That year, on the Ghost Festival, Grandma repeatedly warned me not to go outside after dark. The chubby kid next door laughed and called me a coward, then dragged me out to kick a ball around at night. The moment the ball rolled into a ditch in the graveyard, a deathly pale hand suddenly reached out of the earth and grabbed it. The next day, the chubby kid had a fever that wouldn’t break, and kept screaming, “Didn’t you say we’d play together?” Then, late that night, I heard the familiar sound of a ball bouncing by my window…
