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Myrtle opened her eyes to King's Cross Station, exactly how it had been when she crossed the platform at age eleven and became certain that magic really was real. Exactly as it had been, except completely devoid of people.
“I’m here to offer you a choice: go on or stay?”
Despite the softness of the voice, Myrtle jumped and spun around.
A woman – or perhaps a girl – stood before her in the otherwise empty station. Her hair was the same nondescript faded brown as Myrtle’s own, and she held herself with a slouching weariness that suggested she was as old as a professor but her face looked like that of a sixth year or maybe even a fifth year.
“Who are you? What is this place?” Myrtle blurted out. “I was in the toilet because of Olive Hornby and then there was this boy and then…” She wasn’t sure what had happened next. “And now I’m here.”
“You have the choice: go on or stay?” the woman asked in the same soft voice, gazing down instead of making eye contact.
“You haven’t answered my question!” Myrtle stamped her foot in frustration.
The woman-girl flinched, and Myrtle felt guilty. She seemed like the type of girl Olive would have bullied too.
“My name is Merope, and I’m here to offer you a choice: go on or stay?”
“What happens if I… go on?” Myrtle tried to soften her tone to match Merope’s, or at least not make her flinch again.
“I cannot tell you.”
“What happens if I stay?” Myrtle asked, frustration mounting.
Merope sighed. Her exhaustion was palpable, but if anything, it drove the endless, furious buzzing inside of Myrtle still higher. There was so much to do, to say! Her mother had always said she’d have better luck making friends if she learned to be quiet, but she didn’t understand that Myrtle just couldn’t.
“You may haunt,” Merope said, infuriatingly slowly. “You may be there and yet not there.”
“So I’ll be a ghost.”
“Yes.”
“I’m dead?”
Merope nodded.
Oh.
Myrtle did not want to be dead.
“I can haunt people?”
“You wish to haunt the boy who –”
“No, not the boy!” Merope was slow. Olive really would have bullied her too. “Olive! It’s her fault I’m dead. She made my life miserable, and you’re saying I can haunt her forever? Oh she’ll –”
“So your choice is to stay?” Merope asked. “Here and not here; a presence that cannot touch or be touched?”
Myrtle was a balloon deflating. She really was dead.
“And there’s nothing to do about it? I’m very young! And I don’t even know what really killed me. Or if I’m really dead! Madam Pomfrey can do anything. What if I just need to get to the Hospital Wing?”
“I’m sorry,” Merope said, sounding like she really meant it which made Myrtle feel worse. “I cannot help with that.”
Myrtle looked at her shoes, scuffed leather, made worse by her attempts to renew them with magic.
“I’ve never even been kissed,” she mumbled.
“That I can help with.”
Merope stepped forward and cupped her cheek, drawing her face up to her own. Myrtle closed her eyes as Merope pressed her lips to hers: slow, soft, with unexpected force. Myrtle kissed back, hoping she was doing it right. Merope moved her hand to the back of Myrtle’s neck which seemed like a good sign.
Releasing her and stepping back, Merope said, “Go haunt.”
Myrtle tried to respond, not knowing the custom, never knowing the polite thing to do and forever getting in trouble. Though, she supposed, not anymore. Ghosts didn’t have etiquette or at least she hoped not.
“Go… haunt?” Myrtle tried. “Go offer choices to other dead kids?”
Merope paused before answering, and Myrtle felt herself begin to float away.
“You are the first, but I’m afraid not the last.”
Myrtle did not have time to consider the words, because she was floating, incorporeal, floating back into the Hogwarts toilet. Maybe her first and only kiss would be with a sad, mysterious girl-woman, but she zoomed through the castle, ready to ensure Olive never had another uninterrupted kiss again and tried to find comfort in that.