“She told you I was here?” I whisper, amazed that my mom would divulge this information to Conor. I crouch down to wipe up the mess I made on the floor, but I’m still unsteady and I tip over and bump into Frankie’s bed.
Conor helps me stand and takes the mucky paper towels from my hand. As he finishes wiping my puke off the floor and tossing the paper towels into the waste bin, I can’t help but smile. He was worried about me.
“Concussion, huh?” he whispers then he nods toward Frankie. “How’s he doing?”
Maybe he doesn’t really care how Frankie’s doing. After all, they’ve never met. But I’ve spoken to Conor about Frankie before and the fact that he asked is enough.
“He should be released in a few days,” I reply. “What time is it?”
“It’s 6:30.”
“I’ve been asleep for three hours.”
“Are you hungry? I can take you to get something to eat.”
If I’ve been asleep for three hours, Frankie’s going to wake up soon. I promised him I’d get him something to eat. Conor just tracked me down in a hospital and cleaned up my vomit. I reason with myself that asking him to join Frankie and me for a meal would be a far less awkward endeavor.
“Actually, would you mind if I stay here?” I say with a tiny shrug meant to make me seem cute and irresistible. “He’s probably going to wake up soon and I promised I wouldn’t let them inflict the hospital food on him. Maybe we could all eat something here?”
Conor reaches up and pinches my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ll go grab us a pizza,” he says, before he plants a soft kiss on my cheek and glides out of the room.
“Is that Mr. Black Lab?”
Frankie’s voice is like torn paper, dry and frayed but soft around the edges. If he’s at all upset about Conor being here, he’s tucked his misery deep inside the folds of his usual cool composure.
I pour him a glass of water and hold the straw to his mouth. “Yeah, that’s Conor,” I say as he takes a few sips. “Do you mind that I asked him to get us something to eat?”
“Nope,” he replies.
When I put the cup on the bedside table it’s still full. This concussion is worse than I thought.
Chapter 34
He’s here. I can feel him in the hazy light filtering through the blinds, the bare walls, the cluttered desk. This room reeks of Darius and his arrogance. He’s probably been following me for as long as I’ve been following Belinda. I know he’s flitting in and out of Conor’s body. He was probably there when I kissed Conor, using Conor to get to me.
I stand next to Conor’s desk as I leaf through Conor’s drawings. Four drawings of Belinda. Not one of these drawings is nearly as detailed as the thirty-one drawings of lilies and the one drawing of Lily Porter. Darius was always a brilliant artist. He spent hundreds of years perfecting his craft. He drew, painted, sculpted, and played piano and violin. He used to sing me to sleep. But none of it was real.
It wasn’t that his art was dishonest; it was too honest. He could dissect a piece of music to its barest melody and replay it with a naked, haunting quality that only Darius could create. Darius has always been a ghost, even when he was living inside Samuel’s body.
He’s here. In this lonely bedroom, I can see him. His black hair disheveled from subconsciously running his hands through his hair while creating. His eyes, a blue so dark and rich with possibility it makes the dusky blue twilight seem flimsy. His hands. The soft, slender hands of an artist, an artist who knows his hands are his most important instruments and cares for them with this thought in mind.
I should leave this room, but I can’t. The room pulsates with Darius’s spirit, pressing down on me like gravity. Darius always wins. But his three-hundred-year winning streak is about to come to an end.
Chapter 35
I stay home from school against my better judgment and at nine in the morning I call Mr. Avante to tell him I won’t be taking Nina to the dog park. Mr. Avante always has a way of saying exactly what I need to here.
“You take all the time you need, honey,” he says. “Get yourself some rest and you tell Frankie I said the best way to thank God for saving him is to take his best friend out to a nice dinner.”
“I’ll make sure to tell him that. Thank you, Mr. Avante.”
