Free Dead Reflections by Carol Weekes

about it, though.”
    “My father’s going to clean up the barn and turn the loft into a clubhouse for me. It’ll be cool. I can’t help it that some man fell. You have to be careful climbing ladders.”
    Gina kept walking. “Yeah, or hang onto them when someone pushes you.”
    “Who?”
    She stared at him. “Do you believe in ghosts? Dead things that maybe aren’t completely dead?”
    They both stopped walking.
    “How can they be dead if they aren’t completely dead?” Cory wanted to know.
    “They don’t go away to wherever they’re supposed to go,” Gina continued. “They hang around. Yours isn’t the only house in town that’s called haunted. There are a few others too. I don’t understand how that can be. I wonder what they do?”
    “Who?”
    “Ghosts. I don’t know what they’re supposed to look like.”
    “I don’t know either,” Cory said. He’d have to ask Jeffrey about that too. He couldn’t mention such a thing to his parents, especially with his father so uptight about that room.
    “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” he told her.
    Gina stopped in front of a small farmhouse, its front yard bordered in a dark brown wooden fence. “This is where I live. It’s old, but it isn’t haunted.”
    Cory sighed and glanced down the road at his house.
    “I’ll come over,” Gina promised him, “but I don’t know if my parents will want me to. I can say that you live on another street.”
    “What happens if they find out where I really live?”
    “I’ll say that I got mixed up with your address,” Tina decided, “but that we’d become such good friends, I wanted to visit you, and that your house is really okay.”
    “I think it’s okay,” Cory said. “You don’t think the house is going to eat you up, do you?”
    Gina laughed at this. “No, silly!”
     
    * * *
     
    Gina had him wait on the sidewalk. “I’ll tell them that I’m going with you to play at the park. I’ll just say you’re a new boy at school. It’s not a real lie because you will be new this autumn, right?”
    Cory shrugged. “I guess so.” He waited, his thoughts taken with her words while Gina went inside. He stared at his house in the distance, high and square and dark in the sun, its stone walls looking mossy from here. Nearby, the old red barn. Fell from the loft. Broke his back. Dead.
    “People slip,” he whispered. Gina reappeared, followed by her mother, a thin, blonde-haired woman with a tired, but gentle, face.
    “This is Cory,” Gina said.
    “Hello Cory,” Gina’s mother said. “I’m Mrs. Dewar. When did you move to town?”
    Cory hesitated. Gina widened her eyes at him.
    “Uh, just a little while ago,” Cory said.
    “Where do you live?” Mrs. Dewar asked.
    “Over there, behind those houses,” Cory nodded down the road. “Not too far.”
    “That big stone house up the road that just sold?”
    Cory’s mouth fell open. He didn’t want to lose Gina as a friend, but he felt afraid to lie. He shifted his feet. “Yes, ma’am.” Gina’s face curled in irritation at him.
    Mrs. Dewar’s expression changed. It looked part irritated, part nervous. She looked at the house, then back at him. “You’re welcome to play here, Cory, but I don’t want Gina going to that house. It has nothing to do with you son. I just don’t like the house. Mind my words, Gina.” Mrs. Dewar turned and went back inside, leaving Gina on the porch. Gina strode towards him.
    “What’d you tell her that for?”
    “What did you want me to do? Lie? She’d really not like me then and never let you play with me.”
    “I want to see the inside of your house,” Gina insisted. “Now I’m really curious…”
    “It’s just a house.”
    “I’m going to have to sneak over,” Gina continued. “Maybe I’ll try to stop by tomorrow. I’ll just tell my Ma that I’m going over to the library. There’s a reading group there in mornings.”
    “You’d lie?” he asked.
    “I want to see that house,”