1
We had the bad luck to come of age at the beginning of the end. Our senior year coincided with the season of tempests and pestilence. And although some of our surviving peers later made their livelihoods writing glib op-eds with names like “The Year that Fuck Around Turned into Find Out,” all we were concerned with that year was the ghost boys.
In late autumn, our girls’ school held a special assembly to discuss the third girl in our class to get pregnant. She’d been among us, and then she was gone: whisked out of our school, out of her home, as if she—like the other two—had never existed.
It just kills me to look at you girls, with your hearts full of love, our headmaster said, dabbing at his forehead with a paper towel. He was a timid man, with milky white hair and milky white skin, and his hands always trembled when he stood before our pews.
And then to have to look at those boys, the Thomases and Zacchaeuses of the world, with their hearts full of—of—
He stopped, as if his innocent mouth were unable to even form the word.
In any case, he said, I’ve taken a special step. I’ve ordered one hundred ghost boys to be delivered to our school. The boat from the other side will arrive tomorrow.
We gaped. Not only because our school had, under the auspices of the church, always taken a hard line against any sort of spectral communion but also because no one had ever heard of such a quantity before. The swankiest Halloween parties usually only wanted two or three ghosts for atmosphere. Even the best downtown haunted hotels only shelled out for a half-dozen or so.
Yes, the headmaster said, pleased at our reaction. The company had to go through quite a lot of effort for us, gathering boys from all over the plane. But, he said, his eyes roaming the pews, we thought the expense worth it. To protect you girls.
The ghost boys, he explained, would provide companionship for us. They would be our friends, our study-mates. Perhaps they would—though the company could not guarantee this—develop a stronger connection. These ghost boys were perfect gentlemen. They were not like the hoodlums from the boys’ school, with whom we could no longer share lunch or dances or after-school activities. We would not end up like those first three girls.
Something the administration was offering to us on a silver platter—it had to be a trick.
And yet even tricks glint in the sun. A trick flame can, in a pinch, warm you at night.
We peppered the headmaster. Could the ghost boys stay in our homes, or was that a sin? Could they stay in our beds, or was that a sin? Could we sit next to them, side by side, with a pillow in between? Without a pillow?
The headmaster pressed his sweaty hands against his khakis as he stumbled through the answers. He seemed to be suppressing a feeling at the back of his mind. His scheme, we would learn, had received pushback from the board. Three girls is a crisis, the headmaster had said. It’s nigh on the End Times, he said—all anyone had to do was read the news or look out the window. Different rules for different eras. In the end, he’d had to shout Augustine at them: that God would never permit anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil!
That night the headmaster read through the Book of Revelation again. He imagined the Four Horsemen coming down Main Street, passing by the train station and the boba shop. His school, at least, would be ready: his girls as pure and white as the driven snow.
That night, at our own homes, we couldn’t sleep, imagining the ghost boys. We hadn’t asked the headmaster our real questions: Could they love us? Did their love feel real? Could we hold it in our fists? Could we hold it in our throats?
2
On that ill-fated morning the boat from the other side arrived, the headmaster kept us in the chapel after prayers. It was time to meet the ghost boys, he said. He opened the side door to let them in. We stood up and pushed toward the front, the way we did at the Christian rock concerts, but even in the front row we could barely see. Leaning against the far wall, the ghost boys looked like almost nothing.
We wanted to get close; we were afraid to get close. We pushed until we were ten feet away from them, and then we stopped, as if there was a line across the floor. We looked at the boy-shaped wisps surrounding the headmaster and his pulpit.
You each can pick a boy now, the headmaster said. Go on.
The ghost boys came alive at his words, preening and posing like contestants on Love Island. There was an excess of boys, and no one wanted to be the one going back on that train.
But we hesitated. All our lives we were used to being told no. We were used to clawing at the boundaries. Now, given a yes, we did not know what to do. We waited, watching the boys banter with each other, until Jenny strode forward.
She passed the gulf between us girls and the boys, and she pushed through the boys standing in the front. For a while she disappeared from view. A hush came over us. After a minute she emerged, holding hands with a boy who had been all the way in the back. After this, we all surged forth to get a boy.
