I gulped down a mouthful of muffin and decided to just throw it out there. “Everything you know about Paul—and Danielle. All of it.”
He cocked his head. “Can you be more specific? I can tell you Paul’s birth date, or Danielle’s favorite color, but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for.”
That was a better reaction than I’d hoped for. He seemed cool with it, just cautious. Maybe Tim wasn’t so bad, at least when you could do something he wanted.
“Stuff most people wouldn’t know,” I said. “Stuff the two of them wouldn’t want most people to know. Even if it’s just something you heard, and you don’t know for sure. It’s all good.”
“And I guess this is for more of that vigilante stuff you do.”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
He turned the cup in his hands, making the foam swirl. “You know, Paul and I aren’t so close. Maybe we used to hang out more, but even then . . . it’s not like we talk about a lot of deep secret stuff. Why him and Danielle, anyway?”
“Danielle and I go back,” I said. “I owe her a few.”
“So this isn’t about the good of the world at large. It’s personal.”
I stiffened. “I think the world at large benefits from having people’s crap brought out in the open. So are you going to help me?” I started to stand up. “’Cause if not, I do have a class to get to.”
“Hey, sit down,” Tim said. “It’s not that big a deal. I’d pick Mom over any of them any day. And I guess I already owe you for yesterday.”
I sat, and folded my arms on the table, ready to listen. Tim set down his mug.
“What I know about Paul . . . he makes a lot of jokes about messing around with other girls, but I don’t think he really has, not for a while. Never mentioned anyone or any time specifically.” He paused. “He did start calling his car the lovemobile, so maybe he’s got something going on there.”
“What kind of car?”
“Mustang GT,” Tim said. “Red. Coupe, not convertible. He usually parks it down the street instead of in the school parking lot. Afraid some careless student driver like me will smash it.”
“Well, that’s something.” I’d have to tell Norris and Bitzy to keep an eye on that car. Who knew what he’d been getting away with out there? “Anything else? It doesn’t have to be girl stuff.”
Tim considered, nudging the mug in a slow circle with his thumb.
“Other than Danielle, and the joking, all he really talks about is sports. He’s on the basketball team and the track team—you probably already know that. Um, he was pretty pissed about not making the athlete of the year list, since this is his last year at Frazer.”
My lips quirked.
“What?” Tim said. “That’s good?”
“I just know a few things Paul doesn’t.” Like that he’d originally been on the nominations list. Like which of his friends had gotten him scratched off. “So how about Danielle?”
“Not much to tell there. I mostly only see her when it’s a bunch of us together. She’s going to run for student council next year, she says, and she had some job at the mall that fell through. She seemed upset about that. Otherwise”—he shook his head—“that’s all I’ve got. Honestly, yeah, she talks kind of harsh sometimes, but I’ve also seen her do stuff like spend her lunch hour helping some girl she barely knows get a stain out of her shirt.”
Naturally Danielle showed off her generous spirit when people who counted were around to see. I raised my eyebrows. “That’s it? You spend all that time with those guys—”
Tim grimaced, and I felt a tiny hiccup of guilt. Then, slowly, a hint of a smile crept across his face. It made me more uncomfortable than the grimace had.
“You know,” he said, “there’s a party at Matti’s place tomorrow night. I wasn’t planning on going, I see enough of those guys as it is, but if you came—”
“Me? A party?” The closest thing to a party I’d been to in four years was that last junior high dance, when every girl refused to stand within five feet of me and the boys took turns blowing spitballs at me and muttering lewd comments as they brushed by. “But . . . I—They wouldn’t even let me come in, would they?”
“Sure, if you came with me.” He looked at me curiously. “I figured you could scope out all the gossip you wanted. And I wouldn’t be stuck with only them for company. But it’s not like you have to. It was just an idea.”
Great, now he thought I was chicken. I gritted my teeth. What was my problem? It’d be spectacular. All the biggest poseurs in one house, getting drunk and stoned, defenses down. I could clear up more crap in one night than I had all year.
