Laughing together?
Surreal, their laughter. Something so joyful didn’t belong in a nightmare.
But there they were, lounging by the hood of the car, Marg sitting on top of it, Amanda Lee next to her, looking more relaxed than I’d ever seen her before.
Except for the time I’d given her a hallucination to ease her stress, and it was something I promised I’d never do again. . . .
When they noticed me, they pulled themselves out of their ha-has. And right before anyone said hi, a force zipped up next to me from out of nowhere.
Instinctively, I hardened my arm into a blade, swinging at whatever it was.
Twyla dodged me in a flurry of petticoats and wild hair.
“Shit, Jen. What’s your damage?”
Amanda Lee and Marg looked just as horrified.
I de-bladed myself. “No damage.” Capital-A Awkward.
“Okay, right. Yeah.” Twyla rolled her heavily lined eyes. “Anyway, before you start wigging out twice in a row, I just want you to, like, know that I told her not to do it.”
Oddly, I knew what she meant. All I had to do was piece together the sight in front of me: Amanda Lee’s chilled-out appearance, Marg’s slightly guilty expression as she locked gazes with me.
Marg had given Amanda Lee a hallucination.
Twyla blazed on. “I explained how giving hallucinations can be, like, an addiction for Amanda Lee, but Marg got all mushy-hearted when she saw how stressed Amanda Lee was and she said, ‘Just this once. Amanda Lee’s been awake for over a day straight. She needs a break if she’s going to function.’”
Amanda Lee put a hand over her ear, like Twyla was all high-pitched noise, but I was more focused on Marg.
“Is that true?” I asked. “You gave her a hallucination?”
Marg nodded, her gaze traveling to the ground.
“Twyla said she told you . . .” I started.
“I know.” Marg looked back up at me. The X on her chest was oozing black, like it was full of otherworldly tears. “It was only one time, until we get through the worst of this situation.”
Sometimes teachers thought they knew it all. “Marg, don’t do it again. Hallucinations can take a lot out of a human, and just because they feel better in the short run doesn’t mean—”
“I understand,” Marg said.
Silence came between all of us, a ghost in itself, but then Marg cut the tension.
“Let’s face it.” She gestured to her X. “It’s not as if I’m going to be damned for doing it.”
Twyla flew up to her face like a freakin’ drill sergeant. “Don’t you use that as an excuse, Mrs. C. You know better!”
Marg and Amanda Lee drew back from Twyla, stunned. Usually it was Twyla who needed to be reprimanded, not the other way around.
And she kept on going. “Maybe I’m, like, working off the misty fumes that the dark spirit gave to me and Jen, but don’t mind me if I’m being a bitch face about this whole thing. Yeah, you’re a doomed ghost. Yeah, you’ve been punished for killing the human who killed you, even after you were warned not to do it. Boo-hoo, woe is me, Mrs. C. That doesn’t mean you need to make yourself feel like a hero by babying Amanda Lee with this hallucination shit.”
“I’m sorry,” Marg repeated softly.
“Excuse me? What was that?”
“You heard me.” Her voice was still quiet. “I won’t do it again. I only thought I could help.”
“It won’t help. Pills and shit didn’t help me get happy, either.”
I’d known Twyla had used drugs on the party scene, but this? Hadn’t known.
She floated in midair for a sec more, then with a huff and another roll of her eyes, flew back into the house. An instant later, some Bad Religion screamed out of the gapped door until the music cut off, just like another ghost had canceled it with silence.
Marg stared after her, then looked at me, then at Amanda Lee.
Why did I get the feeling that something else was up?
“I’ll go unruffle Twyla’s feathers,” Marg said, and flew away.
That left me and Amanda Lee, standing there like dopes who didn’t know what to say to each other.
Finally, I went for it. “That was some show.”
“Yes. Well, Twyla’s been on edge. As you know.” She sounded just as stoned as McGlinn the Pothead.
