Content note: Hate crimes and animal death

 

We stole the bottle of Elmer’s glue in the pass time between lunch and free period, the orange cap a beacon on the art room’s back shelves. Mrs. Chowdhury was out having her third baby in as many years, and the sub they’d hired to take her place spent most of his time in the lounge, flipping through motorcycle magazines and drinking neon-colored Surge from a borrowed “World’s Greatest Teacher” mug.

This was before the jocks become the jocks, before the brains become the brains. Before everyone scatters on the last day of middle school and emerges from the roiling summer waters fully formed, as theater kids or stoners, or preps, skaters, goths. We were on our own, before the world was gracious enough to categorize us, let us in on the great secret of where we belonged.

If Mrs. Chowdhury had been there, she would never have let us take the glue, needing it for pop-up books with the sixth graders later that day, and probably having paid for it herself. But Mrs. Chowdhury wasn’t there. And we had another project in mind.

Free period was meant to give us time to catch up on homework and study for tests, but nobody actually dared do any work there, for fear we’d be laughed out of those narrow linoleum halls. Instead, we spent the time killing time, and even that wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Because like anything at that age, what you did became who you were. And before kids were old enough to get serious about travel soccer or bong rips or the high-school production of Kilroy Was Here, what they got serious about was their free-period time killer of choice.

The Doodlers huddled around an open notebook, drawing copy after copy of what everyone called the “Cool S.” Some speculated it was the original version of the Superman logo; others insisted it came from the name of a designer label that only the rich kids, children of doctors and lawyers, could afford. We all knew how to draw it, the “S”: six vertical lines in two rows, then the diagonals to connect them. But no one except the Doodlers was allowed to draw it, not at school anyway. What we did at home was between us and our never-around parents and our staticky Bob Barker reruns and God. 

The Doodlers would become the theater kids, or the goths, depending on whether they applied their burgeoning artistic talents to stage sets or eyeliner. The Casios—the ones who figured out how to spell words on their calculators, BOOBS and BOOBLESS and HELLO—would maintain their fascination with digital languages, going on to write lines of code for some of the most successful apps around. Then there were the Matchmakers, who pushed their desks together and played every true-love game they could think of. They’d be among the first to join OkCupid, then jump ship to Tinder and Hinge when those came about, no pool of potential suitors big or warm enough to satisfy them. 

The Slaps spent all of free period striking these colorful slap bracelets against their wrists, pulling them off, then slapping them down again, again. The stiff bracelets, basically steel tape measures wrapped in fabric, were the only thing the monitors knew to confiscate immediately, and the banned bin in the front office soon overflowed with strips of zebra print, rainbow snakeskin, and peace signs. The Slaps would eventually become competitive gymnasts and world-class ballerinas, MMA fighters and bodybuilders covered in tattoos. They’d grown accustomed to their bodies being magnets for pain.

We weren’t any of those things. We didn’t have anything to do with those kids, and we didn’t have much to do with each other, either. Except that we all spoke in variations of a funny accented English. We had funny-sounding last names and carried funny-smelling lunches that swung from our fingers in plastic bags, and in these ways, we were the same. 

Our parents were too busy to make friends with the other parents, too frugal to bid in the annual fundraiser auction, too tired to join the PTA. But they always made time to pack our lunches, the cafeteria alternative costing an absolutely-out-of-the-question two dollars per day. For Geetha, it was golden disks of rava idli with a ramekin of bright coconut chutney. For Christian, peppery beef with fried crescents of onions and shiny trees of bok choy. Tatiana, Anh, and Javi traded golubtsy for bun cha for cheesy tortas, while the cafeteria-lunch kids looked on, wrinkling their noses over their trays of rectangular pizza and cartons of strawberry milk.

After lunch, we went to free period, where the other cliques assembled around their calculators and MASH life-predictor charts, avoiding us completely. We sat with our backpacks on our laps, the sharp smell of spices and green-card lotteries radiating from us.

Until the day we stole the Elmer’s glue, and everything changed.

It’s funny how the glue game became our thing. It wasn’t even one of the core group who came up with it. There was always one regular, born-and-bred American kid who hung out with us solely because they were the new kid in school, outcasted briefly by the rest of the population as if under some probationary period during which they had to prove themselves worthy or be left on the social fringes for good. Exactly one at a time. Once the next new kid showed up, the previous one cycled out, by then having gotten the lay of the land and found a better group to fit into. They cycled out fast, the new kids. Too fast to make much of an impression.

Except for Reid, a bowl-cut blond from Massachusetts who brought PB and J’s in ziplocks and taught us everything we needed to know about making replicas of ourselves with glue. 