I’ve been lying around the house all day, taking it easy on orders from the doctor, my mom, and Mr. Avante, but by noon I’m restless. I’ve eaten two bowls of cereal, the second bowl out of sheer boredom, and played four hours of Minecraft on my phone. When I wander downstairs for a change of scenery, the last person I expect to find in my living room today is laying on the couch.
My mother is adjusting the pillow underneath Frankie’s head when he notices me coming down the stairs.
“What’s up, B?” he says. “Nice jammies.”
I’m wearing the tattered Tweety Bird pajama pants my mom bought me in junior high. They’re thin as a wisp and literally coming apart at the seams, but they’re the most comfortable pants I’ve ever owned. I still wear them almost every night. Frankie calls them my war pants.
“What’s going on?” I ask as I enter the living room and curl up on the cozy armchair. I pull the knitted throw over my legs partially because my mom likes to keep the thermostat at a chilly seventy-three degrees and partially because I’m afraid any one of the holes in my pants will split farther apart and reveal too much.
“They agreed to discharge Frankie on the condition that someone would be with him 24-hours-a-day for the next three days,” my mom says matter-of-factly as if agreeing to watch over Frankie and his head injury is no big deal. “I took today and tomorrow off and Michael will pick him up on Saturday.”
I stare at Frankie as my mom tucks the blanket around his feet. “I guess you really wanted out of there, huh?”
“I couldn’t breathe,” he says, but he’s not looking at me. He’s too busy typing something on his phone, probably texting his surf buddies to say he won’t be able to surf until he’s served his sentence of mandatory house arrest.
My mom is gone, but I didn’t see her leave. She’s trying to leave us alone to see what will happen, like lab rats in a cage. But Frankie and I have spent the night together dozens of times. Of course, we haven’t had a sleepover in more than two years, but it’s nothing we can’t handle.
“I guess we’re both going to have to make up that English final,” I say, grabbing a dinner mint from the jar my mom keeps on the coffee table. “How’s your head?”
“Just as broken as yesterday,” he replies. “Can you keep a secret?”
“What?”
“It hurts like a bitch.”
The room fills with a dense silence. Frankie hates hospitals. He actually broke his neck last summer, a minor fracture like his cranial fracture, but he convinced the doctor to release him early that time as well.
“If you die on that sofa, I’m not cleaning up the mess,” I say.
“Toss me one of those,” he says, but I don’t toss it. I grab a pale-green mint and take the four steps to the couch to hand it to him. He snatches the mint from my hand and pops it in his mouth.
The sentence I uttered right before the accident plays in my head now: Mara wants me to help her get her body back. If Frankie remembers what I said, he hasn’t brought it up. And I have to at least wait until his head is no longer broken before I possibly break his heart.
When Conor texts me at three, I text him back that I’m taking a day to rest and I’ll call him tomorrow. After a huge lunch made by my mom, Frankie sleeps most of the day. He wakes up at eight and my mom suddenly remembers she has to make an emergency trip to the grocery store.
“Can you stay with Frankie?” she asks with a gleaming plea in her eyes as if I’m going to refuse.
“Get out of here,” I tell her, pushing her toward the front door. “And bring back some of those salt and vinegar potato chips.” They’re Frankie’s favorite.
I take a seat in the armchair across f
rom the sofa again and wait for Frankie to speak. He attempts to sit up, but his face screws up with pain.
“Take it easy, Superman,” I say as I get up to help him adjust the pillow so he can sit up.
“It’s my neck that’s killing me. Fucking palm tree.”
It would be really, really bad for me to offer to rub his neck, but I feel awful. If he hadn’t stopped to pick me up the palm tree would have missed his car, and his head. I sit on the coffee table and the heavy silence returns as I watch him attempting to massage his own neck.
“I can do that for you.”
His left eyebrow shoots up. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”
A sense of relief washes over me, but I try not to let it show as I take my seat on the chair again.
“On second thought,” he says, tilting his head to the side and pointing at the spot where his neck melts into his shoulder. “Can you try to work out this knot? It’s killing me.”
