****
Later that night we walked toward the center of the school, wandering around while waiting to reenact my death. The moon shone brightly on the campus and even without my heightened senses I would have easily been able to see by its beams. It was chilly, cold enough that if I were still alive, my breath would have hung around my face in the air.
“It’s a beautiful winter evening. All that’s missing is snow. I’m never going to see snow again.” I frowned at this realization.
Brent smiled at me mischievously and lifted his hands above his head, mouthing words I couldn’t hear and my mind didn’t understand. The temperature plummeted, and clouds formed, covering the bright moon. Within moments, tiny fluffs of white flitted to the ground around us.
I laughed in amazement, tilting my head back. I stretched out my arms and twirled in the falling snow. The small flakes gradually gave way to larger ones as the pace of them picked up, coming down in a flurry, until several inches of billowy white blanketed the ground.
“How did you do that?” I asked, sticking my tongue out to catch the snowy flakes. They didn’t stop, but fell through me unimpeded.
“It wasn’t hard. It’s the same basic technique I use to control the wind. It just took more time, energy, and concentration. I didn’t do it everywhere, just around the school.”
“How are the weathermen going to explain that?”
Brent chuckled, reaching out his hand and letting a few flecks of snow fall through him. I took a deep breath and inhaled the chilly air. I was surprised to find I felt different. Something in me had changed. After a minute I realized, for the first time since I died, I felt content. Yes, there were things I longed to change, and people I wished to hold, but I could feel myself slowly moving past my life. It’s not that I was losing the memory of my loved ones, but I was coming to accept things as they were. There was a word to describe how I felt. Happy.
Brent turned to me in shock. “You’re happy.”
I stopped walking and bit my lip, turning to face him with a surprised grin. “I am. Or at least I really think I can be.” At that moment I noticed that the room that had once been mine was still dark, but only a little sadness squeezed my heart.
“You can’t already be losing your happiness,” Brent said as he formed a perfectly round snowball. He took aim at me. “This is a happiness-rejuvenating snow ball,” he explained in a very serious tone. He threw it at me, but with a wave of my hand, I forced it to miss its mark.
“Really?” My eyebrow arched in defiance as I created a snowball of my own. I tossed the snowball from hand to hand.
“Now you’re going to want to be careful with that,” Brent warned with a wag of his finger. I ignored the warning and tossed it at him. It didn’t even come close to hitting him thanks to a deflection on his part. Soon the world was nothing but cold wet snow being flung between us. He managed to ”hit” me twice but I returned the favor three times. Having snow go through you is an interesting experience; it made me feel briefly like a rain cloud. When I was tired I collapsed on the wet ground, breathing heavily.
“I haven’t laughed that much since I died,” I wheezed.
Brent plopped himself down beside me. “Me either.” He rested his head on his arms that were crossed above his head.
“Thank you for making this possible. Imagine how surprised everyone will be in the morning.”
“It was nothing.” Brent waved his hand across the sky and the snow began to slow.
I rolled toward Brent, resting my head on my hand. “Why do you always do that?”
“What?”
“Try to make it seem like this ability you have is no big deal?”
Brent stared up at the sky, watching the bright stars and moon. “I don’t know.”
I watched as with a flip of his fingers he began to roll a snowball. “Doesn’t matter. My ability wasn’t able to save us from dying.”
“It saved us when the mist attacked.”
Brent smiled warmly as he sat up. “It did do that,” he admitted—but amended his statement, “but only with your help.”
Brent continued to make his snowball until it got so big that I would no longer be able to get my arms around it. “It’s so cool you had this ability with the elements while you were alive. I never got the chance to try.”
Brent nodded. “Yeah, and unlike everyone else, I could do all of it off campus as well.”
“You mean all the body leaving and moving stuff was limited to campus?” I chewed on the inside of my cheek, thinking. “Are my abilities limited to here, too?”
Brent stretched his neck again rolling his head in a circle. “Maybe . . . probably.”
I looked around Pendrell with its sturdy trees, seasonal flowers, and brick buildings. It all seemed so normal, so unthreatening, but there must be something not right about it. I turned to Brent, curious. “What is it about Pendrell exactly that lets its students project?”
Brent laughed. “I was wondering if we were ever going to have this conversation.” I could hear him shuffling his thoughts, trying to organize them and decide where to start. “Well, Pendrell was founded by Christopher Pendrell,” he said. He seemed satisfied with his snowball and began to roll a new one. “He thought his sons needed to get into an east coast prep school to be able to get into the right college. He was devastated when they weren’t accepted. He set out to make Pendrell better than the schools that had snubbed them. He wanted the kids from his school to be smarter and more successful than any of his competitors. About this time his brother returned from a trip from South America with a plant called pankurem.”
“That’s the same plant my necklace is made of,” I interjected. I could picture the plant perfectly, its tiny leaves growing in little clusters, their edges jagged. I had seen those leaves many times and I knew them well; each one of the amber beads on my necklace had been hand crafted to include a leaf within it. “Vovó uses that plant all of the time in her work.”
