Invisible Ghosts

  “Can I photosynthesize with you?” he asked.

  “What about Sam?” I teased, opening one eye.

  “Eh.” Jamie shrugged. “He got fat.”

  Sam let out a roar of frustration, and Claudia cackled.

  “Thank god someone else said it,” Max drawled, and then made an oof noise, presumably because Darren had elbowed him.

  I sat up, squinting as my eyes readjusted to the sunlight.

  “Shouldn’t we head over to help Nima with the spirit wheel?” I asked.

  Everyone stared at me as though I’d betrayed them.

  “Great,” Max said. “Five more minutes and we could have gotten away with it.”

  We all started to gather our things, and I realized what had happened. Somehow, without my knowing it, instead of orbiting someone else, I’d regained my own center of gravity.

  18

  REHEARSALS FOR THE play began Wednesday after school, but Gardner got started on the table read during class. I’d always enjoyed them before, watching from the other side of the room as Sam’s crowd tried on their parts for the first time. Except now, I felt conspicuously left out.

  I sat there with my friends, following along silently as they read aloud. From across the room, Abby Shah called out her lines as Lucy. Abby Shah, who kept her notebooks in a Louis Vuitton bag and had perfect boobs and Disney princess hair.

  As I listened to her read with Claudia, I tried not to resent it or wonder if I would have beaten her out for the role. It had been my choice not to try out, but that didn’t make it sting any less to be left out of the main thing that was happening in my friends’ lives.

  Logan and I went back to hanging out just the two of us. But it wasn’t the same. Something had changed between us, or maybe a lot of things had. I felt restless, sitting there in front of the television, as though I was wasting my time. As though there was so much more I should be doing.

  By Friday, I couldn’t take it anymore, so instead of going straight home, I biked over to Billz. Just because my friends had play rehearsal every day for the conceivable future didn’t mean I had to sit at home.

  So I ordered a mint brownie and a blended chai and worked my way through the PSAT practice booklet my advisor had handed out that morning. It actually felt nice, sitting somewhere quiet and answering the different sections, like maybe I’d be able to handle the real thing in a few weeks.

  “What are you doing here?” someone asked.

  I looked up from the reading comprehension page. Logan was glowering down at me. Seeing him in the coffee shop was pretty unnerving, and for a moment I understood how Jamie had felt.

  There was something more comfortable about Logan at home. More fitting. Here, in public, surrounded by strangers who couldn’t see him, he stood out, and not in a good way. It was one of his more transparent days, and I could see right through him to where some old guy was scrolling Facebook on his phone.

  “What? I’m studying,” I whispered.

  Logan plopped down across from me.

  “Boring,” he said, shaking his head in disapproval. “So boring.”

  “Then leave,” I whispered back.

  “I came all the way here. I’m not just leaving.”

  “So did I,” I shot back.

  He started to whistle, tuneless and annoying. From the faint smirk on his face, I could tell he was doing it to torture me. Immediately, I felt self-conscious. I didn’t want anyone to look over and see me chatting with an empty chair. So I sent him a glare and packed up my things.

  When we were outside, I glanced around, making sure we were alone.

  “What the heck?” I asked.

  “You were avoiding me,” Logan accused.

  “I was not. I just wanted a brownie.”

  “Then why didn’t you wait for me?” Logan asked. “What were you working on that you didn’t want me to see?”

  “Nothing!” I said. And then I amended, “I wanted somewhere I could concentrate on studying for the PSAT.”

  Logan stared at me like I’d betrayed him. Like I’d announced I was moving out next week and going clear across the country, just to spite him.

  “What do you expect me to do? Live at home forever?” I shot back.

  “I don’t know!” Logan said. “Maybe!”

  “Logan,” I said. “Come on.”

  “You come on,” he said pitifully. “How come you want to leave all of a sudden? What’s wrong with CSU?”