He said everyone at his old school did it: smeared Elmer’s glue all over their fingers and palms, waited for it to dry, then peeled it off carefully, so it came up in a single, translucent husk, intact and thin as eggshells. When we asked Reid why they did that, he said why not. When we asked if it was bad for you, putting all that adhesive directly on your skin, he shrugged.

“It’s just something to do.” Then he swept his hair out of his eyes in that TRL way we knew the other kids would fall head over heels for, and we recognized that there was no time to waste. Sooner rather than later, Reid would move on.

We figured out which of our lockers was closest to the art room and planned to steal the glue the very next day. Because something to do was precisely what we were looking for. Because all we’d found at home were squashed tubes of heavy-duty fabric glue and wood epoxy, in off-limits drawers full of sewing needles and loose keys, and Reid had warned us against using anything stronger than Elmer’s.

Anh stationed herself outside the teachers’ lounge, ready with questions about Harley-Davidsons and crosshatch shading in case the sub got the idea that he should actually do his job. Christian and Geetha waited anxiously by an open locker. Tatiana played the wide-eyed lookout, not trusting anyone else to do it, saying for sure she’d catch the belt if her dad were to find out.

Javi watched the clock.

And Reid led the way.

If you did it right, you’d have a glue version of your own hand lying flat on the pale wood of the desk before you, identical down to the whorls of your fingertips. Everything about it was ritualistic, addictive, from the solemn passing around of the bottle to the group inspection of the glue’s curing, Geetha always insisting it needed just a minute longer, to the lifting of the finicky edge at the heel of the palm, all of us enthralled, refusing to breathe.

Later, some of us would relish peeling our sunburns in the same way, brown and pink skin taking the shape of land and sea in the world map that stretched across our shoulders and backs. It would give us a proximate satisfaction. Those of us who would grow old enough to do it, anyway.

The free-period monitors weren’t oblivious to our newfound interest. All of a sudden, the kids they could always count on to be shy and yielding were whispering furiously in the corner, their backpack straps tangling, forgotten, in the chair legs. But the monitors already had their hands full with the Slaps, who appeared every day with red wrists and a fresh collection of bracelets, undeterred by threats of the banned bin. It was as if the bracelets shot up from their lawns each morning with the sprinklers.

So we didn’t give much thought to the monitors. It was the attention of the other kids that mattered.

They eyed us curiously: our palms covered in globby white paste, the finished products like the disembodied hands of ghosts. Javi, whose parents were even more religious than the rest of ours and lectured him constantly about the afterlife, jokingly called them spirit hands, and the name stuck. We high-fived each other with our spirit hands. We staged low-stakes thumb wars. We waved. Eventually, the other kids had to look away. It was code: everyone had their own time killer, and they’d already chosen theirs.

When the Casios got bored of spelling BOOBLESS in numbers, they discovered GIGGLE, EGGSHELL, and OHIO. 

When we got bored of our flat spirit hands, we started spreading the glue all the way to the other side, across our nails and knuckles, down to the wrist bone. When we pulled the dried glue off, the three-dimensional hand it formed was the stuff of big-city sculpture gardens. We all agreed that, petty theft notwithstanding, it would’ve made Mrs. Chowdhury proud. 

One day, one of the Matchmakers marched over and ran her finger over the creases in Tatiana’s spirit hand.

“This is your heart line,” the Matchmaker cooed. Her lashes were long, her irises milk chocolate, and Tatiana looked like she might lift off into space on the next word.

“See how strong it is right here?” The Matchmaker grazed a spot under the pinky, and Tatiana shoved her own hand into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt, as if it was her real skin that had been touched. “Then it splinters off. That means—”

Another Matchmaker hissed loudly in our direction, and the palm reader gave us an apologetic look before returning to her part of the room. Tatiana spent the rest of free period staring at the upturned line on her spirit hand’s palm, and when Christian presented his own still-drying hand for inspection, she didn’t even look up, just muttered, “Uh-huh. Looks great to me.”

Even on days when no one noticed us any more than they had before, it felt good to make more of ourselves, to see ourselves reflected in this small way we could control. There weren’t many Geethas in our town, or Anhs, or Javis. It was a relief to find that it could welcome—was even capable of holding—a few more of us. 

Christian must’ve been on his thirtieth or fortieth spirit hand when he pushed away from his desk, his chin a terror-struck prune. 

“It moved,” he said. Anh, the bravest among us, pointed toward the open window and laughed. Reid, who hadn’t made a spirit hand in weeks, listened for the number-two-pencil sounds of the Doodlers. He knew it was only a matter of time, and he already had one foot out the door.

Christian shook his head. “No. I mean, it moved.” 

He leaned back and instantly we understood what he meant. The hand, sheer and fragile as chiffon, was crawling toward the edge of his desk, as if powered by muscles and ligaments we could not see. Anh froze mid-laugh, the “O” of her mouth a deflating balloon. 

