Love is Hell. Melissa Marr

talking Louis Vuitton.”

      “Nope, not rude at all.” Craig sighs.

      Raina hands me a stick of cover-up, explaining that it’s “the good stuff,” reserved only for after her late-night study marathons.

      “Which is why it’s never been used,” Craig clarifies.

      While they continue to bicker, I slide back in my chair, fighting the urge to toss up my french fries right on the spot.

      “Are you okay?” Craig asks, probably noticing the sickly look on my face.

      “Yeah,” Raina jokes, “your head isn’t going to do a three-sixty on us, is it? All I need right now is a hunk of spew to land in my duck sauce.”

      “I have to go,” I say, getting up from the table. I grab my books and bolt out of the cafeteria, foregoing Raina’s stick of cover-up, since it’s obviously going to take a whole lot more than makeup to fix what’s going on inside my house.

      And in my dreams.

       Five

      AS SOON AS I get home from school, I dump my books on the floor and make a beeline for my computer. I begin by Googling our home address, which is actually all it takes. An article from the Addison Gazette pops up right away.

      It’s all about our house, about how it finally sold—to my parents—after years of sitting on the market. Apparently we’re not the first family to live here since the infamous bloodbath. Two other families inhabited this place, but it didn’t take them long to bolt—six months for the first family, six years for the second. Both claimed that things went bump in the night.

      The article segues into the history of the house, and what happened here twenty years ago. Raina and Craig were right. A seventeen-year-old boy was murdered. His body was found in the bathtub after he’d been hit over the head with a crowbar.

      “Travis Slather,” I whisper, reading the victim’s name aloud. A toxic taste lines the inside of my mouth. I close my eyes, trying to hold it all together, remembering the boy in my dream last night.

      He told me his name was Travis.

      According to the article, Jocelyn, Travis’s mother, was home when it happened, but she’d been badly beaten herself. The police discovered her huddled inside the hallway closet downstairs, barely still alive. I read on, learning tidbits about the killer—that he was indeed the mother’s boyfriend, that he had a criminal record filled with domestic abuse offenses, and that he’s currently serving a life sentence in prison.

      I glance over my shoulder at my room, conjuring up the images from my dream—the Bruins gear and the navy blue bedcovers—knowing somehow that this was his room, which prompts me to search even more.

      I end up navigating to a site called “New England’s Most Haunted Homes.” I scroll down to a picture of my house. It basically looks the same as it does now—same brown color, same wooden steps, same black metal mailbox—except the maple tree in the front is much taller now. And the window on the second floor—the one in my bedroom—is no longer boarded up.

      It seriously gives me chills.

      I try a bunch of other sites, looking for information about ghosts and hauntings, weeding through all the individual posts—from those claiming to have the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Kurt Cobain taking over their bodies—until I finally find something worthwhile.

      It’s a website that talks about hauntings in general, stating that ghosts who haunt tend to do so because they can’t pass on, because they have some unfinished business to attend to. They cling to people who have some sort of extrasensory insight, relying on them to tie up their loose ends.

      So they can finally rest at last.

      A tight little knot forms in my chest just thinking about it. I mean, aside from that one time with Emma, I’ve never really thought of myself as being or having anything extra-anything, never mind possessing supernatural powers.

      “Brenda?” my dad calls, edging open my bedroom door. “Are you okay? You’ve been in here all afternoon. I thought maybe we could watch the game together.”

      “Why didn’t you guys tell me?” I say, trying my best not to hyperventilate.

      He opens the door wide. “Tell you what?”

      “That this place is haunted, that a boy was murdered here twenty years ago.”

      “Since when do you believe in ghosts?”

      “Since Emma died,” I say, feeling my jaw stiffen.

      He glances down the hallway, checking to make sure my mother’s out of earshot. “Dinner’s in a half hour,” he says in a lame-o attempt to ignore me.

      It’s an unspoken rule in our family that we’re not allowed to talk about Emma. Ever since she died five years ago, it’s almost as if she’d never existed. My parents hired movers to come and clean out her bedroom and turn the space into a home office—an office that no one ever used. Meanwhile, my mother dove headfirst into her work at the candy factory, taking any and all shifts she could get, so she wouldn’t have to think. Or spend time at home. So everything would just go numb.

      It’s gotten a little better over the years, but my mother’s never really been the same.

      And I suppose I haven’t been, either.

      Part of me blames myself for Emma’s accident. She had asked to borrow my roller skates that day so that she could practice her spins in the driveway. But I said no. And so Emma ended up going for a bike ride instead. She rode by herself to the park and crossed a main intersection without looking twice.

      She never came home.

      “I asked you a question,” I say, staring hard at the side of his face. My father refuses to meet my eye.

      “This is a good house with good people in it,” he says, talking to the wall. “End of story.”

      “It’s not the end.” I shake my head. “Why didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you think I’d find out anyway?”

      “We don’t believe in ghosts,” he snaps.

      “No,” I say, biting back. “You don’t.”

      “Dinner’s in a half hour,” he repeats, pulling the door closed behind him.

      I tell him I’m not hungry, but I don’t think he hears me.

      Because he’s already left the room.

       Six

      VNWILLING TO FALL ASLEEP last night, I burned away the hours doing more online research.

      And learning more about Travis.

      About his love for hockey and all things Bruins; how he loved to go camping, even in cold weather. And how he had to deal with a major loss, too.

      His father died of heart failure when Travis was only seven, leaving Travis completely devastated.

      The whole idea of it—of how human Travis sounds in news articles and testimonials, and how it seems we had a few things in common—keeps me awake through all of my classes, my mind whirling with questions.

      But, now, at the end of the school day, I’m beyond exhausted. Even the cracked vinyl seats in the bus feel cozy. I sink down into one near the back and stare out the window, waiting for the driver to finally reach my stop.

      And that’s when I feel something brush against my shoulder. I turn to look.