A small town filled with ghosts that I’ve never visited

I try to describe how Maisie changed. I’m convincing Martin Fitzgerald on the way back from Ayr town centre. She’s not the girl he knew then, mostly. We’re dating now, but I can’t tell him, “She’s got almost black eyes and she keeps her hair in curls, plus she’s got a piercing on her belly button”, because he knows that already. She’s as popular as Pamela Anderson or the Spice Girls, if our school was the whole world. Back then, she wore city-girl perfume and faux crocodile-skin handbags with her white teeth and clean shoes.

Martin lights a cigarette and we sit on a promenade bench that looks across the Atlantic Ocean, I think, or maybe it’s the Firth of Clyde, or both. Martin says, Nice out, and we’re quiet.

I tell him, You know she keeps a collection of dried leaves in a book by her bedside table, and she’s got a framed Rennie Mackintosh print on the wall. She locks the door every time she leaves the house, and when she’s inside she closes the blinds.

Is she cooking drugs?

Mate, maybe. Maybe I’m her drugs, and we both laugh.

Martin says, I never got it. I never got her, you know? But whatever. Be happy and all that, and he flicks his cigarette to the pavement. Don’t be a stranger.

I remember what I wanted to say at midnight, on the final stretch back, right by the ocean, after dropping Martin at home. I’d watched a video online three days back where two kids, a girl and a boy, explored a town in Appalachia, Georgia, America at night, after everyone had gone to sleep I suppose. They’re walking around talking about how frightened they are, but they’re filming through windows and walking into homes with open doors. When we hear footsteps, we hurtle to the bus stop because all three of us are too young to drive.

I think during school Maisie would have watched me walk into the ocean, or the Firth of Clyde and talked about it with her friends. Now we’d hold hands and do it together.

That’s how Maisie changed.