Steps to keep away the dead (a family remedy):
1. Crush tea leaves
2. Add to cup of boiled water
3. Drink every single drop within thirty minutes
4. Repeat twice a day, every day … forever.
Except it doesn’t keep them out completely. Most nights when sleep finds me, so do the spirits. They don’t interact with me, but I can see their shadows lurking in the void space of my sleep. Mom says it was bad before the tea. They would talk to you in your dreams, touch you, and worse: find you while you were awake.
I’m not scared to dream, but she says I should be.
I put my cup on the windowsill and listen to the sounds of night while I wait for Derek Johnson to come out of his house across the street. He’s late. Twenty minutes past the time he’s been coming out the last couple weeks. Maybe he’ll stay in. Maybe …
His front door opens.
Nerves steal my breath. I hide behind my blackout curtains to peek at him through my binoculars. He’s wearing a yellow hoodie under a jean jacket and sunglasses. Sunglasses with dark lenses, even though it’s night. But stranger than that is what he does. How he stands on the top step, so still and unmoving, for so many seconds I remind myself to breathe. When he finally moves, he glides down the steps like a phantom, otherworldly, but then he does something different. He walks over to the rosebush crawling up the side of his house. It’s an everblooming rosebush that brushes his bedroom window and has for well over a decade. He just stares at it.
I squint through the binoculars to get a good look. Maybe there’s an animal hiding between the branches. Maybe something is wrong.
Minutes pass before he turns and walks across the lawn to the sidewalk and up the street, fading into the distance and darkness as he goes.
My hands shake as I hang my binoculars and prepare for sleep. Not that I want to. What I want is to find out where Derek goes on these late-night adventures. Does he meet up with someone? There’s an urge in my body to know, to find out, and it’s hard to quiet. Each night, I consider going after him to see for myself, and the urge turns into a deep ache somewhere down in my bones, in my marrow. I can’t pretend he doesn’t exist the way he pretends I don’t exist, but I shouldn’t go after him. He’d catch me, I’m sure of it. And I can’t ask him what’s going on because he won’t speak to me at all. Not after he ended our friendship two years ago.
I try to bury the urge while scribbling in my journal, hoping the street wakes to distract me. My neighbors usually give me something to write about with their late-night arguments, the pit bulls barking from backyards and their outdoor cats making hellish breeding sounds. They make a movie for me many nights, but not this one. I consider watching The First 48, but my eyes are too heavy. Mom is working an overnight shift, so I lock my bedroom door and put a chair against it. I’d never tell her that sometimes I’m scared to be home alone because she’d tell me to stop watching the gruesome things I watch. She has no choice but to work.
My room goes hazy as I crawl into bed, the tea fast at work, but before sleep pulls me under I pray that whatever Derek’s doing he’s being safe.
The world tilts. Dulls and
darkens. My fingers are in front of me, manicured nails painted white even here. I have ten of them. Not eleven, not nine, but this is still a dream. I’m conscious of it, even though I shouldn’t be. My eyes flick around. This is nothingness. It’s not pitch-black but a dark gray, as if dense storm clouds strung together to suffocate out all of the daylight. A shadow space.
With each step I take on this gray plane, my feet make ripples on its moving surface. I open my mouth, try to use my voice, but haven’t mastered speaking here yet. My throat hurts—tingles and burns—but if I could call out, I don’t think the spirits would answer. My limbs feel too thick to move on my own, but suddenly I’m lifted and dropped again. I’m hanging upside down, or right side up, then I’m floating. Gravity moves how it wishes here so I don’t fight trying to control my body anymore. But then I feel my skin prick all over. My stomach squeezes before I see them slithering. The spirits are wisps of white and black wafting through this world, circling me. They slide through the crevices, the open spaces between my body parts. They could almost touch me, almost. I try to move away from them, but there are so many of them and only one of me and the gray space between all of us goes darker.
But then … something new happens. I’m dumped into a different dream where I’m falling from a sky that looks like the one of my waking world. My stomach is ripped away as I drop, drop, drop. The wind burns my lungs and …
I think. I might. Die.
Until I hit the ground with a thud, and there is no more darkness. An anomaly. This has never happened when I dream of the gray. Here, it’s a bright day, the sun hurts my eyes, but I blink the world into view, my house sitting across the street. I can smell … roses.
