Upstander by James Preller (free ereaders .TXT) 📕

The Garden Gnome was Jonny’s nickname for Ernesto, their mother’s boyfriend. Ernesto was short and paunchy, and he wore a scraggly, elfish beard. Not his fault, but those were the facts. Mary stifled a grin. She caught herself and flashed a time-out sign with her hands. “Stop. Just stop.”

Mary crossed to the refrigerator. Grabbed two clementines, checked her phone, looked from her mother to Jonny. “I’ll be in my room,” she announced. “Headphones on.”

6[ghosts]

On days like this, Mary hated being home, and most days were like this. The house full of drama, worry, stress; her mother anxious about Jonny, and Jonny doing whatever he pleased. The same tug-of-war nearly every day. Threats and accusations followed by excuses and broken promises. Which was why Mary spent most of her time outside or up in her room, drawing pictures, painting, eating marshmallows, zoning out.

It was the summer when Mary first realized she lived in a house of ghosts. One by one, they’d started moving in, replacing the old occupants. Their father was the original ghost, but he had passed years ago, when she was only three, so that wasn’t new or, for Mary, keenly felt. Jonny was the big change. The thing with ghosts is when they take over, they don’t send out a group message. It’s subtler than that. You might not notice the change for weeks, months, maybe years. Then you look up and, oh wait, “You’re not my brother.”

“Yes, I am,” the phantom replies.

But you both know it’s a lie.

The real brother has vanished, maybe gone for good.

The ghost stands there, lanky frame swimming in an oversize T-shirt, wearing his clothes, pretending to be her beautiful big brother.

But it’s totally not.

Mary could tell by the eyes, darting from place to place: the floor, the window, the bedroom door, as if scanning for exits in case of fire. Ghosts are weird about sleep. They don’t need much of it at night, but then will nod off at the breakfast table, a half-chewed piece of raisin toast in their mouth. It’s the ghost way of eating. Food doesn’t really matter to them; swallowing was part of the disguise.

She heard Jonny clomping in the hallway, coughing. It didn’t sound like he was being followed by their mother, which was a good thing. Sometimes she chased him up the stairs, and the battle raged on and on. Maybe they declared a ceasefire. The bathroom door opened, then closed. She heard the shower.

Mary swung open her door, left it partly ajar, and returned to her desk. She spied Jonny as he padded past like an old cat, towel wrapped around his waist. He was skinnier than ever, ribs showing, scapula blades too prominent, but somehow having him home felt less dangerous than the thought of him out there somewhere, doing who knows what. Home, at least, he was safe. That was the dream anyway.

The thing with ghosts, Mary speculated, is they don’t feel anything. That’s how they know they’re dead. The not-feeling is a big clue. It’s also helpful, because that’s basically how a ghost tolerates being a ghost. Because, again, the not-feeling thing. The last sensation a ghost wanted was to start feeling emotions, empathy, self-awareness, anything. That was how Jonny lived now, she could tell. It was like when your foot’s fallen asleep and then you try to walk. Zombie foot. Those pins and needles, fighting against the numbness.

The only way you wake up is through pain.

Ghosts want to stay numb.

They don’t want to feel—because feelings hurt.

For some people, maybe even her brother, drugs were novocaine for the soul. As the dentist says before he sticks in the needle: “You’ll feel a slight pinch, and then it won’t hurt a bit.”

Mary scribbled in her sketch pad. Weird faces inspired by Picasso, ears where eyeballs ought to go, cockeyed expressions, twisted lips, dangling noses. Then she looked at the page in surprise. Shock, actually. For across the bottom she had scrawled the words, Is he going to die?

Mary’s mind didn’t consciously pose that question. It was as if her hand had dreamed it up, the worryfear rising up from her body.

So, well, is he?

Mary sat and stared, pondering the answer. She almost added, Maybe.

“We all die, May,” Jonny had told her once. He’d called her that for years, changing Mary to May. She called him Jonny Bear—for no particular reason. She liked their private nicknames, their secret language. She recalled that conversation, we all die, the one time she got up the nerve to confront him with her deepest fear: that he might be killing himself, that he’d ruin his life if he wasn’t careful. Get off drugs. Stop altogether. Come back to being Jonny, the brother she’d lost, the one who had abandoned her when she’d needed him most. After Mary’s big speech, all those passionate, carefully rehearsed words, that’s all he had said. Smiled wanly in her direction, like a poser Holy Ghost, as if he knew a secret but couldn’t tell. “Everybody dies. We all die, May.”

She could have punched him in the face. Should have. Because at that moment it felt to Mary like he was already dead. Already lost, adrift, floating tetherless through interstellar space—where no one can hear you scream. Mary felt forsaken. The core experience of being abandoned began when her father died in that car accident. She didn’t have many memories of him. At least, not true memories. There were photographs, videos, so she knew what her father looked like, how he acted when the camera was on, but it didn’t seem completely real to her. A memory of a stranger once removed. Horrible to say, but her father might as well have been a supporting actor in a movie she saw at the Cineplex 18. Their father’s death was harder on Jonny, though he never said much about it. No complaints. He just pulled up his socks and went forward with