Four hundred dollars a month, water included, and the realtor is looking at me like she’s about to try and talk me out of the best decision I’ve made in my entire life.
The house sits on a quiet street in Revere Massachusetts. Single story, two bedrooms, finished basement. The siding has seen better decades and the front porch leans slightly to the left, but the windows aren’t cracked, the roof isn’t visibly caving in, and the yard is overgrown in a way that reads more neglected than condemned. I’ve seen worse.
I’ve wanted this for a long time. This level of freedom.
The realtor, Sandra, is standing beside me with her arms folded and her mouth doing something complicated. She looks at me the way someone looks at a dog that’s about to chase a car.
“You’re really sure you want to move in here, kid?”
“I’m twenty-five and my name is Austin,” I say. “And the rent is four hundred a month. And water is included. So yes. God, yes. I want it.”
Sandra makes a sound that isn’t quite a sigh yet. “There’s a reason it’s four hundred dollars.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of renting it?”
“I’m trying to…” She stops. Recalibrates. “My Friends the homeowner… She wanted me to be upfront with prospective tenants. She was very clear about that.
“Okay.”
“The house is haunted.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “We talked about that when I called.”
Sandra looks at me steadily. “A girl killed herself in that house, kid.”
“I looked into it after we got off the phone.”
She sighs fully this time. “Nobody’s made it a full year here. Not one tenant. And I need you to understand that once the keys are in your hand, you’re on the hook for the full twelve months. You leave early, you still pay.”
“That’s fine. I’m not afraid of ghosts.”
She points at me. “That’s what they all say.”
She reaches into her folder and produces a clipboard, a single sheet on top. After everything I signed last week, the application, the background check authorization, the three forms that seemed to be the same form with different headers, this one page feels almost insulting. I sign it.
She takes the clipboard back and holds out the keys. Plain keyring, two keys, a small paper tag with the address written in ballpoint.
“All yours,” she says. “Your landlord’s number is inside the house. Don’t call her about anything haunting-related. Weird sounds, cold spots, whatever. Not her problem. You call her if the pipes freeze, the heat goes out, something structural. Normal stuff.”
“Got it.”
She nods once and turns to go. I’m already looking at the porch, mentally measuring whether that leftward lean is cosmetic or a foundation thing, when she stops and turns back around.
“Hey. How’d you even hear about this place? I don’t think I relisted it on Zillow yet.”
I open my mouth and then close it again. I try to pull the memory up. There’s nothing there. Just a vague sense of having known about it, like the address just popped into my mind one day.
I squint at her. “I honestly don’t remember.”
She looks at me for a second. Then she shrugs like she doesn’t care anymore and walks back to her car.
I stand there another moment in the overgrown front yard with two keys in my hand and four hundred dollars a month locked in for the next year, and then I head back to my own car.
My Accord is parked at the curb, grey and miraculously intact in the way that only a 97 Honda can be. Not pristine, not wrecked, just somehow still breathing at a hundred and fifty-something thousand miles.
I pop the trunk and pull out the CD player, which is big enough to be embarrassing. Six-disc changer, built-in speakers. I got it off Craigslist the other day from a guy in Everett. I grab the two CDs I’d set next to it, tuck them under my arm, and bump the trunk shut with my elbow.
Then I stand at the front door with the player wedged under one arm and my hands doing their best with the keys.
The key fumbles against the lock plate twice before I get it seated right, and I’m standing there on the porch thinking about how this would be a lot easier if I’d just set the CD player down, which I refuse to do on principle. The door swings open on the third try.
Here’s the thing about ghosts.
I don’t believe in them.
I want to be clear about that up front, inside my own head, as a factual position I hold.
I do not believe in ghosts.
I believe in drywall and property law and the fact that four hundred dollars a month is a real number that real people have agreed to in writing.
What I do believe in, from extensive firsthand experience, is that my brain is not always a reliable narrator.
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was eight years old. I’ve been on and off various medications since then, and for a long time the medications worked well enough that the whole thing was mostly a background fact about myself. Then my doctor added something new for the seizures I started having last year, and the new medication and the old medication apparently had a conversation nobody wanted them to have, and now I’m off the antipsychotics entirely while we figure out the next step.
Which means occasionally the voices are back. Not loud or even constant. Just present. A murmur at the edge of things. The auditory equivalent of a TV on in the next room.
The living room is empty. Bare hardwood floors, walls that were probably white once and are now the color of old paper, a single overhead light fixture. There’s a radiator against the far wall.
I set the CD player down against the wall, which feels like the right place. I find the outlet and plug it in, and the little power light blinks on orange.
I straighten up and look at the room for a moment.
This is the part where I have to say the thing out loud, which I’ve been rehearsing in the car and which sounds completely insane no matter how I frame it. But here’s my thinking.
While I do not believe in ghosts, I also don’t believe in taking any unnecessary chances. Those two positions coexist peacefully in my head. If there’s nothing here, I’m talking to an empty room, which is fine, I’ve done that before. If there is something here, then I’d rather it knows from day one that I’m not a threat.
Realistically I’m just trying to placate the future voices in my head…
“Hello, Nicole.”
My voice echoes off the bare walls.
“I, uh.” I hold the CDs against my chest for a second. “I heard you’re haunting this house. So I Googled you, because I’d be crazy not to, and I read your obituary.” I pause. “Your mom wrote it. It was really kind. She talked about how much you loved music.”
The room doesn't respond.
I hold up the first CD.
“So I brought you a peace offering. Hoping maybe we could be… I don’t know. Not enemies. Friends seems like a lot to ask on day one.” I look at the case in my hand. “It’s Alanis Morissette. Jagged Little Pill. Your mom wrote that it was basically all you were listening to when you…” I stop to avoid saying mentioning her suicide. “When you passed away. And I actually listened to it the other day myself to make sure I wasn’t handing you something terrible, and it’s genuinely great. Like, it holds up. The whole album.”
I open the tray, set the disc in the first slot, and leave it open.
Then I hold up the second CD.
“Okay, so. This one.” I look at the case and then at the room. “I know this might be a little presumptuous, and if I’m wrong, I apologize in advance. But I was reading between the lines of your obituary, and combined with the Alanis Morissette thing, it seems pretty clear that when you passed away, you were going through one hell of a breakup.” I say it the same way I’d say it to anyone. Just a fact on the table. “So I also brought you another breakup album. One that I personally love. It’s called Sour. It’s by Olivia Rodrigo.”
I turn the case over in my hands.
“It came out in 2021, so it’s…” I do the math and then immediately feel it. “...fuck, has it really been five years already?” I shake my head. “Anyway. I listened to this one a lot during my first breakup. Like, a lot a lot. It does something for the specific kind of awful that comes with that situation. And I think you’ll like it. I really do.”
I set the second disc in the tray and close it.
The orange light holds steady. The room is quiet. Outside, a car goes past on the street, and I can hear the specific sound the wind makes when it finds a gap in old siding.
I wait.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. Not a voice, exactly. Maybe a temperature drop, the way Sandra had mentioned cold spots, or a flicker of something in my peripheral vision, which granted could just be me. But there’s nothing. The room stays the same room. The CD player sits there looking like the perfectly ordinary piece of secondhand electronics it is.
I stand in the empty living room for another thirty seconds, hands in my jacket pockets, giving it a fair shot.
“Okay,” I say finally, to the room, to nobody, to whoever. “Offer stands. No rush.”
I pull out my phone. The delivery tracker for my new bed and desk has not moved in a meaningful way. Forty-five minutes, give or take. The little truck icon on the map is just sitting on Route 1.
I pocket the phone and look at the front door.
“Might as well get the rest of my stuff.”