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I Am the Ghost in Your House
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Books by Mar Romasco-Moore
Some Kind of Animal
I Am the Ghost in Your House
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2022 by Maria Romasco-Moore
Cover art copyright © 2022 by Alex Garant
Interior illustrations copyright © Rumdecor/Shutterstock and HiSunnySky/Shutterstock
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Romasco Moore, Mar, author.
Title: I am the ghost in your house / Mar Romasco-Moore.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2022] | Audience: Ages 14+. | Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: Born invisible, seventeen-year-old Pie wants more from life than lurking unseen in other people’s houses, but when she finally reveals herself, her mother disappears, and Pie begins to question everything she thought she knew.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003897 (print) | LCCN 2021003898 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-593-17721-1 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-593-17723-5 (library binding) | ISBN 978-0-593-17722-8 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Invisibility—Fiction. | Loneliness—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | Mothers and daugthers—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R66834 Iah 2022 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.R66834 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780593177228
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
Penguin Random House LLC supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to publish books for every reader.
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Contents
Cover
Other Titles
Title Page
Copyright
West Palm Beach, FL
Chapter 1
A Small Town Somewhere Near Lake Michigan
Chapter 2
Anywhere with a Station
Chapter 3
The Cathedral
Chapter 4
The Heart
Chapter 5
Tacoma, WA
Chapter 6
Paradise Cove, CA
Chapter 7
Orlando, FL
Chapter 8
Frick Park
Chapter 9
Albuquerque, NM
Chapter 10
Somewhere in Maine, I think
Chapter 11
The Castle
Chapter 12
The Playhouse
Chapter 13
The Auditorium
Chapter 14
The Cathedral
Chapter 15
Austin, TX
Chapter 16
The Glass Wall
Chapter 17
Portland, OR
Chapter 18
A Complete List of the People I've Touched
Chapter 19
An Incomplete List of the Places I've Slept
Chapter 20
The Train Yard
Chapter 21
An Incomplete List of the Best Meals I've Ever Eaten
Chapter 22
Mobile, AL
Chapter 23
The Other Side of the Ocean
Chapter 24
Las Vegas, NV
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Encino, CA
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
A Complete List of People I Would Rather Be Than Myself
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
This Side of the Ocean
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
The Castle Tower
Chapter 33
New York, NY
Chapter 34
Raton, NM
Chapter 35
The Castle, Crumbling
Chapter 36
Memphis, TN
Chapter 37
Winona, WI
Chapter 38
Winona, WI
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chicago, IL
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
A Complete List of the Ways I Always Thought I Would Die
Chapter 43
New Haven, CT
Chapter 44
Denver, CO
Chapter 45
Somewhere South of Glenwood Springs, CO
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgments
About the Author
West Palm Beach, FL
My mother’s greatest fear when she was pregnant with me was that I would come out normal.
She gave birth in the bathtub of some rich family’s summer home in Palm Beach. The tub had a faux-gold faucet in the shape of an open-beaked swan, so that all the water flowing out of it was swan spit.
The family was gone for the season, the house deserted, my mother alone. Which meant that when the pain came, she could scream.
She said that was the first time she’d screamed aloud in years. She said it felt good. To let out the fear she’d been carrying all those months, nestled alongside me like a twin.
My mother had been to the hospital a few days before, but not as a patient. She’d walked in, unnoticed, helped herself to painkillers, disinfectant, latex gloves, drugs. She was prepared to cut the umbilical cord herself. She’d watched a video online.
When I finally came out, she held me up with gloved hands, exhausted. It was a relief, she told me, to see that I was breathing. And yet it was an even bigger relief to see, clearly visible through the skin of my stomach, the outline of the bathtub faucet behind me.
I was transparent, safe, that golden swan screaming silently inside me.
I was so happy, my mother told me, and maybe she was happy that I was invisible like her, happy that the pain of labor was over. But I don’t believe for a second that she was happy to have me.
She named me Pietà, which is Italian for “pity.”
The train to Pittsburgh was going backward, undoing all the distance we’d covered.
My mother had fallen asleep, head slumped against the window. Through her transparent body, I could see the landscape rushing past in reverse. Images flickered across her face: tree trunks, mountainside, sky. It made her seem restless.
“Mom,” I whispered, nudging her.
The plan was to spend only one day and night in Pittsburgh, then catch a train for New York the next morning, so I was impatient to get there. Worried we never would. It wasn’t as if we’d paid for tickets, at least. My mother and I don’t need tickets.
We just need to be careful no one sits on us.
The sun was rising. Out the window, I recognized a river, which, half an hour before, had been indistinguishable from the night sky. Now it was a cloudy green, broken by red rocks trailing lacy veils of foam. Everything looked sharp in the morning sun, as if the train window were a movie screen. But the movie made no sense. Something arty, experimental. Short on plot.
Mother shifted and groaned softly in the seat beside me.
“We’re going backward,” I told her.
“Must be a freight train on the tracks.” She waved a dismissive hand. “They have right-of-way.”
In the seat behind us, a child started crying. I wanted to cry, too. It was silly and selfish, but I thought maybe the universe was conspiring to keep me away from Pittsburgh. The last time we’d been there, two years ago, things ended terribly. That was my fault, and Mom had told me in no uncertain terms that we were never, ever going back.
But I wanted to go back. I’d been wanting it every day for the last two years.
There was someone there I needed to see.
/> “I feel ill,” my mother said, still curled up with her head against the train window. “Be a dear and fetch me a ginger ale.”
“Okay,” I said. “Of course, right away.”
