Free Ghost Flower by Michele Jaffe

yearning organism. I had good reasons for not believing in ghosts or mediums, but as the silence stretched, I felt myself getting caught up in it. Wanting to believe, anxious about what was going to happen.
    The tension wound itself tighter among us until it was nearly suffocating. At that moment, the woman with the dark hair opened her mouth and in a thin, reedy voice completely different from the one she’d been using said, “I am Aurora.”
    A shudder convulsed the crowd. Everyone craned closer to listen. But the next words were indistinct, jibberish.
    Speaking in her own voice, the medium said, “Can you repeat that? We couldn’t quite hear you Aurora.”
    Silence.
    “I had her, but I feel her slipping away,” the medium said with a small shake of her head, eyes still closed as though she were talking to herself as much as to us. Taking a deep breath, she raised her fingers to her temples and intoned, “Aurora or Elizabeth, if either of you is still there, can you ring the bell?”
    More sticky, lengthening silence. And then, faintly, the bell began to ring.
    Everyone around me straightened abruptly, as though they were all feeling the same chill I felt, and a whisper went through the crowd. I said to the person next to me, “That’s cool.”
    He turned and looked at me. And gasped.
    It was fascinating the way it happened—just the slightest murmur, the sound of bodies shifting as they moved to elbow their neighbor or point, like ripples begun by a leaf hitting the surface of a pond, until someone said aloud, “Oh my God, that’s Aurora Silverton.”
    Then the medium woman’s eyes flipped open, and she stared at me, shrieked, and began to writhe. The crowd parted to make way for her, and she jerked across the floor toward me, as though she were a marionette whose arms and legs were being controlled by an invisible giant. She stopped in front of me, swaying. Her eyes rolled, and her long, blood-red nails curled in my direction. “You—you dare to mock the work of our sister Madam Cruz,” she said in a low, booming baritone completely different than the voice she had been using before.
    “I didn’t mock, I was just—”
    “Silence!” Her head tilted to the side, and her face moved up and down next to me, as though she were an animal of prey sniffing meat. “You are a cursed thing only half-alive. Be careful that evil does not claim the half that still lives. You come from a world of lies and shadows, and they cling to you like ivy.
You reek of the fetid stench of death.
”
    “I’m really sorry, I—”
    A strange growling noise came from deep in her throat. “Your punishment awaits you already. The spirits will have their revenge. Go! Leave! If you have any sense, you will fly from here forever.” And then she passed out.
    It got a bit hectic then. iPhones began popping out everywhere, and I was swarmed by people. From what Bain had said, I got the impression that Aurora and Liza were a bit aloof from the other students in their class, and that probably explains why most people drew closer to me but didn’t address me, watching me instead through the cameras on their phones. There were a handful of girls, who came forward to hug me, but they seemed more wary than glad to see me.
    As though Aurora was nice enough, but not really nice. Or as though they wanted a picture with me to post on their Facebook pages.
    I wasn’t disappointed. I’d only really had a chance to study Aurora’s friends in a yearbook from three years earlier, so I wasn’t going to be able to recognize most people, not easily anyway. Which meant this part was the most dangerous part of my arrival—and I would need to cut short.
    That had been part of my plan from the beginning. Except it’s not as easy as you’d think to start a fight at a fancy graduation party. Actually getting someone to stop tweeting and take a swing at me was a challenge. I had to goad three guys, including one whose iPhone I threw in the pool when he