When I returned to the house, no one was on the ground floor. I figured Patience was still helping Essie with whatever health problem she was having — or fending off the ghost that was harassing her, maybe. She’d suggested I take the day off and go somewhere, but it was a weekday and Kathy, my only friend in reasonable driving distance, would be at work until three-thirty. I decided to drive down to Harperton and eat at a nice restaurant, and maybe kill time at a couple of the stores downtown until Kathy got done teaching for the day.

I brought a book with me to read during lunch, but it was hopeless; I kept turning the strange events of the past few weeks over and over in my head while I ordered and waited for my food and ate, and again while I browsed the antique shop and the consignment store, barely seeing the merchandise in front of me.

At last, three-thirty rolled around. Classes should be over for the day at South Taine Elementary, and hopefully Kathy wouldn’t have a meeting afterward. I gave her a few more minutes to escort her second-graders to the buses and then called her.

“Hey, Jenny, what’s up?”

“A lot, but if I told you I would have to kill you. The short version is I’ve got the day off and I’m in Harperton. You want to hang out?”

“Sure, head to my house and I’ll meet you there in a few.”

Kathy and her husband Tim lived in half of a duplex over on the east side of Harperton, closer to where I was in downtown than to the school. If Tim wasn’t working from home today, he probably wouldn’t be home for hours yet; his office was way down in Marietta, and they made him come in for meetings once or twice a week. There weren’t any cars in their driveway when I arrived, so I figured he wasn’t home. Kathy got there about five minutes later.

She let me into the house and we sat down and started chatting, but I was distracted and she could tell. “You’ve got something on your mind,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do. But I don’t think I can tell you any of it. NDA, remember?”

“Yeah, that sucks. You can’t even hint at it?”

“I’m not supposed to say anything about the child I’m teaching or their family. Or their house — the NDA specifically mentioned the house.”

“And something about the kid you’re teaching or their family is bothering you?”

“...I really shouldn’t say. I don’t think I’m violating the NDA to say they’ve been lovely, but...” I threw up my hands helplessly.

“What about,” she said, “we play a game of two truths and a lie. Only we mix it up so you tell, I dunno, four or five lies for every truth, and you don’t tell me whether my guesses are right? That way you get the benefit of unburdening yourself, but I’m no wiser about your secretive employers than I was before.”

“That sounds like fun,” I said, “but I’m not too sure...” I thought about it for a few moments. Certainly the things I was concerned about were much less plausible than a lot of lies I could make up; there was no way she would guess the truth. “Okay. I won’t tell you how many truths I’m telling and how many lies.

“So the little boy I’m teaching” (first lie) “is a genius inventor” (second lie); “he built a teleporter” (third lie) “and we had a picnic on Ganymede, under a pop-up dome.” Huh, I’d meant to say Europa — that would have been the first partial truth. Slip of the tongue, I guess. “And that’s great, sure, but the reason we had to go to Ganymede was to get away from his mean grandmother.” (Fourth lie — no, fifth counting Ganymede) “She’s a vampire and her son and daughter-in-law made the mistake of inviting her in right after she became a vampire, before they knew she had even died, so now they can’t get rid of her, and she drops in at inconvenient times.” (Six, seven, eight lies, and finally a bit of truth.)

“Have they tried, I dunno, crosses and garlic?” She was giggling at my extravagant story, but looked sympathetic, too, like she could read between the lines and guess at part of the unpleasant truth.

“The grandmother is Italian; she loves garlic almost as much as blood. And her son and daughter-in-law are pagans, so crosses won’t work for them. They tried some pagan symbols, but the Catholic grandmother didn’t recognize them. — But anyway, donating a little blood every few weeks isn’t a big deal; she eats like a bird. A blood-drinking bird. No, the problem is she’s super racist and is constantly spouting bigotry and they don’t want their little boy hearing that.” That hadn’t quite come out how I’d planned, either. “And then she’s always tracking grave-dirt into the house and wiping blood off her mouth with random curtains and tablecloths and it’s just a whole mess. Really interferes with teaching when my pupil is pale and anemic the next morning after a visit from Grandma, too.”

I was getting a little concerned. Ganymede could have been a slip of the tongue, but substituting “racist” for “transphobic”? There had to be more going on. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the ghost was racist too; it just hadn’t come up.

