A loud creak silenced us. Nick had arrived. He did not say hello downstairs or call out to ask where we were. He was all shuffles and swooshes, doors opening and closing. In our rational minds we knew it was him, but we sat stock-still with pursed lips, because that was what we kids of Albany did: created moments where there were none. Made the average into the entertaining.

How could they not see?

Eventually, Nick opened the door to our party room, and the rest of us dropped our charade. Nick crawled in without comment, making his way to the open space beside me. As he unfolded his old sleeping bag, black-and-blue stripes, the smell of soap and must and tree bark wafted over to my swollen nose. Once settled, Nick’s bag overlapped with mine just enough for him to pretend to adjust it. Really, he gave my fingers a quick squeeze: a continuation of our earlier conversation. I’m still here. Are you?

I squeezed back. Oh, the thrill of our touch, in front of the others, but without them knowing. My drowning heart gasped. Wading through my regret was getting harder to do. Everything brewing inside of me was desperate to come out, if only to make room for the hugeness of the feeling between Nick and me.

“So, we’re all here,” Aidy said once Nick stopped fixing his sleeping bag. Her words had sharp edges, ready to cut details into what the night might become.

If I knew my sister, it wasn’t an image that matched with mine.

If I knew myself, I could beat her.

Teeny gasped. “You’re about to announce this is a séance.”

Aidy replied bluntly, “It is not a séance.”

Teeny reached across Ruby to grab my hand and hold it to her chest. “Feel my heart. It’s pounding,” she said to me. It was so flattering, I almost burst right then and there.

She knew I would care. She was starting to understand.

“I’d protect you,” I told her as her heart beat into my palm. I’d always wanted her to toss me even the smallest of olive branches, so I could prove how that branch would root inside me and grow into an undying tree.

“Oh, because you know how to communicate with ghosts now?” Aidy probed.

“I do not do ghosts,” Teeny snapped, breaking our connection. I pulled my hand back and shoved it under my sleeping bag, trying to stop the world around me from shrinking again. I was okay.

It was all okay.

“You’re spending the night in the haunted house,” Harrison taunted.

“If you think this story doesn’t end with you being the first person here the demon kills, you haven’t watched enough horror movies,” Teeny taunted back.

“Why me?”