Alden chuckled. “No. It’s because of the storm I told you about.”
I turned the leaf over and folded a crease in the center from bottom to tip. “The one where I supposedly died in some past life?”
“Yes.” He smiled.
Crazy Ghost Boy. I rolled my eyes. “Were people only a couple of feet tall back then?”
“No. The ground has been raised several feet. The bottom two or three feet of the buildings are underground. The headstones look normal because they were placed on top of the new dirt. The mausoleums were too difficult to raise. Some areas of the island closer to the Gulf are more than fifteen feet higher above sea level than they were in 1900.”
Working from the outside in, I folded the leaf into accordion pleats. “Did the storm raise the ground level?”
“No. Men did. After the storm, they built the seawall and raised the level of the island by pumping a slurry of sand and water from the bay and harbor onto the island. They lifted some of the buildings up on screw jacks before they filled underneath. It was amazing.”
He didn’t seem like a high school boy. “How do you know all of this stuff?”
“I was there,” he reminded me as he stood.
I dropped my leaf fan and hopped to my feet. “Oh, no. You stay right where you are.”
“I’m not crazy, Rose . . . Lenzi. I can prove it.” My heart shifted into overdrive as he moved toward me. “Let me put my soul in your body. It will only take a second. Then you’ll believe me.” He grasped my hands, and that electrical sensation hummed up my arms and into my chest again. I wanted to lean into him and have that current run all the way through me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Zak yelled from several yards away.
Alden tightened his hold on my hands and only smiled in response.
I jerked my hands away and stepped back from Alden, bumping into Zak, who roughly put his arm around my shoulders, causing me to jump.
“Is this guy giving you trouble, babe?” Zak growled, squeezing me territorially and dropping his guitar case. I could feel his muscles twitching. Zak wasn’t totally sober, but he was totally pissed. He was going to flatten Alden. A bona fide testosterone fest was not the way I wanted to celebrate my birthday.
“No! No, Zak. Everything’s cool. We were just talking. He’s, uh . . . an old friend.” I was glad my voice didn’t squeak.
Alden straightened to his full height. He didn’t appear frightened of Zak at all. “Yeah, we’ve known each other practically forever.”
Zak’s fingers clenched into a fist on my shoulder.
“It’s okay, Zak,” I assured him.
“Like hell, it is.” Zak took a step toward Alden, who didn’t even blink. In fact, he smiled. Zak was no taller than Alden, but he was much larger, industrial strength. I cringed when I pictured the potential outcome if Zak went all tough-guy.
I grabbed the back of his shirt. “No, Zak. Please. It’s my birthday.” I wrapped my arms around his waist, doing my best to convince him to let it go. “For me?” His muscles relaxed, and I dropped my arms from around him.
Alden held his hand out. “I’m Alden Thomas.”
Zak didn’t shake his hand, but pulled me to him instead. “I’m Zak Reynolds. Lenzi’s boyfriend.”
Alden winked at me. “Yeah, I kinda picked up on that.”
My phone rang. I wiggled loose from Zak’s possessive grip and pulled my cell out of my purse. It was Mom. “Hello?”
Even through the bad connection, my mom’s anger came through loud and clear. “I’ve crossed the causeway and I’m on Broadway. Where in the cemetery are you, Lenzi?”
“I’m at the gate near the corner of Fortieth and Broadway.”
My mom disconnected the call. She was in total Momzilla mode. This was going to be bad. I shoved my phone back into my purse.
“She’s almost here,” I said, walking toward the gate.
“You called your mom to come get you? Why didn’t you just wake me up, Lenzi?”
I stopped and turned to face Zak. “I tried.”
He strode over and placed his hands on my shoulders. There was none of the electric current I felt when Alden touched me, only weight. “I’m sorry, babe. Really. Just call her back and tell her I’ll take you home.”
I crossed my arms. “No, Zak. I’m not getting in a car with you. You can ride with Mom and me, or we can follow you to make sure you get home okay.”
