Prolific author Julianna Baggott (Pure, Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders) has published novels for both YA and adult readers, as well as poetry. But she’s got something new up next: her first volume of short stories, the provocatively titled I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here With You. io9 has a ghostly tale to share today!
Here’s a quick intro to the collection, followed by the full cover and the chilling “How They Got In.”
In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who’s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been “banned for life,” and finds herself falling in love. In “Backwards,” a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In “Welcome to Oxhead,” all the parents in a gated community “shut off” when the power goes out. In “Portals,” a small town deals with hope and loss when dozens of portals suddenly open. In “How They Got In,” a grieving family starts to see a murdered girl in all of their old home videos.
HOW THEY GOT IN
The daughter. Loose-limbed girl, twelve years old. Pumping her bike. Gangly as a puppet. It’s cold. She grips the handlebars, knuckles red and raw. Her breath catches and ghosts the air as she puffs along, uphill.
Deals on dealsTake up to 70% off at Lenovo's Spring Clearance sale, including a wide range of laptops, monitors, and tablets. Take an extra 15% off with the promo code.
The developer of this neighborhood went bankrupt, so most of these houses were abandoned before they were fully built. Like the daughter was abandoned before fully built; her father’s gone. Cancer, awful and quick. Just a year earlier. She and her mom and brother are still trying to find the new orbit, to reconstruct a family around a massive, cratered hole of absence. The father had been a good father.
Their house sits at the end of the cul-de-sac, the sun on its back like a burden of dying light. The garage is just beams, an unfinished gesture. The leaky bay window is covered in plastic. The den still needs drywall. It’s laid bare in a way that recalls ribs—like being inside a body. She doesn’t want to go home. But her fingers are tight with cold, her cheeks stiff.
She stops. Takes out her phone, points the camera at her face. “Hi! Welcome to my YouTube channel!” She doesn’t have a YouTube channel, but dumb kids at school do, so maybe she could too. “This is where I live.” She points the camera at her house. It looks sad in the frame. Collapsible almost. Like a giant hand could pick it up and take it away.
She shows the street of half-built houses, focusing on one lot that’s only pitted foundation. Poured and abandoned. Things could be worse. That could be her house. She turns the camera off, wipes her bangs out of her eyes, and walks her bike up the driveway. The video uploads to the family’s cloud.
This was how the first one got in. Missing the summer of 1973. Fifteen years old. Her flute case found by a muddy brook six miles southeast.
But not her flute. Just the case, open on the bank. Its blue velvet interior caked in mud. Holly Martine. She remembers herself, some small registering of her existence. The pocket of her jeans; her cross necklace, which gets stuck to her collarbones in summer; her silky hair pulled back in a high ponytail; her teased bangs. The flute in her hand, flecked with blood, keys clotted with mud. The scent of her Jean Nate After Bath Splash and . . . him . . . Cigarettes, acrid body odor, and something like tar and shit and the clay along the water’s edge, gray and wet. She knew her killer. He lived along her route home, small house, neat yard. He was her father’s age. He’d try to make small talk sometimes. Slimmer. George Slimmer.
She appears. Cold. She crosses her arms, flute tucked under one arm. She knows this spot, her makeshift burial.
Holly sees a girl, a middle-schooler, standing in a driveway, pointing something at her then walking away. Holly feels like she’s slipped into something that isn’t the world she’s known. She’s hungry. Not literally hungry, but a physical feeling in her chest and ribs but also her legs and arms, like she’s been starving for a long time. For what?
For everything. Air, dirt, houses. My God, the girl with her bike. Going into a house. To her family? Holly wants life, people, words, her flute; its key pads are stuck. She wants to be and do and make noise.
She runs toward the girl’s house, fever in her chest, but comes to the edge of something. Like an idea has come to an end. She can see forward but can’t move forward.
After the Challenger blew up—the classroom air felt solid, no one moving or breathing. They saw the stalled smoke cloud, nothing at the edges of it, either. She reaches into this stalled air. Opening and closing her hand, it becomes a bunch of dots, like TV channels that don’t work.
