“A daughter,” my father said weakly.
Gigi nodded again. “I know it’s not the same. But you’ve been having such a hard time with the idea of a baby, and while nothing can ever bring Alona back, I thought it might help in some way.”
“Help?” I shouted at Gigi. “How can that help?” I staggered to my feet. “You can’t substitute one person for another! You can’t just switch me out with an…imitation of the real thing, like one of your cheap-ass Gucci knockoffs. He’s my father. He knows the difference. He knows what you’re trying to do and it’s never going to work. I’m the only one.” I could hear myself losing control and getting a bit hysterical, which would lead to more disappearing body parts. And sure enough, when I looked down my hands had disappeared, along with my feet and ankles.
Calm down. Breathe. If I lost control now, after the hit I’d taken from Mrs. Ruiz earlier, I’d vanish and probably be gone until tomorrow morning…at best.
I clamped my mouth shut and waited breathlessly for Daddy’s infamous temper to kick in, for him to shout at her for even implying that anything could make the loss of his only daughter more bearable.
Instead, he wiped his face with the back of his hand, and I watched in horror as he propped the ultrasound picture against the framed photo of the two of us, blocking me out entirely except for the top of my ultrafrizzy head.
“Daddy,” I whispered. “No.”
He beamed up at step-Mothra and pulled her in close, burying his face in what I realized now was an expanding waist. “I can’t wait.” His voice was muffled, but the broken joy in his voice was very clear.
And my last thought before I disappeared for the second time today was this: my half-sibling was still practically microbial, barely more than a handful of cells, and already she’d beaten me. Unacceptable. This was war.
I couldn’t fall asleep right away. Not for the obvious reason, either.
Well, okay, maybe that was part of it. I could still smell the flowery scent of Alona’s shampoo on my pillow and imagined I could still feel the heat of her against me.
But there was more.
Not five minutes after Alona had vanished through the far wall of my bedroom, my mom had poked her head in my room to say good night, and let’s face it, probably check up on me.
Her face was glowing with happiness. She must have had a good time with Sam at the movies. Where I was absolutely sure they did nothing but actually watch the movie, and refused to believe any evidence to the contrary. It was too…weird.
“Just wanted to say I’m home,” she said, beaming at me. My God, was that red patch on her chin stubble-burn? No, no, I wasn’t looking.
“Right on time for curfew,” I said instead, even though I actually had no idea what time it was.
“Ha, very funny. Good night.” She reached for my door to pull it shut again.
“Wait.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to destroy her good mood, but I had to know.
Of all the crazy stuff Alona had spouted earlier about the other ghost-talker, one part of it had actually made sense.
If there was one ghost-talker around here, maybe there were more.
“Did Dad ever say anything about anyone else? Like us, I mean?”
Her smile faded a bit. “Honey, I didn’t even know what was…special about him until you told me about your…gift.”
Nice avoidance of the words “wrong” and “problem,” Mom.“No, I know, but did he ever have any visitors or talk about people who weren’t from work or whatever?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Your father was a complicated man, dealing with many…troubles.”
Like allowing himself to be misdiagnosed as schizophrenic instead of just a guy who could see and hear the dead.
“When he was having a tough day, I didn’t want to make it worse by asking questions,” she said.
I remembered that—Dad coming home from work early, and my mom hushing me as soon as I walked in the door from school. On those days, the house had to be as quiet, dark, and still as possible. I never really put it together until recently that he needed the peace and quiet because he’d probably spent the whole day trying to tune out all the ghosts he encountered through coworkers and the various locations he had to go to for work. It would have been miserable. At least when I was in school I’d had a rough idea of which ghosts were around, what they might do, and how aware they were or were not of the living, and in particular, me. For him, working as he did, on assignment from the railroad company, he’d have always been encountering new spirits and new problems.
“When he was having a good day,” my mom continued, “I…I didn’t want to ruin it. I’m sorry. That must seem horribly selfish to you now.” She gave me a rueful smile, and her eyes were watering.
I winced. “Mom…” I started to get up.
But she stopped me, holding her hand up. “I’m fine.” She cleared her throat and blinked back her tears. “He wasn’t always like that, though. He used to be happier, more social. In fact, when you were much, much younger, he was forever taking off for a weekend ‘with the guys.’” She laughed. “He called it book club, though what kind of book club involves coming back exhausted and all banged up, I have no idea. They were probably off paintballing or some other roughhousing nonsense they didn’t want the wives to know about.” She gave a laugh tinged with sadness and stared off in the distance at a memory I couldn’t see. “I used to get so mad at him.”
Then she edged closer to squeeze my foot through the covers. “Just because you’re different doesn’t mean you have to be alone, sweetie.”
Oh. That’s what she thought I was worried about. Better than the truth.
“I know,” I said.
It was her turn to hesitate. “That’s why I think it might be a good idea for you to branch out, spend some more time with your other friends.” She smiled a little too brightly.
In other words, not Alona.
