Still life with owl (bonus outtakes).

(Image: The author, wearing a black tank top, sitting on a loveseat with a candy corn pillow and a fluffy cat's tail wrapped around her neck.)

So writing a book sometimes means heading down some weird paths that don't make it into the final manuscript.  Sentences tend to be lost to time, but when I have to cut whole pages, I'll generally save it somewhere.  This was originally part of the end sequence of The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, but didn't fit where the plot wanted to go, and I thought I'd share it with all of you.

So, context: Rose Marshall is a hitchhiking ghost, and Gary is both her car and her boyfriend (sort of).  And she's having a hell of a year...

This is not canon, obviously, having been cut from the book pre-publication.

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I lay on his hood, hands behind my head, and try to remember the names of constellations that died millennia ago up in the daylight.  All stars are ghosts when viewed from Earth.  We just take that a little more literally down here.

“I wonder,” I say, and my voice is soft and low in the cooling air.  “If I could find the right off-ramp, do you think I could take the ghostroads all the way to another planet?  Someplace far away, where all the ghosts speak Martian or whatever, and no one knows what a cherry malt is, or cares about the World Series, or knows how to do the Twist.  It makes sense, don’t you think?  There’s so many different ways to be alive on Earth.  There have to be ways to be alive in other places.”

The sound of David Bowie drifts through Gary’s open window.  I laugh.

“Chin up, spaceman, there’s a long way left to go,” I say.  “What do you think?  Want to try to drive beyond the stars, see what’s out there?”

Bobby Cross won’t be out there.  I’m sure of that much.  He’s an earthbound terror, too set in his ways to ever set his sights on the stars.  All those things I said about old ghosts getting tired of keeping up with the times, they apply double to Bobby.  He doesn’t understand that he’s been falling out of date, because as far as he’s concerned, the world is still his oyster.  Poor fool.  He’s as much of a relic as I am, without even the shallow grave to justify it.

The radio spins, settling on “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”  I sigh.

“You’re no fun.”

Gary doesn’t argue with me.  This has to be frustrating for him, too.  Here he spent sixty years dreaming of his high school girlfriend, and now that we’re finally in the same place, he can’t talk to me, can’t hold me…can’t kiss me.  I still look sixteen, which would make things pretty creepy between us if Gary looked like the old man he was when he stopped breathing, but we’ve both existed for the same amount of time, and I could make a pretty decent argument for being the older of the two of us, since I was out there running for my unlife the entire time.  I never got to stop struggling to survive.  He got to grow up and grow old and decide to give up.

Ugh.  I shouldn’t dwell on those things.  They just make me resent him more, and the fact is, we’re stuck, at least for right now.  Gary’s not a road ghost.  If I threw his keys away—really tried to get rid of them, instead of just accidentally dropping them somewhere; part of the ritual that turned him into a car bound his keys to me, so that I can’t lose them by mistake—he would lose his grasp on the ghostroads and fade away.  Maybe he’d wind up somewhere deeper in the twilight, on whatever level is appropriate for the sort of ghost he should have been.  Or maybe he’d go immediately and permanently to his eternal reward.

Without knowing which one it would be, I can’t let him go.  And even if I knew, I wouldn’t be able to let him go until I knew he was ready.  I still believe in asking people before I do things they can’t undo.  Call it a personal failing.

The sky continues to darken overhead as the sun slips deeper and deeper into curve of the horizon.  It could be weeks before we see another sunset.  The fact that the sun sometimes comes up here in the twilight doesn’t mean it keeps anything like a regular schedule.  I sigh, melancholy and nostalgic at the same time, and sit up, swinging my legs around so that I’m perched on the edge of the hood rather than draped across it.

“Sorry, Gary, but duty calls,” I say, and manage to keep the relief out of my tone.

His horn sounds, loud and indignant.  I pat his hood as I slide off it to my feet.  The heavy silk of my prom gown swirls around my ankles.  It must be getting urgent, this call to duty, if I’ve started changing clothes without noticing.

I have two standard modes.  There’s what I sometimes refer to, only half-jokingly, as “roadside Rose”: the face I show the modern world, the short-haired girl in jeans and a white tank top, maybe with a plaid farmer’s shirt worn loose and shapeless over the top, obscuring any real sign of my figure, too small to believably be keeping me warm.  Roadside Rose drinks cheap coffee in truck stop diners and wears tennis shoes that are barely more than tape and prayers, whittling the world away one mile at a time.  The cut and exact details of her clothes will change depending on the season and where in the country she’s sticking out her thumb, but she’s a pretty recognizable character all the same.  That’s the version of me that’s usually referred to as “the walking girl” or “the spirit of Route 42.”

