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She would never call it homesickness.
Natalie doesn’t miss home. She didn’t miss it when Dad dropped her off at the dorm for the first time, nor when he hugged her goodbye after unpacking. She didn’t miss it when Mom called to ask how her first day of college was, nor when she texted Natalie, “We should have dinner the next time you’re back home.”
Natalie doesn’t think she can miss home, not while the memories of curling up on the floor of her bedroom while her parents scream their throats raw downstairs still have their claws hooked into her skin. There’s no separating home from hurt. One will always be haunted by the other.
And maybe because she knows that—because she knows that ghosts are never really gone—she’s less startled than she perhaps should be when she hears quiet footsteps approach her desk from behind, even though her roommate is out getting smashed at some frat party that Natalie had wrinkled her nose at and chosen not to attend. She knows what her party girl self looks like. She retired when Natalie chose to start living more in the present, in the world that she has to believe hasn’t given up on her if she hasn't given up on it.
At least, Natalie thought that was the case. It’s hard to say she’s living in the present when she knows who's standing behind her.
A few silent moments pass as Natalie weighs the price of turning around to look. She can feel his gaze on her all the while, steady and unflinching. He waits, and she wavers.
Finally, she turns and sighs out, “You know, I’m technically not allowed to have visitors without telling my roommate.”
He flashes her a smile, and suddenly Natalie’s back in the kitchen at home again, trying to pretend she doesn’t feel eyes on her back when she asks where Mom has gone. She’s standing at the kitchen counter, failing to disguise her flinch when she feels a hand graze hers in the darkness. She’s there, but she’s also here, in her too-small shared dorm room with a flickering fluorescent light that has remained in spite of the work request to have it fixed that her roommate filed two weeks ago.
Natalie supposes it doesn’t really matter where she is—she should’ve known that here is as good as anywhere else. It was never the house that was haunted, after all; it was them.
It is them.
It’s why she wasn’t surprised the first time she spotted him sitting alone at the kitchen table, taking up the chair Mom always used to occupy. There were just enough seats as there were members in the family again. In a twisted way, it almost felt right.
It almost feels right when she lays eyes on him now, in the sense that nothing about him surprises her or makes her want to flee from her room screaming. His dark t-shirt and jeans are stark against the peeling white walls behind him, and the flickering of the light above dances across his hair in an odd way, but he doesn’t look like a nightmare given form or a phantom of the night. He looks like a normal college boy, if one who looks a bit young for his age.
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he says with a shrug. “Cross my heart and hope to die, and all that.”
“I don’t think that means as much from the guy who’s already dead,” she says.
He laughs, eternally unfazed by the barbed edge of her voice. “All the more reason you should believe I’d die for something, then,” he replies.
“Sure, G—Ghost Boy,” she says, catching herself.
He tilts his head at her. She looks away, picking at a hangnail on her thumb.
“You can say it, you know,” he says. “I’m not, like, Bloody Mary or some other evil ghost that’ll kill you for saying my name.”
“It’s—” She bites her lip, glancing back over at him. “I…”
“I’d like it if you did, really,” he continues, moving to perch on the edge of her bed so that even facing her desk, she can see him out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t hear it very often. It’s nice. Makes me feel—well, alive.”
Natalie swallows. “I can’t,” she whispers. “It doesn’t really belong to you. You’re not really him.”
“I could be, if you believed I was,” he replies, a hoarse edge creeping into his voice. She’d call him desperate but to do so would be to acknowledge her own desperation, and to do that, she’d first need to acknowledge what it is she wants. What he really means.
She shakes her head. “You and I both know that’s not how it works.”
“Do we?” he presses, shifting so he’s hugging his knees, chin tilted in her direction. “How does it work, Natalie? What am I really?”
She picks at her nails. “You’re not him,” she insists. “He—my brother died. You might be what came back afterwards, but you’re not him. You could never be because no one knows that he could’ve been. We’re just guessing.”
“I’m all you’ve got, though,” he says. “I’m the one who’s always been there. Shouldn’t that count for something?”
A saner Natalie would’ve shut him down, but that girl also likely would’ve never caught a glimpse of him in the first place, so instead, Natalie blurts out, “It does.”
He gives her a keen look as she bites her lip and admits, “You’re not him but you’re—I mean, you’re fucking here, as far as my eyes and ears are concerned.” She throws her hands up. “Maybe my roommate would disagree, but she’s not here, so who cares if I go crazy now? Everyone’s already expecting it.”
A beat of silence passes. He shrugs.
“If you say so,” he says. When she shoots him a glare, he holds up his hands in surrender. “I can’t make you believe anything new. What you say goes, Sunshine.”
“Isn’t that nice?” she snarks back.
He smiles, knowing. “That’s the perk of having a brother like me,” he says. “We’ll never disagree like real siblings.”
She’s not sure what exactly about the statement gets to her, but nevertheless, something does. She shudders through an exhale as a pang reverberates through her, aching, and—
She would never call it grief. Natalie doesn’t think she has a right to that word, not when she never got to meet him before he died, taking with him the knowledge of what it would sound like for Natalie to call out to Gabe, to her brother. Still, some part of her must recognize it’s something similar because the look he gives her in response can only be described as sympathetic.
“Look on the bright side,” he tries. “At least you’re not alone.”
Natalie swallows, stomach churning. “But I am,” she says, voice breaking. She feels his gaze on her as she screws her eyes shut, the way she learned to all those months ago, because no matter how much she wishes otherwise—“You’re not here.”
A beat passes. Natalie pries her eyes open to stare up at the single fluorescent light above, still flickering. If she listens, she can hear an electric hum, steady and unchanging as a flatline.
No, the empty room whispers back, you’re right.