“It’s totally got to be a dare or something. I mean, puh-lease.” If anything, Fuchsia’s voice was getting louder. “Lilah? Are you even listening to me?”
“It’s got to be a dare or something,” I repeated, keeping one eye on Lexie and groaning at the fascination more than evident on her face.
“I mean, don’t you think? If Parker’s with Plaid Girl, it’s got to be a dare, right, and how pathetic is that? Someone should buy that girl a clue.”
I refrained from suggesting that Fuchsia invest in a few clues herself. Parker was known for playing the field. That was part of the reason he wasn’t top-three material. For all we knew, he was diseased. With one guilty look at Lexie, I said as much out loud, and Fuchsia latched on to my words like they were gospel.
“I bet he gave her something,” she said, even though, as far as I could tell from what I’d actually heard her say, she’d seen Plaid Girl and Parker together for less than five minutes. “Or maybe she gave him something,” Fuchsia corrected herself, rewriting my words to fit her needs. “That’s soooo…”
“Soooo what?” I asked.
“Call on the other line.” She was practically salivating to spread the Plaid Girl Is Diseased rumor. “Gotta go. Love-ya-bye!”
I hung up the phone and turned to Lexie, who seemed relatively unfazed. She was whispering to herself under her breath, staring at her hands as she spoke. “Well,” she announced cheerfully a moment later, “you don’t see dead people, or at least, that’s not your Sight, not exactly.”
“Good to know,” I said, visions of The Sixth Sense flying through my head.
“And FYI, Plaid Girl doesn’t have any diseases,” Lexie added earnestly.
I stared at her, horrified.
“What?” she asked innocently. “I got bored.”
“Corrupting the young and impressionable, Princess?”
This time, I managed not to scream as he whispered words into the back of my neck. Instead, I twisted around. “Listen, Ghost Boy,” I said.
“Ghost Boy?” Lexie asked, her eyes lighting up. “Where?”
“She’s a cute kid,” Ghost Boy said, jerking his head in Lexie’s direction. “Sure you want to drag her into this?”
“Into what?” I asked.
Ghost Boy leaned forward. “I could tell you,” he said, “but watching you figure it out is half the fun.”
“Figure what out?” He didn’t answer, and if I hadn’t been overcome by the mental image of him bruised and shirtless, I might have threatened to forget about the whole thing.
“What do you want?” I gave him my best “you’re beneath me” look, to which he remained annoyingly immune. “Aren’t dead people supposed to want something?” I asked impatiently. The sooner I could figure out what I had to do to get rid of him, the sooner I could go back to life as it should be.
“I’m not dead, Princess.” He leaned back in the seat, measuring my reaction.
“If I say you’re dead, you’re dead,” I said flatly. “And stop calling me Princess.”
He paused just long enough that I thought I might have won. “I’m not dead.”
“And that would make you a ghost because why?” I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that. “Speaking of ghosts, don’t you have something else to do? Someone to haunt, or some lights to flicker or something?”
He didn’t take the hint, and he didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he leaned forward and put his hand under my chin. I was about to jerk back when, in a single motion, he touched his lips lightly to mine and disappeared.
“Wow, you’re really red,” Lexie said. “What did he say to you this time?”
My lips tingled where he’d touched them, and my face burned with fury, embarrassment, and the fact that, for a dead guy, he wasn’t a bad kisser. I opened the car door and got out. Anything to get away from those particular thoughts.
“If he was like that when he was alive, no wonder he’s dead,” I muttered. “I would have killed him myself.”
“Ummm…Lilah?” Lexie appeared beside me, interrupting my thoughts.
“Lex, I’m tired, can we call a time-out on talking about this whole me-having-ghost-Sight thing?”
“Li—”
I cut her off. “Please?”
Lexie swallowed hard. “Okay,” she said, “but when you turn around, don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”
When I realized that we were standing in Lexie’s driveway, I made a conscious decision not to turn around, but it didn’t save me from the absolute horrors that were already headed my way.
Lexie smiled weakly at the person standing behind me. “Hi, Grams.”
7
Power
Getting the upper hand is easy.
Keeping it is hard.
Grams, aka Caroline Nowly, aka the town eccentric, wasn’t exactly my favorite person. In fact, she didn’t even make the top twenty, which was a pretty weak showing considering that I couldn’t even think of twenty people in this town that I actually liked. Not that I hated her. It was more like…
She freaked me out.
“Lilah, my star, this is absolutely wonderful news.”
My star? This was exactly the kind of crazy-old-lady talk that made me wonder why “Grams” wasn’t in a nice little home on the other side of the state where she couldn’t possibly harm any innocent bystanders by giving them stupid nicknames or trying to regale them with cryptic messages about the Sight. As far as I had been able to tell in the months my mom and Corey had been dating, those were the only two things Lexie’s grandmother was capable of doing.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to problem-solve. Saying “I’m not your anything, now leave me alone” wouldn’t get me what I wanted, which was to take back the fact that I’d carried on an entire “I see dead people” conversation in front of Caroline Nowly, matriarch of the James family and resident Sighty mojo queen.