“Where have you been?” Derek’s voice calls, and I twist my body to him. He is younger. Fifteen, and climbing out of his window while the branches of the rosebush grow like they’re trying to climb inside of it. He jumps down, his arm scratching against the leaves and thorns. He plucks a pink Pippin rose off its branch to hand to me, smiles. “They’re in full bloom now.”
The rose is yellow around the edges and beautiful in my palm. I bring it to my nose, inhale the sweet fragrance as he watches me. But then the smell starts to change. Rancid, rotting. I gag and hold it away from my body.
“What’s wrong, Aria?” Derek says, and when I look up at him, his dark skin goes pale until it starts to fade. He tries to touch his face, but his hand goes right through it. “Aria.” His voice is thin, scared. It makes my heart thrum. Before I can reach for him, he is nothing but wisps of black, and the world around us both goes gray.
I try to scream, but it’s no use.
This is how I wake:
holding my throat, trying to speak, but gasping for air instead.
I sit up, reach for the glass of water on my nightstand, drink it until my throat stops hurting and I can whisper some words. It was just a dream.
No, it was a memory changed.
Derek is okay. He’s fine, I tell myself. But goosebumps trail my arms and there’s sweat at the base of my neck and my shirt clings to my back. I dream of him sometimes. But never when I’m dreaming of the gray space, never with him in it.
And the stench of decay … it’s still here. Once a mouse died on a sticky trap behind the fridge, and Mom and I forgot we put a trap there. This is that smell, but more intense, potent. The same smell as the dead rose in my dream. My hands spread over my sheet, getting ready to search, to tear apart my room, but the stench billows through my open window in a rush and has me blinking until I’m out of bed. Death is the kind of thing I spend nights wondering if I’ll ever see. My love of murder mystery makes me imagine one of my neighbors is dragging a dead body across the concrete, blood trailing as it gets loaded into a trunk.
But all I see through my window is smoke rising from the rosebush near Derek’s.
A fire? No. It’s something else.
I’m about to leave when I notice the teacup on my windowsill and a knowing wave washes over me. It’s unfinished. I forgot to drink every last drop.
Is that why my dream was different?
The benefit of being alone is that I don’t have to slink by my mother’s room or be careful to avoid the wood planks that creak as I walk down the hall. As soon as I open my front door and step outside, the smell catches in my nose and makes me choke. I cover my face with my sleeve, hesitating on my porch, trying to see the rosebush with nothing but the moon and what the dim streetlights provide. Finally, I force myself down the steps. In this moment of curiosity, my heart races for another reason: It’s been so long since I’ve crossed this street. Derek wouldn’t want me to, but I do it anyway.
His porch light blinks on as I creep over to his window. I freeze, counting several seconds before I start to take slow steps until I am standing just a foot from the rosebush. And there’s no other confirmation I need to know this is where the smell is coming from. It’s not the same rosebush I saw before I fell asleep just hours ago. The one that has lived so long people call it unbelievable, a gift, a rarity. It is a dying thing, shriveling right in front of me.
I use the flashlight on my phone to examine it, to make sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing. And I am. But I can’t be. This rosebush has been alive longer than I have. It has drawn blood from me and Derek with our playful finger-pricking games and double dares more times than I can count. It has drawn blood from us when we climbed in and out of his window too. But now, it’s withering and dying in the darkness, crumbling like it’s being burned, but there’s no fire. The leaves are black, the petals
are almost there. They fall against the side of the house; some stick there like tar. One rose falls and I catch it, but it soon turns to dust in my palm.
I blink, shiver, and swallow. Remember the dream, the rose dying in my palm then too. Derek going gray. Suddenly it feels like I’m back there. My limbs are not my own, the world around me dulls, and I feel something pulling, grasping at my back. I reach for one of the stems in front of me, but it’s too weak. It cracks under the weight of my fingers before I can grab it.
Other stems fall with it, and I am sliced by a thorn. The pain makes me wince, but the world returns to its normal inky black. My body is mine again. Then, in a matter of seconds, the whole bush starts to crumble from the top. Rotted leaves and branches and flowers fall from the sky and land on me. I shield my face, step back, coughing at the smell just as the light in Derek’s room blinks on.