He looked over his shoulder at Alden, who cocked an eyebrow.
His grip tightened on my shoulders almost to the point of pain. “I’m fine to drive. And I don’t need your mom to follow me like I’m some baby who can’t find my way home.” He pushed me away. “I’m outta here.” He staggered to the gate, awkwardly scaled it, and landed with a thud on his feet on the other side, catching the bars for balance. He made it to his car, and after cranking the engine several times before it started, pulled away from the curb.
I rubbed my shoulders where Zak had grabbed me and watched him round the corner at the end of the block. He’d told me he had a bad temper, but this was the first time I’d really seen it.
“Well. He’s quite the catch,” Alden said.
I stomped past him and snatched Zak’s guitar case handle, jerking it from the pavement where he’d dropped it.
Alden followed me to the gate. “Please let me show you. If you don’t believe me after we soul-share, I’ll leave you alone forever.”
I shoved both guitars through and grabbed the iron bars. “Forget it.” I struggled awkwardly over the gate, tearing the seat of my jeans on one of the pointy finials at the top. I shimmied to the ground and watched as Alden scaled the wall as if it were nothing, landing lightly beside me.
Mom’s green minivan rounded the corner and came to an abrupt halt in front of us. I could only pick up one guitar at a time because I was covering the hole in my jeans with my free hand. Alden reached in front of me to open the sliding side door of the van and put Zak’s guitar in after I’d put Dad’s on the seat. Was he snickering? He opened the front passenger door for me, and I flopped into the seat.
Mom leaned over to get a look at him, lowering the window as I slammed the door. “Who are you?”
He leaned in through the window, too close for my comfort. He smelled like mint and the leather coat he was wearing. “I’m Alden Thomas. Lenzi had a problem with Zak, so I stayed with her to make sure she was okay until you arrived. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He extended his arm across me while I stifled a groan as my mom shook his hand.
“I’m Julia Anderson, Lenzi’s mother.” She dropped his hand and immediately lit into me. “Why on earth are you in the cemetery after midnight? Making me drive all the way from Bellaire in the middle of the night! You’re lucky it’s your birthday, Lenzi. I had half a mind to leave you here!”
Alden rapped his knuckles on the door of the minivan. “Mrs. Anderson, I apologize for interfering, but Lenzi’s had a rough night. I doubt she’ll do something like this again. Why don’t you wait to discuss it until you’ve both had a good night’s sleep and time to reflect?”
Mom and I stared at him openmouthed.
“It was a pleasure to meet you,” he continued. “Bellaire. We are neighbors. I look forward to seeing you again, Lenzi. Good night.” He got into a gray Audi parked farther up the street and drove off.
I crossed my arms defensively across my chest, anticipating the onslaught of mother artillery. None came.
Mom pulled out on the street, looking somewhat dazed. “Alden seems like a very nice boy. The kind of boy I’d like to see you hanging out with.”
I almost laughed out loud. If she only knew! A reincarnated, soul-sharing lunatic. Ghost Boy—every mother’s dream.
FIVE
I spent the weekend avoiding Mom and doing homework. I’d fallen so far behind in my classes recently, I felt like I’d never get caught up.
I decided to take the Santa Claus approach to Alden’s reincarnated ghost mediat
or story. When I was a little girl, Dad told me that Santa Claus would come as long as I believed he was real. Once I no longer believed, Santa stopped coming. This was how I was going to handle this ghost business. I didn’t believe, so they were not real and would stop coming.
The problem was that approach wasn’t working. The voices were getting worse, despite my constant mantra that they weren’t real. And despite the Xanax too. I couldn’t decide which was worse—going crazy or actually hearing ghosts.
My cell rang right as I finished a hideous trig worksheet. A lump formed in my throat as I stared at Zak’s name on the screen. I hadn’t heard from him in two days.
Zak was the first person I met when I moved back from Galveston three months ago. He was working at a shoe store in the mall and convinced me to buy an outrageous pair of strappy red heels, flirting the whole time. I was immediately attracted to his deep blue eyes and gorgeous smile. I had never worn those shoes, I realized, as his name flickered on the screen.
