“I think so. He said good-bye, and I never saw him again.” She swept her blond bangs off her forehead as if the room had turned hot. “After you were born, I never saw any ghosts again.”
“So you get it,” I said gently. “You know what I’m going through.”
“More than anyone.” She lifted her heavy gaze to mine. “I also know how futile it is to chase a ghost, how they can break your heart.” Gina placed a cool hand against my cheek. “Zachary seems like a good guy.”
I fought the urge to pull away. “I’m sorry about-about that man.” She hadn’t mentioned his name, maybe because it would make her cry. I couldn’t bear to see that, so I didn’t ask. “And your husband, too.”
“Thank you.” Gina sat back with a sigh. “Ah, well, maybe it was all for the best. Being single freed me up to move here to take care of you and your mother when she got sick.”
She looked at the photo on the wall next to the mirror, of her and Mom on the Philadelphia waterfront, mugging for the camera with their arms around each other. Gina was seventeen, sleek and blond; my mother was still a tomboy at twelve, her frizzy dark hair coming loose from her ponytail.
Gina laid her hand on mine. “It will always be the most important thing I’ve ever done.” Her eyes went round and wet. “Whatever you decide-about Logan, about your future-I want you to know that I’m very proud of you. Your mother would have been proud too, to see what you’ve become.”
My eyes heated. I don’t know what I’ve become.
“Thank you.” I fidgeted with the obsidian pendant through my sweater. I suddenly remembered why I’d wanted one for my sixteenth birthday-I’d just had my first encounter with a shade, at the Arundel Mills Mall before a movie. They’d had to shut down the theater for the night, so many customers were sick. I’d heard that one kid had passed out and fallen down the escalator.
“Back when you could see ghosts,” I asked Gina, “were any of them shades?”
She shook her head emphatically, swinging her dangly gold earrings. “It’s all different now. Ghosts were in full color, as you know, not in violet, and they just looked like wispy versions of live persons. Some of them were angry, but they never looked like dark shadows or made me feel sick and dizzy.”
“I wonder why no one ever saw any shades until the last couple of years.”
“My theory? It’s that BlackBox technology. When the ghosts can’t haunt the places and people they love, they get bitter.” She held up a finger. “Mark my words, one day studies will show it twists them into shades, and by then it’ll be too late. Everything’ll be BlackBoxed.”
I touched the chain around my neck. “If you think that stuff is so bad, why did you give me this?”
“Because I’m a hypocrite, and I love you.” She touched my wrist. “I want you to be safe, Aura.”
“I love you, too.” I smiled at her, but my gaze tripped past her to the stairs.
“Well, I have some work to do, and I know you’re tired, so…” Gina stood and drew my head to her chest so she could kiss the top of it. “Happy birthday, sweetie,” she whispered. Her hand tightened on my shoulder, enough to make me wince.
“Good night.” I dragged myself to my feet, then trudged upstairs, feeling incredibly old. The obsidian around my neck seemed to weigh twenty pounds.
I opened my bedroom door. No Logan.
I tiptoed inside and softly dropped my purse on the floor, as if trying not to wake someone, then switched on the nightstand lamp.
Red sheets.
The soft fleece felt warm against my palm as I stroked my pillow. I reached across the bed and touched Logan’s pillow, the place where he’d laid his head, once for real and many times unreal.
The pillow was cold. Instinctively I drew it into my lap. I clutched it against my chest and rubbed my chin over the seam of the flannel case.
His name caught in my throat. If I called to Logan and he came, the red would hurt him. I’d be nothing but bait for a trap of pain.
But maybe I already was. Logan could see and hear me, but never touch me. How long could we pretend? How long could we forget the world?
My fingers dug into the soft material, sinking and stroking the way they could never do with his skin again.
Then I noticed that my laundry hamper’s lid was slightly askew, as if the bin were overstuffed. I slid off the edge of the bed and crept over to it, still clutching the pillow.
I lifted the lid. Purple-black sheets. Aunt Gina had left them here on purpose, letting me choose.
I pulled out the fitted sheet. It would’ve taken only two or three minutes to switch the sheets back and make the bedroom a safe, happy place for Logan on my birthday.
But I used that much time, maybe twice as much, to stand there thinking.
Thinking how Logan’s fingers clenched when he talked about his guitar. Thinking how Mrs. Keeley’s back had stooped when she stood by Logan’s grave-a grave that might as well be empty.
Thinking how Zachary’s lips had felt on mine.
Thinking. Deciding. Choosing.