Another step back, two. I don’t see him, but I can feel him looking at me. The rosebush isn’t okay, but he is. A feeling brushes against my bones, though. It isn’t the same feeling as when we were young, when I’d knock on his window and wait for him to open up for me so I didn’t have to be alone at night. The feeling now makes the hair on my arms rise.
Slowly, I walk backward across the lawn, onto the sidewalk, but when my feet hit the curb, I stumble into the street. Luckily, I catch myself before my body hits the pavement, then I run.
When I’m safe through my front door, I lean up against it to catch my breath, willing myself to wake up from whatever this is. But there are blackened leaves in my hair and blood begins to trail from my finger down my wrist and the smell of death sticks to my skin.
The sound of Mom’s car door slamming shut stirs me awake. I’m on the sofa, still in my shoes and sweatpants, halfway off the couch, the smell of rot on my shirt. My body is stiff.
So is my finger.
I sit up quickly. See that it’s swollen with two red pinpricks in the center: proof of what happened last night. The rosebush, the sinking feeling, Derek’s light coming on. There are several seconds when I can’t do anything but breathe before I get up and rush to the window. A small crowd is gathered across the street, surrounding Mr. Johnson and Derek’s younger brothers. And I can still smell it, not just on my clothing or in my hair. It’s stronger now: wafting through the crack under my front door, seeping through the shut window, polluting the block.
From my front porch, I can hear the complaints. The smell alone would’ve pulled my neighbors out of bed, but the climbing rosebush has also rebloomed and reached for the sky for a rare twenty years. Why so suddenly? How? It doesn’t make sense. Nosier than me, Karina Wilson from a house over pretends to weep while talking to Mr. Johnson, then she moves and blocks what little view I had of the messy pile of black leaves. The man who lives upstairs from us is pulling on a leash to keep his dog from sniffing and licking at what’s left of the rosebush roots.
It’s torture not knowing what Mr. Johnson’s theories are, and not being able to walk over there and examine things myself. But my mom is there, staring at the side of the house before reaching to touch the tar-like substance sticking to the vinyl siding. A breath gets caught in my throat waiting. When she pulls back like the substance stung her, I flinch too.
Mr. Johnson sees my mom staring at her fingers and moves toward her. I try to read their lips but fail. My mom gives him a hug, and for the briefest second I remember hugging his son. There’s an ache in my chest when she walks away from Mr. Johnson, from the rosebush. She sees me, and I use my eyes to tell her to stay where she is and soak up information.
She doesn’t listen. She heads up the steps and onto our porch, and before I can ask her anything she shakes her head, says, “Come inside,” and walks through the front door. I move to stalk after her, but then that sinking feeling from my dream last night grabs my stomach. The back of my neck tingles; so do my legs. I shift to see Derek walking down the steps of his house with his eyes locked on me instead of the crowd, instead of the dead rosebush.
He’s okay. He’s not turning gray or disappearing. He’s not a shadow.
I can’t remember the last time he’s looked directly at me, and suddenly I’m conscious of it. I tuck a curl behind my ear, then the contact is gone; he turns away. Heat replaces the prickling in my neck and crawls to my cheeks. My eyes dart from Derek to the remnants of the rosebush and back. But he strides past the people gathered under his bedroom window, ignores his dad calling out to him, and starts walking up the street.
I’m tempted to cross now that I know he’s gone, but something tells me Derek will know it if I do.
He didn’t always hate me. We played while we were in diapers, dared each other to eat bugs when we got bigger; we climbed trees to build forts and helped his mom prune that rosebush every winter. We wrote Derek and Aria best friends forever in permanent marker on each other’s legs freshman year and I believed it with my soul. The first person Derek would’ve called about the rosebush dying was me, but things are different now.
Mom is already heading for the shower when I walk inside. “Please, Aria,” she says, pulling the elastic out of her straightened hair and letting it fall over her shoulders. “Can I answer your billion questions later? I just want to wash away the smell of work and go to bed.”
I still smell like death from the rosebush, but I’m not ready to wash it away. “Talk while you shower,” I say, following her into the bathroom. “Please, I’ll cook beef sinigang for dinner.”
