Life After Theft

  Then he saw the sticker on the bag.

  His eyes narrowed and in about half a second his hand was back at my throat. “Tell me what you think you know.”

  Know? “I don’t know anything!”

  “Then why did you take these?”

  “I didn’t steal them. I’m just giving stuff back.”

  He paused for a second. “Did you give Sera her skirt and shoes?”

  “Yes.” Honesty seemed like the best policy at the moment, even though Kimberlee was yelling, “Deny! Deny!” at the top of her lungs.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “I just found them,” I said in a much higher voice than I usually use as his grip tightened around my neck. I’d always felt that my six-foot-two height gave me an advantage over bullies. Apparently it made no difference to this five-foot-eight mass of muscles.

  “I’ve been watching you hit on my sister all week.”

  Oh shit.

  “And I haven’t stopped you. You seemed like a nice guy. But now? Give me one reason why I shouldn’t give you two black eyes and promise to break your arms if you even speak to her again.”

  Then he raised his fist of death and I experienced a level of desperation at which I would do or say anything in order to stop the inescapable pain rushing toward me.

  “Kimberlee Schaffer’s a ghost!” I shouted, then covered my face with my hands. As if that would help. I’d probably just wind up with two black eyes and two broken hands.

  But Khail’s arm stilled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “No, no!” Kimberlee shrieked. “He is the last person in the world you want to tell that to!”

  But I babbled on anyway. “Kimberlee’s a ghost but I can see her and she won’t leave me alone unless I help her return all the stuff that she stole I have no choice in the matter and I’m not trying to hurt anyone I thought I was being the good guy.” The words rushed out in a single breath.

  Khail glared at me for a long time. “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “It’s true. There’s this big cave on her parents’ beach and it’s full of stuff I have to give back and every day Kimberlee gets locker combos for me.”

  “Kimberlee. The dead Kimberlee?”

  Kimberlee tossed her hair in offense but I nodded. “Kimberlee Schaffer. I shouldn’t even know about her; I just moved here. I’m not lying.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “No, no, I’ll show you. Look.” I remembered the tactic Kimberlee had tried to use on me that first day. “Hold up a number behind your back.”

  “What?”

  “A number. On your fingers,” I said. “Hold it up behind your back. I’ll close my eyes and Kimberlee will tell me what it is and I’ll tell you.”

  Khail rolled his eyes. “You think I’m an idiot?”

  “Please? Just once.”

  Khail glared. “Don’t you dare try to run.”

  “I won’t.”

  He sighed and I covered my eyes with both hands.

  “Ready,” Khail said, sounding bored.

  “Kimberlee?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “This is the lamest thing ever. I’m not helping you; I am not helping him!”

  I pointed my finger at her—or at least I tried to; it was kind of hard to be sure with my eyes closed—and hissed, “You tell me right this minute or I am done. I swear I am done!”

  She let out an annoyed sigh. “I hate you!”

  “Hate me all you want. What’s the number?”

  “You are a head case,” Khail muttered.

  “Kimberlee, he hits me, I ditch you, and you walk the earth forever,” I growled through my teeth.

  Kimberlee was silent for several excruciatingly long seconds, but finally she told me what I needed to know.

  “You’re not holding up a number,” I said. “You just have a fist.”

  Khail didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he spun me around, not only holding me tight in a headlock, but with his forearm pressed tight against my eyes. “Do it again,” he said, his voice soft, controlled, and with a deadly edge that scared the shit out of me.

  “Two,” I whispered, grateful beyond reason when Kimberlee spat the number right out.

  A moment passed and nothing happened.

  Nothing.

  Then the enormous forearm retreated and sunlight pierced my eyes. After blinking a few times I looked over at Khail. He looked like he’d swallowed something too big for his throat.

  “You honestly believe what you’re telling me, don’t you?”

  I was too scared to talk. I felt like the whole rest of my life might balance on this moment. I just nodded.

