The Ghost and the Goth (11 page)

My jaw tight, I held up the cell phone in my hand. “Speakerphone.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You have speakerphone on that old thing?”

“No, but they”—I gestured to the people in the cars waiting to turn at the stop sign—“don’t know that.” Cell phones with speakerphone or, even better, Bluetooth were the best invention yet for disguising conversations with people no one else could see. It became so normal to see someone seemingly talking to the air that half the time I suspected people didn’t even think to check for the phone. Plus, it saved me the effort of coming up with a less believable lie. Back in sixth grade, I told my mother I was rehearsing lines for a play when she caught me. My dad knew better, but my mom kept asking, for the better part of the year, when the first show was and could she buy tickets.

“Oh.” Alona thought about it for a second. “Pretty smart.”

I bit back a sarcastic reply. For the moment, I needed her, and I didn’t want to run her off just yet. “So what were you saying about figuring it all out?”

“Oh, yeah.” She promptly became more animated. “So, I thought about what you said, about resolving my issues and moving on to the
spirit
world.” She emphasized her chosen term and leveled a warning glance at me.

I held up my hands, protesting innocence. If she didn’t want to be called a ghost, fine. Even if that’s what she was.

“Except it didn’t work out very well. I tried communicating. You know sending signs of my presence, tipping things over …”

My mouth fell open. “You tried haunting people?”

“No, I tried
communicating
. It’s not my fault if they got scared. Besides, it was only a few people, and they totally deserved it,” she said defensively.

“When did you do this?” I demanded.

“Yesterday when you were in la-la land.”

I rubbed my forehead. The fact that she was still here was a miracle, then. For ghosts, nothing drains their energy like trying to cause harm. And when their energy dips low enough, they disappear … for good. “What exactly did you do?”

“What does it matter to you?” she shot back.

“Just tell me.” I’d have to figure out damage control. If she was going to be sucked back up permanently any second now, then my plan was history.

She picked at the edge of her thumbnail. “Among others, I may have visited a former friend’s house and knocked over a few things while she was making out with”—she grimaced in distaste—“her new boyfriend.”

“Chris and Misty.” I sighed. “They’re not your unfinished business.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, unless I completely misunderstood what I saw, you didn’t even know about them until yesterday. As in three days after you were already dead and stuck here.” I could see she didn’t want to believe me. “Whatever. Did you scare them?”

A cocky smile emerged on her face. “Yeah, a little.” She hesitated and then leaned closer to me, excitement making her whole body tense. “It was so cool. I only knocked down pictures with me in them, right? That way they’d know it was me.” She frowned. “But there weren’t that many pictures of me up anymore, so really I only got to push down one, and they didn’t even notice because the music was so loud—”

“Alona,” I tried to interrupt. Even as she spoke, the tips of her fingers were turning translucent.

“But then I decided to find her yearbook because—”

“Alona!”

“What?” She looked over at me, decidedly irked.

I grabbed her wrist and held her disappearing hand up in front of her face.

Her green eyes grew wide. “Oh, crap, not again. It’s getting worse. Yesterday whenever I tried to communicate, I kept being pulled away … to that other place.” She shuddered. “The one I can’t remember.”

“Do you think that might have been a clue?” I muttered, releasing her wrist before it dissolved, too. “Say something nice,” I commanded.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “In your dreams.”

“It doesn’t have to be about me,” I said with some exasperation. “It’s probably better if it isn’t, because it has to be genuine.”

“What are you talking about?” She stared at me.

I resisted the urge to shake her. “Look, I don’t have time to go into a whole lot of explanation on this. Your ankles are already gone.”

She glanced down at her footless legs and squeaked in horror.

“Say something nice,” I repeated, feeling a growing sense of panic. If she’d been “communicating” all day yesterday, this might be it, her final visit to Middleground.

“Why are you helping me?” she asked with a frown.

“Why do you care?” I snapped. “Just do it.”

