Rain pelted the one window in the attic, so thick that it created the illusion of the house being underwater. It was a funny idea, Junie thought—their whole house being underwater—but it was also kind of cool, the sort of thing she liked to think about. An underwater home, but no mermaids. Definitely no mermaids. She knew her sisters would disagree about the mermaids, but there was no need for fantasy in a world already so strange. No, Junie's ideal would be something deep in an abyss, down where all the weird creatures lived, the ones that lit up strange parts of their bodies like soundless firecrackers in the pitch black. One could look out the living room windows and catch sight of those little things that looked like transparent whiskered grapes—ostracods, she thought they were called. Yes, one might see a yellow ostracod, might have the desire to reach out and pop the thing. Or perhaps from an upper bedroom window, sitting in one's bed and gazing out, a person might look into the fathomlessness and see rainbow lights running along zippers, all blue and red and green, and they'd see as it approached the pane that it was a bloodybelly jelly, red as a meaty, wafting heart. And there'd be other jellies, too, massive ones, just passing the windows like stop-motion flocks of geese, their ribbons of gray tentacles behind them. Maybe from the attic, one might notice a lone barreleye just sort of hovering there, watching, its transparent head revealing its two eyes sitting like little men in a cockpit, its purpose and thoughts unknown.

Junie's gaze remained plastered on that waterfalling window, and in her mind's eye she almost saw that barreleye, almost asked it what it was doing there, looking into her world from the outside, but her sisters drew her back into the room.

"You're zoning out," Mabel scolded.

"Sorry, sorry. Just, the rain. It's a lot. Like the ocean."

Autumn, the eldest, rolled her eyes. At fifteen, she was much too old for these sorts of games, but the power had been out for several hours at this point, and her phone's battery had died. If she could've gone to some friend's house to charge it, she would have, but nobody wanted to go out in that torrential storm. "You say the weirdest shit, Junie."

The twins gasped simultaneously. "You can't say that!" whispered Hazel, scandalized.

Juniper looked at her sisters in the gloom of the two camping lanterns they'd brought upstairs: all three cross-legged on the floor, all three slender and straight-haired, the twins still in their pajamas and Autumn leaning back on her palms as if everything bored her. They sat and bickered, the darkness painting them as apparitions in the attic (wouldn't that be a good story title? Junie thought suddenly—Apparitions in the Attic . . .), their voices hushed as if afraid they'd stir spirits. And maybe they had reason to be afraid; they were, after all, about to communicate with one.

Or try to, at least.

Juniper stepped from the window and joined her sisters on the carpet. At least this attic wasn't creepy and cobwebbed. It was fully finished. In fact, the cozy space with its open stairwell served as the twins' bedroom and was therefore filled with the items ten-year-old girls could be expected to have: stuffed animals and old Barbies and slime kits, books and sparkly lotions and all manner of random doodles, notes, and paper crafts, all of it under a sloping ceiling sandwiched between two unmade twin beds, a bureau, and a squat tent in the shape of a castle. In essence, there was little space to gather, and yet they managed.

"Where did you even get this?" Mabel asked, she and Hazel having sufficiently shamed Autumn for her language. The twin was flipping the planchette in her hands, bringing it up for a moment to peer with her right eye through the window at its center.

"Bailey let me borrow it," Autumn responded with a shrug of her shoulders, popping gum the others didn't know she'd had.

Juniper listened for a moment while the twins tried to wrangle some Bubblicious (cola flavored!) from the teen, but then her patience got the best of her. "Can we start?"

Autumn snapped toward her sibling and stared, hard. Even in the shadow, Junie saw she'd taken umbrage. Leaning forward, Autumn huffed. "What's your hurry? You think there's a ghost up here for real?"

Mabel and Hazel snickered; one whispered to the other.

"No," Juniper said firmly. "I don't. But if mom finds out we're playing with it—"

"How's she going to? You gonna tell her, snitch?"

Juniper sighed in her older sister's direction, held her temper. There was no sense in arguing with Autumn. Even though Junie was a mere eighteen months younger, her maturity was far beyond her elder's. She'd taken on their father's collected, pensive demeanor, and while Juniper loved the man, she still had moments where she wished she'd resembled him physically rather than temperamentally. The others had, with their slim and straight and blonde—why hadn't she? Instead, Junie's untameable poof of tawny hair, her shorter, wider frame, and her huge dose of freckles (not the cute kind, the light ones that were sprinkled across her sisters' noses but the kind that were dark brown and spread like a swarm of gnats across her whole face) colluded against her, particularly in these warm summer months. The freckles darkened, her body suffered under the pants she continuously wore, and her hair—well, it became a veritable jungle. "My little cave girl," That was the nickname her father had given her when she'd been a child, as much for her love of running barefoot and digging for dinosaurs and making bug traps and coming home filthy every day as it had been for her wild appearance.

But no fourteen-year-old wanted to be called a cave girl.

Autumn to her left, Mabel across from her, and Hazel to her right, Juniper sat with her sisters around a standard Ouija board. They were chattering again. They just couldn't keep quiet. Junie had something like love for them, but in this house, they were too close, and no matter how many family vacations they took or how many shopping trips or ice-cream outings they went on, Juniper never could quite relate to the others. There was just something in her nature that separated her from them, and she knew it was there, but she couldn't identify what it was, that thing that kept her apart. Glancing at their smiles, she wished she could feel what they felt, that she could cross whatever barrier held her back from them and their . . . their what? Their easiness, maybe? Their carefreeness. Junie never felt carefree.

