I lift myself out of my own sweat and plant my feet on the floor, pushing my hands into the mattress. “Oh, boy.”

“Oh, boy, indeed.”

“What was I saying?”

“Um . . . shut up, let go of me, no . . . sounded like you were fighting a kidnapper.”

The ghost on the patio . . . spoke through me in my sleep?

“Anyway,” Benji says. “Don’t be so scared. Mom says we’re getting the cameras tomorrow.”

“Cameras won’t do anything about the real problem.”

“Ugh. Don’t start talking about netherworld demons, please.”

He was done with it all when I was five and he was six. I interrupted his gaming to tell him there was a whole possum in our backyard.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“No, there really is!” I insisted. “I bet you ten dollars.”

I led him to the patch of grass where I heard the creature yowling from under the ground. He dug a hole just to prove to me there was nothing down there. What I found was a possum running in circles around the walls of its grave, and what he found was a skeleton wrapped in a dirty white T-shirt, worms and bugs clinging to the bones.

“You owe me ten dollars.”

Benji reburied the corpse with his foot and didn’t talk to me for three weeks.

He trudges out of my room now and clicks off the hallway light before I can respond. I follow and approach the top of the stairs as his bedroom door clicks shut behind me.

A roll of thunder shakes the foundation of the house as I put my foot on stair one. My hand squeezes the polished wood of the bannister, grateful to have something sturdy in it. From here I can see the entryway and the living room, but the patio door off the kitchen is hidden.

I move down the stairs and through the kitchen. The blinds are shut. There was someone out there when I was asleep, but it could have been a nightmare. Sometimes I can’t tell the ghosts in my mind from the real thing.

The house rumbles as I reach for the door to the patio. In the kitchen, a time flashes green on the oven display: 2:06 a.m. The power was out, and I didn’t even realize it. I’m not all there, I guess—not fully awake.

Through the blinds, the platform outside is empty. Nothing but the pots where Mom’s plants have died.

No people, and no ghosts.

Sawyer

October 17

Dear Diary,

It’s so easy these days to doze off in the sopped leaves. I know I’m only seventeen, but I’m ready to move out. Somewhere dank and dark. Maybe a tree house. It stormed out here last night, and I ventured out, found the spot where the most rain crashed through the canopy, and lay in the mud until I became a part of the melting earth.