  There were about a million things wrong with CSU. It was just down the street, for one. And it was so mediocre—everyone called it “C-Student University.” If you got on the 405 and drove north to Los Angeles, you’d hit half a dozen better schools along the way.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly.” Logan looked pleased, but I didn’t have the heart to explain.

  So I didn’t. Instead, I just rode my bike home with Logan floating by my side, listening to him chatter about which episode of Star Trek we should watch when we got there.

  MY FRIENDS AND I went to the movies on Saturday night, and my parents were relatively chill about it, even if they did make Jamie come inside “just to say hello.” Mom was so chatty that by the time we got to the theater the previews had already started, and we didn’t have time to get snacks.

  But even without the prospect of our fingers accidentally brushing in the bucket of popcorn, everything turned out okay. Our friends had saved us decent seats, and Jamie’s hand still found mine under the armrest.

  All of us went out for burgers afterward, dragging extra chairs over to the biggest booth In-N-Out had until we’d managed to fit seven of us around the same table. Inexplicably, Max and I got chairs, while Sam wound up squished in the middle of the booth between Claudia and Darren, looking like a giant.

  Sam made a comment about it that I didn’t understand, but it sent everyone into hysterics.

  “It’s from rehearsal,” Jamie whispered, and tried to explain, but everyone had moved on to something else that happened at play rehearsal, so there wasn’t much point.

  The conversation was a cascade of anecdotes, all of them funny to everyone else. I smiled along at all of it, pretending to follow. It had only been three days of rehearsal, and already, they had so many things to laugh about.

  There was that thing Seth did with his hat. And Abby showing up in ridiculous stiletto heels. And Gardner eating that giant sub sandwich with the lettuce falling onto his shirt—Nima and Sam competed to see who could do a better impression of it.

  “You guys have to vote for your favorite,” Sam insisted.

  When it turned out to be a tie, everyone groaned. And I realized that, if I’d tried out for the play after all, mine could have been the deciding vote. That I could have been laughing along with them at Gardner eating the sandwich, or Seth and his hat flip, or Abby being such a diva.

  “Sorry everyone talked about rehearsal so much,” Jamie said on the car ride home.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I swear to god, I kept trying to make them switch to something else,” he promised.

  I laughed.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” I said. “All it did was make you sound a little too obsessed with the PSAT.”

  “Standardized tests are important!” Jamie protested, and then laughed at himself. “Wow. Nerd is not a good look on me.”

  “Nerd is the only look on you,” I joked.

  “Thanks a lot, Cleopatra,” he said.

  We drove in silence for another block, both of us smiling. The song on the radio was somehow both sad and upbeat at the same time, and I didn’t know how I felt about it.

  “I love this song,” Jamie said, turning it up. “It reminds me of you.”

  I must have made a face, because he made one back, teasing.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s beautiful,” he said. “And it makes me happy when I hear it, even though it’s about saying good-bye.”

  “You think I??
?m beautiful?” I asked, surprised.

  “Of course,” Jamie said, glancing at me sideways. And I could tell that he meant it.

  We’d taken the scenic route, through the narrow canyon pass, instead of the direct shot down Ocean. We were stopped at the red light outside the old general store, and there was no one else on the road. The store was closed, and the parking lot was empty, and I could almost believe it was just us, alone in the darkness, even though I knew our friends could pull up beside us at any moment in their own cars.

  “You know I had a crush on you back in fifth grade, right?” Jamie went on. “I had this idea of you, in my head, after I moved away. But I never let myself look you up on Instagram or anything, because I didn’t want to ruin the picture.”

  “Your loss. You would have gotten over that crush in about two seconds,” I joked.

  “Nope,” Jamie said. “Because when I saw you again, on the first day of class, you were even prettier than I imagined.”

  “I bet you use that line on all of the girls in your English class,” I teased.

  “Oh, I do,” Jamie promised. “So it’s lucky you’re not in my English class.”

