I looked up and found him leaning against the frame of the back door and silhouetted by the hallway light. Through the darkness, I could only see a few of his features: a crease of worry between his eyebrows, a strained twist at the corner of his full lips. God, I loved that face. I didn’t want to think how much I’d miss it.
He was obviously still worried about what had happened tonight between him and Kaylen. Despite everything, a tiny laugh passed my lips. In a matter of hours my problem with Kaylen had gone from mountainous to fly sized. Insignificant, compared to everything else.
“What’s so funny?” Joshua asked quietly.
Knowing that Joshua could see me clearly, I forced a smile.
“Actually,” I said in an offhanded tone, “I was laughing at myself.”
“You were?”
I widened my smile until it ached. “Absolutely. Just laughing about how much I overreacted earlier. How was the rest of the party?”
“Overreacted?” he said, ignoring my question. “About Kaylen? Hardly. You have every right to be mad that she kissed me. It was totally—”
“Not your fault,” I finished, swiping my arms across each other in the “safe” signal.
In the dark, I saw him shake his head. “But I’ve known Kaylen for years. I should have guessed what she was up to.”
I laughed lightly. “I expect certain things from you, but the ability to read Kaylen’s twisted little mind isn’t one of them.”
“Are you … sure, Amelia? You don’t want to scream at me for an hour or two?”
I pushed my lips out into a fake pout. “Wow, Joshua. I may be a little jealous, but I’m not crazy.”
I could hear the smile in his words when he replied, “Huh. Well, in my experience, jealous sometimes equals crazy.”
“Oh, does it?” I teased. “In your vast experience?”
“Hey,” he protested, pushing himself away from the doorway and walking toward me. He came close and hesitated, just a moment, before pulling me into his arms. When I melted against him, he gave a low laugh. “Don’t knock all seven of those dates I had last year. They taught me a lot about the female mind.”
“More than you’ve learned in the past three months?” I said, nuzzling into his chest, wishing desperately that I could feel his warmth right now. Just a little physical sensation to help me keep up the happy charade, to prevent me from revealing to him how I really felt inside: scared, defeated, sad.
Lucky for me, Joshua couldn’t read my thoughts. His hand moved to my back and started to trace circles there. Slowly, the places where his fingertips touched began to burn.
“I hope you know,” he whispered, “that there’s only one girl I want to kiss. And she’s never smelled like stale beer.”
“Not in the past decade anyway,” I whispered back, smiling weakly. When I burrowed closer to him, Joshua laid his chin on top of my head.
“You have no idea how relieved I am. I seriously thought we were going to have a huge fight tonight.”
I leaned back and looked up into his eyes. In the shadows, their dark blue seemed almost black. “You weren’t planning on fighting with me, were you?” I asked, still smiling.
“Nope. I planned on keeping my mouth shut while you did all the talking.”
“Wise. Very wise, indeed.”
He grinned back at me for a moment, but the expression unexpectedly faltered. All at once he looked like he wanted to say something … something I probably wouldn’t like.
I tilted my head to one side. “What’s wrong?”
He grimaced, clearly deciding whether or not to speak his mind. “Nothing’s wrong, really,” he said hesitantly. “It’s just that, well …”
When he trailed off awkwardly, I frowned. “It’s just what, Joshua?”
He released a jittery puff of air and then launched into a dizzying rush of words.
“It’s just that you’ve been acting really weird lately, Amelia. All depressed and quiet. I keep thinking that sometimes I do stuff to make you mad, but you never really say anything one way or another. Then tonight happened, and I wondered whether you were going to explode. Because that’s what people do when they keep everything inside for a long time: they explode. So I’ve just been … waiting, I guess. For the nuclear meltdown.”
Once finished he panted, as if exhausted from the effort.
As for me, I simply stared at him, motionless, speechless. I didn’t really know what to make of his confession, except that he obviously read me better than I’d expected.
Distract him, I thought. Otherwise he’ll have you figured out before you get within two miles of New Orleans. He’ll know you’re trying to leave. And then how will you protect him?
I pushed him away, crossed my arms over my chest, and forced my mouth into a scowl. “Are you saying that I’m the only one acting weird, Joshua? What about you?”
“What about me?” he asked, taken aback by my cold tone.
“Last time I checked, Mr. Popularity just had his first real conversation with his friends in months. And I basically made you do it.”
Joshua crossed his arms too, suddenly defensive. “Yeah, so?”
“So I know what you’ve been doing.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“Avoiding the living, Joshua. Choosing the dead.”
His arms dropped. Even in the dark I could see his pained expression. “Don’t call yourself that, Amelia. Please.”
“But that’s what I am,” I pressed, my tone softening a bit. “I’m dead. There’s really no point in calling me by any other name, is there?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Living, dead—I don’t care. I’m with you. And I’m going to do whatever needs to be done.”
I sighed. “That’s one of the things that’s been bothering me lately, Joshua. I understand why you think you need to do it, but just … don’t, okay? Don’t let go of your friends because you think it will benefit me.”
“Benefit us,” he corrected.