“You’re slick.” She sucks her teeth and begins to undress. “Have kids, they say. They’ll grow up and you’ll get your privacy back, they say.”
I arch an eyebrow at her. “Who says that?”
“Everyone.”
“Well, too bad I’m still a child.”
“If that’s the case, you should definitely do as I say and leave me in peace after the shit I had to clean off the walls at work. Besides, you could always go talk to Mr. Johnson yourself.” After she says it, she sees the look on my face and mumbles an apology. She knows why I won’t go over there. She turns on the water and gets in the shower, pulling the curtain closed.
I brace myself against the bathroom sink and wait. But not long. “What are the findings?”
“There’s nothing significant to report to you, Aria. The findings are inconclusive. Yesterday the roses were still in full bloom and today … well, you know. They’re the opposite of blooming. And Mr. Johnson doesn’t know why. No one does. Happy with those deductions?”
“Negative.” I lean into the sink until I hear it creak under my weight. “Does Mr. Johnson feel broken up about it? You know how much Mrs. Johnson used to love that rosebush.”
Steam starts to fill the bathroom; I breathe it in while she speaks.
“He seems more clueless than sad, but what do I know? I could hardly get more than a few words in with everyone out there,” she says. “And you should stop calling her Mrs. Johnson before you offend that family. You know he doesn’t ever want to talk about Shelley.”
Shelley. Derek used to call her by her first name, and I’d joke about how my mom would never let me call her Helena. Memories of Derek and Shelley fill my mind. They’d tend to their garden in the backyard while I watched them grow basil and blueberries and watermelon. Shelley telling me and Derek which branches to remove from the rosebush while we helped get it ready for the season change. Derek smiling, always smiling when his mother was around. But that was before she left him and his whole family two years ago.
I make a mental note: She’s no longer Mrs. Johnson. She’s Shelley, always has been. And Shelley never came back, not even once. Now the roses are gone with her.
Mom snaps me from my thoughts. “It’s weird,” she says. “The rosebush. It seems like…
Seconds pass. My heart beats hard in my ears. My skin is warm. “Like what, Mom?”
She doesn’t respond. I turn toward the mirror, watch it fog out my features. “There’s something strange about it,” she finally says, even quieter now.
The black tar substance. The smell. The way it crumbled over my head. That pulling feeling right before. I look down at my swollen finger; the pricks are still bright red and burning at the slightest touch. “Do you think … there’s something otherworldly about it?”
The silence is maddening before she laughs a little. “Aria, come on. It’s just … Maybe it had a disease. We should leave it alone.” I want to tell her about my dream last night and how it felt like a premonition, but she says, “Please shut the door on your way out. I’m finishing, then going to bed for a few hours. Don’t forget…”
“To make my tea,” I mumble. How could I forget? She reminds me like clockwork.
“And,” she stresses, “that you have to meet with your titi Evelyn in an hour.”
I sigh and slip out of the bathroom, shutting the door. Senior year doesn’t start for two days and Mom insists I get my college plans settled like she hasn’t already settled them herself: me living at home and going to Rhode Island College. Titi Evelyn isn’t even an academic advisor, but Mom keeps saying, “She has a PhD from RIC. Doesn’t owe much in loans; she’ll convince you to stay at home.” Neither Titi Evelyn nor Mom ever ask what I want.
There’s only one bag of tea leaf left in the cabinet, but it should last another month. With a mortar and pestle, I crush the leaves until they are almost as fine as dust and boil some water. But I’m feeling off-center thinking of the dream I had after not finishing my tea last night.
While watching the steam rise from the kettle, I call my sister. Adelia is in her first year of college and lately she’s been too busy for my calls, but to my surprise, she picks up this time. Her voice sounds breathy, like she’s walking up the URI campus hills. She lives there, forty-five minutes away, even though our mother expects me to stay at home. Adelia tells me I have four minutes and twenty seconds to talk her ear off before she has to hang up. So I speed through the story about the rosebush dying and tell her about my dream too.
Her breathing is even now. She’s stopped walking for this.
“You saw it before it happened?” A hypothetical question. She doesn’t wait for my response. “Interesting.”
