The Ghost and the Goth (17 page)

Joonie pushed through the revolving door, and I slipped into the compartment after hers, letting her do all the work of moving the heavy glass and metal. She headed immediately for the elevator and pressed the up button. While we waited—I might have figured out how to pass through walls and solid objects, but levitation seemed a bit more of a stretch and I didn’t particularly feel like searching out the stairs—I noticed a lot of nurses coming and going with their lunch bags and jackets. Shift change, probably?

The elevator finally arrived, and Joonie pushed the button for the fifth floor. A short ride later, during which I very deliberately concentrated on thinking about how very
solid
the elevator floor was, we arrived at our destination—the children’s floor. The wall opposite the elevator was painted with fluffy clouds, rainbows, and bright yellow smiley faces—the exact same kind you see on bumper stickers with the saying
Shit happens
. I suspected that any kid residing on this floor probably already knew that fact better than most, anyway.

Joonie stepped off the elevator and immediately headed to the left, like she knew exactly where she was going. The nurses manning—
wo
-manning?—the floor desk didn’t even glance up, as they were checking charts and talking to the next shift of nurses.

I watched Joonie stop at a door midway down the hall and step inside. A second later, her head reappeared, looking up and down the hallway, before she slapped either a yellow sticker or magnet on the outside of the door and shut it gently.

Interesting. Automatically glancing back over my shoulder at the busy nurses, like they could see me, I headed toward the now-closed door. When I got closer, I could see it was a magnet she’d put on the metal door frame, and it read, bathing. privacy please.

“What the hell?” I muttered.

“Don’t you know you’re on the kids’ floor?”

Startled, I looked down to see a little blond girl with pigtails, staring up at me from her old-fashioned wooden wheelchair.

She sighed in disgust and rolled on down the hall, passing through the wall. Yep, dead like me. Maybe it was a good thing Killian hadn’t come with me. The hospital was probably full of spirits.

I approached the door Joonie had closed and cautiously peered in, ignoring the chill against my face.

At first, it appeared to be your standard hospital room. Blah beige walls with a matching tile floor, a puke green curtain hung on a rack in the ceiling so it could be pulled for privacy from annoying roommates, and a television mounted high on the wall. That old cartoon
Mighty Mouse
was on, but the sound was off.

The girl in the bed, though, was my first clue that not everything was as it seemed. I recognized her, sort of, as the girl in the picture Joonie had pulled up earlier. I mean, I recognized her, but she only vaguely resembled the person she’d once been. Her dull and glazed eyes stared straight ahead, about three feet below the television. A jagged scar, still puffy and red, decorated the left side of her face from her hairline down to her jaw. There were no tubes or anything, other than an IV, and a monitor with her heartbeat showing, so she was obviously breathing on her own, just not much else.

The weird part was that seeing her this way, as a three-dimensional, albeit damaged person rather than a flat image on a screen, finally made it click for me. I knew where I’d seen her before. Months ago, she’d been one of Ben Rogers’s girls, another stupid and willing underclassman. Really, I’d only seen her a few times with Ben before they broke up …or at least, that’s what I assumed happened.

She was new, as of last year, I thought. Didn’t have many friends. I’d never seen her with Killian or Joonie … as far as I knew. To be fair, though, until recently they were not a demographic I would have bothered noticing. People like them don’t even vote for homecoming queen.

I tried to remember the last time I’d seen this girl, Lily Whatever—Turner, that sounded right. Maybe Ben’s back-to-school bash? I did remember something about a car accident a few miles away, one they were going to try to pin on our party, but the driver hadn’t been drinking, so they had nothing to hold over us. But that was, like, all the way back in September. She’d been like
this
since then?

The utter stillness about her was the worst part. She still moved—even as I watched, her fingers, resting on the top of the bedcovers, jerked and twitched—but she seemed …empty. I’d never thought about life as energy before, at least not until Killian talked about it like that, but now I could see what he meant. Even someone sleeping, eyes shut and not moving at all, would have seemed more alive than she did, and I could see that from across the room.

