Love is Hell

And how could they?

How can anyone make sense of something so nonsensical: the sight of my sister, Emma, in her Girl Scout uniform—the one she always insisted on wearing to bake sales, cookie sales, troop meetings, or just around the house. She’d been in a coma for six full months.

But I still saw her that day. She opened the front door of our house, crossed the living room to kiss me goodbye, and then vanished without a word.

I knew it was her ghost that appeared to me. I knew that she had died. When I tried to tell my mother, she buckled to the ground, refusing to believe me, telling me I was cruel and insensitive for making up such horrible lies. But then, not even five minutes later, my father called from the hospital and told us—Emma had passed away.

Craig slides a bowl full of crinkle fries and ranch dressing toward me. “How’s it going?” he asks.

Raina frowns at the offering. “You really want to nauseate the girl on her first day of lunching with us?”

“Actually,” I say, “this looks great.”

Craig seems to like the answer. His smile grows wide, showing off the tiny—yet adorable—gap between his two front teeth. “I knew this girl had taste.”

We end up trading lunches like in grammar school—a few of his fries for a couple of my peanut butter–stuffed celery sticks. And then Craig suggests that we all get together this weekend. “Raina and I can give you a tour of the town,” he says.

“Should take all of five minutes,” Raina jokes, glancing at the bruise on my wrist.

I tug my sleeve down to cover it over, and then give them a thumbs-up for the tour. We end up making plans for Saturday night—at 7:00 P.M. sharp. Craig offers to come pick me up, and that’s when I tell them my address.

“Are you kidding?” Raina gasps, nearly snorting out her strawberry milk. “The bloodbath house?”

“What are you talking about?” I pause mid-chew.

“No big deal,” Craig says, trying to make light of it. “Just your typical friendly neighborhood—”

“Bloodbath!” Raina bursts out, finishing for him. “Didn’t the real estate agent tell you the history of your house?”

I shake my head as they give me the details: a seventeen-year-old boy was murdered there, the police found his body in the bathroom, and it was the mother’s boyfriend who did it.

“Apparently, a blow to the head,” Craig explains. “The boyfriend hit him with a crowbar and he landed hard against the cast-iron tub.”

“Hence the bath of blood,” Raina offers.

“Lovely,” I say, thinking about the boy in my dream—he had a gash in his forehead.

“Seriously,” Raina continues, “I don’t even know how you can sleep at night. People say the place is crazy-haunted.”

“I can’t sleep at night,” I say, feeling my stomach churn. “I mean, not usually.”

“Well, that would explain it,” she says. “I mean, I hate to be rude, but you’re packin’ some serious baggage under those peepers, and I’m not exactly talking Louis Vuitton.”

“Nope, not rude at all.” Craig sighs.

Raina hands me a stick of cover-up, explaining that it’s “the good stuff,” reserved only for after her late-night study marathons.

“Which is why it’s never been used,” Craig clarifies.

While they continue to bicker, I slide back in my chair, fighting the urge to toss up my french fries right on the spot.

“Are you okay?” Craig asks, probably noticing the sickly look on my face.

“Yeah,” Raina jokes, “your head isn’t going to do a three-sixty on us, is it? All I need right now is a hunk of spew to land in my duck sauce.”

“I have to go,” I say, getting up from the table. I grab my books and bolt out of the cafeteria, foregoing Raina’s stick of cover-up, since it’s obviously going to take a whole lot more than makeup to fix what’s going on inside my house.

And in my dreams.

Five (#ulink_32beb0fa-f0ca-5ca1-9ef6-7238b0d1a1e7)

AS SOON AS I get home from school, I dump my books on the floor and make a beeline for my computer. I begin by Googling our home address, which is actually all it takes. An article from the Addison Gazette pops up right away.

It’s all about our house, about how it finally sold—to my parents—after years of sitting on the market. Apparently we’re not the first family to live here since the infamous bloodbath. Two other families inhabited this place, but it didn’t take them long to bolt—six months for the first family, six years for the second. Both claimed that things went bump in the night.

The article segues into the history of the house, and what happened here twenty years ago. Raina and Craig were right. A seventeen-year-old boy was murdered. His body was found in the bathtub after he’d been hit over the head with a crowbar.

“Travis Slather,” I whisper, reading the victim’s name aloud. A toxic taste lines the inside of my mouth. I close my eyes, trying to hold it all together, remembering the boy in my dream last night.

He told me his name was Travis.

According to the article, Jocelyn, Travis’s mother, was home when it happened, but she’d been badly beaten herself. The police discovered her huddled inside the hallway closet downstairs, barely still alive. I read on, learning tidbits about the killer—that he was indeed the mother’s boyfriend, that he had a criminal record filled with domestic abuse offenses, and that he’s currently serving a life sentence in prison.

I glance over my shoulder at my room, conjuring up the images from my dream—the Bruins gear and the navy blue bedcovers—knowing somehow that this was his room, which prompts me to search even more.

I end up navigating to a site called “New England’s Most Haunted Homes.” I scroll down to a picture of my house. It basically looks the same as it does now—same brown color, same wooden steps, same black metal mailbox—except the maple tree in the front is much taller now. And the window on the second floor—the one in my bedroom—is no longer boarded up.

It seriously gives me chills.

I try a bunch of other sites, looking for information about ghosts and hauntings, weeding through all the individual posts—from those claiming to have the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Kurt Cobain taking over their bodies—until I finally find something worthwhile.

It’s a website that talks about hauntings in general, stating that ghosts who haunt tend to do so because they can’t pass on, because they have some unfinished business to attend to. They cling to people who have some sort of extrasensory insight, relying on them to tie up their loose ends.

So they can finally rest at last.

A tight little knot forms in my chest just thinking about it. I mean, aside from that one time with Emma, I’ve never really thought of myself as being or having anything extra-anything, never mind possessing supernatural powers.

“Brenda?” my dad calls, edging open my bedroom door. “Are you okay? You’ve been in here all afternoon. I thought maybe we could watch the game together.”

“Why didn’t you guys tell me?” I say, trying my best not to hyperventilate.

He opens the door wide. “Tell you what?”

“That this place is haunted, that a boy was murdered here twenty years ago.”

“Since when do you believe in ghosts?”

“Since Emma died,” I say, feeling my jaw stiffen.