NINE YEARS LATER
ALANA DANVERS could go five minutes without blinking. Sometimes, when she was alone in her room, she quietly folded her pale hands in her lap and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror. She'd stare at her reflection, at the dark hair sitting obediently behind her shoulders, at the pair of black eyes looking back at her, large and fathomless.
Looking at her features in the mirror was comforting. Alana's reflection reminded her of someone. Multiple someones, perhaps. If she stared hard enough, maybe she would remember them, connect faces to names to the distant, disjointed memories her parents insisted were just things she made up.
She knew they weren't made up. She knew her parents weren't her real parents.
In those five, unblinking minutes, she wasn't Alana, but the girl that existed in those memories. She had another name but Alana couldn't remember it. Whenever she tried, her skin tickled with the barest imprint of recollection before it danced away, quick as the wind.
That other girl was a ghost.
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"Guys! You know how Beth Brown's been out since Halloween? Yeah, turns out she fucking died."
The tip of Alana's pencil broke, and the bobby pin in her other hand dug itself under her thumbnail, forcing her to break concentration. Her eye twitched at the disturbance. She'd been so close to finishing her translation of a Latin passage into English.
Alana took a deep breath and exhaled it soundlessly. With her focus gone, there was nothing else to do but listen to the gossip.
The classmate stood in the doorway, wide-eyed and panting heavily with the weight of the news they brought. There was a pause, and suddenly eleven or so seventh graders slammed their pencils down and swarmed the newsbringer for an explanation.
"Hey, hey, no pushing the desks!" The supervising teacher called out in vain. Desks were pushed and Latin club activities were abandoned.
Overhead, the loudspeaker fizzled to life. One of the ladies in the main office announced, tinny and monotonous, that twelve-year-old Beth Brown was dead. Effective immediately, all clubs and sports were to evacuate from school grounds.
In the ten minutes it took for Alana to pack up, put on her coat and scarf, and head outside, a small hysteria had spread among the students still on campus. At the bicycle racks, everyone spoke to each other in murmurs, eyes flicking around, hands over their mouths as if Beth Brown's death was contagious. The abrupt dismissal fueled the tension -- words like murder were thrown around.
Boring.
Alana unlocked her bicycle, ready to speed home and find something more entertaining to do.
Someone unlocking a nearby bike called out to her: "Hey. Pretty scary, huh?"
It was Gabby from the photography club.
Alana, who had never spoken to her before, was a bit confused. "My bicycle?"
"No, not -- I mean, you know, Beth Brown being murdered."
"Oh," Alana held her bicycle steady as someone sloppily bumped into it. "No. Death is natural."
She looked closer at Gabby and saw that her face had a gray tinge. The hairs on her temple were slick with sweat.
"Are you sick?" Alana asked curiously.
