They were playing a game. Clasping and unclasping hands, following rules I couldn’t make sense of. They were wondrous and I was unafraid. Under the steady moon, the fog moving across the sky like a living thing, I watched for a long time, astonished by how lucky I was to have been chosen. How incredible it was to be there in that strange, incomprehensible place. I saw the glow of a new ghost approaching, and something shadowy, too. Something there and then gone.

I half slept in Blake’s skeleton house under the eucalyptus trees.

Wind through the dry leaves.

An owl’s hoot, a cat’s yowl. A scampering. My mother’s moan.

Once it was light I rose to my feet, bladder full, and found the hole in the ground Blake used as a toilet. He’d told us about the ashes he poured over to get rid of the smell, but I smelled it anyway—pungent enough to turn my stomach. I squatted, held my breath. When I had finished, I rinsed my hands at the spigot. I washed my face and my hair, too, used a bar of soap because it’s all I could find. I wrung my hair out, water dripping onto the dirt, and went to find my mother.

There she was, sharing a bench with Blake by the firepit.

He looked at me with his green eyes, his smile that had never been friendly, not even the first time I’d met him. His arm was around my mother, holding her in place.

“Good morning,” he said.

___

My best friend, Hayley, the only friend I spent time with outside of school, was away at camp with no cell service. I left her a message later that day, telling her to call me as soon as she could. But that evening, before she’d called me back, Blake took my phone away.

“We don’t need these,” he said. “What we need is human connection.”

He was standing in fur-lined slippers on the concrete foundation, the frame of the house towering over him, the last of the evening light filtering through the place where the roof should have been.

My mother had just left for work. She would be gone all night.

“I want to show you something,” he said, slipping my phone into his pocket. “Follow me.”

I followed him to the space he called his room. There, tarps hung as walls with blankets lining them for insulation. Layered carpets spread over the concrete, and on top of some of them was his mattress. He opened a box and dug through it for a velvet pouch. Inside was a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

He handed them to me. “These can be a lot of fun,” he said. “The old-fashioned kind. Let’s fix some dinner and you can see what you find when you take the time to really look. You don’t need screens. You need real life.”