Ms. Josette is standing in the walkway at the back of her shop. A green-and-gold gown shapes her like a serpent. Her dreads are long and freshly twisted, their sheen reflecting in the candlelight.

“It’s funny,” she says, her voice like an oracle. “Something told me I’d be visited by a certain Jake Joseph Livingston today.”

“Hi, Ms. Josette.”

She’s still and brooding, eyes wide as the moon, mouth pursed with disapproval. “You ignored my last call.”

“Oh.” I laugh nervously. “My bad. I don’t talk to anybody, really. I’ve been trying to get better about that.”

She comes toward me, her gait languid and graceful—a swag too tough to cross—and pulls me in for a tight hug. “Well, at least you’re here now. I’m sensing . . . increased panic. Fear for your life.”

Amazing how she does that. “Something like that.”

“Come to the back.”

The chamber has an intricate Kashmir carpet, with flowers, pinwheels, and faces in the patterns. I sit on the floor and rest my elbows on the low table. The alphabet forms a rainbow shape in the wood. There are numbers underneath, and good bye is carved into the bottom.

I grab a pillow and hug it to my lap.

Ms. Josette plops into a green armchair across from me and pours a cup of tea.

“I’m only hard on you because I want to know you’re safe,” she says. “How’s it been, managing the perceptions?”

“Fine, mostly. I’m better at it now. Better than I used to be.”

“No ghouls hanging out in your bedroom?”

“I saw one in my neighbor’s yard. Well, I saw one in my yard today too.”

Josette slows the kettle to a drip. “That doesn’t sound good. Usually they show up to the homes where all the joy has gone missing.” She puts the kettle down, crosses her legs. “What’s going on, Jake?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” I guess there’s no joy in my house. “It’s not just the ghouls. I’m afraid something else is after me. I kind of feel like I’m fine, and it can’t really hurt me, but then I feel like it can. And it’s just waiting for the right moment, or slowly planning my demise. A ghost. A vengeful one who’s trying to haunt me for some reason, and I don’t know why, because I haven’t done anything to this person. I never knew this person.”

There’s a moon and a sun carved into this table too. A yes and a no.

“In what ways is it haunting you?”

“Showing up at my house. On the patio. And at school, in the library. It shows up, and it doesn’t usually do anything, but today it did. It was floating through the walls, and I chased it up to the roof. And it told me . . .”