“‘Us’ is okay,” I said, fighting the cruel little voice that reminded me of what a lie I’d just told. “We’re going to be all right. In fact, we’ll be even better if you just go back to living your life the way you did before we met. Except, you know … with me in it.”
Joshua’s eyebrows drew together in doubt. “Are you sure, Amelia?”
I threw my hands up in the air. “You keep asking me that like you have some reason to think it isn’t true.”
“Are you saying I don’t …?” He cracked a small, questioning smile.
“I’m saying you don’t.”
In my head, I added, Actually, I’m saying it’d be better if you started living your life like I wasn’t even in it. But whatever.
“How about I make you a deal, then?” Joshua said. “I’ll make an effort to spend time with my friends, and you’ll try to be—”
“Happier?” I offered.
“Happier works.”
“Good,” I said, nodding. “Happier works for me, too.”
Joshua laughed. “And here I thought we weren’t going to have a big fight.”
I drew closer to him. “I can think of a few ways we could make it up to each other. I mean, you weren’t planning on sleeping tonight, were you?”
“Absolutely not. That’s what tomorrow’s car ride is for.”
His smile broadened into the one I loved so much, and I paused, just for a second, to memorize every detail of it. Then I melted into him again.
Chapter
SEVEN
By hour six of our drive to New Orleans, I wished I had slept last night. Nightmares, involuntary materializations—any number of unpleasant things would have been preferable to this car ride.
With bleary eyes I surveyed the interior of the Mayhews’ SUV. Though it looked spacious enough, the vehicle had already proved too small to handle this particular grouping of people.
In the front, Jeremiah and Rebecca continued to trade positions between the driver
and passenger seats. Despite this split of duties, the two couldn’t seem to stop bickering over who had the best set of directions. As a result, we’d spent half the drive on the highway and the other half on a disconcerting maze of back roads. So instead of four remaining hours in the car, we had at least six more ahead of us.
To no one’s surprise, Joshua and Jillian weren’t handling the endless claustrophobia well, either. Like young children, they’d occupied hours of this drive with snide remarks, kicked seats, and passive-aggressive sighs. Now, in a rare but nearly blissful period of silence, Jillian stretched across the first row of bench seats, listening quietly to her iPod while Joshua napped beside me in the back row.
While he slept, his head rolled backward on the top of the seat, affording me a good view of his profile. I watched it for a moment and then sighed. If only I could find a way to sleep without nightmares, I might forget how little time I had left to look at him.
I turned to stare out the window, at the other problem plaguing our drive. Apparently, the winter storm had decided to follow us south. Although we’d driven hundreds of miles away from Wilburton, the snow continued to fall, piling up in the ditches alongside the highway and shifting like thin, insubstantial ghosts upon the surface of the road. Flurries swirled against the windows, distorting the landscape that moved past us.
Without the responsibility of navigating through this storm, I might have found the scenery peaceful. But my mind still reeled as much as it had last night. In fact, it hadn’t stopped reeling. For many hours I’d alternated between trying to find a way out of my exile and reminding myself that, by evading the dark spirits, I would keep them from hurting anyone else.
I’d also spent a great deal of time wondering where I’d materialize to once the Mayhews returned home. I couldn’t decide whether I should pick the location in advance, in case I was too upset to make a decision when the time came, or whether I should just vanish to somewhere unknown. Somewhere so far from Wilburton I could never find my way home again.
As I stared out the window, with my mind jumping from one bad option to another, my eyes occasionally caught on an individual snowflake. I mindlessly followed one’s progress until the wind whisked it away and another flake took its place. The longer I watched the flakes, the more they mesmerized me, like a thousand tiny hypnotists intent on distracting me from the problems at hand.
While the storm held my attention, another part of my mind caught glimpses of the landscape behind it. White hills and valleys—indistinguishable from one another in the heavy snow—rushed past us. I started to suspect that an empty world waited just beyond this vehicle. A world untouched and blank: not for me to write my story upon, but to disappear into. To fade against, finally, like the ghost I was.
I shook my head lightly, trying to focus, but I couldn’t make anything out in all that infinite white. Soon my eyes glazed over and my vision blurred until I’d had far more of the bright emptiness than I could take. I turned back to the dark interior of the SUV for some relief.
And then I gasped.
The upholstered seats, the low ceiling of the SUV—everything was gone. Replaced by the bright, blinding snow.
I looked down to find that my legs, instead of being curled beneath me in the back row of the SUV, were buried ankle-deep in the snow. Inexplicably, I’d gone from the safety of the vehicle to the center of the blizzard. From what I could see—which wasn’t much—the SUV had disappeared, wiped from existence by the storm.
Upon realizing this, I could actually feel the blizzard: the cold wind gusting around me, battering my shoulders and whipping my dark hair into tangles in the air; the frozen ground stinging the soles of my bare feet; the snow soaking the hem of my dress until it clung, wet and uncomfortable, against my legs.
But just as abruptly as I’d entered it, the storm ended.
I watched, stunned, as the dark clouds broke apart to reveal a soft, summery blue sky. The last shriek of the winter gale died in the air, and a warm breeze took its place. Then, like the grand finale of some fantastic play, the heavy layer of snow melted into lush, green grass—grass that should have died months ago and shouldn’t now sprout a blanket of wildflowers.
