with a mind so easy

With her notebooks lying around her, those heavy block textbooks with ancient graffiti inside the covers because the school’s too cheap to buy new ones — it’s that heavy late-afternoon hour where all the light is gray and all sound is muffled, before anybody else is home to cause a ruckus and be embarrassing. Headphones on, bookbag slumped beside her pillow. She shuts her eyes and sticks her hand down the front of her skirt, past the waistband of her underwear.

Anya is thinking of Sean, of somebody else — of nobody at all, maybe, just what it would be like to be somebody else. No story, no fantasy, just working with her hand until she’s almost there and letting up, and then back again, long lazy circles of almost coming close and then shying away before she has to come.

Eyes shut, not thinking about anything — not anticipating the weight of long hair swishing against her face, heavy as water and insubstantial as smoke.

Anya jerks back to reality. Anya screams.

The ghost is hovering beside her, calm as anything, making a motion like she’s filing her nails or something. Anya yanks her hand away and shoves it under the bedspread — like that’s going to hide what she’s been doing with her knees sprawled apart. “Jesus! Emily!”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Something like that. Can’t you go back inside the necklace and give me some privacy?”

It’s like having a roommate — kind of fun, kind of obnoxious. Maybe this is what having sisters is like. She doesn’t say go back inside your fingerbone, seriously, because that’s both rude and unsettling, but she’s thinking it.

Emily ignores her and settles in on the ledge next to the bed, pearly and prim.

“Why don’t you ever put on something nicer? I wish I could.”

“What do you mean, nicer?” Anya sits up. “It’s a uniform. I wear it every day.”

“I know that. But you could do something to it. At least straighten up your socks.”

Emily pulls out on a long thread of ectoplasm, or whatever she’s made of, rustling the folds of Anya’s skirt as she goes past. The elastic tops of her school socks begin to hike up higher, first on one fat leg and then on another. It kind of tickles, and it’s really annoying.

“Hey, cut that out—”

“It looks sexier this way!”

“What do you know about sexy?”

She’s not going to make sartorial decisions on the basis of what a tragic horny ghost has to say. Maybe she and her soldier boyfriend never made it together and she’s living vicariously through making Anya look like the town tramp. Maybe it does look better that way. If Emily’s been reading fashion magazines again maybe it’s time to see if she can use the internet — though that might blow her little ghost mind, and it doesn’t seem kind to remind her that everybody who might have been alive to catch the guy who killed her is long-dead by now. Anya rolls over onto her side with guilty hands folded and pretends to nap. Emily pretends to let her.

*

(Some nights she wakes up with her pyjamas shucked apart — with the top pulled up and her shorts low down on her hip — and tries not to think about how she got that way.)

*

It’s after one of those services that runs too long, full of standing up until your legs cramp and snide comments in the vestibule afterward from your mom’s sister’s cousin’s great-aunt about whether you’ve gained weight. Anya can’t go out past seven on a Wednesday night to see a concert or go to a movie but listening to old people complain about politics is a 24/7 commitment, apparently. Emily got an eyeful of Russian community pride and Anya got to hear all about what church was like back in the old days, while hoping nobody caught her whispering into her cleavage

Anya is bone tired. (Though maybe that’s not the phrasing she should be using with Emily around.) Tired like she hadn’t been since she fell down that huge hole in the first place, though then at least she’d had crazy amounts of near-death-experience adrenaline to keep her going until completely wiping out. Her knees are wobbling. She shimmies out of her skirt, makes more or less sure the door is shut as far as it’ll shut, and shuts her eyes — no headphones, no nothing.

And when she sleeps, she doesn’t really dream. Or she dreams about Sean and the girl in the bathroom at that party, about indiscriminate arms and hands and mouths and not Elizabeth keeping sad watch outside the door. It’s sexy, but only in the disjointed way dreams are sexy — bumping up against stuff you’d rather not think about, getting completely spoiled.

She doesn’t really wake up, either.

It’s like lying on your back in a swimming pool and having the water pool up over your face, your nose, your eyes — Anya always hated swimming and that going-under feeling isn’t helping. Something is happening to her —

Something she can’t fight. Like lying there in soaking-wet clothes — heavy, and immobile, and freezing cold. Her lungs are straining, and her throat hurts, locked in a permanent swallow — she wants to jerk upright and gasp, but she can’t.

