I flung my hands into the air, exasperated. “How can I believe you, Katie? You’re dead. I know you’re dead. If I believe you, I have to believe that ghosts are real, and that’s nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Katie replied. “Everybody eventually becomes a ghost. Your dad is a ghost.”
“Watch it,” I said. “Don’t say another word about my father.”
“Or what?” Katie said with a snicker. “You’ll hurt me?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll hurt myself. If you really are Katie, you’ll never let me do that to myself.”
“Fine,” she said. “You always were stubborn. Isn’t there anything I can do to convince you?”
“Sure. Tell me something I don’t know. Anything.”
“You know everything about me,” Katie said. “Literally everything.”
“Well, then I guess there’s nothing you can do.”
Katie sighed. “There is one thing, but I don’t think I should tell you. It might hurt you, and I don’t want to hurt you.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Then I guess we’re done here. Go haunt somebody else.”
There was a long silence. For a moment, I thought she might be gone, but when I tilted my head up, she was hovering over the corner of my bed.
“I loved you,” she said, softly.
“I loved you, too,” I replied. “That’s not news.”
“No,” Katie said, turning to me. “I loved you loved you.”
“Don’t lie to me,” I replied. “That’s not fair. You’re in my brain. You know how I felt about you, and…that’s not fair to lie to me; to use my own feelings against me.”
“I’m not lying,” Katie replied. “I have proof. Or more like, there’s proof in my room.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me. Just get up and walk across the street, and I’ll show you where the proof is.”
I sat up in bed. “Fine.”
I pushed myself off the bed and rushed to the door. I had never been angrier in my whole life, but even in my anger, a little piece of me hoped it was true. It was just my brain acting out my deepest desire. I had always loved Katie, not as a sister, but as so much more. I never told her, and that was my biggest regret.
Chapter 11
She’d better not be lying to me. She’d better not be lying to me. She’d better not be lying to me.
I couldn’t believe I was entertaining the thought that a ghost was telling me the truth as I marched across the street to Joanne’s house.
“I’m not lying to you,” Katie said as I knocked on the door.
I shook my head. “No, you aren’t lying to me. My subconscious is lying to me, because my subconscious is cruel.”
Joanne swung the door open. She looked around before looking at me. “Who are you talking to?”
“Nobody,” I said, turning my eyes to her. “Can I come in?”
“Of course.” Joanne held open the door.
“Where am I going?” I whispered into the ether.
“Upstairs. Into my room.”
“Do you mind if I go upstairs again?” I asked. “I think I left something up there yesterday.”
“You don’t need a reason, dear,” Joanne said. “You can come and go as you please.”
“Thanks.”
I marched up the stairs, fully aware that I had now crossed over from crazy to bonkers. I wasn’t just hearing the voice in my head, I was following its commands. It was some John Wayne Gacy level stuff.
“As long as you don’t put on a clown costume, I think you’ll be fine,” Katie said as I turned the corner toward her room.
“If you’re not in my head, how come you can hear my thoughts?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d be lying if I said I understood how this ghost thing worked, honestly. It’s not like there’s a spirit guide to show you how to be a ghost. You just kind of wing it.”
“There’s not? That must make it hard.” I shook my head again. “I can’t believe I’m talking to myself.”
“You’re not,” Katie replied. “And no, there isn’t. You’re on your own. Even if you find a ghost…never mind.”
“What is it?” I asked, walking up the steps.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just…let me prove I’m real to you first.”
“Good luck.” I swung open the door to her room. “What now?”
Katie pointed to the bed. “Under the mattress.”
“A little cliché, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s not like I had the energy to do much else or go many other places. My bed was my sanctuary.”
I pushed up the mattress. Sure enough, wedged in under the sheets was a marbled notebook with the words KEEP OUT across the front.
“Don’t worry about the warning,” Katie said. “That’s just when I was alive.”
“What if your mom found it?” I said. “I mean…after.”
“I didn’t think much about it,” Katie said. “I just needed a place that I could tell the truth. There’s no way you knew about this notebook.”
“I don’t know. I guess you could have talked about it and I forgot. It seeped into my subconscious or something.”
“Trust me. I would NEVER have told you about this journal. Not ever.”
I opened the notebook. Scribbled across the front page a hundred times was the name “Katherine Eugenia Aguilar.” The first three pages were nothing but her first name and my last name written together.
“What is this?” I asked.
“I was practicing, for in case we got married, and I was going to change my name.” She hid herself behind her hands. “Man, this is so embarrassing.”
I flipped through the pages. Every one of them was filled with her inner most thoughts and feelings. On the tenth page, for instance, she wrote:
Anna came over today. I vomited in front of her. It was the most embarrassed I’ve ever been in my entire life.
“Why would you be embarrassed about that?” I asked, looking up from the notebook and catching Katie’s eyes.
“Cuz I didn’t want you to see me like that. I mean have you ever had the flu so bad you were sweaty and yucky and throwing up?”
“Yeah, you know