  “Hey,” I said in mock outrage, swatting at him.

  A song came on the radio from our childhood, one of those instantly recognizable things.

  “No way!” he said, turning it up. “Come on, Cleo, let’s see your dance moves.”

  “I’m a terrible car dancer,” I protested, but it was no use. Jamie only cranked the radio up even higher, goading me.

  The music seemed to reverberate off the walls of the canyon. It was pitch-black everywhere, except for the narrow path illuminated by Jamie’s high beams, and it seemed too quiet and too still for us to be dancing in our seats to an ancient One Direction tune, but we did it anyway, belting the lyrics across the gear shift. Jamie drummed the steering wheel, and I tapped my feet, and the canyon walls rose up high and dark around us, making the sky look like a distant river of stars.

  Another song came on after that was even better, and Jamie stared at me in shock.

  “That’s it,” he said. “We’re parking.”

  He pulled off the road, onto one of the narrow ledges on the side of the canyon, and opened the door to his car, turning his stereo up all the way.

  “Come on,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “When the universe gives you a moment this good, you don’t waste it,” he said, stepping out of the car.

  I followed him, and we danced in the glow of his high beams, to perfect song after perfect song, whirling along the edge of the canyon.

  When we pulled up outside my house, my throat felt raw from singing, and my heart was hammering in my chest, not from fear or stress, but because I was alive and laughing and sitting in the dark with the cutest boy I’d ever seen.

  “And you said you didn’t dance,” Jamie pointed out.

  19

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks, I watched as my friends disappeared into the play. At lunch, they’d reel off whole paragraphs of dialogue, testing each other so they could get off book. And then, every day after school, they stayed behind for rehearsal.

  Costumes had never been much of a commitment—between what we already had in the wardrobe closet and what we could rent from Harbor Playhouse, it was mostly just some steaming and pinning—but it felt like even less of a job once I saw how involved my friends had become.

  I had nothing to do during Gardner’s class, which now functioned as an extra rehearsal period. But even worse, I had no one to do nothing with. I’d grab a seat at one of the empty lunch tables in the quad and take out my homework. And whenever I looked up from my French or my precalc, I’d see Claudia and Abby, their heads bent close, running lines.

  They looked great together, with their matching swirls of perfect dark hair, Claudia in her bohemian dresses and boots, and Abby in her tight skirts and platforms. They were #goals, while I was that mediocre selfie you delete an hour after posting.

  “Rose!” someone called, startling me. It was Leah, one of the Renaissance Faire girls in my class. She was sitting at a table with a bunch of other classmates who hadn’t been cast in the play.

  “Hey,” I called, waving.

  “Come join us,” she insisted. “We’re playing Heads Up!”

  “Yeah, come join!” her friends echoed.

  I’d never really talked to them much, but I went over anyway and joined their game. I’d seen people play it before, holding their phones to their foreheads and looking ridiculous, but it actually turned out to be fun. Everyone was laughing and making fools of themselves, and that was the point.

  I was so into the game that I didn’t even notice Jamie sneak up behind me. He wrapped his arms around me, and I jumped, startled.

  Jamie laughed.

  “Wow, you’re an easy scare,” he teased.

  “You’re just that scary,” I shot back.

  “You wound me,” he said, putting a hand to his heart.

  Leah and her friends were staring at us like we were that couple—like we were Sam and Claudia.

  “Gardner says everyone can go a few minutes early,” Jamie said.

  “Everyone?” I asked hopefully.

  “Everyone else,” he amended, sighing. “Just wanted to pass on the message in case anyone’s parked in the lot.”

  “Oh, crap, I am,” one of the girls said, scrambling for her bag.

  “Walk me back to the theater?” Jamie asked, so I did.

  It was a short walk, but he held my hand anyway, smiling. He looked so happy, like being in the play and hanging around with our old friends and kissing in his car whenever we had a moment together was so much more than he’d hoped for.