“It sounds like a bad situation,” Kathy said. “Is it anywhere near bad enough you’re thinking of quitting?”

“No, not at all. I want to be there for him. He’s got good parents and they’ve been perfectly lovely to me, it’s just his racist vampire grandma that’s the problem.” I’d been thinking about testing a hypothesis, wondering what would be the best way to go about it, and just then I made up my mind. What I planned to say next was this:

“And besides, the kid is messing around with gender, and it’s too early to say, but he might not actually be a boy. I want to be there for him, or her or them, as sort of a role model. And additional support when his vampire grandmother turns on the transphobia.”

What came out was this:

“And it’s too early to tell with a kid that age, but I’ve seen a couple of signs he might be gay? I want to stick around and be a role model when he starts figuring that out in a few years. And additional support when his vampire grandmother turns on the homophobia.”

It didn’t feel like someone controlling my mouth and making me say something different. It felt like a slip of the tongue, like the Europa/Ganymede mixup, even though no such total difference in content could be simply that. But it scared me, and made me want to change the subject. Kathy wouldn’t let it go right away, though.

Kathy hummed thoughtfully for a bit. “I don’t know if I can give you any advice,” she said. “Maybe go over to the Catholic church and pick up some holy water?”

“Doubt it’ll work, since I’m not Catholic, but it might be worth a try.”

“And, I guess, just be a good teacher and role model for the kid. Try to counteract the bigoted influence. Sounds like his parents are doing that, too?”

“Yeah.”

“And — is she being transphobic to you, too? That kind of bigotry usually goes hand in hand.”

“Don’t think she’s clocked me, actually. She was pretty nearsighted and the vampire curse just stopped her aging, it didn’t make her young again. I’m sure she’d be even more nasty if she did.” At this point I didn’t think it was worth even trying to tell a partial truth. “Let’s talk about something else. What’s the news from South Taine?”

She shared the latest gossip about the other teachers and fun stories about the kids in her class. When Tim got home, we ate supper and watched a movie before I drove back to the Oldcroft house.

 

* * *

 

My head was churning with questions as I turned off the pitted asphalt road that Google Maps knew about onto the dirt road that it didn’t. Why had my tongue repeatedly betrayed me whenever I got too close to the truth, however inextricably mixed with lies? Was it the ghost’s influence? Kathy’s duplex was a good thirty miles from where he was buried and the house he’d been haunting, but I didn’t know how ghosts worked. More likely, I suspected, it was something about the NDA I’d signed that was making it literally impossible for me to violate it.

I wanted to ask Patience how that worked, but I obviously didn’t want to tell her I’d tried to violate the NDA, even under circumstances where I wouldn’t be believed. I still had plenty of other questions for her, though. Questions about her grandfather’s ghost. About what she’d said about “doing what she could” about Essie’s haunted nightmares. About the loud arguments she had with him night and day. About why she and Essie were still living in that house if it was haunted — maybe they figured the ghost was haunting them, not the house, and would follow them anywhere?

I parked in the driveway, walked up to the house, and let myself in. “I’m back,” I called out, not too loud in case Essie or Patience was trying to sleep.

“Welcome back,” Patience said, coming into the parlor from the dining room with a mug in her hand. “Essie is upstairs, asleep. She had a stressful morning.”

“I hope she’s doing better?”

“Yes, I hope you can resume lessons tomorrow.”

“Before you go to bed, I’d like to ask you a few questions. Some stuff that came up in the last few days that’s got me confused.”

“Oh,” she said flatly. “Yeah, I was wondering when that would happen. Have a seat.”

We sat in the parlor, her in an easy chair and me on the sofa. She took a sip of her tea and asked, “Well?”

“How long has your grandfather’s ghost been haunting you and Essie?”

“Since a few days after he died,” she said. “But it wasn’t that bad at first. Just popping in every few days or weeks to give unwanted advice, same as he used to do when he was alive. Even when he got mean, it was usually directed at me, berating me for not being married to Essie’s father. It didn’t get really bad until Essie came into her power, and changed herself into a girl.”

“What?!”