The other common face I show to the world is older and truer and harder to carry.  That’s the teenage girl in the green silk prom gown, old-fashioned and demure and so far out of style that she can’t even be considered vintage anymore.  She wears her hair in heavy curls bleached blonde with lemon juice, she wears dancing shoes that were never designed to tread a highway shoulder, and she’s so young, and she’s so lost, and she’s never going to find her way home.  But even that phantom face can change.  She wears a white asphodel corsage around one wrist these days, a gift from Persephone herself, who sort of took an interest when I successfully completed a katabasis to steal myself from the underworld.

It’s been a very interesting couple of years.

Gary’s engine rumbles, shaking his sides where my palms are still pressed flat against the metal.  I turn and frown at him.  “What?”

The radio spins, settling on a country song I don’t recognize, about how the singer’s girl keeps leaving him home alone to watch the clock.  My frown becomes a scowl.

“You’re being unreasonable.”

The volume increases.

“I know you don’t like it when I leave you here by yourself, but it’s not like I can take you with me into the daylight.”

The song cuts off.  He revs his engine hopefully.

“No.”

He revs louder.

“No.”

His engine abruptly cuts off.  Somehow, the silence is even louder.

“The whole point of me going into the daylight is hitchhiking.  I’m a hitchhiking ghost, remember?  Getting rides from strangers is my job.  It’s how I pay my debts to the twilight and get it to allow me to stay here.  If I take you with me, I’ll have a car.  If I have a car, I don’t need a ride.  If I don’t need a ride, I can’t do my job, and I’ve just wasted the energy to get to the daylight without doing anything to restore myself.  You know better than this.  You can’t come.”

The radio clicks back on, playing a wistful song about how the singer’s lover is always leaving, and they worry that one day she won’t come home.  I manage—through sheer force of will—not to roll my eyes.  It wouldn’t help my case.

“You can always find me in the twilight, no matter where I go, and I have to come back to the twilight, because I’m dead, and this is where dead girls belong,” I say, as patiently as I can, even though I want to drum my fists against his hood until they leave dents, to demand to know why he thinks his grand gesture of transforming himself into my car for eternity means he has any right to tell me where to go or when to do it.  I didn’t ask for this.  I care about him, absolutely, maybe even love him, but this was his choice, not mine.

I’ve been running my own life for a long time.  Maybe I need to learn how to compromise.  I don’t know.  I just know that I never did like being told what to do.

Gary somehow manages to make honking a horn sound sullen.  This time, I do roll my eyes.

“Would you rather be bored and alone for a little while, or have me disappear forever?”

He flashes his headlights once, which I’ve come to recognize as a sign that he’s giving in and I’m going to get my way.  It should feel like a victory.  Instead, it just feels exhausting.

“I’ll be back soon,” I say, and kiss his frame, right next to the windscreen’s edge.  I try not to leave lip marks on the glass.  It feels tacky, like I’m branding him as mine.  Not only tacky—untrue.  I’m not so sure I want that kind of responsibility.

I should be kinder.  I know I should be kinder.  It wasn’t that long ago Bobby arranged for me to be brought back to life through a series of loopholes that should never have been chained together, much less exploited by a monster like him.  Gary and the rest of my friends and allies had been frantic, searching for me across the twilight with no idea that I wasn’t there anymore.  It should have been easy for me to stop being alive—people do it every day—except that the twilight remakes what it claims, and there was no guarantee that dying for a second time would have made me into the same kind of ghost.  Which meant being away for even longer, crossing an ocean, traveling to actual Underworld, and attracting the attention of the Lord and Lady of the Dead.  No big.

Massive big.  Terrifying, towering big.  The kind of big that makes it totally reasonable for Gary to be a little clingy right now, since it wasn’t long ago he came close to losing me forever.  A thing being reasonable doesn’t make it any easier to handle.

I step away from Gary’s side, tilting my face up toward the last of the sunset’s glare, and close my eyes.  I can feel the twilight breathing all around me, the weight of a million souls stretched across these endless fields, this seemingly infinite road.  I can feel it all.  It’s beautiful and it’s sad and it’s mine, all mine, forever.