The necklace is still there, around her neck. It’s digging into her throat, trapped against the mattress behind her shoulder. She fell asleep without even taking it off. She didn’t even take her bra off, and Emily had been so chatty all night, so funny, so nice even—

The weight of it is choking, like somebody’s boot is stomping the air out of her lungs. When she opens her eyes it’s like yanking up a garage door by hand — but the pressure on her chest eases a little, and even in the dark she can still see a little.

Emily’s head is between her legs, her mouth moving against the cloth of her underwear.

You can only sort of see herself through her now — her hair is a dark spill of opacity, but you can see the ugly birthmark on the inside of Anya’s thigh straight through Emily’s hand where it grips her hard enough to hurt.

“Emily.”

And her eyes — Jesus, her eyes, looking up at Anya from the ink black, not shiny but completely flat. Like holes in the darkness.

“You were thinking about it. We didn’t do that,” Emily says, “back then.”

They’re talking, but her mouth won’t move. What the fuck? “You’re hurting me—”

“I thought girls were supposed to shave now,” Emily says with a discernible sneer, and her white smoke hand snakes over Anya’s skin, from the soft inner part of her leg down to her knee. But she’s not even talking about her legs, because she goes right back to molesting her through her panties like this is just a thing that girls do. Anya can feel her tongue poking up against her clit, just a little.

She’s wet. Did Emily do that, or did that just happen?

Play it cool. You wouldn’t have boundaries either if you’d been dead for a hundred years, and what is a hundred-year-old dead girl doing complaining about her bush?

She can’t even move to swat her away. It’s like something in a movie, where time stops and everybody’s stuck in whatever ridiculous positions they were in before — her arm’s sprawled behind her head, her left leg is bent, the covers are balled up down the side of the bed like they just got kicked off in the night. It’s not cold without them, and it’s not warm, and thank God the door is still closed —

Anya’s mouth has dried up. Her throat still hurts — like trying to scream, and not screaming, except Emily can still hear her.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Let me have fun for once. Help me.”

If she concentrates really hard, she can move her right arm. It’s bent next to her side, just below her breasts, falling across her abdomen real casually — if this is how Emily’s arranged her for easy access to her body she’s going to scream for real.

Emily slips two fingers into her, just testing.

“Just stop it! I know you don’t have a body but this is uncalled for. I’m not—”

“What about your friend who wears boy’s clothes?”

“Maybe Siobhan’s a lesbian, but that doesn’t mean I want to get eaten out!”

And maybe she likes girls but that doesn’t make her a lesbian. There are no lesbians from Russia, they must all come from someplace else. From Ireland, like Siobhan. Like Emily Reilly, R.I.P.

“Is that what they call this? You should take your panties off. Pretend I’m Sean.”

“I’m not going to take my panties off—”

“Take them off or I’ll stick you like this forever. They’ll find you like this in the morning. The whole town will come. It’ll be another big mystery.”

If she concentrates hard enough, she can move her arm by degrees — Emily must get fed up with waiting because a sudden burst of slack lets her move almost unimpeded, but only far enough to pull the elastic waistband down, to shimmy it down to mid-thigh. If she really concentrates, she can flex her knees — not one at a time but both at one time, to force her legs apart.

It’s like manipulating a really big, really stiff doll. And it’s humiliating. Emily has rolled off her, if she was ever really on her to begin with, and is watching her do it. Her awful sharp white fingers start playing with Anya’s body.

Okay, think about science class. Think about science class and the doctor’s office and gym class. Not Emily’s cold wet mouth tracing arcane patterns on her clit, and her fingers—

She doesn’t really come. Or: she comes, but it isn’t good. Like hurting, like pressing down hard on the webbed part of your hand — a bruising force, something being ripped away from her. Anya splinters apart. Like being forced right up to the edge, in front of a long drop — and when she wakes up every inch of her body is shivering and boneless.

Maybe she just had a seizure or something. Maybe that’s all that was. Her face is wet, her arms and legs are slack and her whole body aches like a bruise. Anya lies in the dark with her eyes wide open and makes no sound.