The Ghost and the Goth

13 Alona

I stalked to the end of the main hall, reaching the double glass doors, and stopped. I had no idea what to do or where to go next. Actually, to be honest, I was a bit surprised to find myself intact still. I hadn’t exactly been nice to Killian back there, but then again, I was fighting for the right. He hadn’t spent the last few hours hearing all the stories, seeing all the faces …

Look, I’m no soft touch for hard-luck stories. You make your own bad choices, you have to live (or not) with the consequences. But most of the people I’d talked to earlier were resigned to their fate. They’d come to talk to me after hearing rumors about Killian’s ability — the dead apparently love to gossip — on the slimmest possibility of hope. Some of them had been here for years, watching helplessly as everyone they’ve ever known or loved had moved on or spiraled into a half life of misery and regret.

Tricia, the girl who’d given me the pen and paper, had been stuck since 1988 (the leg warmers would have been a big clue even if she hadn’t told me). She’d chased after their family’s dog, Mooshi, when she went out into the street, but Tricia had slipped on an icy spot and hit her head. She’d died almost instantly. All she wanted now was to tell her “little” brother that it wasn’t his fault. He’d left the door open, just a crack, after he and Tricia had come home from school, and Mooshi had nosed her way out. He was only eight, and it was just a dumb mistake. But even now, he still blamed himself for Tricia’s death, their parents’ divorce, and every bad thing that had come after that. According to Tricia, he’d tried to kill himself twice.

We, Killian and I, could change that. We could tell Dave what his sister wanted him to know, helping both of them at once. And yeah, maybe it wouldn’t work every time. Maybe some of the spirits were deceiving themselves about what was really holding them here, but what about the one or two or five that weren’t?

A swirl of black in motion in the H-branch to the right caught my attention. I spun around, expecting to see Gloomy Gus coming to shred me for real this time. Instead, it was just Joonie emerging from the bathroom, her book bag clutched tightly to her chest. Her face was pale, except for around her eyes where it was red. She looked like she’d been crying.

Tucking her head down, Joonie scurried toward the library. I followed. Killian had said that there was no need to trail her. He knew her schedule on Fridays. He’d never bothered to explain it to me, though, so I’d have to do the detective work on my own. No problem. Wasn’t like I had anything else to do right now.

“Hey, Alona!” Creepy janitor guy waved to me with great cheer as I passed him once more mopping the carpet.

God, if Killian didn’t come through on at least some of those requests, my reputation was going to be shot all to pieces. I waved back and kept going, following Joonie through the library doors and to one of the computer stations against the wall.

With a nervous glance over her shoulder, she set her bag, now zipped, carefully on the floor next to her.

“Oh, good,” I told her. “Now you worry about who might see it.”

In a few clicks, she was on the Internet and then Google. Her search topics? Comas, ghosts, contacting the spirit world, and my personal favorite, reincarnation.

I snorted. No, Joonie wasn’t involved in this mess, not at all. I wished I could print it all out and show it to Killian. He’d never believe me otherwise, finding some other perfectly rational explanation for her behavior that did not include raising a really pissed-off spirit or whatever the heck Gus was.

The question was, why? Why would she go to such dangerous lengths? Her last stop on the Web provided one possible answer.

After a quick glance over her shoulder to check on the location of Mr. Mueller, the librarian, Joonie typed in a MySpace Web address. A bright pink page appeared on the monitor, along with the first few crashingly loud notes of some former American Idol pop song. While Joonie fumbled for the mouse to turn down the volume, I leaned in to take a better look. To my surprise, the girl in the profile photo looked vaguely familiar. Cute in that innocent farm girl kind of way. Straight, mousy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail (with some blond highlights and a decent cut, it would be acceptable), pale skin (hello, Mystic Tan?), and light brown eyes that would have been striking, if not pretty, with the right application of products. The little box that listed her vital stats put her at sixteen, possibly a sophomore, maybe a junior. That would explain why I didn’t know her, even though her page claimed she went to Groundsboro High.

I frowned. Why did I remember her face? Something niggled at the back of my brain but wouldn’t move forward into the light.

