What was left of our childhood could have fit in the jar of coffee we snatched from the tallest shelf in the kitchen so that we wouldn’t fall asleep. The kind of coffee Ali’s parents drank was torrefacto, which sounded like instant to us, so when Ali lined up our five glasses of milk on the counter, we each scooped some spoonfuls of the grounds into our glasses like Colacao, completely forgetting about the existence of coffee makers.

Ali lived in a house of nooks and crannies. The ceilings were low and the parquet floor was rough, made of a wood that seemed like it had been spilled on too many times. Along the walls were all sorts of dressers, picture frames, and combinations of mirrors and cheap decorative pieces that hadn’t been dusted in years. It didn’t look like the rest of our houses because it looked more like a junk room than a house. Even if we were blind we still would have immediately been able to identify this place by its musty smell. The smell was because of their cat Bobo, whose fur was always a mess because they’d found him on the street. I had noticed that everything Ali owned was second-hand, like she lived off everyone else’s scraps. Usually when she saw us pressing hard in our planners with a worn-out marker or pen, she would come up and ask us if she could keep it, holding onto our defective stuff like some homeless lady’s collection. Ali and her parents always wore sweaters with elbow patches, and in all the photos around the house that showed her sister when she was still alive, she had worn them too.

We never asked Ali how her sister had died. Lots of rumors circulated at school, but the most widespread theory was that she had choked on her boyfriend’s spit while they were kissing. One morning, while we ran laps around the courtyard, I decided to ask Carla about it, because I wanted to know if the rumor was true or not.

“God you’re stupid.”

“Why?”

“For believing that.”

“So she didn’t choke?”

“I mean, duh, she choked, just not on his spit. Even if he was a literal slug, there’s no way.”

“How’d it happen, then?”

“It was the other stuff. She choked on the other stuff.”

“Ahh!”

This exclamation came out too affected, at a higher volume than my normal voice, which made Carla think that “the other stuff” hadn’t occurred to me before, but that I could imagine it in some new place in my head.

I looked at the photos in the living room, where Ali’s sister smiled and wore polos with neatly ironed collars. She didn’t look like the kind of girl who would have died choking on anything except maybe a fish bone. I pinched my nose to gulp down the grainy coffee and went back to the living room, where the other girls had just pulled out a stash of mass-produced pastries. A few times a year, Ali’s parents would go back to their hometown and leave her home alone with the cat. Ali told us that she always used to go with them, but once her sister was gone it was so boring she could have died. That’s exactly how she described it, unintentionally using that word, and a heavy silence fell over the rest of us, which only Ali was able to break up with a hysterical giggle that mixed in with Bobo’s meows.

We’d been watching MTV clips for two hours when I had to get up to pee. Bobo followed at my heels. I tiptoed through the hallway to the bathroom and sat on the toilet. He leapt into my lap and kept meowing and meowing, meanwhile I heard the tunes of the latest Cranberries single as distantly as if I were in a submarine. I washed my hands quickly and went back into the dark hallway. Bobo was super jittery, so I tried to pick him up but he wouldn’t let me. Instead, he started clawing one of the doors, but not the door to Ali or her parents’ room, it was a door with a Johnny Depp cutout taped to the wood. I put my face against the door and turned the knob a tiny bit so that I could peek inside. Bobo stayed in the hall with his hair on-end. There was a bit of light inside, like someone had left a tiny lamp on, but it was a pale, unstable light, like in a pantry or time-out corner. I looked at the shadows of the fantasy sagas on the shelves, the chess certificates, the pop-punk band posters, and the back of the desk chair with a cardigan folded on top of it; I took it all in very slowly until I reached the bedspread, which hung limp over a tall bed frame.

Ali’s sister was sitting on the bed drinking a smoothie out of a carton.
Ali’s sister.
Ali’s dead sister.
Drinking a smoothie.
Out of a carton.

I shut the door and stood in the dark hallway, too mortified to breathe, while Bobo paced back and forth. I stood frozen there for so long that my friends had to come check to make sure me and the cat were okay.

I didn’t tell anyone I’d seen the ghost of Ali’s sister. I decided to keep it to myself, and I thought a lot about how she’d looked in her room, peaceful and detached from the world. In class, I would try to sit behind Ali, who looked a lot like her, and would glance back and forth between her hair and her elbow patches for hours until a teacher said my name and broke the spell.

