Page 76 of Ghost

Luna sits with her feet kicked up on the desk and her laptop balancing on her lap. Her fuzzy pink slippers shift back and forth as her feet tip side to side. She has a coffee mug and a bottle of water on the table, and a collection of phone chargers, textbooks, and nail polish bottles slowly taking over my desk.

While I’ve spent the day working, she’s alternated between studying, gaming, and painting her nails.

Looking up, I catch her eyebrows scrunching as she frowns.

“Everything okay?”

“Fine. Just a little annoyed. Rider was supposed to help me with this raid today, and he’s been M.I.A.” She glances up at me when I don’t say anything. “He’s just a friend, nothing more. I’ve never even met him. It’s a raiding thing. We dungeon together; he heals me. Never mind. I should stop talking.”

“I like when you talk.” I lean back in my chair, watching her.

“Even when it’s about nothing?”

“Especially then.”

When she talks about her game, she lights up, and I can’t help but absorb that energy. There’s only one other place she gets this excited, and it’s in my bed. Someday, I’m going to mix the two together and see what happens.

“So you like gaming, huh?”

“It’s a nice escape from the real world.” Her game makes a sound, pulling her attention back to the screen. “And it was a good distraction growing up.”

“In what way?”

Her eyes flick back and forth from her game to me, and she bites her lip, likely debating how she wants to answer. Official records never paint the full picture, and from her nerves, I can tell there are probably stories that never made it into her case worker’s files.

“Not all of the houses I lived in growing up were good ones.” Luna shrugs. “Some were fine. Some were amazing even. But the one I moved into when I was fifteen wasn’t. Lots of yelling. Sometimes worse. It depended on the day, so gaming made for a nice escape.”

“They hurt you?”

Her fingers pause on the keys, and I swear the oxygen leaves the room while I wait for her answer.

“Not on purpose.”

She says it like I’m not going to have to kill someone foraccidentallylaying a hand on her. Intentional or not, no one touches this girl. Past or present. But I manage to swallow that down for her sake.

“Explain.”

Luna leans back, nervously biting the inside of her cheek. “No one wastryingto hurt me because they knew my case worker would check in regularly, and they couldn’t risk losing the checks I came with. But my foster dad was an asshole, and everyone else in the house wasn’t as lucky as I was.”

My fingernails dig into my palms, and I make a mental note to go back and figure out what foster home she lived in when she was fifteen.

“My foster brothers got the worst of it. Steven was older, so he’d take the brunt of it for Brandon, but if their dad got drunk enough, there was no stopping him.”

“He beat them?”

She nods, and her eyes gloss over. “The worst I got was when he accidentally hit me with a book he was throwing at Steven from across the room. It nicked meon the shoulder and left a little scar. But that was nothing compared to witnessing what he did to them and not being able to do anything about it. He told me if I said anything to my case worker, he’d make them pay for it, and I couldn’t risk that.”

Of course she tried to protect them. That’s who Luna is. Her heart is good to the very center.

“What happened to them?”

She blinks, like my question snapped her back to this moment.

“I don’t know. I never looked back after I left, and I’m guessing they didn’t either. Sometimes bad things draw people together; other times, the people you experience it with are too much of a reminder, and it pushes you away.”

“I get it.” I scoot my chair back. “Come here.”

She slaps her laptop shut and stands, walking over to sit on my lap.

---