  “What?” I finally asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, and then amended, “You weren’t sitting alone.”

  “No,” I agreed. “I wasn’t. Stop looking so smug about it.”

  “Who’s smug?” Jamie asked innocently. “That’s just my face. My unbearable, smirky face.”

  “Ugh!” I said, pummeling him.

  LOGAN WAS WAITING by the door when I got home. I was later than usual—Claudia and I had gotten caught up in chatting about costumes, and our stage manager had assumed I was staying for rehearsal.

  “I waited for you on the trail,” he said accusingly.

  “I took the parkway. It was faster.”

  “You never take the parkway,” he said.

  “I do sometimes,” I protested, even though it wasn’t true.

  “Well, you’re here now,” Logan said. “And I know exactly what we’re watching.”

  He raced over to the sofa, looking so excited that I couldn’t help but grin. He insisted on an episode from the first season of Star Trek: TNG, and at first I wasn’t sure why he’d chosen it, since we both preferred the later seasons. But then I figured it out.

  On the screen, I watched as Wesley studied for the Starfleet entrance exam. It looked like he was going to score high, but at the last moment, he failed the psychological test and didn’t get into the academy.

  “Logan,” I said, pausing the TV. “Why did you want to watch this?”

  “No reason,” he said, smirking.

  I waited, making no move to unpause the TV.

  “Maybe I put it on so you’d see that it’s not the worst thing in the world to stay behind with people who care about you,” Logan explained, in a rush.

  “You’re unbelievable,” I told him. “I can’t deal with this right now.”

  “Okay, fine, we can turn it off and watch Buffy,” Logan said, as though that was the issue.

  My eyes narrowed.

  “Season four?” I guessed. “Where Buffy and everyone stay behind in Sunnydale to go to college?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Logan,” I said warningly.

  “What?” he asked. “It’s a good season.”

  “Buffy had to live on the Hellmouth to fight vampires. It was a
burden to her, not some amazing option.”

  “I’m not a burden!” Logan said, losing his temper.

  “I never said you were!” I shouted back. “I said being a VAMPIRE SLAYER IS A BURDEN, OH MY GOD, WHY ARE WE FIGHTING OVER THIS?”

  “Stop yelling at me!” Logan screamed. The TV remote, which had been sitting on the coffee table, flew across the room and slammed into the wall. It dropped to the ground, leaving a dent.

  Logan stared at it in shock, and then disappeared.

  “Great,” I muttered.

  LOGAN SEEMED TO take my banishment to heart, since he didn’t show up for the next few days. It was just as well, since they passed in a panicked blur of test prep. The PSAT was on Thursday, and our advisement teachers marched us into the gym, where hundreds of desks had been lined up in a neat grid. Mr. Thompson, the guidance counselor, seated all of us alphabetically down the rows.

  Jamie slid into the seat in front of mine. He was wearing an ancient San Francisco State hoodie I hadn’t seen before, which looked like the softest thing in the world. He turned around and grinned.

  “Bet I can beat your score,” he teased.

  “On the nonexistent art history section?” I shot back.

  “How’s that math coming along?” he asked innocently.

  I kicked the back of his chair in response.

  I’d thought I would be more nervous, but I was strangely calm as I filled in the answers on my test. There was something reassuring about having Jamie there. About the way his shoulders curved forward in his sweatshirt as he hunched over his exam booklet. About Sam, two rows over, all six-foot-two of him crammed into a desk meant for someone much smaller.

  We were outgrowing this place, I realized. One day soon, we were going to look down and realize it no longer fit. I’d seen a picture on the internet once of this bicycle that someone had locked to a tree and left behind. The tree kept growing, lifting the bicycle off the ground and enveloping it so that, even if someone did come back to unlock it, the bicycle was irreparably stuck.

  WHEN I GOT home, Logan was flopped on my bed, glowering.

  “What?” I said. “It’s a required test. It’s not like I could have skipped it.”