

Germ, blushing with a combination of self-consciousness and pride, watches him walk away. It’s a look she wears more and more, and I don’t like it. Germ has never cared what people think, but these days she seems to care a lot.

Still, as her eyes catch mine, she suddenly zeroes in on me. She cocks her head, looking at me and placing a hand on her hip, her annoyance with me gone.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “You look kind of off.”

“I’m fine,” I say nervously, now unsure how to tell her about last night, or even if I want to. “I didn’t get much sleep.”

Germ folds her arms, unconvinced.

“What’s going on with you?” she asks sharply. “Tell me.” Now that she’s focused on me, she reads me like a book.

I look around the crowded hall. Everyone is busy talking, laughing. My throat tickles with nerves. I suddenly feel ridiculous.

But I lean forward and tell her anyway.

“I think I saw a ghost last night,” I say, low, feeling my face flush.

I wait for Germ to laugh, or be annoyed, or both, as she looks at me for a long moment. Sometimes I worry that she is losing that strange, wild, fighting-spirit piece of herself that makes us fit together so perfectly.

But now she lets out a breath decisively.

“I’ll ask my mom if I can sleep over,” she says.

CHAPTER 4

We go over it all several times on the bus ride home: the sound of muttering in the hall, the glowing man hovering by the door of the basement. Germ makes me slow down over this or that detail now and then, but she never laughs. She looks uncertain but not amused.