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Shaken, I cross campus, heading towards Marchand House in a daze. Classes are letting out now and as I walk, I look at everyone I pass. I feel pale next to them. Insubstantial.
    I’m a real ghost now, I think suddenly. I’ve known people put on probation before. It’s weird, but you don’t want to be around them. They always feel like they’re living on borrowed time, but now I realize that everyone instinctively knows that they are already dead, and like all people since the beginning of time we fear it’s catching. We are all taking a test, in this time between high school and the adult world, and the ones who fail are dangerous.
    Don’t touch me, I think at everyone I pass. I’m dangerous.
    No one does. I drift through the crowds and to the edge of the campus, where Marchand House sits. Two trees tower in the front yard, ancient and gnarled. Their dry leaves whisper and click together as I trudge up the front walk. I key in the code and let myself inside.
    Not even the familiar musty smell of the old mansion can comfort me. The anger has receded and now I’m just scared, bone-deep, soul-deep.
    If I get kicked out of college, there’s nowhere for me to go except back home. And I can’t go back there. I’ll die.
    Maybe I’m dying here, too, but it’s slow, and it feels good. Fucking too many guys and drinking too many nights away—that’s a slow death, but not a bad one. Of the two choices, I want to stay here. The thought of returning to my mother’s house, where everything is cold and sharp...
    My heart squeezes in my chest. I peek in the living room to see if anyone is here, anyone who could take my mind off my impending doom, but there’s no one except a guy I don’t recognize sleeping on one of the couches. When I retreat, I see a message on the house whiteboard: “Don’t call the police. The vagrant sleeping on the couch is my cousin. Feel free to draw on his face. —Mason.”
    The message doesn’t even wring a laugh out of me. I turn away and run up the stairs.
    The room is empty. Tanya is at class. I drop my bag and grab one of her water bottles and drink half of it. Then I shimmy out of my jeans, climb to the top bunk where I sleep, and crawl under the covers.
    I’m not going to cry. I’m going to bullshit my way out of this mess. Somehow.
    I’m shaking with cold. I burrow down, close my eyes, and try to sleep through the fear.

.0.
    Y ou can’t conjure a ghost.
    I know. I’ve tried. A lot of other people have tried, too, and they were all frauds or kooks. You just can’t ask a ghost to come to you. It has to come on its own.
    I don’t know what it’s like to be haunted. I mean, really haunted, by a spirit. But I can guess.
    My brain tries to kill me sometimes. Little things set me off. Things that seem innocuous. Things like gunning a car engine, or someone yelling at the TV. Or it can be something that’s never haunted me before at all, something like a telephone hanging on the wall.
    The day will have been normal. Nothing strange about it at all, and I’ll be strolling through the kitchen when I spy the telephone. An old wireless one, the kind you plug into the wall and charge. And then I’ll think, I hope I didn’t ruin that nice 9-1-1 operator’s day.
    And just like that I’m falling and it all comes crashing back in like the bursting windows of a sinking ship and I’m drowning in the terror and the helplessness, the cold and the despair, and I’m on my knees and I can’t breathe, and I’ll never get past it, it will always come back, I will never escape, never escape never escape, never never never never never never never fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK—

.0.
    S o.
    That’s what it’s like to be haunted. You can’t just call it up, and anyone who wants you to is an asshole.

.5.
    T he Student Health Center is cold and sterile and smells like a veterinarian’s office. I hate that about places where people go to get healed. It never smells