I decided to not confront him about the cemetery. I couldn’t risk losing him too. “Hi, Zak,” I answered, tapping my pencil on the table.
There was a long pause, and I thought for a moment he’d hung up. “Hey, babe. I . . . um . . . I’m really sorry about Friday night. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “It’s okay, Zak.”
“Can I make it up to you?”
My fingers touched a piece of paper, and I instinctively began to fold. “Sure.”
“How about I take you for seafood in Kemah? You like roller coasters, right?”
I made triangles from the edge moving in, tension ebbing from me into the folds. “Love roller coasters. Sounds fun.” I turned the paper over and repeated.
“Awesome. I know you have school tomorrow, so we’ll make it an early night. I’ll pick you up at six o’clock, okay?”
“Great.” I pulled on the edges of the triangles slightly, without looking.
He was quiet for a moment. “You okay? You seem distracted.”
I looked down at my hands. My trig worksheet was now a crane. “Yeah, I’m great. I was just finishing some homework.” I unraveled the bird and smoothed the worksheet flat. “I’ll see you at six.”
After changing clothes and strapping on those red heels, I watched for him out the narrow, vertical window next to the front door. Mom was still mad about the cemetery, so to avoid a scene, I didn’t tell her good-bye when I took off.
It’s a miracle I made it to the car without falling flat on my face. Heels are not my thing, but Zak’s grin was worth it. The door to his beat-up Delta 88 heaved a metallic groan as he opened it for me. “Nice shoes!”
“Yeah, this slick salesman at the shoe store convinced me I couldn’t live without them.”
Zak grinned and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me against him. His warmth ran all the way down my body. “What else did he convince you you couldn’t live without?”
“Um.” I pulled away and slid into the car. “Dinner.”
His mood on the surface was light, but he wasn’t his usual easygoing self. His smile never reached his eyes. We made small talk on the forty-minute drive to Kemah, covering every subject with the exception of the voices in my head and what had happened at the cemetery.
When we pulled off the highway, the noise in my head became so loud, my eyes watered. I don’t know if it was because there wasn’t as much road noise or if it was really louder. Individual voices would fade in and out periodically, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
“You okay, babe?” Zak pulled off into an office parking lot.
The voices continued to crescendo until I clamped my hands over my ears and held my breath to keep from screaming.
“Is it the voices?”
I nodded and uncovered my ears so I could unbuckle and reach my purse on the floor. I was shaking so hard, I couldn’t manage the zipper. Zak leaned over, unzipped it, and rooted around until he found the bottle of pills. He handed me a pill and I bit off a quarter and swallowed it dry, dropping the remainder loose in my purse.
“Just relax, okay? Give it time to work,” he said.
He rubbed my shoulders while I waited for the pill to take effect, which didn’t take very long since I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I hated the numbing effect, but it did make the voices return to background static.
“Better?” he said, brushing the hair from my forehead.
I nodded.
He started the car and pulled back out on the road. “You should really tell your mom about this. I’m worried about you.”
Just like with the background noises in my head, I pretended not to hear him.
The Kemah Boardwalk was an entertainment complex built on the northwest side of Galveston Bay, far inland from the Gulf, halfway between Houston and Galveston Island. There were clubs, restaurants, and amusement rides.
We sat outside on the second-story deck of a casual seafood restaurant looking over the water. Sailboats, Jet Skis, and wet bikes zipped over the surface of the water below, while seagulls and pigeons bummed food from the restaurant guests. The cool breeze blowing off the water felt good.
Zak usually sat beside me when we ate, but today he sat across from me. The waitress placed our food on the table, and he leaned closer. His eyes were the color of the darkening sky behind him.
“You’re still mad at me for what happened in the cemetery, aren’t you, Lenzi?”
