Chapter Text
There’s a quiet buzz around her, dull and muffled in her ears. It must be words but she doesn’t hear them. The air feels thick and heavy around her drowning out the sound of voices, distorting the image of her colleagues—her friends. She’s underwater and no one sees her floundering. She can’t breathe. She wants nothing more than to sink down to the bottom of her own despair and disappear.
She felt dirty, angry, horrified, violated, disgusted, embarrassed; she felt so much all at once that now she feels nothing at all. She’s hollow and bobbing up and down in the tide, letting it wash over her, pulling her away from her very self.
I can’t be here, she thinks. I don’t want to be here.
JJ rubs her fingers on the soft material of her sweater, pulling it over her thumbs, tucking them safely inside trying to cover as much of herself as possible, shrinking to fit all of her within the comfort of a well loved sweater. Maybe cocooning herself in fabric could make her invisible, like what can’t be seen just isn’t there.
She could become a ghost. She can already feel herself drifting away, letting the hypnotic drone of familiar voices wash over her while her vision becomes blurry and unfocused, staring at nothing in particular. Her body is becoming a shell that feels uncomfortable, tight, like it no longer belongs to her and she longs to slip out of it and watch from the outside, unseen.
The thought transports her to another place, carrying her back on wings of time.
She was eleven the first time she became a ghost. When she retreated so far into herself that her body no longer felt like she controlled it, she was simply a spectator watching the world happen around her, invisible.
It was only a week after Roslyn’s death that her parents had sent her back to school. It had been a Tuesday, because Tuesdays they had gym.
When the front door opened for the first time in days, everything smelt wet, the dampness of spring rain desperately clinging to the air as her father ushered her from the house into the suffocating pressure of the atmosphere and into the old station wagon. She’d climbed into the rear facing seat in the trunk— Ros’s favourite spot—allowing herself to watch her house shrink into the surrounding trees before vanishing completely as they descended the hill into town. To her it looked as if her home and her mother inside it had been absorbed back into the earth, just as Ros had been lowered into the ground six days previous.
Her mother had been so deep in her own grief, only barely still human herself, that she couldn’t care for JJ. Sandy couldn’t stand to have JJ in the house with her for long periods of time lest she look at her surviving daughter and become overcome with body wracking sobs. Her father, unequipped to handle her mother’s outbursts decided it was best for JJ to be out of the house and back to her familiar routine. So, he had packed her up in the car and without a word driven her to the school like it was any other Tuesday.
When she hadn’t gotten out of the car immediately he’d come around to the trunk, and opening it with more force than necessary he stood there waiting for her to move. He didn’t say anything, just stared at her with something akin to desperation etched into the crease of his brow. Please, you have to go, his eyes said. Somehow he expected her to get out of the car and walk into school and pretend like she hadn’t just lost the most important person in her life—the one person to whom she’d always felt like she mattered. She was supposed to pretend she didn’t see the red of her sister’s blood staining the bathroom every time she closed her eyes. Pretend her nights weren’t haunted by blue eyes so like her own, once so full of feeling, what used to be a kaleidoscope of blues and greys and greens turned slate staring at her, void of anything at all.
But JJ had always been a good girl— a cooperative kid. JJ wasn’t like Ros, she didn’t argue and had always done as she was told. Always. So, she would pretend because that’s what was asked of her. But she decided right then to do it on her own terms.
She pretended she wasn’t really there.
I don’t exist, she told herself.
Non-existence made it easier to handle the looks and the whispers while she walked down the hall to class.
Everyone knew. Everyone had heard what happened to her sister. There was no discretion in the small town police force, so by the time a week had passed since they’d buried Roslyn in the squishy, black, rain sodden ground of the East Allegheny cemetery, everyone in town knew what she had done to take her own life and that JJ had been the one to find her.
Apparently she just stood there, one boy, the thirteen-year-old nephew of the deputy, had whispered to his friends while JJ was mere feet away, her hair obscuring her face while she leaned forward to drink from the water fountain. Didn’t get help. Didn’t even say a word.
She blinked and swiped her hair away from her face and looked at the older boys standing near their lockers, and they didn’t even seem to notice. As if she blended in with the wall. Being a ghost was working, she thought then.
What a freak, the deputy’s nephew continued, while JJ walked to the locker room to change. I wonder if she can even talk anymore.
Gym had been outside. The rain that had been threatening all morning had passed and the sun was high in the sky, bright and warm over the grassy back field, the first dandelions just starting to sprout. JJ remembered a time when she’d sit next to this very field while Ros played soccer, picking the brightest yellow dandelions in a bouquet to present to her sister after the game. While the other kids ran off after the ball, JJ wondered if she could lay on the damp grass and sink into the field and become a dandelion.
She couldn’t bring herself to play, and Mrs G, her teacher with her sandy, frizzy hair blowing around her face like a lions mane, clipboard clutched to her chest let JJ be. She didn’t bother asking if she was alright, just offered a sad smile in JJ’s direction, not directly at her—as if she knew JJ didn’t want to be seen—just cast her eyes near where JJ sat by the field, the dew on the grass soaking through her shorts.
Letting Mrs. G’s low, melodic voice run over her and turning the shrieking of her classmates into background noise like the chirp of crickets at night, JJ pulled her t-shirt over knobby knees, tucking them tight against her chest. She huddled herself under a too big East Allegheny Middle School t-shirt as if she were donning an invisible cloak, and rocked back and forth wishing she were anywhere else. Anyone else.
