When Girls Become Ghosts

By Melanie Maggard

/ Fiction /  

We decided to build a treehouse after they found one of us dead in the abandoned mall parking lot. 

That morning, we had ridden our bikes through the field behind the high school, jumped tiny hills and kicked up dust that clung to our calves. We yelled at each other, “Faster, faster!” hoping one of us would take flight. This was what we did during the summer days of our fastest-growing year. We were weeds sprouting, blades sharpening, buds blooming with each bite we took. It was the summer we were fourteen.

“We should go swimming in the lake,” Janie said, her fingernails full of dirt, her hair abused by the wind. “If I go home like this, my mother will kill me.” 

Candy brushed the dust off her legs, leaving streaks of brown, and said, “I could go for a swim.” 

Janie smiled and put her arm around Candy and looked at me and Julie. “That settles it! Let’s go.”

“We should wait for Nina to get here,” I said, shuffling my feet and looking back at the gate, waiting. Things were always better when we were five. 

“Come on, you know if she’s this late, she’s not coming. Her mom probably made her clean her room,” Janie said. 

Julie ran up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “If she comes looking for us, she’ll know where we went.” She smiled and then picked up her rusty ten-speed. 

“Okay,” I said as I grabbed my bike and pushed it toward the open area in the fence where we would meet the street, ride through town, and end up at the bottom of the lake. I hoped Nina would find us.

* * *

That evening we learned Nina was dead from the local evening news. Her eighth-grade school picture enlarged to fill the television screen. I stared at this image, pretending to be Nina, shaking my head, confused. 

Janie called me minutes later. “Meet at the big willow tree at nine in the morning. We need to do something.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why we need to meet,” she said before hanging up.

The next morning, we arrived with puffy eyes and runny noses. Janie had stolen a bottle of gin from her mother’s nightstand, and we took swigs each time we remembered something about Nina. 

Like the time she fell off her bike, and we all thought she was dead, but she had laid there soaking up coolness from the concrete as the sun beat the fear of God into us, and when she rose up, Julie thought she’d risen because we’d each prayed so hard to just let her be alive. 

And the time Nina came to school crying because her stepfather had spilled beer all over her book report that morning and she didn’t have time to rewrite it, so I gave her mine and she made me a special friendship bracelet as thanks. 

And especially the time she made us laugh so hard at Candy’s sleepover that we started crying and couldn’t stop even though our sides ached, and we fell asleep next to each other, exhausted yet so alive. 

“We should have a seance,” Janie said, “try to communicate with Nina.” 

“Will that work?” Candy asked.

“Maybe,” Janie said. We were okay with maybe. We had always been told no, so maybe felt like a door being flung open, even if we weren’t sure we believed in spirits.

“So, we could ask her what happened? Who did that to her?” I asked, kicking at exposed roots.

“I’ll take Margie’s Ouija board this weekend; she won’t miss it,” Janie said.

“Won’t Margie be mad if she knows you touched her stuff?” I asked, worried. The last time Janie entered her sister’s room, she came to school with a black eye beneath her mother’s concealer. 

“She won’t find out, so she won’t be mad.” Janie shot me a look that meant she had it under control.

“I’ll bring candles,” Candy said.

“Are we sure we want to do this?” Julie asked. “It sounds creepy.”

Janie put her arm around Julie and looked at each of us. “Don’t worry. If we stick together, we’ll be fine.”

* * *

In the days following Nina’s death, we stayed together all day, afraid of what would happen if we didn’t. 

“If we build a treehouse, we’ll be safe because we’re together, away from everyone,” Julie said as we sat on the lakeshore dipping our toes in cool water. 

“That would be nice,” Candy said, wiping her runny nose on the inside of her t-shirt. 

“Yeah, it would be great not to have people telling us what to do all the time,” Janie said.

We each nodded, then I blurted out, “I don’t want to die.”

We started crying again because we didn’t want to die, and none of us wanted to admit how glad we were we weren’t Nina. 

* * *

We forgot about the Ouija board and the seance and trying to speak to Nina’s spirit. Instead, we lay on the beach, on the carpet of Candy’s bedroom, on the dirt floor beneath our future treehouse. We cried and remembered her through mint chocolate chip ice cream, fried okra, chicken nuggets, gummy bears, “The Princess Bride,” Paula Abdul, River Phoenix, “The Baby-Sitters Club,” roller skating, pink glitter nail polish, dandelions, hamsters, science class, friendship bracelets, fractures.

* * *

We never asked for permission to build a treehouse. We stayed in the woods until supper was ready every day for the rest of the summer, not wanting anyone to know what we were planning. We didn’t want them to stop us, and we didn’t want to lose those moments we lingered over dirt and tree bark and leaves, telling stories of how Nina was the best of us even though she wasn’t but that was what you did when you missed someone and somehow they became the best of you, of us. We wished we had started building sooner, before she was gone. 