“I know about it being in your necklace,” Brent said, still working on his second snowball.
“You knew?” I thought back to when he had seen my necklace and how it had reacted to him.
Brent listened to my thoughts. “Yeah, that stuff responds to people like us. It’s supposed to keep spirits safe, and can protect us while we project. I never found any but when I saw your necklace I knew what it was. Like some part of me recognized it.” The corners
of his mouth sagged. “I thought it would keep you safe.”
“Maybe it would have if I hadn’t been a slave to fashion.”
Brent tilted his head to the side considering before continuing. “Anyway, back to our story. His brother told him about the plant’s ability to help people reach their highest mental potential, helping them see connections they might have otherwise missed. Christopher was eager to learn more about the plant and invited a few people who knew about it to teach at the school. He planted it all around campus and started growing it in his sons’ rooms. He even put a small amount in their tea and food.”
“Well, I am sorry to discredit that theory, but that is the same plant I had in my necklace and it didn’t seem to do me any good at all.”
“Yara, please, I’m trying to tell you a story here.” Brent sighed. He examined the beach ball sized snowball, nodded, and began to make a third. I pretended to zip my lips and continued to listen. “So, not only did it help their grades, but it also had a side effect: they were able to leave their bodies. And they shared that secret with a select group of their friends. And thus began Pendrell’s secret society, the Clutch. Each class passed it on to the next group of students, until two boys died in a tragic fire. After that, some members tried to keep it going, but too many weird things started happening— guys getting hurt on their way to meetings, strange accidents when they met, just . . . weird things. Eventually things got too hard and they gave up. The society sort of petered out.”
“So you’re telling me that we had a secret socie
ty at our school? Really? You weren’t kidding about that? One that never made it into any of Cherie’s stories?”
“It was a secret,” Brent pointed out, exasperated.
“It must have been hard not to be able to project after they left the school.”
Brent confirmed this with a nod. “Every New Year they would all gather in the pool house and celebrate together. You see, once you could do it, you could always do it when you were here. The only problem was that you couldn’t do it when you anywhere else. Well, most of them couldn’t,” he added with a sheepish grin.
I tapped my lips with my finger, thinking. “Even if you had enough of the plant?”
“Yes— believe me, they tried everything,” Brent said. His third snowball was now also complete, around the size of a basketball.
“How does Thomas fit into all this?”
“I’m pretty sure he was Clutch and probably behind all the weird stuff after the fire. I don’t have any details on what scared them so badly though.”
“So how do you know all this?”
Brent shrugged. “I read it Neal’s journals.”
“How did he know?”
“Well, my grandpa was a member, but it had disbanded before my dad came along. And he couldn’t find anyone else interested and could only barely project himself.”
“So, genetics plays a role?”
“Seems that way. All the bushes on campus died years before dad started school here. He thought maybe that was why he had a hard time doing it . . . and he was afraid any of the plant left in the soil would have faded even more by the time Neal came along. I think my dad had hopes of Neal starting the Clutch again. He was worried not having the plant would make it impossible.”
“But how did we leave our bodies without the plant?”
“Well, my grandpa had a different theory: that the plant wasn’t really necessary to project, it just made it easier. He was convinced the plant’s most important purpose was to protect the body from harm while the spirit was gone. Once I read that in Neal’s journals, I started practicing it at home.”
“Wow.” I was once again impressed at his power.
He shook his head in annoyance. “It’s dangerous to leave your body. I was stupid. Not to mention, you did it with one lousy paragraph from a book. Believe me, I’m much more impressed by that. You didn’t spend hours sweating for nothing in your bedroom and accomplishing nothing but body odor.”
I laughed at the mental image. “It wasn’t me. It was my necklace and the step by step instructions from Thomas.”
“Maybe.” Brent piled his three snowballs on top of each other. “A snowman,” he said.
“I figured that out all by myself.” I spotted two thin branches I thought would work for the snowman’s arms and I commanded them over toward the piles of snow.
“How come your grandpa and dad didn’t tell you about this? How come you had to read it in Neal’s journals?”
Brent shrugged. “Not sure.”
I watched as five stones floated through the air and then became a pair of eyes and the buttons on the snowman’s chest. Brent stood and examined our little snowman. “It needs a good nose.”
I stood up, looking for something that would work while Brent made a mouth with two leaves.
“It was supposed to protect me,” I said, positioning an orange flower above his green lips. Sitting back down in the snow I examined our masterpiece. I didn’t really see it, though; my mind was still on my necklace. I wished I had it on now so I could examine it more carefully. I found it odd that, from another country, my grandmother had sent me a present that was tied not only to my death, but to the mystery of Pendrell itself. “Maybe the necklace did work.”
Brent turned to me, stunned. “How exactly do you explain that?”
“Well, it allowed me to the see the mist and save you, and it protected me that time it tried to attack me. Well I guess you helped that time, too. That is what all that frantic hand waving was about, right?”
