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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
GHOSTS
Althea Fann
REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
REAL GHOSTS
Althea Fann
Plan B Issue 14.2 Charlee Walker
H I G H W AY
I first notice the trees on the long car ride to the orphanage. They mark out the edge of the Romanian highway like sentinels, tall columns of red bark painted white at the bottom. They create an invisible fence, and on the far side of it are unreachable green hills. Their branches of smoky fall foliage don’t matter as much to me. I don’t consciously care much about beauty yet. I’m nine. I only notice contrast. Trees turn orange everywhere in October, but we don’t have painted trunks at home in South Carolina. At first, I like the way the painted sections seem almost like people at a distance. But soon the repetition bothers me. The white looks waxy, reminds me of the skin on Frankenstein’s monster. This is Transylvania, after all. Each pillar manages to blur past the window despite standing still. I like to move my head to focus on one tree, catch it out of the blur and then let it go, imagine it running past the car, running away down the road. Why would someone go to this much trouble to coat each trunk in six feet of paint? I think of the painted roses in Wonderland.
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
When I ask our driver, he tells me the city paints the trees to insulate them from the cold of winter. The whites of the tree trunks and the protection they signify won’t be ironic to me until years later. One day I’ll compare their shade to the cauterized memory of white cigarette burns on my adopted brother’s fat toddler arms, the whites of my mother’s eyes when she shows his arm to my father in the dimly lit orphanage, the white uniform dresses the orphanage nurses wear that mean they should know better than to burn a baby for crying. But I’m not there yet. For now, in the hot car on this golden afternoon, I’ll watch the trees and try not to feel afraid when they stream past me in an endless line, like a parade of ghosts.
GHOSTS
// REAL GHOSTS
Only one photo alarms me: a hunched shadow appears to crouch behind a twisted tree. If you glance at it quick enough you can intuit a shoulder on the left of the trunk, maybe a knee or flank on the right. This seems more real. It’s hard to imagine any more human impulse than the urge to hide yourself. It’s Eve in the garden, where the reality of her full potential occurs to her in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s me in my room as a teenager, where I pretend not to hear my fifth-grader brother fail to throw a chair out of the dining room window. It’s him still in his room at my parents’ house ten years later, where he seems not to notice as his teenage years fade behind him and the future ahead opens up into the void. I don’t believe in ghosts, but every time I hear his screams echo and rage down the years, I believe a little more in hauntings.
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The ghosts in the photos are less disconcerting. Their presence seems natural. In one photo, lights scatter through the misshapen branches. Viewers report a sensation of danger that accompanies the lights, similar to fairy fires in folklore, the dancing false lanterns used by paranormal forces to lure travelers off safe paths. When the camera translates the image to two dimensions, though, the lights literally fall flat. It looks like the lens caught some kind of flare, nothing more. The other pictures I find via Google seem more strictly ghostly to me. In one a clearly Photoshopped white figure flails between two trees. It isn’t scary, but at least an attempt at something once human has been made. The posture is the problem. I can’t imagine a person who would take the time and effort to come back as an apparition only to flail their arms and yell, “Boo!”
A LT H E A F A N N
When I find out the world’s most haunted forest grows outside of Cluj, about an hour from my brother’s old orphanage, if it still exists, I’m not surprised. Of course, the distinction of “most haunted” is a hyper-subjective selfdiagnosis, so it’s a little hard to take the Hoia Baciu Forest website’s word for it. I’m more suspicious when I factor in the white text on the wanna-be-menacing black background (“Two years ago, the famous actor, Nicolas Cage (…) came to Cluj specifically to see this mysterious forest. (…) If you are brave enough, visit the Hoia Baciu Forest to discover for yourself….”). The trees are spooky though. Even a skeptic has to admit it. They either curve as they exit the ground, which lends them the silhouette of snakes trying to stand up, or they suddenly cant to the side like broken bones. In one photo, a series of trees all bend into an identical “s.” They seem to undulate across my computer screen. The implied motion worries me, and the worry makes me wonder why no one has taken the time to paint them. Maybe the caretakers know paint couldn’t prevent the trees from their contortions. Maybe the trees were warped already, down to the roots.
