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chapter three

the living, the dead, and the in-­betweens

Every year, as soon as harvest ended, Doris took her fourteen girls on a field trip for the Happy Ghosts Festival. Although not all the girls still believed in ghosts, they all had their own reasons for going.

This year, they woke up with the sun and spent their day preparing a feast. Each girl had been given her very own job this year, while Doris stood in the middle of the kitchen blurting out names and sometimes getting them right.

“Lissy and Cilla, I need you two to collect banana leaves.”

“Okay!” They (and Junebug) went outside and mostly played with green sticks.

“Gabby, I need you to rummage around in the spice cabinet and find me some cinnamon.”

“ ‘Gabby’? Milly, who’s she talking about?” one of the girls whispered.

“I think she means Abby.”

“Oh . . . wait. That’s me!”

“Nenita,” Doris continued, oblivious, “come here and bring that sack of june-­eyed beans with you.”

Little Nene wobbled across the room, taking twice as long because she didn’t want to step on any of the cracks in the floor.

“Nishi, can you keep an eye on that pot of rice?”

“Ugh.” Nishi dragged Ikki along and forced her to stir the pot while she braided Ikki’s hair.

“Mei, I need squash from the garden.”

“Called it!” Marikit jumped out the door at the chance to go outside.

“Hey! She said I could do it!” Mei shouted, clambering after her with only one shoe.

“Aisha, please don’t eat the pudding before it’s ready.”

“Aisha’s not here today,” said Aisha, with her pinky finger in the bowl of pudding. She licked it, then stuck her index finger in for another taste.

Meanwhile, Milly was in charge of nothing in particular. Which meant she was in charge of everything.

“Aisha, get your fingers out of that.”

“I’m not Aisha. Today I’m Fahtma—”

“You knew exactly who she meant.” Milly swung around. “Nishi, please stop making Ikki do your work.”

“But I’m too busy.”

“I’ll fix your hair later.”

“Really?!” they both said.

“Yes. If you do your jobs. I need Ikki to help me with these bean cakes.”

“Go on, Ikki. I got this.” Nishi pushed her sleeves up past her elbows.

“Fiiine.”

Most of the morning continued like this, and they somehow made progress throughout the day. Slowly, the mess on the table transformed into an arrangement of platters and bowls. Little steamed packets of rice sat in a row, neatly dressed in banana leaf robes and twisted-­grass ties. A large bowl of rice porridge with flowers carved along its wooden sides sat in the middle, cinnamon dusting the top. Round ovals were stacked on a plate, hard-­crusted on the outside and filled with soft purple beans within.

When the sun began to set, all fourteen girls took a portion of this feast and packed their rice and bean offerings into little open-­topped boxes. Doris lined them up and led them out the front door onto a small stony path that led away from the rice terraces and toward the Hallow at the edge of the cliff.

As they approached the Hallow, some of the farmers and villagers from the nearby Tugalong Town materialized down the road. Many of them were older without kids of their own, but they all had some ghost—some memory—to pay tribute to. Living in West Ernost meant you were haunted by the dead, and that was a fact of life.

Most of the girls were too young to remember who any of the ghosts used to be. For them, this was a chance to get honest, down-­to-­their-­toes scared.

Every child wants to be terrified out of their boots every so often. Nothing’s better than a monster at scraping down the walls, stripping the floors, and tearing down the doors that have locked up one’s complacent heart. Fear has its way of startling the heart back into shape. It nips the heel. Stings the skin.

As they marched toward the festival, the girls whispered among themselves stories of cruel fairies and ancient giants, mischievous dwarves and pale-­eyed djinns. However, if they wished to be particularly scared, the definitive worst of the worst were the woesome, wily, wicked, and wasteful witches.

Nishi, as usual, was the first to bring them up.

“I heard they like to eat children,” Nishi said, whispering over her shoulder at Ikki and Cilla. She licked her lips, wrinkled her nose, and took on a croaky voice. “Mmm, roasted bones.”

“Teeth soup,” Ikki added.

“Finger sandwiches!” Marikit exclaimed a little too loudly.

“That’s not true,” Cilla said. She had Junebug pinched beneath one arm while attempting to balance her boxed offering. “Witches aren’t canned knee bulls.”

“What?” Nishi made a face.

“Canned. Knee. Bulls.” Cilla repeated, emphasizing each word as she avoided the cracks in the worn path.

“You mean cannibals?” Milly asked, trying to be helpful.

“That’s what I said.”

