The House Above the Sea

32.

"This should work, right?" Elsie asks, poking Joey in the shoulder.

    He whirls around, his eyes half-obscured beneath the brim of a white baseball cap, and squints at the small, navy blue box in Elsie's hand's. "Kosher salt?" he says, then flashes a grin. "Sure. Especially if the ghost is Jewish."

    Elsie's nose wrinkles. "Seriously, Joey," she says with a sigh, placing it back on the shelf with a sharp, metal twang. The sleepy folk music emanating from the overhead speakers does nothing to drown out the fierce beating of her heart, which has been racing in her chest ever since Neo told them how to break the curse. She is excited, and terrified, and sick, all at the same time. She barely even knows how she's still standing upright.

    "Wait," Joey says, swinging around to her other side, looking her square in the face. "I'm sorry. I just—um. Are you okay?"

    Elsie shrugs. "I don't know. I'm trying to be. It's the closest we've gotten to getting Kit out of there, I know—but I just can't help thinking of all the ways it might go wrong."

    "Like what?"

    "Like what?" Elsie scoffs. "I don't know! Like everything."

    Joey studies her for a moment, an annoying little perk to his mouth, then shrugs and reaches over, dropping the Kosher salt back in her basket. "Here's the thing, Elsie. It's impossible to predict the outcome of stuff, even if we really want to. So I think we just have to do our best, and if something goes wrong, we deal with it. No sense in getting worked up about it."

    If only it were that easy.

    After Kit went missing, all Elsie did was worry. She didn't eat, hardly slept; she had to read every page in her textbooks maybe twenty times before the words stuck in her brain. Then they told her he was dead, and that didn't stop the worrying. Maybe because she didn't entirely believe it yet.

    When she stopped worrying, the day of Kit's twelfth birthday, that was when she knew she'd truly given up. It was a relief at the same time it was the worst day of Elsie's life.

    And now Kit is back, and so is the worry—a dark, tense vice around her heart, pulling tighter and tighter with every passing minute. She doesn't want to trade that in, she realizes. Wouldn't it mean giving up again?

    "Elsieeeee," Joey says. "Hey, Earth to Elsie. Are you still with me?"

    "What?" Elsie sways just slightly on her feet, rocking into Joey's chest. "Yeah, I'm fine."

    "You're not fine." Joey's voice is careful, stern, as stern as the hand he lays on her shoulder to steady her. "You're worried sick, Elsie. I can see it."

    Elsie waves his arm away, casting her eyes at the floor. "Sorry."

    "Don't apologize."

    "Oh. Sor—"

    Joey glares at her. Elsie coughs.

    "We're going to figure it out, you know," says Joey, and now his voice is soft again, like honey oozing onto a silver spoon. A shudder goes down her spine—and Elsie hates it. She hates what this boy is doing to her, and yet she doesn't want him ever to stop.

    "We're gonna get Kit out of that shitty place," he goes on, sliding his hands into his pockets. "We just have to."

    We just have to.

    They aren't the most comforting words, sure. But they are true, true enough to pull Elsie's head out of the clouds, to ground her once more to the here and now.