HANSEL AND GRETEL
The farmhouse where my parents and I stay while they figure out the final few steps of my brother’s adoption looks right out of a fairy tale. It’s hard not to think of the rougher kind of Grimm fables on the first night in the attic bedroom. I’ve never seen a handmade mattress before, and the lumpy filling is the last thing I want after the transoceanic flight with my dad. My parents seem relieved to be back together after a few weeks apart. They talk in their bed across the room in hushed tones. After weeks in Romania, Mom wants to know how my older, collegiate brothers are doing, how I handled the international flight, if the dogs seemed happy when we dropped them at the vet to be boarded. She came early to bond with my new brother, so rural Romania seems at least somewhat normal to her now. When we heard the adoption would finally go through, she couldn’t wait any longer. There had been almost two years of delays.
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
They fall asleep quickly, but I’m still awake. The boards on the floor and the pitched attic ceiling don’t appear to seal off the bedroom quite like they should. Every time I relax, the wind whistles through again. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, the clatter of bare branches reminds me we aren’t in our deciduous swamp house anymore. We’ve transitioned from one storybook to another. In this story, a family sets out in a far off land of haunted forests and horizon-line fires to rescue their lost child. I still don’t know how it ends.
G U I LT
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
The piece of paper on the desk looks like a photocopy of a yearbook page for babies. All of them seem vaguely related, dark hair and eyes. Only a few smile. My parents and I have come to the international adoption agency for what feels like the hundredth time, a low building that smells like a doctor’s office and has a big gold outline of a globe on the wall. Normally I would be reading, either in the lobby or in a chair in the corner of our adoption agent’s tiny office, but today is different. We’ve come to finally choose a child. A little below the middle of the page a smiling boy is circled in red marker. Up in the corner a stoic girl has been marked the same way. The agent explains the boy and the girl are cousins. When the time to decide comes, my parents look to me. Which will it be, a boy or a girl? I choose the boy, because I don’t want to have to share my clothes with a girl, and change our family’s future irrevocably based on one childish impulse. Later my parents will say this never happened, but I remember it in precise, obsessive detail.
H I G H W AY
If I close my eyes I can still summon the orphanage out of the past. The supposed-to-be-white building stands on a hill with a curving front drive. Leaves rattle across the lawn. A rusted playground sits off to the side. When our driver drops us off, my mom tells me to be polite, as there is a bit of a smell inside. This is an understatement. The front hallway smells like a hospital in hell. Women in white walk the halls, their shoulders bent down, their faces angled away from us. In every room we pass, a child cries. In some, many cry. Later, I’ll dream of this building again and again, but it will be empty. Now, it’s so full. Each room bursts with abandoned children, sometimes literally. A few older kids roam the halls. All the children look essentially the same, the way they did on the page that didn’t exist at the adoption agency. They have dark hair and skin and shining brown eyes. My mom explains that’s because they’re all Romani gypsies. I’ve never heard of Romani people, and gypsies are something I’ve only read about in fairy tales. These real Romani are a traveling group that originated in India. They spend their lives on the move, in small groups. There are some who live out on the hills between the farmhouse where we’re staying and the orphanage. Whenever I see the campsites from the car, I wonder if my brother’s birth mother is somewhere nearby. We will encounter more Romani children when we take a day trip to a nearby city. In Cluj, we stumble across big bands of homeless kids our guide warns us to avoid. My parents tell me to take this with a grain of salt.
My mom rides in the front seat of the car in silence. When we’re halfway to the farmhouse, I see the Romani fires out on the hills, some close enough to reveal horse-drawn caravans interspersed with old cars in the orange light, some so far away they look like fallen stars going out on the horizon.
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One day at the orphanage, shortly before we’re scheduled to take my brother home with us, a girl throws a fit in my brother’s group room. Out of the blue, my brother throws a little yellow Tonka truck at her. It strikes her on the side, and she looks up in shock for a moment before wailing again. The woman in white who tends to this room smiles and claps my brother on the back, clearly praising him in Romanian. My mom picks the girl up, who quickly settles down, while my dad tries to explain to the caregiver via loud English, broken Romanian, and copious sign language that he doesn’t want his child throwing things at the other kids. She ignores him. Then our time to visit is up. On the way out, my dad glares at the woman, but she looks indifferent. Her face seems to say the babies are just gypsies after all. It’s my brother’s turn to scream when we leave for the night.
REAL GHOSTS
be a little afraid when we see them of the kids only have one hand or one boy sitting on a sidewalk because his my brother smiles in his carriage, horse.