Joonie clicked to view her pictures, and as the images scrolled across the screen, one major piece of the puzzle dropped into place. A few vaguely out-of-focus pictures of a dog and a much too childlike bedroom with princess wallpaper passed by, and then I saw people I recognized: Joonie sticking her studded tongue out at the camera; Killian with his arm protectively around the girl as she stretched her arms out to take a portrait of the two of them together. Killian grinned into the camera, revealing those perfectly white and even teeth. I’d never seen him that happy. She wasn’t facing the camera, though. She’d tipped her head back to look up at him, adoration shining from her plain face.

My gaze snapped back up to the Web address. Lilslife. Lil. Lily. The one I’d been hearing so much about — this was her. She was — what? — Killian’s girlfriend? He said they were just friends; I heard him tell his sketchy psychiatrist that. But still …

An uncomfortable prickle started in my chest. I wrapped my arms around myself. It wasn’t jealousy, though. No. What was there to be jealous of here? A pseudo-goth guy and his plain-Jane maybe-girlfriend? Just because I’d never looked at anyone like that, not even Chris on our best days, and now it was too late because I was dead, and Killian had never smiled at me—

A loud sniffle from Joonie interrupted my thoughts. “I’m sorry, Lil. I’m trying,” she whispered. Her black eye makeup ran in streaks down her cheeks. She glanced back over her shoulder, checking on Mr. Mueller’s position, then turned back to face the computer, kissed the tip of her index finger, and pressed it against Lily’s mouth in the picture.

Whoa. What was going on here?

While I gaped at her, Joonie exited the browser and logged off the computer. She stood up, scooped her bag off the floor, and strode to the library door — her skull necklace clanking — with what appeared to be a renewed sense of purpose.

I, of course, followed, my thoughts all abuzz. If Lily was Killian’s girlfriend, Joonie sure had a strange way of showing it. I mean, seriously. I’m not afraid of gay people, guys or girls. I don’t think every lesbian in school wants me; I know they do, just like all the straight guys. But I also know that they aren’t going to trap me in the corner of the girls’ bathroom and try to convert me. Please, Alona Dare as a resident of Lesbos? I don’t think so. I like the male form a little too much for that. Plus, I hate flannel.

Joonie’s behavior was just … weird. Also, clearly, something had happened to this Lily chick. When they talked about her, it was in this hushed and holy tone. Was she dead? Then why had Joonie said something to Killian about visiting her in the hospital?

I followed Joonie around for the rest of the afternoon, ditching her only the few times when I saw Killian coming. He didn’t look happy with me. Too bad, so sad. The best part was that it had never been easier to avoid him. Not like he could call out after me, right?

Unfortunately, as far as Joonie was concerned, nothing else happened. No bathroom stall séances or blood sacrifices at her locker. Joonie went to class just like normal, or as close to normal as she could get, anyway. Until last hour.

Joonie hauled her bag up tighter on her shoulder and hurried into chemistry class. I frowned, my complete and utter boredom shattered by the small but odd behavior change. In my vast hours of experience with her, Joonie never hurried to anything, especially not a class. Her whole persona was based on an utter lack of caring about anything.

Which is total bullshit, of course. First of all, because she obviously cared about making people think she didn’t care about anything. But whatever.

I followed her, watching with amazement as she sat down at her lab table, pulled her chemistry book and notebook from her bag carefully, and lined them up on her desk … a full two minutes before class even started.

Mr. Gerry nodded with approval at her from his lab stool up front.

“What is going on here?” I muttered.

The rest of the class filtered in, including Jennifer Meyer, who was wearing the absolute worst plaid miniskirt. I shuddered. Plaid was so … mid-nineties.

The bell rang, and for the next thirty-three minutes, I saw a completely different Joonie Travis. She raised her hand on almost every question, volunteered to hand out safety goggles, and even put on a protective glove that no one else had to wear — Mr. Gerry thought the piercing in the web between her thumb and first finger might get overheated near the flames of the Bunsen burner — without complaint.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Oh, how nice. The High Priestess of Pain found something she is good at that is also relatively socially acceptable.” Well, let me tell you that … she sucked. She got most of the answers wrong, and the ones she didn’t, it was only because she flipped through the textbook wildly before raising her hand. She also dropped two beakers — empty ones, thank God — and partially melted her own safety glasses when she leaned too close to the burner’s flame. In short, she was a disaster. But she kept trying … something I didn’t understand. At least, not until the last ten minutes of class.

