Past Midnight. Mara Purnhagen

and I spent the next few weeks of our vacation going to the beach or taking walking tours of the historic downtown. She didn’t talk about what had happened and I didn’t ask. I hated to see her so quiet, though. She wasn’t simply my sister—she was my friend. We’d spent our lives moving from place to place and, besides my parents and Shane, Annalise was the only truly constant person in my life. Despite the fact that I sometimes felt overshadowed by her beauty and the attention she received, I was closer to her than anyone. I had missed her terribly when she left for school, and I knew I would miss her even more after the summer ended and we moved to our next destination while she began her junior year of college.

      “Where are you guys going after this?” she asked me one afternoon. We’d stopped at a little park to enjoy a picnic lunch. I was sitting against the trunk of a huge tree, eating pasta salad out of a paper bowl. Annalise was sitting cross-legged in the grass and poking at a Cobb salad with her plastic fork.

      “No idea. They’d better figure it out soon, though. I need to register for school.”

      “You’ll be a senior,” Annalise said softly. “Wow. That’s kind of hard to imagine.” She fastened a foil lid on her bowl and set it inside the beach bag we’d brought. “How many high schools have you been to?”

      I did a quick calculation. “Five? No—six. I guess Florida doesn’t really count, though, because I was only there for a few weeks.”

      Annalise shook her head. “You know, it’s not fair. To you, I mean. You should be able to stay in one place for more than a single semester.”

      I sighed. “That would be nice.”

      I had learned how to leave a place behind without leaving a piece of myself along with it, but more important, I had taught myself how to be detached. I never joined teams or clubs, and I doubted my picture appeared in a single yearbook. I was, in a way, a ghost: no one could prove I had ever existed once I physically left a location.

      “You should say something,” Annalise said. “I mean, aren’t you tired of Mom and Dad dictating your life?”

      “Why didn’t you ever say something? You’ve been to more schools than I have.”

      “Honestly? It never even occurred to me that I had a choice.”

      “But you think I do?” I wasn’t sure what my sister thought I could accomplish. Did she want me to pick a fight with our parents? Did she want all of us to move permanently to Charleston?

      “I think that if we approached them together, we could change things.”

      “Change what things?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to join Annalise’s revolution. Things were fine. Not perfect, but fine. I could live with that.

      “It’s time we had a voice,” Annalise said. “Whatever Mom and Dad want, they get. If they want to move across the country, they do. If they want you to stand in the middle of a room and allow negative energy to hurt you…” She didn’t finish her sentence.

      “What really happened?” I finally asked. She was plucking grass from the ground.

      “I don’t know, Charlotte. I really don’t. But I don’t want to feel that way ever again.”

      “What way?”

      “I just felt this sadness. This terrible, awful sadness, and it seemed to come from inside me and fill me up until I could hardly breathe.”

      I watched my sister for a while. She was staring at the grass, slowly running her fingers over it. I wanted to help her get over the experience, and there was only one way I knew how to do that.

      “You have to go back,” I said.

      “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

      “If you don’t face it—whatever it is—it’ll bother you. And you can’t escape it, exactly, because you live here now. What if your friends decide to go to the Courtyard Café for lunch one day? You can’t avoid this. Not forever.”

      “I know,” Annalise said softly.

      “We can go in the daytime, with the entire crew and everything, so you won’t be alone.”

      “That didn’t help me before.”

      “I’ll be with you, too. I’ll stand right next to you and I won’t leave no matter what.”

      “I know you won’t, Charlotte. But you didn’t feel what I did. You’re not afraid because you don’t think anything’s really going to happen.”

      She had me there. Annalise was the sensitive one in the family, a sponge soaking up other people’s emotions. I was more like a slab of concrete. I believed she’d felt something, but I didn’t think it was anything more than random energy. If she went back, maybe she’d realize that and she could stop feeling so frightened.

      We sat in silence for a few more minutes. I knew she was coming to a decision and that I shouldn’t push her. I looked around at the park where we were sitting and realized that we were just a block from the Courtyard Café. Horse-drawn carriages clopped steadily down the road while happy tourists snapped pictures and peered into the windows of specialty shops. Everything in Charleston felt so old, as if it was stained with history. I rested my head against the tree and wondered how long it had stood there. More than a century, I guessed. Its trunk was huge, and its thick branches curled up toward the sky.

      Finally, Annalise looked at me. “You really think I should do this?”

      “I do.”

      She stood up. “Okay, then. Let’s get it over with.”

      Our parents were thrilled that Annalise had reconsidered, but revisiting the café proved to be difficult. Mrs. Paul, the restaurant’s owner, had seen a surge in customers after my parents appeared on the local news and proclaimed the Courtyard Café “one of the most haunted locations in the city.” We had to schedule a time when business was likely to be slower so we could close off the side room and not affect the dinner rush.

      Two weeks later, right after the Fourth of July, we returned. Our visit was supposed to be short—less than an hour, Mrs. Paul declared—and we couldn’t move any of the furniture. Dad grumbled that they’d done a lot for the business and this wasn’t the way to be thanked, but Annalise was relieved—no matter what, the whole thing would be over and done with soon.

      “Ready?” I asked her. We were sitting at a small table in the main room as the crew set up their equipment.

      Annalise nodded. “Yeah. I mean, you can’t ever be ready when you don’t know what’s about to happen, but I’m as ready as I can be.”

      We were wearing black T-shirts and khaki pants like everyone else. I’d grabbed my sister’s pink sweater as we were heading out, just in case she got cold, and tied it around my waist as we walked into the side room. Both cameras were focused on us as Annalise and I weaved around the tables and made our way to the center of the room. I took hold of my sister’s hand and squeezed. She smiled at me then began to speak out loud.

      “Hello. My name is Annalise and I’d like to know if anyone is here with us today? If there’s someone here, could you give us a sign?”

      The room began to feel cooler to me, and I almost let go of my sister’s hand so I could put on the sweater, but she was holding on to me tightly and I didn’t want to pull away from her.

      “How are the readings?” Mom whispered to someone.

      “Normal so far.”

      “Keep talking,” Dad directed.

      Annalise took a deep breath. “Hello? Do you remember me? I was here a few weeks ago. I felt—something. Was it you? Is someone here?”

      Nothing happened. Twenty minutes passed, and all the readings remained the same. I could tell my sister was feeling calmer because she began to loosen her grip on my