Later, Christian would say he had a paper cut on his thumb that day, and the blood’s what activated the glue for us in a way that Reid, with all his experience, had never seen before. Tatiana’s theory had to do with the sun hitting the desk at exactly the right angle. The rest of us just figured that each of us, in our private inner worlds, had wished for it hard enough.

The spirit hand paused and drummed its fingers against the wood, pinky to index, as if thinking. It reached into Christian’s unzipped pencil case and plucked out his treasured two-color BIC pen. 

Then it did something none of us would have dreamed of. It clicked on the blue ink tip and slowly carved an asterisk into the desktop, bold and obvious as the North Star. 

By the time we started making full spirit bodies, Reid was long gone, drawing that pointy “S” along with the rest of them until his hand cramped. We weren’t bitter—it was the way of the new kids to not stay new kids forever—but we still joked that, had he stuck around with us, he would’ve had backup hands to spare.

The new new kid was Savannah. She wore basketball shorts that looked big enough to belong to an older brother, and she would never stop being angry, in all the time we knew her, about getting yanked out of her old school in Texas, all her friends now two whole time zones away. Savannah never did get in with the other cliques. She was with us till the end of the school year. Mostly, we saw her sitting in the gulch between the playground and the Shell station, flicking a lighter on and off, alone.

If Mrs. Chowdhury had been there, she would’ve stopped us before we took it any further. But Mrs. Chowdhury wasn’t there, and Mr. Hockeborn was. 

Mr. Hockeborn was the social studies teacher, and he was obsessed with the Second World War. Whatever the lesson started out as, he always found a way to work it back to the Allies and the Axis, the German casualties at Dunkirk—even when we were supposed to be learning about the branches of the U.S. government or the women’s suffrage movement. Once, spiraled off on one of his tangents, he told the class that families used to send soldiers silk stockings stuffed with candies and safety razor blades and other necessities a man at war would need. 

“Like a piñata?” It was one of the Casios, smirking, proud of his disruption.

“Not at all like a piñata.” Mr. Hockeborn dropped his eyebrows in a look meant to remind us that we were talking about war. “Not at all.”

He went on: “Some people today think the soldiers coveted the stockings because the shape—thighs, calves, feet—reminded them of their wives and girlfriends back home. Others say the men wore the stockings themselves, their wool socks having fallen to pieces from all the marching they’d done.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And others think it’s all just hokum. That the silk-stocking care packages are nothing but a myth.”

That was Mr. Hockeborn’s favorite word, “hokum.” When Geetha came home later singing, “Hokum, hokum!” her parents demanded to know what in God’s name they were teaching her at that second-rate American public school, and threatened to pull her out if she ever said it again.

Christian’s spirit hand came alive on a Wednesday, Mr. Hockeborn delivered the pantyhose history lesson that Thursday, and by Friday we’d come up with a plan: we would do the spirit hands on a grander scale, use the glue to make duplicates of our entire bodies. If silk stockings could be made to not look like clothing anymore—to look like real legs—then couldn’t we do the same? After all, the soldiers’ families had managed it approximately one million years ago, and today we had twentieth-century adhesive technology, and an unopened six-pack of Elmer’s bottles Anh had swiped behind some absent-minded teacher’s back. And we had the keys to Geetha’s house, which had enough rooms for each of us to strip down to our underwear and spread the glue over ourselves in peace, without anyone seeing anything they weren’t supposed to.

Like most of us, Geetha was an only child. Only Christian had a little sister, Megan, who was born in an American hospital and burbled her first words in English, and who he regarded as an alien because she didn’t share any of his interests and instead spent hours every day smacking her unopened bubble wand toy against any hard surface she could reach. Megan wasn’t old enough to go to school yet, and Christian swore his mom’s body had a permanent lean to it from toting his sister to and from work.       

Geetha’s parents were never home. None of our parents were ever home, but Geetha’s parents were not-home in the fun way, meaning she had her own fancy teal iMac in her bedroom and a friendly old labrador named Ollie for company and a pantry full of roasted chana we ate in fistfuls straight from the bag. Unlike the rest of us, Geetha even had a real babysitter when she was younger, but last year her parents decided they could try trusting her on her own.

Savannah had elected to spend her afternoon scowling at birds and rocks and whatever and whoever else dared to cross her, but the rest of us were there, at Geetha’s. We kicked our shoes off inside the door, and Tatiana spent an inordinate amount of time straightening them out, so each shoe was next to its sister on the mat. She looked sheepish, but we didn’t say anything: we knew by then how her dad was.

