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When Gem is five, she hears voices for the first time. It starts at night, when she's drowsy enough to think that maybe she's dreaming, but then she sits up and stares at the glowing stars across her ceiling and the voices keep whispering. They're nearly indecipherable, like the brush of wind through pine branches, but sometimes she swears she hears giggling - the kind that sprouts from a joke so bad it's amusing in its own right.
At five, they're her imaginary friends, and her mom doesn't see any particular problem when she giggles at "Mumbo" or "Skizz".
At nine, Gem thinks she might be a little strange.
Joel certainly thinks so. He calls her an idiot and laughs boisterously. He doesn't really mean it, probably, because Joel is even more of an idiot than she is, but it does make her a little more self-conscious when she whispers to the voices at night. They've gotten more consistent in their presence. Where she used to only hear them on the cusp of consciousness or on the rare waking occasion, she now hears them several times a day, and for longer.
Two weeks into fifth grade, a man starts following them a few blocks from the school. Joel is being his usual dumb self, making egotistical remarks to every dandelion and car that passes. Gem laughs at most of them, because her sense of humor has been so worn down by the sheer idiocy that are her voices, but she also has to fact check him because there is no way Joel is "faster than a car" or "sexier than a tree". Okay, maybe the last one has some merit, but 'sexy' isn't a word they're supposed to be using yet, so she admonishes him anyway.
Point is, Joel isn't paying attention, and then out of nowhere the voices start murmuring in low, panicked tones. Gem perks up immediately, because they've been silent for most of the day, but then she looks behind her and there's a man and he looks scary and he's only some ten meters back and he's still there, even when they cross the street and turn left.
"Joel," she whispers, tucking close to his side and cutting off whatever tirade he'd launched himself into. "There's a scary guy following us." Joel, tactless as he is, turns around immediately. The man speeds up, the ghosts get louder, and Joel, athletic as he is, can't manage to lose him.
Gem shuts her eyes tight as she blindly runs after Joel, breathing quickening with panic until she comes to a slamming halt against something warm and soft. She pulls away, blinking confusedly.
"Hello kids," a woman with curly orange hair asks, voice like an English aristocrat, or maybe warm butter. Those two things don't have much connection, but Gem thinks them anyway. Cleo, she introduces herself, is actually their neighbor, and walks them home with a nasty glare over her shoulder.
She's a medium, which is a relative measurement between small and large, the name for art types, and also, apparently, someone who talks to ghosts. She explains that with a wink toward Gem and a stare that fixes on a point somewhere above her shoulder.
Gem doesn't spare too much thought toward that interaction, and doesn't see Cleo much after that because "ghosts aren't real" and "being a medium isn't a real job" and "Cleo isn't a very good influence, honey".
It's fine though, because honestly Gem didn't know Cleo that well in the first place, and she grows up as a perfectly normal girl who doesn't believe in ghosts. The voices never leave.
By middle school, Gem is pretty sure the voices don't know she can still hear them. They don't directly address her anymore, though she sometimes hears her name muttered. Fair enough; it's not like Gem talks to them anymore, either. When she'd gone downstairs for a glass of water and heard her parent's concerned conversation wondering about voices and imaginary friends at this age and psychiatric treatment, Gem realized that maybe she wasn't just strange; maybe she was wrong, too.
She stopped responding to Mumbo's questions about her day, or Skizz's "back in my day" brand of bragging, and when the voices said something particularly entertaining, Gem would pretend to remember something funny she'd seen. Her parents were confused by the sudden switch up at first, but then just seemed relieved. Gem wasn't sure how she felt about the whole thing, but her parents no longer talked about her behind her back, so it was better.
Joel, bratty sixth grader that he is, never gives up the voices joke, even as it fades out of relevance. He likes to ask her if the voices will tell him the test answers if he's nice enough, but these days Gem just gives a wan smile and tells him, "Maybe."