They were only visible in contrast: their outlines shimmered against our pulpy frames. It was also hard to hear them when they spoke, their hushed contraltos sinking below our brassy clamor.
Jenny picked her ghost boy because he had slunk back, almost disappearing into the linoleum. Her ghost boy could take this world or leave it, she thought. Lately, she too had felt this, every evening drinking in news about the forest fires upstate, the flash floods along the coast, as if she were only waiting for—or perhaps willing—such disasters to happen here.
When, at the end of the period, Jenny introduced her soft-spoken ghost boy to us, we wondered if we had chosen wrong. Anything Jenny picked was perfect; we measured our own ghosts in relation to hers. Perhaps, we thought, each of us could have a do-over. But by then the headmaster was shuffling all the ghost-rejects back out the door, their ectoplasmic faces forlorn as they prepared to reboard the boat to the other side.
That first day, the ghost boys came with us from class to class, standing in a quiet clump in the back. In history class, we couldn’t focus on the documentary; we only turned around to see if we could remember which ghost boy was ours, if we could glean from their gestures—their stance—who they were. By eighth period, our fingers were trembling with anticipation. Not only would we be able to be alone with our ghost boys, but we were allowed to be alone with the ghost boys without the weight of sin hanging over us.
After school, Jenny’s ghost boy followed her home. In the living room, her skeptical parents sat on the couch across from them; in the bedroom, he saw in the mirror the reflection of him and Jenny, seated at the foot of the bed together, his mist next to her solidity. He blushed, invisibly.
In the kitchen, where Jenny’s little brother, Mikey, joined them at the table, her mother had placed before the ghost boy a steaming Zojirushi. His saliva gathered, but after Jenny’s mother made him a bowl, he could not taste the food; the spoon went through the space where his mouth was.
Haven’t you figured this out by now? her brother asked him.
It’s my first time back, he explained. (Being an American, he was screwed. The other ghost boys annually returned to the living—the Japanese all going back in summer for Obon, the Mexicans for Day of the Dead, the Taiwanese for ghost month. The American boys were out of luck.)
What if we placed the food for you on an altar, her father asked, trying to be hospitable.
He went downstairs and dug around in the basement until he found his grandmother’s old home altar. He set a bowl of rice in front of the boy and waited, but no luck.
Instead, the ghost boy watched them eat. Forks through the soft salmon. Slurps of miso. He lacked nostrils but could smell all of it. My kingdom for some MSG, he thought.
Do you think about your old life, Jenny asked him that night, when they were alone in her bedroom. He sat at the very edge of her bed. She leaned against her desk, not yet bold enough to sit next to him.
Her ghost boy shook his head. I don’t even know my name, he said. Without a holiday to call him home to the living, it was easy to become untethered on the other side.
Then what do you think about, she said.
Food, he said, honestly.
Though our headmaster had feared his scheme would not work, the ghost boys became our ghost boyfriends very quickly, due less to our inherent charms than their desperation, which seeped through their skin as pungent as the scent of soil which called to them.
We were thrilled with our ghost boyfriends, who never left us for soccer practice or video games or another girl. Our parents viewed them with both skepticism and relief, and did not bother us when they followed us to our bedrooms and we closed the doors.
The ghosts stuck to us as if their lives depended on it. We argued over which of ours was cuter, smarter, more attentive, but Jenny’s ghost was, of course, the best—just as everything else Jenny had was the best. We didn’t mind. We were her best friends. We couldn’t count on a lot—everything, then, teetered on a precipice—but we could count on that.
Those weeks after the ghost boys arrived, we saw her less and less. We loved hanging out in groups—our ghosts seemed less weird when they were together—but she and her ghost boy broke off from us more frequently as she got used to his presence.
Sometimes she didn’t know he was there. Sometimes he seemed like a trick of the light.
They fell in love, as teenagers do. Afternoons, they walked along the lake. At twilight, he blended into the purple-gray shadows. And at night, they snuck out together. Under the almost full moon, she could clearly discern his features: the fine shading of his eyebrows, the curve of his collarbone. Once her mother caught them and was about to yell but then said, Well, what could you get up to, anyway? and let them go.