* * *

That week, our classmates tried stealing our grief. They made a vigil for Nina at the entrance to the school, as if she had lived and died there, where she had been murdered. 

The girl who used to make fun of Nina’s copper curls spoke. “Nina was such a sweet person. I pray for her soul to be at peace.” 

Afterwards, Janie whispered in her ear, “I’ll punch you into next week if you speak Nina’s name again.” 

The girl pursed her lips and muttered, “Y’all need to find God if you don’t want the same thing to happen to you.” 

Later, together, we vowed to beat anyone who prayed for Nina or us again, and for a moment we felt like we could take on the world if it came for us.

* * *

The police questioned each of us. They asked, “What kind of girl was Nina?” as they hitched up pants their belts had failed. “Who did she hang out with?”

When we answered, “She hangs out with us,” they seemed dissatisfied, looking at each other as if we had a secret, that Nina wasn’t the girl we thought she was. But she definitely was. 

“They kept asking if Nina had a boyfriend or was friendly with guys. It made me want to scream! I told them Nina hated boys.” Janie wiped a tear from her face as we sat, taking a break from pulling leaves off fallen branches. 

“They kept interrupting me and wouldn’t let me talk,” Julie said.

“They’re not looking for what really happened to her; they’re looking for a reason to blame her,” Candy said as she picked up a rock and tossed it into the brush. “That’s what my mom says.”

“Why would they blame her?” I asked, confused, wondering what Nina had done. 

* * *

The five of us had been friends since kindergarten, when we arrived on the first day of school with matching Strawberry Shortcake lunchboxes. We splayed our pink pails on the lunchroom table and feasted from a buffet of bacon and white bread sandwiches that stuck to the roofs of our mouths, chips that left oily crumbs coating our cheeks, tiny cakes that made us want an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas because we weren’t allowed in our mothers’ kitchens. We were hungry for what the others had, what fit in the palm of our hands. 

We made pacts by curling our pinkies together, standing in a circle facing outwards in the middle of the merry-go-round. We watched the world twirl around us, no matter how fast it spun or how much the boys tried to spin us off, away from each other. We stood like a resistance, like a pillar of girlhood because we had each other. Now, we felt weakened, as if the world had started spinning too fast and we were scattering across the playground, unsure how we could resist. 

* * *

I imagined being covered with dirt, how heavy it must feel, not like water, but weighed down, and how Nina would hate that feeling, how she hated being held back. She was the fastest, outrunning us when we raced or played tag. Sometimes she’d slow down so we wouldn’t feel so slow. But she always ran away from us just a little. 

I swore to my mother I never wanted to be buried, and that night I heard her tell my father. He replied, “That girl is always thinking about things she doesn’t need to be worried about.” My mother went quiet, and I felt like maybe she understood.

* * *

Two months later we abandoned the treehouse. Our limbs and branches always fell. The tarp we rescued from the shed behind Julie’s house for the roof kept blowing away. The ground had turned to mud, and the weather had turned colder. 

One day after we started our first year of high school, we returned to the treehouse and found a raccoon watching us from beneath a pile of sticks we’d gathered the week before. Its eyes shone from the darkness, tracking us as we sneaked towards it to get a better look. Then it growled and lunged forward. We ran and never went back.

* * *

Nobody asked us how we felt. They patted our shoulders, told us to “wash up for dinner” or “get ready for bed” or “don’t forget your lunch” as we were handed scratched lunch boxes, the pink worn away so the white plastic shone through like bone. Everyone lived as if everything was the same when it wasn’t, not for us. We had called ourselves the Strawberry Sisters since a third-grade science lesson, when we learned a strawberry was a collection of fruits, not just a single fruit, that formed a red heart-shaped berry, bound together until the end. 

* * *

On the six-month anniversary of Nina’s death, we sat on Candy’s porch swing listening to the sleet on the metal roof and imagined what it would be like to be dead. 

“Do you think you see your death coming like a friend or lurking behind you like a shadow?” Janie asked. 

“I think it’s more of a shock, like dropping into cold water or a balloon popping,” Candy said.

I shivered under the blanket we had draped over us. “Maybe it’s everywhere, lurking and stalking us.”

Julie said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” 

We curled together, watching our breaths become ghosts, until Candy’s mother called us inside for hot chocolate.

We thought about digging up Nina’s body to make sure it was there. Our parents hadn’t let us attend the funeral, thinking her death was contagious and it would only be a matter of time before we all caught it. If they could just keep us safe a little longer, if we did all the right things, then everything should be okay. But it wasn’t. 

That summer we grew smaller, we learned to fear everyone, we questioned how many summers we had left. That summer we had a dream of a treehouse.