When the clock reached 2:15, a full fifteen minutes before the end of class and the end of school, Joonie stopped working and began putting all of her equipment away. By 2:20, she was parked on her lab stool, books put away and bag zipped up, staring at Mr. Gerry.

After sighing at another pathetic attempt at the daily experiment by Jennifer Meyer and Ashleigh Hicks, Mr. Gerry finally looked up and saw Joonie, her foot jiggling against the stool legs and her body ramrod straight with tension. He nodded reluctantly at her, and Joonie leaped to her feet, slung her bag over her shoulder, and practically ran from the room.

Caught off guard by her sudden exit — I was entertaining myself by watching Jesse McGovern use the Bunsen burner to heat and bend plastic straws swiped from the caf into swearword sculptures — I had to run to catch up.

Joonie tucked her head down and darted down the hall and the stairs, through the main hall, and out the front doors. Interesting … she’d better hope that Brewster didn’t catch sight of her. He was exactly the type to bust her for skipping school, even if it was only the last ten minutes.

Breaking into a light jog — I hate sweating — I caught up with her near the Circle and tagged along out to her car, the Death Bug. She tossed her bag in the back, climbed in, and started the car while I was still talking myself into sliding through the metal.

She began backing out.

“Hey, watch it!” I threw myself the rest of the way into the car, trying to ignore the cold shuddery feeling I got from passing through the door. “What is your big freaking hurry?”

Joonie pulled out of the parking lot at, like, the speed of light, throwing gravel everywhere and leaving a huge trail of dust in her wake. She turned right onto Henderson, and then left onto Main. A couple more turns and it was obvious: we were heading into town.

Referring to it as “town” sort of gave the impression that Decatur was the cultural center of the area. It was, however, where most of the jobs were — people just lived in the little towns outside, like Groundsboro, and drove in to work at the factories. On a day with a strong breeze, you could catch a whiff of ADM or Staley’s, processing soybeans in town. It smelled like instant mashed potatoes. There’d been days when I couldn’t wait to get away from here and that smell. But now, honestly, if I’d caught the scent, I might have felt a little comforted. I’d died, but some things still stayed the same.

Anyway, Decatur did offer a few things — a movie theater, a mall, and a hospital. Actually, the big movie theater and the mall were technically part of Forsyth, another dinky little town clinging to the edges of Decatur, but that probably didn’t matter, since I doubted Joonie was going anywhere for fun.

My hunch was confirmed when, twenty minutes later, the Death Bug pulled into the visitors’ parking lot of St. Catherine’s Hospital. Joonie had mentioned visiting Lily in the hospital. I sat up straight in my seat. Finally, this was getting good! Maybe now I’d get some answers.

Joonie slammed the gear shift into park, snagged her bag off the floor by my feet, and hustled out of the car toward the hospital. With a sigh, I followed her, albeit at a slower pace. I didn’t understand what the big hurry was. If Lily was in the hospital, it wasn’t like she had other plans anytime soon, right?

Joonie pushed through the revolving door, and I slipped into the compartment after hers, letting her do all the work of moving the heavy glass and metal. She headed immediately for the elevator and pressed the up button. While we waited — I might have figured out how to pass through walls and solid objects, but levitation seemed a bit more of a stretch and I didn’t particularly feel like searching out the stairs — I noticed a lot of nurses coming and going with their lunch bags and jackets. Shift change, probably?

The elevator finally arrived, and Joonie pushed the button for the fifth floor. A short ride later, during which I very deliberately concentrated on thinking about how very solid the elevator floor was, we arrived at our destination — the children’s floor. The wall opposite the elevator was painted with fluffy clouds, rainbows, and bright yellow smiley faces — the exact same kind you see on bumper stickers with the saying Shit happens. I suspected that any kid residing on this floor probably already knew that fact better than most, anyway.

