The Ghost and the Goth (18 page)

Alona arched an eyebrow. “I saw the picture of the two of you.”

“How …” I shook my head. I didn’t want to know. “Okay, so she might have liked me a little or something, but it never turned into anything. She had a crush on Ben Rogers, too,” I pointed out. Which was probably the reason my friendship with Lily had stayed just that, a friendship. I liked her. She was sweet and funny. Hell, she even made Joonie happy, and that was a true miracle. But obsessing over the popular crowd and their entanglements had been one of Lily’s favorite pastimes, one that I did not share. So, it hadn’t been that big of a shock, at least not to me, when she dumped us to climb the social ladder after she and Joonie had that big fight.

“Lily wasn’t the only one with a crush,” Alona said.

“What are you talking about? Joonie?” I laughed. “Joonie doesn’t like me like that.”

“Not you,” she said pointedly.

“What?”

“Oh, my God, could you be more dense?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what, just forget it. Even if I tell you, you won’t believe me and you’ll just get angry, so it’s not worth it. I don’t know why I’m even here in the first place. You don’t listen to anything I say—”

“You’re not saying anything!”

“You don’t do what I tell you to, you dismiss all of my ideas. I mean, what’s the point of having a spirit guide if you’re just going to ignore her?”

“Trust me,” I said. “You are impossible to ignore. I’ve tried. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t leave here fast enough.”

She froze, a wounded look flashing across her face.

I felt like a shit. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did. I’m done here.” Alona swung her legs off the bed. “I don’t have the time to waste on you anymore.”

“Alona, wait.”

She ignored me and pushed her hands against the mattress to climb down. I grabbed for one of her wrists … and my hand passed right through her.

I gasped.

Alona glanced back over her shoulder with a sigh, more bruises flickering to life. “Looks like you’re getting your wish.”

W
ill stared up at me, his face pale except for the black eye he’d gotten from Chris and his bruised and swollen cheek. “What’s happening to you?”

I turned away from him, closing my eyes against the tears that suddenly stung them. “Shut up, I’m trying to concentrate.” I’d been fighting this sensation of being pulled away since the moment I’d woken in his hospital room. It felt like I’d left part of me behind in the place I couldn’t remember, and something on the other side was working as hard as possible to get the rest of me.

“Think positive thoughts.” He sounded panicked. “Um, makeup sales, prom dresses, sex in the backseat of a limo.”

I shot him a look over my shoulder. “Exactly what kind of prom night do you think I was planning?”

He raked his free hand through his rumpled black hair, making it stand out even more crazily. “I don’t know. I’m just trying to help.”

I shook my head. “Thanks, but it’s not working.”

“Maybe if you think positive thoughts about other people—”

“Killian. I’ve been here two hours, and I’m fading in and out, no matter how often I think about puppies, rainbows, and your surprisingly large biceps.” Ha, let him chew on that one for awhile.

A pause. “My what?”

“Forget it. You were right. There’s a time limit for everyone, and mine is just about up.” Oddly enough, the thought brought relief. I was tired of fighting this … whatever this was. I just wanted to be done.

“No. That doesn’t make sense. You’re my spirit guide … or whatever,” he insisted.

“Yep, one that you don’t listen to.” I wiped under my eyes and shifted on the bed to face him again.

He struggled to pull himself into an awkward half-sitting position. “Okay, I might have been wrong about that. I didn’t throw your papers away.”

“It doesn’t matter, Will. I can’t stay,” I said wearily. That was the conclusion I’d reached while waiting for him to wake up. “I’ve only got a few hours left here, less if I’m here and Gus shows up again, and I’ve got some stuff to do.”

“Things you put off doing until you had no choice.” His shoulders slumped and he sagged back onto the bed.

“Exactly.” I nodded. “You were right about that. And”—I hesitated—“you were right about my mom.”

He looked up, surprised. “Alona,” he said, his voice gentle, not pitying. There was a difference, and I could recognize it now.

I waved away his words and the sudden stinging in my eyes. “Shut up, I don’t want to talk about it now.” I took a deep breath. “But I wanted you to know you were right. And … yes, some of those things I wrote down from Grandpa Brewster and the rest, they probably aren’t what’s holding them here. But”—I leaned closer making sure I had his attention—“some of them are, and you can do something for those people. Hiding doesn’t help anyone, including you. You need to know that.”