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It’s still hard not to that day in town. Some foot. When we pass one legs end at the knees, distracted by a police
A LT H E A F A N N
“Racism is everywhere,” my mom says.
ECHO
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
On the first night out of Romania, a stopover in Paris, my new brother screams for the entire night on the floor of our hotel room. This sounds like an exaggeration, but it is not. His face turns bright red, while his fists pound the floor. I notice my dad looking unsure of what to do about my brother for the first time. I would pay more attention to this moment, but I fall into a kind of tantrum-filled pseudo-sleep. Up until now things have been difficult, but not insurmountable. The embassy the day before became tense until an official finally accepted our bribe? Donation? Fee? And armed men had attacked the orphanage to try and elicit some kind of ransom while my mom was visiting, the week before my dad and I arrived. And my brother keeps doing this strange thing where he holds food in his mouth, sometimes for hours, which makes my parents think he hasn’t been getting fed regularly, even though they have been sending money to make sure he is taken care of for years. All the drawings I made for him are missing, along with the toys and clothes we sent during the long wait. The adoption brochure pictures of happy, multiracial families hugging at an airport seem like something from another reality by now, and we’re only twenty-four hours in.
GHOSTS
As I grow older I become more and more fascinated by ghost stories. I like the way they imply a causality rather than chaos. In ghost stories, a haunting is always caused by something that happened to the ghost, a root source the hero can discover through research or séances or both, particularly if they are brave and unafraid to face the past.
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
Recently I heard a story about ghost hitchhikers in Thailand. Taxi drivers kept picking up customers only to find the person had disappeared by the time they reached the destination. They determined these must be the spirits of young people who died during the tsunami trying to reenact their final steps or return home. Real ghosts, the kind I don’t believe in, don’t seem to work that way, with such concentrated organization. A moment might become haunted, but it’s anyone’s guess why or how such a thing could occur. You’ll only see the wounds, find the damage striated on the walls, like a house after a flood.
REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
G U I LT
One night a couple years ago, my dad finds a home movie while emptying out some boxes. We aren’t a home movie kind of family. We barely keep up with photo albums, and my parents have never sent a Christmas card that I know of. My husband wants to see what I was like as a child, so we find a VHS player and have an impromptu viewing party at my parents’ house. The first scene shows a swim meet. After one of my older brothers wins his race, butterfly, the footage cuts to a shot of me losing mine, freestyle. I recognize it, the indoor olympic pool at the high school where all the swim meets in Nantucket were held. Just seeing the image brings back the damp heat of the greenhouse-like room. Even in the dead of winter, it was hot and wet in there, the air pungent with chlorine that hit burned my eyes.The shot drags on and on while my dad cheers me on off screen, at first with vigor, then later half-heartedly. “You can do it, Althea,” my dad says a long time ago, “Keep swimming. Oh no, stay in the lane.”
Time runs together in a home movie, and now we’re suddenly in a pool outside of Las Vegas. It’s the tail end of a cross-country road trip, so by the time the video is shot we’ve been relaxing in Vegas for a couple days. My older brothers splash each other while my mom and I look on. I’m six or so, with thick bangs interrupted by swim goggles. My dad laughs again behind the camera. Everyone smiles. In the present, we try to sort out which hotel this is, if there are other tapes from this trip. “Where was I?” my younger brother asks suddenly, his voice a little too loud. He has trouble with the rhythm of conversation, and his attempts to join in almost always result in interruption. At first nobody answers. I’m trying to do the math mentally. What year is this video? “Was I in Romania?” he asks. He sounds annoyed. “You weren’t born yet,” my dad says. He turns off the TV and goes in the kitchen to start dinner. “What?” my brother asks. He gets louder. “What? What?”
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My younger brother comes in and sits on the couch when the next scene begins. He is a teenager now, with long limbs and a wardrobe of almost entirely red clothing. He always seems to collapse into chairs like he’s exhausted just moving from one room to the next. I’m not sure if he’s actually tired from his medication, or if he’s just going through normal teenage angst.
A LT H E A F A N N
ever, but and begin chuckle roof of the
REAL GHOSTS
crawl to go dad’s glass
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For a moment I appear to stop the slowest then I realize I still have half the pool again. The camera starts to shake when my becomes a full laugh, which echoes off the building, the water, and the concrete.