Joonie stepped off the elevator and immediately headed to the left, like she knew exactly where she was going. The nurses manning—wo-manning? — the floor desk didn’t even glance up, as they were checking charts and talking to the next shift of nurses.

I watched Joonie stop at a door midway down the hall and step inside. A second later, her head reappeared, looking up and down the hallway, before she slapped either a yellow sticker or magnet on the outside of the door and shut it gently.

Interesting. Automatically glancing back over my shoulder at the busy nurses, like they could see me, I headed toward the now-closed door. When I got closer, I could see it was a magnet she’d put on the metal door frame, and it read, bathing. privacy please.

“What the hell?” I muttered.

“Don’t you know you’re on the kids’ floor?”

Startled, I looked down to see a little blond girl with pigtails, staring up at me from her old-fashioned wooden wheelchair.

She sighed in disgust and rolled on down the hall, passing through the wall. Yep, dead like me. Maybe it was a good thing Killian hadn’t come with me. The hospital was probably full of spirits.

I approached the door Joonie had closed and cautiously peered in, ignoring the chill against my face.

At first, it appeared to be your standard hospital room. Blah beige walls with a matching tile floor, a puke green curtain hung on a rack in the ceiling so it could be pulled for privacy from annoying roommates, and a television mounted high on the wall. That old cartoon Mighty Mouse was on, but the sound was off.

The girl in the bed, though, was my first clue that not everything was as it seemed. I recognized her, sort of, as the girl in the picture Joonie had pulled up earlier. I mean, I recognized her, but she only vaguely resembled the person she’d once been. Her dull and glazed eyes stared straight ahead, about three feet below the television. A jagged scar, still puffy and red, decorated the left side of her face from her hairline down to her jaw. There were no tubes or anything, other than an IV, and a monitor with her heartbeat showing, so she was obviously breathing on her own, just not much else.

The weird part was that seeing her this way, as a three-dimensional, albeit damaged person rather than a flat image on a screen, finally made it click for me. I knew where I’d seen her before. Months ago, she’d been one of Ben Rogers’s girls, another stupid and willing underclassman. Really, I’d only seen her a few times with Ben before they broke up …or at least, that’s what I assumed happened.

She was new, as of last year, I thought. Didn’t have many friends. I’d never seen her with Killian or Joonie … as far as I knew. To be fair, though, until recently they were not a demographic I would have bothered noticing. People like them don’t even vote for homecoming queen.

I tried to remember the last time I’d seen this girl, Lily Whatever — Turner, that sounded right. Maybe Ben’s back-to-school bash? I did remember something about a car accident a few miles away, one they were going to try to pin on our party, but the driver hadn’t been drinking, so they had nothing to hold over us. But that was, like, all the way back in September. She’d been like this since then?

The utter stillness about her was the worst part. She still moved — even as I watched, her fingers, resting on the top of the bedcovers, jerked and twitched — but she seemed …empty. I’d never thought about life as energy before, at least not until Killian talked about it like that, but now I could see what he meant. Even someone sleeping, eyes shut and not moving at all, would have seemed more alive than she did, and I could see that from across the room.

Joonie, however, did not seem to notice or care, and that was my second clue that something was really wrong. She was racing around the room, setting what appeared to be little silver hockey pucks on the floor at set intervals around the bed and talking to Lily at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to get Killian to come with me. I thought it would work better with him here, but he …” She paused, probably remembering his reaction to the Ouija board. “He wouldn’t. I’m so sorry, Lil.”

I snorted. He wouldn’t. Right. Well, I mean, he wouldn’t have, but she didn’t even try to explain what was going on or what she wanted him to come to the hospital for. Speaking of which, why did she want him to come to the hospital? This was obviously more than just a friendly, keep-coma-girl-company visit.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she said firmly. “I’m going to make this right, no matter what it takes.” Her gaze wandered to the still form on the bed. “I’m going to get you back where you belong.”

Joonie jerked back into motion and her combat-booted foot knocked one of the silver disks toward the door, where I still stood, half in and half out. I looked down and found it to be a little white candle in a metal wrapper, like the kind my dad used to put in my carved pumpkin when I was little.

