“No. That doesn’t make sense. You’re my spirit guide … or whatever,” he insisted.
“Yep, one that you don’t listen to.” I wiped under my eyes and shifted on the bed to face him again.
He struggled to pull himself into an awkward half-sitting position. “Okay, I might have been wrong about that. I didn’t throw your papers away.”
“It doesn’t matter, Will. I can’t stay,” I said wearily. That was the conclusion I’d reached while waiting for him to wake up. “I’ve only got a few hours left here, less if I’m here and Gus shows up again, and I’ve got some stuff to do.”
“Things you put off doing until you had no choice.” His shoulders slumped and he sagged back onto the bed.
“Exactly.” I nodded. “You were right about that. And”—I hesitated—“you were right about my mom.”
He looked up, surprised. “Alona,” he said, his voice gentle, not pitying. There was a difference, and I could recognize it now.
I waved away his words and the sudden stinging in my eyes. “Shut up, I don’t want to talk about it now.” I took a deep breath. “But I wanted you to know you were right. And … yes, some of those things I wrote down from Grandpa Brewster and the rest, they probably aren’t what’s holding them here. But”—I leaned closer making sure I had his attention—“some of them are, and you can do something for those people. Hiding doesn’t help anyone, including you. You need to know that.”
He looked away. “What about you? You’re my spirit guide. You’re supposed to stay here for as long as I need you.”
I smiled. “You don’t need me. If you did, I wouldn’t be disappearing, right?”
“We don’t know that.”
The sound of voices in the hall grew louder. “Someone’s coming. I better go.” I took a deep breath, steeling myself to push off his bed and actually leave. Finally leave.
He caught my arm before I could get down. His hand rested warmly against my skin, not passing through or sinking in. He pulled me toward him, his pale blue eyes bright with emotion, and I let him. His mouth, so warm and soft, brushed over mine, once, twice … and lingered. I snuggled closer to his heat, bracing my free hand against the pillow. He let go of my wrist to thread his fingers through my hair and tilt my head. Suddenly, I was being kissed, really kissed, and I leaned into him, tasting him as he tasted me.
The loud clatter of something hitting the floor in the hallway broke us apart.
“Maybe you should have done that earlier,” I said, trying to catch my breath and feeling deliciously warm for the first time in days. “When I was alive.”
He smiled, his cheeks flushed. “When you were alive, you would have hit me.”
“Yeah. True.” I slid off his bed and walked around to the other side.
“Let me come with you,” he said quietly. “I can help.”
I shook my head. “What then? When I’m gone and they find you’ve escaped? What kind of measures do you think they’ll take next time?”
He didn’t say anything. I folded his free wrist back into the restraint, wrapping the fabric as loosely as possible, and he let me. I was right, and he knew it.
I smiled at him, his image suddenly blurry with tears. “You want one last piece of guidance, not that you’ll listen?”
“Alona—” His voice broke.
“Tell your mother the truth. Your dad had his reasons for keeping this secret, okay, fine. But that didn’t work out so well for him. You don’t owe anything to him, you aren’t obligated to do what he did just because you share the same gift.”
“And if she doesn’t believe me?”
I tapped the restraint around his wrist. “Kind of hard for her to make things worse, right?”
“Stay. We’ll figure something out.”
“Please don’t make this any harder, okay?” I forced a choked laugh. “I’m scared enough as it is.”
“Alona, please. Just wait!” He struggled against the restraints.
I straightened my shoulders and gave him my biggest, see-it-from-across-the-football-field smile. “Can’t. Time’s up.” I touched his cheek but pulled away before he could try to grab me. “I’ll come back to you if I can. If not … see you on the other side someday, maybe.” Then I walked through the door and down the hallway before he could change my mind.
16
Will
I pulled hard enough against the restraints to shake the bed, and succeeded only in rubbing my wrists raw. Okay, so Alona had a point about the consequences of breaking out of here, but did she have to tie me up again to prove it?
“Having a little trouble?” A little girl, probably about ten or eleven when she died, with blond pigtails and pink striped pajamas rolled her heavy wheelchair through the partially closed door.
I ignored her.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “I know you can hear me.”
She wheeled herself closer, but I turned away, facing the ceiling, and concentrated on twisting my wrist inside the binding. The right restraint, the one Alona had undone, was looser than the other.
“I saw that blond chippie with the foul mouth leaving your room. So, I know you can talk to us,” the little girl continued.
“I have to get out of here,” I muttered. Even as I lay there, Alona could be disappearing into nothingness.
“I can help you,” the little girl volunteered instantly. “I just need you to do me a favor. It’s real easy.”
I barely resisted rolling my eyes.
“I know you can do it, too. I heard some of the others talking about you. If you help me,” she gave a shrug of her thin shoulders, “maybe I can help you.”
In avoiding her gaze, I ended up staring at my jeans lying over the back of the visitor’s chair with all my other clothes. I’d picked up all the notes Alona had thrown down in frustration and put them in my pocket. Not that I’d had a chance to tell her that. In the last few minutes of seventh hour, just before the fire alarm had rung, I’d even written part of Grandpa Brewster’s letter. It had started more as a gesture, to show Alona I was listening (and that it wouldn’t really change Grandpa’s situation), but when I got going, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe she had a point. It was time to stop running. But how? How would anyone believe me now?
“Come on, please?” the little girl wheedled, rolling her wheelchair closer to my bed.
Out in the hallway, I heard my mother’s voice, getting closer.
“—was completely inappropriate, and you expect me to trust you after that?” she asked.
“Julia, I swear to you, I never let my writing interfere with the treatment of your son.”
Miller. Alona was right.
“Don’t call me Julia,” she said with more command in her tone than I’d heard since before my dad died.
“Okay, okay,” Dr. Miller said in this annoyingly fake soothing voice. Didn’t this jerkoff know how to do anything right?
“We need to find out what’s wrong with him. Locking him away is not the answer,” she said.
“Don’t think of it that way, Julia. With the right medications and intensive therapy …” Miller paused. “You’d still be able to visit him on Sundays.”