Is she going to stand here and wait? Has she learned nothing? She heaves herself in the direction of the girl with the bike, heaving herself into that pixilation.
Now, in the basement, the son. He’s fifteen. A workout bench, gaming station, futon. Buzzing space heater. Cave crickets appear, so muscular and erratic that he’s scared of them and embarrassed by it.
His girlfriend is here. She came in through the cellar door. This is how his life is since his dad died. No one knows what he’s doing. No one cares. He loves it except if he thinks about it too much. Like the way his mother sees past him. They could go for days, near misses, almost seeing each other. He hears her walking around overhead. Maybe she hears his video game gunfire. How long could he go missing before she noticed?
His girlfriend would notice. She’s wearing an Old Navy sweater over a tank top. She smells like a strawberry-scented car deodorizer, the kind that clips onto the air conditioning vent. His dad had one in his Toyota.
On the futon, she slips her hand along his thigh.
“Does it stink down here?” he asks. His Christmas stocking was foot sprays and Axe body spray—as if his mother didn’t see him anymore but could still smell him.
“My mom sells essential oils,” his girlfriend says. “There’s one that smells like pot, swear to God.”
“I’d need something to cover up pot.”
“She’s got those.” She kisses him. “Do you want me to steal one?”
“But does it stink down here?” She looks around. “It smells like a basement. Right?”
“I guess.”
She pushes him down onto the futon and straddles him.
“You know what we should do?”
“I’ve got a few ideas.” He’s surprised that he knows what to say sometimes and how to lower his voice to say it.
“We should tape it,” she says. “Like celebrities.” “
Tape, like, us?”
“Duh. Yes!”
“Like how much?” She tugs his shirt. “Just a teaser. We’re not sluts.” The first time she called him a slut it was confusing. They’d hooked up at a party. Two months later, he still doesn’t know how to take it.
“Just a teaser,” he says. “Okay.” She takes off her sweater, her tank top riding up her soft stomach, and picks up his phone.
Holly is at a birthday party. The girl with the bike is younger, turning seven. The mother is presenting a Barbie baked into a cake, which is the bottom of her ball gown. Smart, the girl thinks. Did they put the Barbie in after the cake was baked? Still, she can’t help it—she imagines the Barbie burnt to char.
Holly stands at the back of the room, holding her flute. She doesn’t recognize these people, these toys. All of these things gripped in their hands. They point and shoot like cameras. They bing, click, play music. The father touches a button, and it’s Aunt Jackie, calling from Baltimore. A phone?
Why this house and this family and this moment? She moves toward the kitchen, finds an edge, like the one she heaved herself into. Can she push from this moment to another? She’s warm here. There are sweets, a punch bowl with ice cream and foaming ginger ale. She wants to eat the cake but she also wants to shove her hand into it and feel it. Again, it’s hunger but not typical hunger. It’s wanting . . .
They sing “Happy Birthday.” She sings along quietly at first. A stranger at the party, and no one notices?
She sings louder. Do they see her at all?
By the time they get to the little girl’s name, she’s singing at the top of her voice, off-key, angrily. “Happy birthday, dear Little Giiiiirllll . . . happy birthday to you!”
Their eyes glide past her. But then, a quick flip. They’re in a living room. The daughter opens a gift of pink cowboy boots. And a Lego set—a pirate ship? Holly remembers getting a yellow Wuzzle bear and a SheRa Crystal Castle for her birthday. Her older brother grabbed the castle, screaming about Castle Grayskull.
These two fight the same way. A sudden brawl. The father says, “Hold on.”
“It’s her birthday, for crying out loud!” the mother says.
Holly hated her family, but she misses them now.
She sits down, cross-legged. She thinks of marching band and how she didn’t get to go to the marching band competition. They had a routine to an old sitcom theme song, My Three Sons, her band director’s favorite show as a kid. Mr. Tidek. He thought they could win. She starts to cry.
An old lady touches her shoulder. The grandmother, the next-door neighbor? “They’re just playing,” she says, pointing at the kids. Source: Gizmodo