ECHO
I’m making Kraft macaroni and cheese when my seven-yearold brother tries to stab me with a pair of old scissors he found in the pen cup by the phone. He walks into the kitchen with the scissors held in one fist, slightly ajar. I’m in late middle school now, and this is the last time I will babysit for a long time. Before the adoption, I was the one who got babysat, but by now my older brothers have all moved out into adult lives. It’s just me and my little brother left in the house. Each time my parents leave us alone leading up to this moment I feel a little less in control. What used to be tantrums in toddlerhood have ramped up into something else in the past few months.
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
When I first notice he has armed himself I don’t look up from the neon powder, but something tells me an instant later to react before it’s too late. In my mind I can see him without looking up from the noodles, his weight shifted forward, the scissors outlined against the yellow cabinets. I turn off the stove and snatch the blade out of his hand in one movement, just as he begins to lunge forward, stunning him into tears with my severity. He says I hurt his hand. Years later at a womens’ self defense course I’ll learn that approaching an assailant with a blade is the most dangerous thing you can do. At the same time I’ll know—but not say—that it’s crazy to think you can control yourself in a moment like that. Some force inside takes over, like magic.
H I G H W AY
My brother’s first full sentence comes late. Having to start a whole new language after speaking late anyway sets him back, though it’s a common developmental delay even outside of disaster scenario babyhoods. We won’t find out the full extent of his impairment, well, ever. For now there have only been hints, and we’re all still hoping for the best. He’s been in America for over a year before he speaks up, unprompted, from his car seat. We pass his favorite restaurant, Mom and I in the front seats, when something breaks through and he tells us he’s “thirsty for Chick-fil-A.” We laugh, and he laughs because we are laughing. I think he likes Chick-fil-A as a toddler because of the ice cream, and yes, he does try to hold it in his mouth sometimes the way he stored food in his cheeks in Romania. But even he thinks it’s funny now when it melts away.
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
The next day he will erupt in the back seat. Nobody will be sure what prompted the outburst, not even him when my mom asks about it later. For the next few years, the anger seems to surge out of him without reason. It’s simply there and it needs to get out. In the car, after he loses interest in screaming, he will throw his toys and shoes into the front seat, aiming for the back of Mom’s head. One shoe ricochets into my lap, and my mom tells me to set it all on the dashboard until we get home. When he runs out of heavy ammunition, he resorts to throwing his clothes until he’s down to his super hero underwear, his face bright red, his fists clenched on nothing.
HANSEL AND GRETEL
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
Whatever happened to those kids anyway? In the newer versions of the story their dad came to his senses and took them back after they escaped the witch, but I find that fiction a little hard to believe. In all our time at the orphanage in Transylvania, I never saw any fathers show up repentant. Just more and more children all the time, going from one kind of lost to another.
GHOSTS
Everybody always wants to know what’s wrong with my brother, as if this information will somehow help. When I tell them we still don’t know, after doctor upon doctor, examinations by the state, meetings with special education teachers, consultations from priests, a lifetime of therapy multiplied by almost the whole family, they seem disappointed. As a toddler some of his behaviors verge into the autism spectrum. If he plays with matchbox cars he only plays one game, Traffic Jam. To play Traffic Jam you must line the cars up meticulously according to a mysterious system, for a minimum of several hours. When he’s in first grade, before we fully understand the extent of his learning disabilities, my parents take him to every doctor possible, trying to come up with a diagnosis of a hearing or vision impairment that could explain why he won’t pay attention in school. By second grade he loves to play dress up so much, he wears military and superhero uniforms as everyday clothes until my parents finally have to take them away when he reaches high school.
Everyone wants to know why bad things happen, why there is pain in the world, why a mother would leave her child at the hospital, why a country’s court system would impede the rescue of that child while systematically breaking his spirit down and reassembling it into something unrecognizable in an old orphanage in the middle of nowhere, why a mental sickness with no discernable definition would rampage through that child’s whole life, why so many unfair things could pile into one little baby and reverberate forever. I want to know too, but his ghosts don’t talk to anyone, certainly not to me.
// REAL GHOSTS
As a high schooler, to outsiders, he can come off as benignly eccentric, but he still can quickly become violent, sometimes without much warning. When my husband and I are babysitting him at age nineteen he has what we refer to as a “meltdown,” essentially an adult version of a tantrum, in the parking lot of a Tex-Mex restaurant, screaming and slamming the car door repeatedly while we look on in silence, hoping nobody calls the police.