In ninth grade, Gem takes her mandatory health credit. They watch a documentary about schizophrenia, and for the first time in her life, Gem feels cold with panic and dread. She's so shocked it takes until arrive home for her to process enough to break down in tears, and by that point she's already scared Joel enough that he's blown up her phone and the voices, the voices keep muttering, muttering, muttering!
"Shut up!" she wails, sobs ripping from her throat. It's one thing to have privately held the fear that she was different. It's entirely another to have the cold reality shoved down her throat like this.
The voices leave - not just quieting down, but their presence actually disappears - and Gem cries herself to sleep. Her parents aren't home yet, and they never question her unusually disheveled appearance in the morning.
Gem is that that awkward age where even when the thought of the s-word weights on her heavily, she can never force the words out. Sometimes she goes at sits with her parents for long minutes of silence in which she pretends to look at her phone, trying to work up the courage to say something. She never does, too scared of... of what, exactly? Going to therapy? Taking some medicine? Being weird? The voices going away forever?
Joel notices her unusually withdrawn mood - of course he does - and tries his best to cheer her up. His jokes take a nosedive from casually bad to utter shit, and their conversations shift to one-sided ramblings spurned on by her occasional chuckles.
The voices notice too, and seem torn between trying to sooth her anxieties and keeping quiet for her sake. She cries on the nights their whispering picks up, until one night, when Mumbo is telling Skizz about some quirky thumb posture he had when serving some dumb aristocrat's tea - oh yeah, Gem's voices are ghosts, apparently, and a stupid Victorian butler and Illinois trucker at that - Gem flips onto her back and growls at the air.
"Shut up you stupid, idiot ghosts!" she hisses, quiet enough not to risk her parents hearing through the thin walls. "I know you're not real! I'm old enough now and I don't believe in stupid voices in my head or ghosts or... or! Whatever you're supposed to be! Just get out of my head!"
The ghosts glance at each other, ashamed, because Gem can see them now too, which is just great really. She's losing it - seriously dropping her marbles all over the place at this point. Gem flops back over, wrapping an extra blanket around her head like it will do anything to keep her sanity intact.
Between ninth and tenth grade, Joel cracks. They're getting ice cream together, and he asks her how she's doing. Innocuous, sure, if Gem hadn't been in a depressive state for the past year. Joel's asked her how she's feeling before, but this is the first time he says it and his tone means he wants an answer.
Gem leans forward, swallowing the last of her cone and itching the callouses on the side of her writing fingers.
"I keep-" hearing things, she almost blurts out. Instead, she says, "never mind," and Joel groans comically loud.
"Gem, seriously?!" he complains. "You...! You need help!" he protests, and though Gem thinks she should probably be offended that Joel of all people is proposing therapy, she can't really say anything because he's right. He's only verbalizing the fear she's had since eleven.
Just two weeks later, Gem is lethargic enough that her parents send her to get groceries on her own just to get her out of the house. They think she's depressed too (which she is) but not for the right reasons. She tries to act energetic, or at least comply with their attempts to get her active, because otherwise she fears they'll want to send her to therapy for that too, and once she's at therapy won't everything come tumbling out and then what.
Gem grabs a basket, heads to the heads to the produce, and stops dead in her tracks.
There's a voice that reaches Gem through her earbuds - a voice she hasn't heard in years. It's elegant, like an old English aristocrat, but warm like melting butter, and when Gem's head snaps sharply up, she sees a tumbling pool of sunset locks pushed back by a decorated headband.
And she's talking to two familiar faces.
Mumbo, sitting in a phantom chair, chuckles into a glass of tea while Skizz, gesticulating wildly and swooping through the air with his legs melting into nothingness tells some wild tale of a hijacked semi and a runaway.
Cleo has earbuds in and could just as easily be talking on the phone, but her responses - god her responses - they line up too perfectly, and Gem practically melts with disbelief, relief, and validation.
And then she chokes on the most horrifying thought she's ever had.
What if Cleo isn't real either.
