Plagued by nightmares of another world, a girl makes an impossible choice.

Names falling from my wrist
Shall I let go of your hand?
There are worlds of ugliness
I hope you’ll never understand

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Rue used to practice in the mirror to make her eyes look blank instead of frightened. It must have worked because even Antonio stopped asking about her dreams.

The sun shines through the blinds and Rue burrows under the covers with a whine. The bed dips and a warm hand cards through her hair.

“Rue, sweetie,” Mamma says, “if you don’t get up, your brother will leave without you.”

The words drip into her bones like honey and Rue forces herself to sit up. She blinks blearily at Mamma perched at the end of the bed.

“Good girl.”

Rue comes downstairs to Antonio hunched over a textbook. He taps his pencil against his cereal bowl in a rhythmic clink-clink-clink. His hair is a mess still and Rue snorts.

“Hurry, would you?” Antonio mumbles, “I’ve got a test today … Modus ponens: if P then Q, P therefore Q … to affirm the conditional’s …”

Rue makes a face, grabs the cereal box and plops down across from him. This is her big brother with unparalleled aloofness fit for the tormented martyr he must’ve been in some other lifetime, Mamma likes to joke. Whereas, Dad reckons Antonio’s previous life had been little more heated — a healer, he’d say, who saved an entire village and was burned for it.

“I thought they only burned women back then,” Antonio said.

Dad raised his eyebrows meaningfully. Mamma laughed.

“Ooh,” Rue said. “What if you really were a girl? I want to be a girl too.”

Antonio whacked Rue with the Scrabble board. “You are a girl, Rue.”

Now, as she reaches across the table to push Antonio’s hair from his eyes, she doesn’t want to know what either of them had been. The way the morning sun hits him makes her heart ache a little.

Her brother is too real sometimes.

When they were five and nine, they always snuggled under Mamma’s quilt during the winter. And in the summer, when it was too hot, Antonio would lie on the floor, feet propped on the sofa as he watched cartoon figures dance upside-down. Rue was too short for this, and she didn’t like how hard the floor was, so she stayed on the sofa, occasionally tickling the bottom of Antonio’s feet with her toes.

When they turned eight and twelve, their parents were finally able to afford a new home. Rue ran inside their new house before Antonio could stop her; the wooden floor was clean and Rue’s shoes were still dirty from playing in the yard. Their parents were amused at Rue’s excitement, so they didn’t mind her frolicking noisily.

But unlike Rue, Antonio had always been calm. He took everything in slowly, and that must’ve worried their parents because Mamma asked, “What do you think?”

“It’s new,” he said.

The house smelled like new wood and fresh paint, and it was much more spacious than their old home.

“Do you like it?” asked Dad.

“It’s all right.”

Dad and Mamma looked at each other and probably knew that that was all they could get from him. But Rue, who had been watching from the stairs, understood that her brother was the type to grow to love something rather than fall head-over-heels at first sight.

So they moved in right across from the Gooles who had a son named Gilbert. Gil was almost never seen without the youngest of the Burdens. Tommy and Gil had grown up as neighbours and claimed to hate each other but were actually inseparable. They saw Rue through the window one afternoon and thought that she was a ghost.

Antonio had laughed when he found their letter in the postbox.

Hello,
What’s your name? My name is Gil. I am eight years old.
My friend Tommy wants to know how you died.
Gil

Rue never got a chance to write back because when she walked into her new school the next day, Gil and Tommy nearly wet themselves.

“Hello, my name is Rue. I am not dead. Let’s be friends.”

In her class, she sat beside Polly Woolford who liked to braid Rue’s hair and paint Rue’s cheeks with crayons. But it wasn’t until the summer holiday did a certain frizzy-haired girl blow into Rue’s life with a gust of dandelions. Rue had been sitting on the porch, bored out of her mind, when suddenly there was a net over her head.