I take a seat on the end table next to the sofa then I reach over and place my hands on his shoulders.
“Closer to my neck.”
I move my hands inward and the smoothness of his skin startles me. I roll my fingers, kneading his skin, until I discover the knot in his shoulder. I lean closer to get more leverage and he lets out a soft moan.
“Am I hurting you?” He shakes his bandaged head, but he doesn’t speak. “How long did they tell you to wait before you can surf?” I ask, because I need to fill the silence with something familiar before this becomes too uncomfortable.
“Three weeks,” he replies, his voice heavy with exhaustion.
“And how long are you actually going to wait?”
“Three days.”
Chapter 36
I jerk my hands back. “Are you crazy? You just had your skull bashed in by a tree and you’re going to act like nothing happened. Do you want to die?”
The muscle in his jaw clenches as he glares at me and I feel like an idiot. Of course, he wants to die. That’s why he earned his body back after roaming the Earth as a carrier spirit for hundreds of years.
He turns away quickly and gazes out the window, but the glare of the living room lamp reflects our faces back at us. “I don’t want to die yet, but I have a competition in nine days. I have to show up and I can’t show up unprepared.”
If I had gone to the SurfRiders meeting with Frankie two nights ago I would already know this. When it comes to a charity competition, he never disappoints. He’s placed third or fourth in every competition this year. Hundreds of people come to the competitions and many come just to see him.
“I think they’ll understand if you sit this one out.”
“You know I’ve never backed out of a competition. I’m not going to start now. Besides, there are some scouts coming to this one and Scott is counting on me.”
Scott Young is the head of the SurfRiders organization. Scott and Kira, his girlfriend, have mentored Frankie since he started surfing nine years ago. He’s been trying to get Frankie a sponsor for almost a year, but Frankie has resisted the idea. He must have finally relented and now he can’t let Scott down.
“Well, then I’m going with you, out on the water,” I reply and the weak smile he gives me makes me think he hates the idea of being babysat in the water—his kingdom. Kings don’t need babysitters.
My mom and I don’t like the idea of Frankie sleeping downstairs alone, so I give him my bed and I make myself a bed on the floor with a bunch of blankets and a pillow; the way we used to do it for sleepovers.
“I feel like a jerk for taking your bed,” Frankie says as I turn off the lamp and tuck myself into my floor-bed. “Are you sure you don’t want to trade? Or you can share with me. I swear I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
I laugh out loud. My double bed is definitely big enough for both of us, but the idea of lying that close to Frankie for the next seven or eight hours when we’re both suffering from head injuries makes me nervous. “I’ll take my chances down here with the spiders and the demons under the bed.”
“Are you trying to scare me? ‘Cause it’s working.”
“Shut up and go to sleep.”
We lie in silence for a few minutes before Frankie’s voice breaks the silence. “Belinda?”
I open my eyes and he’s sitting up in bed as he looks down at me. “What?”
“Do you think we’re gonna drift apart after the summer?”
Just the thought of Frankie and me drifting apart makes my throat ache. “I hope not.”
He smiles as he lies on his stomach and hangs his arm off the side of the bed. I want to reach up and grab his hand and never let go.
“Goodnight, B,” he whispers.
“Goodnight.”
I expect my mom to be asleep when I wake, since she’s not going to work, but she’s already downstairs making coffee and setting out ingredients for an extravagant breakfast. From the looks of it she’s planning to make pancakes, eggs, bacon, and hash browns.
“I understand Frankie needs to eat, but don’t you think this is a bit much?” I say as I sit down at the table and begin applying my face powder.
“You know how that boy eats,” she replies as she cracks an egg into a glass bowl. “I don’t want to be accused of starving him.”
I grab a banana off the banana hanger on the counter and grab my backpack. “Whatever. Just dial back the matchmaking stuff, please. I have a boyfriend,” I say, even though the words feel sticky and misshapen on my tongue. “I don’t want to give Frankie the wrong idea.”