Anh dutifully handed out the bottles of Elmer’s, and we disappeared into our separate rooms. It took a lot more time for a whole body’s worth of glue to dry than it did a single hand, and Javi, who’d wound up in the clean, bare laundry room, was bored out of his skull waiting all that time without snacks or books or a TV. The dog whined piteously from the mudroom, locked out of every place with people. It was for its own safety—Anh said the glue was probably nontoxic, but Geetha wasn’t willing to chance the day ending with a call to her mom’s office, a trip to the emergency vet.

Once the glue had dried, peeling it off took a long time, too: maintaining that delicate, unbroken layer around the tricky ridges of our ears, the dimpling at the backs of our knees. By the time we reappeared in the living room fully clothed, our stomachs growling like they did all the time back then, the sun was ready to set. Geetha told us not to worry. Her parents would be playing squash with her mom’s boss till late; there was a lot on the line, talk of a promotion.

The rest of us could only think of squash like the food—a pan full of sweet, fried cubes—but before Geetha could explain, our first spirit person emerged. 

It was Tatiana’s, taller than the rest of us by half a foot with a hooked nose just like hers, lips but no mouth, smooth valleys where there should have been eyes. From where it stood on the second-floor landing, it looked like it was blushing, reliving the Matchmaker incident or some other excruciating moment in Tatiana’s life, though that was impossible: Tatiana hadn’t mixed pink dye into her glue, so there was no way hers was a different color than ours. Her spirit person descended the stairs with Tatiana’s familiar timid, halting walk, like it wanted to be sure it wasn’t interrupting before it took even one step further. 

Of course, it couldn’t have been interrupting. It was what we were waiting for. 

Soon, the others emerged: Javi’s with his broad shoulders, Christian’s with his fine cellist’s fingers, Anh’s so petite it reminded us how slight she really was, a fact her tenacity and brazenness had all but erased. Finally, Geetha’s came out of her bedroom, the dried glue catching the light with the iridescence of a tightly woven spider web. The dog barked from behind the mudroom door, louder than ever.

Tatiana stood before her spirit person, disbelieving. When we’d left the rooms minutes before, the glue versions of us weren’t stirring. Draped over the office chair and washing machine, they were no better than those promotional cardboard cutouts at the AMC, and so much worse for being featureless and flimsy. We didn’t think the magic had worked.

Tatiana was barely breathing. “Remember when everyone wanted a My Size Barbie?” 

Christian and Javi shrugged noncommittally. Anh and Geetha looked wistful. Even Geetha’s parents, who could afford a litter of My Size Barbies, refused to buy one, because the dolls only came pale-skinned and blue-eyed, and were, according to Geetha’s parents, utter nonsense besides. Nonsense, Geetha contemplated to herself now, being just another word for hokum.

The dog barked urgently, scratching at the door.

Tatiana stretched her arm out, letting her hand hover an inch from her spirit person’s nose. “This is so much better than that.” 

On the other side of the room, the bottom of Geetha’s spirit person’s face ripped in a short horizontal line. It parted its dried-glue lips around the tear.

“Quiet!” Geetha’s spirit person ordered, and the dog shut up.

We thought we’d keep them in our bedrooms at home, but Christian raised the point that none of us were allowed to lock our bedrooms, and about half of us weren’t even allowed to close our doors, so how exactly was that going to work? Then Javi’s spirit person, as much a comedian as the real Javi, demonstrated it had no trouble working a lock anyway. Having freed Ollie from the mudroom, Javi’s spirit person chased the old labrador in circles around the kitchen. The dog finally got so worked up it peed on the tile, sending Anh into titters while Geetha and Tatiana panic-rummaged through the cupboard of cleaning sprays.

Our only option, then, was to bring our spirit people to school. And like with anybody’s first day of school, there was a heated discussion about what they should wear. 

Tatiana wanted to dress hers up like a doll, in her best checkered dress with a ribbon around the waist. Anh scoffed: what did we think she was, the Bon-Ton? She could barely keep herself in clean clothes, much less outfit a whole other person. Christian reasoned that since our spirit people didn’t have, um, well, parts, they didn’t really need to wear anything, did they? He turned red as soon as he said it. Javi snickered. Geetha squirmed.

It didn’t matter anyway. Didn’t take long for us to figure out they couldn’t withstand the weight of fabric. Geetha’s spirit person collapsed under her lightest T-shirt, Geetha hurrying to pull the shirt off before the dried glue at her spirit person’s wispy shoulders could split. 

We were nervous about what people would think of them. We should’ve known better. Our schoolmates had always been self-absorbed and distracted, our teachers overloaded and under-observant. Too much grading, too many helicopter parents pestering them about why their son’s clay pot hadn’t been featured in the quarterly art show. 

Actually, for the first few weeks, it was perfect. While our spirit people sat through math or language arts or phys ed, we did the things we’d always wanted to: pooled our change at the Shell for a hot pickle-in-a-pouch, wrote confessions in intricate cursive on the bathroom stalls. But there was only so much to do within walking distance of Corley Middle School, and when it all got old, we trudged back to class, secretly hoping we hadn’t missed anything major.