“She was right to get after Marg for giving you a hallucination,” I said.
“It was her idea, and I didn’t say no.”
She fluffed up her hair in a lazy-bug sort of way. Her usually neat red strands with the gray streaks in front weren’t so neat now. Actually, she was just a few hairdo tricks and some Aqua Net away from being the Bride of Frankenstein. Well, not really, but this loose, trendy hair definitely wasn’t in the Amanda Lee museum of style. She also had a glassy sheen in her hallucination-tinted eyes, and that didn’t help the whole freaked-out-female-just-coming-alive comparison.
But who could blame her for wanting hallucinations? I mean, what would it be like to live with ghosts? With death and fear around every corner? Yeah, I knew what that was like, too, but I wasn’t a human like Amanda Lee. Plus, death was supposed to be my thing now.
I gestured back to the house. “There’s someone in there who might have better solutions for you than hallucinations, anyway. Old Seth brought a woman named Kalli back with him from Temecula because she’s good at encouraging the positive in people. She’s a spirit guide.”
Amanda Lee nodded. “I’ll have to meet her, then, but after we nail down a few situations. Speaking of which . . .”
She let out a contented breath and leaned on the hood. Maybe she was going to pull out an afterglow cigarette and smoke it next.
“Let’s just say there’s not much of an update about anything,” she said. “Ruben didn’t pick up his phone—he’s probably working—and Wendy and her mentor, Eileen, are still putting their heads together about how to banish your killer. The ghost hunters up in Elfin Forest called, though. They want to know what time I’ll be over there for my consult, because they’re on the trail of the White Lady instead of you now. Supposedly.”
She’d said White Lady funny, in a dramatic whisper. The sound of it evidently cracked her up, because she started laughing.
But then she became Amanda Lee again, and another pause came between us. I felt like the cause of all her stress. Wasn’t I the choicest company ever?
Then I said, “So, about Kalli . . . I think she’s part of the vision you had about bringing me here today.”
“Excellent.”
Even through her lazy attitude, I could see there was something else she wanted to say to me—something that didn’t have anything to do with our cases. And when Amanda Lee glanced back at the house again, I started to remember her and Marg out here, laughing it up. There’d been a closeness between them. A . . . connection.
“The way Twyla acted . . .” I said. “She’s jealous of you and Marg. Isn’t she?”
Amanda Lee hesitated, then said, “I think she does feel territorial about Marg. Twyla’s the one who took her under her wing after Marg died.”
“Are you two . . . ?”
She stared at me for a moment, then laughed, the sound dying on an edge of hurt. “No. It’s not like that at all. Liz is still with me in so many ways. I’m never going to feel like that about anyone again. Never.”
Not even ghostbuster Sierra? I thought.
I let her comment about Elizabeth slide long enough for another thought to push its way into me. One that featured Amanda Lee, last night, in the woods.
“I always tell myself that, someday, I’ll bring another ghost like you into my confidences . . .”
Did she already have a particular ghost in mind?
Marg?
It was clear that she’d read my question in me
, and she reached out, like she could touch me or something. I pulled away. Why? I didn’t know. Maybe it was just because I was still pissy.
Or maybe I’d come to depend too much on Amanda Lee, the woman who’d saved me from my time loop. Even if we didn’t always get along, I always came back to her, and she to me.
I was being put aside.
“Jensen, now listen. We’re both being run ragged, and—”
“It’s okay.” Defensive much? “I mean, if you want to work with someone else, it’s not like I’m the boss of you or anything.”
She saw right through me again. “Marg and I have a lot in common. Our age, for one thing. I’ve never been able to talk with a spirit as I can talk to her about the traveling she did during her summers off from teaching, the books she’s read . . .”
Wow. They’d sure been spending some quality time together while I was away. But what was I getting cranky about? It wasn’t like Amanda Lee was cheating on me.