Within seconds I’d gone from the Arctic Circle to some prairie paradise.
I lifted one foot and marveled at the daisy that had just popped up beneath it. “What the …?” I murmured aloud.
“More like ‘where the,’ actually,” a pleasant voice chirped from somewhere behind me.
I spun around, sending an impossibly thick cluster of dandelion seeds into the air. For a moment I didn’t see anything but their wispy cotton strands. Only when they drifted up, toward the clear sky, could I see her.
She stood only a few feet from me, with her hands clasped in front of her. Her feet were bare like mine, and she rocked back and forth on her heels as if she had news she couldn’t wait to share. Her green eyes seemed to sparkle with that same exciting secret. She ran one hand through her wild auburn hair and then, unbelievably, waved at me.
“Hi, Am—a.”
Her voice crackled like radio static in the middle of my name. The weird noise obviously didn’t bother her, though, because she broke into a warm smile.
Too baffled to do much else, I smiled back.
“Um … hi,” I said. “And you are? And I’m where?”
Her smile turned dimpled, and mischievous. “Not—lat—someone wants—talk to you.”
Again her words crackled, as if she were trying to speak over a broken connection. She shook her head, auburn curls bouncing against her shoulders. Then, without so much as another staticky word, she vanished.
I stared openmouthed at the empty space she’d left. There was no evidence that she’d been there at all except maybe the wildflowers now seemed a little thicker, a little wilder where she’d stood.
“No, really.” I spoke to the vacant field, feeling dizzy from all this weirdness. “Where am I?”
“Don’t you know?” another unfamiliar voice teased, not much louder than the breeze.
I spun around again, searching for the new speaker. This time, however, I found no one watching me. Nothing surrounded me but the flowers, the ankle-high grass, the cloudless blue sky.
“Who’s there?” I called out, still spinning, still finding nothing.
“Me,” the voice whispered again.
“Me, who?” I demanded, my own voice sharp and impatient. Another second of this eerie place, these cryptic visitors, and I’d have to reevaluate my sanity.
“You know who, darlin’.”
My mouth twitched and then pulled itself down into a disbelieving frown.
Darlin’.
The way the disembodied voice dropped its g and drawled out the word with affection … only one person in the world had called me darlin’, and had said it in that way.
My father.
The voice sounded like it had in all my nightmares about him. But here, in this beautiful place, it also sounded richer. Clearer. Which shouldn’t be the case since my father was trapped in the dark netherworld.
I felt the muscles in my neck tense. “No, really,” I almost growled, defensive for reasons I didn’t fully understand. “Who are you?”
“There’s not much time,” the voice cautioned. “I need you to listen. I need you to uncross your eyes, darlin’.”
I froze. No part of my body moved, except perhaps for the frown, which released its hold on my mouth.
The image sprung into my mind before I had time to think. A flash of memory. I hadn’t had one in months, not since the struggle this fall on High Bridge. But suddenly, without warning, I could picture my hands clasped around a math textbook. Calculus, judging by all the letters and numbers dancing impossibly around one another on the page.
“Ugh,” the flash-me groaned. “This stuff is making my eyes cross.”
I heard my father speak from somewhere to my right: “Then you’ve gotta uncross them, darlin’.”
He’d sa
id that at least a thousand times before, and who knows how many times after. This was our routine, our own goofy comedy bit. Whenever a problem bothered me, I’d say it made my eyes cross; and every time, my father would suggest I uncross them, as if the problem was that simple to solve.
Just uncross your eyes, darlin’. Nothing to it.
Silly. Meaningless, really. But it always made me laugh, even helped me to focus, because the phrase was ours.
Besides than my mother and me, only one other person knew that phrase, knew what it meant to me.
“Dad?”
I breathed the word like a prayer. I received one quiet word in acknowledgment:
“Amelia.”
Maybe I should have been more skeptical, demanded more proof. Instead, I started to cry. Because I knew how my father’s voice sounded when he spoke the name he’d helped give me.
“Dad,” I called again, frantic. “Dad, where are you? I’ve been trying to find you. I’ve been trying to—”
“There’s no time, Amelia,” he interrupted. “You have to listen to me. They’re coming.”
Immediately I knew whom he meant. And the warning chilled me just as much as when Eli delivered it last night. But this time I steeled myself against the fear and drew my head up so my father would see—if he could see me at all right now—that his daughter’s backbone had survived her death.
“I know, Dad. That’s why I’m leaving Oklahoma.”
“That’s not enough,” he said. “You have to—but not without—”
The same static interference that had broken up the girl’s voice now distorted my father’s. Like the two of them were speaking on the same radio frequency.
“They want—but it’s hard to—the rivers—mustn’t rise.”
“What? Dad, I can’t hear you. ‘The rivers mustn’t rise’?”
I moved to the right and then the left as I’d seen Joshua do when he wanted to get better cell phone reception. Then I craned my neck up, my face pointed to the sky as if my father’s face might appear there.
No such luck. My father continued to speak, but infuriatingly, I could only catch a few words at a time. Worse, his voice began to fade, the volume lowering until I could barely hear him at all.