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In middle school, he is diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder, maybe with ADHD, maybe something else too, who knows. Even this doctor, willing to prescribe medicine, seems to be pulling at threads in the quest for closure. I’m in college and fairly sure that diagnosis is at least not totally accurate, but I also don’t know if being able to label him as any certain type of illness would even be helpful at this point.
A LT H E A F A N N
Routines become vital for the family to function throughout his childhood. Every day has to proceed in the same way, with medications, meals, play time and bed time occurring in a militaristic consistency. Waiting for food is unbearable for him, and quickly becomes unbearable for anyone else in the restaurant, so eventually we only eat out once a week, at his favorite Chick-Fil-A, always on Saturdays.
G U I LT
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
With time we all start to change in unexpected ways. We catch my brother’s anger like some kind of contagion. When my dad has to hold my brother down during a particularly bad tantrum during his hormonal preteen years—some of the most violent we experience—I can see the pain in his face for days afterward. My mom thinks we were just too late. If we could have gotten there sooner, protected him earlier, maybe things would have been different. Even the house bears some scars. The refrigerator is still pockmarked from the time he attacked it with a knife, before we realized we needed to hide all the kitchen implements.
G U I LT
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REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N
I develop my own mental illness as I get older, this one a more obvious diagnosis: anxiety spectrum Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I fixate on small moments. I replay the times when I said something mean or kicked a little too hard during childhood squabbles, when I felt a wrong or unforgiving emotion as I watched him bite my mom or claw himself on the living room floor, when I resented him for a thousand tiny wrongs. I resolve an infinite number of times to treat him with more grace, to love him more, to take care of him when my parents can’t, but I can’t derive any peace from those invisible promises. I suspect my parents make the same commitments too. The only way to really cope with it all is to ignore it, to get in the car, to go home to my husband, to our distinctly un-haunted house, to think about other things. But my parents can’t do that, and neither can my brother.
ECHO
After a Sisyphean fifteen-year haul, he graduates high school. It was his last chance before he aged out of the public school system. Students have to get a GED instead if they can’t meet their graduation requirements by twenty in this state. But with constant supervision from my parents, two nights a week of tutoring at a minimum, and unofficial tutoring and/or homework assistance from my husband and I when my parents got exhausted, he has made it through his senior year. My parents hire a DJ and pick up catering for his graduation party. They didn’t celebrate this much when I got into graduate school, or my older brother got his white coat for medical school, but I remind myself that this situation is different. It’s special. They convert the living room into a dance floor.
He slams his bedroom door a few times. The kitchen falls quiet again. “It’s always just when you think he’s doing better,” my mom says before we leave. Her back has started to curve forward in the past few months, like the weight has become too great, so she’s gotten a chiropractor to unwind it once a week. “I always think things have turned around.” I know what she means. Past damage always sneaks back in when we least expect it. Real ghosts run down the years. Their feet touch down like thunder. The echo of a cry reverberates, grows larger, until the roar of sound becomes a kind of white noise. A television set gets left on a decommissioned channel, the hiss resonates so long it can no longer be heard, and I can only perceive it when I turn away
// REAL GHOSTS
“I wish you hadn’t adopted me,” he says from the hall. He’s said this kind of stuff more and more often lately. I don’t know if he understands what it really means. “You aren’t even my real parents!”
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In the fall, he drops out of the remedial English and Math courses he needed within a few weeks. They were too difficult, and even these precollege courses have less of a safety net than high school classes, particularly without the special education support of public school. The family doesn’t find out until the second semester is beginning, because he has been hiding out at the mall when class would normally be in session. My mom tells my husband and me what has been happening later that week at a family dinner, which my brother considers a betrayal. He storms from the table.
A LT H E A F A N N
My husband and I hide out on the roof for as long as possible, expecting a sudden influx of high school kids at any moment. But when the guests do arrive, they are all either teachers or the various tutors my parents hired over the years. None of them dance. They stand on the back porch, drink tiny plastic cups of wine and express what we are all feeling, pure relief. This achievement, hard won, means something. He doesn’t have the full degree with which most other kids graduate high school, but rather a reduced certificate. The battle isn’t over yet, precollege courses must be completed in the fall if he wants to try to catch up, maybe get an associate’s degree at the community college. Still, this means he can get there if he wants. The future isn’t bright per se, but it isn’t as dismal as it seemed six months ago.
REAL GHOSTS
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A LT H E A F A N N