Joonie, however, did not seem to notice or care, and that was my second clue that something was really wrong. She was racing around the room, setting what appeared to be little silver hockey pucks on the floor at set intervals around the bed and talking to Lily at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to get Killian to come with me. I thought it would work better with him here, but he …” She paused, probably remembering his reaction to the Ouija board. “He wouldn’t. I’m so sorry, Lil.”

I snorted. He wouldn’t. Right. Well, I mean, he wouldn’t have, but she didn’t even try to explain what was going on or what she wanted him to come to the hospital for. Speaking of which, why did she want him to come to the hospital? This was obviously more than just a friendly, keep-coma-girl-company visit.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she said firmly. “I’m going to make this right, no matter what it takes.” Her gaze wandered to the still form on the bed. “I’m going to get you back where you belong.”

Joonie jerked back into motion and her combat-booted foot knocked one of the silver disks toward the door, where I still stood, half in and half out. I looked down and found it to be a little white candle in a metal wrapper, like the kind my dad used to put in my carved pumpkin when I was little.

Candles, living-dead girl, creepy declarations of intent, plus the Ouija board Joonie was packing … uh-oh. I knew nothing about magic, witchcraft, voodoo, or whatever else this might be (and I bet Joonie didn’t either, given the results so far), but I’d seen enough
Charmed
reruns to know this was trouble.

“Okay, then.” I pushed myself the rest of the way into the room. “Hey, Joonie, stop. Whatever your freaky little self is up to, cut it out.”

Joonie ignored me, of course, and reached into her bag to pull out the lighter and the Ouija board.

Oh, crap. I paced a step or two and lifted my thumbnail to my teeth—what now? It wasn’t like I could march out into the hallway and shout at the nurses for help.

Nurses. Help.
Call button
. If there wasn’t a lightbulb hanging in the air above my head, there should have been. If I had the strength to concentrate and shove folders around the floor, surely I could push one little button.

I strode confidently across the room, avoiding Joonie as she crouched down to begin lighting candles, but I hesitated when I reached the bed. Up this close, Lily was tragic … and eerie. The light of the television flashed in her blank eyes, adding a creepy and superficial spark of life. The remote with the bed controls and the nurse call button lay half under Lily’s arm, a big sign of someone’s wishful thinking.

“Don’t be such a baby,” I told myself. Trying not to think about the germs that had to be floating around here—it was a hospital after all, full of disgusting sick people—I reached down, intending to scoot the remote out from under her arm with a series of little pushes. My hand should have passed through her arm with little more than a cold tingle, but the second I touched her skin, I
felt
it. An intense heat radiated up my fingers. Then the solidity that was Lily’s arm melted beneath my touch and my hand sank into her arm. Not through, but in. My skin, the darker of the two, thanks to my hours in the sun for prom prep, melded with hers.

I sucked in a breath and jerked my hand away. Her arm followed, lifting off the bed. I watched in horror. For an endless moment, the bond between us held tight, then something loosened and let go. Her arm flopped back onto the bed, landing squarely on top of the remote. It didn’t push any buttons. Oh, no, that would be too good to be true. It prevented me from another attempt to reach the call button, though, unless I wanted to touch her again.

No freaking way.
I stumbled back from the bed, clutching my arm against my chest. I didn’t know what had just happened, nor did I want to know.

I bolted past Joonie, who, her acolyte duties finally completed, was settling herself on the floor with the Ouijaboard in her lap. I passed through the door, barely even feeling the tingle of it, and darted down the hall.

I ran for the nurses’ station. But what could they do? What could anyone do? I was terrified to even look down at my hand, afraid I’d see Lily’s pale skin instead of my own.

When I drew even with the nurses’ station, the elevator dinged and the doors opened. Some instinct made me look up and over. Killian, head tucked down and hands tucked in his sweatshirt pockets, strode off the elevator and then down the hall toward me and Lily’s room.

“Will!” I darted toward him, relief at seeing him here washing away any of my leftover anger from earlier this afternoon.

He looked up, startled. “What are you—”

“Joonie’s in there right now and she’s doing something with that stupid board.” I spoke as quickly as I could.

