by Cassia Leo
Table of Contents
Note to the Reader
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Parallel Spirits Playlist
Acknowledgements
Other books by Cassia Leo
About The Author
by Cassia Leo
http://cassialeo.com
Parallel Spirits
Copyright © 2013 by Cassia Leo. All rights reserved.
First Kindle Edition: 2013
Editing by Margaret Rainforth
Formatting: Streetlight Graphics
This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Note to the Reader
Some chapters in this eBook begin with a musical note symbol, which contains a link to a YouTube video of a song pertaining to that chapter. Most of these links are mobile-friendly and work on internet-ready devices such as smart phones, tablets, and computers. These links will not work on all e-readers. If you are reading Parallel Spirits on an incompatible e-reader, feel free to open the playlist on a compatible device and listen as you read.
The playlist is available on YouTube at:
http://bit.ly/psplaylist
The playlist is available on Spotify at:
http://bit.ly/psplaylists
For Patty.
I miss your kind spirit.
Chapter 1
Connecticut, 1707
Listen
They say love is blind, but they’re wrong. Love is the harshest light shined on every insecurity, every weakness, every broken promise. It exposes its victims, laying their bloody hearts bare on a slab of cold stone. Love is not for the fainthearted. Love is for humans.
Finding another carrier spirit like me residing inside my best friend’s body was unbelievable. Falling in love with my best friend, having learned love’s deadliest lesson long ago, was foolish.
Samuel stands at the edge of the water with her cowering in his arms. The moonlight leaps off her black hair lighting up the expression of disbelief in his eyes.
“You said our spirits were destined for each other!” I shout at Samuel across the dark beach.
“Mara, I am telling you the truth,” he insists.
There’s something magical about the beach at night. The way the stars and the moon lay a twinkling blanket over the tumbling surface of the ocean. The black waves exploding into clouds of briny mist. It’s so violent yet so serene. It’s perfect on a night when you can’t decide if you’d rather live or die.
I plant my bare feet firmly in the wet sand. “Stop lying, Darius!” I shout. If he wants to call me Mara then I’ll call him by his spirit name as well.
A guttural sob builds in my throat and I feel as if I’m being split in half. Half of me wants to die and be done with the miserable business of being human. Half of me wants to return to my life as a carrier spirit, when nothing could harm me—and love couldn’t reach me.
My arms are stretched before me as I concentrate on holding in the energy building inside me. The restless sensation that penetrates down to my bones is unbearable. Telekinesis is only useful when you can control it. And right now, I am very out of control.
The girl’s face is still buried in Darius’s overcoat. His arms are wrapped around her protectively, the same way his arms were wrapped around me last night and the night before that. I’ve spent the last three years of my human life in Darius’s arms. This girl has spent the last three hours there. As I watched from a distance, those were the cruelest moments of my life—unless you count the moment my spirit was ripped from my body fifty years ago.
“Mara, please calm yourself,” Darius pleads over the shrill sound of his mistress’s whimpering.
“Why don’t you DISAPPEAR?!” I shout. “Better still, why don’t you make her disappear so we can settle this now, just you and me?”
“Because I want you to believe me,” he pleads.
“I believe what I saw!” I shriek, and my outstretched hands tremble with the memory of Darius’s lips on her collarbone. “Release her!”
“I love you, Mara,” Darius says. “Please put your hands behind your back and I will release her. Put your hands down, my love.”
“How could you do this to me? After everything I told you. After everything I did for you!”
Darius knows how my spirit became detached fifty years ago. The memory of it came to me when I was just five years old. I thought I was remembering dreams, until more memories came flooding back. Blurry faces and events became solid, heavy memories of my former life as an Indian princess. By the time I was eleven, I remembered everything about the day I took my own life; the day I lost my body.
“Please, Mara. Put your hands down. Please don’t do this.” His face doesn’t look like the face of a frightened man and this only makes me angrier.
I want him to feel what he’s done. I want him to hurt the way I’m hurting right now. He knows what’s at stake and he doesn’t care.
Before I became the human I am now, I roamed the Earth for forty-three years as a carrier spirit with no body. This was difficult enough, but trying to find a way to earn my body back nearly drove me insane. The only way for a carrier spirit to earn their body back once they’ve been sentenced to life as a carrier spirit is to restore the imbalance created by their death.
In my case, that meant I had to create true love—the kind of love that could counterbalance the heartache that caused my spirit to detach. I managed to do this eighteen years ago and my spirit was reinserted into the body of child about to be born. It took eleven years for my memories of being a carrier spirit to fully return. Then, six years ago, at the age of twelve, I met Darius.
