Really? Was there any sane person who wouldn’t at this point? I shook my head. “No, I won’t. I want to help you.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said fiercely. Her fingers on the planchette turned white with the force of the pressure she applied, and Gus oozed forward.
I flinched and turned away.
Joonie sucked in a breath and looked around the room. “She’s here, already?”
“It’s not her, Joonie. Please, I promise you.” If Gus came crashing down on me and I couldn’t run …
Across the room, the door handle suddenly rattled back and forth. “Will?” My mother called. “What’s going on in there?”
I took one look at Joonie’s eyes, warning me without words to stay quiet, and shouted, “Mom, get help.”
After that, things happened kind of fast.
Gus surged forward. It crested above me like some kind of horrible wave and then flung itself down on me. I screamed, and it poured down my throat, filling my airway and sealing off my lungs.
“William!” My mother beat against the door frantically.
I couldn’t breathe, and the sheer coldness of Gus penetrated to my very core. Fighting back took more energy than I had, and everything, including my weak flailing in self-defense, had dropped into slow motion. Except for me dying; that was happening fast enough.
A bright flash of light appeared suddenly in the center of Gus and burst outward, tearing it to shreds. The horrible pressure on my chest and throat eased, and I sucked in air by the lungful, coughing and sputtering all the while.
“Can’t leave you alone for a second, can I?” an all-too-familiar voice asked.
I blinked my watering eyes, clearing my vision sufficiently enough to see Alona standing next to my bed. She looked …amazing. More beautiful and somehow more real. Like I’d only been seeing a projection of her true self before. Her hair was shinier, her eyes brighter. In short, she looked like a vision. So much so that I began to wonder if I hadn’t already started the great transition.
“Dead?” I croaked.
She snorted. “Not hardly. This time, anyway.”
At that point, Joonie seemed to notice a difference in that I was breathing again and not struggling to live.
Gus began gathering the shreds and wisps of itself, building again.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Alona reached over the arm of Lily’s wheelchair and started pushing the planchette around the Ouija board. I couldn’t see what letters she picked, but Joonie, quite helpful in her messed-up and out-of-it state, called them out loud.
“S-T-O-P. U-R-F-O-R-G-I-V-E-N.”
Then, as a final touch, Alona slipped her hand inside Lily’s and moved it to touch Joonie’s on the board. I gaped at the sight. She’d said something about it before, but I’d never imagined …
Joonie looked back and forth between Lily’s hand and her still, empty face, and then she began to weep.
Alona, with a little difficulty, managed to pull herself free from Lily’s hand, looking as disconcerted by it as I felt. Then she smiled at me. “Told you you needed me.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice cracking. “Does this mean you’re back for good? I could use a little spiritual guidance.”
She bit her lip with a frown. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure how I …” Her eyes widened, and a glow, so bright I had to squint, enveloped her. She stretched her hand out toward me, and I reached for it … but caught only air.
“Alona!” The light surrounding her intensified until I could no longer see any part of her. Then it vanished, with an audible pop, taking her with it.
When the janitor and the security guard finally forced the door open a few minutes later, that’s how they found us. Joonie sobbing on the floor, holding Lily’s hand, and me still tied to the bed, my eyes watering. I wasn’t crying. No, not at all. It was just the light. Or something in my eye. Yeah, that’s it.
Twenty-six days had passed since I’d last seen Alona Dare. In that time, my mother had permanently jettisoned Dr. Miller, and we’d realized neither of us was in a big hurry for a replacement. I worked from Alona’s notes and kept the ghosts … spirits … at bay by helping them out as best as I could. I sent Sara’s brother his medal with a fake letter from the hospital, explaining it had been found during routine file reorganization. I’m proud to say that Grandpa Brewster did, in fact, move on into the golden light shortly after I sent anonymous letters to his son and grandson.
Other than that, I did my homework, passed my finals, and, at my mother’s insistence, sent in applications for late admission to a variety of schools. In true parental spirit, she’d bounced back from my revelation about seeing the dead quickly enough to point out that if I wasn’t hiding anymore, I didn’t need to leave town, and could therefore attend classes at a university—as was the original plan for me. Yeah, she kind of had a point.
We celebrated my eighteenth birthday on May 30, just my mom and me. She was getting used to the idea of what I am, but that almost made it harder for her to accept what my dad did instead of just telling her the truth. She was working on it, though.