He started down the hallway toward Lily’s room. I stayed next to him, trying to explain. “I told you, she’s the one that’s doing it, calling up that creepy ghost, and when I tried to stop her, my hand touched Lily’s arm and …” I shuddered. “Something is just wrong. I don’t understand—”

The air suddenly turned to ice around me, and Killian stopped suddenly. I watched the color drain out of his face as he stared at something down the hall.

I turned away from Killian slowly, knowing already what I would find. The creepy shadow ghost was back. This time, it grew, rippling at its edges, to fill the entire hallway, blocking out the light from the windows at the end of the hall. Inside its misty body, things moved beneath the surface, like snakes sliding under a blanket.

It gathered itself, pulling together at the edges until it hung over us like a wave waiting to crash.

“Killian,” I said, my voice wobbly.

“Yeah?” He didn’t sound so great either.

“Run!” I shoved him away.

With a roar that should have shaken the building, the shadowy spirit crashed down on me. Slivers of what felt like frozen metal tore through my skin, and I screamed. Then everything went dark.

I
was beginning to think that the universe was united against me in some kind of vast conspiracy. I was supposed to be in detention right now, and I would have been … if someone hadn’t accidentally set fire to a bunch of straws in chem lab during last period. The fire alarm went off right as school let out for the day. Recognizing the hopeless prospect of keeping all of us delinquents in one place in an area as unconfined as the parking lot, Ms. Bernadino, the detention teacher for today, had canceled detention and rescheduled it for next week. I’d gone there for four years and had had more than my share of detentions probably, but I’d never heard of them canceling it before.

Feeling unexpectedly lucky—really, I should have known better—I headed to the Dodge, which started on the first try, and then on to St. Catherine’s. I knew that’s where Joonie would be.

I couldn’t forget what Alona had said about her. She, Joonie, had been acting so weird lately. But she’d been my friend, pretty much my only one, for years. Why would she want to mess with me like that? Of course, she’d have no way of knowing what a Ouija board did when I was around. But Alona was right. Why else would she act so guilty? Why run away? Why didn’t she just laugh or seem confused at my strange reaction to seeing her with one?

I was afraid I already knew the answer, but I needed to know for sure. I needed to talk to Joonie. If she was involved, that changed everything, including—most likely—the true identity of the entity Alona called Gus. As an angry and despondent ghost, my father might have attacked me to show his disapproval. Maybe. But he wouldn’t need Joonie or a Ouija board for that.

I’d gotten to the hospital in record time and found a parking space in the first visitors’ row. A waiting elevator, which also happened to be both people- and ghost-free, had taken me directly to the fifth floor. And then my luck had changed with a vengeance.

Rooted to the spot, I watched the shadow ghost collapse over Alona and tear through her, her green eyes going wide with the pain before she vanished.

“No!” I shouted, furious. Why hadn’t she run? She knew what this thing could do to her, knew that every time she disappeared there was a growing chance she might not come back.

Because she was saving me.
The realization knocked me back a step. She’d seen what Gus could do to me, and Alona Dare had just sacrificed herself … for me.

My throat grew tight, and the hallway blurred before my eyes. Maybe that unselfish action would be enough to send her to the light, though I’d seen no sign of it before she’d vanished. Either way, I wouldn’t let it be in vain.

“Joonie, get out here!” I forced the words out past the lump in my throat.

Rushing footsteps sounded behind me as the nurses’ abandoned their station and raced down the hall toward me. “Sir? Sir, you can’t yell in here. This is a hospital.”

“Joonie, I said come out,” I repeated.

The black shadow ghost, having long since dissolved Alona, just hung there in midair as though waiting and watching to see what I would do next.

“Joonie …”

“Sir, you’re going to have to come with us.” Strong female hands grabbed at my arms and shoulders. “Somebody call security, please.”

All up and down the hallway, doors started to open, and pale and somber little kid faces poked out to see what was going on. Then Lily’s door opened and Joonie stepped out.

“J,” I said. “Call it off, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

She shook her head, eyes bright blue and red-rimmed. “I can’t, Will. I just … can’t.”

Then she backed up into the room and shut the door.

“Sir, you have to come with us.” Those hands on my shoulders and arms began pulling me backward, but it wasn’t enough. I knew it wouldn’t be.