The next time her parents went away, Ali invited us to her house for another pajama party. Carla said behind her back that she did it because she couldn’t stand not being the center of attention for more than like five minutes. Then she added that Ali’s house smelled like cat and death. We all agreed, including me, because I never missed an opportunity to pretend I was stupid. And because honestly, even though I myself had seen a ghost there, and even though the house did smell a bit like cat, it also smelled like bread and oregano and old magazines, but nothing more unpleasant than that.

The day before the party I asked my mom for a new pair of pajamas and we went to a store downtown. I picked out a white set with black sheep on it that I thought were cute, but when I put them on at Ali’s house the next day, I regretted buying them and realized that I should have picked out a set with a brand logo, like Carla’s, or taken a shirt from an ad campaign out of a box, like Ali.

We pitched our camp of inflatable mattresses in the living room. Ali blew up every single one by herself and said how her room was too small for all five of us, and how it was much more fun to be in the living room anyway. She had put scented candles all around the house and was acting sort of desperate, like she had a sixth sense about what we’d said about her. Halfway through the night, while the other girls picked out a movie from her parents’ DVD collection (a set that came with the Sunday papers), I took the opportunity to sneak to the hallway again. Bobo had decided to curl up on top of a beam. I called for him to come with me, but he wouldn’t budge. My hands shaking, I turned the knob to the door with the Johnny Depp cutout and went inside, ready to see the supernatural vision again. It was dark inside this time. I peeked a little further in, until half my body was inside, and let some light from the hallway through so that I could carefully study the room, but there was no one on the bed, at the desk, or behind the columns. It was empty.

I got cold all of a sudden and closed the door, then dragged my feet back to the living room, where the other girls had paused the screen on a frontal nude shot of an actor I didn’t recognize, busy trying to open a bottle of hazelnut liqueur with a pair of scissors.

Ali began to notice that I was staring at her. It didn’t come as a shock: over the course of a few months she turned around further and further in her seat to glance at me out of the corner of her eye. She never said a word about it, but she started leaving her hair down and straightening it, which made her look even more like her sister. Meanwhile, consistently disappointed at every sleepover, where I encountered an empty room (my eyes roved over every inch of it in the dead of night, while my friends’ sleeping or drunken bodies lay on the ground), I fed on Ali’s appearance as a substitute for the ghost. She liked that I looked at her, it gave her confidence and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Juan, the boy who sat next to her who was repeating the grade, liked to mess with her, and he entered my fantasies too. I imagined them kissing a lot, and sometimes I even imagined Ali on her knees between his legs, choking to death right in the middle of math class.

We became best friends and told each other things we didn’t tell the other girls. I told her about my black sheep pajamas and about how much I regretted buying them; she told me that her parents cried a lot at home when they were making dinner or basically doing anything, and that sometimes it was because of her sister and sometimes because of money, but she could never tell the one kind of crying apart from the other. We liked to isolate ourselves. Most days we sat alone in a corner of the courtyard while the other girls glared at us jealously from the other side and whispered like their secrets were more important than ours. Ali stopped throwing pajama parties, not that it really mattered to me because I’d already given up all hope of seeing her sister’s ghost again. I even started to question whether I’d seen her to begin with, to doubt whether I’d ever seen her hazy glow and her smoothie, like she was just another one of the fantasies in my mind, whose perversity was running wild, uncaged.

One Friday morning, the sky turned black and there was a gust of wind so strong it lifted the prefabricated roof off the gym and carried it to a nearby field. A dozen teachers went running out after it, and they sent us home before the sirens had even gone off. Ali, overexcited by the meteorological developments, told me her parents had gone to their hometown again and invited me, and only me, to her house after the first drops had started to fall.

She didn’t know how to cook, but she knew how to boil pasta and open cans, so she made me spaghetti Bolognese. Some of her hair had gone frizzy from the rain, and some was stuck to her skin as the water dripped down her neck and gradually pooled on her back. She skipped around the kitchen, laughed with the spices in hand, and bent over the flame, seeking out light like a freshly watered plant. I realized how weird it was to see her like this, and I felt like I was experiencing a unique moment, encapsulated there in the kitchen like a pill.