Not Cleo Cleo, but this Cleo. In the store. Talking to Gem's ghosts. Hallucinations aren't limited to two stupid ghosts, and coming up with a fake scenario to prove herself right seems just so poetically messed up that Gem can't even dismiss the idea. She takes a photo, and captures Cleo but not the two men. She wants to believe.
Gem turns away, stuffing her hands into her overall pockets and resolutely ignoring the tears that prick at her eyes. No reason she can't hallucinate a photo, either.
But then a that warm voice asks something, and a store employee responds and she knows she's not hallucinating him because she bumped into him on the way in and... and...
Everything clicks like cogs that have been jammed with a loose nail for so long they've begun to rust, and it's all Gem can do to keep from sobbing in the middle of the store but she needs to speak with Cleo. Gem abandons her basket where she stands and waits outside the store, rubbing away tears as they spring up. It's a small enough grocer that there's only one exit, and few enough customers that Gem doesn't feel too subconscious about her sniffling.
Fifteen long minutes later, Cleo leaves, humming something sweet and waving off her ghosts with a scoff. Gem's ghosts, she thinks with a surge of possessiveness that takes her off guard. She'd have done anything to get rid of them just minutes ago, and now she's almost offended to see someone talking so familiarly with the voices that have haunted her since childhood.
"Cleo!" she calls, pushing off the wall desperately, gripping the woman's arm when she reaches her. Cleo jerks back with surprise, eyes clouded with confusion for a moment before Skizz says something Gem doesn't catch and then Cleo gasps and tugs her in closer.
"Hey kiddo," she smiles. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"
In the following weeks, tea with Cleo becomes as normal as eating - well, tea with Cleo, Mumbo, Skizz, and Skizz's coffee. Then Joel is added to the mix. At first, Gem fears she's messed up, because her idiot best friend immediately goes off and makes crude comments on the decorative taxidermy and stylized portraits, to which Cleo responds with offense. Then, Gem realizes that the offense is all fake, and Cleo is as amused by Joel's antics as she is, so tea between the three (five) of them becomes as normal as breathing.
Cleo explains the ghosts to her, which isn't actually that much explaining because as much as Cleo is an expert in the supernatural, it's also the supernatural, and doesn't make much sense to begin with. There's Mumbo, of course, the butler who got himself blown up in a mining accident which he wasn't even supposed to be involved in, because he's a butler, not a miner, and Skizz, who fell off a ladder at a construction site. Then there are the others.
Most of them are shy, barely even conversing with Cleo, but Martyn comes out sometimes with all his swagger and charisma. For as much as he talks about himself, his life is mostly unknown to Gem, but it's fine, because Martyn is a great conversation partner. He doesn't follow her like Mumbo and Skizz, but he too, becomes a staple at tea.
On a gummy July afternoon, Gem sits Joel down and tells him, "I can see ghosts." He stares at her like he did when he first got glasses, which is to say confused that the solution works, or in this case, confused that the explanation makes sense.
He doesn't scoff at her, nor does he question her; he just sits there for a moment, starts to speak a few times before shutting up with a thinking noise, and finally says, "That makes sense, and I hate that it makes sense. Gem, you've got me all confused now!" she laughs, bewildered by how the conversation has gone, and relieved more than anything that he's not trying to lock her away, but maybe between Cleo's casual remarks to someone who isn't there and Gem's childhood voices, the truth had enough evidence for a guy as impulsive as Joel to give it thought.
He keeps testing her, having her turn around and answer how many fingers he has up based on the ghost's feeding her information. At first, they like to troll her, but after a firm scolding, they quit pranking her long enough for Joel to believe her without any doubt.
When Gem is sixteen, she hears voices, not for the first time - not by a long shot - but it's the first time in a long time that she allows herself to laugh freely at their stupid jokes, and drift to sleep with whispered conversation playing in the background. At sixteen, they are not her imaginary friends.
She sees ghosts.