“Nothing,” I snapped. “They were born earlier or later.”
“How do you know for sure?” Megan asked.
“The DMP told me.” It was true that they’d confirmed it, but I’d heard it first from Ian. I didn’t want to mention him if we didn’t have to. “They’ve been keeping tabs on me.”
“Wait.” Her eyes and mouth went round. “If you were born right when the Shift happened, does that mean you caused it?”
“I don’t know what it means. But I think it gave Zachary this—thing he can do.” I waited for him to seize this last chance to back out, but he simply stared at the table in front of him, running his thumb over the corner of his notebook. “He makes ghosts disappear.”
“Mr. Red,” Logan murmured.
“What did you call him?” Megan asked.
Zachary stiffened. “What did he call me?”
“Ow!” Logan covered his ears. “Tell him to shut up.”
“Please don’t speak,” I reminded Zachary. “He called you Mr. Red, because to him, you look like you’re wearing a Santa suit.”
Logan snorted. “More like Little Red Riding Hood.”
“Wild,” Megan said. “So, Aura, if Zach has this power for being the Last, what do you get for being the First?”
“She cures shades,” Logan replied. “And she brought me back to life.”
Megan’s hand halted with the cookie halfway to her mouth. “When you say ‘back to life’—”
I explained. “For about fifteen minutes on the equinox, Logan was human again. He was alive.”
She shook her head vigorously, a pair of tiny auburn braids sweeping her cheeks. “That’s not even remotely possible.”
“It happened,” Logan said.
“And then what?” She looked between the two of us. “Oh my God.”
“No, not that,” I said. “Fifteen minutes isn’t enough time, anyway.”
She and Zachary burst out laughing.
Logan squeezed his fists beside his head at the sound. “What’s so funny?”
Zachary smirked as he scribbled, then showed me his notebook: 15 mins = > enough time. Trust me.
I wondered how many times he’d done it with Suzanne in their eight months, three weeks, and a day and a half. Probably a lot, if fifteen minutes was more than enough time.
I quickly changed the subject (sort of). “Zachary’s and my powers are sort of . . . fluid.” I winced at my choice of words, since it was exchanging fluids that made it happen.
“What do you mean?” Logan asked.
I twisted my hands together, unintentionally making a reverse spider-swear. “When we, um—sometimes I can scare off ghosts. And he says he can see them.”
“When?” Megan said. “Is this another equinox thing?”
“No, it’s—” I kept my eyes away from Zachary. “It’s a kissing thing.”
“What?” Logan leaped up from the couch. “You mean the other night, I couldn’t be with you in the car because you’d been hooking up with him?”
“Get over yourself!” Megan told him. “Did you expect her to join a convent?”
“This isn’t regular kissing,” Logan said to me. “He’s turning you red.”
I felt myself blush, as if to prove his point. I touched the banister behind me, to steady myself if Logan got shady.
“Is that what you want?” he asked me. “For him to change what you are?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want, because it’s over.”
Megan turned to Zachary. “That’s why you broke up with her? She said it was complicated.”
“Aura?” Logan spoke in a low, almost threatening voice. “Did you kiss him on your birthday? Did you make me shade?”
“Whoa, what?” Megan’s hands formed a time-out T. “Logan shaded on your birthday?” She looked at Zachary. “Did you know about this?”
He nodded, then met my eyes long enough for my memory to lock on to that night.
I turned back to Megan. “Remember when I fell off my porch roof and Logan woke you up so you could get Gina?”
“Yeah.”
“I fell because he shaded.”
Megan looked at him. “But Logan was a ghost when I saw him that night. How’d he make it back from shade?”
“I was so scared I had hurt her.” Logan shook his head at the floor, passing his foot through the leg of the coffee table. “I didn’t care about myself anymore.”
“Awww,” she said.
Zachary tapped the corner of his notebook on the table to get Megan’s attention, then spread his hands.
She told him, “Logan says he came back from shade for Aura.”
“Tell Zachary that seeing Aura fall made me forget myself.” Logan stepped as close as he could, keeping his gaze on me. “Tell him it made me forget everything except how much I love her.”
Megan quietly recited Logan’s words. Zachary’s mouth opened, then shut. He wiped his face and picked up his pen. With his elbow on the table, he shielded his eyes as he touched the ballpoint’s tip to the blank page. It trembled, but didn’t move. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.
Finally he set down the pen, resting his fingers on the barrel as if it were the trigger of a gun.
“What did he write?” Logan snarled. “What can he say to that?”
“Nothing.” I closed my eyes, the hurt seeping down the sides of my neck into my chest. “Nothing at all.”
“That’s because he’ll never love you like I do.”
“Logan says—”
I stopped Megan. “Please. Don’t.”
She laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, Aura, but you know it’s wrong to censor ghosts.” Megan turned to Zachary. “You’ll never love her like he does.”
Zachary’s face went stony, even as his green eyes filled with fire. He swiped a hand across his empty page, then began to write, gripping the pen so hard, the creases of his knuckles turned red.
“What’s he saying?” Logan asked.
Megan sidled around the table to read over Zachary’s shoulder. “Uh-oh.”