Are you vapor, Jenny asked him, waving her arm right through his torso. Can you feel this, she said, like a phantom limb?
No, he said. Can you feel me at all, she asked, twirling her body into his.
No, he said. He ran his hand up her arm, then to the top of her head, to see if her hair stood up. Can you feel me? She shook her head. Nothing.
On the other side, there were ghost girls, but they were evanescent. There was nothing for the ghost boys to hold onto. It was vapor against vapor. An echo couldn’t reverberate against nothing.
At school Jenny looked up stories about hungry ghosts. She looked up joss paper and hell money and that afternoon, after further research, she took a pair of scissors and proceeded to cut a piece of paper into tiny ovals. She colored in one of the ovals a pale pink and cut it into the basic shape of a fish. She placed each piece into the ceramic bowl and set it on the floor.
Your dinner, sir, she said. She dropped in a match. It smoked, but not much else happened.
She looked disappointed. All that folklore, she said.
Maybe you’re not doing the ritual right, he said.
Jenny brought the home altar into her bedroom and placed the ceramic bowl in front. She found incense in the living room cabinet and, after lighting it, waved it around the room. The scent of sandalwood filled the space. I don’t know what to say, she said. She dropped another match into the bowl, where the paper lit and flared for a moment.
And then it was there in his cheeks. She could see them bulge. He chewed. The soft give of rice—it had been, what, decades? His eyes got a little wet.
Thanks, he said. Could you cut up a little more?
At chapel, while the rest of us were singing, Jenny stared out the window. Our ghosts had taken to hanging at the park together until we were let out of school, but Jenny’s ghost boy was never far from her. He was there, the glint behind the oak tree. Sometimes we could see him and sometimes we couldn’t. Sometimes she could see him and sometimes she couldn’t. It depended on a lot of things, things even Mrs. Ito could not explain to us in our physics class.
When Jenny shivered, or glanced around the classroom, the rest of us would wonder—was he here with us right now? Could he see us raise our eyebrows at each other? Whatever was happening between them was happening outside our purview.
Whatever her parents made for dinner, Jenny cut her own paper version and lit it aflame on their little altar, and the ghost boy could taste the meal, and then swallow it. After dinner, they excused themselves to her room and lay next to one another in her twin bed. It was big enough for both of them because he took up no space.
For a few weeks this was enough, and then it wasn’t.
When they were alone, walking through the park, Jenny held her hand to where she thought his cheek was and said I wish. In the bright sun she could only see the hollows of his eyes.
I know, he said.
In bed he crawled on top of her but she was not crushed. They were eyeball to eyeball.
He felt like nothing.
I want, she said. I want, she said.
In his life—his old life—no one had ever said anything like that to him before. Mostly girls had ignored him. Death was one long longing.
Cutting out the chili for his dinner—black paper for the black beans, red paper for the tomatoes—he asked, what if you light a picture of me from before, would that work?
Would what work? Jenny asked.
For us to be enmeshed, he said. For me to be inside you, like the food goes inside me.
I don’t know, she said. Maybe.
It would only last a moment, he said. He thought it would be enough. The taste of rice and nothing else.
How can I be the one to do the consuming, she asked. Burning the paper made the food cross realms, they knew that much, from the living to the dead. But how could they make it switch?
What’s the opposite of fire? he said.
Water, she said. There was water for purification in front of all the shrines I went to in Japan. Maybe fire and water, she said. If anything will work it should be that. We can try, anyway, she said. Skin to skin.
She went to the kitchen and filled a mug with tap water. When she returned he was standing near the window, looking almost corporeal. She drew the outline of his face on a piece of blank paper, and then filled it in: his watery eyes, the small hump of his nose’s bridge. When she finished, she placed the sketch in her little bowl. She looked at the black-and-white image.
She crumpled it. This was a silly idea, she said. I can cut you out some ice cream instead.
No, he said.
Perhaps what lay at the end of the eating was not connection but annihilation. He did not know the rules of this transmigration, what bridge they were preparing to cross. He did not know why he had remained as a ghost. Was this what would push him over? Suddenly fearful, he reached out, but his hand passed through her as it always did.