I could have explained that my other friends were a bit scarce these days, never having been plentiful in the first place. Joonie was still adjusting to living at the group home, not to mention keeping up with the summer classes that would let her earn her high school diploma. Erickson was in California with his cousins for one last summer of surf and smoke, and Lily…well, Lily was exactly where she’d been for the last ten months. In a coma at St. Catherine’s.
Her soul was gone, having moved on to the light immediately after the car accident that landed her in the hospital in the first place, but her body was still basically functional. A couple months ago, Alona had saved my life by making it seem as though Lily were communicating from beyond (long story). She’d spelled out a message on a Ouija board, and even managed to put her hand inside Lily’s for a moment to move it. Since then, her parents had backed way off from the idea of removing her feeding tube and letting her fade. At least, her mom had. I wasn’t sure her dad was convinced. I’d visited a few times since that incident, and the tension between them was enough to keep those visits very short. If Lily had been aware and able to, she’d have walked out herself, I was sure of it. Her mother had hovered, always making sure a Ouija board was right at Lily’s lax fingertips. Her dad had looked ready to burst a blood vessel every time her mother even mentioned “communicating.”
But rather than getting into all that with my mom, who knew pieces of it, but not everything, it was just easier to agree. “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
She smiled, pleased at having helped, I’m sure. “I’ve got an early shift tomorrow. You’ll come by for lunch? I think Sam’s got you scheduled for the afternoon.”
Now that school was out, I was picking up a few hours at the diner as a busboy. The work was not glamorous, but the gas money was good. On days that my mom and I both worked, I usually went in early to eat so I didn’t have to worry about fending for myself around here.
“Yeah,” I said. Alona would not be pleased. She hated hanging out at the diner. Claimed she could smell the grease in her ha
ir for hours afterward. Again, highly unlikely, but who was I to say?
My mom nodded and started to leave.
“Hey, Mom? The book club guys…they were from Dad’s work?” I asked. It was probably nothing, but I had to ask.
“What? Oh. Actually, I don’t know.” She frowned. “I don’t remember. I think so. It was so long ago, I’m not sure.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why? You don’t think they were…like that, do you?”
Like the girl from the Gibley Mansion? Like me, Mom?“No,” I said. Because if so, why hadn’t my dad ever mentioned them to me? It was one thing to refuse to talk much about the gift/curse we both shared. A whole other thing to let me think we were alone in it when he knew otherwise. “Definitely not.”
She nodded again, seemingly reassured, a spark of her Sam-induced happiness returning. “Good night, hon.” She snapped the light off and shut my door on her way out. After a few seconds, I heard her running water in the bathroom and the sound of her footsteps heading down the hall to her bedroom. A few minutes after that, nothing but that heavy silence that comes with someone sleeping.
I wished it could be that easy for me. But my mindwould not slow down, playing back the evening over andover again, in fast-forward, rewind, slow motion, and every possible combination. No additional answers emerged, though.
I was finally starting to doze off when a funny scrabbling noise sounded at the window behind my headboard.
My first completely illogical thought, half-asleep and fuzzy-brained as I was, was that Mrs. Ruiz had managed to pull herself back together, and she was pissed and coming after me. I knew for sure it wasn’t Alona. She always managed to slip in and out of the room without a sound.
I bolted up and off the bed, swallowing back the instinctive and childhood urge to call for help, fumbling and flailingto reach the light on my desk.
The window squeaked upward, and I cursed myself for always leaving it unlocked.
I snapped the desk lamp on and hoisted it above my head as a makeshift weapon, just as a familiar face, surrounded by mass amounts of wild dark hair, appeared in the opening. “Thank God,” the girl from the Gibley Mansion said, bracing herself in the window frame.
I didn’t move, couldn’t move. I wasn’t entirely sure I was awake.
“You know just about every spook in town knows your name, but not where you live?” Without waiting for a response, she clambered in and stepped down on my bed and then the floor. “What are you doing?” she asked with a frown, taking in the lamp with her gaze.
Like I was the one where I wasn’t supposed to be. I couldn’t have been more surprised if Jessica Alba had suddenly appeared in my bedroom. Thankfully, I’d thrown a T-shirt on after Alona had left, and getting caught in boxers wasn’t that big of a deal.
“What do you want?” I asked, when I recovered the ability to speak. Alona’s dire warnings of a vast conspiracy rang in my ears, sounding less and less crazy by the second. Feeling a little foolish suddenly with the lamp above my head, I set it down carefully.
“So suspicious,” she said, still frowning.
Now I was getting pissed. “Were you or were you not the person accusing me of ruining your life just a few hours ago?”
She sighed. “You’re going to make this difficult, aren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, she reached forward, and I stepped back, the sharp edge of my desk biting into my back, before I realized she was just grabbing for my desk chair.
She rolled the chair toward herself with a smirk that said she’d seen my retreat and found it amusing. She twisted the chair around backward and sat down, her arms resting across the back.
“Where’s the queen?” she asked.
It took me a second to realize she meant Alona. “Not here,” I said warily. “Why?”