And still my heart was making nervous patters at the base of my throat.
“I’ll consider it,” I said.
“You should come,” he said, his smile growing. “It would be . . . interesting, anyway.”
A shop attendant shuffled over and gathered our mugs. “You want anything else?” Tim asked.
“Nah, I’m ready to get out of here.”
He hesitated. “So, ah—my place?”
A thought raced through my mind: I had all he could give me, I could walk off without looking back, without having to deal with this dead person who wanted nothing to do with me. As fast as it had come, I shook it away. Tim had done his bit, and I’d be as full of crap as the rest of them if I skipped out on mine.
“Why not?” I said. Relief washed over his face so fast I almost thought he’d start bawling. “I’ll do what I can,” I added quickly. “She was a little . . . shy, last time. I can’t promise this’ll work out.”
“Hey,” Tim said, raising his hands, “I’m not picky. I’ll take whatever you can get. You trust me to drive now?”
“I guess.” I trusted him enough that I’d rather risk five minutes in the car than walking with another half hour of awkward conversation.
Naturally, Tim managed to work in a whole heap of awkwardness anyway. “If you don’t mind me asking,” he said, pushing back his chair to get up, “about the spirits and stuff. How’s that work? You just see them? Since always?”
My throat closed up, and I turned away as I stood so he couldn’t see my face. My fingers mashed the last few crumbs of muffin into powder. “Yes, I see them,” I said. “No, I haven’t always.” Only since the morning after Paige’s junior prom.
I’d replayed the memory so many times that it ran like a movie in my head. That night, I’d stayed up into the wee hours listening for the click of the door and the shuffle of Paige’s shoes in the hallway, then woken up late and groggy in the morning, realizing I’d drifted off without meaning to. When I’d plodded past Paige’s half-open door to the stairs, she was there. I only got a glimpse of her, curled up on her bed, wailing so loud I thought they must have been able to hear her down the street. Nothing new. Some tragedy at the prom, I figured—Larry had broken up with her, or kissed some other girl, or she’d spilled punch on her gorgeous dress. Odd that Mom wasn’t in there comforting her, but maybe Paige had been inconsolable. It had happened before.
Then I reached the bottom of the stairs and heard Mom sniffling in the dining room. My skin started prickling. Mom never cried, not where anyone could see her. Where was Dad? Panic hit me, and I bolted into the dining room.
Dad was there, standing behind Mom, squeezing her shoulders. Mom swiped at her eyes with a tissue.
“Oh, Cassie,” she said.
Dad took over. “Cassie”—his voice creaked—“your sister—”
What? Paige was sick? Hurt? But she’d be okay, she always was.
He cleared his throat. “Your sister . . . died last night.”
I stared at them. The words hit me and stuck. They couldn’t quite wriggle into my head. Mom and Dad were wrong. Paige wasn’t dead. She was upstairs. I’d just seen her—hadn’t I just seen her?
“Cassie,” Mom murmured.
I fled, back up the stairs to Paige’s door, and peered inside. There she was. Sobbing, quietly now, into
her pillow. I pushed open the door, gearing up to tell her to get her butt downstairs and sort things out, and that was when I noticed. The edge of the pillow, the rose-print sheets, they showed right through her. She sat up as the door tapped the wall, and I could see the maple headboard through her pink-tinged face.
“Cassie?” she said. “Cassie, everyone’s crazy! They won’t talk to me; they won’t even look at me. Can you ask Mom what’s wrong? I can’t get her to tell me—”
I welcomed my newfound talent by yanking the door shut and running straight into my closet, where everything was dark and solid, and nothing outside seemed real. I did it, I kept thinking, I wanted her gone, and now she is. To everyone but me. I did this.
“Cass? Hey, Cass?” Tim was saying. I jerked my head up. We were at the corner of Earl Street—somehow I’d arrived there.
“I was just thinking,” I said.