  Khail licked his lips. “Ask her what I gave her for her tenth birthday,” he said after a long pause.

  “Um, dude, she’s not deaf.”

  Killer eyes swung at me.

  I raised my hands. “Sorry.”

  Kimberlee rolled her eyes. “Trick question. He hasn’t come to one of my birthday parties since I was, like, eight.”

  I conveyed the message.

  Khail’s jaw clenched, his jaw muscles—even they were huge!—working furiously along the side of his face. “Ask her . . . ask her . . .” Then he was silent.

  The bathroom was silent for a long time and I couldn’t tell if Khail was leaning more toward believing me, or swinging back to wanting to kill me.

  “Jeff,” Kimberlee piped up softly. “Tell him he doesn’t have to ask.”

  “What?” I said, turning my head away from Khail, but feeling him jump at the sudden noise anyway.

  “Tell him he doesn’t have to ask.”

  “Uh . . . she says you don’t have to ask.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Khail asked, but his voice was quiet now.

  “Tell him I haven’t told anyone. Not even you.” It was the most sincere thing I’d ever heard Kimberlee say, and she was staring at Khail like it hurt her eyes to look at him.

  I faced Khail again. “She said she hasn’t told anyone.” I shrugged. “Even me.” I hoped I sounded as clueless as I felt.

  His eyes widened and suddenly it looked a little like he was having an asthma attack. His breathing went ragged and he looked around the bathroom like a man hunted.

  Or haunted.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  I pointed off to my left where Kimberlee stood.

  Khail’s gaze flicked to where I’d pointed and his eyes narrowed like he could will himself to see her. Finally he released the front of my shirt. “Tell her I hate her.”

  “She can—”

  “I want you to tell her.”

  “He hates you,” I parroted obediently.

  Instead of looking defiant, or bored, like I expected, Kimberlee stared at the ground, cowed.

  “Tell her she has no idea how badly she messed things up and how glad I am that she’s dead.”

  I repeated his words again.

  When I was done Kimberlee’s head was so far down I couldn’t see her face anymore. After a few moments a sob wracked through her chest and she gasped against it. I swallowed hard; I’d only heard that sound a couple of times in my life—once from my mom, at her sister’s funeral.

  “I didn’t do it,” Kimberlee choked out.

  “She said she didn’t do it,” I whispered, wishing Khail could hear her himself. “I think she means it.” I wanted to mention the tears, that awful sound, but I had a feeling Kimberlee would kill me if I did.

  But Khail didn’t look fazed at all. “She’s a liar,” he said, his voice like iced steel.

  Kimberlee fled the bathroom without another word.

  “This isn’t over,” Khail said. “I don’t want her”—he said it like it was a nasty word—“in Sera’s life, even as your invisible friend.” He hesitated. “Don’t tell Sera about this,” he warned. “Not a word.” Then he was gone, the door closing noisily behind him before I could even catch my breath.

 
“Not a problem,” I whispered to the empty space.

  Sixteen

  I WENT TO THE CAVE BY MYSELF that afternoon; Kimberlee hadn’t shown her face since our bathroom run-in with Khail. It was the first time I’d been there alone. Annoying or not, Kimberlee’s yapping had made the beach feel more . . . alive. Now it was too quiet and more than a little creepy. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a seagull swooped low and let out a piercing caw. Today it was easy to imagine someone dying here. It felt lonely and empty. I wondered how much time Kimberlee had spent down here by herself when she was alive, and if she had felt lonely and empty too.

  I climbed into the cave and blinked in the darkness. The never-ending boxes stared back. As I gathered a bunch of bags from a box simply marked Whitestone, I was nearly overwhelmed by the hopelessness of my task.

  I couldn’t keep doing things this way. We’d scarcely begun and I’d already been caught once. No one was going to believe I had to piss that much, and eventually someone was going to realize I was doing something sneaky.

