The Ghost and the Goth

14 Will

I was beginning to think that the universe was united against me in some kind of vast conspiracy. I was supposed to be in detention right now, and I would have been … if someone hadn’t accidentally set fire to a bunch of straws in chem lab during last period. The fire alarm went off right as school let out for the day. Recognizing the hopeless prospect of keeping all of us delinquents in one place in an area as unconfined as the parking lot, Ms. Bernadino, the detention teacher for today, had canceled detention and rescheduled it for next week. I’d gone there for four years and had had more than my share of detentions probably, but I’d never heard of them canceling it before.

Feeling unexpectedly lucky — really, I should have known better — I headed to the Dodge, which started on the first try, and then on to St. Catherine’s. I knew that’s where Joonie would be.

I couldn’t forget what Alona had said about her. She, Joonie, had been acting so weird lately. But she’d been my friend, pretty much my only one, for years. Why would she want to mess with me like that? Of course, she’d have no way of knowing what a Ouija board did when I was around. But Alona was right. Why else would she act so guilty? Why run away? Why didn’t she just laugh or seem confused at my strange reaction to seeing her with one?

I was afraid I already knew the answer, but I needed to know for sure. I needed to talk to Joonie. If she was involved, that changed everything, including — most likely — the true identity of the entity Alona called Gus. As an angry and despondent ghost, my father might have attacked me to show his disapproval. Maybe. But he wouldn’t need Joonie or a Ouija board for that.

I’d gotten to the hospital in record time and found a parking space in the first visitors’ row. A waiting elevator, which also happened to be both people- and ghost-free, had taken me directly to the fifth floor. And then my luck had changed with a vengeance.

Rooted to the spot, I watched the shadow ghost collapse over Alona and tear through her, her green eyes going wide with the pain before she vanished.

“No!” I shouted, furious. Why hadn’t she run? She knew what this thing could do to her, knew that every time she disappeared there was a growing chance she might not come back.

Because she was saving me. The realization knocked me back a step. She’d seen what Gus could do to me, and Alona Dare had just sacrificed herself … for me.

My throat grew tight, and the hallway blurred before my eyes. Maybe that unselfish action would be enough to send her to the light, though I’d seen no sign of it before she’d vanished. Either way, I wouldn’t let it be in vain.

“Joonie, get out here!” I forced the words out past the lump in my throat.

Rushing footsteps sounded behind me as the nurses’ abandoned their station and raced down the hall toward me. “Sir? Sir, you can’t yell in here. This is a hospital.”

“Joonie, I said come out,” I repeated.

The black shadow ghost, having long since dissolved Alona, just hung there in midair as though waiting and watching to see what I would do next.

“Joonie …”

“Sir, you’re going to have to come with us.” Strong female hands grabbed at my arms and shoulders. “Somebody call security, please.”

All up and down the hallway, doors started to open, and pale and somber little kid faces poked out to see what was going on. Then Lily’s door opened and Joonie stepped out.

“J,” I said. “Call it off, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

She shook her head, eyes bright blue and red-rimmed. “I can’t, Will. I just … can’t.”

Then she backed up into the room and shut the door.

“Sir, you have to come with us.” Those hands on my shoulders and arms began pulling me backward, but it wasn’t enough. I knew it wouldn’t be.

The shadowy ghost poured over me, surrounding me in deathly cold and tearing me from the nurses’ grasp. I struggled, pulling back with all my strength, but it … he? …she? … easily overpowered me, slamming me face-first into the wall. Something in my face, possibly my nose, possibly a cheekbone, cracked, and someone screamed. It might have been me.

“What do you want?” I squeezed the words out.

It gave no response, only a vague howling sound, like wind rushing through a broken window. Then it hauled me away from the wall and tossed me down the hall. I tried to regain my footing and stumbled, bashing my head into the side of a medicine cart left abandoned there, and everything went mercifully black.

I woke up in restraints, my hands pinned to the bed beneath me with Velcro and fabric straps. Never a good sign, really. Before I even opened my eyes, I recognized the antiseptic smell unique to hospitals. So I wasn’t in jail — that was a plus, at least.

My whole body ached, and my head throbbed with an intensity that I suspected would only grow worse when I finally decided to brave the light and crack my eyelids open.

“Will!” A vague whisper from my right. “Wake up. I know you’re in there. I saw you pulling against those skanky armbands. I mean, seriously, do you think they clean those after every use? I doubt it. You’re, like, sharing skin cells with the last sweaty and depraved lunatic they locked up. Sick people are so gross.”

