It’s your junior year in high school and when everyone else has already cemented their friendships and formed their cliques, you get to be the new girl. It’s super fun feeling permanently awkward and not knowing anyone for those first 3 months where you eat your lunch in the bathroom.

The night whispers and so do the ghosts but I pretend like I don’t hear them because no one else does. But I do. I always did. But no one else does. Except my cousin, Mia. She sees me, and I see her. We see each other, and we see them. We pretend like we’re like everyone else. But we’re not.

It’s hard for us to sleep. I still can’t but when I was a child it was even worse. The night terrors. The dreaming of bad things that sometimes would happen. I was told I was silly. Imagining things. In fact, I wish I was imagining, silly childish games. I wasn’t. I was haunted and had nightmares that followed me in the daylight.

It started when I was a baby but when I was five, that was when I became afraid. At night, I saw someone my mother said wasn’t there. She said it was normal to have imaginary friends. It wasn’t a friend. It was something I couldn’t explain. It looked like a person, but my mom couldn’t see him. He had long, black hair, he had long fingers and he stayed in the shadows where the darkness would pool around him. There was an absence of light wherever I would see him as though his very presence dimmed the light. I would be awoken in the middle of the night, frozen in terror. He would wait until I was in a deep sleep and then he would start to play and would slowly pull the covers off my sleeping form. At first, I screamed until I realized it accomplished nothing but upset my mother. Then I told him to stop but he never did. Now I just squeeze my eyes shut waiting for whatever it is to pass.

My cousin also saw him. He was transparent and had a black heart which could be seen through his transparent torn shirt. It never was clear – what he wanted maybe just to be seen. When Mia stayed with us which was often back then, she held me and stroked my hair. She told me it would be ok. But it really wasn’t, and if he wasn’t there would be another shadow waiting to take his place.

Mia and I saw a photo at our neighbor’s house, Mrs. Wren, and that’s when we found out our nightly visitor was a troubled soul who used to live in our apartment on Willow Lane. His name was Laurence and he died in our apartment. Mia said that he couldn’t hurt us but he could steal our ability to sleep and he did.

Mia and I were like sisters then, closer than many sisters by blood. I was older, but she looked after me and was so brave, so sure of herself. Many thought we were twins but when we would tell them I was older, they would look at us uncomprehending.

Back then we had our own language, my cousin and I, and sometimes when we really tried and focused, we knew what the other was thinking. Usually it was unimportant things like that the other was hungry or that someone wanted to go on a bike ride especially at first. Other times, we communicated secret things, important things. One time in particular would never leave our memories. The time Mr. Wallace gave my cousin the creeps.

She told me never to be alone with him because he was a bad man. One day, Mr. Wallace was outside when I was playing and he came closer. He asked if I wanted to play in his basement and said he had loads of toys from his nieces and nephews. In answer, I ran home and put the covers over my head. Hours later my mother came to get me for dinner and I was in the same spot, hiding, She wouldn’t let me stay in bed unless I told her why I was so afraid. She wouldn’t stop asking because seeing me so afraid she knew something wasn’t right. Eventually I told her. She worked in foster care and knew right off the bat the suggestion from Mr. Wallace was odd considering he was an unmarried, retired man who never had any children.

My mother told my father who went over to talk to Mr. Wallace. He must have scared Mr. Wallace because days later they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot or at least that was what we were told. It seems Mr. Wallace liked children much more than he should. They found a secret room in his basement with chains and other implications that he was not a good man. The most unsettling aspect for the neighborhood to digest was the police found a jacket that belonged to Charlie who lived down the street. Charlie hadn’t been seen for years.

When I was growing up in that neighborhood and on my walks to school, while passing Charlie’s house on Poplar Street I would sometimes see him wave to me from his bedroom years after his disappearance.

I didn’t mind seeing Charlie, but I did mind seeing Mr. Wallace stare soullessly at to me from his window. The worst was when he would visit me at home at night. At first it frightened me, until I ignored Mr. Wallace much like I ignored the other things that were happening to me. Eventually he evaporated into thin air, but I never forgot what it felt like when the hairs on my neck would stand up and I would open my sleeping eyes and his ghost would be smiling back at me.

He was a wolf. His large gleaming teeth and dominant personality. She should have know better but instead insisted that she knew what she was doing. She didn’t and then her house of cards crumbled and she was humbled to only except scraps. Until one day, she knew she’d had enough. She was better than what she thought of herself and she knew she needed to break away. She chiseled every last lock of the chain she had gladly thrust upon herself and made her escape. Her defiance, her willingness to leave everything - it changed her. She was stronger than she knew. Armed with only that knowledge, she began to look at things shrewdly but she found her hope. She had the audacity to want better. These are the teachings she learned. She could get through anything as long as she remembered that caresses were fleeting but self preservation was necessary as air. This was merely a dark time but the light she saw in the sky held so much promise, it took her breath away. She looked high above and then took flight to where she was always meant to be.