But our teachers didn’t mention participation points or makeup tests. They didn’t even acknowledge our recent absence, just sighed and added extra names to the roll call. We’d never know which of us were real to them, and which of us nearly invisible.

So when the winter dance rolled around and Slaps were voted to every court slot for the second year in a row, Anh complained that she’d probably be popular, too, if she had any time left to curry favor. After, you know—she ticked off her obligations on her fingers one by one—getting straight A’s, plus helping her grandparents at the store, plus babysitting her annoying buttface cousins, plus getting strong enough to carry the sousaphone in the marching band next year. She could use more hours in the day, she said, or just more of her in the same hours. 

We allowed that Anh had what it took to be popular, but we weren’t so sure about the rest of us. We agreed to test her theory because there was another obvious benefit to making additional spirit people: the more of them there were, the more places they could be. And even though we knew it was unlikely they’d fit in everywhere, we were positive this was the fastest way for us to find somewhere we belonged.

It would be like test-driving dozens of different lives at once. We’d find our place by summer break, and we’d do it without sacrificing our grades or missing a single cello lesson. And if by some miracle we became popular along the way, we’d find a way to live with it.

Geetha’s mom got the promotion, and while her parents were out at their celebratory dinner at Tanino’s, we knocked on wood and made three more spirit people apiece. When her parents disappeared for the weekend to a conference in Vegas, we made even more, the glue coming up faster and easier each time. We started racing to see who could get them done the quickest, Javi smoking the rest of us nine times out of ten. 

Tatiana said it was no fair: Javi hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, and she had so much more glue to spread out and peel. Javi’s spirit people did a victory conga line around the sectional. Tatiana’s spirit people glared from their missing eyes.

Soon, the hallways at school were filled with our willowy spirit bodies, each the consistency of newly shed snakeskin and the color of fogged-up glass. And not true copies anymore, not really. Smarter than us. More agreeable than us. Better than us in every way. We didn’t mind. It meant Geetha and Christian could pull ahead in line for valedictorian, finally edging out the leader of the Casios by a quarter of a point. It meant Tatiana could sign up for the newspaper like she’d always wanted, and write more articles than the rest of the staff combined, impressing the palm-reading Matchmaker, who happened to be editor-in-chief. Javi went out for almost every sport the school offered—except swimming and intramural dodgeball, things he acknowledged a person made of dried glue’d better not attempt. He set new records in all of them. And Anh? She got invited to her first sleepover party, and despite having to babysit her cousins that night, she could actually go.

None of this really happened to us, of course. But in a way, it did. Just like Tatiana felt the Matchmaker’s touch on her own palm that day in free period, we felt everything our spirit people experienced. When one of them scored the game-winning point or got the solo in church choir, we were elated. We felt all their wins simultaneously. We had won, too.

And we felt the force of the work they put in. At the end of the day, exhausted from their cumulative efforts, we tumbled into our beds, heads feeling wrung out and everything sore and spent. 

Observing our tired gaits the next morning, our parents squeezed our shoulders and consoled us. It had been like this for them, too, they said. People like us would always have to work twice as hard to prove ourselves half as worthy.

On their own, the words seemed angry. But the unchecked pride in our parents’ voices betrayed them.

At school, the other kids didn’t know what to do with themselves. While they were buried in their cootie catchers and pages of doodles, we’d become the biggest clique in school, seemingly overnight. It was impossible for them to ignore us now. We took up rows of desks in every classroom, had whole tables to ourselves in the cafeteria, were the first chairs of every instrument group in band. The custodians loved us because we cleaned up after ourselves—had been, as they put it, “raised right.” The coaches loved us because we added significant numbers to the cheering section at home games. 

We felt like superheroes. Were superheroes, with the special ability to split ourselves into so many layers. To keep it together while spreading ourselves thin.

We were so earnest, so disciplined, the other kids couldn’t compete. Not that they didn’t try. We caught the Slaps waving their bracelets around like they were wands. Then, the Casios tried to start a rumor that anything they typed into their calculators would come true. But they were all pretending, and everybody knew it. 

One day, the Matchmakers even tried the glue game themselves, though this was strictly against the clique code. But they got impatient. Didn’t wait long enough for the Elmer’s to cure, and ended up getting their hands stuck to their binders and composition notebooks. We laughed from our corner of free period: they didn’t have the restraint, the diligence our parents had imprinted on us.

Whatever they did, they’d never be able to make the same magic we made of ourselves. 

