Someone entering the room. A rough, calloused hand against my cheek. It doesn’t belong to anyone in this building I can think of. Fingertips trace my face and I think I must still be asleep and dreaming, but I don’t want this dream, whatever it is, so I turn my face away from the touch and then the footsteps retreat and I realize I am awake. I sit up fast, bleary-eyed, and stare at the open door to the nurse’s office. From here, the hall seems empty, seems cold. Was I awake? I get up slowly, my body groaning, and pad out of the office. I stand in the hall, unsure of my next steps. It’s dark and I feel exposed and I want to know who touched me because the more awake I get the more awake I’m sure I was when it happened and I can’t deny the familiarity of the touch but I need to deny its reality.

I walk past the administration office, guiding myself by shadows. I stand at the barricades against the front entrance and try to remember what it felt like to come through the doors every day when this was just a school. I can’t.

And then my whole body goes rigid.

The charged feeling of another presence in the air. I step forward, my eyes traveling over nothing. I bring my hand to my face and move back down the hall, the way I came, when I get another weird feeling, like I’m being watched. And then a musky scent coats the inside of my throat. My chest tightens. It feels like I’m being wrapped in plastic. I wonder if I’ll remember him forever, if nothing will disappear the feel of his hands, his scent.

“Dad,” I say.

The hall crackles with my voice, breaking the spell. I fumble back to the nurse’s office and sit on the edge of my cot, waiting for the invisible hand that’s squeezing my heart to let it go. I grab the flashlight and turn it on its lowest setting and it catches my note to Lily on the table. I unfold it and smooth it out over and over until I calm down.

I wonder if she hears him where she is now, if she hears his voice and his footsteps in her dreams. I wonder if she hears him when she’s awake or if she stopped hearing him as soon as she left, if everything got more okay the more distance she put between us. Or maybe the voice and the footsteps she hears are mine. I hope they are. I hope I’m the ghost that belongs to her.

“Ready to join the land of the living?”

I wince. Even Cary cringes as soon as it’s out of his mouth.

“I guess,” I say.

He brought me clothes from the drama department. A plaid men’s shirt and a pair of jeans that don’t fit. I look rural. The buttons of the jeans dig uncomfortably into my abdomen. I changed into them in the little bathroom across the room and when I came out, he was still there, waiting to ask me that. Am I ready.