Joonie was doing okay. In trying to explain the whole mess of what happened at the hospital without outing me (which also probably would have made her look a little less than stable, anyway), she ended up inadvertently outing herself. Or maybe not so inadvertently. She seemed relieved. I understood the feeling. When she was released from the hospital, though, after all kinds of psych tests, evaluations, and counseling, her parents refused to let her come home. She ended up living in this sort of halfway house/group home. It was all right. I went to see her there every couple of weeks. A therapist, a nice woman named Joan Stafford, made house calls there on a regular basis, and Joonie said that helped. She’d missed too much school to graduate with our class, but with a few summer classes, she’d get her diploma. Once she turned eighteen in August, she was moving to New York to live with her middle sister, Elise, who, it turned out, had had her own reasons for attending Wellesley.
Graduation day, June 1, dawned bright and suffocatingly hot for so early in the summer. They set up the stage in the middle of the football field, causing me to voluntarily set foot on the playing field for the first time in four years. I kept expecting to get tackled. When Principal Brewster called Alona’s name and her mother stepped up to accept the diploma on her behalf, I couldn’t help but look around. No sign of Alona, though, not even when Principal Brewster revealed a sketch of the memorial plaque with her name that would be attached to the new bench in the Circle. It was our senior gift to the school, suggested anonymously by yours truly and funded by donations that Misty Evans had relentlessly pursued. Alona had wanted to be remembered in the style she was accustomed to, and now she would be.
I waited, shifting uncomfortably on my plastic chair and sweating under the polyester gown and the dress shirt my mother had insisted on, until my name was called.
“William James Killian.” Principal Brewster looked like he’d sucked down an entire lemon-tree orchard to get a look that sour. I loved it.
I left my chair, walked up the aisle, and ascended the steps. Behind the stage, Liesel, Eric, Jay, and a few others cheered wildly as I shook the superintendent’s hand and then Brewster’s. He handed me my diploma but kept my other hand captive in a crushing grip.
“I don’t know how you managed this, but I know something just isn’t right with you, boy.”
“Yes, sir,” I agreed cheerfully. “But I beat you and that’s all that matters to me.” I yanked my hand out of his grasp, switched my tassel to the other side of my cap right there in front of him, just to taunt him a little, and bounded down the stage and back to my seat, feeling lighter than I had in years.
“Glad to see you learned your lesson about playing well with others,” Alona said dryly in my ear. Her familiar light and flowery scent drifted over my shoulder.
I jolted and started to turn.
“No, no, don’t turn around,” she said impatientl
y. “You’re almost out of here. Don’t make a scene by talking to someone who isn’t there.”
“Where have you been?” I whispered, pretending to look through my program.
“You saw the light. You know where I’ve been.”
“But since then?” I muttered.
“I had some things to take care of.”
“Like what?”
“You’ll see.” She sounded positively gleeful. “Just keep watching. Things are about to get very interesting.”
“Are you back for good?”
She made a frustrated noise. “Just watch. Ask questions later.”
So, I watched. At first I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Then Principal Brewster called for Ben Rogers. My hands clenched into fists. For the last three weeks, I’d had to let him walk around, smirking like the ass that he was, because I couldn’t touch him. Not until after graduation. Well, graduation would be over in the next twenty minutes, and then I’d do my best to pound his face into the ...
The first ripple of giggles from the audience as Ben walked up the side aisle tipped me off that something was up. The giggles turned into a roar of laughter and then hooting and hollering. Only when Ben drew even with my row could I see the source of the hoopla. A paper sign had been taped to the back of his gown, right at his shoulder blades. In big block letters, it read, I HAVE A TINY PENIS. WANT 2 SEE?
I laughed. “Awesome.”
Ben, completely bewildered, but accepting the added attention as his due, simply thrust his fist up in the air in a gesture of triumph as he climbed onto the stage. Yeah.
Behind me, Alona smothered a laugh. “What an ass.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said.
Next to me, Jillian Karson gave me a look and shifted her chair farther away. Whatever.
“Meet me after,” Alona said.
“Where?” I asked, prompting another glare from Jillian.
“You know where.”
By the time I could risk a casual glance behind me, she was gone.
After the ceremony, I made my way over to the bleachers and my mother. “I’m proud of you,” she said.
“Thanks.”
She hesitated. “Your dad … he’s proud of you, too, I’m sure, even if he can’t tell you that himself.”
I’d confessed to her my original suspicions about dad being Gloomy Gus a while ago and she’d tsked at me for thinking that my father would ever haunt me. She was right, of course. One way or another, my dad was gone and, I hoped, happy now in a way he couldn’t have been in life.
“Thanks, Ma.” I gave her a hug. “I need to go check on something. I’ll meet you back at the car?”