"What should we ask it first?" Hazel's gleeful voice cut through Junie's thoughts.

"You have to put—we have to put our fingers on it," ordered Autumn, who'd worked through all her eyerolls and decided it was acceptable to enjoy herself. "Come on. Just the first and second ones, like this." The others dutifully obeyed, and then, her theatrical nature shining through, the eldest intoned a greeting. "If there are any spirits in the room, we ask you to come talk to us," she implored, cutting an icy glance at the twins when they started to giggle.

Junie watched her sisters more than she looked at the board. Mabel and Hazel became instantly sedate after Autumn's glower, and Autumn herself had tensed, shaken from her shoulders down to her fingers to get into the role. Somewhat perplexed, Juniper chewed her lip and thought. This sort of thing—spirits and ghosts and all that—she wasn't sure what she thought of it. She'd no reason to believe or not to believe and was somewhat bored with the concept, sure that supernatural entities would have far more interesting ways of communication than a mass-marketed board game.

She was about to turn back toward the watery window and return to her deep sea imaginings, but the twins' squeals startled her.

"Don't take your fingers off, Junie!" Mabel practically screamed. "It's moving!"

"Shh!" Always remembering her place, Autumn read out letters as the planchette seemed to float on its own toward some conclusion.

"What did you even ask it?"

"Shut up!" Autumn snapped at Junie. "I'm trying to read, it's so dark—E . . . K . . . Are you moving it? E . . ."

Hazel leaned toward Juniper and whispered, "She asked the spirit's name."

Junie processed that (did spirits have names? She thought that was more ghosts, which came from dead people. Was there a difference? She thought there was), and she was about to offer a mild nod of understanding when Autumn suddenly stopped after announcing an "O" and pulled her hands away from the planchette, much to the twins' expressive annoyment. "You jerks!" she cried. "You pushed it!"

Confused, Juniper brought her hands to her lap and watched the interplay. The twins tried to hide their mirth, Autumn threw a few more words at them (including a curse word or two), and the twins laughed harder before beginning to taunt with a name: Shane Kerbow. Then Junie understood. Her older sister must have felt some kind of way about the boy. In her anger, Autumn began throwing things at the twins, who continued to laugh and dodge stuffed animals and paperbacks and whatever else was launched at them. Junie scrambled away from the board and back toward the window. The chaos of the room was nothing abnormal, and yet it put her on edge. Why couldn't everything be calmer? Perhaps she would like to be a deep sea creature, in perpetual silence, left alone to drift where she wished (nevermind the constant fear of predators hiding in the watery cosmos).

"What in the world is going on up here?"

Their mother's voice immediately silenced the girls. They stood as gargoyles, mouths fittingly open as rain spouts, none daring to reply. Their fight was nothing to be worried about; it was the contraband gameboard on the floor. No occult objects were welcome in the Jackson household. Fortunately, it was rather dark, only the two lanterns (which had been knocked over, skewing their golden beams) and the artificial glow of their mother's cellphone to illuminate a select few spaces. The half of their mother they could see in the stairwell looked more like one of the spirits they'd been pretending to summon.

"Knock it off, all of you!—So how's baby? . . . Keeping you up all night . . . Sounds right . . . Mmmhmm. I know. You four are too old for this! Your father and I—Me? I don't know how I did any of it. I don't know how I'm doing any of it right now, Danielle. It only gets harder, hate to say—Power's back on."

Their mother's information meant for them was clear only because the woman covered the lower half of her phone and hissed the words for her daughters, while she spoke cheerfully into her device the words meant for whoever was on the other end.

"Trust me, men are virtually worthless with newborns; I don't think you're missing out on much, there . . ."

Her voice receded as she descended to the second floor. In the vacuum of sound and activity that followed, Autumn and the twins stared at one another and then at the board, somewhat breathless, before they bolted down the stairs after their mother, Mabel and Hazel arguing over which of them got to play some kind of video game and Autumn calling, "Pick up the mess, June!"

Left alone, Juniper stayed where she was for a few moments, listening to the heavy rainfall against the roof. She hadn't been able to hear it before, probably because of the people noise. Silence was far preferable to people noise. The very bodies of people seemed to give off noise, even if their mouths were shut. But the rain was so soothing, as were the shadows. Cool and comforting. She didn't feel the need to rush back to light and sound, not quite yet. Maybe she would pick up the room, not because her sisters deserved any help but because it was something to do. Junie didn't mind. And Autumn had told her to put away the game, anyway.

Crouching away from the window, Juniper crawled hands and knees, rearranging stuffed animals into neat piles and stacking books. When she reached the Ouija board, she gave it a curious stare, studying the bold arc of letters, the vintage sun and moon. She wondered why "good" and "bye" were two separate words instead of one, but it didn't bother her long before she placed the board into its box. Where was the planchette? Junie sat back on her heels and moved her eyes about, picked up one of the lanterns to aid her, and she found it resting atop an open magazine.

Juniper liked the shape of the planchette, she realized, leaning toward it. It was sort of like an inverted heart, with that interesting window right inside, a window that now, interestingly, rested over a bright red-lettered word: HELLO.

It was part of an article title: "SAY HELLO TO SUMMER!" The planchette window had perfectly encapsulated that one-word greeting.

Funny, thought Juniper, inadvertently putting a hand to the back of her neck as her skin began to prickle. Aloud, she said, "Hello to you, too." But though she was a perceptive girl, she was also a serious one, so she picked up the planchette, put it into the box, and closed it. Then she went downstairs, disregarding the uncanny sense that she were somehow floating over a deep similar to the one she'd been pondering moments ago.