The mist. Duh. But . . . Well, there was also my whole thing about mattering, I suppose. Amanda Lee had needed me when I’d needed to be needed.
I shook off the negativity the dark spirit had put into me, but it didn’t exactly work.
“Have you really thought this through, Amanda Lee?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“First off, there’s . . . the X.” I should’ve stopped there, but I couldn’t. “What if there’s a chance that Marg’s X makes her open to the dark spirit, and she betrays you when you’re least expecting it . . . ?
“Are you jealous?” she asked. “Just like Twyla is of Marg and me?”
“Course not.” Maybe.
“Oh. So you didn’t mean to accuse her of cozying up to me because she’s being controlled by your killer? Or that she could be controlled because of her X?”
Hey, it wasn’t exactly a bad theory, because what if?
What if, what if, what if?
Amanda Lee pierced me with her hazy gray gaze, which didn’t seem all that hazy right now. “I think you really should take that break I suggested earlier, Jensen. Your paranoia is becoming its own X.”
She went around to the other side of the car, got in, started the engine, and took off in a flare of dust. I let the dirt fly through me, not feeling a thing.
Or maybe feeling more than a ghost should.
13
In life, there was one place I could always go when I was at my lowest. A place that’d felt absolutely right after a boy I liked ignored me in the school hallways, or when one of the more vicious girls in middle school would point out in the PE locker room that I hadn’t gotten boobs yet.
It was a place I should’ve gone right after I’d broken the Best Friend Code and visited Gavin last night.
Suze had always been my favorite place, and she even trumped my death spot as far as comfort went.
I decided to try her at work first, banging out of my travel tunnel, then flying over the downtown Gaslamp Quarter, where early diners all seemed to be inside the restaurants instead of sitting at tables under the cloudy sky. I headed to an Irish pub named Flaherty’s, where recorded music bled onto the sidewalks.
I almost expected to find Randy inside at the long bar, since Louis had said he was watching over Suze. But he’d also said that my favorite drunken sailor was doing his best to avoid me because of the whole dark spirit–impersonation stuff, so I got a little blue when I didn’t see him hunched on his usual stool, using ghost power to knock a bottle from the shelf so he could dive under the spill and let the liquor flow through him.
Nope. No Randy here. There were just your average humans in the pine-wooded room with all the Irish decorations hanging from the walls, like a copy of the passenger manifest from the Titanic, a tin whistle, and a picture of a thatched-roof cottage that’d belonged to the owner’s old daddo.
Suze was in the middle of it all, working behind the bar, waiting on a happy-hour crowd who seemed pretty far into their cups as they talked over the music.
I materialized above their heads for the slightest instant, then blipped back to invisibility, but Suze spotted me, giving me the cheery best-friend smile I was so used to.
Her dyed, spunky curls were barely held together by a barrette that’d obviously been shoved into her hair, and she seemed . . . Hmm. Not sad. I mean, she and Gavin had broken things off yesterday, right? So why wasn’t she showing a little bummerness?
Even while I was thinking that, guilt gnawed at me. I’d gone into Gavin’s head, and while it wasn’t exactly sex, it was intimate enough. Sure, I could’ve used the dark spirit’s mist attack on me as an excuse for my bad behavior, but there was no denying that I’d wanted to be close to Gavin, anyway. I had ever since the second I’d seen him.
That made me a sneaky sneaker, sneaking around on my friend with her love interest, and I’d been putting off telling Suze about it. But, seriously, should I just keep my trap shut since this was no normal love triangle and I’d been going into Gavin’s head long before he’d met Suze?
She said something to one of her coworkers behind the bar, then headed toward the back break room, untying her apron. I followed her through the hall and the open door to a table and chair-ridden space where the shelves were stuffed with restaurant supplies.
I materialized fully to her, but right at that second, the lights went out at the rear of the room.
Red alert. Why were they off? Why, why, why? Shivers fritzed over me as I whipped my gaze around.