“Ah, you hadn’t figured that part out yet, had you? Yes, magic runs in our family. I don’t have much, myself, but Essie shows signs of being really strong. If she can learn to control it, to use it at will and not use it on subconscious impulse. But anyway, yes, one morning before school she told me she was a girl, and she was so happy I couldn’t tell her no... And then she, ah, showed me. I’d already seen that her hair had grown a foot overnight. Well, I could have made her wear boy clothes to school for a few days and pretend she hadn’t changed while we figured things out, but I didn’t want to make her cut her hair short again — who knew when she’d get enough conscious control of her magic to make it grow again. So I called in sick for a few days while I tried to figure out what to do next, but her magic was too much in flux to risk her being around other kids. I decided to just withdraw her and homeschool her until her magic calmed down enough that I could hire a tutor. Even now she’s having those spontaneous flare-ups of her magic, but not as often or as bad... I was honestly expecting you to see her using magic before you figured out about Grandpa.”

I had, I realized. The magnetic levitation trick... and maybe that dream about nineteenth-century Calcutta, with those distinct smells so unlike any other dream, had been caused by Essie’s magic?

“It was just a few days later she transformed herself, after I’d made her some girl clothes and gotten my old dolls out of the attic for her, that Grandpa started getting really mean. Almost every night she would have a nightmare of him yelling at her or worse. Almost every night he would appear in my room and yell at me for supporting her transition. A couple of times her spontaneous magic would banish him temporarily, but he’d always come back.”

“You said you’d hired another teacher before me, someone who only lasted a few days. Did she leave because of the ghost or because of Essie’s magic?”

“The ghost, I think. She left after having nightmares several nights in a row. Thank you again for staying, by the way.”

“I don’t want to leave Essie if I can help it,” I said. “The nightmares haven’t been that bad since we started having success with lucid dreaming, anyway. It seems like we can escape him by shifting the scene of the dream two or three times.”

“Yes, Essie told me about that. I have a lot to thank you for. You’ve helped Essie where all the relatives I went to for help either refused, or couldn’t help.”

“Because they disapproved of Essie’s transition?”

“In some cases. Or because I wasn’t married to Essie’s father, or both. Some of my younger cousins are fine with that, but they don’t have the skills or power to banish ghosts, and my older cousins wouldn’t, or not without major strings attached. They all resent me for not marrying one of their sons.” She scowled. “It was because Grandpa was putting me under so much pressure to have an heir that I went and got pregnant with Essie. I’d say I regret giving in, but I don’t — Essie’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Well,” I said, “do you have any plans or ideas for getting rid of his ghost permanently?”

She threw up her hands. “Nothing that will work in the short term. I’ve tried the banishing rituals in the books, and they don’t work for me — not enough power. So my best option is to keep teaching Essie until she can control her power, and then have her do it once she’s skilled enough. Which won’t be quick; none of the banishing rituals are easy.”

I thought about it. “Do you think she might be able to build on the lucid dreaming? Since that gives us temporary relief, maybe super-charging it with magic could get rid of him permanently?”

“...It’s possible,” she said. “I don’t know how she’s using lucid dreaming to escape him. I looked through the books for references to dreaming and didn’t find anything like that. And sharing lucid dreams with you is the only kind of magic she’s managed to do repeatedly.”

“Let’s suggest it to her,” I said. “Tomorrow, when she’s better rested.”

“All right,” she said. “If you’ve got more questions, I’ll try to answer some of them tomorrow. I’m going to bed, I’ve been sitting by Essie’s side most of the day and then cleaning up afterward.”

“Good night,” I said.

I got ready for bed, but didn’t fall asleep for a while. I kept thinking about what I’d learned, and what it meant. If Essie’s magic had spontaneously given her an affirming body, was it possible she could transform me too, whether deliberately or spontaneously? I didn’t want to ask her to do it for multiple reasons: one, I didn’t want to pressure or guilt-trip her when she had no conscious control of her magic, or even after she’d just started getting control of it. Two, I didn’t exactly want a cisnormative body. I’d been planning to get facial feminization surgery when I’d saved enough money, and maybe implants if a few years of HRT didn’t do enough to satisfy me, but not bottom surgery. I actually kind of liked my penis, although I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to keep my testicles. And I didn’t want to talk with an eight-year-old about those nitty-gritty details of the body I wanted. Anyway, it was a moot point for now; Essie didn’t have control of her magic yet, and when she did, it might be years before she was skilled enough with it to do deliberately for me what she’d spontaneously done for herself.