She laughs, and my face heats up further, feeling sufficiently chided. Let’s just say that I’ve been dead a long while. But what the spirits don’t teach me, I pick up from reading anything I can get my hands on. Over shoulders on your strange lightboxes. Whispering pages of books long abandoned in corners and garbage pails. 

“They let girls read when you were alive?”

Let me? No. She laughs and her laugh makes the apartment with its stuffy air seem clearer. For a second, I catch a glimpse of what this place was before these boxes had been built into the sky. The meadow she ran in when she was alive. The dreamy slivers of moonlight. I taught myself. I can’t remember the exact details, but I’m sure I was clever—too clever for my own good. She crows.

She considers me another moment before she lifts her hand to her face. “What are you doing, G.G.?” The way I say it, it sounds like Gigi. She doesn’t get angry at me for it, though, accepting her uncertain name. 

She holds her free hand to me, but her fingers go through mine. She flickers again, something she does in sadness. You cannot look me directly because of my ghostly form, can you? It’s too hard to focus when I’m constantly changing.

“No, I just… I can barely make eye contact with my own reflection in the mirror. It’s not your fault that my brain is broken.”

Still… and when she removes her occupied hand, she stares out at me from a painted mask, like the kind that graces dolls crafted of porcelain and paint in vintage stores. Lips painted a soft red. Eyes with impossibly long lashes. Do you like it? She smiles. I painted it myself. Crafting the mask’s skin of stardust, the lips of ladybug shells, the lashes from grave ash.

I take her hand. It flickers, cold, through my very skin. I run my thumb along her wrist, marveling when my nails go through her very flesh. “If the mask makes you happy,” I reply with a wolfish grin, “then it makes me happy too. You’ll be my roommate for a very long time after all.”

Good, she nods, and her hair floats around the delicate mask. I would so hate to have had to scare you to death to kick you out of here.

My smile drops. “What?”

Oh, nothing! Again, that damnable laughter. Nothing you have to worry about now anyways.