I stuffed the sheet back into the hamper and tamped it down so that the lid would close.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my face already damp. I was tired of tears, tired of the constant heat behind my eyes, tired of my cheeks feeling stretched and dry.
I set the pillow carefully on the bed, then changed into a mismatched pair of flannel pajamas. I just wanted to be warm.
The sheets pressed heavy against my skin when I slid between them, my back to the window. I shivered as my own heat wrapped around me like a cocoon in the dark. Like the arms of a real live boy.
The tears came harder, but for the first time, they felt something less than endless.
“Aura.” Logan’s voice was strained.
I rolled on my back. He stood by the window, shimmering.
“Aunt Gina knows,” I told him. “She changed the sheets.”
“Can you change them back?” he asked quickly.
“Um…” I fumbled for an answer. “The thing is-”
“Happy birthday,” he said. “I’m sorry I don’t have a gift or a card or anything.”
“You have a good excuse.”
He gave a labored laugh. “True. I guess you heard about the trial. There’s no way we can stop it now. Everyone will know what happened.” He staggered forward, his mouth twisting like he was walking on hot coals. “I hate my parents.”
His pain and rage made my heart fold inward. “You can still leave. Save yourself.”
“No! I won’t let you go through it alone.” Logan’s outline flickered again. “We’ll do this together. We’ll have each other’s backs, like always. I may be dead, but I’m still your boyfriend.” He took another heavy step. “Right?”
Every word I needed to say jumbled up inside my head. Words like “breakup” and “over” and “good-bye.” But how could I hurt him when he was such a wreck?
I sat up and reached for him. “Listen-”
&
nbsp; He ducked, as if from a punch. “Shit, the red is so much worse than before. Feels like I’m disintegrating.” He tried to straighten up again and failed. “We need to talk. Come outside.”
Logan disappeared. I threw back the covers. Outside, where he wasn’t in pain, I could tell him it was over, that he had to move on without me, for both of us. But the thought of breaking up with Logan made my insides twist and tangle like a set of earbud wires.
I put on a cardigan and sneakers, then opened my bedroom door. Down the hall, Aunt Gina’s door was ajar. The sounds of shuffling papers and tapping laptop keys came from her room. Who else would be working at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night?
I closed the door, then opened my window. Logan was pacing in front of the house, his form slightly faded in the glow from the streetlights.
“Hey.” I spoke quietly. “She’s still up, so I can’t come out through the door.” I hoisted myself through the window and set my foot on the gentle slope of the porch roof we shared with our next-door neighbor.
“Be careful,” Logan said.
“I’ve done this a hundred times, remember?”
“I know, but I can’t catch you anymore.”
I peered over. It was too far down to jump, and even if I could, I’d be locked out of the house. So I swung my legs over to sit on the edge of the roof above the front walkway.
“How was your birthday?” Logan shifted his nonexistent weight from one foot to the other. “Did you guys have dinner?”
“We did.” My fingers tightened on the shingles as I realized he could have shown up at the restaurant tonight. He’d taken me there before the homecoming dance, so it would be part of his ghostly habitat. “But not at Chiapparelli’s.”
“I know. I looked for you. Where did you go?”
“To someone’s house.”
“I went everywhere I could think of.” Logan flailed his arms. “The whole day, I looked all the places you could’ve gone, but whenever I tried to get to you, something freaky would happen.”
My pulse skipped. “Really?”
“Yeah, really.” He swaggered up to the edge of the grass. “It’s that guy, isn’t it?”
“I don’t-”
“What is his deal?” Logan’s voice crackled. “Why is he so fucking bright I can’t look at him?”
I shook my head, but the motion made me so dizzy, I had to blink hard to clear my vision.
“Is that why you like him, Aura? He’s all red and shiny?” The edges of Logan’s image fizzled black, like he was being swarmed by a thousand gnats. “Or is it the accent? I mean, what’s he got that I don’t-no, don’t answer that. Duh. A body.”
“Logan, please calm down.”
“Are you going to change the sheets or not?” He looked at the front door, then up at me. “Do you want me to come back?”
I stared into his eyes for a long moment. I could almost imagine them blue as a September sky.
“Aura.” His whisper seemed to be right at my ear. “Do you still love me?”
It was the wrong question, because boy or ghost or shade, there would always be only one answer.
“Yes.”
Logan’s dark outline brightened to pure violet again, and I let myself breathe.
“I love you, too.” He bounced on his toes. “So we’re cool, then? I’ll come over tomorrow after you put the other sheets on. You leave for your grandmom’s on Monday, right?”
“I do, but-I don’t think you should come here… tomorrow night.” I cursed myself for wussing out at the end of the sentence. I’d never broken up with anyone before Logan. I’d never loved anyone before Logan.