“What’s absolutely wonderful news?” I asked, putting as much boredom into my voice as I could manage on short notice.
“Your Sight,” she replied immediately.
“What Sight?” I asked, forcing my voice to remain completely uninterested.
“Nonsense!” she boomed.
I arched an eyebrow at her, waiting. If that was all she could come up with, I wasn’t impressed.
Lexie stared at me incredulously, like I was some kind of foreign species just because I was strangely immune to her grandmother’s orders, which everyone else seemed to instantly jump to obey.
After a prolonged silence, the grandmother in question spoke again. “I see.”
In the high school world, I would have counted those two words in response to my silence a success, but the way she said it made me wonder exactly what it was that she “saw.”
“Lexie, dearling,” Grams (Lexie talked about her that way so much that I couldn’t help thinking of her as Grams, even though I would have died before I’d said it out loud) said, “would you give the two of us some time to talk?”
Lexie glanced up at me, a worried look on her face. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked me, her blue eyes clear and solemn.
“I’ll be fine,” I told her.
Thirty seconds later, once Lexie was gone, I realized that if she hadn’t been so concerned with my well-being, I probably would have refused to talk to Caroline at all.
It was strange. Now that Lexie was gone, her grandmother was “Caroline” to me again. Nothing against Lexie, but I liked it better that way.
Caroline took my hand in her own and prodded me toward the front porch. I was debating exactly how to handle all of this (I couldn’t exactly push her down and make a run for it, and I had a sneaking suspicion that Caroline Nowly wasn’t the type to shy away from the kinds of quippy barbs I’d been using defensively all these years) when the vision hit me.
A woman: dark hair, light eyes. Bulging stomach.
“She’s really in there?” a little girl asked, placing her hand on the woman’s pregnant
belly.
“Of course she is,” another, slightly older girl replied sagely. “Mother already said she was. Don’t you ever listen, Sorcha?” Casually, as if she wasn’t terribly interested, the older girl put her hand on the mother’s stomach as well.
With her touch, colors solidified in the air around them: purple, blue, pink.
And then, there was nothing.
The first thing I saw as the vision slipped away and the real world pieced itself back together was Caroline Nowly smiling at me maniacally. Okay, maybe “maniacally” is a bit of an overstatement, but she was definitely staring at me like she could see into my head.
Oh God, I thought. What if she can?
“The Sight,” she said in a low, almost musical voice, “is a precious gift.”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. The images of the woman and the little girls were still too fresh in my mind to deny that I had seen them.
“For generations, our family—”
That snapped me out of it. “Your family,” I corrected sharply.
“Soon enough to be yours again, child,” the infuriating old woman replied.
What was that supposed to mean?
Wracking my brain for a way to break the intensity of the moment, I grabbed my cell phone out of my purse. As my fingers moved across the keys at a furious pace, Caroline wrinkled her forehead.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied in my best “something” voice. Apparently, the great Caroline Nowly either didn’t know what text messaging was, or she wasn’t used to people messaging their friends during her sacred Sight speech. Either way, it broke her stride enough to give me time to text Tracy and push the image of the woman and her children out of my mind.
Me: How’s mall?
Tracy: Parker diseased, Fuchsia pissed. Found good pants, tho.
“The Sight comes in many forms. It is rarely simple, and to harness its power, you must learn to listen, learn to understand, and learn to—”
“One sec,” I interrupted her, turning my attention to my phone again and biting back a wicked grin.
Me: Cute pants?
Tracy: Cute on me. Fuchsia gelous.
I did a double take at Tracy’s creative spelling of “jealous.”
“Phone!” Caroline’s booming voice had me looking up, and I couldn’t quite keep the surprised expression off my face.
“Say what?” I asked.
“Phone,” she boomed again. “Now!”
I started to arch an eyebrow at her, but didn’t get very far before she had my phone in her hands. For an old woman, she was pretty fast.
“That happens to be my personal property,” I said tersely. “And you have no right—”
“Listen!”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she leaned forward and cut me off. “The Sight is a gift, but like any gift, it has its limitations, and to hold the power without learning those limitations can be a death wish.”
“Say what you want,” I said in my patented bored-now voice. I glanced down at my nails and blinked slowly, doing my best impression of someone who was so uninterested they could barely keep their eyes open.
“Close your eyes.”
I couldn’t help frowning at her. It was hard to look bored if your eyes were already closed.
“Close!”
I decided to humor her. The sooner she said what she had to say, the sooner I could forget she’d ever said it and call Tracy to discuss whether or not we were actually going to the mall that weekend. Honestly, I was kind of surprised she’d gone with Fuchsia today, unless, of course, she’d gone to keep an eye on Fuchsia.
Leaving Fuchsia alone was never a good idea.
“Pay attention, dearling,” Caroline said, back to the low, singsong tone and the stupid nicknames. “The Sight touches your eyes, and it touches your heart, but your brain is your own. You must use it to enhance your Sight, not to ignore it, and certainly not to convince yourself you don’t have it.