The shadowy ghost poured over me, surrounding me in deathly cold and tearing me from the nurses’ grasp. I struggled, pulling back with all my strength, but it … he? …she? … easily overpowered me, slamming me face-first into the wall. Something in my face, possibly my nose, possibly a cheekbone, cracked, and someone screamed. It might have been me.

“What do you want?” I squeezed the words out.

It gave no response, only a vague howling sound, like wind rushing through a broken window. Then it hauled me away from the wall and tossed me down the hall. I tried to regain my footing and stumbled, bashing my head into the side of a medicine cart left abandoned there, and everything went mercifully black.

I woke up in restraints, my hands pinned to the bed beneath me with Velcro and fabric straps. Never a good sign, really. Before I even opened my eyes, I recognized the antiseptic smell unique to hospitals. So I wasn’t in jail—that was a plus, at least.

My whole body ached, and my head throbbed with an intensity that I suspected would only grow worse when I finally decided to brave the light and crack my eyelids open.

“Will!” A vague whisper from my right. “Wake up. I know you’re in there. I saw you pulling against those skanky armbands. I mean, seriously, do you think they clean those after every use? I doubt it. You’re, like, sharing skin cells with the last sweaty and depraved lunatic they locked up. Sick people are so gross.”

Alona! The disgust in her voice was as distinct as the antiseptic hospital smell. I braved the light enough to squint in the direction of her voice. When my eyes stopped watering and focused, I found her sitting in the visitor’s chair next to my bed, her knees pulled up to her chest as if she didn’t even want her ghost feet touching the floor. She looked pale and tired, and for the first time, a line of bruises decorated the left side of her face. That meant either she didn’t have the energy to project herself as flaw free, or she was really feeling beat up.

“Are you okay?” I asked, my mouth feeling stuffed full with cotton.

She straightened up and flipped her hair over her shoulders when she saw me watching. “I’m fine,” she said quickly. “But I’m not the one locked up with a cracked face.”

Automatically, I tried to reach up to touch my face, but my effort only tightened the restraint on my arm.

Alona unfolded herself from her chair and moved to sit on my bed. Her deft fingers worked the Velcro and straps until my hand was free. “I’ll have to refasten that, you know, or else they’ll be locking you up tighter next time they come to check on you.”

“Yeah, I know.” I traced the swollen lines of my cheek carefully with my fingers. Puffed up like a pincushion and hot, the right side of my face felt like it’d been microwaved.

“They did X-rays or an MRI or whatever about an hour ago. You have a hairline fracture in your cheekbone. I heard them talking about it before you woke up.”

I groaned. Well, that explained the pain radiating down to my jaw and up to my temple.

She pulled her legs up on the bed and curled in closer to me, her hip and backside a steady warmth against my waist. “Why didn’t you run? I told you to run.”

“I thought Joonie would listen to me, that she’d stop it when I confronted her,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Good thinking.”

“Hey,” I protested.

“I’m serious. Now you’re stuck in here.” She shook her head, and the scent of her shampoo drifted toward me. “They’re all convinced that you’re schizophrenic and possibly epileptic on top of it. You’re on a regular floor for now, but they’re going to move you as soon as a bed opens on the psych floor. And the chin-rubber is back.”

“No.” I struggled to sit up.

“Yeah. He has hospital privileges here or something. Your mom’s trying to get rid of him.”

“My mom is here?” I reached for the remaining strap to undo it.

“Don’t.” Alona pushed on my shoulder, forcing me back. She gestured to the mostly closed door. “They’re in here about every fifteen minutes. I don’t know if I can get you all the way tied up again without getting caught. I’m good, but maybe not that good.” She gave me a wan smile, the likes of which I’d never seen from her before, and it startled me.

Over the years, I’d seen all kinds of smiles from her. The kind designed to make all the blood drain from your head and gather behind your zipper. The kind given with cold, cold eyes, showing she was mad as hell but wasn’t going to break form to show it. The superior smile was a particular favorite of hers in recent years, like she couldn’t help but find it funny that you, a petty, insignificant being, would try to interact with her. None of those even looked related to her current expression. She looked … defeated.

