Alicia.

      Alicia sat next to Blair and across from Miss Susan and me at the table covered with a hot-pink paper tablecloth. She had a small face, with long oval eyes that had a soulful quality, like a mystical wood fairy or small elf. Her eyes could flash colors of gray or sea blue in her comical moments. But this morning she seemed more contemplative than normal. Changes were happening in her family, and Alicia seemed to be struggling to understand what it all meant. At first, her mother had begun staying out late at night. When this happened, Alicia and her brothers found themselves alone in the rental unit all night. Finally Alicia and her brothers had moved in with their grandma. Soon after that, strange events began to take place.

      “You guys know what happened yesterday? I was sittin’ on my bed and my window was open and a bird flew in.”

      “A bird? A bird?” said Elizabeth, suddenly looking up from the pile of bread and jam on the small paper plate in front of her.

      Blair looked up too. Her thoughts had been elsewhere: all week long she had been hard at work on her own fictional story, set in the attic of her house. At night when the house went dark, she lay awake, half-dreaming about the attic and its invisible occupant, Rose. Sometimes at night she saw things. When she couldn't sleep she would stare at the dresser her Grandma Lilly had placed against one wall. She could see things on it, like Frankenstein or Freddy Krueger with his claws.

      “One time my grandma seen a bird fly through her bedroom window,” said Blair. She still looked sleepy at this early hour. On her plate was a half-eaten piece of French bread with jam and a cooked brown egg that was still in its shell.

      What all of the girls knew about birds was this: When a bird flies through your window and goes out a different window, that means somebody is going to die. If it flies through your window and goes out the same window, that means somebody is going to be born.

      One time a bird had flown through Alicia's bathroom window and then flew back out. That was the time her baby cousin Nathan was born. Alicia was nervous about this latest sighting of a bird. And there were other things about the house where she now lived that didn't seem right. For one thing, the house had a ghost. The ghost's name was Howard, and he was prone to misbehaving.

      Earlier that week, Alicia had been holding her baby cousin while her Aunt Emily was doing her hair.

      “And the light was flickering on and off,” said Alicia. “My aunt said, ‘Stop it, Howard!'”

      “Psycho!” said Shannon in a giddy voice. Her mother's people, down in West Virginia, liked to tell stories, and she perked up at the prospect of a good ghost story.

      “And the light kept flickering on and off,” said Alicia. “And my aunt didn't have ‘nough light, so me and her went upstairs.”

      Ghost Howard's room was downstairs. It was the dining room now, but it used to be his bedroom. His mother was a woman named Dora who had worked at a nearby Boys and Girls Club. She had to retire because she was old and people were mean to her. One time someone put a banana peel on the floor and she slipped and broke her arm. Then her son, Howard, couldn't take it anymore and he shot himself in the head. Dora moved out, but Howard's spirit remained.

      “My brother was downstairs, and he heard a big noise,” said Alicia.

      Elizabeth had for once fallen still. Even her restless arms seemed to be in a state of listening.

      “My brother walked, he walked into the living room. And there it was! He saw the light had fell. And busted all over the floor. And if me and my cousin was still in there we would've been cut up.”

      My thoughts drifted back to my girlhood, when I used to sit outside at night with my friends and tell ghost stories. The mist that hung low over the mountains framing our small western North Carolina town seemed to give rise to spirits. Long summer evenings were our time for sitting outside for hours, imagining that a flickering light barely visible on one of the hills was a lantern, its owner a sad and tormented dead man. The ghosts of my childhood always lived elsewhere—on the hills—turned a luscious, nearly blue color by the rain—or on the back roads where lost souls and headless girls roamed at night. It had taken me by surprise, when I first began teaching my students, that the ghosts haunting their neighborhood were so close. You could hear them breathing at night, their voices speaking from the spirit world. And they were real, I had learned. The girls’ stories made them come alive, and stories were what mattered anyway.

      Adriana's voice interrupted my brief journey into the past. Her friend Alicia's story had made her think about the house closer to the bingo hall, where Miss Susan herself had once lived.

      ‘Ain't there a ghost in that blue house down by the church?” she said.

      Miss Susan shifted her broad shoulders and raised her head slightly, like a queen signaling her intent to speak. The girls hushed up and I listened too. Miss Susan had a story to tell.

      Once, when she was only a young woman, Miss Susan had lived in a house not far from the school. There were some things about the house that were not right, she said. Miss Susan's eyes darted in Blair's direction, then stared straight ahead.

      It started when Miss Susan, then a young mother of two little girls, began to notice freakish things. The vacuum cleaner would start up on its own. The family dog wouldn't come into one room where Miss Susan often read. Some parts of the house stayed mysteriously cold, no matter