“When are you getting back from Philly?” he asked me. “I’ll stop by then.”
“I-no. I don’t want you to come here.” I shuddered at the sound of my words. “I can’t see you anymore.”
Logan went very still, as if caught in a freeze-frame. “You said you love me.”
“I do love you.”
“But you’re leaving me.”
“It’s the only way to-”
“I’ve lost you.” He stepped back and looked up and down the sidewalk. “Because I died, I’ve lost you.”
“Logan, don’t-”
“God, this isn’t happening. It was one thing to lose my life, but this.” He dragged his hands up his face, into his hair. “What can I do, Aura? Tell me what to do.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“No!” He lunged through the iron gate into the yard, then stopped with a hiss, like something had pushed him back. “There’s got to be something. Got to be!”
Black lightning shot through his body, ripping him apart.
“Logan?” I reached for him. “Logan, don’t!”
Something slithered over the back of my neck as I moved. The chain of the obsidian pendant. I wrenched my body to keep the stone inside my shirt, but it swung out, dangling in the air before him.
Logan hurled a gurgling, staticky shriek. “THERE MUST BE SOMETHING!”
My brain tilted. I grabbed for the edge of the roof, but my hands went in the wrong direction. Up was down and down was up.
As the world dropped away, I saw Logan’s shadowy figure streak toward me.
“AURA!”
Then I was twisting, slipping, scrambling.
And finally, falling.
In the long, gray moments that followed, I heard Logan calling for help. He screamed my aunt’s name, but of course she couldn’t hear him. I lay on the cold concrete walkway, trying not to let the desperation in his voice make my own lungs seize. It hurt to breathe.
“Aura.” Logan knelt beside me, sobbing. His voice had lost its crackle. “I’m gonna get Megan. I’ll be right back. Don’t move, okay?” When I didn’t respond, he shouted into my ear. “Aura! Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Go.”
His violet hands reached for me, but then he snatched them back as if I’d burned them. “Don’t move. And don’t fall asleep. Think of a song.”
“A song?”
“Something fast. Think of ‘Devil’s Dance Floor.’ Remember?”
He blurted out the first line to jog my memory, then disappeared. A moment later I heard his voice from two blocks over, shouting Megan’s name again and again.
I tried to turn my mind to the song, remembering how he would lock his gaze with mine on the first verse, how he would pull each musician into the interlude like a wizard coaxing the four elements, how he stoked the crowd through the frenzied finale, urging them to swing a little more on the devil’s dance floor.
The song ended and he finally quieted, in both imagination and reality. I closed my eyes and let the gray turn to black.
Chapter Twenty
Wake up, dork.”
I opened my eyes reluctantly to see the pockmarked tiles of the hospital room ceiling.
“It’s been two hours already?” I asked Megan.
“Yep. The nurse is on her way to check on you again. Figured you’d rather wake up to my pretty face than hers.”
>
I tried to roll over in bed, but the sharp ache in my side stopped me. “Ow!”
“More painkillers you need,” Megan said, using the new Yoda puppet she’d bought for my birthday.
“Where’s Gina?”
“In the lounge she is, her messages, she is checking.” Megan coughed and lowered the puppet. “It hurts to do that voice. How do you feel?”
Once again my mind was slammed by the events of the previous night. Logan shimmering in pain. Logan raging over our breakup. Logan turning shade.
“I just want to sleep.”
Megan’s eyes widened. “Uh-oh.”
“No.” I gritted my teeth as I used my one good hand to help myself sit up. “I’m sleepy because I fell off my roof and got poked at by doctors until five a.m. I’m not sleepy because my brain is sloshed.”
“Are you sure? I can ring the bell and have the nurse come quicker.”
“I don’t feel sick. I’m actually kinda hungry.”
“That’s supposed to be a good sign.” Megan straightened the thin knit blanket over the sheets. “You could totally use this head injury thing when school starts again. If you flunk a test, just say you had memory loss from your concussion.”
Ha. If only the injury could clear the memories I dreaded most. But I knew I’d never get that lucky.
The nurse came in then, and I understood Megan’s point about not wanting to wake up to that face. “Agatha” (according to her name tag) scowled at me as she took my blood pressure and checked my chart. She asked me several questions and seemed disappointed with my unremarkable answers.
“The neurologist will be in shortly to examine you. Until then, don’t move.” Agatha shook her finger at Megan on her way out, like my friend might challenge me to a game of one-on-one.
“Do you want me to call Zach for you?” Megan said. “You can’t use cell phones in hospital rooms.”
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