“No, it’s not.” Nishi nudged Cilla forward. “Come on, you’re so slow.”

“I heard,” Marikit said, “that they’re the reason the ghosts can’t pass on to the next life.”

Ikki rolled her eyes. “Who told you that?”

“Old Man Tem-­Tem. He says that’s what all the shadows are.”

“Well, duh.” Nishi snorted. “That’s why we had to get rid of them all.”

“The shadows?” Cilla asked.

“No. The witches!”

Cilla squinted. “Are all the witches really gone?”

“Don’t you know anything?” Ikki kicked a stray stone down the hill. “They made their last stand in East Ernost. And that’s gone now. So what does that mean?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“There aren’t any more witches anywhere.”

“Wizards got rid of the witches because they stole children,” Marikit said. “And now the ghosts are all that’s left of the children’s souls.”

Ikki nodded her head vigorously.

Cilla frowned. “I’m sure some witches are nice.”

“Why d’you think that? Have you ever met one?” Marikit asked, eyes wide.

Nishi sneered. “Have you ever met one?”

“That’s not the point!”

“Point is,” Nishi said, “witches are scary and you should be scared of them.”

“All witches have big noses to sniff out their prey,” Ikki tried to helpfully contribute.

“And wrinkled hands.”

“And smelly feet!”

Milly plucked a long blade of grass, then slowed down until she was walking next to Nishi.

“Why do you care about witches so much, anyway?” Nishi got closer to Cilla and lowered her voice. “You should be happy they’re gone. If they were here, they’d probably catch you in a great big net. Then they’d bring you to their home and sing a wicked song while boiling water to cook you up in a—”

Milly tickled Nishi’s elbow with the blade of grass.

Nishi screamed, almost dropping her box in the process.

Doris spun around, eyes ablaze. “Shhhh. Show some respect!”

All the girls hushed. Nishi glared at Milly and stuck out her tongue before finding a new place in the line.

Milly tossed the blade away and winked at Cilla. “Don’t listen to her. No one’s seen a witch in years, anyway.”

But Cilla didn’t respond like Milly had hoped she would. Instead, she looked down at her feet and kept walking.

Nishi looked like she wanted to say something else in retort, but Milly glared her back into silence. Instead, Nishi just exhaled through her flared nostrils.

Seeing an old couple ahead of them, the girls quieted and didn’t say another word on their journey along the winding path.

The Hallow was a half-­circle of stones that surrounded a large white tree growing out from the very edge of the cliff. Old Man Tem-­Tem said that the tree had been consumed in a fire and lost its entire crown of leaves. Instead of dying, the tree was blessed (or cursed, depending how you thought of it) to grow for eternity. Even though it appeared completely dead on the outside.

Some nights, the villagers swore they could see little balls of fire still dancing in its branches. They claimed these dancing lights were the departed ghosts, and that if one were ever lost, all they had to do was follow these lights back to the tree in the Hallow.

They called the tree Elma.

When Doris and the girls arrived at the Hallow, they saw some of the villagers already laying down their offerings on the stones and whispering prayers for whoever it was they remembered or missed or wished would come back one day to visit.

Some of the girls had prayers already prepared, mostly for old parents to come back or for new ones to take them away. Others stared into their boxes with gurgling stomachs, wondering when they’d be allowed to get back to St. George’s and eat.

As for Milly, prayers felt too much like dreams. She didn’t really have any for herself. She knelt for a short while and placed her box down next to Ikki’s. She had given up on asking for parents a while ago. She was almost thirteen, after all. Practically her own person.

She did, however, still keep a list of prayers for the others. Things like:

Please fix Doris’s brain.

Please make Nishi shut up sometimes.

Please give Marikit a friend.

While she muttered her short, scattered prayers, she looked over at the others—some intensely staring at their boxes, others yawning into their fists. Cilla was mumbling something to Junebug.

Suddenly, a small shadowed hand reached toward Cilla’s head from the nearby tree. Milly jumped up.

“Cilla!” she said.

The hand quickly pulled back.

Cilla stared at Milly, a very confused expression on her face. There was no sign of shadows around her.

Milly shook her head and sat back down. A cold wind blew across the sweat on Milly’s brow as some of the others glanced at her, but she didn’t look up. The wind brought with it the scent of something . . . burnt. An odd thought crossed her mind. She wished she could ignore it, but the idea was too strange. Too specific.

She closed her eyes and muttered one last request.

“Please don’t let Cilla be a witch.”