Alona! The disgust in her voice was as distinct as the antiseptic hospital smell. I braved the light enough to squint in the direction of her voice. When my eyes stopped watering and focused, I found her sitting in the visitor’s chair next to my bed, her knees pulled up to her chest as if she didn’t even want her ghost feet touching the floor. She looked pale and tired, and for the first time, a line of bruises decorated the left side of her face. That meant either she didn’t have the energy to project herself as flaw free, or she was really feeling beat up.

“Are you okay?” I asked, my mouth feeling stuffed full with cotton.

She straightened up and flipped her hair over her shoulders when she saw me watching. “I’m fine,” she said quickly. “But I’m not the one locked up with a cracked face.”

Automatically, I tried to reach up to touch my face, but my effort only tightened the restraint on my arm.

Alona unfolded herself from her chair and moved to sit on my bed. Her deft fingers worked the Velcro and straps until my hand was free. “I’ll have to refasten that, you know, or else they’ll be locking you up tighter next time they come to check on you.”

“Yeah, I know.” I traced the swollen lines of my cheek carefully with my fingers. Puffed up like a pincushion and hot, the right side of my face felt like it’d been microwaved.

“They did X-rays or an MRI or whatever about an hour ago. You have a hairline fracture in your cheekbone. I heard them talking about it before you woke up.”

I groaned. Well, that explained the pain radiating down to my jaw and up to my temple.

She pulled her legs up on the bed and curled in closer to me, her hip and backside a steady warmth against my waist. “Why didn’t you run? I told you to run.”

“I thought Joonie would listen to me, that she’d stop it when I confronted her,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Good thinking.”

“Hey,” I protested.

“I’m serious. Now you’re stuck in here.” She shook her head, and the scent of her shampoo drifted toward me. “They’re all convinced that you’re schizophrenic and possibly epileptic on top of it. You’re on a regular floor for now, but they’re going to move you as soon as a bed opens on the psych floor. And the chin-rubber is back.”

“No.” I struggled to sit up.

“Yeah. He has hospital privileges here or something. Your mom’s trying to get rid of him.”

“My mom is here?” I reached for the remaining strap to undo it.

“Don’t.” Alona pushed on my shoulder, forcing me back. She gestured to the mostly closed door. “They’re in here about every fifteen minutes. I don’t know if I can get you all the way tied up again without getting caught. I’m good, but maybe not that good.” She gave me a wan smile, the likes of which I’d never seen from her before, and it startled me.

Over the years, I’d seen all kinds of smiles from her. The kind designed to make all the blood drain from your head and gather behind your zipper. The kind given with cold, cold eyes, showing she was mad as hell but wasn’t going to break form to show it. The superior smile was a particular favorite of hers in recent years, like she couldn’t help but find it funny that you, a petty, insignificant being, would try to interact with her. None of those even looked related to her current expression. She looked … defeated.

“What happened in there?” I asked, not entirely sure I wanted to hear the answer.

Alona lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “She had candles and that stupid board. And she kept talking to coma-gir … I mean, Lily.” She hesitated. “I think she’s trying to fix her.”

I frowned. “What do you mean, fix her? Lily is—” I paused to take a deep breath, needing it to force the words out—“brain dead. She has been since the day of the accident.” Fifty-four miles per hour around a curve that has a thirty-mile-per-hour speed limit. One tree. No seat belt. Lily, as we knew her, wouldn’t be coming back. It never got any easier, that realization. I kept thinking it would, but no.

Alona shook her head slowly. “I don’t think she’s talking about brain surgery here, Killian. Lily’s empty, you know? The lights are on but nobody’s home?”

I grimaced but nodded. Alona had quite a way with words.

“So first, I’m wondering what Joonie’s trying to do with all the candles and spirits and everything.” Alona waved her hand dismissively. “I mean, hello, even I recognize some kind of creeptastic ritual when I see it.” She paused, her sharp green eyes focusing in on me as though trying to will me into believing her words. “I think she’s been trying to call up Lily’s spirit.”

That was … possible. Joonie had not been the same since Lily’s accident. She’d blamed herself for it, a crazy line of thinking that went something like this: if she and Lily hadn’t had a fight, Lily would have been with us instead of the first-tier crowd and she’d still be alive … in more than just the technical sense.