We watched The Simpsons while we ate, and when the episode was over, we swallowed the whole run of ads until a talk show came on. The host, who’d had a face lift with questionable results, announced their guest for that afternoon, a tall man with an impeccable suit and an ascot, who said he was an expert at communicating with ghosts. He picked an audience member at random, brought him up to the stage, and asked him about a loved one who had passed away. Then he took the audience member’s hands and mediated between him and the ghost, asking questions and backpedaling on his questions, but when the ghost gave an answer he transmitted it to the audience with a gravelly voice that came from some other place, and the whole audience started to cry, even the host, whose tears ran down her lifted face and made her look like a melted candle. The atmosphere was so electric that Ali and I held tight to each other on the couch, unable to tear our eyes away for a full hour and a half. When the show was over, Ali picked up the remote and turned off the TV. Outside, the wind rattled the sunshades against every window in the house.

“I saw your sister once,” I blurted out.

Ali smiled, leaned her head on her knee, and said: “I know.”

“Huh?”

“She’s been hiding ever since.”

“What do you mean? Why?”

“She can’t handle more than like five minutes being the center of attention.”

Ali brought me to her room. The ghost glowed with the whitish light that I’d seen before, shining through the blankets on Ali’s bed, where she’d been hiding since the day I’d found her. Now, clothed and trembling, she looked like a plane crash survivor, stumbling around the wreckage in a daze hours after the crash. Beside her on the nightstand were dozens of coconut smoothie cartons.

“It’s the only thing she’ll have,” Ali said.

I sat beside her on the bed, and she shuffled back to the opposite edge. I’d never been so close to her. She was older than us, although it wouldn’t be long before we would pass her. We would pass right through her and start to forget her and life would keep on going until we wouldn’t know what to call her anymore, Ali’s big sister or little sister. I remembered all the times I’d seen her when she was alive, when I had started secondary school and she was about to graduate. She would walk out of the upperclassmen’s annex at recess with her backpack slung over one shoulder, and sometimes she would bring Ali a sandwich, or a jacket, or a folder, or whatever else she needed. Ali never introduced me to her. When she’d died they held a ceremony for her at school, and for a while her face was all over the hallways and the projector screens and the corkboards and the prayers and the English writing assignments. She was in so many places that sometimes people drew things on her face. No one knew how she’d died. Then I started to hear that she’d choked on her boyfriend’s spit, and I thought that, all things considered, it wasn’t the worst way to go. Maybe I thought that because I still hadn’t kissed anyone. When I did, the next year (wrapped in the arms of Julio, a friend of my cousin’s, under a cork tree in the Tiétar Valley), I realized that it would be impossible to die from choking on someone’s spit. That’s when I’d asked Carla to tell me the truth, and the truth was that Ali’s sister was a—

“Dicksucker,” Ali said. “You can say it, it’s okay.”

“No, no, that’s not what I was going to say.”

“Yes, you were, that’s what everyone says.”

“Fine.”

I’d never said that word before, and I didn’t say it then, despite Ali’s insistence. I hadn’t even seen a penis before, let alone sucked one, and I had no plans of changing that in the near future, which is when I realized that the people who called her that (Carla, Juan, the other boys in our class) hadn’t done it before either. I said that to Ali, but she just shrugged. Her sister poked the straw into another carton and stuck it in her mouth like we were talking about someone else.

Bobo came into the room and jumped onto a shelf to watch us. It had stopped raining. The ghost gazed at me and handed me the smoothie in silence. I took it. The straw was so cold that my lips turned blue. I took a big suck and it gave a loud slurp that made Ali laugh. Her laugh got bigger and bigger and turned contagious, like a virus, until it made me cackle so hard that I choked on the smoothie and started to cough. Then her sister started laughing too, and gradually the laughter turned into something else, something like a white glow or a hiccup. We were laughing for an hour. It was the first time I’d seen a ghost laugh.

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Julia Viejo (Madrid, 1991) is a writer and English-Spanish translator who has also worked as an editor and bookseller. She has published the short story collection In the Cell There Was a Firefly (2022), edited an anthology of the poetry of Gloria Fuertes, and translated Red Comet: the Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Her debut novel, Dark Estrella (Evil Star) was published in January 2024.

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Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. His translation of Manuel Rivas’ The Last Days of Terranova was published by Archipelago Books in 2022, and of Berta Dávila’s The Dear Ones by 3TimesRebel Press in 2023.