Inbetween

long before whoever made those rules stopped him?

I needed my journals. Needed to go over Maeve’s attacks. Now that I knew what they were, maybe if I could figure out a pattern. Then I could be better prepared. Predict her moves before she made them, and have the sage and incantations ready for when she did. It was a long shot, but it was all I had.

By the time I made it into my room, my brain was humming with all of the information I needed to gather. I climbed into bed and stared at the pile of journals I’d dumped onto the comforter. There were so many. So many dreams. So many memories. I picked up the first one and peeled back the cover, running my fingers over the page. This was the first book. The one they’d given me at Brookhaven that documented what they had called delusional paranoia. I felt sick just looking at it, but I shook off the feeling and read.

I told Mom I went running because it was the first sunny day we’d had in a week. I really went running because I didn’t want to think about Dad. The faster I ran, the farther away the accident felt, so I ran until I hit Church Street. I would have gone farther but that’s where it happened. I remember the whisper.

“Move.”

And then the power line was flying at me and I was running across the road as fast as my legs would go to get out of the way. Everything felt cold and I didn’t understand why because a few minutes earlier I’d been sweating. Once I reached the grass, I just watched the power line squirm across the road. It was right where I’d been standing. All I could think was that I should have been dead.

Knowing now that Maeve had caused it, knowing that whisper had been Finn and not just a broken part of my brain, it was like I was seeing it in a different light. I placed my palm over the words, hating the memory. It had happened two months after the car accident, and was the first of many accidents. I read over a few more entries that the doctors had made me record. There wasn’t any pattern, no regular time frame. The only thing they had in common was the fact that I knew they weren’t accidents.

I opened another journal and stopped when I reached the first entry I’d made about the car accident.

The one I’d survived. The one Dad hadn’t. Why had they made me write this down? Was having this all recorded for eternity really supposed to help me?

I could still hear Dad. I could still remember the moment right before it happened.

“I want to quit,” I said, staring out the window. Raindrops splattered against the windshield so hard you could barely hear the Journey song on the radio.

“Why?” Dad asked.

“Because I don’t…” I thought about the other cheerleaders. They lived for it. I lived for the moment practice was over. “I don’t feel like me.”

Dad sighed and patted my hand on the console. “Then you don’t have to do it.”

I looked at him, hopeful. “I don’t?”

Dad laughed. It was the last one. The last smile. “No, you don’t have to do anything that doesn’t make you hap—” He never got to finish because the world shattered and went black after that. The next thing I remembered was lying in the back of the ambulance and wondering why my dad wasn’t there.

“What’s wrong?”

I jumped at the sound of Finn’s voice and slammed my journal shut. “You came back,” I breathed.

He stepped closer to the bed, eying the leather-bound journal half-covered in my sheets. “What were you doing? You look sick.”

“Homework.” I pulled my hair over my shoulder. “Where have you been? You just disappeared yesterday.”

Finn walked over to the wall and ran a shimmering finger over a glass-framed print on my wall. “I was at work.”

I took a breath and exhaled slowly, pushing the memory of Dad as far away as I could, trying to focus on Finn.

“Work? Dead people have jobs?”

He smiled. “Yeah. Some of us do.”

I watched him as he made a point not to watch me. “What’s your job?”

“I…just a messenger. I deliver things to where they are supposed to go.”

“What kinds of things?”

“What kind of homework are you working on?”

I chose to ignore his question the same way he’d ignored mine and chewed nervously on my bottom lip as Finn examined the black-and-white prints on my wall. He was completely engrossed, his gaze sweeping across the landscapes that I’d captured at their most beautiful moments before trapping them behind glass for as long as the frames would hold. These pictures were the only good things to come out of Mom’s insistence that I take yearbook.

“Where were you from?” I asked, inching to the edge of the bed. I’d seen it, but I needed to hear it from him. “You know, when you were alive.”

“Charleston.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “South Carolina.”

“Did you have family there? A job?”

He paused. “Why do you want to know all of this?”

“I just feel like I should know something about you,” I said. “I mean, two years of following me around? You probably know everything about me. Probably even know what color my underwear are right now.”

He rolled his eyes and grinned. “I have no clue what color your underwear are.”

“I still want to know.” I didn’t just want to know. I needed to know more about him than the fact that he was dead. I needed to put a name to this feeling eating me from the inside out. I needed to understand how someone who wasn’t even alive could make me feel like this.

“I worked on my dad’s farm,” he finally said, so quiet I could barely hear him. “He taught me to fly.

To dust the crops.” He laughed to himself and stared at a blank spot on the wall. “My brother was always so jealous of that. He’d hide my boots, so I couldn’t leave him behind.”

“So are you my guardian angel?” I finally asked the question that had been eating at me all day. He didn’t turn around. Instead he moved on to the next print, the one I’d taken at Lone Pine Lake a couple months ago.

“No. I’m not an angel. I already told you. I’m a soul. I used to be person. And now I’m just…lost.”

He trailed off. “Lost and terribly invested in a human that I couldn’t leave now, even if I wanted to.”

“Do you ever want to? Leave, I mean?”

Finn finally turned around to face me, his outline shimmering with a silvery dust. It was like he was wrapped in the Milky Way, cloaked in a translucent blanket of stars. “No. I have never thought of leaving you for even a second.”

I didn’t say anything. Instead I leaned forward and traced the jagged outline of Mount Whitney with my fingertip.

“This one’s my favorite,” I whispered. “I’d forgotten I set the timer. I didn’t even realize till later that I’d taken it. I’m usually not in my photos.” I looked at myself staring across the horizon, the lake reflecting a mirrored image of the setting sun behind the pine-dotted crags that etched the rocky terrain. Beside me was a shimmery light, a spectacular sunburst of color against the plain gray horizon. I’d always thought it was just a reflection of the sun off the camera lens. Now I knew better.

“I remember.” Finn touched the shimmery shape beside me and smiled.

I looked back and forth from the picture to Finn, trying to fit the two images together, until my fingers found their way to the glass. At least I could touch this.

“Tell me something about you,” he said.

“You already know everything about me.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t know what goes on inside your head. I don’t even know what you want to do after high school.”

I glanced at Finn, at the floor, at the pictures. I felt like he was asking me to crack myself open and show him my insides with that one simple question. “I’d like to own a bakery someday. The kind where people can come in and sit at little iron tables and soak in the smell of bread when it’s cold outside.”

The second I allowed myself to think it, the pain started. Dull. Achy. The kind that always accompanies