  But what else was I supposed to do? I’d agreed to help and even if I didn’t have the threat of a crazy ghost hanging over me, I had to admit, it was kind of nice giving stuff back to people. It made them happy.

  Well, except Sera.

  And Khail.

  But even he seemed pleased to actually have his stuff back. A hat and silk boxers. Now that was a story I wished I knew.

  Still, at this rate, I was going to graduate from college before I got everything done.

  When I got home I poked my head through the garage door and checked for any signs of life before speed-walking through the kitchen, my arms loaded with stolen stuff, and hurrying up the stairs to my room. I managed to only drop two bags while I tried to get my bedroom door open. I swore under my breath and kicked them into my room, hoping they didn’t contain anything too fragile.

  Kimberlee was sitting on one of the ginormous beanbags I got for Christmas. I tell you, it’s the weirdest thing to see someone sitting in a beanbag without making a dent. At all. And why didn’t she just sink right through it? Or right through my floor, for that matter? The physics of Kimberlee’s ghostliness continued to elude me. But then, what about Kimberlee did make sense? Ever?

  My knee-jerk reaction was to demand an explanation, or maybe give her a sarcastic greeting after being ditched all day, but I remembered the way she’d sobbed in the bathroom and settled for a quiet “Hi” instead. I stashed the stuff in a corner of my closet and closed the door before turning to face her. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Kimberlee said, sounding completely emotionless.

  I was silent, waiting for her to say . . . I don’t know. Something. “So,” I finally blurted, “crazy day, huh?”

  She just raised one eyebrow and shrugged.

  I sat down on the bed and began unlacing my Docs. “Come on. You don’t get to have a scene like that with Khail, disappear for the whole afternoon, and then just shrug. What’s up with you and Khail?”

  “Nothing,” Kimberlee said flatly. “There is absolutely nothing between us.”

  “Well, not anymore. But—”

  “There wasn’t anything between us in life, either.”

  “Oh please. He hates you; you hate him—unless you want to claim you hated everyone in life then there is def—”

  “I don’t hate him,” Kimberlee said. Her voice still had that eerie, flat tone. “I just can’t stand to be around him.”

  Oh. Now I got it. “You liked him?”

  She swallowed. Answer enough.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “So you liked him and then you died. Is that it?”

  “Basically.”

  Basically my ass. “So why does he hate you?”

  “Because I’m a bitch,” she said simply, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world.

  “Come on,” I said, trying to look her in the eyes. “You have no one to talk to except me and I can’t tell anyone in the world about you.”

  “Except Khail.”

  I bit back a sharp retort. “Except Khail, who I hope to never speak to again lest I die young. So spill.”

  “I liked him, I tried to get with him, he rejected me, and I . . .” She rolled her eyes and I couldn’t tell if it was because she didn’t believe what she was saying, or because she couldn’t believe she was saying it. “I reacted badly.”

  “What do you mean, badly?”

  “I was mean to him. I kinda held some stuff over his head; I picked on his sister,” she snapped. “I am a spiteful, terrible person, okay? There, I said it. Happy?”

  “What did you hold over his head?”

  She shook her head. “No way. I’ve learned my lesson—it’s his business, not mine. Just . . . I was a bitch; end of story.”

  “Okay.” Then the rest of her admission sank in. “You picked on his sister?” I said, too loudly.

  Kimberlee slid back against my pillows with an irritated sigh. “It’s ancient history; would you just leave it alone?”

  “I can’t leave it alone when it keeps coming back and slapping me in the face. Today, almost literally. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me while you’re in confessional mode? Like why do all the kids at my lunch table hate you? What did you do to them? Did you pick on them, too?”

  “No!” Kimberlee said, getting pissed. Somehow pissed was better than sad. Less scary. “I was the queen of the school. In case you are unfamiliar with the pecking order, that means I was that person that everyone either adored or hated because they were jealous out of their minds. That is not my fault.”