Candles, living-dead girl, creepy declarations of intent, plus the Ouija board Joonie was packing … uh-oh. I knew nothing about magic, witchcraft, voodoo, or whatever else this might be (and I bet Joonie didn’t either, given the results so far), but I’d seen enough Charmed reruns to know this was trouble.

“Okay, then.” I pushed myself the rest of the way into the room. “Hey, Joonie, stop. Whatever your freaky little self is up to, cut it out.”

Joonie ignored me, of course, and reached into her bag to pull out the lighter and the Ouija board.

Oh, crap. I paced a step or two and lifted my thumbnail to my teeth — what now? It wasn’t like I could march out into the hallway and shout at the nurses for help.

Nurses. Help. Call button. If there wasn’t a lightbulb hanging in the air above my head, there should have been. If I had the strength to concentrate and shove folders around the floor, surely I could push one little button.

I strode confidently across the room, avoiding Joonie as she crouched down to begin lighting candles, but I hesitated when I reached the bed. Up this close, Lily was tragic … and eerie. The light of the television flashed in her blank eyes, adding a creepy and superficial spark of life. The remote with the bed controls and the nurse call button lay half under Lily’s arm, a big sign of someone’s wishful thinking.

“Don’t be such a baby,” I told myself. Trying not to think about the germs that had to be floating around here — it was a hospital after all, full of disgusting sick people — I reached down, intending to scoot the remote out from under her arm with a series of little pushes. My hand should have passed through her arm with little more than a cold tingle, but the second I touched her skin, I felt it. An intense heat radiated up my fingers. Then the solidity that was Lily’s arm melted beneath my touch and my hand sank into her arm. Not through, but in. My skin, the darker of the two, thanks to my hours in the sun for prom prep, melded with hers.

I sucked in a breath and jerked my hand away. Her arm followed, lifting off the bed. I watched in horror. For an endless moment, the bond between us held tight, then something loosened and let go. Her arm flopped back onto the bed, landing squarely on top of the remote. It didn’t push any buttons. Oh, no, that would be too good to be true. It prevented me from another attempt to reach the call button, though, unless I wanted to touch her again.

No freaking way. I stumbled back from the bed, clutching my arm against my chest. I didn’t know what had just happened, nor did I want to know.

I bolted past Joonie, who, her acolyte duties finally completed, was settling herself on the floor with the Ouijaboard in her lap. I passed through the door, barely even feeling the tingle of it, and darted down the hall.

I ran for the nurses’ station. But what could they do? What could anyone do? I was terrified to even look down at my hand, afraid I’d see Lily’s pale skin instead of my own.

When I drew even with the nurses’ station, the elevator dinged and the doors opened. Some instinct made me look up and over. Killian, head tucked down and hands tucked in his sweatshirt pockets, strode off the elevator and then down the hall toward me and Lily’s room.

“Will!” I darted toward him, relief at seeing him here washing away any of my leftover anger from earlier this afternoon.

He looked up, startled. “What are you—”

“Joonie’s in there right now and she’s doing something with that stupid board.” I spoke as quickly as I could.

He started down the hallway toward Lily’s room. I stayed next to him, trying to explain. “I told you, she’s the one that’s doing it, calling up that creepy ghost, and when I tried to stop her, my hand touched Lily’s arm and …” I shuddered. “Something is just wrong. I don’t understand—”

The air suddenly turned to ice around me, and Killian stopped suddenly. I watched the color drain out of his face as he stared at something down the hall.

I turned away from Killian slowly, knowing already what I would find. The creepy shadow ghost was back. This time, it grew, rippling at its edges, to fill the entire hallway, blocking out the light from the windows at the end of the hall. Inside its misty body, things moved beneath the surface, like snakes sliding under a blanket.

It gathered itself, pulling together at the edges until it hung over us like a wave waiting to crash.

“Killian,” I said, my voice wobbly.

“Yeah?” He didn’t sound so great either.

“Run!” I shoved him away.

With a roar that should have shaken the building, the shadowy spirit crashed down on me. Slivers of what felt like frozen metal tore through my skin, and I screamed. Then everything went dark.