“Yeah, I noticed.” He ducked his head. “I mean, I’m sorry I asked, I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine. You wanted to know when it happened. Four years ago. Right after my sister died. The how part, I don’t know. It didn’t come with a manual.”
I pushed my hair behind my ears and started walking toward my house so briskly I left Tim behind. After a second, he caught up.
“Wow,” he said. “Must have been rough. I’m sorry about your sister. Do your parents know?”
I sputtered a laugh. “What do you think? I was so freaked at first that I tried to tell them, and that just got me sent to a shrink. Far’s they know, it was a brief, grief-stricken episode that will never repeat itself.” There were some things parents weren’t built to handle. Having a twelve-year-old daughter babbling that she can see her sister’s ghost must be one of them.
At the car, Tim unlocked the passenger door first. I wanted to sink into the seat and lean my head against the window, but not with Tim watching. He was already looking at me funny. I had to pull myself together.
“What’s it to you, all that stuff, anyway?” I said.
“It’s interesting.” He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine coughed. “I don’t meet a whole lot of people who talk to the dead, you know. Do you . . . are there other things, too, that you—”
“I can look for your mom. That’s all that’s important to you, isn’t it? I’m not a walking freak show.”
“I don’t think you’re a freak.”
“Right.”
“Well, I don’t.” He paused for a second to check his blind spot as he eased out of the driveway. “Interesting and freak aren’t the same thing. My mom used to say, ‘Every person you meet’s like a fascinating story you’ve never read before.’”
“That’s real wise,” I said.
“I don’t know if she was wise,” Tim said. “But she was . . . good. If you needed her, she’d drop everything. She was always there. That’s more than I can say for anyone else I know.”
“Must have been nice. And it was just you, no brothers or sisters?”
He nodded. “She said every family she knew with more than one kid, the parents always ended up playing favorites, even if they didn’t mean to. She didn’t want that to happen.”
Well, I could back her up on that one. “So she was good and selfless and all—didn’t she do anything for herself?”
“It was for her. She really liked helping, being there for people—she worked at the seniors’ home, volunteered at the homeless shelter around the holidays. Is it so hard to believe someone would want to do all that?”
I shrugged. “It’s hard to believe she didn’t have anything that was just for her.”
“Well . . .” His eyes went distant as he scanned the road. “She liked music. I used to come home and she’d be singing along to some oldies album. And she took piano lessons for a while. I think the keyboard’s still in the basement. . . .”
His voice halted, and I remembered what—or rather, who—we’d come across in that basement yesterday.
“Since we’re talking about fascinating stories,” I said, “what about this thing with you and your dad?”
Tim slammed on the brake just in time for a stop sign, jolting me against the back of my seat. As he waited for the other car to make its left turn, he flexed his fingers against the wheel.
“What do you mean?” he said, his voice hardening.
“I’m not blind. Yesterday you looked like you’d rather stab him than say hello. And you told me yourself you couldn’t talk to him.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to talk about him either, okay?”
“You think I live to share stories about how I see dead people?”
“Just leave it alone,” he snapped.
I tipped my head back and looked up at the faded gray of the car ceiling. “Whatever you say.”
The car puttered forward, Tim staring grimly ahead. Figured. It was like that day at the park, all over again. He was all gung-ho to hear about the freaky parts of my life, but a little question about his family issues—
“He left,” Tim said, suddenly. He stopped, and I waited. “When Mom got sick, and we knew she wasn’t going to get better, he couldn’t take it. Said it was too hard for him, watching her get weaker . . . so he took off. The hospital moved her back home toward the end, and he moved out. Stayed in a motel somewhere. I didn’t see him for months. He only came back when she was in the hospital again for the last few days. Okay?”
My mouth fell open, but it was empty. I had no words for that.
“He—You were on your own?” I managed.
“Well, there was a nurse in ten hours a day, and my aunt, my mom’s sister, spent a lot of nights. It helped having her there.”
