Friday nights had shapes the way some people have rituals. For Lily and Emily, they were a map of small certainties: mismatched socks from the bottom drawer, pizza with extra cheese, the debate over which horror movie was acceptable, whispering until their voices thinned into sleep. The world felt simpler inside a blanket fort with two flashlights and a pile of shared secrets. Those sleepovers were how they learned the exact cadence of each other’s laughter, how Emily would hum off-key during the scary parts and how Lily would always promise to keep the closet door shut.
When Emily drowned, the world became a collection of empty rooms. People came and went—neighbors with casseroles, teachers with awkward smiles, the town’s pastor with his slow, careful condolences. Friends hugged Lily in waves that felt both too small and too large; their arms could not hold the space Emily had left behind. At the funeral the casket looked impossibly final, a box the size of certainty. The day after, Lily caught herself still tucking an extra blanket into her backpack, half-readying for a sleepover that would never happen again.
The first Friday after the funeral, Lily lay awake for hours watching the dark through her window, waiting for a text she knew would never come. The second Friday she tried to sleep at her friend Maya’s house and kept waking to run home because something in her chest ached like a missing tooth. By the third, the house had grown a new kind of silence; it hummed with things unsaid.
Her mother noticed the change—saw the way Lily lingered over the back door as if listening for a footstep, the way she kept a pillow on the couch as if saving a place. One evening when she came in to tuck Lily under the quilt, she asked it casually, the way parents try to turn worry into conversation.
“You’ve been talking a lot in here at night,”
Her mom said, pausing in the doorway.
“Who were you talking to last night?”
Lily said the obvious, a small lie that tasted like metal.
“No one, really.”
She kept the rest-Emily’s name—tucked in her mouth. It felt like betraying the truth to say it out loud. But the truth is a stubborn thing. Even if you refuse to give it air, it will find a way.
On the fourth Friday, Lily woke at some ungodly hour to the smell of water. It was faint at first, a memory of diving into a lake on a hot day, cold fingers wrapping around ankle and toe. She sat up, the sheets sliding coolly away from her skin, and saw them—wet footprints crossing her bedroom carpet. They were small, bare, spaced with the casual rhythm children use in sleepwalking: toe-first, then heel, the way the water at the edge of a pool clings to skin and beads on the sole.
Her heart did the exact wrong thing—it didn’t race. It steadied, submitting to the surreal. She followed the trail with her eyes. It led directly from the back of the house, where the pool sat dark and sealed with a taut plastic cover, to her closet door. The closet door was cracked open a hair. The hinges whispered as the wood eased itself wider.
Lily could have run. She could have switched on her lamp, called for her mother, dialed a neighbor—hell, she could have driven two towns over and never looked back. But the presence in the doorway was not loud or violent. It was a small, shy thing, like a person awkwardly trying to slide into a conversation already in progress. From between the coats, a dripping voice—wet and close—giggled.
“You didn’t think I’d miss our sleepover, did you?”
The voice was Emily’s, the particular lift in the last syllable that Lily could have picked out from a crowded room. Only now it was thinner, like song played on a cheap radio far away. It carried the slack of someone who’d been underwater too long. Lily’s knees didn’t buckle. Her mouth formed the answer she had practised in her dreams and nightmares both.
“Took you long enough,”
Shee replied. That response was small, but it was a choice: a pact to treat the impossible as ordinary, to re-enter the play despite how dangerous acting could be. After all, Emily had been the person who taught her to say the funniest things at the worst times. To refuse would feel like closing the book on a story before the last page.
After that night, the house developed a list of new rules. The closet stayed partly open. Lily left the hallway lamp on. She kept a towel by the bed and a small bowl for dripping water and told herself the practical comforts were enough. She told her mother she was fine. She lied. But the ghostly routines that had begun with footprints were patient. They spread.
At first, they were the small things that live on the edge of belief—the sound of a towel slapping the floor at dawn when no one got up. Wet hair on the back of a chair. The TV muting itself mid-reel and, for a second, the film’s soundtrack dissolving into the distant noise of rushing water. Lily’s pillow was damp one morning, as if a small hand had tested it for warmth. Once, she came downstairs to find the living room couch arranged in the exact way they always had—two cushions side by side for sleeping, a folded blanket across the back. She hadn’t left the blanket like that. She had no memory of arranging it.
Neighbors shrugged. Kids make noise, they said. Old houses settle. A dog left by a window door will shake and leave wet paw marks. The explanations were small and neat. But one night Lily found a child’s hair bow pinned to the curtain rod and realized she hadn’t seen that bow in months—the sort of bauble Emily always wore, lost the summer they climbed the willow tree at Miller’s Pond.
