I Am the Ghost in Your House by Mar Romasco-Moore

Author:Mar Romasco-Moore [Romasco-Moore, Mar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

He agreed to tell me the story in exchange for a haircut. It was one of the few services not accessible to him in any form. No one could see his hair to cut it.

He sat rigidly in a chair in his kitchen, stiffening further if my hands ever strayed too close to his shoulders or ears—in danger of touching. He just wanted the hair shorter, he said—it didn’t really matter how it looked. Which was good because, while I’d cut my mother’s hair plenty of times, I’d never had much of a knack for getting it even.

While I worked the scissors, he talked. His words seemed to come easier when he didn’t have to look at me. He told me his story, starting nearly from the beginning.

Like my mother, he was born visible and had been consumed by the need to get away when he was a teenager. But not for the same reasons. There was no abuse. His parents, he told me, were well-meaning, quiet and detached, like him.

Everything and everyone else, though, was a problem.

School, unbearable. Stores. Streets. All too loud. Too chaotic. Clashing lines and colors. Music, lawnmowers, voices. Faces.

“Faces,” he said, “have so much information, all of it coming at you so fast. Have you ever noticed?”

It was as though everything in the world was screaming at him all the time.

So he left. Walked away one day when he was seventeen, into the forest outside town. He camped out, made midnight runs into town. Broke into his own house, the houses of neighbors, to take food, borrow books. He felt guilty, but he couldn’t stand the thought of having to face anyone.

“You were a thief, too,” I said, still prickly about his accusations.

“I was,” he admitted.

As time wore on, he faded. Soon he no longer needed the cover of night to sneak into town. No one could see him. He took more things, took from stores, set up a luxurious campsite in the woods, well hidden. He wasn’t content with his life, exactly, but he didn’t know how else to live.

Three years later, my father showed up. He tracked Steve down, drawn to town by reports of mysterious disappearing objects, daylight thefts that seemed impossible. My father caught Steve midheist. He couldn’t see him, but he spoke to him, seemed to know about invisible people. Seemed to think, at first, that Steve was someone he knew.

My father must have been searching, I realized, for us. My mother and me.

Once my father realized that Steve was a stranger, he offered him a deal. My father wouldn’t tell the people of the town about Steve in exchange for some favors.

And so Steve became my father’s accomplice. He stole for him, got access to private information useful for cons. My father, meanwhile, set Steve up with a nice, quiet apartment in the city. He brought him groceries, takeout.

It was through my father, indirectly, that Steve met the other invisible person. My father was tracking this person, noting patterns of strange disappearances around town.

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