The Ghost and the Goth

driven Lily away. But Joonie blamed me, too, and I didn’t know why. I mean, she was right, of course, but she didn’t know about Lily’s call to me, the one I’d missed. I couldn’t tell her because I knew once she thought about it she’d realize that I would have been Lily’s second choice for help. She was always much closer to Joonie … until that stupid fight.

Last summer, a few weeks before school started, Joonie had shown up at my house without Lily for movie night. When I’d asked what happened, Joonie had waved it away and eventually, at my pressing, said they’d had a fight.

“About what?” I’d asked.

She’d looked away, staring out the window instead of at Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing it up on screen as the Terminator. “Boys.”

I still didn’t understand how a fight about boys could be that bad, particularly since neither of them had been dating anyone. But understanding girls, even ones I had as my friends, wasn’t exactly something I had a great deal of success with, so whatever.

The problem was, now, I didn’t know how to feel guiltier and more shamed than I already did, and I couldn’t apologize for something Joonie knew nothing about. In short, it was horrible and destroying whatever was left of our friendship.

“Yeah, okay,” I said finally, not sure what else to say.

Another car, Kevin Reynolds’s old Geo Metro, pulled up behind Joonie and honked.

Joonie responded by tossing him the finger. “If you’re not in Pederson’s class, I’m coming to find you,” Joonie warned as she shifted the Bug back into gear.

I shook my head. “I’ve got in-school suspension this week, apparently.”

She frowned.

“I’ll catch up with you, I promise. You better hurry up. Brewster will be looking for you to be late.”

The Bug stuttered and then revved, pulling up to the stop sign, where Joonie conscientiously came to a full stop, prompting another honk from Kevin.

“Your friends seem to care about you,” Alona said next to me, her voice holding more than a trace of wistfulness. “Like they’d really miss you if you were gone.”

I looked over at her, a bobbing head three feet above the passenger seat, like some kind of green-screen movie magic, and watched as the rest of her body took shape and filled in again. She really meant what she’d said, and while not exactly a cheery sentiment, she’d intended it as a compliment.

I flopped back in my seat, exhausted. “There. Was that so hard?”

9 Alona

I stretched out my newly solid legs, bending them at the knee and rotating my ankles, rejoicing in their, well, thereness, and then turned to stare at Killian leaning back in his seat, his eyes closed. “How did you do that?” I demanded. I’d tried everything to keep from disappearing — well, if everything meant screaming, shouting, and cursing for it to stop — and it hadn’t even slowed the process a bit.

He opened one eye to squint at me. “I didn’t do anything. You did.”

“Oh, no, no.” I pointed a finger at him. “Don’t even try that with me. You knew it would work. How?”

“Positive equals energy,” he muttered under his breath.

I frowned. “What?”

He sat up slowly. “Nothing. Forget it.”

“I will not forget it. I need to know how you did that.”

“Why? So you can scare people and then pull yourself back together at the last second?”

“Well …”

“Sorry, it doesn’t work that way, sweetheart.”

I glared at him for the endearment, but his gaze was already focused on something in the rearview mirror.

“Cops,” he said. “Time to go.”

Glancing back over my shoulder, I found a squad car doing a slow roll down Henderson. It sped up and pulled even with us just as Killian started the engine.

The policeman, an older, grizzled-looking type, rolled down his passenger-side window.

“Everything okay here?” he asked. His sharp gaze took in Killian’s hair, his dark clothes, the car.

“You better smile, or we’re toast,” I said. “Everything about you screams social malcontent with a grudge and a trunk full of weapons.”

Killian’s hands tensed on the wheel, and I knew he was dying to tell me off. Instead, he forced a reasonable- looking smile on his face. “Yes, officer. Everything’s fine. Just waiting for someone who never showed.”

“Oh, ha, ha,” I said.

The policeman nodded after a long moment. “The street is not a parking lot, son. Move along.”

“Yes, sir.” Killian turned off the hazards, flipped on his turn signal, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb — textbook driving.

“Well, aren’t you a good citizen?” I smirked.

“Shut up.” He kept his gaze on the rearview mirror as we proceeded down Henderson at three miles under the speed limit. He turned right onto Elm, cut in front of the school, through the teachers’ parking lot, and into the last aisle of the student lot. I knew it as Burner Row. He parked and slumped back in his seat with a loud sigh of relief.

“If he could arrest someone for looking guilty,” I said, “you would have been it. You weren’t even doing anything wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t risk any more trouble right now.”

I turned sideways in my seat to face him, grateful for the first time for being invisible to everyone else. Hardly anyone was left in the parking lot by now — all of them moving toward the building and class — but still. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined a scenario, even life after death, that would have me in Will Killian’s car in Burner Row. Though, it did offer a pretty view of the track and the football field. “So, why am I here? And no smart-ass answers, please,” I added quickly.

Killian didn’t answer right away, tapping his hands restlessly on the steering wheel, pale-skinned but nicely shaped biceps pulling at the sleeves of his T-shirt. Wow, so goth boy found time to work out. Interesting. “I have a proposition for you,” he said finally.

To which I responded the only way I could. “I’m not sleeping with you, even if you are the only one I can touch. I’m dead, not desperate.” I flopped back in the passenger seat and checked the tips of my nails for damage, more out of habit than anything else. I’d worked very hard to grow them out for prom and graduation, not that it mattered now.

He made a disgusted noise. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I’m not the one who keeps staring at my legs,” I pointed out.

Two red spots rose in his pale cheeks. “What happened to being nice?”

I lifted a shoulder idly. “Break glass in case of emergency, you know?” I waggled my fully formed, noninvisible hand in front of him. “I’m not disappearing yet.”

“Unfortunately,” he muttered.

“Hey!” I sat up. “I was only disappearing because you wouldn’t help me in the first place. You can’t take credit for fixing a mess that you made.”

He raked his hands through his shaggy black hair, which might actually have been attractive with the right cut. “Whatever. I’m ready to help you now.”

I let my hand drop. “What?”

“You heard me.” He refused to meet my eyes.

“Why?” I asked suspiciously.

“What does it matter?” he asked with impatience. “Just—”