The Haunting of Sunshine Girl (20 page)

Nolan grins. “Guess he got sick and tired of being called crazy. It looks like he'd been researching for years, trying to find solid evidence of the ghosts he'd always believed in.”

“That's why he saved that article about Professor Jones,” I say, remembering the headline that promised proof. “And now you do have proof.”

“I know,” Nolan nods, a sad sort of smile playing on the edges of his lips. “I just wish I could have found it before he died. It'd have been so amazing to . . . I don't know, share this with him, I guess.”

“I think he probably knows what you found. If the last few months have taught me anything . . .” I trail off meaningfully, the words I don't say hanging in the air between us: Nolan's grandfather could be watching us, right now, cheering us on.

Nolan nods and refocuses his attention on the article in front of him. He reads aloud once more: “
Some say it's been a thousand years. Rumor has it that this is the source of a rift within the luiseach community
.”

On the stove behind us the teakettle begins to whistle, even though it's empty and there's no flame lit beneath it. Nolan and I exchange a look with a capital L.

“Why would low birth rates cause a rift?”

Nolan shakes his head. “I don't know. Maybe they're just scared.”

“Shouldn't being scared draw them closer together? You said they lived in super-close-knit communities, right?”

“Sometimes fear makes people turn against each other.”

I nod. I mean, Mom and I have always been so close, but now that I'm scared a ghost or a demon or a dark spirit or whatever might be possessing her, we have no relationship. Our own private rift.

“So what?” I have to shout to be heard over the kettle's whine. “You're saying that you think I'm the first luiseach to be born in a century or something?”

“Maybe,” Nolan answers solemnly. The bulb above us—still swinging back and forth—dims as he adds, “but more than that—I think I'm saying that you're the
last
luiseach to be born.”

I'm about to tell Nolan that's crazy when the bulb above us brightens, so bright that it's blinding, like someone set it on fire from the inside. Suddenly it bursts, sending shards of glass down from the ceiling like rain.

I scream, jumping up from my chair so that it falls with a crash on the floor behind me. Oscar dives under the table like he's ducking for cover. He's got the right idea, because glass continues to rain down, far more glass than a single bulb could possibly contain.

Covering my head with my hands, I glance over at Nolan. He's still seated in his chair, and he hasn't so much as gasped. I feel like a total wimp for screaming.

But then I see that he's holding his hands out in front of him; his left palm is covered in blood.

“Oh my gosh!” I shout.

Blood is dripping from his hand onto the papers beneath, rendering them illegible. “What are you doing?” I shout at the ceiling, certain that the ghost can hear me.

In answer, the storm of glass stops as abruptly as it began, the teakettle stops whistling, and the light stops swinging back and forth.

“Come here,” I say frantically to Nolan. He stands up and walks to the island in the center of the kitchen while I reach for the first aid kit under the kitchen sink, the same one I used when my mother cut herself.

I press a fistful of gauze into Nolan's palm, careful not to let my skin touch his, keeping my arm straight so we're not standing too close. “Our cuts almost match,” I say, holding up my left hand, the angry red scar between my thumb and forefinger. If Nolan's cut leaves a scar, it will be almost in the center of his palm.

“I thought you weren't good with blood.”

“I'm not.” I press harder. Mom says you're supposed to apply pressure when someone is bleeding, to help staunch the flow.

“You seem okay.”

Blood is still dripping from his wound. “You might need stitches,” I say worriedly. Without warning, Nolan places his undamaged right hand on top of mine, applying more pressure.

I take a deep breath and concentrate so I can swallow the feeling that follows. The sensation is overwhelming: the muscles in my legs are demanding that I take a step backward, away from him. The bones in my fingers want to drop the gauze and slide out from under his grip. And my throat—this is something beyond nausea. It's not quite that I want to throw up; it's more that I want to expel Nolan's scent from my nostrils. He's wearing his grandfather's leather jacket, just as he does almost every day, and my arms want to rip it from his body and tear it to shreds, just to get rid of the scent of it.

And yet . . . somehow I ignore all the signals my body is sending me and I don't move. I
won't
move. My friend is in trouble. My friend—maybe the only friend I have left, with Mom in outer space and Ashley oblivious—is bleeding, and I have to help him. Mom once said I should spend the day at the hospital to get over my fear of blood—you know, immersion therapy or something. Maybe I can immersion therapy away this weird feeling I get when I touch Nolan.

So instead of letting go of his hand, I press harder, ignoring my nausea, silently screaming at my muscles to stop trying to move in the opposite direction. I concentrate on the feeling of the callus in his right palm, pressing against the back of my hand. I stare at the creases in his leather jacket, butter-soft after so many years of use. And all the while—even though it doesn't exactly feel
good,
being so close to him—there's also a pleasant flutter of butterflies flapping around my stomach. I feel warmer than I have in months, a warmth coming from the center of my body and spreading out to my extremities.

Part of me, at least, likes Nolan's touch.

“I think it's stopped bleeding,” he says, lifting his hand off of mine. I remove the gauze and take a look. What had been gushing blood has slowed into a trickle. The wound is ugly and wide, but not deep.

“Guess you don't need stitches.”

“Guess not.” Nolan steps away from me, turning toward the kitchen sink, rinsing the blood from his hand. He holds it out for me to bandage, then grabs a paper towel and wipes away the blood that dripped onto the kitchen counter.

