Coraline walked in her front door, shut it behind her, dropped her backpack on the floor, and then saw what was right in front of her. For a long moment, she just stood and stared, with her mouth slightly open.

The boxes in the foyer were no longer stacked in neat pyramids. Instead, they were all hovering slightly, hanging in midair like a tiny constellation, swaying gently from side to side. As Coraline gaped at them, they all turned to face her and then, as one, started to speed toward her.

Coraline screamed and ducked, flinging her arms over her face.

"Coraline Jones!"

There were a series of crashes, and the corner of something hard and square glanced off of Coraline's elbow. She risked a peek from under her arms to see boxes scattered around her, their contents spilled all over the floor, and her mother standing in the doorway leading to the kitchen, her arms crossed and a scowl on her face. One foot was tapping ominously against the floor.

"There had better be a good explanation for this, young lady," Coraline's mother said, her tones icy enough to sink the Titanic.

Coraline lowered her arms, slowly, straightened up, and looked around at the devastation surrounding her. Finally, at a loss for ideas, she chanced a grin at her mother, which almost instantly withered in the frost of her gaze. Coraline could tell that this wasn't going to go over well, but she took a deep breath and tried anyway.

"A ghost?"

…

"I just don't understand it. She's fourteen years old, for Pete's sake! Why can't she just accept that we're not going back, and adjust?"

Coraline's mother's voice drifted up from downstairs. Coraline sighed and scribbled down a few more steps on a math problem, then groaned and threw down her pencil. How was she supposed to focus on trigonometry when her house was haunted and her parents were blaming it all on her?

She opened up her laptop, and stared at her math homework as she waited for the computer to boot up.

From downstairs, she heard her father say, "Well, she is fourteen years old, and we did just drag her halfway across the country just when she was starting to get settled in again."

A huff of exasperation from her mother, and the sound of a cabinet door shutting. "It's just so immature! She complained and moped around after the move to Ashland, but she seemed to be doing so well here. I just don't understand what she thinks she's going to gain from this kind of behaviour."

Coraline typed in her password and waited as her desktop slowly loaded.

"Maybe she's hoping we'll buy this story about the house being haunted and decide to move back?" her father suggested. Coraline scowled.

"Okay, first, it's not a story, and second, I can't believe you'd just assume that about me!" Coraline whisper-shouted. Downstairs, her parents continued their conversation, blissfully unaware that their daughter could hear every word. "How old do they think I am?"

There was a cheerful ding! as a message popped up on Coraline's screen.

She spent the rest of the night chatting with Wybie and scouring the internet for ghost hunting tips. Most of the sites she found seemed to be a load of new age drivel, and she finally gave up in disgust.

That night, before going to bed, Coraline took the charm off of a necklace among her jewellery, and threaded the stone with the hole in it onto the chain. She fastened it around her neck, under her pyjamas. She wasn't sure if it would be very effective against ghosts, or if it would even have an effect at all, but, she figured, a little bit of extra protection never hurt.

That night, she dreamed about cats, and doors, and whispery voices on the very edge of hearing. She woke up only once, but it took her a long time to get back to sleep.

...

"Hey, you haven't said much today. Are you still asleep?"

Coraline blinked blearily and focused, with a little difficulty, on Danny. "Uh? Oh, I guess I am." She yawned and stretched, knocking her books off her desk onto the floor. "Awww, drat."

As she got up to get them, an outstretched foot was nonchalantly placed in her path and Coraline hit the floor, face-first. She scowled as laughter broke out around the room.

"Wow, that's really mature," Coraline muttered, pushing herself up into a sitting position. "Are we still in third grade?"

"That's Dash for you," Danny answered, getting up from his seat. "Body of a high-school linebacker, mind of a third-grade bully. Are you okay?"

Coraline nodded. Angry as she was that someone would bother to trip her up, she was angrier that she hadn't seen it coming. "I'm fine. I just bruised my pride a little." She started to gather up her fallen books, only to find that Danny had beaten her to it. "Oh, thanks."

"No problem." He handed her books to her, and three things happened in quick succession – their hands touched, briefly, something on Coraline's collarbone flared white-hot, and Danny yelped and jumped backwards. Coraline just barely managed to catch her books before they all fell to the ground a second time.

The classroom was deathly silent, and when Coraline looked around, all eyes were on them. Or, rather, all eyes were on Danny, who was looking at her like he'd never seen her before. Coraline looked down at herself, but nothing seemed to be out of place. Except for the stone with a hole in it, still hanging around her neck, which was glowing orange, as if cooling down from an enormous temperature.

"Wow, you, uh, have really cold hands," Danny said lamely.

"Uh, sure," Coraline agreed, eager to deflect attention from herself. "Sorry about that."

Thankfully, it was just then that Mr. Lancer walked in. "Sorry I'm late," he apologized, as everyone scrambled to get into their seats and pretend that they hadn't been frantically trying to complete their homework in the few moments before the teacher showed up. "I'm sure you all did your readings last night, so I took the liberty of printing up a pop quiz."

Groans and complaints filled the air, and life went back to normal, the weird altercation between two nobodies momentarily forgotten.

…

"So what happened in Lancer's class?"

Coraline stopped dead, a few feet from the picnic table. They hadn't seen her yet, and Tucker's voice had carried loud and clear across the open area. Part of her felt guilty for eavesdropping, but she really wanted to hear the answer, and something told her that she wasn't going to get it just by asking.

"I don't know! There's just something really weird about that new girl." Danny sounded deeply suspicious, and Coraline felt awful for about half a second before it gave way to rage. So what? Maybe there was something weird about him, but it wasn't like she was randomly freaking out about it in the middle of class. Not, of course, that there really was anything particularly weird about Danny, beyond the whole 'wigging out for no reason in the middle of class' thing, but still. "All I did was brush her hand, and it was like I got an electric shock."

"Do you think she's -" Sam started, then her voice dropped and Coraline couldn't make out what she was saying any more. Danny's answer was hushed too, even though the picnic area was all but deserted.

Fuming silently to herself, Coraline took her tray and sat down at an empty table. Unfortunately, her parents hadn't gotten around to doing the grocery shopping, and she was stuck with hot lunch again. A suspicious pinkish substance that claimed, in the face of all the evidence, to be meatloaf quivered under her glare.

There was only the slightest hint of apprehension in Tucker's voice when he said, "Uh, guys? I think she heard us."