When Mom had finally given in and agreed to a brief Pittsburgh detour, it had seemed, perhaps, too good to be true.
Today, if the train ever started moving the right way again, we’d stop by the City of Bridges, and then tomorrow we’d go to New York City to celebrate my favorite day of the whole year. Not my birthday—that had already happened. Tomorrow was far better than my birthday, far better than Christmas.
Tomorrow was Halloween, the one day of the year that I could be seen.
Not because of magic or anything. Halloween is just the only day it’s acceptable to wear a full-face mask without everyone assuming you are about to kill them. People could see the mask, but not my face.
I was born invisible.
Really invisible. Not just shy or overlooked. Not like a superhero, either. I couldn’t turn it on or off.
Nobody in this world had ever seen my actual face, except for my mother, who was invisible, too. She saw me the same way I saw her, the same way I saw myself in mirrors. To her, and to myself, I looked like I was made of glass or water. Insubstantial. A girl who might break or wash away.
To anyone else, I looked like nothing.
I’d never had a job or a car or a friend. My mother and I roamed, taking what we needed, living in other people’s houses like ghosts.
We had been formally exorcised, in fact, six times.
On the backward train, I stood and made my way down the aisle. We took trains because they have more space. Buses are like moving sardine tins. Airplanes, I imagine, are even worse.
I pressed my gloved hand against the automatic door panel at the end of the train car. We are invisible but not insubstantial. The door didn’t know the difference between me and someone normal. One old Mennonite woman glanced up as the door rattled open for—from her perspective—no one, but this early, most passengers were asleep.
In the tiny metal no-man’s-land between cars, the muted rumble of the train became a clanking, wailing, whistling roar. On crowded trains, my mother and I were occasionally obliged to spend most of the trip in these thunderous spaces where the floor and the ceiling and the doors all rattle like wild. The wind wants to get in, wants to ride for a while.
In the café car, a conductor was sitting on one of the blue padded benches, eating a muffin. He frowned through me as I came in.
“Is that door broke?” he called to the café man, who shrugged.
The train shuddered to a stop, and I lost my balance, banging my hip against a booth. The conductor grumbled about the “goddamn freight trains” clogging the tracks.
I crept past him to the counter and pulled off one of my gloves. They were lilac silk with pearl buttons, lifted from a vintage shop in Chicago.
When the café man turned to wipe down the microwave, I hefted myself up onto the counter, reaching out with my bare hand for the stacked soda cans on the shelf behind it. The moment my fingers brushed against a can, it went filmy, translucent, as see-through as me. To the conductor and the café man, had they been looking, it would have disappeared.
That’s how it works. That’s why I always wear gloves. Anything that touches my bare skin turns invisible, too. For Halloween, I have to wear two masks, one on top of the other, because the first one will vanish.
My mother says that we are controlling this effect, on some level, but unconsciously. It’s a reflex, like flinching when touched. Sometimes my mother can control it a tiny bit if she concentrates super hard—can cause, for instance, only one small part of an object to become invisible—but I’ve never managed.
Ginger ale acquired, I slipped back out of the café car. Behind me, the conductor cursed “this run-down hunk of junk.” We were still at a dead stop.
Mother was slumped forward in the seat when I reached her, head cradled in her hands.
“Mom?” I said quietly.
She glanced up, face pale, which is to say more see-through than usual. Out the window behind her, a hawk landed on a tree alongside the tracks, perched directly in line with her right eye.
We don’t reflect any visible light, for the most part, though Mother says if we stood stock-still against a white wall, a close observer might spot a slight darkening of the air where our pupils are. But she and I can see a fraction of the spectrum that normal people can’t. It means we see better in the dark, because there’s a haze of infrared around anything living, anything warm. That’s why I can see her, though faintly, and she can see me.
It’s always been that way.
I tried to hand her the ginger ale, but she blanched, turned away, and clutched her stomach. I thought she was going to puke, but she didn’t.
Instead, she disappeared.
A Small Town Somewhere Near Lake Michigan
Unlike me, my mother wasn’t born invisible. It came on, like a condition, in adolescence. At ten, she told me, her invisibility first manifested, during a trip to the lake. She remembers standing at the edge of the water. Just a few feet away, her father yelled her name, but his eyes passed right over her. For a few wonderful moments, she was safe.
At first, her invisibility would come on unpredictably, last for a few hours, fade. The duration and frequency increased over the years until, by the time she was fourteen, it was permanent. Irreversible.
Not that she had any desire to reverse it.
My mother believes it was a defensive adaptation. Protective camouflage. Because already, by that age, she was being seen in ways she didn’t want to be.
I have never met my grandparents and I never will. My mother doesn’t like to talk about them. They weren’t good parents, weren’t good people.
At fourteen, as soon as she could hide from them, as soon as she could get away, she did. From then on, my mother took care of herself, haunting the houses of the rich, taking what she needed. She never finished high school, but she read voraciously, sat in on college classes. Learned all she could. Traveled. She was self-sufficient. Alone.
Not counting, of course, the five or so years she spent being an international art thief with my father.
She says she regrets those years now.
Never fall in love, she always tells me. It isn’t worth it.
Well, too late.
I stared at the empty seat beside me on the train, which was supposed to be going to Pittsburgh but at that moment was going absolutely nowhere.
My mother is dead. That’s the first thought that popped into my mind. It didn’t make sense, but neither did what I’d just seen.
Maybe this was what happened when people like us died. I’d always assumed we died the same way as everyone else, but it wasn’t like I had proof.
My mother had told me she didn’t know if there were any other invisible people out there. We hadn’t met any. It might just be the two of us. Alone in the world.