He clicked off his pen and sat back in his seat, keeping his eyes straight ahead.
“‘For my free question.’” Megan took a deep breath. “‘Do you love her enough to let her go?’”
I turned to Logan, expecting an instant “Yes.” He’d already told me as much—not in so many words, but in his plans to pass on and his agreement to be my friend.
Yet Logan was struck silent. A cold snake slithered up my spine. I’d never asked him the question so directly, never forced him to search his soul for the strength to release me.
“Logan?” I whispered.
“That’s not a fair question.” He began to pace. “How am I supposed to answer that?”
“You can’t lie,” Megan said, “so you give the only answer that’ll come out.”
“I can’t.” He put his hands to his head, gripping the once-blond spikes. “Don’t make me say it.”
I took a shaky step away from him, then another. He couldn’t say he loved me enough to let me go. Because it wasn’t true.
I met Zachary’s eyes, which held sorrow, not smugness. Even though he’d one-upped Logan. Even though his own answer to that question would be a clear, quiet, “Yes.”
He whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you!” Logan bellowed, his voice crackling. “Fuck you, you piece-of-shit coward! You can touch her and kiss her any time you want, but you break her heart because you don’t want to see ghosts? What the fuck is wrong with you?” He lurched toward the dining room.
I put my hands up. “Logan, no!”
Zachary stood and moved forward. “What’s wrong? Is he threatening you?”
“Augggh!” At the sound of Zachary’s voice, Logan dropped to his knees, his outline flickering black. He’d stopped just in time to avoid seeing Zachary.
“Zach, I’m fine! Just stay there.” I stumbled, dizzy from turning my head and from Logan’s shady energy.
/> “Aura!” Zachary rushed toward me.
Logan vanished with a shriek. I clutched the banister at the bottom of the stairs, stopping my fall.
Zachary caught me around the waist. “Are you all right?”
“I told you I was fine.” I brushed him off. “I also told you to stay over there.” I sank onto the bottom step and bent my head, letting my hair veil my face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I couldn’t let him get away with that. I couldn’t let you think I don’t—” He didn’t finish the sentence. “I hope he’s all right.”
“Zach, you better go.” Megan sat beside me and placed a protective hand on my back.
“Right.” He gathered his notebook from the table, then passed the stairs on the way out, so close I could’ve reached out and stopped him.
At the door, Zachary lingered, fingertips tapping the brass knob. The moment stretched on as I waited to hear his next words.
He had only two. “Good night.”
“Tell me how that could’ve gone worse.”
I sat with Megan at the dining room table to smother and drown my dashed hopes with cookies and tea.
“The DMP could’ve shown up. Or the Channel Four news team.” She poured me a cup of tea, which looked lukewarm, based on the lack of steam. “So, I was thinking, you said no other babies were born in the same minutes as you and Zachary, right?”
“Right.”
“But instead of you guys keeping all the other babies from being born at that time, what if no one was meant to be born in those minutes? But somehow you guys got in.” She licked her finger and used it to dab up her plate’s remaining powdered sugar. “It’s like at a club, when they stop letting people inside for whatever reason, and they put the velvet ropes up? And then the bouncer’s friends, or some hot girls, or famous people walk up, and they get in without having to wait.”
I stared at her, then examined the contents of my plate. “What kind of drugs is my grandmom putting in these cookies?”
“Ah. Skepticism from the girl whose ghost boyfriend came back to life just long enough to get laid. By the way, why didn’t that happen?”
“It almost did. I’m so sick of almosts.” I told her the whole story. It felt good to talk about something as normal as sex (normal for people who were not me).
Megan left an hour later, after I promised she could help me find a prom dress over the weekend.
Once the house was silent, I sat on the couch and turned off the lamp. “Logan, you can come back if you want.”
He appeared at the other end of the sofa, in the same place he’d sat before, but now his knees were pulled to his chest. For once, he said nothing.
“I’m glad you didn’t shade.” My voice was toneless.
“Never going there again.” He rested his hands on his knees. “That’s the truth, as far as I know.”
We sat in silence, contemplating the hardest truths, before he spoke again.
“Why is Zachary letting this power-trading thing come between you? Not that I mind. But I want to know what’s worth making you miserable.”
“He thinks we’re breaching some kind of cross-Shift boundary and that it could hurt us or somehow mess up the world. His father just got lung cancer, like my mom had. So Zachary thinks our power-switching is a sign of something dangerous.”
“Sucks about his dad. I know what that’s like.”
“Yeah, I remember.” I’d been with the Keeleys the night Logan’s father had his first heart attack.
“So you think Zachary’s right about all this?”
“I think he’s scared. Not of me. Maybe for me.”
“Huh. I wish I had the guts to be scared.”
I thought I knew what he meant, but asked him anyway. I wanted to hear him say it.
“When he gave me that trick question,” Logan said, “if I loved you enough to let you go, I wanted to say yes. I wanted it to be true. I know it’s what’s best for you.” He shook his head at the wall between himself and the dining room. “I thought tonight I could prove I was the better guy for you. I thought I’d prove I loved you more, and you would—” He set his elbow on the back of the couch and rubbed his mouth. “But a jerk like me can never compete with someone so fucking pure of heart.”