My killer? Was he about to haunt me again? Was he about to do something to Suze?
I swept in front of her to protect her from him.
“Jen!” she said, laughing. “What’s wrong with you?”
Before I could explain about the dark spirit, she strolled toward the back of the room.
“Suze, don’t . . . !”
She pointed upward, toward a long light fixture that had a bulb that’d burned out. “Is that what’s got you jumpy?”
“Oh.” I offered a laugh. Scared of a lightbulb. Awesome. “Maybe I need a chill pill, huh?”
“I’d say. Is everything okay?”
“Sure, yeah.”
Thank God she bought my bull.
“I’ll fix it later,” she said. “Just another thing on my list.” She walked toward me, tossing her apron onto a shelf. “You’ve got good timing. I’m due for a dinner break, so join me?”
My electric pulse was just now smoothing out. “For what? Spirit chow?”
“Not what I meant.” She adjusted her tight yellow top. “I was thinking of taking a walk to Subway and grabbing a bite to bring back. The more of a breather I can get from my managing duties here, the better. I had to wreak some disciplinary action today on a terminally late waitress. What fun.”
I’d learned enough by now to know that Subway wasn’t a new mass public-transportation system in San Diego. And I was game to walk with Suze there because this was friend time. Friend time meant that I was going to lend an ear to all her problems, especially since I’d become a big part of them, with Gavin and the breakup.
She made sure she had her wallet in her jeans pocket and a Bluetooth device hooked to her ear. The money I’d been sneaking her had bought that device, and I still couldn’t get over how totally robot it was. The future was now.
Before we made our way out of the back room and through the bar, I dematerialized. Once we were in happy-hour heaven, though, everyone I passed looked around to see what was causing the cool rush over their skin. That was the lowest profile I could manage.
When we got outside, I took up position in front of Suze while she walked and hovered backward above her, floating in reverse. Since I’d gone back to being invisible and hidden from everyone, she wouldn’t be able to see me. But we had a system.
“So, besides work junk, how’re things?” I asked, channeling my voice
through her Bluetooth jigamabob. It was a clear invitation to pour her broken heart out to me, and I was going to be the best friend ever and soothe her about the breakup.
Even if I sucked and had gone to Gavin before I’d even seen her . . .
“Things are fair to middling,” Suze said, peering in the window of a shoe store as we passed it. She didn’t stand out in the crowd because the Bluetooth thing on her ear meant that she didn’t look like one of the transients who talked to themselves on the villagelike city streets.
“So things are cool?” I asked. “Everything’s cool?”
“Yup.” She sent a strange look in my invisible direction, then continued window-shopping. “How’re things with you?”
“Oh, you know, pretty celestial. Amanda Lee and I are investigating a few situations, so I dropped in to say hi, just in case I don’t get to see you much for the next week or so.”
Or in case my killer screwed me up so badly that I went back into a time loop out of utter fright and psychosis.
“You’re turning into a real Charlie’s Angel,” Suze said. “God, I wish my life were that exciting.”
Right away she blushed, so I knew she didn’t mean it. Being alive was exciting enough, and some of us would’ve given our last sigh to be back in the real world.
“Sorry,” she said.
“No sweat. I know what you mean. You had a bad day at the bar.” And you’re bummed about Gavin.
Suze didn’t answer because something had caught her attention in another store window. As we slowed, I saw that it was a slinky red dress, and that this was no regular clothes store. It was a chic boutique with cocktail attire draped over headless, ballerina-armed mannequins who seemed to reach toward the window with come-hither-and-spend invitations.
She tilted her head. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I had a good view of her face, the longing on it. Dammit, Suze had been faking me out this whole time, hadn’t she? Because now I could see the sadness in her.
I hovered over her shoulder, admiring the dress, too, but the only reflection in the glass was of Suze. And you know what? I felt like a pretty invisible friend right about now. I mean, who keeps secrets like the one I had about Gavin from their buds?
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