three hauntings

October 3rd: the day Mattie Southern died, and the day West McCray got a phone call.

I wrote these three very short stories as thanks to and for everyone who has come to love Sadie as much as they might have ended up hating me for writing it.

I hope you like them.

---

I.
Sometimes, Nell wakes up in the middle of the night with her heart so far up her throat she thinks she’s choking on it. She has a lot of nightmares, all woven from the parts of herself that make them real. There’s one more recurring than the others. Involves a body that is not her body. She tried to tell her mom about it once, how in the dream she gets all the way to the corner with the twenty clutched tightly in her hand when a powerful feeling calls her back. How she creeps silently up the opposite side of the street, then hides behind the neighbor’s house and watches. It was at that point in the telling that her mom touched her cheek and said, Nell. Nell. I want you to think real hard about who saying this is going to help, and now only one of them knows how it ends. Her mother is not a bad woman, but the threads holding her together are easily undone—not like Nell’s, knotted tight and unforgiving. But anyway. In the dream, she waits, her gaze traveling toward her bedroom window. Sometimes she played a game looking at it and the game was I Am the Girl Outside and The Girl Inside is Not Me. This day, more than all other days, it’s true. She keeps her eyes on the window even after the front door opens quietly out into the street, keeps her eyes on it until she hears his footsteps, his gait heavy and uneven, as though bearing the weight of all he has done. When Nell looks to see what, exactly that is, she finds herself in bed again, her eyes wide open. She remembers the air in the dream had a kind of taste to it that sometimes coats her tongue in her waking hours, and those days, following the dream, the light seems especially bright. Those days, she sees red, glimpses of it, flashes of it out the corner of her eyes, but every time she tries to look more closely, it disappears.

---

II.
Because I can’t take another dead girl. It’s become almost mantric for him at this point. Danny had him in the booth for hours that final night, repeating the line over and over until, at last, it hit. This is the scaffolding you built the whole narrative on. This is where you drive it all home. So do that. There were rumors West had been crying when he read it. No, no, he’d never tell them. It was just a touch of vocal fry. There were only a handful of moments he’d broke during production, and he remembered, then buried them all—the worst of them after talking to Ellis, after finding out about the tags. He’d locked himself in his car that day. Because I can’t take another dead girl. It came to him while he was doing the most benign things: getting the groceries, cleaning the shower, packing Cricket’s lunch for school. He had the feeling he was on some road to hell that cut a path straight through his daughter’s room, where Ben would often find him, drunk, leaning against her door, centering himself with her presence, the sound of her breathing as she slept. Together, they would go back to bed, Ben settling West in on his side. Talk to me, he’d say. Don’t do this. Talk to me. What are you thinking. Why are you doing this to yourself. Because I can’t take another dead girl. His voice on a loop in his mind, and the longer he turned it over there, the more convinced he became of its own mocking edge. You can, in fact, take that, he thought. You can take all that and more.
¹

---

III.
She would never tell anyone about the way she sometimes misses Aspera, its gleaming surfaces, the tender, careful ways in which they held her reflection. Nora would categorize these feelings as deeply problematic at best and in desperate need of intervention at worst. But how does Georgia explain that her longing, at its worst, is almost always the consequence of moments she’s caught her image elsewhere, the sight of herself in other people’s eyes. Yesterday, Matthew was in one of the resort’s cars, parked at the intersection while she crossed, and when she noticed him, she stopped dead in the middle of the street. It was like something out of a movie, like a fucked-up kind of meet-cute, the way their gazes locked. He waved to her, a lazy salute, and she did something she knew no one would ever forgive her for: she waved back. She might have even smiled. She wondered if there was anyone on this earth who would ever know her as well as he did, as well as Cleo, and that was something she knew she could never say out loud. But to give someone so totally what they needed, you had to really know them, and you had to love them for it and at Aspera, she had felt both. Even that last night with Cleo, even on her knees in front of Matthew, Georgia had felt it simmering beneath the surface of everything else that was wrong. I saw Matthew in town, she told Tyler when she came home and the look on his face wore her failure and when Nora called her that night, from school, she didn’t pick up. Instead, she sat on the couch in front of the television, scrolling through movies until a familiar name lit the menu. SADIE. An Archer Studios Production. Based on a true story. She pushed play. The lead actress had an intensely beautiful look about her but there was a point in the next 90 minutes where her whole face seemed to change, features shifting until she became someone else or more of who she was pretending to be. So hungry and so real that Georgia had to pause. She crawled across the living room floor and brought herself as close to the screen as she could get, until she saw the ghost of herself there, just there in the girl’s eyes. And she felt held in them so tenderly. So known. So loved. Clean.
²

---

Purchase the paperback edition of Sadie
Purchase the paperback edition I’m the Girl

courtneysummers.ca
instagram.com/summerscourtney
https://www.threads.net/@summerscourtney

1. The ‘epilogue’ to Sadie that builds on this vignette is called Greetings from Sunny Los Angeles and can be found in print in the paperback edition of I’m the Girl. An audio version can be found at the end of its audiobook edition.

2. Georgia is the protagonist of I’m the Girl, which is set in the same world as Sadie, and loosely connects the two.