“Will? Is everything okay?” Joonie’s voice came from my right.

I looked over to find Joonie’s beat-up black VW Bug, requisite skull and crossbones etched in the paint on the driver’s side door, stopped in the road, just ahead of the stop sign. Joonie had her window rolled down, all the better to stare at me more clearly.

“What happened, the Dodge finally give out on you?” Joonie asked, her painfully thin black brows drawing together over her bloodshot blue eyes. I always wondered, with her eyebrow piercings, if it hurt for her to make certain expressions.

“Sort of.”

“What does saying something nice have to do with anything?” Alona, now a torso only, demanded.

“Are you waiting for a ride?” Joonie asked, disbelief coloring her tone. No wonder, considering I probably could have crawled to the school on my hands and knees and still made it on time.

“Tow truck?” I offered as a possible explanation, though when she saw my car in the lot later, it might trigger a few questions. “Do it, unless you want to be gone forever,” I said to Alona, out of the side of my mouth.

“This is bullshit,” Alona muttered. “Fine.” She took a deep breath and said loudly, “I’m happy to be here.” She threw up her arms, now missing from below the elbow. Nothing happened.

I fake coughed. “Has to be genuine.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Joonie frowned at me. “You seem a little … disconnected.”

“Stop being my mom, J. I get more than enough of that at home,” I said gently.

She stiffened, her mouth opening to rip me a new one, no doubt, when she caught herself. “Sorry,” she said with a forced grin. “You bring out the mama bird in me, I guess.” Her expression clouded. “Especially when I have to drag your half-conscious ass out of school the day before.”

“I’m fine. I promise.” Or, at least, I might be fine, if I could get Alona to say one genuinely positive thing.

“It’s a warm spring day, and that makes me happy,” she shouted angrily.

Riiight
.

“Listen.” Joonie leaned out of her window. “I went by the hospital yesterday. Saw Lily.”

Next to me, Alona stopped shouting random and fake compliments to everyone (“Your friend’s tongue-piercing is very shiny”) and everything (“The tennis courts look really … green today”) and looked at me. I felt her gaze, but I kept my focus on Joonie, trying to maintain a neutral expression. Alona didn’t need any more ammunition against me. “Yeah?”

“We need to talk.”

I shifted uncomfortably. Joonie held herself responsible for Lily’s accident, for the fight that had, in theory, driven Lily away. But Joonie blamed me, too, and I didn’t know why. I mean, she was right, of course, but she didn’t know about Lily’s call to me, the one I’d missed. I couldn’t tell her because I knew once she thought about it she’d realize that I would have been Lily’s second choice for help. She was always much closer to Joonie … until that stupid fight.

Last summer, a few weeks before school started, Joonie had shown up at my house without Lily for movie night. When I’d asked what happened, Joonie had waved it away and eventually, at my pressing, said they’d had a fight.

“About what?” I’d asked.

She’d looked away, staring out the window instead of at Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing it up on screen as the Terminator. “Boys.”

I still didn’t understand how a fight about boys could be that bad, particularly since neither of them had been dating anyone. But understanding girls, even ones I had as my friends, wasn’t exactly something I had a great deal of success with, so whatever.

The problem was, now, I didn’t know how to feel guiltier and more shamed than I already did, and I couldn’t apologize for something Joonie knew nothing about. In short, it was horrible and destroying whatever was left of our friendship.

“Yeah, okay,” I said finally, not sure what else to say.

Another car, Kevin Reynolds’s old Geo Metro, pulled up behind Joonie and honked.

Joonie responded by tossing him the finger. “If you’re not in Pederson’s class, I’m coming to find you,” Joonie warned as she shifted the Bug back into gear.

I shook my head. “I’ve got in-school suspension this week, apparently.”

She frowned.

“I’ll catch up with you, I promise. You better hurry up. Brewster will be looking for you to be late.”

The Bug stuttered and then revved, pulling up to the stop sign, where Joonie conscientiously came to a full stop, prompting another honk from Kevin.

