Local Legends

By the third trip up, Shandy LaVigne had decided the staircase was personal.

It wasn't a normal staircase. Normal staircases had the decency to be boring. This one was three flights of tile the color of weak tea, wound tight around a stairwell so narrow her laundry basket kept clipping the rail, and every step threw the sound of her sneakers back at her twice as loud, like the building wanted her to know exactly how out of shape she was. Beckett Hall had stood on this hill since the eighteen-nineties and it had opinions about people who hadn't.

"You know," she called down over the rail, "when the brochure said historic dormitory, I pictured, like, charm. Wainscoting. A window seat you could be tragic in."

"You pictured Hogwarts," Katie said, three steps below and not remotely winded, because the universe was unfair.

"I pictured charm, Katie."

"You pictured Hogwarts."

Fine. She'd pictured Hogwarts.

They came out onto the third-floor landing and Shandy dropped the basket to shake the ache out of her arms. Through the window at the end of the hall the whole town lay out below them in the long gold light — Waterside, all of it, close enough to hold in two hands. Orange brick set ablaze against the ivy that climbed every wall it could reach. The white spire of a church. The river past the rooftops, wide and flat and bright, sitting up against its banks the way it did in late summer before the water went down for the fall. Beyond that, the hills, and beyond the hills, more hills, going blue and soft all the way to Canada. North Country. The actual edge of the actual map.

It was, Shandy would admit under torture, a little bit beautiful.

Not that she'd say so out loud. Saying so felt like admitting she'd been nervous, and she hadn't been nervous. She'd been ready. She had been ready to leave Golding since roughly the sixth grade, and Waterside — one town over, one exit up the highway, and about a hundred rungs up the social ladder — was where readiness went to get rewarded. Golding was where you were from. Waterside was where you got to be somebody — or that was the pitch, anyway, the one she'd been quietly selling herself for years. College. A real one, small and old and stitched into a town people had actually heard of.

And she was doing it with Katie. That was the part that made it real. They'd been best friends basically since they could walk, and even if the housing office hadn't given them the same room — Shandy had refreshed that assignment page all summer, praying otherwise — it had at least put them on the same floor. Same floor was enough. Same floor she could work with.

"Okay," Katie said, nudging the propped door of Shandy's room with her hip. "Where do you want the haunted lamps."

Shandy stopped. "They're not haunted. They're Grandma's."

"Same thing, historically."

The lamps sat in the open box by the bed where Shandy had set them that morning, wrapped in a beach towel because she hadn't trusted the movers within a county of them. A matched pair, older than her mother, the bases some heavy dark metal and the shades a warm amber glass that turned any bulb inside them the color of honey. They'd stood on either end of her grandmother's mantel her whole childhood, and when the house had been emptied last spring they were the only thing Shandy had asked for. She could not have told you why. They weren't worth anything. They just felt like the last lit windows of a house that wasn't there anymore.

She unwrapped the first one and set it on the desk and plugged it in, because a room wasn't yours until something in it glowed, and the amber came up soft and steady and immediately the cinderblock cell looked like somewhere a person lived.

For half a second the light dipped — a small brown flutter, there and gone, the way old bulbs do when a floor's wiring is as old as its stairs.

Shandy didn't notice. She was already reaching for the second lamp.

"There," she said. "See? Charm. I made charm."

Katie leaned in the doorway and considered the room with the flat, patient attention she gave everything, like she was waiting for it to confess. She had a sucker parked in the corner of her mouth — cherry, from the gas station on the way up, the stick angling when she talked. They'd somehow been a matched pair since forever, long enough that Shandy didn't question the physics of it anymore. Opposites, sticking. Whatever.

"It's a nice room," Katie allowed. Then, because she could never just leave a thing nice: "Old, though. This hall's older than it looks."

"Everything up here is older than it looks. That's the whole brand."

"Mm." Katie's eyes had drifted to the wall, like she was reading something off the brick that Shandy couldn't see. She didn't finish the thought. She never did, on day one — just filed it somewhere and let it ripen.

"Cool. Great. Love that for us." Shandy flopped onto the bare mattress. "Please tell me you did not sign up for a class about this."

The sucker stick stopped moving.

"Katie."

"I might have signed up for a class about this."

Shandy sat back up. "Katie Post. You did not."

"Local Legends of Waterside and the Surrounding Counties." Katie delivered the title like a woman announcing a lottery win. "One-oh-one. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Professor Marsh. It counts for the humanities requirement, so technically I'm being responsible."