“You’ve seen a ghost, child, and unless my guess is wrong, you’ve seen more than just that.”
I didn’t reply. At least with my eyes closed, I didn’t have to look her in the eye.
“You’ve seen memories living in the air around you.”
I can neither confirm nor deny that statement, I thought. Aloud, I said nothing. The silent treatment was a powerful weapon. Of course, it would have been more powerful if the person I was giving it to wasn’t absolutely content to ramble on by herself indefinitely.
“You see the past.”
“And the ghost?” I opened my eyes.
“Close!”
I closed my eyes, cursing myself for having broken the silence. I knew better than to give in first. My ability to outcool, outcalm, and outlast anyone was supposed to be legendary.
“What is a ghost,” Caroline asked softly, touching my eyelids with soft hands, “except for a trace of the past caught in the present? Yours is the gift of retronition. Some see what will be; some see what is. You see what was.”
Retronition. I tried the word out in my mind. Despite the fact that I was entirely against this whole Sight thing on principle, I had to admit that it had a ring to it.
No, I reminded myself immediately, it might as well be called Nontronition, because that was what it could do to me if I let down my guard.
I’d been there. I’d done that. I had no intention of doing it again.
“I know you, girl. I see you. You think you can ignore it, think you can make it go away, but you can’t. It’s a part of you now, as much as your lungs or blood or heart. The Sight takes hold of you, and it doesn’t let go.”
My eyes flew open, and this time I had no intention of closing them again. If I wanted the Sight to let go, I could make it let go. It didn’t control me. I was the one in control.
“Memories are all around you, Lilah.”
No stupid nicknames this time. Just my name.
“You can’t escape them any more than you can escape what you are. The world is full of memories for those who can see them: yours, those around you, those long forgotten by everyone else. The air cracks with them, Lilah, and you can see those cracks.
“The dead, caught in the past, will talk to you, and you will see them no matter how many times you tell yourself they don’t exist, and just when you think you’ve managed to escape your gift, you’ll touch an object and the touch will bring with it a flash, violent and intense, of where it’s been before you held it.”
Oh, goodie. I had even more Sight crap to look forward to.
“Wherever you go, whatever you do, the Sight is a part of you now.”
No. It wasn’t.
“The past is everywhere, Lilah dear, and you can’t escape it.”
“She’s right, you know,” a male voice whispered in my ear, and this time, my hand shot out to grab the whisperer by the neck. I was getting so sick of this.
“You can’t escape any more than I can, Princess.”
“Wanna bet?” I asked.
“Pardon?” Caroline asked, and I remembered that despite all her so-called knowledge about the Sight, she couldn’t see the dark-haired boy standing behind me or hear his gloomy words.
I pushed the boy away from me, surprised at how warm his neck had felt to my touch. “Observe,” I told them both. “This is me, escaping it.”
I turned on my heel and fled down the driveway, not even bothering to stop at my car. I lived across the street and one house down. I could come back for the car later.
“The past is everywhere,” I mimicked under my breath. “Yeah, right. The past is over.”
And if I had anything to say about it, it was going to stay that way. Fumbling for my keys, I cursed.
Air crackling. A dark-haired child on a worn porch, all alone…
“Arrrrrgggggg!” I screamed out my frustration and slapped at my front door until the image that danced upon it faded away.
“Locked out again, sweetie?” A voice
came from behind me.
“I have my keys in here somewhere,” I muttered. It looked like my mom was home early from the hospital. I tried to remember whether or not she was supposed to be on call tonight and couldn’t.
As my fingers closed around my keys, I turned, making an effort to smile. “Found them—”
I cut off my own words.
“What’s that?” I asked, my breath caught in the back of my throat as I stood frozen to the front porch in shock.
My mother looked down at her hand, or more specifically, at her ring finger. She smiled at me tentatively, her face crinkling around the edges in worry.
“What’s that?” I repeated dully, even though I knew the answer.
“Corey proposed.”
I turned back around. I couldn’t handle this right now. My conversation with Caroline played in my head.
“For generations, our family—”
“Your family.”
“Soon enough to be yours again, child.”
I so could not handle this right now.
“Lilah…”
“Not now,” I replied, forcing my body to thaw enough that I could jam my key into the lock. Channeling everything I was trying not to feel into my motions, I wiggled the key back and forth in the lock, forcing the door open before life as I knew it could end.
As I ran into the house and up the stairs, images and words flew through my mind with every step: Fuchsia in Brock’s lap, Lissy walking out on me in the bathroom, Lexie’s “ohmigod,” Mystery Boy leaning toward me. The ring on my mom’s left ring finger.
And then I knew. This time, it didn’t matter how good I was at keeping things under control. Life as I knew it was already over.
8
Hurt
What they don’t know
can’t hurt you.
I didn’t slam my door. I wasn’t seven years old again, this wasn’t a temper tantrum, and slamming a door wouldn’t make anything go away. Instead, I shut it behind me as quietly as I could and immediately flipped the lock. I knew my mom well enough to know that she’d be on my heels.
“Lilah?”
Right on schedule.