The sky was flat. And white. It looked like frosted glass. Adaline had always hated frosted glass. It was so very cheap, only ever used in mall bath­rooms and ugly hotels; it was un-classy.

“How long have you been a ghost, if you can remem­ber?” asked the woman.

Adaline didn’t look again at the woman when she answered. She could remem­ber her face exactly. She knew she should more aptly be called a girl due to her obvi­ous­ly young age, but that lent her face too much inno­cence, so Adaline called her a woman.

“A long time,” Adaline replied. She con­tin­ued to watch the frosted-glass sky. As far as skies go, it wasn’t a bad one, but it simply had to be frosted glass, didn’t it?

The woman’s hair was thin and average and brown. It hung in sticks down the sides of her face, cracked and tangled into a pre­tense of a bun. There wasn’t quite enough hair to begin with, and so the bun could not prop­er­ly be called a bun, although it tried.

“Do you remem­ber how you died, and when?”

“Yes.”

The woman looked up from her notepad. It was the first time she had done so since the begin­ning of the inter­view. Her skin was too thin. It was like a single layer of baklava, wetted and draped over her face so that there was nowhere it fit quite right. Her eyes unset­tled Adaline. They were expres­sion­less. It was not that their expres­sion was unread­able, or hidden; they could not even be called empty, because that may have implied that they had once had an expres­sion. They held, simply, nothing. It was neither good nor bad; there was not a single judgment.

Eye shouldn’t look that way, Adaline thought. Eyes should reflect a person’s insides. This woman had no insides.

“Would you care to elab­o­rate?” the woman asked.

Adaline would have liked to describe her as mousey because of her hair and her skin, but because of her eyes she could not. This woman held a strange pres­ence. It was silent, but it was in no way quiet. She looked down at the top of her mousy head, the woman’s eyes hidden by her feath­ered hair.

“I was shot at a ball that my cousin held. The shot was most likely meant for him. He was a radical and was equally hated as revered. Well, I say equally, but it must not have been, for someone to shoot at him.”

“Did you take the bullet for him, so that he could live?”

The woman did not lean forward, her eyes did not bright­en, and this was why Adaline could not call her a girl, no matter that she could be no older than sixteen. She did not care for the world about her. She did not see it. She did not even see Adaline, for all she had been sent to inter­view her.

“No,” said Adaline.

The woman wrote this down, too. She looked up once more. Adaline did not turn away from her eyes this time. “Did you get to watch your funeral?”

“Yes.”

Adaline noticed a paper but­ter­fly by the woman’s elbow. It was white, but in such a way that it did not exactly look like it could have been made of paper.

“What was it like?”

Adaline remem­bered only impres­sions. It had not been sunny, but she could not tell the woman whether it had rained. There had been white roses. The grass had been green. The sky had been frosted glass. “No one cried. Too many people came, so they over­flowed the parking lot, and it was in the news­pa­pers every­where. Someone shot my cousin, and the other ladies got to say they’d seen both of us die.”

The woman wrote every­thing down. Her hand was small and looked to be of wax paper. The but­ter­fly landed on her knuck­les. It was blue now. Adaline won­dered whether the woman could feel it. She made no reac­tion, and Adaline thought about why people could see her but not her but­ter­flies. She had made hun­dreds while alive, so every­one could see them, back when they didn’t see her. Why had she been worth­less, alive, inter­est­ing only now that she was con­sid­ered a myth? When she fol­lowed her cousin up to society, she’d stopped making the but­ter­flies. They fol­lowed her now, while she waited in death.

“Have you ever seen your cousin, now that you’ve become a ghost?”

The woman did not look up.

“No.”

“Do you feel the need for revenge on the person who killed you?”

“No.”

“Have you ever haunted anyone?”

“Yes.”

The woman did not ask her to elab­o­rate this time.

Another but­ter­fly landed on the woman’s ear. This one was pale pink. It was the same color as the lilac bush by her mother’s cottage, before she’d died and it was sold, and Adaline had left to become a lady for her cousin.

The woman did not ask her if she liked being dead. She did not ask her if she knew of any other ghosts. She did not ask what Adaline had done when she was alive, or if she had had any friends or lovers, or if death was fun, or boring, or just okay.

“Thank you for your time, that will be all.”

The woman stood, bowed, and left. The but­ter­flies did not follow her through the door.

Two weeks later, Adaline found the story in fine print on page 8 of the mag­a­zine. It told a tragic story of a beau­ti­ful lady who saved her cousin from certain death by gunshot at his birth­day party and paid the price. It told of a thun­der­storm funeral and watch­ing help­less­ly as her cousin was shot, as his life fell apart without her in it, the parking lot over­filled with the people who’d loved her. Adaline smiled now. She was not dis­ap­point­ed. She was not angry. She felt nothing at all, as if the noth­ing­ness that flat­tened the woman’s eyes had slid into her; slow, cold, pale, like frosted glass.