I’m not sure if she’s teasing. “Will you just come take a look at the rosebush?”
She hums, which means a no is coming. Adelia hasn’t been home since she left for school
a month ago. “Maybe soon, but if there is something … strange going on, you already know of a certain shop owner who could tell you what it is better than I can,” she says.
I roll my eyes because I’ve been trying to push away all thoughts of the shop owner she’s referring to, and because I know she’s right. “You know I’m not allowed in the shop anymore.”
“What I know,” Adelia says, “is that you’re immature and need to apologize.”
“For what? He’s the one…” A loud whistle breaks through the room and interrupts me.
“Is that the tea kettle?” Adelia asks. Then, “You’re still drinking that stuff?”
Her emphasis on the words that stuff makes something stir inside of me. “Twice a day,” I tell her. “Same as the last time I saw you. Same as the past decade.”
“No, I mean … even though not drinking all of it gave you a vision last night?”
“What if it wasn’t a vision exactly, and what if the tea isn’t connected?”
“Hmm,” I can tell she’s smirking, “well, you’re the one who presented it that way.”
“What if I’m wrong and…”
“Aria,” Adelia interrupts. “Are you looking for me to tell you to take your tea today?”
I chew my lip, say, “Maybe that’s partly why I was calling. You’re always saying I’m rash, and I’m not sure if this urge warrants a reaction. I mean, the tea protects me, right?”
“Does it really?” Adelia says, and we both fall silent for a few seconds. “We never talked much about your tea. But aside from wanting to know about the vision you had, do you ever think about what it would be like if you decided to face the ghosts?”
“Why would I want to face them?” I eye the kettle and the teacup on the counter.
Then my sister says, “To ask what it is they want from you.” Even though the thought has nagged me for years, hearing her say it causes a shiver to crawl up my spine. “For all your curiosity about everything else, I wouldn’t be surprised if you ache to know more about yourself and the spirits. Especially now that you had that dream of the rosebush dying. I’m sure you’re anxious, mind running, curious with what else you might see without the tea.”
“But I can’t be.” The words come out in a whisper. I clear my throat, speak louder. “You know Mom and our little shop owner wouldn’t let me stop the tea. Not if it keeps me safe.”
“Something I’ve always found intriguing about you is how you usually do whatever you want,” my sister says, “consequences be damned. Except when it comes to this.” Her words bite into me, but before I can respond, she says, “The four minutes are up. Talk to you soon.”
“I have twenty more seconds,” I say. Then, “You didn’t try to convince me to drink it.”
“You didn’t really want me to,” she says, and hangs up.
But part of me did want her to convince me—because why would I want to be tormented by the things I used to experience when I was younger? Right now, my dreams are only gray void, wisps of shadows. They’re bearable, but without the tea they wouldn’t be. And worse: neither would my waking life. That’s what I’ve always been told, and yet, I’m never scared to dream. I’ve always been curious. It can’t be a coincidence that last night’s dream was different; the foreshadowing was visionary.
But it wasn’t just the rosebush that faded away, it was Derek too. He’s been acting strange. What if something in my dreams can tell me why?
My throat is so thick, dry. I pour water from the kettle into the cup and drink a few sips. Out of habit, or maybe fear. Because Mom’s always saying, We should leave it alone. Not now, Aria. Drink your tea, Aria. Don’t forget to drink your tea. But the conversation with Adelia reverberates in my mind as well, and all of my curiosity clouds Mom’s constant warnings.
I stare down at the warm cup in my hands. The fragments of crushed leaves have settled at the bottom, and before I can think twice about it, I pour the liquid down the drain. Blood rushes in my ears, and I can barely breathe, but there is something else: a buzzing in my bones. Adrenaline coursing through me. I reach into the cabinet, grab the last bag of tea leaf and inhale before dumping all of it into the trash.
My chest is hot when I walk toward the bathroom. Mom will know what I did by hearing my voice. She will. The shower isn’t running anymore. She must be getting dressed. I knock, clear my throat, say, “Mom, can you tell Titi I’ll talk to her after church tomorrow?”
“What?” Mom says. “No, you’ve already canceled on her twice. You’re going.”
I try to calm my racing heart in fear that she’ll hear it somehow. ...
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