Just considering this was breaking about every rule I had about the list of the dead who needed our help — it was totally first come, first served, unless you pissed me off and I sent you to the end, or extenuating circumstances bumped you to the top. No playing favorites.
I had to maintain strong, unbiased order, or they’d be walking all over me to get to Will, and I didn’t have the time or energy, literally, to fight them all off.
But Liesel maybe had a point — this time — about Mrs. Pederson’s potentially more optimistic mood.
The pissy part of me wanted to tell her to forget it, but the truth was, if I wasn’t a little flexible when needed, I’d lose control just as fast as if I were too relaxed about it. Besides, Daddy always said, the well-timed favor earned more respect than yet another example of being a hard-ass.
Plus, she’d said she’d liked my hair and meant it.
“I’ll think about it and let you know,” I said. Of course, inthe end, it wasn’t my decision at all, but I sure as hell was notgoing to say that now. I knew Will would be twitchy aboutthis one, as he always was when it came to dealing withliving people he knew. But he’d graduated. As his former teacher, Mrs. Pederson was no longer really in a position togive him trouble. I might be able to talk him into this one.
“Tonight,” Liesel said.
I glared at her. “Don’t push your luck. Tomorrow.”
She opened her mouth to object and seemed to think better of it, which, frankly, would be a first. “Fine,” she said with an eye roll.
“And do not even think about going in there to try to talk to him yourself.” I jabbed a finger at her. It would be awfully tempting for her, I knew, with him so close by. It was one thing for Mrs. Ruiz, someone we’d never met before, to approach Will directly with an immediate need. Something different for Liesel to continually harass him.
“I won’t,” she said with exasperation. “God.”
“Because I will put you even farther down the list, behind people who aren’t even dead yet.” I frowned at her. “How did you find me here?”
We were very careful about not meeting spirits at Will’s house. It was the one place where he could be guaranteed some peace and quiet. And since we weren’t omniscient after death any more than we’d been in life, and had significantly less access to a phone book or the Internet, most spirits had no idea where he lived.
“I followed you here a couple days ago,” she confessed.
Damn. I was going to have to start being even more careful. One more thing to worry about.
“Don’t do that again, and if you tell anyone where he lives, you’re off the list completely,” I said to her, though I wasn’t entirely sure I had the authority to make that decision. “Now go before I change my mind.”
But she didn’t scurry away as I expected.
She brushed off the front of her dress, though it held no dirt or grass stains. “I meant what I said…earlier,” she said, keeping her eyes focused on her task.
I bristled.
“You’re going to have to pick a side at some point, his or ours.” She looked up, a challenge in her gaze.
“I’m on my own side,” I said.
She nodded, but I could see she wasn’t convinced.
Will and I had an understanding. He helped me. I helped him. That was all there was to it, and the only thing that mattered.
Arguing with Liesel had put me in a less than stellar mood — I mean, who did she think she was, anyway? — so I walked home instead of trying to catch a ride…or ten. Trust me, there is nothing more frustrating than sliding into a car to hitch a ride only to have it turn thirty seconds later in a direction you don’t want to go.
But by the time I breezed through the front door of my old house — literally
Home, for all that it had been a chaotic nightmare when I was alive, was sort of comforting now in its familiarity. School was out. My friends (and enemies) had graduated. I was dead.
But home was still home, you know? The one thing that hadn’t really changed.
The downstairs was empty. The lights were on in the kitchen, but my mom wasn’t there, which was kind of weird. Now that she wasn’t drinking anymore, I usually found her in the kitchen eating a Lean Cuisine right out of the black microwaveable tray while she watched a lame sitcom or chatted online with her old college friends. (I know; creepy, right? The elderly have invaded Facebook. That is just wrong in so many ways.) Pretty much the rest of the time, she was either at an AA meeting or working. She’d gotten a job at the Clinique counter in Von Maur and got to wear one of those cool white lab coats.
“Hello?” I called more for my peace of mind than anything. Occasionally, I still had trouble with the idea that I was in the world but not of it, if that makes sense. It was comforting to keep up the habits and conventions of the living.
There was no answer, of course. But I thought I heard her moving around upstairs.
Our house is a big, brick two-story with a dramatic foyer open to the second floor and a sweeping staircase in the front hall, which, let me tell you, would have rocked for prom photos if I could have ever brought anyone to my house.
I started up the steps, noting that all the piles of magazines, laundry, and school stuff I’d stacked on the individual stairs during the last days of my life had disappeared. Also, very weird.
At the top, I discovered the light was on in my room, and my heart started to pound like crazy. (Yes, I am dead. Yes, I attended my funeral and watched them put my body in the ground. But I still
I’d been dead and living, if you can call it that, as a spirit for about two months now. In that whole time, the door to my room at my mother’s house had stayed closed. Just like I’d left it when I’d bolted out the door for school on that last morning. Okay, yeah, my mom had probably looked in there every once in a while or whatever. I definitely had. It was kind of disturbing and sad in some way that I didn’t quite understand. I mean, I’m still me, I’m still here. And yet, when I’d see my sleep shorts still on the bed where I’d tossed them, the covers shoved back, like I’d just gotten up, and my backup outfit for the day — a super cute vest with matching tie over a three-quarter- length sleeve, white fitted shirt and a black pleated mini — hanging on the front of the closet door, it gave me this odd pang in my chest.
It was like a memorial — or a museum display — for a girl who no longer existed. And yes, while a little creepy, it was also reassuring, like hard proof that I’d once been here and that I might still somehow walk back into my life, into this moment frozen in time.
But now…with the door open, the light on, and sounds of movement coming from inside my room, any hint of reassurance was being replaced by blind panic. What was she doing in my room? That was unacceptable. I’d spent years training both my parents to stay out unless they were invited in, which, hello, like that was going to happen.
I bolted the last few steps to my room, a protest she wouldn’t be able to hear already forming on my lips, and then stopped dead in the doorway, my mouth falling open.
My mother was not just poking around, picking up random items and crying, as you might expect. Nor was she looking for my secret diary. (I didn’t have one — too risky. Why give a rival everything she needs to take you down in one easy package?)
No, my mother was in the middle of my room with a HUGE black garbage bag in her hand, and she was throwing things away! My life was being tossed into the garbage! As I watched, she pried the Krekel’s takeout cup of Diet Coke off my dresser, where it had been disintegrating into a puddle of sludge and paper pulp for the last eight weeks or so, and tossed it into the bag. That cup might not seem important to her or to anyone else, but it had technically been my last meal, or part of it.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, when I could breathe again.
“It’s not everything. Just the garbage.”