“Your friends seem to care about you,” Alona said next to me, her voice holding more than a trace of wistfulness. “Like they’d really miss you if you were gone.”

I looked over at her, a bobbing head three feet above the passenger seat, like some kind of green-screen movie magic, and watched as the rest of her body took shape and filled in again. She really meant what she’d said, and while not exactly a cheery sentiment, she’d intended it as a compliment.

I flopped back in my seat, exhausted. “There. Was that so hard?”

I
stretched out my newly solid legs, bending them at the knee and rotating my ankles, rejoicing in their, well, there
ness
, and then turned to stare at Killian leaning back in his seat, his eyes closed. “How did you do that?” I demanded. I’d tried everything to keep from disappearing—well, if everything meant screaming, shouting, and cursing for it to stop—and it hadn’t even slowed the process a bit.

He opened one eye to squint at me. “I didn’t do anything. You did.”

“Oh, no, no.” I pointed a finger at him. “Don’t even try that with me. You knew it would work. How?”

“Positive equals energy,” he muttered under his breath.

I frowned. “What?”

He sat up slowly. “Nothing. Forget it.”

“I will not forget it. I need to know how you did that.”

“Why? So you can scare people and then pull yourself back together at the last second?”

“Well …”

“Sorry, it doesn’t work that way, sweetheart.”

I glared at him for the endearment, but his gaze was already focused on something in the rearview mirror.

“Cops,” he said. “Time to go.”

Glancing back over my shoulder, I found a squad car doing a slow roll down Henderson. It sped up and pulled even with us just as Killian started the engine.

The policeman, an older, grizzled-looking type, rolled down his passenger-side window.

“Everything okay here?” he asked. His sharp gaze took in Killian’s hair, his dark clothes, the car.

“You better smile, or we’re toast,” I said. “Everything about you screams social malcontent with a grudge and a trunk full of weapons.”

Killian’s hands tensed on the wheel, and I knew he was dying to tell me off. Instead, he forced a reasonable-looking smile on his face. “Yes, officer. Everything’s fine. Just waiting for someone who never showed.”

“Oh, ha, ha,” I said.

The policeman nodded after a long moment. “The street is not a parking lot, son. Move along.”

“Yes, sir.” Killian turned off the hazards, flipped on his turn signal, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb—textbook driving.

“Well, aren’t you a good citizen?” I smirked.

“Shut up.” He kept his gaze on the rearview mirror as we proceeded down Henderson at three miles
under
the speed limit. He turned right onto Elm, cut in front of the school, through the teachers’ parking lot, and into the last aisle of the student lot. I knew it as Burner Row. He parked and slumped back in his seat with a loud sigh of relief.

“If he could arrest someone for looking guilty,” I said, “you would have been it. You weren’t even doing anything wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t risk any more trouble right now.”

I turned sideways in my seat to face him, grateful for the first time for being invisible to everyone else. Hardly anyone was left in the parking lot by now—all of them moving toward the building and class—but still. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined a scenario, even life after death, that would have me in Will Killian’s car in Burner Row. Though, it did offer a pretty view of the track and the football field. “So, why am I here? And no smart-ass answers, please,” I added quickly.

Killian didn’t answer right away, tapping his hands restlessly on the steering wheel, pale-skinned but nicely shaped biceps pulling at the sleeves of his T-shirt. Wow, so goth boy found time to work out. Interesting. “I have a proposition for you,” he said finally.

To which I responded the only way I could. “I’m not sleeping with you, even if you are the only one I can touch. I’m dead, not desperate.” I flopped back in the passenger seat and checked the tips of my nails for damage, more out of habit than anything else. I’d worked very hard to grow them out for prom and graduation, not that it mattered now.

He made a disgusted noise. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I’m not the one who keeps staring at my legs,” I pointed out.

Two red spots rose in his pale cheeks. “What happened to being nice?”