Chapter 37
He bares a slight resemblance to Tuket, but this boy’s personality is just a shade of a memory of the man I once knew. Either Tuket really has become a new person, a better person, or he’s become an expert at concealing his true nature.
He has been lying awake in Belinda’s bed most of the night. I’m not sure if his fitful sleeping pattern was due to Belinda’s presence or if he’s starting to feel my presence. I’ve never been good at guessing.
Frankie’s left eyebrow creeps upward as I appear at the foot of Belinda’s bed. “Good morning, Tuket,” I say. “Are you comfortable?”
His mouth curls into a smile. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
“Well, you didn’t expect me to ignore this little ploy to get closer to Belinda, did you?”
“I don’t need ploys to get closer to Belinda. Have you already forgotten? We’re best friends. And, by the way, it’s Frankie. I don’t go by my spirit name.”
“Hmm… yes. Frankie…. Frankie and Belinda. Best friends forever. I think I remember how that goes, falling in love with a best friend. It never ends well.”
His smile falls and I see him biting back an angry retort. “What I did to Reno—what I did to you and Reno was wrong. There’s no excuse for it,” he says, never breaking eye contact with me. “It took me a long time to understand that and I hope you can accept my apology.”
I wander toward the window and peer across the street where a woman is unloading an infant from a car seat. I’ve held many children in my arms while inhabiting strangers’ bodies. I even entered the body of a woman giving birth once, just to see what it felt like. The only positive side to being a carrier spirit for hundreds of years is that I saw the birth of thousands of humans and inventions that made our lives more enjoyable. The downside, of course, being I saw all the devices, the bombs, the hatred, the humans that made our lives more terrible. I’ve seen enough.
“Even if I accept your apology, I still can’t trust you,” I say.
“You can’t trust me?” Frankie replies incredulously. “You’re the one who’s scheming to bring Belinda and Conor together. It’s no wonder you’re still a spirit if that’s how you think it’s done.”
“That is how it’s done!” I reply, the power of my voice rattling the window. “I did it three hundred years ago and I will do it again. I have to undo what you did to me. You killed my hope.”
“I didn’t kill your hope. I killed your best frie
nd. You’re free to love anyone and hope for anything. You’re the one who gave up.”
“Don’t speak to me as if you know me.”
“Don’t attempt to push Belinda away from me just so you can get revenge.”
A shrill laugh ruptures in my throat. “You think I’m trying to get revenge. I want out. Plain and simple. I want out of this…” The word prison comes to mind, but being a carrier spirit is worse than being a prisoner. At least prisoners have the comfort of knowing their freedom lies in someone else’s hands. If I never make it back into a body I will have only myself to blame. “How did you do it?”
“Ask Belinda. She’ll tell you,” he says as he bends and straightens his legs several times.
He must be itching to get out of bed, away from me, into the water. The water…. A blaring alarm goes off inside my head. That’s Frankie’s power.
Chapter 38
I call the library during break to let them know Frankie and I won’t be coming in tonight; then I text Conor during fourth period to ask if he’s going to the dog park, but he never responds. I figure he’s probably busy with finals or something. No big deal. He’ll get back to me when he’s not busy.
I walk home after school, trying not to watch Mariposa Blvd. for signs of his car, but I find myself glancing over my shoulder every twenty steps. I must look paranoid to the group of freshmen walking behind me. I call Mr. Avante on the way home to let him know I’m picking Nina up. Maybe Conor will show up at the park. Or maybe he never got my text.
I open the front door to find Frankie sitting in the armchair in the living room wearing my mom’s eyeglasses and reading a book. “Are you trying to appear scholarly?” I say as I shut the front door and let my backpack plunk down on the floor behind me. The air-conditioned air glides over my hot skin and I let out a deep sigh.