He looked away. “What about you? You’re my spirit guide. You’re supposed to stay here for as long as I need you.”

I smiled. “You don’t need me. If you did, I wouldn’t be disappearing, right?”

“We don’t know that.”

The sound of voices in the hall grew louder. “Someone’s coming. I better go.” I took a deep breath, steeling myself to push off his bed and actually leave. Finally leave.

He caught my arm before I could get down. His hand rested warmly against my skin, not passing through or sinking in. He pulled me toward him, his pale blue eyes bright with emotion, and I let him. His mouth, so warm and soft, brushed over mine, once, twice … and lingered. I snuggled closer to his heat, bracing my free hand against the pillow. He let go of my wrist to thread his fingers through my hair and tilt my head. Suddenly, I was being kissed, really kissed, and I leaned into him, tasting him as he tasted me.

The loud clatter of something hitting the floor in the hallway broke us apart.

“Maybe you should have done that earlier,” I said, trying to catch my breath and feeling deliciously warm for the first time in days. “When I was alive.”

He smiled, his cheeks flushed. “When you were alive, you would have hit me.”

“Yeah. True.” I slid off his bed and walked around to the other side.

“Let me come with you,” he said quietly. “I can help.”

I shook my head. “What then? When I’m gone and they find you’ve escaped? What kind of measures do you think they’ll take next time?”

He didn’t say anything. I folded his free wrist back into the restraint, wrapping the fabric as loosely as possible, and he let me. I was right, and he knew it.

I smiled at him, his image suddenly blurry with tears. “You want one last piece of guidance, not that you’ll listen?”

“Alona—” His voice broke.

“Tell your mother the truth. Your dad had his reasons for keeping this secret, okay, fine. But that didn’t work out so well for him. You don’t owe anything to him, you aren’t obligated to do what he did just because you share the same gift.”

“And if she doesn’t believe me?”

I tapped the restraint around his wrist. “Kind of hard for her to make things worse, right?”

“Stay. We’ll figure something out.”

“Please don’t make this any harder, okay?” I forced a choked laugh. “I’m scared enough as it is.”

“Alona, please. Just wait!” He struggled against the restraints.

I straightened my shoulders and gave him my biggest, see-it-from-across-the-football-field smile. “Can’t. Time’s up.” I touched his cheek but pulled away before he could try to grab me. “I’ll come back to you if I can. If not … see you on the other side someday, maybe.” Then I walked through the door and down the hallway before he could change my mind.

I
pulled hard enough against the restraints to shake the bed, and succeeded only in rubbing my wrists raw. Okay, so Alona had a point about the consequences of breaking out of here, but did she have to tie me up again to prove it?

“Having a little trouble?” A little girl, probably about ten or eleven when she died, with blond pigtails and pink striped pajamas rolled her heavy wheelchair through the partially closed door.

I ignored her.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “I know you can hear me.”

She wheeled herself closer, but I turned away, facing the ceiling, and concentrated on twisting my wrist inside the binding. The right restraint, the one Alona had undone, was looser than the other.

“I saw that blond chippie with the foul mouth leaving your room. So, I know you can talk to us,” the little girl continued.

Chippie?
She almost caught me with that one, nearly got me to turn my head and look at her. Alona and I had, after all, been shouting pretty loudly there for a while. But even if this girl had heard something, there’s no way she could be sure it was us. “Us.” Now that was a funny term to be applying to me and her highness, Alona Dare. But kissing her … no matter how long I live (or don’t live), I will never forget her mouth, warm and soft, moving under mine, the heated silk of her hair wrapping around my fingers and that small, pleased, almost inaudible, sigh she gave.

“I have to get out of here,” I muttered. Even as I lay there, Alona could be disappearing into nothingness.

“I can help you,” the little girl volunteered instantly. “I just need you to do me a favor. It’s real easy.”

I barely resisted rolling my eyes.

“I know you can do it, too. I heard some of the others talking about you. If you help me,” she gave a shrug of her thin shoulders, “maybe I can help you.”

