The Ghost and the Goth

Then we’d see who laughs at Alona Dare. Nobody, that’s who.

Except for maybe Will Killian.

Frowning, I stood up and started pacing, just in time for Jesse McGovern’s green and nasty hooptie to pass right through me as he sped from the parking lot to his loser classes at the trade school in town. I ignored the cold shuddery sensation, trying to focus on a vague memory struggling to come to the surface. I remembered hearing Leanne and Miles bitch about me and seeing Misty kissing Chris, that was clear enough. After that, though, everything started to get a little fuzzy. The bell had rung, and people had started walking into the building, and then …

Will Killian’s mocking smile and pale blue eyes appeared in my head. He’d laughed at me. He’d looked right at me and grinned, delighting in my misery. Any other day I would have been worried that someone like him was making fun of me, but today, all I could think about was, to do that, he had to have been able to see me. Hear me, even.

If Killian could see or hear me, maybe other people could, too. Maybe I wasn’t really dead. At least, not all the way. Though what I’d seen at my funeral would indicate otherwise. I’d watched them lower the casket into the ground and—

I shook my head, sending my hair flying across my face. No. I wouldn’t think about that now. Being dead and trapped here forever, unable to do anything, that wouldn’t be fair.

There had to be another explanation, and Killian probably knew all about it, freak that he was.

All I had to do was make him tell me.

Too easy. After all, he could see me, right? Freak or not, Killian was still a guy.

I flipped my hair back over my shoulders, smoothing it down. After another quick second to tug my shorts back down into place — evidently getting hit by a bus gives you a semipermanent wedgie — I was ready to go. I couldn’t do anything about the big tread mark that ran diagonally across my white shirt, though I hated it, and my favorite M·A·C lipstick was probably still in the locker I shared with Misty. If she hadn’t taken that for herself, too.

I looked pretty good for a dead girl, though, if I did say so myself. Not that I could see my reflection or anything, but when I’d first woken up here days ago, I’d immediately checked my arms and legs for gaping cuts and bones sticking out and gross stuff like that. I found nothing but a few bruises and scrapes that went away, like, the next day. My face, which I’d explored cautiously with my fingers, appeared similarly undamaged. Apparently, according to the coroner, I’d died of massive internal injuries. But nothing you could see out front. Awesome. Killian didn’t stand a chance.

For the second time today, I headed around the edge of the tennis courts and up toward the school building. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much farther this time than I had the first. Double doors, big glass ones with that chicken wire stuff threaded in between the panes, blocked the main entrance. Typically, they stood open when everyone got here in the morning, but now with classes in session, Principal Brewster had locked everything down tight. All the better to keep a random psychopath out, never mind the ones in the student body that were locked in by the same measure.

I reached for the metal handle, just to jiggle it to see if the door might pop open, and my hand passed through it. I yanked my hand back and cradled it against my chest until the cold tingling feeling passed. It didn’t make sense. Cars and people passed through me, yeah, but I still managed to walk on the ground, sit on a chair at the funeral home, and—

Suddenly the doors in front of me seemed to shift and grow larger. What the—?

I looked down and found my feet sinking into the concrete sidewalk, like at the beach when you dig your toes in and the wave washes more sand over you until your feet seem to be gone. Only this was the real thing.

Oh, no, no, no. I squeezed my eyes shut tight. The ground is solid, the ground is solid. I just kept repeating it to myself until I could feel, once more, the sensation of concrete beneath me.

I cracked one eyelid open to check and sure enough, I was back on the ground instead of in it. Unfortunately, my shoes and socks did not make the transition. My toenails, painted in Very Berry, sparkled up at me, under a light layer of dust. Great.

Whatever. At least I’d learned something.

“The ground is solid but the door is not. The ground is solid but the door is not.” I stepped forward, prepared to feel like an idiot when my head smacked the glass. Instead, the cold tingling sensation I’d felt in my hand when it passed through the handle spread through my whole body.

Then suddenly, I was on the other side of the door in the overheated little vestibule between the outer doors and the inner ones, standing on the rubber-backed mat they’d left out from the last rainy day. Yes! Finally something was going my way.

Following the same technique, I walked toward the second set of doors, and in seconds, I found myself barefoot on the cold linoleum in the main hall.

“All right!” I took a second to dance around like an idiot, tossing my hair the way a certain traitorous former friend of mine and I used to when it was just us and we were being stupid and watching videos on MTV2. In some respects, being able to do what you want without worrying about someone seeing you was kind of refreshing.

“Glad to see someone’s having a good day,” a morose voice said somewhere to my left.

I jumped and turned to see a janitor, dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit, approaching me slowly as he pushed one of those buckets on wheels. The school was set up like a giant H. The main hallway, where I stood, was the crossbar in the H. He was coming from the first left branch of the H, where the library and the English classrooms were.

“You can see me?” I whispered, hardly daring to believe it.

“Of course I can see you.” He paused, lifting the mop into the wringer thing at the top of the bucket and squeezing it. Dirty nasty water flowed out. “You’re tracking prints all over my nice clean floor.”

I turned around to look at the ground behind me and saw nothing but gleaming tile. “Uh, okay. Whatever.” I shook my head. “If you can see me, too, that means I must not be dead. At least, not completely, right?” I bounced on my toes in excitement. Forget the fact I was talking to the janitor — a thirty-year-old guy with bad skin who never left high school? Hello, his picture was the definition of loser — I finally had proof that things weren’t as bad as I thought.

He let out a bellowing laugh, revealing snaggly teeth and a serious need for whitening strips. “Honey, you’re definitely dead. You just ain’t the only one here.”

He pulled the mop from the bucket and plopped it on the floor, the carpeted floor. Only the main hall was tile. All the branches of the H, including the one where he still stood, had that gross, government surplus, every-color-and-no-color-at-the-same-time carpeting.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He ignored me, shoving the mop back and forth across the floor. “Damn kids, always leaving a mess.”

The carpet didn’t get wet, though, at least not that I could see, and then he was pushing past me with his mop.

“Watch it.” I jumped back, expecting a cascade of cold yucky water to reach my toes, but the water seemed to puddle only directly under his mop. Weird.

“Never thinking about what they do, what kind of work it makes for the rest of us,” he muttered, rolling his bucket past me.

“Wait.” I turned to follow him. “What did you mean I’m not the only one? I mean, yeah, clearly I’m not the only person who’s ever died but … Oh, my God.” Even as I watched, the janitor walked right through the trophy cases in the main hall, still mopping and mumbling to himself. Why would he do that? There was nothing behind that wall except the courtyard and …

I inhaled sharply. The old gym. The entrance had once been there. Before they built the new addition…way back in, like, 1992. It was soooo before my time, but Maura Sedgwick, suck-up that she was, once did this big history project on the school. Total snoozefest, but the old pictures were kind of cool. You should have seen the way people ratted their hair back then. Totally gross. My mom … I mean, someone once told me that back in the sixties women used to use sugar water to make their hair stiff, and they’d wake up to find cockroaches nesting in there. Ewww.