Tatiana was in her bedroom learning how to kiss when we got the news. She wriggled on top of her comforter next to one of her spirit people, poking her tongue through the slit in its face to probe the empty air beyond. She pulled away, uncertain this was how it should feel. Her spirit person smiled, the glue around its mouth softened by spit. Tatiana settled for holding its hand, nearly weightless in her own.

On the other side of town, Geetha was frantically punching in Anh’s house number, the beginning of the worst five-way call none of us could have foreseen. Downstairs, her dad was scrubbing the red spray paint off their garage door, fire in his throat.

“Ollie,” Geetha sobbed, once we were all patched in. 

It turned out the writing on the garage door wasn’t the half of it. Geetha wouldn’t tell us what it said, either, just that it was bad, really bad—bad enough that her mom had stormed off to work without even helping her dad uncoil the hose. Just that it said something about glue. Later, once she’d recovered from the initial shock, Geetha would do a scathing impression of her mother that day: “We pay all this money to move again to this nice neighborhood, Anu. And for what?”

But the garage door was only the mess they could wash away. The real mess, there was no getting rid of, no coming back to a clean slate from. 

Whoever had spray-painted the garage door had also chucked a sirloin steak laced with antifreeze over the fence. Vomited-up chunks peppered the zinnia plot. It could have been two different culprits, of course—Geetha’s parents hadn’t installed cameras yet, so they couldn’t be sure—but the family decided to believe it was the same person. It was better than entertaining the idea that there could be multiple people like that in the world, who were so hateful, who hated them so. 

Geetha suspected Savannah: angry, lighter-flicking Savannah. But when we confronted her, she spat that she’d never do a thing like that. Her brother had died huffing spray paint back in San Antonio, and she had a soft spot for dogs.

The antifreeze was speculation, too, though the vet said he was ninety-nine percent sure. Labradors love to put things in their mouths. They’re bred for it: gently carrying the corpses of game birds back to their owners.

“At least Ollie was old,” Christian said into the phone. He’d always been the logical one; he found comfort in sound reasoning, and he hoped Geetha might, too. But Geetha had learned to walk with her tiny hand balled tight in the scruff of that dog’s neck, and it was the wrong thing to say. 

Word got around, and the PTA held a meeting everyone admitted was probably long overdue. Students couldn’t attend, but later, when the case went to the district court, the minutes from this and future meetings were made public and everyone could see. 

For the most part, the teachers were okay with the spirit kids coming to school. They liked having full classrooms, packed assemblies, choir performances whose roaring crescendos vibrated pleasantly through the assembly hall. With attendance soaring to peaks they hadn’t seen their entire careers, they felt their lessons must really be reaching the students—that the low pay and lost weekends were worth it; they must be doing something right. And if they could keep enrollment numbers up, wouldn’t that mean the school would finally get some wider attention? Which might bring with it much-needed funding and, for example, teachers no longer having to buy their own supplies? Besides, as a rule, they got into teaching to teach. And the spirit kids were model pupils, so eager to learn.

For the most part, administration had no strong feelings about banning the spirit kids. 

For the most part, the parents wanted them dead. Today, their kids were getting beat out for concert solos and spots in the starting lineup. Tomorrow, it’d be placement exams. Then college scholarships. Then jobs.

Later, those of us who survived would read the published minutes with one hand over our eyes, the screen dimmed low enough that we could set it to black with a single click. We would want every opportunity to vanish those words when they became too much to handle.

Our hands would be smooth, untouched by any kind of glue for decades. At some point, one of us would hear from a shrink that glue peeling could actually be a useful strategy, a distraction from the urge to self-harm. Another one of us, during a family vacation in the sun-drenched wilds, would return to the campsite to find the kiddo absolutely covered in cactus spines, having tipped over backwards into a young saguaro. And since we wouldn’t have health insurance at the time, the wife would tell us she knew a way to get the spines out, a trick from her childhood—all we’d need was a pair of tweezers and a bottle of glue—and we would say no, God no, and the wife would mistake our “no” for the screech of a gunned-down bird. 

But we weren’t those people yet, and some of us would never get the chance to be. We were just kids on a five-way call, desperate to get Geetha to stop crying. 

Javi said the right thing. “We’re gonna be grounded for life.”

We all groaned, our spirit people huddling closer around our phones, trying to listen in. 

It was a good enough diversion. 

“You’re right,” Geetha said, less shakily, now that there was a pain we could all share in, one she didn’t have to suffer alone. “Bet my parents accuse me of cheating again.”

“Mine are going to call me lazy,” Christian offered.

“Mine’ll say I did it for attention,” Anh sighed.

“Are you kidding?” Javi howled. “What d’you think my family’s gonna say about me kicking it with a bunch of ghost-looking things? I’ll be sentenced to church every day for the rest of my life!”