In avoiding her gaze, I ended up staring at my jeans lying over the back of the visitor’s chair with all my other clothes. I’d picked up all the notes Alona had thrown down in frustration and put them in my pocket. Not that I’d had a chance to tell her that. In the last few minutes of seventh hour, just before the fire alarm had rung, I’d even written part of Grandpa Brewster’s letter. It had started more as a gesture, to show Alona I was listening (and that it wouldn’t really change Grandpa’s situation), but when I got going, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe she had a point. It was time to stop running. But how? How would anyone believe me now?

“Come on, please?” the little girl wheedled, rolling her wheelchair closer to my bed.

Out in the hallway, I heard my mother’s voice, getting closer.

“—was completely inappropriate, and you expect me to trust you after that?” she asked.

“Julia, I swear to you, I never let my writing interfere with the treatment of your son.”

Miller. Alona was right.

“Don’t call me Julia,” she said with more command in her tone than I’d heard since before my dad died.

“Okay, okay,” Dr. Miller said in this annoyingly fake soothing voice. Didn’t this jerkoff know how to do anything right?

“We need to find out what’s wrong with him. Locking him away is not the answer,” she said.

“Don’t think of it that way, Julia. With the right medications and intensive therapy …” Miller paused. “You’d still be able to visit him on Sundays.”

Oh, hell, no. I tugged harder at the restraints, succeeding only in losing another layer of skin.

“Okay, suit yourself. I guess you don’t want out of here bad enough.” The ghost girl started to roll her chair backward.

“Getting out isn’t the problem,” I said wearily. “Staying out is. And she’s not a … chippie.”

“Ha, I knew it!” She squealed in delight.

I raised an eyebrow.

“That you could hear me, I mean,” she said.

“Honey, who are you talking to?” My mother pushed open the door to my room with a frown.

I hesitated, a million familiar lies tumbling to the tip of my tongue.
It was the radio. I was talking to myself. I was singing… . rehearsing lines for a play … quoting my favorite line from
Ghostbusters
.
Lie after lie after lie. I could have given her any of them, but the words just wouldn’t come.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. I looked to the little girl. “What’s your name?”

Miller’s eyes nearly bulged from his head, such was his joy. My mother just seemed … resigned, and a little scared.

“Honey, it’s me,” my mother said. “Dr. Miller came by for a visit, too.”

I ignored them and kept my gaze steady on the girl.

She shrugged finally. “Your funeral. My name is Sara, Sara Marie Hollingsford.”

I nodded. “Nice to meet you, Sara Marie Hollingsford.”

My mother sucked in a breath. “No.”

Miller approached. “He’s having another episode. Now, Will—”

“You stay away,” I told him. “Mom, I’m fine. I’ve always been fine. I really can see and talk to”—there was no easy way to soften the next part—“the dead.”

She shook her head. “Not again, William.” Her voice broke.

“Yes, again, the whole time. I just stopped trying to convince you because it seemed easier to let you believe what you wanted. That’s what Dad did and what he told me to do.”

She blanched. “Your father knew?”

“He was what I am. Grandma Killian, too, I think.” I’d never met her because she’d died before I was born and evidently had not stuck around. From what my father had said, though, on the rare occasions I could convince him to talk about it, he’d inherited his “gift” from his mother.

A strange look crossed my mother’s face. “Bridget?”

“What?” I asked, trying not to sound too eager.

She shook her head as if trying to talk herself out of something, but the words escaped anyway. “She told me once that my grandmother had left the necklace for me, not Charlotte. I had no idea what she was talking about. She’d only met my grandmother once, at our wedding. Then when Char got married a few years later, she wore the pearls that were my grandma’s favorite.”

Not surprising, Aunt Charlotte, who lived in California, and my mother had grown up the bitterest of rivals from the stories I’d heard.

“Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe this.” Miller sighed. “Julia, your husband committed suicide because of a deep depression and repeated schizophrenic episodes. Schizophrenia has a genetic component, which can be passed down to offspring.”

“So does this … gift, curse, whatever,” I shot back at him. Then I turned my full attention to my mother. “Dad killed himself because he was hiding.”

She took a step back. We never talked about what happened to my dad, ever. It was almost like she feared saying the words would make it happen again.

“The pressure to behave normally, to ignore dozens and dozens of voices around him, all the time … it just got to him, I think. But I’m done hiding.” The ferocity of that declaration startled even me, but it was genuine.

“I’ve heard enough of this. We’ll discuss this tomorrow after your tests are complete.” Miller started for the door.