“What happened in there?” I asked, not entirely sure I wanted to hear the answer.

Alona lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “She had candles and that stupid board. And she kept talking to coma-gir … I mean, Lily.” She hesitated. “I think she’s trying to fix her.”

I frowned. “What do you mean, fix her? Lily is—” I paused to take a deep breath, needing it to force the words out—“brain dead. She has been since the day of the accident.” Fifty-four miles per hour around a curve that has a thirty-mile-per-hour speed limit. One tree. No seat belt. Lily, as we knew her, wouldn’t be coming back. It never got any easier, that realization. I kept thinking it would, but no.

Alona shook her head slowly. “I don’t think she’s talking about brain surgery here, Killian. Lily’s empty, you know? The lights are on but nobody’s home?”

I grimaced but nodded. Alona had quite a way with words.

“So first, I’m wondering what Joonie’s trying to do with all the candles and spirits and everything.” Alona waved her hand dismissively. “I mean, hello, even I recognize some kind of creeptastic ritual when I see it.” She paused, her sharp green eyes focusing in on me as though trying to will me into believing her words. “I think she’s been trying to call up Lily’s spirit.”

That was … possible. Joonie had not been the same since Lily’s accident. She’d blamed herself for it, a crazy line of thinking that went something like this: if she and Lily hadn’t had a fight, Lily would have been with us instead of the first-tier crowd and she’d still be alive … in more than just the technical sense.

“But then, I’m like, what does any of this have to do with Killian? I mean, she could try to call up Lily’s spirit on the Ouija board without you.”

“It won’t work, though,” I said, “with or without me. Lily isn’t here anymore. She’s … moved on. Like I said before, people who are really gone are gone. There is no reaching them.”

“But I bet Joonie doesn’t know that,” Alona pointed out.

“Probably not,” I admitted.

She took a deep breath. “It gets worse.”

“How?”

“She’s not
just
trying to call up Lily’s spirit. I think she’s trying to get it back into Lily’s body.” Alona hesitated. “And she wants you to help.”

“No,” I said instantly.

She looked at me in exasperation. “What else could ‘get you back where you belong’ mean? She was staring right at Lily’s body when she said it, and she definitely mentioned you.”

“No, I mean it’s not possible. It’s a one-way door. It has to be,” I tried to explain. “Once you’re out, you’re out. Otherwise, you’d see walking corpses everywhere when people like Grandpa Brewster or Liesel got tired of being trapped in between.”

“But Lily’s still alive.” She gave a shudder.

“Not really.” As much as it hurt to say that, I made myself keep going. “Her heart still beats and everything, but she wouldn’t be able to function, even if you could get her spirit back inside her body. The connection between the two is broken.”

She rolled her eyes. “Again,
you
know that. Does Joonie?”

My mouth worked for a second, as I tried to find an answer. “But Joonie doesn’t know what I can do. How would she even think to—”

Alona held up her hands. “I don’t know. Not my problem. You figure it out. I’m just telling what I saw and heard.”

I shook my head, angry at the suggestion. “No, she knows better than to mess with stuff like this.” Even if it was possible, which it wasn’t … as far as I knew, there were so many things that could go wrong. What if Joonie successfully managed to get Lily’s spirit back into her body only to discover that it was little more than a prison of flesh and bone?

How would she even know she had contacted the right spirit to begin with?

“Desperate people do really dumb ass stuff,” Alona said. “Trust me on that.”

“Joonie would never take the chance of hurting Lily,” I insisted. What was left of her, anyway. “It almost killed her when Lily ended up here.” Joonie had spent most of the month of September locked in her room, not leaving for school or anything until Brewster threatened to keep her from graduating if she didn’t return. After that, she’d dragged herself back to school, but it had taken a couple more months for her to show even some spark of her former self.

“I bet.” Alona’s voice was bland, but her tone hinted at something she wasn’t saying.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t.” I ground out the words.

She sighed. “Was Lily your girlfriend or not?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just answer the question.”

“No. She wasn’t. We were friends. I looked out for her. At least, I tried to.” Obviously, I hadn’t done such a great job of that.