Tatiana’s line was quiet. We knew—our guaranteed months of no after-school hangouts, no computers aside—that she had the most to lose. She’d been the most careful to make sure her dad didn’t find out about her spirit people, folding them into her sweaters and dresses while she was home, and barring them in by shoving a bookcase against her closet door.

It was at that moment we realized we didn’t know our parents at all: instead of being irate with us, or disappointed, or even confused, our parents were impressed. And they asked us to teach them the glue game, too. 

We didn’t ask them their reasons. Even if we weren’t quite as smart as our spirit people, we still had some brains, and we figured our parents’ motivations couldn’t be far off from our own. 

Everyone wants to be good. To be liked. Everyone wants to find a balance between what they want to do and what they have to. 

So we told them to go out and get some Elmer’s, and we showed them how it worked.

Tatiana’s dad was the only one who didn’t want to learn. He was too proud to ask that sort of thing of his adolescent daughter. It was probably for the best, since none of us could imagine that level of intimacy between the two of them. His giant, leathery hands, like bear paws, coated in glue, and him holding those hands still, rendering them perfectly harmless. 

But he also didn’t have the blow-up reaction we were expecting, and Tatiana’s step was a little lighter, a little more confident, for a while.

The night we got together in Geetha’s backyard to hold a funeral for Ollie, Tatiana told us she had a plan for the next time her dad got mad: she’d simply send one of her spirit people instead. 

“Tati!” Geetha gasped, having reached her personal threshold for cruelty toward non-humankind. Or what we’d all agreed to call non-human, anyway.

“Huh? Would you rather it happen to me?” Tatiana crossed her long arms, a challenge. “There are a lot more of them, and I can always make more.”

Javi hugged his knees. Anh hugged Tatiana. Christian grimaced, the one among us who could trace the twisted logic of a person enduring so much hurt—getting mixed up in ideas about what’s owed and who deserves it—that they would readily inflict it on others. 

“Anyway, I’ll still feel it a bit. Happy?” Tatiana snapped, pulling out of Anh’s arms. We’d never seen her like this. “It’ll be better this way,” she said. “At least glue doesn’t bruise.”

Christian considered, but knew better than to mention that Tatiana’s plan couldn’t work. Even if some teachers couldn’t tell the difference between us and our spirit people, our parents, who had raised us from diapers, certainly would. 

It didn’t happen often, but this time his reasoning was off.

There might’ve been a point when our parents would have been able to pick us out from a crowd of our spirit people, but that point had passed by the time spring break came around. 

We blamed it on the news while we still could: there was a severe drought in Geetha’s parents’ hometown; sanctions against the countries where Christian and Tatiana were born, forcing hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation. Border patrols, flash floods, corrupt cops, and drug shortages meant everyone had family to check up on, and, like always, their focus wasn’t on us. 

Still, when Anh walked in to find her grandparents playing tiến lên with one of her spirit people, it took her by surprise.

We pretended we could still tell the difference—that we would always recognize the real, original five—but gradually even this stopped being true.

Because while the school board held meeting after meeting, loaded down with motions to ban the spirit kids, to keep the spirit kids, to raise money to build the spirit kids their own school, we kept making more of them. We weren’t waiting till we could get to Geetha’s house anymore. We didn’t care about having separate rooms, about the consequences of small-scale shoplifting for minors. From the home-ec room, the guidance office, the Dollar General, we took it. Under the bleachers at school, in the locker room’s communal showers while everyone was playing pickleball on the blacktop, we smeared the glue across our chests with a fevered, desperate urgency, blowing on each other’s skin to hurry the dry. Like at any minute, this could all be over.

We sensed ourselves growing lighter and lighter, our bodies uncertain as crepe paper from the craft store. We’d been thoroughly distributed. We began holding onto everything as we passed it, brick walls and stair railings, so sure were we that the slightest breeze would blow us away. We felt ourselves losing substance before we got confirmation. Insubstantial, Geetha mused to no one in particular, being just another word for unverifiable. Unreal.

The fingerprints were a hot topic in the school-board meetings; they made people uneasy. Those who were pro spirit kid argued that fingerprints marked us as individuals, and if the spirit kids had their own unique sets, it meant they were no less human than anyone else. Even identical twins have distinct fingerprints, they said. 

When they filled the nurse’s office with ink pads and made the entire student body come in shifts to get their fingerprints done, we expected the results to be conclusive. We remembered those first ghostly, one-dimensional hands lined up on our desks in free period, the patterns of friction ridges an exact match to our own.

But pretty soon, the school announced that the spirit kids would stay put at least through the end of the year, which we took to mean they had passed the test.

Anh borrowed—her new word for stealing—a magnifying glass from the science lab, and examined the pads of her fingers beside those of a few of her spirit people.

“Yep,” she said finally. We let out our collective breath.