“You can’t help what you feel.”
“I can try harder to feel something different.” His fist tightened on his knee, then let go. “At least I’ve got the music now to distract me, and maybe help get these feelings out of my system.”
“The music?”
“I picked a band Sunday night. That’s what I was trying to tell you in the car, but you were too red.”
“Who’s in this band?”
“Three sixteen-year-olds—Josh, Heather, and Corey.” His gloom dissipated as he spoke. “They call themselves Tabloid Decoys.”
“Great name.”
“It’s from that song ‘Leech,’ by Eve 6.”
“I remember that band! We used to love them when we were kids.”
“Remember that talent show we did for our folks, where we sang ‘Inside Out’?”
I laughed at the memory of us screaming into fake microphones. “We must’ve been six years old.”
“I loved that line about the heart in a blender. I thought it was so funny.” He touched his chest, his smile diminishing. “I wonder if Mom still has the video.”
“I’ll ask Dylan. You could play it on a screen before one of your shows.”
Logan’s eyes lit up, glowing a brighter violet than the rest of him. “That’d be awesome! But show, not shows. We’re doing one big concert, on the solstice.”
“You mean, with—”
“My real hands, holding a real guitar.” He stretched his fingers. “If I turn human again.”
“You told your bandmates about being solid? You barely know them.”
“Calm down. No one knows about that except the four of us. It’ll be a surprise.”
“And then what’ll you do?”
“Play a few tunes, and probably turn back to ghost, like before. Then I’ll pass on if I can. I’ve got seventy-nine days to make myself worthy.”
“What if you stay alive?”
He tilted his head. “Then I guess I’ll play an encore.”
I tried to smile at his joke. “The DMP won’t know what to do with you—what to do with us—if you pull this off.”
“Kind of funny, since they’re sponsoring the whole thing.”
A sudden thought occurred to me. “Logan, if it gets out that ghosts can come back to life—even if it’s just you—it’ll blow people’s minds.”
“Cool, huh?”
“Not cool. Pre-Shifters have barely gotten used to the idea that ghosts exist. Now you’ve proven that shading can be reversed. If you show that death itself can be undone, there’ll be a massive, worldwide freak-out. It would be like aliens landing, maybe worse.”
“Huh,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“No, you only thought about how fun it would be for you. I can’t be part of this.”
“Wait. What if we came up with a way to let people believe it was some kind of illusion?”
“Like a magic trick?”
“Sure. Then they could choose to believe it or not.” He leaned forward. “It’d be worth it, don’t you think?”
I pictured him standing in the spotlight one last time, his hands bringing magic out of the shiny black Fender, his eyes gleaming with the energy of the crowd and the ecstasy of creation. After months in the shadows, being less than nobody, he could let his light shine forth.
He could be a god again.
I’d have done almost anything to give him such a send-off. It wouldn’t erase the tragedy of his death—nothing ever could—but it would leave us both with a memory of glory.
I put my hand over Logan’s. “Totally worth it.”
So what are we looking for here?” Megan rifled through a rack of prom dresses at our favorite formal-wear shop in Mo
unt Washington. “Sexy, sassy, funky, what?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.” I picked up a blue dress, then promptly put it back when I saw the skirt was slit up to the thigh. “Probably not sexy.”
“You don’t want to put Zachary in a world of hurt? I would.”
“He’ll be too busy drooling over Becca. She always looks amazing in formal wear.”
“True. But you’re the one he loves. He said so.”
“He didn’t say so.” I’d replayed his exact words in my head the last four nights, trying to decipher their meaning. “He said he couldn’t let me think that he didn’t . . . something.”
“Love you.”
“Nope. If he did, he would’ve come out and said it. Logan says it all the time.”
“Logan says everything that pops into his head. Zachary actually thinks first.”
“He thinks too much.”
She snorted. “At least Zach half said he loved you. Have you even a quarter said it to him? No, you’re still at the admitting-it-to-yourself stage.”
I grumbled and held up a purple gown with straps crisscrossing the chest. “You think Dylan would like this?”
“If it comes with a Wonder Woman cape. Why do you care what Dylan would like?”
“He’s my date. More important, he’s not Logan or Zachary.”
“Points for him. Ooh, that style comes in red.”
“No red.” Was Megan still trying to wean me off Logan? “I hear a ton of ghosts show up outside Ridgewood on prom night. I’d hate to ruin their nostalgia-fest.”
“But you look so hot in red.” She turned me to the mirror and held the red dress in front of me. I had to admit, it was the perfect complement to my tan skin and dark eyes.
I brushed it aside. “I don’t want to look hot. It’ll give Dylan the wrong idea.”
“Good point. You need to look gorgeous, but not ho-baggy. Let’s try on the purple one.”
The dressing room was too small for two people, so Megan sat outside the door, on the platform with the three-way mirror.
I undressed quickly, wanting to get this over with. I stepped into the gown, almost tripping on the straps.
She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Mickey and I stopped having sex.”
I had no clue how to respond to that announcement. “On purpose?”
Shift Page 12
