U Up? A Novel

by Catie Disabato

Genres: Coming of Age; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

In the follow up to her smart debut, The Ghost Network, Catie Disabato creates a vivid portrait of a young woman investigating her best friend's disappearance while navigating codependent friendships, toxic exes, and witchy rituals

Eve has a carefully curated online life, works occasionally, and texts constantly with her best friend, Ezra. Basically, she is an archetypal L.A. millennial. She has also been carrying on a year-long conversation with her deceased friend Miggy over text. But when Ezra goes missing on the anniversary weekend of Miggy's death, Eve feels like her world is shattering.

Over a frantic weekend Eve investigates Ezra's disappearance, scouring social media for clues, while drowning her anger and anxiety in drinks, drugs, and spiritual cleansing. Eve starts to spiral as her friends try to convince her that she's overreacting, and ghosts--both real and metaphorical--continue to haunt her. When she uncovers clues to a life Ezra kept hidden, Eve starts to question how much she really knows about her best friend...and herself.

In U UP? Catie Disabato holds a mirror to the ways the phantom selves we create online permeate our emotional lives and hide our worst traits from everyone, including ourselves.

Release date: February 2, 2021

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 288

Sample

Most of the time when people die, they leave the rest of us behind forever, but occasionally an impression of them remains: a ghost, obviously. Some people, like me, can see and communicate with ghosts. Nozlee, too. From the ghosts we understand that the afterlife is like you’re napping most of the time, and when you’re awake you’re driven by unchecked desires; hungers and thirsts so intense they are all-consuming. In every werewolf movie, they have a scene of the body mid-transformation: a hunched and contorted back sprouting hair, claws growing where fingernails should be, eyes glowing yellow, teeth elongating and sharpening. Ghosts are creatures constantly in that mid-transformation state, their non-corporal bodies sometimes half-formed mist, sometimes a fully defined body, sometimes that body is contorted and growling and almost fully a beast. 

Most of my friends know that I “see ghosts” but almost all of them, even Ezra, think I’m being, like, hyperbolic. I’ve always been into the now-trendy pseudo-witchiness, into candles and moon ceremonies and crystals. They know I grew up in Los Angeles, and they remember New Age-y Topanga from Boy Meets World, and they remember when “being Wiccan” was a thing in junior high school, and they also watched The Craft on cable in high school and, after, bought a necklace with a Pentagram on it from Hot Topic. When I say, “I see ghosts,” they think I mean that sometimes in the corner of my eye, I see a flicker of a shadow that I’ve decided is a ghost. It’s easier to not correct them. It’s easier not to insist, I experience an actual materialization of the dead. Life is too exhausting not to make the easiest choice when it comes to the kind of thing that used to get my kind burned at the stake. 

When Miggy died, he didn’t return to me as a physical presence, but as a contact in my phone. We text a lot. Though he had little to report from life after death, it was a pleasure to still get a sense of his voice in my ear. Miggy didn’t have a voice anymore, not a throat, not the capacity to suck air into a throat to produce sounds, but I could remember what his voice sounded like. As a ghost, his driving thirst was conversation. He was like that when he was alive, too; when we die, we just become extreme versions of ourselves, our traits and preoccupations amped up so high that it’s monstrous. When he was alive, Miggy loved detailed descriptions of my days, gossip (even about people he didn’t personally know), and deep conversations about divisive topics like the efficacy of meditation and the future of the Democratic Party and if there is such a thing as a truly selfless act. Miggy still loved all those things after he died. As a ghost, he’s devoted himself to texts with me, with Nozlee, and with any other mediums I knew, or who were friends of friends and willing to provide their phone numbers and text with a ghost on those long, lonely, spooky nights.
I keep the texts secret so none of our other friends get jealous, so I don’t have to explain to them that I can see ghosts and re-traumatize myself when they don’t believe me or have me committed, and also so that if they did believe me, I didn’t have to be the conduit when everyone else wanted to say hi to Miggy. Getting to talk to Miggy is my prize for all my early-in-life suffering as the result of seeing ghosts—visits to childhood psychiatrists who asked leading questions trying to determine if I was seeing hallucinations or just had an active fantasy life, social isolation from the other kids who thought I was a “weird Wiccan bitch,” waking up in the middle of the night to hear my mother crying softly to my father that it was her fault that I was “different” because her mom was manic depressive and her aunt had depression and it was actually so selfish of her to have passed on those genes, and I was lying awake knowing it was because of my strangeness that my parents choose not to have any more children.

The only person I can talk about it with is Nozlee. We met in this sort of witch-skills apprentice program in Brooklyn, back when she tweezed her eyebrows too much and claimed to be a bisexual. We studied under a more experienced witch to hone our otherworld communication and exorcism skills; unfortunately Witch Colleen didn’t offer much in career training, so it was about as useless as our BAs in Comparative Literature in helping us pay our rents. Some of Witch Colleen’s students tried to make witchcraft into a career, but it was harder to make a living than even if we’d been freelance journalists. At Colleen’s suggestion, Noz and I both moved to LA because it was easier here to use our skills to make money on the side. Sometimes, I did exorcisms for rich people. Before her set work picked up, Noz made good money reading tarot cards, which is completely unaffected by her ability to see ghosts. Colleen herself had vanished from New York a little while after we graduated from her program, and was rumored to have moved out to the desert to find work as an exorcist or shaman; Nozlee insists that Colleen reaches out to her sometimes, but since Colleen had never reached out to me, I was sure she was exaggerating, conflating a like on Instagram with an actual reach-out.