A rush of cold air fills the space he used to take up beside me, and I shiver.

“Where do you keep your broom?” he asks, and I gesture to a long, skinny cabinet beside the sink. He sweeps up the glass on the floor around the table. Next he finds a fresh lightbulb and climbs onto the table to replace the one that broke.

“How can you be so calm?” I ask.

“I don't know,” he shrugs. “Maybe because I grew up believing in ghosts. For you, this is all still pretty new.”

“It's new for you. You may have believed in ghosts, but you
said so yourself—you never had any actual evidence that they existed before.”

“True,” Nolan agrees, screwing in the lightbulb.

“Was this the reaction you had in mind when you said you wanted to do this here?” I ask, gesturing at the ceiling.

“I didn't have anything in mind, really. I just had a hunch.”

“A hunch that what?” I ask, gesturing to the ruined pages on the kitchen table.

Nolan hops down off the table. He runs his undamaged hand through his hair, brushing it away from his face. “I thought maybe someone would be really excited that we've found out this much.”

“Excited?” I echo. “She practically cut your hand off.”

“Not even close,” Nolan counters. “Anyway, I don't think she was trying to hurt either of us. She was just trying to make sure we were paying attention.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Professor's Disappearing Act

Nolan and I run
out the front door to his car, sitting idly in the driveway. I don't even stop long enough to put my peacoat on over my (two-sizes-too-big) gray sweater.

“Professor Jones must know something more!” I practically shout as Nolan speeds out of Ridgemont toward the university. I was so anxious to get out the door that I forgot to leave dinner for Oscar and Lex. I'll make it up for them when I get home.

“Even if he doesn't know anything, those books in his office . . .” Nolan trails off hopefully, his eyes practically glowing in anticipation of getting his hands on all that research material. “One of them will tell us something about what luiseach actually
do
to get rid of dark spirits.”

He thinks we'll find instructions or something, a step-by-step guide that's simple to follow, just like the recipes Mom likes to print off the Internet. She always said that if you could read,
you could cook. Nolan seems to believe that if you can read, you can exorcise.

“I'll spend all night digging through them if I have to.”

“Me too,” I nod, but the truth is, I don't feel nearly as confident as Nolan sounds. There must have been hundreds of books in Professor Jones's office. It would take longer than a single night to read them all, even with both of us there. It could take months, especially since we don't really know exactly what we're looking for. I close my eyes, and an image of my mother's bleeding wrist blossoms up behind my eyelids.

I don't know if we
have
months.

“Can we talk about something else?” I ask suddenly. “Please? I just need a break from all of this.” I lift my hands and gesture to the air in front of me, like that's where the ghost is hiding. Which—what do I know?—maybe she is.

“Sure.” Nolan smiles. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything. Something. Actually . . .” I smile back. “I know exactly what I want to talk about.”

“What's that?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“You know all about my life and my dramas, and now you think that I'm not even technically
human,
and I barely know anything about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

I purse my lips, trying to remember what I already know about Nolan. He's lived in Ridgemont his whole life, and his family has been in the Northwest for generations. His grandfather was his favorite person in the whole world.

“So your grandfather was your dad's dad?”

“Technically, I had one of each,” Nolan answers with a smile. “But, yes, the grandfather you're thinking about was my dad's dad.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Nope. Only child.”

“Me too.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

“Well then, why did you say so?”

I shrug. “I don't know. Just making conversation.”

“Anything else?”

“Have you ever gotten a grade below a B-plus?”

Nolan furrows his brow mock-seriously, as though he's mentally reviewing all the grades he's ever gotten. “Nah,” he answers finally, “though all this ghost hunting did cut into my study time this semester.”

I laugh out loud. I'm practically sleepwalking through finals myself. “Hope I didn't mess with your GPA.”

“If my grandfather were still alive, he'd have told me that grades weren't nearly as important as helping a damsel in distress—especially when that distress is paranormal.”

“Hey!” I protest. “I'm not just some helpless damsel.”

“No,” Nolan nods in agreement, “you're not.”

By the time we get to Levis Hall I know that Nolan always wished he had a little brother, but his parents didn't have any luck getting pregnant after him. I know he loves dogs but never had one of his own, though he did grow up with a pet rabbit. (“Not the same thing,” I said, and he agreed.) He actually likes
Ridgemont, and the lack of sunlight doesn't bother him in the slightest, though he can understand that it might bother someone who hadn't grown up here.

We sprint through the parking lot and up the stairs to the professor's office. Once again there's no other person in sight, but I don't care. I don't even care if Professor Jones is there or not; we'll pick his lock if we have to—not that I know how to pick a lock, but that seems beside the point. We just need to get our hands on his books.

Or Nolan's hands on them, anyway. Thank goodness the one believer I happened to befriend since we moved to Ridgemont also happens to be an honor student with a gift for research. What are the odds of such a lucky coincidence? Maybe one day—when we're not sprinting upstairs and I'm able to actually catch my breath long enough to say more than a syllable at a time—I'll ask Nolan and he'll actually want to do the math to calculate the odds.

Ashley would think it was nerdy, but I think it's
wonderful.

As we race down the hall I get a bad feeling. I mean, a
worse
feeling. (I was already pretty saturated in bad feelings to begin with.) It's cold, but it was cold the last time we were here. But something about this cold feels different.