I’m not here. I’m not here. I’m not here, she repeated, like Dorothy Gale clicking the heals of her ruby slippers together and wishing to go home.
Her wish comes true when she’s brought out of her remembrance by the sound of her name. It prods at the little bit of herself she left behind in her shell of a body.
She hears the question, but doesn’t fully process that she’s meant to respond. She’d forgotten that she was sitting here, Emily standing close to her off to her left, Tara and Luke sitting across the table from her.
“JJ?” Emily says again, and it’s with a familiar softness, the way her name spills off Emily’s tongue with gentle knowing concern that only Emily can convey in those two syllables that breaks JJ from her trance like state, pulling her back into herself.
It’s jarring, being brought back to her body in such a way. But there is a very small measure of peace that lingers in the back of her mind from the way Emily said her name. There’s something so familiar about that particular cadence that she hasn’t heard in a long time, stored away somewhere in memories of other times Emily has seen her, understood her in ways no one else has.
Blinking her eyes and moving her hand from where it was tucked under her chin, JJ pulls her thumbs back into her sweater, stretching, and distorting the material as she tries to dig into her unconscious brain and find the question that was asked of her. All three other sets of eyes in the room are on her now, waiting for her to say something. She wants to shrink back into nothingness. She doesn’t want to be looked at, to be seen. Not by anyone. But especially not by people who know. Who’ve seen. She feels like she can’t cover herself enough. And she needs to say something soon so that they’ll stop looking at her.
Her hands shake as she picks up her tablet, hoping whatever she has on the screen will remind her of what she’s meant to be thinking about other than ghosts— ghosts of her young self, her dead sister and the hauntingly real images of herself that aren’t really her but even she wouldn’t believe the truth of it.
JJ, were you able to pull anything from the surveillance cameras in the garage? That was it. She looks at the stills she has pulled up on her screen, revealing very little other than shadows and the pay station.
She can feel her hands shaking and she’s struggling to hold her tablet still as she talks, refusing to look up. Hoping that no one notices that she’s vibrating with tension, that she can’t stay still but also feels paralyzed.
“Yeah,” she says and it sounds startled, even to her own ears. “Uh, turns out there was only one camera working that night and it was lined up with a ticket kiosk. This was a set up from the start.”
She hopes that’s enough, that she can retreat again now that she’s said her part. She knows her voice is off, wavering and unsure in a way that will be unfamiliar to her colleagues—except Emily—but she hopes they can ignore it. Chalk it up to exhaustion. This case is getting to everyone.
Then Tara’s saying something more, but JJ is retreating again, trying to run away from herself. She’s trying desperately to disappear again, so she doesn’t notice when Tara stops theorizing and Emily dismisses her and Luke. She doesn’t hear when Emily says her name again.
She’s not in this room, instead she’s somewhere else. She’s not in this body that doesn’t feel like home anymore. A body that is no longer safe. She hates it here, inside herself. Instead she lets herself sink deeper into an abyss, dropping like a stone in a lake.
But then there’s Emily’s voice again.
“JJ,” she says, pleading, scared. JJ can hear it, the fear in her voice. Emily is almost never scared, yet here she is calling JJ’s name without even trying to hide it. JJ must have been frighteningly far away. “Jayje, hey come back okay?”
JJ nods, but can’t find words, not yet.
She pulls at her sweater again and feels as her thumb breaks through the delicate cashmere, tearing the fibres. She looks at the small hole, just big enough to stick a finger through and thinks of how easily it ripped, how something that she donned to cover herself, to make her feel safer could come apart under very little pressure. It’s almost enough right there to break her, the tiny hole in the cuff of her sweater made by tugging too much at the sleeves, but then she tucks it into her palm, folding her fingers over it and hiding the damage from sight.
She opens her mouth to tell Emily she’s fine, to ask her what she needs her to do next, to give her some other task to draw her focus too. But then she makes the mistake of looking up at Emily and Emily is looking at her.
She can see the unshed tears in Emily’s eyes, clinging to her lashes but refusing to fall. Emily looks right into her eyes and JJ can feel her looking into her soul, seeing her. Emily sees not through her, as if she were invisible like she tried to be, but straight into her, uncovering everything. Emily knows. Emily always knows. JJ has never been able to hide from her.
That’s her undoing. And Emily sees that too. Emily sees the exact moment that JJ loses the final thread holding her tattered self together.
Quickly, Emily walks to the window and draws the blinds shut before returning to JJ’s side.
Emily has JJ’s hands in hers and is pulling her up out of her chair and into waiting arms the right as the dam breaks. It’s like the sky has opened up and with a single crack of lightening a torrent is let loose.
JJ sobs and Emily holds her tight, pressing her soul back into her body.
JJ’s hands clutch desperately against Emily’s back, holding their bodies together until she feels both her heart and Emily’s beating inside her chest. She cries against Emily’s neck, full body sobs and Emily has to hold her up. And she does.
“Shh JJ,” she whispers, soft as the hand caressing JJ’s hair. “It’s okay JJ, you’re okay.”
She’s never been able to hide from Emily. And as Emily holds her she knows Emily won’t let her become a ghost.
“I’m here, JJ. I’m here.”