The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

 

I glanced over at Eliza. I still wondered if she was behind it somehow—after all, she’d been the first ghost I’d seen … after. And there was something guarded about her that made me uneasy. She seemed to be hiding something.

 

“Maybe she’s different,” Eliza said to Florence, ignoring me. “Because she owns the place. Is that possible?”

 

Florence didn’t seem convinced. “Anything’s possible. But in my opinion she’d do well to confine herself to the known parts of the house.”

 

Known by whom? Now I was annoyed. “I don’t think I can accept being trapped here,” I said. “This is not a good place. I came here, and I saw all this dark smoke, and then—” I paused. “I was murdered.”

 

Florence jolted upright. “Murdered?”

 

“What could you possibly mean, murdered?” Eliza asked. “You jumped out that window.”

 

“I didn’t,” I insisted. “I would never have done that. And if I did—for some reason—then it wasn’t my doing. It was something in the house. I saw it.”

 

“What do you think you saw, honey?” Florence asked.

 

I nearly glared at her, but stopped myself. “Like I said, I saw … smoke. Coming out of the walls. It came over me and … it made me fall.”

 

“You’ve been through an awful lot,” Florence said, a careful slowness to her words, “and nobody can blame you if you went a little batty because of it all.”

 

A familiar old feeling flared up inside me. It took a moment before I recognized it as the feeling I’d had when my parents disregarded what I’d actually said and instead heard things as they expected them to be.

 

“How do you know I jumped?” I asked Eliza.

 

She drew back, offended. “Well, I didn’t push you, in case you plan to start accusing me again. I … I was in the room. I heard the commotion and came to see what was happening.”

 

“You saw me fall? And then you saw my ghost?”

 

She nodded.

 

I sat up. “Then … why was I still inside? If I died from falling? Shouldn’t my ghost have been outside?”

 

She blinked.

 

“I couldn’t breathe,” I said. With the memory, my throat tightened. “Right before I fell. I couldn’t get air in my lungs.”

 

Florence sighed. “Delia, nobody’s trying to tell you this place doesn’t operate in mysterious ways. There are plenty of unanswered questions around here. But say there is something in the house that could do that to you—wouldn’t it be best left alone?”

 

“Forget it.” I shook my head in frustration. “Anyway, there’s nothing stopping me from looking for a way to get back to my family.”

 

They didn’t reply.

 

“Is there?” I asked. I felt increasingly like the two of them were in some clique that I was being shut out of.

 

“I just think …” Florence glanced at Eliza. “I just think you’ll be happier—in the long run—if you don’t make such a fuss.”

 

“But I …” I couldn’t even find the words to express the fact that I was completely unable to tolerate the idea of a “long run” spent in this haunted old place. “I guess I’ll figure something out.”

 

Then the room was awkwardly silent, and I felt like I should just go find my own spot and leave Eliza and Florence to be BFFs without me. So I stood up and walked self-consciously out of the dormitory, basically reliving all the moments in my life when I’d proved too dorky or smart or unfashionable to hang with the popular girls.

 

Of all the things I would have guessed about being dead, I definitely didn’t expect that it would sometimes feel exactly like high school.

 

 

 

 

 

I spent the night sitting alone in the superintendent’s apartment. But by the time morning came, I was restless and antsy, and the low, dark ceilings seemed to be closing in on me. I passed into the lobby, headed for the double doors that led outside, and then felt a jolt of shock.

 

Two wide-eyed teenage girls stood directly in my path, shoulder to shoulder, both with messy hair and in matching long, flannel nightgowns.

 

More ghosts.

 

The girls stared in mute fascination until I slipped outside, at which point their shrill giggles echoed behind me.

 

I rolled my eyes and kept going. A soft snow fell, the kind of big, fluffy snowflakes that land on your clothes as tiny crystals. Except they fell right through me as I passed silently through the quiet morning.

 

I trudged down the hill to the west of the house, stopping when I came to a row of white marble protrusions sticking up through the snow.

 

Just as Theo had said—the graveyard.

 

A few feet away, there was another row of headstones, and another one after that. Those beyond were buried in a deeper bank of snow, which was a relief to me. I didn’t especially want to know how many women and girls had met lonely deaths here.

 

I turned around and nearly ran smack into Theo.