“Good.” She nodded.
“What do you want?” I repeated, still not sure how I felt about her being here now. Yes, I was curious. Not sure I was curious enough for a stranger to be in my bedroom late at night when I hadn’t invited her.
Alona’s voice whispered in my head. Invasion of your territory; it’s a power play. Damn. Maybe my mom was right. I was spending way too much time with her.
The girl didn’t answer right away. She just stared up at me in that cold, evaluating way that made me feel like I was back in Principal Brewster’s office. I took the opportunity to get a better look at her, and though I tried to make it as intimidating and hard a stare as hers, I doubted I succeeded.
She was still wearing her worn-out cargo pants and combat boots. Silver duct tape was wrapped around the toe of one boot, seemingly holding it together. Her dark hair, which I had thought was going to give Alona fits earlier, still stood around her head in a halo, but now it seemed less a result of poor hygiene and more the product of wildly curly hair and possibly being jammed in the hood I could now see at the back of her shirt.
“You know, I had you all wrong,” she said finally, using her toes to spin my chair a few inches in one direction and then back, over and over again.
“What does that mean?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
She settled herself more comfortably in my chair, as though it were her own. “At first, I thought you were just a curiosity seeker, or some no-talent local out to see what he could see.”
Um, ouch?
“Then I thought you were maybe a Casper lover trying to interfere.” Her mouth twisted in distaste.
There was that term again. I understood the meaning from the context—and clearly it was meant as an insult—but it was the way she said it, like it was a real thing. Some acknowledged piece of vocabulary I’d somehow missed during SAT prep.
“But”—she leaned closer—“then I had some time to think about it, and you’re not any of those things, are you? You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“Well, the no-talent thing was pretty clear,” I said.
She grinned and something dangerous gleamed in her eyes, which, I noted with a bit of shock, appeared to be two different colors, blue and green.
“Funny. I like that,” she said.
And third time’s a charm.…“So what do you—”
“I’m proposing an arrangement,” she said, choosing her words carefully.
“Uh-huh.” Even I could hear the suspicion in my voice.
“You help me out with a little something, and I give you information.”
“Information about what?”
She grinned again. “Everything you don’t know.”
“What makes you think I don’t—”
She pulled something small, shiny, and silver from one of her pockets, holding it up and waggling it at me. It was, I was fairly certain, the device that had saved my life by vanquishing Mrs. Ruiz right before my eyes. I could see it had buttons on the top and wires sticking out of one end, details I’d missed before. “Standard issue,” she said.
“For who?” I couldn’t help myself from asking.
She smirked. She knew she had me then.
Then her expression grew more guarded. “First things first. You can see them, can’t you? I mean, better than I can.” Her mouth tightened as if admitting that last fact had actually pained her.
I assumed she was talking about ghosts. “I don’t know. I can—”
“You knew when my aim was off,” she said sharply.
Boy, she was not fond of letting me finish a thought. “Yeah, but it wasn’t off by that much.…”
“When they move, I lose them,” she said bitterly. “I can see them just fine while they’re still, but when they start moving around, I can’t get a bead on them.” She shook her head. “It’s like my eyes can’t keep up with my brain.”
That was, oddly enough, something I’d never considered before, when I’d been thinking of the possibility that there would be other ghost-talkers out there. That there would be disparities in level of ability. Though it kind of made sense. Just because a bunch of people could play the trumpet didn’t mean they co
uld all play it equally well, with equal aptitude for the high and low notes or whatever.
She looked up at me with a glare, as though daring me to feel sorry for her. “I can hear them better than anyone, though. I heard the princess whining long before I ever saw her.” She scowled at me. “How on earth did you end up with that tagalong?”
Somehow I sensed that explaining the whole spirit guide thing might not be a great move right now. “We’re friends.” Which was more or less the truth.
She raised an eyebrow. “Friends or friends friends?”
I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but her tone suggested that “friends friends” was something more, and not an area I particularly wished to discuss right at this moment because I really didn’t know the answer anyway. Alona and I were…well, we were just us. That was all.
“What do you want me to do in exchange for this information you’re supposedly going to give me?” I asked instead.
She shrugged, looking a little more self-conscious than I’d seen before. “This is my last chance at a containment if I want full membership. I might need a little help getting Mrs. Ruiz in the box.” Her voice held a defensive note.
Ignoring, for the moment, that most of what she’d justsaid sounded like gibberish—“in the box” was a little ominous, and full membership in what?—I had a larger concern. “Mrs. Ruiz? But…she’s gone. I saw you fire that thing and—”
The girl grinned again, clearly enjoying my ignorance. “Nah, the disruptor just disperses their energy enough to break them up temporarily. It takes multiple hits if you want it to be permanent, and even then, sometimes it doesn’t work. On one like her? No way. Did you see the way she was closing those doors on you?”
“I thought she was going to trap me in there with her,” I said with a grimace.
She laughed. “She might have. It’s been known to happen to a few of us who’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, so to speak. Not with her, obviously, but other green-levels.”