Fine. Whatever. I sat down to jam my shoe on, and by virtue of sheer luck, discovered my missing one by sitting on it. Excellent.
I needed to find Alona to make sure she was all right, at least. If, after that, she still didn’t want to be my spirit guide…well, then, I’d have to deal with that when the time came. Just the idea, though, of her not being in my life was hard to imagine, and I didn’t
Ask me if I’d ever thought that would be possible a year ago. Hell, two months ago.
The trouble was, I had no idea where to begin searching for her. In theory, if she’d resigned as my spirit guide — could she even do that without me being aware of it? — then she’d probably woken up back on Henderson Street where she’d died. But that had been almost an hour ago. She could be anywhere by now.
My mom knocked again.
“Mom, I said I’m okay,” I said, struggling to keep the irritation out of my voice.
“It’s not that,” she said, opening the door. She looked pale, standing there in a tattered plaid flannel robe with the house phone clutched to her chest. I hadn’t even heard it ring.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, with the sudden sick assurance that it wasn’t.
She nodded, her eyes bright with tears. “It’s the hospital. St. Catherine’s.”
“No, no, sweetie.” My mother swept into the room and knelt to give me a one-armed hug. “It’s not that. She’s awake! Lily’s awake.”
I stared at her. “Lily Turner?”
My mother laughed. Her tears had clearly been of the happy variety. “Of course. How many other Lilys do you know?” She held the receiver out to me. “Her mother’s on the phone. She says Lily has been asking for you.”
But that was just not possible. I’d looked everywhere for her spirit after that accident. Lily was gone. Not dead, but certainly not alive and definitely not capable of waking up and asking for me.
And yet, I doubted that her mother, Mrs. Turner, would ever in a million years make something like that up.
So…what did that leave? I had no idea.
My head swimming, I stood up and took the phone.
“You.” I pointed at Liesel. “Don’t go anywhere.” She’d helped cause this problem with Alona; she would help me solve it, by God.
My mom raised her eyebrows at me but said nothing.
Liesel flung herself, sulking, down at the foot of my bed, “Whatever. You better be ready to help Eric and me after this. This thing with Todd isn’t going to last forever.”
Todd again, whoever the hell he was. I ignored her and put the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Will, it’s Mrs. Turner. Lily would like to—”
In the background, I could hear a ruckus, a familiar voice, one I hadn’t heard in almost a year and thought I’d never hear again, saying something in a demanding tone. It sent a chill over my skin. If I’d been wrong about Lily’s spirit being gone, God, what else had I been wrong about? I’d been so sure.…
“In a minute, Lily,” Mrs. Turner said, sounding slightly muffled.
“She’s still a little hard to understand sometimes,” Mrs. Turner said to me. “But we’re working on it. She’s been asking for you, pretty much since the moment she woke up. I made her wait until it was a decent hour, and as you can hear, she’s not happy with me.” And yet the joy in Mrs. Turner’s voice, that her daughter was awake and annoyed with her, was evident.
“I’ll put her on now,” she said. The phone rattled a little, and I heard Mrs. Turner say, “Here you go, honey,” in the distance.
“Will?”
Even though I’d been expecting it, hearing Lily say my name sucked the air out of my lungs and made my eyes sting with tears.
“Yeah,” I managed.
“I need to see you.” She was enunciating carefully, but other than that she sounded almost, well, normal. “Can you come to St. Catherine’s, please? Now?”
I heard her mother admonishing her in the background for the demand. But Lily persisted. “Now?”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Lily Turner had moved to Groundsboro about a year and half ago from a small town in Indiana. With her conservative clothes and heavy, almost southern accent, she hadn’t fit in at our school, which worked out well, since neither had I. Most people had assumed I was goth. In truth, I was just trying to be as invisible as possible. Dark clothes, earbuds in all the time, quiet in class — it was my way of disappearing. I’d been trying to avoid attracting the attention of all the ghosts wandering the halls, but it had worked equally well at repelling most of the living as well.
I liked Lily, though. She was different. I’d been going toschool with the same people since kindergarten, and most ofthe time it was like they’d all been brainwashed by the samecult leader. Any sparks of real personality were snuffed out by the need for conformity within all the little individual cliques. Jocks wore their letter jackets on certain days. The band kids created goofy T-shirts with sayings nobody else understood. Alona’s crowd rose to the top by shoving everyone else down.
But Lily was an outsider. She asked smart questions and really listened to the answers, offering opinions that might not have been the “right” ones. She didn’t know the right ones, not for our school. Not in the beginning, at least.
She was pretty, too, though not in the same fantasy crush way Alona was. She was more like the girl you’d want as your lab partner and your date for Homecoming, even if all you were going to do was sit at a table in the back and watch with amusement as the popular girls wept and raged over their loss in the race for queen.
At one point, I’d thought there might be something between us, a chance for it to be more than friends.
In the end, though, things had changed, the way they always do. Lily had harbored a secret obsession with the first-tier (a.k.a. popular people) — seeing them like Hollywood royalty. In the beginning, I think it was just because she’d never seen anything like them before, except in television and movies. Her high school had consisted of a hundred kids total, and they’d known one another since birth. So, pretty much all the mystery and intrigue was gone. But not here at Groundsboro High: here we had mystery, intrigue, and drama — oh, the never-ending drama — to spare. It was like watching a soap opera play out before your very eyes…or living in one.
Unbeknownst to me, our mutual friend Joonie, one of Lily’s only other friends, had had a crush on Lily from day one. She took a chance one afternoon and confessed her feelings to Lily with a kiss. Though Lily tried to handle it the right way and let Joonie down kindly, Joonie’s home life (nothing was ever good enough for her controlling and conservative minister father) was such shit that she kind of freaked, afraid her dad would find out what had happened.
Accusations and threats were made, and the two of them stopped speaking without ever telling me what had happened. Lily left us and started hanging about the edges of the popular crowd, seeking scraps of their begrudging acceptance. And then Ben Rogers, dickhead extraordinaire, had plucked her out of obscurity. He “dated” her for about a month, and then he dumped her publicly at a first-tier party.
Lily had been devastated, realizing finally that Ben and his crowd weren’t as wonderful as everyone seemed to think. She’d left that party in tears and tried to call both Joonie and me on her way home. Then she’d missed a turn on her drive and slammed into a tree. She’d never woken up from that night.
Until today, apparently.
On the way to the hospital, I pushed the Dodge wellover the speed limit, risking a ticket. I couldn’t shake the irrational fear that somehow she would be unconscious againif I took too long to arrive.
Except maybe not. After Lily’s accident, I’d done a ton of reading about comas and people coming out of them (or not). Sometimes the person woke up for a day or even just a few minutes, seemingly coherent, only to lapse back into that unnatural sleep…or worse yet, to die. I’d read of that happening — the person waking up only to die shortly afterward — at least a couple of times. The articles had interpreted the occurrence each time as a gift from God for that person to have a chance to say good-bye.