“What a jerk. You must hate him.”
Tim said nothing, his eyes fixed on the windshield. A streak of cloud was sliding in from the lake, white with a gray belly. He took the turn onto his street smoothly and parked outside his house in silence.
I took a deep breath. After that whole conversation-turned-confessional, I felt as wrung out as a dishcloth. Time to snap out of it, focus. Tim’s mom couldn’t escape into the basement this time, but nothing would stop her from sinking into the walls or floating up through the roof. Maybe I had done something to scare her off yesterday, but she wouldn’t remember me today, anyway. Maybe she was just scared of people in general. I had to assume, no matter what I did, she might not stick around long once I got inside. I’d have to start pitching my case the second I walked in the door.
“I think you should stay outside for now,” I said to Tim. “Give me a chance to explain things to her.”
Tim frowned. “You can’t explain with me there?”
“If she’s nervous, the more people there are, the harder it’ll be to get her to listen. Soon as she’s ready, I’ll shout for you.”
“Okay.” Getting out of the car, Tim glanced up at the house, his mouth tight. “But as soon as you can—”
“Of course,” I said. “What have I got to talk to her about?”
I waited by the car while he loped down the driveway to check the garage. “He’s definitely gone,” he yelled back to me. “We’re good to go.”
We walked up to the porch, and he handed me his keys. “Go ahead. It’s the big silver one. I’ll wait here.”
I jingled through the keys until I found the one I needed. The lock stuck for a second, then clicked. The door drifted open.
“Mrs. Reed?” I called, hopping over the doorstep into the darkness of the hall. A wisp of powdered sugar lingered beneath the dust. I dropped the key ring onto the shoe rack, shoved the door shut with my foot, and lowered my voice. “Mrs. Reed, I need you to come out for a minute, for Tim. I know you can hear me, and if you’ll talk to me I can hear you, too. It’s just for Tim, I promise. I think he wants to know that you’re . . . okay, or something. Now that he thinks you’re here, I don’t think he’s going to give up, so let’s get it over with, all right?”
The taste of sugar tingled on my tongue, and the living room
brightened, faintly. I stepped through the doorway. “Mrs. Reed?”
The dining room was filled with an airy glow, and inside the glow a woman floated. Her white summer dress rippled around her willowy body. She glided toward me, stopping on the threshold with her hands clasped in front of her. Beneath the curls of her honey-blond hair, her face was thin and wan. She stared at me with eyes the same gray-blue as Tim’s.
She was the prettiest dead person I’d ever seen. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought she was an angel.
“Who are you?” she said, her voice mild but uneasy.
I exhaled slowly. “I’m . . . sort of a friend of Tim’s. We both go to Frazer. He asked me to come.”
“Why? What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything,” I said. “It’s Tim, it was his idea. He just wants . . . well, I don’t know exactly what he wants, but I think he’d like to talk to you, knowing you’re here. He’s waiting outside. Will you stay here if I go get him?”
Her forehead creased. “This isn’t a good idea. You shouldn’t have let him—”
“Hey, wait a sec.” I held up my hands. “I didn’t ‘let him’ anything. I’m only here because he made me come. Your son’s a stubborn guy, you know.”
She dimmed, the shadows seeping through her. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. You can’t understand. I watch him looking for me, just sitting there in my room or down here, wasting all that time when he should be out with his friends, or getting ready for college, or . . . It’s hurting him, and it’s my fault. If I could go, if I wasn’t here at all . . .”
She had no more control over that than Paige or the others did, of course. Though I couldn’t help wondering if it might have something to do with her after all, something she didn’t even realize. If her worries for Tim were holding her here, just like he couldn’t let go of her. Of course, what dying person didn’t have worries? But if she’d known just how messed up he’d be, between his dad taking off and his friends backing away . . . Maybe the pain on his face had been enough to make anyone want to stick around and watch over him.
I shook the thoughts away. I had no way of knowing, and it wouldn’t change anything anyway.