“But then, I’m like, what does any of this have to do with Killian? I mean, she could try to call up Lily’s spirit on the Ouija board without you.”

“It won’t work, though,” I said, “with or without me. Lily isn’t here anymore. She’s … moved on. Like I said before, people who are really gone are gone. There is no reaching them.”

“But I bet Joonie doesn’t know that,” Alona pointed out.

“Probably not,” I admitted.

She took a deep breath. “It gets worse.”

“How?”

“She’s not just trying to call up Lily’s spirit. I think she’s trying to get it back into Lily’s body.” Alona hesitated. “And she wants you to help.”

“No,” I said instantly.

She looked at me in exasperation. “What else could ‘get you back where you belong’ mean? She was staring right at Lily’s body when she said it, and she definitely mentioned you.”

“No, I mean it’s not possible. It’s a one-way door. It has to be,” I tried to explain. “Once you’re out, you’re out. Otherwise, you’d see walking corpses everywhere when people like Grandpa Brewster or Liesel got tired of being trapped in between.”

“But Lily’s still alive.” She gave a shudder.

“Not really.” As much as it hurt to say that, I made myself keep going. “Her heart still beats and everything, but she wouldn’t be able to function, even if you could get her spirit back inside her body. The connection between the two is broken.”

She rolled her eyes. “Again, you know that. Does Joonie?”

My mouth worked for a second, as I tried to find an answer. “But Joonie doesn’t know what I can do. How would she even think to—”

Alona held up her hands. “I don’t know. Not my problem. You figure it out. I’m just telling what I saw and heard.”

I shook my head, angry at the suggestion. “No, she knows better than to mess with stuff like this.” Even if it was possible, which it wasn’t … as far as I knew, there were so many things that could go wrong. What if Joonie successfully managed to get Lily’s spirit back into her body only to discover that it was little more than a prison of flesh and bone?

How would she even know she had contacted the right spirit to begin with?

“Desperate people do really dumb ass stuff,” Alona said. “Trust me on that.”

“Joonie would never take the chance of hurting Lily,” I insisted. What was left of her, anyway. “It almost killed her when Lily ended up here.” Joonie had spent most of the month of September locked in her room, not leaving for school or anything until Brewster threatened to keep her from graduating if she didn’t return. After that, she’d dragged herself back to school, but it had taken a couple more months for her to show even some spark of her former self.

“I bet.” Alona’s voice was bland, but her tone hinted at something she wasn’t saying.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t.” I ground out the words.

She sighed. “Was Lily your girlfriend or not?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just answer the question.”

“No. She wasn’t. We were friends. I looked out for her. At least, I tried to.” Obviously, I hadn’t done such a great job of that.

Alona arched an eyebrow. “I saw the picture of the two of you.”

“How …” I shook my head. I didn’t want to know. “Okay, so she might have liked me a little or something, but it never turned into anything. She had a crush on Ben Rogers, too,” I pointed out. Which was probably the reason my friendship with Lily had stayed just that, a friendship. I liked her. She was sweet and funny. Hell, she even made Joonie happy, and that was a true miracle. But obsessing over the popular crowd and their entanglements had been one of Lily’s favorite pastimes, one that I did not share. So, it hadn’t been that big of a shock, at least not to me, when she dumped us to climb the social ladder after she and Joonie had that big fight.

“Lily wasn’t the only one with a crush,” Alona said.

“What are you talking about? Joonie?” I laughed. “Joonie doesn’t like me like that.”

“Not you,” she said pointedly.

“What?”

“Oh, my God, could you be more dense?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what, just forget it. Even if I tell you, you won’t believe me and you’ll just get angry, so it’s not worth it. I don’t know why I’m even here in the first place. You don’t listen to anything I say—”

“You’re not saying anything!”

“You don’t do what I tell you to, you dismiss all of my ideas. I mean, what’s the point of having a spirit guide if you’re just going to ignore her?”

“Trust me,” I said. “You are impossible to ignore. I’ve tried. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t leave here fast enough.”

She froze, a wounded look flashing across her face.

I felt like a shit. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did. I’m done here.” Alona swung her legs off the bed. “I don’t have the time to waste on you anymore.”

“Alona, wait.”

She ignored me and pushed her hands against the mattress to climb down. I grabbed for one of her wrists … and my hand passed right through her.

I gasped.

Alona glanced back over her shoulder with a sigh, more bruises flickering to life. “Looks like you’re getting your wish.”