Worse came as a patient erosion. Lily’s own memories became smudged. Fun nights with Emily—the big belly laughs, the time they both ate too much ice cream and got sick—became hazier. Details smeared at the edges, until she would reach for a memory and find it only as a suggestion, not an image. Her mother noticed more than most. Sometimes she’d ask Lily about stories from Emily’s childhood and Lily would answer with blankness around the edges. “You remember when Emily fell out of the canoe?” her mom would prodd. Lily would smile and say yes, because to answer no felt like airing that memory in public and admitting it had been taken from her.
The town, too, whispered. At school, kids would keep their distance the way they once did when squeamish about pudgy grief. Teachers offered hollow platitudes. Friends drifted; grief makes companions small and uncomfortable. And still, the sleepovers continued.
On the tenth Friday, the wet voice wasn’t just a giggle. It hummed a tune they’d made up—an off-key lullaby about pizza that never got cold. The voice sounded closer, and when Lily answered, it seemed to ease. Emily’s form remained tucked in the doorway at first, more shadow than shape, then more human until the familiar bob of her head was visible. Lily would tell her about school. Emily would tell her, in return, about a world that smelled constantly of lilies and damp stone, a place where the pool was warm and not sharp at the edges.
There were nights when Lily slept and dreamed of swimming—of going under water and hearing distant applause, of hands that guided her in and out. And waking up, sometimes she would remember the small warmth near the ribs where a friend would have rested, their breath muffled with sleep. Sometimes, when Lily laughed and the sound tasted real, her mother would come in and stare at her with a look that’s half relief, half fear.
One night, deep into a winter when the world was frayed and grey—Lily’s mother finally sat her down in the kitchen with a hot cup of tea and the soft light of a lamp. She watched Lily stir sugar into her mug, watched the small, mechanical movements that belong to someone pretending normalcy.
“We can call someone,”
Her mom said slowly.
“We can ask… a pastor, or a doctor. Maybe you’re not sleeping enough.”
Lily listened, the kettle hissing like a distant tide. When it had been just grief, the words would have felt like betrayal. Now she was older—or rather, thinner with missing things—and she looked at her mother as if across a harbour.
“No,”
She said.
“She’s there. She’s here.”
Her voice was steady.
“She comes for the sleepover.”
Her mother kept the tea-ladled hands in her lap. There was a season for everything, even for accepting that something impossible might be hurled at you. She didn’t push further. She didn’t have to.
That weekend, the house kept the sleepover schedule. Lily arranged the pillows, warmed the pizza, left two cups on the side table. At midnight the moon went tight-lipped behind clouds and the house grew small and certain. The closet creaked open as it always did. The footprints traced their path across the carpet and stopped at the bed. From inside came a breath, the sound of water falling in measured drops.
This time, the figure stepped out fully—Emily as she had been: hair plastered in damp strands, jeans clinging, a wet edge to the hem of her sweater. Her skin had the eerie translucence of someone who belongs partly to cold water. Up close, Emily’s eyes were glassy, like the surface tension of a pond. But the slant of her mouth was the same crooked half-mock, half-devoted smile she’d always had.
She stepped into the room like a person sliding into choreography—sure of step, of rhythm. Lily felt the old ease unfurl inside her chest. She felt the years collect like old blankets and make a nest. For a moment, everything was the way it had been when they were six and making mud pies in Mrs. Callahan’s yard.
“Did you bring snacks?”
Emily asked, and the voice snagged on a giggle. Lily’s reply surprised her; she felt fierce with the rightness of it.
“Took you long enough,”
She said, and the words wrapped the two of them like a truce. Emily’s laugh chimed, watery and bright, and in that sound Lily found, for one steady breath, a life where laughter could be trusted. The world tilted and hummed with an answer that let her fall into the pool of a friendship that refused to die.
Outside, beyond windows and thin wood, the town would keep stirring. Inside, time folded itself into a long, warm night. The sleepover continued. The closet remained unshouted at. The footprints dried and disappeared as if the night itself had wiped them away.
In the mornings, sometimes Lily would find the bed damp and her pillow flattened by an extra weight. Sometimes a hair ribbon would be on the nightstand. Sometimes the memory would loosen and she would blink and the edges of an afternoon would tremble back into place. But sometimes the effort to remember would fail, and a part of the story would be missing like a photograph with a smudge in the center.
It is a small mercy, perhaps, that grief and ghosts both can be negotiated into routines. They become domestic, woven into the chores of making tea and folding blankets. They become the kind of secret that parents keep. They become the shape of a child who refuses to let go.
Friday nights still have shapes. They keep the map of small certainties, including the most dangerous: the decision to stay, to answer, to invite back what was lost—if only for a single sloping, moonlit night.
And in the doorway, Emily waits with wet hair and the old mischief in her eyes, ready to hum the off-key lullaby and tell the same jokes at the scariest parts. Lily pulls the blanket over two bodies, and they laugh together like only conspirators can.
“Took you long enough,”
She says, and the words land like a key turning.