“That frantic hand waving is a highly polished form of defense that saved your butt.”
“Anyway, as I was saying, it allowed me to save you, protected me and probably even made my Waker genes finally develop. The plant is supposed to protect pure spirits—” I blushed at the compliment I had just implied about myself. “—from being hurt by evil ones. I never really thought about the plant inside the necklace actually working, but it does seem that the necklace really helped me.” I scratched my collarbone where my necklace should have been and bit my lip. “Now that I think about it, Thomas couldn’t even touch me when he was pretending to be you . . . until I took it off. And if I hadn’t been so heedless of my grandmother’s request to wear it all the time, I might still be alive.”
“Or,” he countered, “it led you to your death by letting you leave your body and attracting the mist’s attention in the first place.”
“Or maybe it’s just helping me see connections that I haven’t figured out yet. My grandmother is a smart lady.”
Brent didn’t reply. He didn’t have to. I could feel how strongly he disagreed with me. He was silent for a while and I could hear him thinking. “Yara, do you believe in fate?”
“I suppose it depends on the context.”
“This plant. It can’t be coincidence that your great-greatgrandfather worked here and that this plant your family uses in their spiritual work also ends up here. I’m willing to bet he’s the one who brought it to the school. You said he was a science teacher, right?”
I nodded, starting to see where his line of thinking was going.
Brent continued, “Your family knows so much about herbs, it must have been him Christopher chose to teach him about the plant. Even though the plant eventually died, it still managed to somehow imbue its magical powers into the soil. Then you arrive here decades later, a girl who’s been raised with this stuff, who’s special even among those who are already considered special. It’s no wonder you astral projected so soon and so powerfully. I don’t think you could have stopped it even if you wanted to.” I blushed. He either didn’t notice or had the grace to pretend not to. “And you bring your unique gifts and a necklace infused with this plant to school,” he continued, pacing around. “Maybe you’re tied to all of this somehow.”
“My grandma didn’t want me to come to Pendrell. Grandpa always swore there were evil things happening here. My parents didn’t listen. I didn’t listen.” I bit my lip considering. “But if he was so sure, why didn’t he do anything about it? I mean couldn’t he have fought it?”
Brent looked at me like I had missed an important piece of information. “Didn’t you say only the girls in the family could see ghosts?” I nodded. “Maybe he knew there was something going on, but didn’t know where to look.”
I stared at him, shocked and open-mouthed. It all made sense; everything fit. How did I feel, though, about the idea that I was tied to every paranormal happening at Pendrell over the last sixty years? I didn’t have time to think too long on it though, because the pull of my reenactment was tugging at me. Once again, it was time for me to die.
Chapter 14
The next day, students were slushing through the melting snow, trying to make the most of it. Brent was watching the crowd carefully. I followed his gaze and found my eyes resting on Thomas, in Brent’s body, playing ball with Brent’s friends.
“So how does he go from piloting your body to controlling the mist? He was in the mist fighting when it attacked.”
“I’m guessing he has to leave his . . . my body to do it.”
I bounced on the tips of my toes. “That means the next time it attacks, you should search for your body while I—”
“Not going to happen,” Brent said through gritted teeth. “I’m not risking you to help myself.”
“But I . . .” I let my sentence trail off when I caught the fury in Brent’s eyes. “Okay. Okay. It was just an idea.”
“I don’t ever want you to take a chance like
that.” Brent seethed, still watching Thomas, who winked in our direction tossing a football to Travis. For the briefest of moments, Thomas’s green eyes flashed inside Brent’s brown ones.
“Was that wink meant for us?” I asked Brent, who was eyeing Thomas carefully.
“Yes,” Brent said as he folded his arms. Finally he turned and looked back at me. “How can everyone think he’s me?”
“Maybe because he is literally inside your body?”
Brent looked at me, exasperated. “Obviously there is that. But that’s not what I mean.”
“What is it?”
Brent dismissed the conversation with a wave of his hand. “It doesn’t matter.” Brent studied Thomas with disgust. “All of those girls are around, some of my buddies are with him. Can’t they tell it isn’t me?”
“They probably know something’s up. The girls just think you’re cute,” I said, ignoring the pleasure in his eyes. “And they’re still getting to know you; most of them didn’t really know you before you died.”
“I thought you knew me,” he admitted. “Turns out you didn’t. You thought he was me.”
“I didn’t,” I lied, examining my nails.
Brent gave me a knowing look. “You almost kissed him.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” My cheeks burned.
“I just thought . . .” Brent trailed off, his eyes looking hurt. “He isn’t anything like me. I guess that’s why he picked the fight with Steve; Steve would know. I mean, I would never act so cocky.”
I struggled to hold back a laugh. “Yes . . . you are so different that way.” The floodgates of my laughter burst open and I giggled uncontrollably for a full minute.
Brent cleared his throat and glared at me. “Are you quite done?” My laughter dried up immediately. “I can be a bit cocky, but mine is good-natured.” Brent peeked at me from the corner of his eyes, making sure I agreed with him.