“Erin!”
A tendril of white, wet substance pushes past my lips. It coils and oscillates in front of my tear-stained face, branching out and upwards, a root reaching for sunlight.
“Holy shit.” Tobias pushes away from me, his eyes fixated on the tendril. My jaw locks, unable to close as I continue to expel this substance from deep within me. It just keeps coming and coming, whatever it is—unspooling—blooming in the air above our heads.
I can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Can’t— Amara reaches out to touch it.
“Don’t,” Tobias starts.
The tip of her index finger barely grazes the surface of the writhing mass, wet and alive.
Tobias tries to pull Amara’s hand away. “Don’t touch it—”
The mass ruptures.
Whatever suspended itself in the air immediately loses its hold the moment Amara touches its slippery surface. It falls to the floor and bursts into a yellowish liquid that appears to contain the contents of my last meal. Trail mix and bile splash across the floorboards.
I feel as if I just broke through the surface of a body of water, finally able to breathe again. I gasp for air, drawing in deep, ragged breaths as I expel the last of the drug from my stomach.
“Erin. Erin.”
I finally look at Amara. The terror in her expression is unmistakable.
“What—” I say, hacking uncontrollably. I hold out my arms to her. I need to hold someone. Need to feel safe. “What—”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, I got you.” Amara opens her arms and I collapse into her, letting her take my trembling body and keep me from shaking. I can’t stop. She combs the wet hair out of my face with her fingers, using her sleeve to wipe the vomit from my cheeks.
“What was that?” I shriek.
Tobias is practically hyperventilating. The elation on his face sends a chill through me—I know exactly what that expression means.
It works.
stash
The mushroom cap is a creamy off-white, a gauzy veil draped over its stalk. When I hold it up to the sunlight, it’s nearly translucent.
It even resembles a ghost, I think.
“Shrooms?” Amara is incapable of hiding her disbelief. “Are you kidding me? We’ve been taking fucking shrooms?”
“Hebeloma sarcophyllum.” Tobias’s jaw clenches as he enunciates its name. “They’re very rare. They don’t grow on just anything.”
I try repeating the name. “Sarco…”
“Phyllum. You can’t even find them in the US. Silas had to order a batch from—”
“I don’t give a shit where they came from,” Amara interrupts. “You lied to us!”
“How? I’ve told you everything. You’re just not listening to me.”
“You didn’t tell us we’d be shrooming. We’re not in college, tripping our balls off.”
“Taking Ghost isn’t shrooming.”
“Stop.” I can’t keep from trembling. My sleeping bag is draped over my shoulders, but the cold reaches my bones and now my whole body is vibrating like a tuning fork. “Just…stop.”
A stale, meaty aroma has seeped into my skin. Amara leans in to take a whiff of the mushroom cap, then pulls back, her expression souring. “No wonder you puked.”
“That wasn’t vomit,” Tobias says. “That was ectoplasm.”
“I’m sorry?” Amara’s expression sours.
“Ectoplasm,” Tobias repeats. “A substance that exudes from the body during a trance—”
“Oh, come on.”
“It must be some kind of side effect of the—”
“I’m surprised Erin didn’t purge pink elephants!”
“We all saw him, right?”
“I didn’t see shit.” Amara says it way too quickly, as in end of discussion.
“That was Silas! Do you know how amazing this is? The séance worked. Ghost works—”
“Erin puking is not a religious experience and you’re sure as shit not some shaman.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I knew, I just knew, you’d latch onto this infantile idea that it’s all a bad trip.”
“That’s exactly what happened—”
“If I wanted us all to shroom, I would’ve bought us some shrooms!” Tobias isn’t getting anywhere with Amara, so he turns to me. “Erin—you experienced it. What did it feel like?”
“I don’t know.” I focus on the mushroom. Pinching its stalk, I roll it between my fingers so the cap spirals. All I think about is the shadow in the corner of the room. How it moved toward me—reached for me. I nearly touched him. “Can we do it again?”
“Excuse me?” Amara nearly shouts. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I want to try again.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Tobias cuts in. “Slow down. I’m not sure what the side effects are…”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Amara says.
“We need to stay hydrated and get some rest before we dose.”
“When?” I fail to suppress the eagerness that even I don’t totally recognize. The need.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I can see it click in Amara’s mind that this isn’t over yet. Not as far as Tobias is concerned—or me. It’s only Saturday. We have a whole weekend ahead of us. “I’m out,” she says.
“You saw him,” I insist. Silas materialized for me. Silas picked me. It was my voice that drew him in—not Tobias’s. It was my words that lured him toward our house. Mine.
“No, I didn’t.” Amara’s digging in. She’s not going to cede any ground. She’s scared.
“We’re this close,” Tobias says, nearly pleading with her.
“I—am—not—doing—it—again.”
This isn’t the response Tobias was expecting. He reaches for her. “Amara. Please. We—”
Amara yanks her hands back. “Don’t you touch me.”
“We can’t leave until we—”
“You can’t keep me here!”
It seems to collectively dawn on us all that I’m the one with the car. Both Amara and Tobias turn to me, identical pleading looks in their eyes.
“Amara…”
Amara steps back, the walls closing in on her. “I’ll call a cab.”
“You know what we saw.” Tobias says it in the calmest voice possible.
Amara looks back at me.
“Please, Amara,” I say.
I understand how she must feel like I let her down; that I’m on Tobias’s side now and she’s all alone in this house with no skin. She heads to the kitchen by herself. I hear her stifle a sob, but the house lets her anguish echo through its hollow halls.
Tobias turns to me. “If she leaves, we’ll break—”
“I’ll talk to her. Jesus, just calm down.”
I find Amara leaning against what would’ve been the sink. “Amara…? You okay?”
She stares through the window frame instead of at me. The late afternoon sun seeps through the tarp, casting a gray pallor over her face. She looks exhausted. Spent.
“This isn’t what friends do to each other. This isn’t healthy. You know that, right?”
She’s right. Of course. What none of us have said—not out loud, at least—is that our friendship has felt extremely lopsided ever since Silas died. Our quartet is now a trio and we haven’t found our footing yet. But hearing Amara say it, hearing the words out loud, cuts deep.
“So what’re you saying?” I try to make a joke out of it. “You breaking up with us now?”
She is, I realize. Oh god, Amara is letting go. She’s cutting me out.
“I’m only doing this for you. Not for Tobias, and definitely not Silas. Silas is dead.” Amara says it so matter-of-factly, it angers me. “He’s gone and this isn’t going to bring him back.”
“I saw him, Amara. You did, too, didn’t you?”
“No.”
Liar.
* * *
—
I can just barely spot the lights from Richmond burning on the horizon through the clear plastic tarps. Crickets chirp in a steady, mechanical thrum outside the house, dampened by the plastic.
We all agreed to stick together, just in case one of us—meaning me—gets sick. Amara wants to keep an eye on me, I can tell, even if the conversation between us is pretty brittle for the rest of the night. We’ve held each other’s hair back plenty of times, helping each other through our most pukeable moments. Even now, there’s a silent solidarity between us. I hope so, at least.
We’re in our sleeping bags, facing the ceiling. The lamp lights up the Ouija board walls.