Supervision. Alison Stine

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      “I just screamed myself hoarse. I can make objects seem to float, and that’s entertaining, but no one sees my hand holding the candlestick.”

      I looked away, down the road. Clara made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t seem to shake her; she could appear and disappear where she liked. “Where’s Tom today?”

      She shrugged. “He had a hard night last night.”

      “How can you have a hard night? You don’t sleep. What do you do all the time?”

      Clara stood. “There are ways of entertaining oneself. Like this.” She nodded toward the road. “Here he comes. Just like I told you.”

      The truck pulled to a halt in front of the mailbox. In the front seat, a man in glasses sorted through a stack of envelopes. I felt nervous, like I was about to get in trouble, about to get caught. I didn’t really trust Clara. But Clara said I couldn’t get caught.

      She pushed me forward and I tripped against the truck, grasping at the open window frame to steady myself. The man in the truck—the mail carrier—didn’t notice. I said hello. He didn’t notice.

      I stood right beside the truck. I took the letters when he stretched them toward the mailbox. I was shaking so hard, I knocked them out of his hands.

      He looked up, but not at me. He looked past me, right through me. He didn’t retrieve the mail that had fallen. He didn’t even get out of his truck. “Haunted house!” he said, and yanked the truck into reverse, moving away from us, as fast as he could.

      I watched the truck careen down the road, then I picked up the mail from the mud.

      “Good work,” Clara said. “Now you know the post office can’t see you. Oh well for your pen pals.”

      “You don’t have to be so mean, Clara,” a voice said—and Tom was there, at my side in the way that he and his sister and Martha had, appearing without warning.

      I turned to him, and my smile at hearing his voice fell away. On his face, there was a bruise, a huge purple circle blackening his eye, bleeding darkly onto his skin.

      Tom said it didn’t hurt, but he wouldn’t let me touch his face, or get an ice pack.

      Or Martha. “It’ll fade,” he said. “I promise it will.”

      “I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you couldn’t bleed. I thought you couldn’t get hurt, couldn’t get bruised. I thought that’s how you knew I wasn’t dead.”

      “We can’t get hurt,” Clara said. “Unless—”

      “Clara,” Tom said.

      She shrugged and turned, skipping back up the hill to the house.

      “Tell me about the mailman,” Tom said.

      I couldn’t look at Tom with his bruised eye. I looked at the ground instead. “He didn’t see me. He cursed and ran away, said my grandmother’s house was haunted. Do people know, about you and Clara and Martha? Does everyone in town know?”

      “I don’t know. There have been stories about this house for a long time. People say it’s cursed.”

      “Did you live here? Was Martha your maid?”

      “Oh no. We lived down the hill.” He turned and pointed across the road, to an empty field. “There was a little shack there, by the railroad tracks. It was torn down, years and years ago. We had a view of the mansion on the hill, and at night, Clara and I talked about what it might be like to live there. But we didn’t see anything or hear anything strange around the house before…”

      “Before you died.”

      “Yes.” He faced me. “Is this too much for you?”

      “That you’re dead, or that you’re talking to me? Or that I’m invisible? Or what?”

      “All of it.” He took my hand. His touch was warm. His hand was warm.

      Real, I thought. Alive.

      This was happening. We couldn’t be figments or shadows or fades. We were real, and when he brought my face closer to his—that was real. And the fluttering in my stomach—that was real too. I felt true things. Everything was real except his breathing, which I couldn’t hear; a pulse in his wrist, which I would never find; a heart, which could never beat for anyone.

      “Your bruise,” I said. The mark was already starting to fade. “What happened?”

      “That must be nice.” A man stood at the top of the driveway, the man in black with his hands in his pockets and sticking-up black hair. “Ghostie love,” Mr. Black said.

      I pulled away from Tom. “I’m not a ghost.”

      “Isn’t it convenient, Tom, that a girl your age should die, just—what? A hundred or so years after your interment? Lucky you. You hardly waited at all.”

       A hundred years?

      “Esmé Wong,” Tom said. “Mr. Dylan Black. He’s a decent friend, when he isn’t tanked up.”

      Mr. Black made a little flourish with his hand, and attempted a bow, nearly tripping. He smelled—like earth, as Tom and Clara and Martha did—and like something else too, something strong, medicinal.

      Alcohol. Mr. Black was drunk.

      But that wasn’t what worried me. “How old are you?” I asked Tom.

      “Don’t scare her off now,” Mr. Black interrupted.

      “When did you die?”

      “Always an awkward question,” Mr. Black said.

      “Tom,” I said.

      He glanced at Mr. Black. “Isn’t there a hay loft that needs haunting?”

      Mr. Black shuffled away, muttering. Tom waited until he had gone. When he turned back to me, his eyes were flashing. How could they do that? How could they change depth, and sparkle, and lighten and darken? How could he be so changeable? He was dead.

      “When?” I asked. “When did you die?”

      “Ez,” Tom said.

      “If you won’t tell me how, at least tell me when. At least tell me how old you are.”

      Tom said, not looking at me, “I died in 1903. I was seventeen.”

      “You’ve been seventeen for over a hundred years?”

      “It’s not that bad. It goes by quickly. You find things to do.”

      “What? I scared the mail carrier today. That took two minutes. What else have you been doing?”

      “Trying to find a reason.”

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