“What sins do you have to confess, my dear?”
“Whoa,” I said. “I don’t have sins to confess, but if I did, shouldn’t we be in one of those big wooden rooms with the little sliding grate?”
“I’m afraid we don’t do that here.”
I shrugged. “I just thought that was the way Catholics did things.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it’s a common misperception. Other churches have the ‘confessional’ as you are describing it, but we do not.”
“Weird,” Katie said. She had floated in during Father Thomas’s explanation. “This where I had my first confession.”
Father Thomas didn’t hear any of that because he couldn’t see Katie. Instead, he sat still with a pleasant look on his face while my eyes darted between him and Katie. “If you aren’t here for confession, why are you here, Anna?”
“I need to ask you about ghosts.”
Father Thomas sighed. “Not again. Are you another of those ghost catchers? What is about people and ghosts these days? Don’t tell me you’re putting on a paranormal show, too.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “My friend just died, as you know, and I was wondering if there was any way to contact her.”
Katie giggled as the priest gave me a concerned look. It was like I’d told him I was going to murder someone. “Anna, once a person moves on, they are no longer in our care. They are in the hands of the Lord.”
“So, is that on another plane of existence?”
“In a way, sure. The Lord is neither temporal or corporeal, and neither are our souls.”
“Is that what ghosts would be, if they existed? Souls, do you think?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Can you humor me, Father? I’m having a tough time with Katie’s death. This is helping.”
“Very well,” Father Thomas said with a sigh. “I suppose, in a way, if ghosts existed, they would be the soul of a human struggling to get to the Lord.”
“He’s just a jerk,” Katie said. “There’s no God. At least, none that I saw. Just a lot of darkness, and other ghosts turning into blobs of jelly.”
“I can tell by your eyes that you have something you want to ask me, but you are, as they say, beating around the bush about it.”
I lowered my head. “All right. I’ll come out with it. Do you know how to heal a rift between the living and the dead?”
“I don’t understand,” Father Thomas replied, squinting and giving a shake of his head.
“Say there was a tear in the fabric of reality that separated living and dead people. Is there any way to patch the fabric—like, sew it up, so it didn’t get any bigger?”
“My dear,” Father Thomas said after clearing his throat. “I have been a priest for twenty years, and in seminary for several more, and I have never heard something so fantastical in all my life.”
I sighed. “Of course you haven’t. Another dead end.”
“Well, at least we knocked it off the list,” Katie said.
“And wasted an evening in the process,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?” The priest gave me another worried look.
I stood up. “Nothing, Father. Thank you for your time.”
Chapter 15
I waited at the bus stop the next morning in the cold, alone. Well, not really alone. Katie hovered next to me, her warm, blue glow lighting the dim morning.
“You really shouldn’t be going to school today,” she said. “We have way too much to do.”
“I know that you never really valued school, but I do.”
“It’s not that I didn’t value it. It’s just that I knew I wouldn’t need it. I mean, either I was going to die, or I would be able to make up the work. They’re not going to fail a girl with cancer, now are they?”
“We weren’t all born so lucky as to get cancer.” I regretted the words the moment I said them. “I’m sorry. That was—”
“No, it’s fine. I’m dead. I mean what do I care, right? But it was just luck that I got it, when you think about it. Stupid, dumb luck, but luck all the same. And I was going to use that crappy luck to give me as many boosts as possible.”
“Like your ‘Make a Wish.’”
Katie laughed. “I mean, who doesn’t want to meet John Cena?”
“Seems like everybody does. He’s visited more sick kids than anyone I hear.”
“By a wide margin, and for good reason. Dude is awesome. He benched pressed me with one arm.”
“Yeah, but you were like, seventy pounds by then.”
“You couldn’t bench press me as a ghost with both arms.”
I was laughing now, too. “That’s true. Give me a year to train I probably still couldn’t do it.”
I wondered what would happen if somebody came around the corner and saw me talking to the air. Would they think I was talking to myself? Would they think I’d lost it? Would they think I was crazy? They probably thought all those things already, honestly, and I was oddly okay with that.
Finally, good old Bus 523 came to pick me up. But then the conversation was completely one-sided. Katie talked to me, but I didn’t talk back. I didn’t need everyone thinking I’d lost my mind. I think she enjoyed having my undivided attention. We usually shared the spotlight equally, but when I was riding to school, or with other people, she knew she could monopolize the conversation.
I appreciated that she didn’t sneak into my head and try to read my thoughts. I loved Katie, but there were some things that were too personal for her to know, and I needed some place that was sacred.
By the time we got to school, even Katie was tired of talking, and she never got tired of talking. Even on her worst days, she would go on and on for hours, as I laid at her bedside stroking her hair. She even mumbled in her sleep.
“I still don’t like this