"You are being a goblin." Shandy pointed at her, a gesture that in eighteen years had never once landed. "We are supposed to be reinventing ourselves. New town, new people, new — I had a whole plan, Katie, and the plan did not include you taking a three-credit course in the exact thing I have spent my entire life trying to get you to shut up about."

"You shut your mouth right now, Katie Post," Katie recited, fondly, in a decent impression of Shandy at fourteen. "I don't need to hear one more of your silly ghost stories."

"That still holds up. That was good advice."

"You know what they say about Waterside."

"That it's a magical portal to the great beyond?" Shandy rolled her eyes so hard it almost hurt. "That the veil is thin here, that there's something in the water, that whooo—" She wiggled her fingers. "Some drivel like that."

And here was the thing about Katie. She didn't get mad, and she didn't get loud, and she didn't take the bait. She just took the sucker out of her mouth, and looked at Shandy for a second the way you'd look at a kid who'd said something a little sad without knowing it, and said, perfectly evenly:

"You don't have to believe in something for it to be real, Shandy. That's not how real works. We're not talking about Tinkerbell."

Which was — okay. That one landed somewhere Shandy wasn't expecting, somewhere just under the ribs, and she didn't have a joke ready for it, and she hated not having a joke ready.

Figures, she thought. Day one. Not even unpacked, and they were already here, back in the dark at the top of the stairs at some sleepover, Katie's voice going quiet and certain in the way that used to keep Shandy up long after Katie had fallen asleep like a stone. She'd thought she was leaving that in Golding with everything else. Should've known better. Katie was the one part of home she'd wanted to bring with her.

"Well, when the portal opens," Shandy said, recovering, "you get to explain to my mother why I'm in another dimension. She still hasn't forgiven me for the tattoo."

"You don't have a tattoo."

"She hasn't forgiven me for the hypothetical tattoo."

That did it. Katie's mouth twitched, and then broke, and then they were both going, the real kind, the kind that folded Katie in half and made Shandy wheeze, over nothing, over a hypothetical tattoo, in an empty room in a building on a hill in a town neither of them belonged to yet. God, she'd missed this. This exact stupid thing. All summer she'd been so busy being ready she'd half forgotten that the whole point of the plan was to keep getting to do this.

"Come on," Shandy said, wiping her eyes, standing. "There's a whole van of my stuff still down there and the boys texted about pizza at some place called Stella's. If we don't get the mattress made before dark I'm sleeping on your floor and you know I steal covers."

"I know you steal covers."

They headed back out to the stairs.

Katie went first this time, already three steps down and talking about something — the boys, Frank being Frank, whether Stella's was the kind of place that did a decent slice or the kind that would try to sell them something called a pizza roll — and Shandy was half listening, arms already bracing for the trip back up, when she heard it.

Under Katie's voice. Under the double-loud slap of their sneakers in the tight stone throat of the stairwell. Something else.

Laughter.

She stopped on the landing with one hand on the cold rail.

It wasn't Katie. Katie was still going, oblivious, her voice bouncing up flat and ordinary. And it wasn't their laughter from a minute ago, warm and dumb and spent. This was thin. Drawn out. Somewhere below them and somewhere in the walls at the same time, in that way sound did in here where you couldn't trust it, and it went on a beat too long to be anybody catching their breath. There wasn't any joy in it. If anything it sounded like something that had been laughing for a long time and had stopped finding it funny a long time ago.

Somber. And — she didn't have a better word, and she didn't like the word — mocking.

"Katie." Her own voice came out smaller than she meant. "Did you—"

The laughter stopped. Or the echo caught up with itself, or a door shut two floors down, or the boiler did whatever boilers did in buildings this old. The stairwell was just a stairwell again, tea-colored tile and their own feet and the gold light going long and red through the window.

Katie had turned on the stairs below her. The sucker was back in her mouth. She was looking up at Shandy with that flat, patient, waiting look, and for once she wasn't saying anything at all.

"Nothing," Shandy said. "Old building. Old pipes." She came down the steps fast, past Katie, wanting nothing but to be out of that stairwell — down into the daylight and the ordinary van full of her ordinary life. "It's the acoustics. This whole place is basically a giant echo chamber, I read it in the — it's the acoustics."

"Sure," Katie said, and followed her down, unhurried. "The acoustics."

Behind them, three floors up, the amber light on Shandy's desk dipped once more in the empty room — brown, and low, and gone — as if something had leaned close to look, and then stepped back