She nodded, and Sam, my mom’s boss at the diner and the only other person I’d invited to graduation, took her arm to help her down from the bleachers. I didn’t think she needed the help, but I suspected she liked it. And Sam, too. That was cool. He was a good guy.
I left the two of them behind and headed toward the main entrance of the school. On the way, I passed Ben Rogers, holding the sign that had been stuck to his back. “But it isn’t,” he insisted to anyone who would listen. Unfortunately, no one seemed to believe him.
As I approached the Circle, I could see Alona sitting on her bench, her long legs stretched out in the sun.
“So what happened to being nice?” I asked when I reached her.
She squinted up at me. “What, the thing with Ben?”
I snorted. “Yeah,‘the thing with Ben.’”
She shrugged. “Not my idea. It was Leanne’s. I heard about it when I visited Misty.”
“Misty?” I asked.
Her gaze barely flickered from mine. “She was my best friend forever, and she kept my secrets. I’m not going to let Chris get in the way of that.”
“Oh.” Quite a different song than she’d been singing before about their relationship, but maybe the round-trip visit into the golden light changed that … and her.
She shrugged. “Besides, Chris slobbers a little when he kisses. Ick.”
That startled a laugh out of me. No, same Alona.
“Anyway”—she looked at me with some exasperation—“when I was visiting Misty, I learned something interesting. Apparently, Leanne and Ben hooked up freshman year, and she never got over him dumping her. That’s why they refused to talk to each other.”
“She waited four years to get even?”
Alona grinned. “Never piss off the girl who sits behind you at graduation, especially if it’s Leanne Whitaker. That girl can hold a grudge like nobody’s business.”
We sat there in silence for a moment. “It was nice, though, for Lily, I mean,” I said.
“For all of them,” Alona corrected. “But, yeah, for Lily.”
“So,” I ventured, “you’re back.”
“Yep.”
“That’s a little unusual, I think.”
“Hmm.”
I swallowed back my irritation. “You’re going to make me ask again, aren’t you?”
She gave me an innocent look. “Ask what?”
“Are you staying … or just passing through?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Why? Does it matter to you?”
A thousand smart-ass replies leaped to mind, but she would be expecting that. So, I went for the truth. “Yeah, it does.”
Her eyes widened and the faintest hint of pink spread across her face.
I grinned. Had I just embarrassed Alona Dare, the Alona Dare?
She sniffed. “Someone has to keep you out of trouble. Might as well be someone who knows the stupid crap you get yourself into all the time. And …” she traced the grain of the wood on the bench with her fingertip, “there may also be a small issue of me still learning to consider others before myself.”
“I was never in trouble except when …” I paused as her last sentence sank in. “Ha! You got held back because you don’t play well with others,” I crowed. “Told you it was about being nice.”
“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “Being a poor winner isn’t nice, either,” she pointed out, but she got up and came to sit beside me.
We sat in comfortable silence for a long moment.
“Thank you for my bench,” she said almost shyly.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Oh, please. As soon as I heard Misty talking about it, I knew it was you. Who else would have come up with that quote?”
When it was finished, beneath her name and dates, the plaque would read, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
I shrugged, unaccountably pleased.
She edged a little closer. “So … thanks.” She leaned in and before I realized it, she kissed me. Her mouth tasted warm and sweet, and when her hand touched my chest for balance, every cell in my body stood at attention.
She broke it off first, pulling away from me and touching the corners of her mouth as if to make sure her lip gloss was still in place. It was, by far, the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
I cleared my throat. “If that’s for a bench, what happens if I suggest a whole dining room set?”
She laughed and slid away from me. “In your dreams, Killian.” She tucked her legs up under herself and gave me what I recognized now as her “getting serious” look. “Okay, so college. Let’s talk dorm room decor. I’m thinking we really need to go beyond the whole milk crates and dark, moldy-smelling comforter—”
I groaned. “I think this is a little outside your responsibilities as a spirit guide.”
She shot me an offended look. “I have to stay there, too, you know.”
I considered her words and all the various pleasant and unpleasant ramifications. “Well … that ought to make things interesting,” I said weakly.
She grinned. “No point in living otherwise.”
My thanks to my fabulous agent, Laura Bradford, for taking me on. To my editor, Christian Trimmer, who is
ten kinds of awesome and made this book better than it ever could have been without him, and everyone at Hyperion. To Ed and Debbie Brown and Stacy Greenberg for help when I needed it most. To my supportive family, especially my parents, Steve and Judy Barnes. To my husband, Greg, for understanding what this means to me. And to my sister, Susan, who inspired me to write this story.
Stacey Kade, The Ghost and the Goth
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