‘Why wouldn’t I? You don’t need to read that, Sydney. You really don’t even need to look at it any more.’

‘But what if it was …’

‘What?’

‘Evidence?’

Olivia tilted her head. ‘Evidence of what?’

‘That … I don’t know, that …’

‘Seriously. You don’t need to look at it. And there. It’s symbolic. Literally burning, because it doesn’t matter at all. OK?’

I wanted to fight with her, insist that it did matter. That everything mattered, all of this mattered, and still no one else noticed.

I thought about this for a while.

‘Hey,’ Olivia said finally, something charged in her voice. ‘Let’s play Ghosts.’

Ghosts? It was potentially the weirdest thing she could have said at that moment. Ghosts in the Graveyard was a game we’d played when we were little, scurrying through the wooded labyrinth behind my house. Actually, it wasn’t much of a labyrinth. But it was big enough to be disorienting at night, and that was all you needed for Ghosts. That and preferably more than two people. Dad would play, sometimes. Ghost would hide. Gravedigger would look. And if the ghost caught the gravedigger first, the gravedigger would become the ghost. ‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘Right now?’

‘Yeah. Come on. I’m trying to – I don’t know. You used to love to play. Scared the bejeebus out of me. Maybe it’d get your mind off things. You know? Do some dumb kid stuff.’ She headed for the tree line, started to shuffle through. ‘I’m ghost.’

‘Fine. Thirty seconds,’ I told her while she crept further in. The crunch of twigs grew more distant, and her black coat disappeared between the trees, and then it was just me, counting up to thirty, saying time’s up, and stalking in after her.

My footsteps were slow. When I was little the woods gave me the creeps at night, and even now a sharp pang of fear sat at the bottom of my belly, waiting to strike, but it wouldn’t. Not now. I had seen every scary thing in the world. I was every scary thing in the world.

I came to the dried-up scar in the earth where there used to be a creek, and flicked on my phone’s flashlight so I wouldn’t fall off the makeshift bridge Olivia and I had built over it with plywood we found in her garage. In the summer, there would sometimes be enough fireflies to light the way. By mid-June there’d normally be so many that it was hard to tell where the star-littered sky ended and where the forest began. They’d light up on the ground, even, so if you blurred your eyes just the right way it felt like you were walking through space.

And then I saw … someone.