Darius’s spirit detached almost two hundred years ago, but he refuses to tell me how it happened. Darius refuses to tell me a lot of things—just like he’s refusing to tell me the truth about this girl. I suppose it’s this mysterious quality that drew me to him.
Her black hair is swept up in the ocean breeze and Darius closes his eyes. Is he breathing in her scent?
A pulsing wave of energy rumbles in my chest and explodes through my fingertips. A beam of blue light flashes across the beach and I’m catapulted backward. The sand rains over my face, stinging my skin and filling my mouth. One moment I’m choking on the gritty earth and the next my spirit is ripped away from the beach, from my body, at the speed of light—for the second time.
Chapter 2
Payne Bay, California, Present Day
Listen
A PowerPoint Presentation on colon cancer? Can my life be any more excruciating? I won’t even get into the irony that I live in Payne Bay.
“Belinda, you’re up,” Mr. Frock calls to me with a nod toward the wooden podium at the head of the class.
My heartbeat pounds inside my skull as I trudge toward the head of the class with my USB flash drive in hand. Some students have their heads down, absorbed in text message conversations, some are watching me, and a few are asleep. No one’s laughing yet, but that’s only because they’ve all forgotten the topic of my presentation—and I’ve yet to open my mouth.
How did I get stuck with colon cancer?
Oh, yeah, now I remember. Helen Neubauer begged me to switch with her. The same Helen Neubauer who pushed me down and called me a “smurf” in second grade when I asked if I could play tetherball with her. I guess we’ve all come a long way in the past ten years. Well, at least I have. I’m no longer the shortest kid in the class and I’ve given up trying to play with the big girls.
Scooting in behind the podium, I hand Mr. Frock my flash drive. He jams it into his laptop and the contents of my flash drive are projected onto the screen. A brief moment of panic subsides as I realize I actually remembered to erase the contents of the flash drive before class. During our last PowerPoint presentation, I forgot to delete some old pictures of me at a water park with my mom. Pictures of flat-chested twelve-year-old me sporting a bathing suit and a mouthful of metal were splashed across the screen as Mr. Frock searched for my presentation. Surprisingly, this wasn’t my most embarrassing moment.
“No girls gone wild pics today?” Jared Wilkins yells from the back of the class.
My face heats up as I stare at the index cards in my hands.
“This is your first and only warning, Jared,” Mr. Frock says as he clicks his mouse to start the presentation. “Go ahead, Belinda.”
I clear my throat and take the first step down Colon Lane. “Colon cancer is one of the top five most common and deadly cancers in America—”
They’re already laughing at me.
“Don’t laugh at him. He’s constipated!” Jared shouts.
I glance at the screen behind me as the class explodes into laugher. The old man in the photo I placed on the introduction slide does actually look constipated.
Mr. Frock holds up one finger for everyone to quiet down. “Jared, see me after sixth period for detention,” he says, before he turns to me. “Go on.”
My hands are numb with humiliation. I wriggle my fingers and my index cards spill over the top of the podium. I gather them up and try to put them back in order as my hands tremble. A muffled chuckle from somewhere on my left falls with a dull thud in my ears, but I don’t look up. If my best friend Frankie were here, he’d tell me to imagine everyone naked, but somehow I don’t think this is the best strategy when giving a presentation on bowel health.
Taking a deep breath, I start over. I make it through most of the presentation with minimal giggles from the class. When the second-to-last slide appears on the screen the entire class bursts into uncontrollable laughter. Under the heading “Detecting Colon Cancer” I’ve placed a picture of the inside of a healthy colon taken during a colonoscopy. I didn’t realize everyone would find this image so hilarious.
“All right, all right, that’s enough,” Mr. Frock calls out over the laughter. “Settle down and let her finish the presentation.”
When the torture session is over, I trudge back to my desk, two rows behind Jared. As I pass him, he smirks at me. My foot catches on something and I trip spectacularly, coming down right next to my desk.
My body aches with mortification as I glance behind me and see I’ve tripped over the strap of Helen’s backpack.
Jared is crying with laughter as he asks, “Did you break your colon?”
Helen Neubauer and Jesse Nova turn away from me so they can snicker in private.
Just when I think I might actually die of embarrassment, the cold speckled linoleum I’m staring at disappears.
