Unfortunately, so did my ghostly fan club.
“Dibs,” Liesel announced.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t call ‘dibs’ on something like this,” Jennifer’s grandfather said.
“We’ve been waiting the longest. Eric and I should get to go first. You, like, just died a couple of years ago.”
“I’m the one who found him,” Grandpa B. pointed out. “The rest of you just get in line behind me, especially you, chickadee.”
“All I want to know is the score. How hard can that be? Did we win? You got to know, man.” Jay’s fingers clutched at my other arm.
“Lost by two,” I said, though I knew, somewhere inside, he already knew that.
Joonie turned her head to stare up at me, her face, framed by her jet black hair, even paler than normal. “Will? You still with me?” Despite having seen this kind of thing from me before, she was scared. I couldn’t blame her. It scared me every time, too.
He pulled harder on my arm. “I don’t believe you.”
I tried to shake his hand off, causing Joonie to stumble and list heavily to the left. Her shoulder collided with the edge of the lockers in the wall, and she winced.
“Joon, you okay?”
She nodded, though tears made her blue eyes more sparkly and bloodshot. “You have to hang in there, Will. After what happened to Lily … I can’t deal. I can’t.”
“You’re lying, man. You’re lying. We won. I know it,” Jay insisted.
“Check the trophy case, and leave me the hell alone,” I told him before turning my attention back to Joonie’s pleading gaze. “I’m trying. Brewster wouldn’t believe me and—”
“Don’t blame this on him.” Grandpa B. bumped into my side, jostling for position with the others.
I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye, and suddenly, Evan, the ghostly janitor who mopped the floors all day, every day, appeared next to me. He shoved Grandpa B. out of the way.
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Evan pleaded, tugging at my shoulder. “You got to tell them that. Those kids … they were asking for it, teasing me like that. Didn’t give that judge no right to kill me.”
“Just let go, please,” I said.
But it was Joonie who listened to me, Joonie who let go of my wrist with a hurt look on her face. With no support on my other side, Evan managed to pull me down to one knee. Other hands began grabbing at me.
I resisted the urge to fall to the floor and curl in a ball to protect myself. “Joon—” I began.
“Hey!” an unfamiliar female voice shouted. “Listen up, you dead people.”
That got everyone’s attention. The ghosts stopped clamoring and pulling and arguing to look around. I followed suit and found myself staring at a pair of female legs so smooth they gleamed. Sleek muscle curved beneath the lightly tanned skin, especially at the calf, where imagination easily supplied the sensation of my hand resting there. Despite everything, my heart thumped a little harder.
Then I raised my gaze a little further and found … red gym shorts, a white T-shirt with a big tire tread mark across it, shiny blond hair falling across one shoulder. I groaned. Alona Dare.
Frowning, Joonie knelt next to me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just …” I shook my head and stared at Alona, standing in front of me, her hands on her hips, like she was preparing to lead some kind of cheer. “I thought for sure you were going straight to hell.”
Alona glared down at me. “Hey!”
Joonie looked stricken. “Me?”
“What? No, never mind. Can you just help me up?” Alona’s appearance had managed to distract the deadly dozen — well, half dozen — and I wanted to take advantage of it while I could.
Joonie knelt beside me and lifted my arm across her shoulder again, but she still seemed shaken.
“Are you new?” Liesel asked Alona. Then, turning to Eric, she whispered, “She must be new.”
“All of you, step back and go haunt somebody else,” Alona said. “I found him first.”
Her pronouncement produced a chaotic burst of sound from the others, but at least it was directed at her instead of me this time.
“You can’t—”
“Hey, new girl, some of us have been waiting for—”
“—Just want to know the score.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered to Joon.
Still pale, she nodded. We stood up together and started to edge through the cluster of ghosts. If Joonie thought it was weird the way I moved to avoid invisible-to-her obstacles, she said nothing. She was used to occasional strange behavior from me, and it wasn’t something we ever discussed. There were lots of things we didn’t talk about. It was easier that way sometimes.
“Look, here’s the deal,” Alona declared. “I’m not having a very good day, so I’m only going to say this once. I found him this morning. If he’s helping anyone, he’s helping me first. He’s mine. End of story.”
The moment she finished speaking, a strange blast of wind carried through the corridor, tumbling Alona’s perfect hair and sending a chill over my skin. An odd sense of something having clicked into place fell over me.
I stopped. “Did you feel that?” I asked Joonie.
“Feel what?” Joonie repeated.
“The wind. It—”
Joonie took a cautious step back from me, her eyes wide. She slipped both hands into her bag, like the temperature had just dropped to below zero and it was her only shot at saving all of her fingers from frostbite. “Are you hearing something?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.
I shook my head, hating the confusion and naked fear I saw on her face. “Never mind. Forget it. Let’s just go.”
But she didn’t move. Her gaze was fixed on me, and her hands fumbled inside her bag for something, maybe the phone she’d forgotten she’d left at home? That she would feel like she needed to call someone because she was scared of me … that hurt. “Joonie? I don’t—”
Movement flashed near the corner of my eye, and I automatically turned toward it, expecting another sideways assault from Evan the janitor. Instead, a dizzying black cloud of energy hovered about three feet away. The edges of the thing rippled the air, like the shadow of heat escaping from a closed-up car on an August day. It grew larger, taller, wider, and darker, until it blotted out the overhead lights.
My heart sailed into my throat, and I couldn’t breathe. It’d been a few weeks since I’d seen it last, and just like every time before, I’d hoped it would be the last time. As in the last time it came around for me, not the last time I survived it.
“Will?” I heard Joonie’s voice distantly. “Are you okay? Are you still hearing … the wind?”
The ghosts scattered — Liesel ran screaming with Eric on her heels, Grandpa B. hightailed it past me, presumably to the office again. Jay and most of the others just turned and walked silently through the wall of lockers.
But not Alona. She remained rooted to the spot, staring upward at the horrible cloud. “What … what is that thing, Killian?” Her voice still sounded remarkably normal, despite the tremor in it.
This “thing” was the reason I knew Alona Dare hadn’t committed suicide, no matter what the rumors were. When you killed yourself, all the negative energy — the sadness, the self-loathing, the fear, and the desperation — remained. Most of the ghosts like that were just sad and silent wanderers, vague shadowy outlines of who they’d once been. In this case, the negative energy was so strong, it had consumed any hint of who the person had been, leaving little more than a physical manifestation of pure anger. I’d never seen anything like it before, but that was okay. I didn’t need any hints to figure this one out.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, trying to sound calm. “What are you doing here?”
5
Alona
