The Freezer Girl

My house is a converted school bus, not one of those fancy ones you see on Instagram, but a real, rusted-out yellow bus that my father and I spent two years gutting and rebuilding. We parked it on a plot of land my family has owned for generations, a scrubby patch of desert out in the middle of nowhere, where the only sound at night is the wind and the occasional yip of coyotes. The bathroom was the last thing we put in. Dad built it out of pine boards and a salvaged shower stall, and it’s cramped but functional. There’s a small freezer unit in there, one of those chest freezers, that we use for storing meat and frozen vegetables, because we’re off-grid and only make a supply run once a month.

I never thought much of it, but some mornings, around dawn, when the light was still gray and I’d be half-asleep, I’d shuffle into the bathroom and see a girl sitting on the freezer. She was small, maybe eight or nine, with lank brown hair that hung over her face, and she wore a faded blue dress that looked like it came from another era. She never made a sound, just sat there with her hands folded in her lap, staring at the wall. I figured she was a leftover from some dream, or maybe a trick of the light, so I’d blink and she’d be gone, and I’d go about my business.

But as the weeks passed, she started coming more frequently. She’d be there when I went to brush my teeth, or when I stepped in for a shower. I started to get a prickly feeling on the back of my neck every time I saw her, like I was being watched by something that didn’t belong. So one morning, when I was particularly tired and she was sitting there as if she owned the place, I said, ‘Hey, could you leave? I need to take a shower.’

She didn’t move. She just tilted her head, and her hair fell away from her face for a moment, and I saw that her eyes were not eyes at all, but dark, empty sockets, like a doll that had been left out in the sun and had its eyes melted away. She said, ‘Why do I always have to leave?’ Her voice was soft, like wind through dry grass, and it made the hair on my arms stand up.

I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘Because I’m not comfortable with anyone else in here while I’m showering. It’s a private thing.’

She said, ‘You used to let me stay.’

I frowned. ‘No, I didn’t. I’ve only seen you a few times, and I always asked you to leave.’

But she shook her head slowly. ‘No, not you. The other you. The one who used to live here before.’

I had no idea what she was talking about. We’d bought this bus from a scrapyard, and before that, it had been a school bus for a district that had shut down years ago. There was no ‘other me’.

I said, ‘You’re not making any sense. Please leave.’

The girl slid off the freezer and stood on the cold tile floor. She was shorter than I thought, barely up to my waist. She walked toward me, and I felt an urge to step back, but I was already against the wall. She stopped right in front of me and looked up. Her sockets were bottomless, and I felt like I was falling into them. She said, ‘You know, the freezer is cold. It keeps things fresh. But some things ain’t meant to be kept.’

I didn’t know what to say. She turned and walked to the door, but before she left, she looked over her shoulder and said, ‘I’ll be back when you’re ready to let me stay.’

And then she was gone. I stood there, my heart pounding, staring at the empty spot where she had been. I figured it was just a dream, or maybe I had a fever, but when I went to work that day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what she said – ‘the other you’ and ‘the freezer’. I got up and went to the bathroom, just to check, but she wasn’t there. The freezer was humming quietly. I opened the lid, half-expecting to see something horrible, but it was just my usual stock: a few frozen packs of ground beef, some chicken, a bag of peas.

I closed it and went back to bed. But I couldn’t shake the chill that ran through me.

The next morning, I was in the shower, and I heard a sound – a soft thud, like something heavy being set down. I pulled back the curtain, and she was there again, sitting on the freezer. I yelled, ‘I told you to leave!’ But she just smiled, and her smile was too wide, full of too many teeth. She said, ‘You’re not ready yet, but you will be. And then I won’t have to leave.’

I got out of the shower, dripping wet, and grabbed a towel. ‘What do you want from me?’ I demanded.

She tilted her head. ‘I want you to remember.’

‘Remember what?’

She pointed at the freezer. ‘What’s in there.’

My blood ran cold. I suddenly had a terrible, irrational urge to open the freezer. She watched me, her empty eyes unwavering. I took a step toward it, and my hand was shaking as I reached for the lid. I lifted it, and inside, instead of the usual packages, I saw a child’s shoe – a small, red shoe, caked with dirt. And then I saw a scrap of blue fabric, just like the dress she was wearing.

I slammed the lid shut and stumbled back. ‘No. No, that’s not real.’

She was still sitting there, and now she was crying. Not tears, but a thick, black liquid that oozed from her sockets. She said, ‘You don’t remember, do you? You don’t remember what this bus was before.’

I shook my head. ‘It was a school bus. It was retired.’

‘It was retired,’ she repeated, ‘but not because it was old. Because of an accident. A crash. The bus went off the road, down an embankment. The driver died. And so did a little girl. She was thrown from the bus, and she landed in the cold, cold earth. They never found her body. They assumed it was swept away in a flood. But they didn’t look hard enough.’

My stomach lurched. I whispered, ‘You’re her? You’re the girl who died?’

She nodded. ‘I was looking for my body. You have it. You have my body. In the freezer.’

I looked at the freezer, and now I felt a wave of nausea. I had never seen anything like that. But I knew, with a horrifying certainty, that she was telling the truth. My father had found the bus in a scrapyard, but he had never told me the whole story. He had said it was from a school that had closed, but that wasn’t true.

I don’t remember what happened after that, but the days blurred together. I avoided the bathroom, but I could feel her presence, like a weight in the air. I asked my father about the bus, and he grew pale. He confessed that he knew about the crash. He had gotten the bus cheap, from a salvage auction, and when he had been cleaning it out, he had found something in the freezer – a small, desiccated corpse, wrapped in plastic. He had panicked and reburied it somewhere in the desert, but he hadn’t told me.

I felt like I was losing my mind. The girl started appearing everywhere, not just in the bathroom. She would stand at the end of the hallway, or sit in the passenger seat of the bus, staring at me. And she would always say the same thing: ‘Let me stay. Let me stay. You have to let me stay.’

I realized then that she wasn’t asking to stay in the bathroom. She was asking to stay in me, to share my body, to possess me, so she could have a life again. And I knew I couldn’t allow that.

One night, I woke up and found her standing over my bed, her face inches from mine. Her empty sockets were glowing with a faint light. She said, ‘You’ve had enough time. Now you must let me in.’

I tried to scream, but no sound came out. Her hands reached out, and they were cold, so cold, like the freezer itself. She placed them on my temples, and I felt a terrible pressure, as if my skull was being split open. I heard a voice inside my head – her voice, but also mine – saying, ‘You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.’

I fought, but I was weak. I could feel her pushing into me, her thoughts intertwining with mine. And then, just as I felt myself giving in, I remembered something my grandmother once told me about the desert – that the dead belong to the land, and to the sand, and that you can’t deny them their due. I focused on the heat, the dry wind, the vastness of the desert, and I spoke, not with my voice, but with all my strength, ‘Go back to the earth. Go back to the dirt. You are not welcome here.’

The girl gasped and recoiled, as if burned. She hissed, and then she vanished. I was alone, shaking, drenched in sweat.

The next day, I went to the place my father said he had buried the body. I found a small mound, the earth disturbed. I dug it up with my bare hands, and I found the remains, wrapped in a moldy tarp. I took them to the county sheriff and told him everything – about the girl, about the freezer, about the crash. They identified her as a missing child from a decade ago, whose death had been ruled an accident.

She never came back after that. I thought she was finally at peace. But sometimes, late at night, when the wind is just right, I think I can hear her whispering outside the bus, ‘Let me stay, let me stay.’ And I know that even if I closed the freezer and buried her bones, she will always be out there, waiting for another chance to come back in.