“You’re Rue the ghost girl! I’m Bree. I don’t live on this street but I heard about you from Polly. Do you like bug catching? Have you been to the woods? I could show you. Do you have friends other than Polly? You can be my friend!”

Bree thrummed with so much energy that Rue was left breathless. Rue may have said something stupid like, “Okay.” Bree took the butterfly net off Rue’s head with a grin which seemed to say, I’ve caught you.

“I’ve got other friends,” said Rue when she found the words again, “but they broke Nio’s window with a baseball so they can’t come out to play. And Nio’s moping inside so he also can’t play.”

“Who’s Nio?”

“My brother. He’s so old he’s twelve.”

“No wonder he mopes,” said Bree. “Come on, let’s go cheer him up.”

So, Rue had friends who genuinely liked her which still surprised her sometimes. They were kind and boisterous, letting exaggerated groans when Rue tripped up the stairs, and including her in conversations when they had no reason to.

Four years later, these things haven’t changed.

Unlike Rue who likes having friends, Antonio likes being difficult.

“Stop asking me about them,” he grumbles on their way to school, “Auley isn’t my friend, all right? And neither is Saiko.”

“But they think you’re their friends,” Rue says.

“I know. They keep following me around.”

“That’s because they like you, Nio.”

Antonio huffs. “Well, I don’t like them.”

“You like them enough to not tell them to go away.”

“I’m just being polite,” he says defensively. “And I did try to tell them to leave me alone. But they thought I was upset because Auley stole my chips.”

“You don’t even like chips.”

“Exactly! They know nothing about me and they think we can be friends? I can’t show them how annoyed I am either because they think I’m a saint, or whatever. You know that Lugnor Caw from the debate team? He’s started a new rumour about how I baptised the headmistress’ children.”

“That’s stupid.” Rue makes a face. “You’re not a saint, Nio. And you aren’t even remotely nice. You’re so full of destructive power that you’re above prejudice — you hate everything and everyone equally.”

“I don’t hate everyone,” says Antonio who doesn’t get the sarcasm. “I don’t hate you, or Mum, or Dad.”

Rue pretends to be unfazed while her heart swells two sizes bigger. “Who d’you like best?”

“You, obviously. You’re clumsy and weird. You trip up the stairs, drown your pancakes in honey and have sleeping problems. What’s not to like?”

And then Antonio sprints past the school gate before Rue realises what he’d just said.

“Hey!” she squawks and chases after him.

This is her life, with the moving pictures and childhood laughter and everyone living on and on. Rue grows up with little notice, punctuated by flashes of misplaced memories so vivid they make her gasp awake at night. In her dreams, she sees a manor crumbled to pieces and friends reduced to their bare bones. The images send her mind reeling with unfathomable emptiness, with desperation, with emotions she cannot place.

Sometimes they seep into her waking moments, and Rue see things which doesn’t belong: a shadowless man crossing a street, a laughing skeleton by the bed, a smile on her brother’s face twisting all wrong.

Her trick with the blank eyes stops working. Her friends begin to notice.

They are having lunch in the courtyard because the day is suspiciously sunny. Rue looks up from her bacon sandwich she’d been trying to get through for the last half-hour.

“Rue, are you sleeping enough?” Polly asks.

“That’s how she always looks,” Gil says with an eye roll. “If you don’t like it, then just paint her cheeks in like you did in primary school.”

Polly elbows Gil in the ribs who elbows back. They start bickering.

“What’s your lunch ever done to you?” grouches Tommy, shoving the unshredded half of Rue’s sandwich into his mouth.

“Rue!”

Bree is running up the football pitch in her netball gear, nearly crashing into a few boys and their PE teacher.

“Oh, look, it’s Bulldozer Bree,” Rue jokes, “almost flattened our rugby stars there.”

Bree grins as she pants. “What d’you want for your birthday?”

Rue blinks.

Her eyes blur as shadows haunt the edges of her vision. And with a flash of white light, her life shimmers and changes.

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