The Queen of Junk Island by Alexandra Mae Jones

Author:Alexandra Mae Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Annick Press
Published: 2022-02-22T15:12:33+00:00

Part Three

The Apparition and Anne

Chapter 10

It kind of puts things into focus—stumbling through a forest in the dark, chasing redemption and ghosts and love gone misshapen like paper left out in the rain. It makes things clear. Makes a person realize that they need to stop ignoring what’s really going on and actually deal with stuff.

“So, I think I’m being haunted.”

On the other end of the phone, Paul made a distracted hum. Then, “Say that again?”

I was in my room, supposedly taking a bathroom break from garbage duty in the forest. Cross-legged on the bed, I fanned out a semicircle of photographs, all taken by my hand. Square cutouts of forest, sun, faces. Snatches of my mother and Ivy with water and leaves shining in the distance.

“I keep seeing my aunt everywhere,” I told Paul. “Like, glimpses of her in the water and stuff. And I’ve been having the same dream almost every night, where I’m stranded on the island by my mother.”

I had so many photos of the island, but it was impossible to tell if my dreams had gotten the layout right; there was the cab of the truck and something that could’ve been a coatrack near it, but mostly it was a mishmash of color and shape, bubbling under the sunlight.

I inspected the photos one by one, looking for white streaks, smudges, unexplainable glows.

“A spirit only sticks around if they have unfinished business, right?” Paul said. “Do you know what that could be?”

I thought of my gram refusing to speak of her, of Joe and my mother’s awkward avoidance of Julie’s relationships with her parents. I thought of my mother running into the lake, convinced that our family’s things had been dragged out and abandoned on the island.

“Not yet,” I said. “But I’m going to figure it out.”

The morning after the lake debacle, Ivy and I had woken up to find the trapdoor folded neatly back into the ceiling. Two hours into forest cleanup, my mother had casually dropped that she didn’t want us to get “distracted” and that it was more important to clean and learn to swim than to go through old things.

I hadn’t pushed back. I’d gathered garbage and followed Ivy and my mother down to the water hole as they chatted like best friends. I’d let Ivy demonstrate different arm strokes and leg movements under the silk of the water while my mother occasionally yelled pointers from the sidelines. I had played along with all of this over the past few days. And all the while, my mind was elsewhere, chasing after a girl in baseball socks, who looked so much like me.

“Has your mother or Ivy seen the ghost, too?” Paul asked.

“No,” I said. “I think if she’s trying to send a message, it’s for me. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

The problem was, if I was going to solve this mystery, there was another mystery I needed to crack first.

Ivy.

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