  “Jealousy? That explains everything,” I said sarcastically. “Who did like you?”

  “Langdon!”

  “Oh good, Langdon the asshole. I’m so proud of you.”

  “And Neil,” she continued almost desperately. “Kyndra liked me too. We kinda ran the school, okay?”

  “With an iron fist, maybe? I’m starting to think you were just a bully with sticky fingers.”

  “I was not a bully!” Kimberlee protested.

  “Oh yeah? I find that a little hard to believe from someone who admits she was mean to someone she liked. How did you treat people you didn’t like?”

  “Screw you!” Kimberlee said, standing on my bed. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me!”

  “That’s because half the time you won’t tell me anything, and the other half you’re lying!” I yelled back, not considering until the words were out of my mouth that my dad, at least, was almost certainly home. If I made it through this ghost ordeal without getting thrown in a padded room, I was going to be seriously proud of myself.

  Kimberlee glared at me for a second and then sank through my bed and out of my room via the floor. Despite everything that had happened in the last couple weeks, my hands started to shake at the creepiness of that moment. I managed about two and a half calming breaths before my phone rang, making my heart go erratic all over again.

  And seeing Sera’s name on the caller ID may have sped it up even more than that.

  “Hey,” I said, hoping my voice wasn’t shaky.

  “Hi. My parents are driving me nuts. You want to do something tonight? Preferably outside of my house?”

  “I’m fine; thanks for asking. And how are you?”

  She started to laugh and the stress of the last few hours seemed to melt away. “Sorry,” she said. “Long day. Long week, really. I wish I got to see you more.”

  “Me too,” I said, the sad truth of those words sinking right into my bones.

  “So can we please, please, please do something tonight?”

  I loved how she asked like I would even dream about saying no. “Well, since you said please. Did you have anything in mind?”

  “Something completely brainless,” she replied. “How about we actually go to a movie this time?”

  “Sounds good to me. What’s playing?”

  “Does it matter?” Sera asked in a
tone of voice that suddenly made me feel very anxious to leave.

  “No, no, it doesn’t,” I replied. “When can we go?”

  “In an hour?” she suggested.

  “Half,” I replied with a grin.

  “You’re on.”

  I laughed as my mom knocked softly and popped her head through my doorway. “You have a guest,” she said, in a weird-ass cheerful tone that made me suspect she had heard me yelling at Kimberlee. My poor mom.

  “I’ll be down in a sec, Mom,” I said, but she opened the door farther, revealing Khail’s steely gaze. His shoulders were as wide as my doorway.

  Just to add to the weirdness, Kimberlee was standing behind him with her arms folded over her chest. I suspected they had “run into” each other in the front yard. My mouth went dry and I think my throat may have started closing up. “Hey, listen,” I said to Sera, the words pouring out of my mouth. “On second thought, let’s go in an hour. I’ll pick you up, okay?”

  As soon as she made some kind of positive response, I hung up with a quick “Bye.”

  “Hey, Khail,” I said, trying—unsuccessfully, I might add—not to let my voice crack.

  My mom departed and Khail let the door swing shut behind him, pushing it until the latch clicked. Probably just wanted to beat me up in private. Understandable.

  Neither he nor Kimberlee spoke, resulting in a moment of silence, like at a funeral. In this case, my funeral.

  “I want to see the cave,” Khail finally said in a surprisingly quiet voice.

  “The cave?”

  Khail pointed a meaty finger at me. “You said there was a cave,” he said, his tone full of accusation.

  “Oh, Kimberlee’s cave. Yeah, sure, of course.” Like I was going to say no? “Uh . . . let’s go now.” I walked past him and opened the door—it felt more like opening the gate to a cage—and led my little entourage down the stairs, Khail clomping along resolutely and Kimberlee noiselessly pouting.

  I threw off something about the mall to my mom and headed out to the garage. As the door was rising I asked, “You want to, um, ride with me or . . . ?” I let the sentence hang in the air.