“I’m not mad.” I picked up the ketchup and unscrewed the lid. “I’m disappointed.” I tipped the ketchup bottle, wanting to kick myself for how lame that sounded. When nothing came out, I gave the bottle a couple of whacks on the bottom. “I sound like my mom, huh?”
Zak chuckled and took the bottle from me. “I deserve it.” He tipped the bottle at a slighter angle and poured a puddle of ketchup next to my fries.
I cut a bite of fish with my fork. “You do stupid things that are totally out of character when you’re drinking.”
He screwed the top back on and set it down. “Like what?”
“Like trying to make out at my father’s grave.”
He pushed his fries around. “Yeah, that was pretty stupid.”
“It was.”
He pointed at me with a shrimp. “But you can’t really blame me. Come on, Lenzi. It was your birthday. You were so . . . hot. You are so hot. I can’t help myself.” He dragged his shrimp through my ketchup, winked, and popped it in his mouth.
A blush burned my cheeks. I was probably the color of the ketchup on my plate.
He grinned. “You are especially hot in those shoes.” He reached under the table and ran his fingers over my knee, causing tingles to skitter up my leg.
“You’re mine,” a disembodied male voice said from behind him. I swiveled to the side, pulling out of Zak’s reach.
“Why did you pull away?” he asked.
Heart hammering, I rearranged the French fries on my plate and searched for an answer. “Too public” was all I could come up with. I really didn’t want Zak to know that even with the Xanax, I was still hearing voices. He might tell Mom. I couldn’t bear that.
The voice laughed from behind me, and I flinched.
Zak’s brow furrowed. “You okay?”
I reached for my glass to buy more time. “Yeah, I’m just jumpy, that’s all.”
He held his empty glass up and signaled to the waitress to bring another iced tea. “I need to go to the bathroom.” He stood. “You sure you’re okay?”
I ran my finger down the condensation on the outside of my glass. “I’m fine. Really.”
He leaned over and kissed me. “Okay, then. Be right back.” He stopped to look back at me for a minute before disappearing down the patio stairs.
I felt a cold breath on my neck. “I want you. You will surrender to me,” the voice hissed. I spun around and found no one.
I didn’t know why this voice was so much more terrifying than t
he others, but I instinctively felt I was in danger. It was hard to breathe, like the air had gotten thicker. The thing’s cold respiration continued on my skin, making my flesh crawl. I covered the back of my neck with my hands.
The middle-aged waitress stared at me as she set the tea down on the table and picked up Zak’s empty glass. She pulled a straw out of her apron pocket and placed it on the table. “You okay, hon?”
I nodded.
“Well, just let me know if y’all need anything.”
As the waitress wandered off to the next table, the thing breathed on the right side of my face. I shuddered, and gooseflesh prickled down my arms.
“Surrender,” the voice demanded.
The woman at the table next to me stopped eating and gave me a you-are-totally-nuts look. And she was right. I needed to get another pill down and hide someplace until it took effect.
I sprinted to the bathroom, clutching my purse. Sinking down to the floor of a stall, I focused on staying in control. My hands shook, making it difficult to unzip the purse. I dug around in the bottom and found the bottle of pills. I fumbled with the childproof cap and instead of just taking a quarter this time, I swallowed a whole pill.
The thing breathed on my neck again. My scream ricocheted off the hard surfaces of the bathroom, amplifying my terror. I jumped to my feet and backed into the corner, wrapping my arms around myself. When I clamped my eyes shut, an image of Alden filled my brain. Alden! In the cemetery, he’d told me to just tell the bogeybaby to go away, and it did. Maybe it would work with this thing too.
My voice sounded like a cartoon character with a speech impediment. Fear personified. “G-g-go away. I w-won’t surrender to you. G-go away.”
It laughed.
“Now! I mean it.”
I stood in the bathroom stall for a long time waiting for the next terrifying assault. The ghost, or whatever it was, seemed to have taken off. Maybe it was gone, or maybe the Xanax had taken effect and I’d stopped hallucinating. Either way, I washed my face at the sink, praying the voice wouldn’t return.