I lifted a shoulder idly. “Break glass in case of emergency, you know?” I waggled my fully formed, noninvisible hand in front of him. “I’m not disappearing yet.”

“Unfortunately,” he muttered.

“Hey!” I sat up. “I was only disappearing because you wouldn’t help me in the first place. You can’t take credit for fixing a mess that you made.”

He raked his hands through his shaggy black hair, which might actually have been attractive with the right cut. “Whatever. I’m ready to help you now.”

I let my hand drop. “What?”

“You heard me.” He refused to meet my eyes.

“Why?” I asked suspiciously.

“What does it matter?” he asked with impatience. “Just—”

“Oh, no, it matters. Yesterday, you kept trying to send me away. I had to twist your arm to get you to give me ten minutes of your time, and then you went and got yourself knocked out for the day. Plus,” I added with a little extra indignation, “you said you thought I went to hell.”

He sighed. “Are you going to keep bringing that up?”

I pretended to consider it. “Yeah, I think so.”

“All that matters is …” He fidgeted with a gash on the steering wheel plastic, his fingers tracing it over and over. “Look, do you want to get out of here or not?”

“Depends,” I said slowly. “Where are you going to send me?”

He made an exasperated sound. “It’s not like that. I don’t have that kind of influence over … You have to understand …” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he turned slightly in his seat to face me, his face serious.

Feeling a tingle of anticipation for what he was about to say, I leaned forward.

“Not everyone who dies ends up here,” Killian said, with the air of someone imparting some great secret.

I flopped back in my seat with a sigh. “Duh.”

He scowled at me.

“Seriously, do you expect that to be a shock to me?” I shook my head in disbelief. “I’ve been here for five days, and I have yet to see any of the dead people I know … knew.” I frowned. “Whatever. Plus, it would be way more crowded.”

He looked startled. “That’s true. How did you—”

“Just because I care about what I look like”—I took in his black T-shirt and ratty jeans with some distaste—“doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

“Fine, fine.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Just listen, okay? Not everyone who dies ends up here. Some of them go directly to their final destination. Do not pass Go, do not visit your own wake.” He gave me a sharp look.

I shrugged. Yes, I’d attended my own visitation and funeral, so what? Who wouldn’t? It’s literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—actually less than—to see who really cares about you and how much.

Thinking about it now, I did not remember seeing Killian at the funeral home, the church, or the cemetery. Yeah, it had been gratifyingly crowded at each location—the superintendent had even let everyone out of school early just so they could go—but trust me, you pay a lot of attention to who’s coming and going when you’re the guest of honor, so to speak.

I felt a weird sort of pang in my chest—almost like hurt. So, I was good enough to argue with, stare at, and fantasize about—since sixth grade, and yes, it was obvious—but not special enough to warrant a fifteen-minute side trip in the course of his day? Granted, the number of other spirits that probably hang around a funeral home and church might have made it a bit uncomfortable for him, but still.

Whatever. Like it mattered. Who was he to mourn for me? Just a lame-ass social nobody I never even would have realized was missing from my funeral, if I hadn’t died and needed his help. Right, okay, a small logic problem with that, but you know what I mean.

He waved a hand in front of my face to catch my attention. “I’m not doing this just to hear myself talk. You with me?”

I swatted at his hand. “I’m sorry, was my glassy-eyed boredom distracting you? Please, keep going.”

He gritted his teeth for a long second, but eventually continued. “Like I was saying, for people like
you
”—he made it sound as if nobody was like me, but not in the good way—“who end up here, one of three things happens.”

Now this is what I needed to hear. Forcing aside the odd little flare-up about Killian missing my funeral—being dead really screws with your emotions—I sat up straighter and turned toward him again, folding my legs underneath me.

“Most people aren’t here very long—”

I frowned. “But those ghosts … spirits at the school—”

He let out a breath between his teeth, an impatient hiss. “Hang on, I’m getting there.”

