Ways to See a Ghost

gave way, and Isis sat down heavily on the grass.
    “I can’t see her now,” said Gray. “It was only for a second. Just now.”
    Isis turned the moment over in her mind.
    “When her hand was in yours?” she asked.
    Gray nodded.
    Angel’s dance turned into an aeroplane flight, arms stretched wide as she flew around them.
    “Will you hold Gray’s hand again?” Isis asked her. Angel shot behind Isis, pulling her arms in tight. She peered round at Gray, then shook her head.
    “No.”
    “But you just did!” Isis pushed herself up to standing.
    “I not want to
now
,” said Angel, putting her hands behind her back. “He too big.”
    “Please, Angel, don’t you want him to see you again?” Isis made a move for Angel, but the little ghost skittered away, shaking her head even harder.
    “No no! I not
want
to!”
    “What’s going on?” asked Gray, looking blankly around.
    Isis stood still, and sighed. “She’s being awkward, like usual.”
    “I not orkard!” Angel’s mouth fixed into a pout, she started fading.
    “No! Angel, don’t!” Isis lunged for the little ghost, but she’d already misted into nothing. Isis turned to Gray. “I think she’s gone a bit shy.”

    They sat in their chairs, looking up, letting the star-filled night press down on them. Cally and Gil were near the black lump of the camper van, surrounded by a pattern of blue and green lights, some along the track, some glowing out of the field. Gil’s UFO monitors, relentlessly measuring.
    “Will she come back?” asked Gray.
    Isis shrugged. “Usually she sulks for an hour or so, but I don’t know about now. She’s never been seen by anyone else before. I think it scared her. She’s always saying it’s what she wants, and she was really happy. But then she just vanished.”
    Gray stretched out his legs, nylon-whispering his sleeping bag.
    “Has your mum seen her?”
    Isis shook her head.
    “Have you told your mum you can see her?”
    Isis shook her head again. “After Angel died, she got really depressed.” Lost in a dark world, unreachable. “I wanted to tell her, but I… couldn’t.”
    Her dad had been around, for a few weeks after Isis got out of hospital, but he and Cally had filled the air with fighting and crying. When he went away again, the house had seemed too quiet to speak in, too empty. The words had sat on her tongue every day, the imagined answer to everything her mum said.
    “Did you have a good day at school?”
    Angel’s still with us.
    “What do you want for tea?”
    I see her all the time.
    She’d never said them, of course. She’d never known if they’d make things better or worse. Not long after, Cally had said she was going to become a psychic, and even at not-quite eight years old Isis had understood what a fragile strand her mum was clinging to. She’d knownthen she definitely couldn’t say anything about Angel.
    Isis watched a star twinkle in reds and yellows, just above the horizon.
    “And now it’s been so long, and she says she’s the psychic.”
    Gray was watching her, frowning.
    “What does that matter? Won’t it make her happy?”
    Isis stared at him, then shrugged. “She is happy. Since she met your dad.”
    Gray went quiet, looking away.
    “How long did you see Angel for?” she asked him.
    His eyes turned back to her. “Like I said, just a second.”
    He didn’t seem special, or gifted. Especially not swaddled in his sleeping bag.
    “I just don’t understand why it happened,” said Isis. “No one else has ever seen her.”
    “Maybe I’m psychic too?” said Gray, hopeful sounding.
    “Maybe.”
    But Isis remembered the first time she’d seen him, back in the garden. Angel had touched Gray then, kicked him actually, and he hadn’t noticed. This time, Isis had been holding onto Angel as well. Was that the difference?
    “We should wait until she gets back,” said Gray excitedly,“then we can try again and…” His eyes flashed with a sudden reflected light. His face was bleached by it, every curl of his hair gleaming like wire. The flowers on Isis’s sleeping bag leaped into colour, and she squinted against the brightness. In the distance, Gil was shouting.
    Gray leaped up off his chair, scrambled out of his sleeping bag and ran for the camper van.
    Isis stumbled to standing, still caught in her sleeping bag, putting her hands up against the blinding light. Looking down, she saw the grass lit into luminous green.
    Then, darkness.
    She couldn’t see a