Chapter 3
It’s 2:30 in the morning when I wake in my bed. Wispy dreams clutch at the periphery of my memory. I vaguely remember dreaming about yesterday’s presentation. Everything happened exactly the same as it did in real life except in my dream I had a good comeback for Jared’s broken colon joke.
“Did you break your colon?”
“Yeah, now I have a semicolon. Want to kiss it?”
I snort with laughter then lie back down to go to sleep. If only I were that witty in real life.
I throw my backpack onto the floor of my mom’s Volvo and hop into the front seat. She taps my hand as I reach for the radio.
“Mom, you know I hate that talk radio crap,” I complain.
“It’s my car. When you get your own car you can listen to whatever you want,” she replies as she takes a cursory glance in the rearview mirror to check her reflection.
She moves a few stray wisps of light-brown hair aside until she’s satisfied. My mom is as beautiful and vibrant as she was when she got married twenty years ago. Even after my dad died, she still took the time to apply eyeliner around her crystal-blue eyes and nude-pink lipstick on her full lips. But her poufy, feathered hairstyles are perpetually stuck in the eighties.
“How did your presentation go?” she asks as we turn onto Mariposa Blvd.
We pass Trixie’s, the frozen yogurt shop where Helen Neubauer and her clique hang out after school. This is precisely why I avoid the yogurt shop even though they have the best peanut butter swirl cone on the planet.
“Belinda? I asked you a question.”
I try not to roll my eyes as I think of yesterday’s disaster. My mom hates it when I roll my eyes. She says it’s a nasty habit that keeps people from taking you seriously.
“It went fine,” I reply as I stare out the window at the mansions on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Almost every home in Payne Bay overlooks the ocean, even the crummy apartments. It’s practically illegal not to have a dazzling view and a gorgeous tan.
I’m not as pale as I was freshman year, when I tried dressing up as a ghost for Halloween. I painted my face and hands white and showed up at the Payne Bay Library’s costume party as the ghost of Charlotte Brontë. No one noticed the ghost part of the costume. But, of course, it’s kind of difficult to maintain a gorgeous tan when you’re doing everything in your power to avoid the surfers at the beach.
The Volvo pulls into the steep, semicircular driveway in front of Pacific High School. “I have a chamber meeting tonight,” my mom announces. “Don’t wait up for me.”
“Call me if you need a designated driver. I know how the Chamber of Commerce likes to party,” I say, forcing a smile as I lug my backpack off the floor and hop out of the car.
Joking with my mom and forcing smiles has become a routine for the past two months. It’s almost tragic how good I’ve become at looking normal, almost happy.
I jostle my way through the crowds of students hanging out on the steps. When I reach the top step, I glance over my shoulder at the view of the ocean. I’ve done this almost every day for the past two and a half months. Every day I glance at t
he water and make a wish. Normally, I wish that seeing Frankie will be just a little easier than it was the day before. Today, my wish is that everyone in Health class came down with a sudden case of amnesia. Luckily, Health class is my first period. I’ll endure fifty minutes of shame then move on with my life.
Trudging into Mr. Frock’s class, I try to keep my head down, pretending the way my hair hangs around my face makes me invisible. I make it to my seat in the back of the classroom and quickly begin rummaging through my backpack for a notebook and pencil.
“Hey, Belinda!” says a voice on my left.
Jesse Nova, a pothead who prefers being called a “tree lover,” is staring at me looking utterly impressed. His red, glossy eyes and slick expression mean he’s probably already stoned out of his mind. He wriggles his thick eyebrows at me and the curly clutch of brown hair on the top of his head wriggles in unison.
“That was pretty dope, what you said to Jared yesterday,” he says, holding out a small folded piece of paper to me. “Here’s my number. You should really think of colon me sometime.”
He winks at me as I take the paper from his hand. I turn away and stare at the whiteboard in a daze.
You should really think of colon me sometime?
What kind of pickup line is that? And why, in the name of all that is sacred, is Jesse Nova trying to pick me up? No one ever tries to pick me up. Everyone at Pacific High assumes I’m off limits or just too much of a hassle to get close to because of Frankie. What guy wants to be with a girl who holds them to Frankie’s standards; junior pro surfer with a 4.0 GPA? Not to mention the fact that Frankie knows all my secrets. Well, except the one I’ve been keeping from him for the past two and a half months.
So Jesse Nova thinks I’m pretty dope. Or, at least, whatever I said to Jared yesterday was pretty dope. What did I say to Jared? Then it hits me. It wasn’t a dream. I actually had a witty comeback. I actually asked Jared Wilkins if he wanted to kiss my semicolon.