“Well, hurry up.” Sheesh, wasn’t like we had all day. Actually, one of us had much longer than that, but again, listening to Killian babble was not exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of eternity.

He glared at me. “Are you always this pushy?”

“Only when my immortal soul hangs in the balance,” I shot back.

“I knew you were Catholic,” he muttered.

“Watch it.”

He ignored me. “Like I was saying, when people land here, they don’t stay very long. For the most part, they’re gone in a few days.”

“Gone how? That’s the part I need to know.”

He clamped his mouth shut, and his jaw muscles twitched beneath his skin. To be sure, he had a nice jawline, firm and square. Too bad he ruined it by being all pale and spooky-looking. “For some of them, someone or some …thing comes to get them.”

“A bright white light?” I asked eagerly. I’d seen no sign of that around me at all, but at least I’d know what I was looking for.

Killian, for once, didn’t seem annoyed by the interruption. He shook his head thoughtfully. “No, not like what you see on television. It’s hard to describe. At a distance, it feels sort of warm and welcoming, like someone captured a perfect summer day in a jar and poured it out over your head.” His eyes stared off at some point above my head, a faint smile pulling at his mouth.

“How poetic,” I said with a smirk.

He snapped back to attention then, glaring at me. “You asked.”

“What about the others?” I persisted. “You said one of three things happened. The happy golden light is one alternative. Getting stuck here forever or at least for a bunch of years, like the people at school, that’s clearly option number two.”

He nodded begrudgingly.

“So what’s the third thing that can happen?” I bet he just loved having me pull all of this information from him, making him feel special and important and crap.

“Most of them just disappear,” he said, sounding like that’s what he wanted to happen to me right then and there.

Alona gone, poof. But for once I didn’t feel the slightest bit woozy.

“How long does the disappearing thing go on?” I really hated this sliding in and out of existence. It was annoying, like never being able to finish a sentence before having to start over again.

Killian shook his head. “That’s what’s weird. For most of them, it’s a one-shot deal. When you disappear, you’re done.” He looked over at me, his pale blue eyes distant and cool, like he was imagining me gone.

“So what happens when you completely disappear? I mean, is it bad there?” I felt tears pricking my eyes. Okay, so maybe I hadn’t been perfect, but surely, I didn’t deserve to be completely obliterated, right?

“I don’t know,” he said, lifting his hands palms up. “I’ve never had anyone come back and tell me.”

“But I don’t understand—” I stopped, a sense of horror dawning on me as his words made another piece of the puzzle click into place. “That’s why you laughed at me yesterday. Before school started. You didn’t care if I saw you see me because you thought I was gone for good.” I felt the truth in it even without his response.

He glanced away, staring out the side window at the parking lot. “I shouldn’t have laughed. That was wrong.”

“You’re damn right it was.” I couldn’t believe him, parading around as this nice, albeit freaky, guy when secretly he wanted nothing more than to see me gone … permanently. “I’ve never done anything to you to deserve—”

He laughed bitterly. “Oh, right. The great and golden Alona Dare, the original Miss Perfect.”

Stung, I jerked back. “I never claimed to be—”

But he wasn’t done yet. “One cross-eyed look or nasty word from you destroys lives, and you take pleasure in it—”

“I’ve had enough of this.” I turned away from him to pass through the car door and into the street, but my foot, followed closely by the rest of me, smacked solidly into metal and plastic. “Ouch.” I reached for the car door handle.

“Becca Stanhope.”

I stopped, my fingers wrapped around the metal handle. “The fat …” I paused and rolled my eyes. “Big-boned girl from pre-calc who wears the baggy sweaters? What does she have to do with anything?” I tossed a triumphant look over my shoulder at Killian. “
She
came to my funeral, and she cried.”

“Probably with relief because you were dead and wouldn’t be bothering her anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You made her cry.”

It took me a second to remember what he was talking about. I’d said something to the her, I didn’t even remember what. Only that she’d run from the room, crying, her sweater flapping behind her. “Once, and that was, like, months ago.”