“You want proof,” I said.

He stopped and turned around with a tight smile. “I suppose my great-aunt Mildred is waiting there for a message.”

Mildred?
“Uh, no, it’s just me and Sara for the moment. Unlike the movies or TV, I can only talk to whoever’s here, and she doesn’t have a message for either of you.” I looked to Sara for confirmation and she nodded. “But I’m wondering if she’d be willing to play a little game.”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

“Okay, Dr. Miller over there.” I gestured to him with my chin—I could have asked them to release the restraints, but I didn’t want them to think this was a trick to help me escape. “He’s going to step out into the hallway, close the door, and write a word on his prescription pad. The only rules are that it has to be clearly written, and the pad stays where he can see what he’s written at all times.”

“This is ridiculous,” he muttered, but he went into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him. He was probably already writing it up as a new chapter in his book.

Sara followed. A second later, she said, “He’s holding it too high.”

“You’ll need to lower it a little,” I called to Miller. “Sara’s in a wheelchair.”

My mother gave a soft gasp.

“Um, I don’t know this word.” Sara sounded uncertain.

Shit, I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe I should have gone the number route instead. “Can you spell it?”

“A-N-A-B-O-L-I-C.”

“Anabolic,” I called out.

No response.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“He looks kind of mad. Wait, he’s writing another word.”

“Mom,” I whispered. “Do you believe me? That’s all that matters.”

She hesitated, brushing a strand of hair off her weary face, and only then did I realize she was still in her diner uniform. Someone must have called her at work. The number was in my wallet. “William, I want more than anything for you to be well, but—”

“Um,
vest-ig-all
?” Sara tried.

I frowned. “Spell this one, too.”

She did.

“Vestigial,” I shouted out. Thank God for the SAT vocab section.

“He’s writing another one and … I’m not saying that!”

I laughed.

My mother looked at me sharply.

I shook my head. “He wrote some kind of swearword. Will you spell it, Sara?”

“No!” she said.

“Please?”

“First four letters spell ‘bull,’” she said huffily.

“I do believe the good doctor is questioning my authenticity. It’s
not
bullshit, Dr. Miller. I promise you that.”

“Now he’s just scribbling a bunch of letters.
X, Y, Q
…”

I repeated them after her, and the door burst open again, Miller with his pad in hand, looking wild-eyed. Sara rolled in after him. “How are you doing that? You’ve got spies in the hall,” he accused.

“You’re right,” I said. “Her name is Sara, and she died in …” I looked at her.

“1942,” she supplied.

“1942,” I finished.

Miller’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

My mother plucked the top sheet off his pad and glanced at it. She paled, and her mouth tightened.

I held my breath.

Then she told Miller, “Make your name with someone else’s son. We’re done here.” She frowned at me. “William, stay put, I’m going to get you checked out of here. Don’t think you’re off the hook, though, young man. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

I’d never been so happy to have my mother angry with me. “Okay.”

She turned on her heel and marched off down the hall.

Miller trailed after her. “But, Julia …”

“Thanks,” I said to Sara. “What can I help you with?”

“My brother gave me his St. Michael medal when I went into the hospital. It’s still in my file. They took it off when they did X-rays. I want him to have it back.”

I nodded. “I think I can do that.” Getting into the file room might be tricky, but I’d have help. “I have to do something else first, and then I’ll be back.”

She cocked her head to one side and gave me an evaluating look. “You’re going after the blonde.”

I nodded.

She shook her head. “Good luck with that. She seems like a pain.”

It was only after Sara rolled through the door that I realized everyone had left me still in restraints. Damnit, I could have been up getting dressed. I had no idea how much time Alona might have left.

“Sara?” I called. “Mom? Hello?”

Fortunately, the door to my room opened again right away.

“Oh, good,” I said. “I thought you might have been too far away to—”

It took my brain just those extra few seconds to process what I was seeing—someone, not my mother, backing into the room with a wheelchair. An already occupied, modern wheelchair, its passenger slumped to the side at an odd and unnatural angle.

“Will!” Joonie cried, her voice all high-pitched and kind of crazy sounding. She spun the chair around to face me, and Lily, her eyes as dull and empty as they’d been for the last eight months, stared blankly in my general direction. A Ouija board rested in her lap. “We’re so glad you’re awake.”