They were changing, and the fingertips were just the beginning.

One thing among the many things that made our spirit people a wonder to us was the way you could see right through them—not totally, not with any real clarity, but as if you were looking through a pair of filmy eyeglasses whose prescription was way stronger than your own. When they leaned against our open lockers, we could discern behind them the shape of the string lights they’d hooked to the inside wall, the little notes they’d put up with magnets on the door. Notes to each other, we assumed. The messages weren’t written in any of the eight languages in which we were jointly fluent, and we couldn’t make heads or tails of them.

Then one day, the glue peeled off us without its usual transparency, clouded in places with shades of porcelain and copper and beige, and we looked down at our own bodies and saw the missing skin. The lesions were wide but not deep, a couple of layers at most, no worse than a road rash or a turf burn. But they stung profoundly, as if the wounds were more than surface. Tatiana likened it to growing pains. Geetha said it made her think of one of her uncles, who had a callus on his forehead from years of repeated contact with his prayer rug. 

The next spirit people had hair on their arms and legs in large, irregular sections where it had been yanked up from our own. Our injuries weren’t superficial anymore. Javi remained stoic as his scabbed into immense purple lava mounds that twinged and pulsed. Anh pulled her scabs up in the night, the skin underneath raw and weeping and, also, not exactly skin. The smell of infection wafted from her, cloyingly sweet—in the cafeteria we pushed away any desserts our parents had packed us.

We were mottled in our way, and the spirit kids were mottled in theirs, our raised parts and recesses lining up. We told ourselves we were the original images and they were our negatives. We told ourselves that, like anybody would.

Layer after layer, coating after coating, we gave ourselves up to our spirit versions. In science class, we learned about rock strata: how every layer tells you something about the period when it formed. Up came the calluses on Christian’s left hand—the hours of practice with his mom clapping her hands like a metronome; the time the band’s conductor got so frustrated he flung his sheet-music stand across the room and, barely missing Christian, slashed a third-chair oboe player on the chin. Up came Anh’s freckles, which her grandma had been trying to disappear with gobs of bleaching cream since she was six. 

Up came Javi’s shin splints, along with the tendons that connected his calf muscles to the bone. The spirit people were unrecognizable with our smooth, stringy muscle on the outside. They tensed and released all over as they skipped over the cracks of the sidewalk, just like we’d been taught to; as they pumped their new legs, the playground’s beat-up swing set wailing like a banshee.

Why did we keep doing it, then, factoring in all that it cost us? It wasn’t a mindless compulsion, like some so-called child behavior specialists would later suggest. It was, like Reid had said at the start, something to do. A way to lay claim over our days, to be a part of something. 

Then our spirit people came, and they were so clever, so beautiful and capable, and they seemed to fit in so much better than we ever had. On them, our peculiar features had been polished away, and their speech was news-anchor flat and unadorned by accent. Where once we had marveled at their resemblance to us, now we were grateful for the departures future generations had taken. We loved them, and we wanted the best for them. We were so proud. 

We couldn’t have anticipated how the other kids would come to love them, too, despite their parents’ objections that the spirit kids were predatory, robbers of opportunity. The Matchmaker who’d once read Tatiana’s palm now stood in front of one of her spirit people, asking to touch its exposed bicep. It nodded yes, its ropy neck muscles flexing. The Matchmaker lightly stroked its arm, then when it nodded again, worked her fingers into the spongy tissue. On the other side of the schoolyard, Tatiana tilted her head back and moaned.

Soon enough, everybody finds their place in the world. Our parents thought it was a choice they could make, that this country would be place enough for us. But they left parts of themselves behind when they came here, and it was just like us to follow their example. 

Soon enough, we all find out what we’re made of.

Would you believe that, at our centers, was glue? 

We could have used it to stay together. But there came a point when we each had to save ourselves, or try.

There were those of us who would make it out of Corley with something left of our personhood. Not much, but just enough so we could rebuild piece by piece in the future: eyes with which to glare at the shrink when she assigned us our weekly “homework,” arms with which to steer the kiddo into the tent, lips with which to tell him this wouldn’t hurt much. A lie.

And there were those of us who would be lost, our fading incremental, so day by day it was easy not to notice, until it was complete.

In the pass time between our final free period and the end-of-year assembly, we floated through the halls against the current, ghosts pushing against the material truth of all our past and future lives. The dried glue of us stretched, tore, and crumpled as it came in contact with the sharp edges of the kids who passed us: their skateboards and lunch boxes, their stacks of used textbooks. We kept moving, sticking to nothing. 

At the end of the hallway, we reached toward the double doors that led outside, two thin rectangles leaking the afternoon sun. Our gossamer hands, in their last imploring, glimmered, penetrated by the light. 

© 2023 Kristina Ten