Vera Kurian | 35
ghosts never talking to each other.” I babbled on as if I knew what I was talking about. The one thing that is true of all people, dead or alive, is that they love to correct people who are shooting their mouths off. I was pretending I knew more because I wanted her to correct me. To tell me about Esme. The one thing I never dared ask about.
Esme was a microbiologist working at the National Institutes of Health. She was one of the few women that I almost instantly became infatuated with, something about her luminous eyes, her quick wit. She frightened me a little because she didn't seem to operate on the same plane of existence as other girls. She seemed impenetrable at times, lapsing into silences that weren't sullen at all. Sullen, I had seen before, but a silence almost as if she were off in another universe, I had not. She wrote poetry and read French novels. She had trouble making eye contact if things were