I'd Rather Not Be Dead

by Andrea Brokaw

  “I'm sure you were.” My grumble's met with a grin.

  “Grandpa... Thinks that's possible.” He draws the words out. “But he came up with a lot of other things it could be too.”

  “Like?”

  There's a pause long enough for a very slow breath. “It could be a punishment.”

  “For having incredibly bad taste in boyfriends?” I suggest.

  Finn smiles. “That appeal should be easy since he wasn't really your boyfriend, right?”

  “Right.” My fingers dig further into the pillow while I imagine sinking claws deep into Cris's flesh, ripping him apart with my bare hands. With a growl, I shove the imagery away. I'd never have the heart to do it even if I could. “I haven't done anything bad.”

  “Yet.”

  I squint. “What do you mean?”

  The chair squeaks as Finn hunches forward and puts more weight against its back. “It's easier for shadows to bend time,” he answers me, watching my hands as they knead at the pillow. “If you do something later, The Shadow Lord might already know about it. Which is another possibility, that he's trying to keep you from doing something in the future.”

  “Like what?”

  “Usually it's something dangerous.” He frowns at the window, like he's seeing past events on the glass. “There are a few ghosts trapped in homes around town. One of them kept trying to push people onto the train tracks. One liked to write in sand, trying to get attention.”

  “How's that dangerous?” I blurt, thinking it's actually a decent idea. And not far from when I was trying to type.

  Finn gives me a long look. “If people believed in ghosts, they'd put more effort into killing you.”

  I swallow as ice pours over me. “Right.” It could be that one. Very easily.

  “Or...” Finn continues, straightening his posture and making the chair creak some more. “It could be you're too strong.”

  “Too strong?” I snort. “I faint at least once a day.”

  “But what do you do before then?” His eyes wide, he shakes his head in amazement. “Glory thinks you're probably the third most powerful ghost in this region of Shadow. Right behind your friend Fray and The Shadow Lord himself.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I'm serious, Drew.” He leans forward again, his gaze intense as it latches onto mine. “She told me about the fliers. She barely managed to move one of them and you ripped down a whole street's worth.”

  “Then I passed out,” I interject, shaking my head vigorously. “Hate to burst your bubble, but I'm not all that powerful.”

  “You only think that because you don't know what's normal.”

  I stare back at him for a few seconds before rolling my eyes and giving up. “Whatever. The Shadow Lord's scared of my awesome power. But Glory said Fray's stronger than me and he isn't being held prisoner.”

  “True,” Finn acknowledges. “But he grew into his power. You're going to be stronger than him one day. Maybe even one day soon. The Shadow Lord could have locked you up now because he won't be able to do it later.”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe.” All these maybes are starting to seriously irk me.

  “I know,” Finn mumbles to the floor. “You just want to leave.”

  I see something I was either not supposed to see or meant to see a long time ago. He doesn't want me to go. And, shockingly enough, I don't want to leave. Sure, I'd prefer having my own room, but the idea of having a home... But the truth is I'm having with fun with Finn and his goofy weasels and cheesy movies. Staying here with him is a lot better than spying on people who'll never know I'm there. And while a month ago, I wouldn't have believed I'd ever tolerate the guy, now I find myself going beyond that and actually liking him.

  Straightening his spine, Finn smacks his palms lightly against the back of his chair before virtually jumping to his feet. “Let's go make sure you're still locked in here. Maybe you're just not allowed out after curfew.”

  Without a word, I follow him, careful not to let the ferrets slide out the door with us.

  He opens the front door and, his eyes on the ground, waits for me to leave. I want to ask if I have to go or if it's just an option, but I can't. The question isn't safe enough. So, instead, I'm going to try to walk though the door. And if I do it... I'll have to keep walking.

  My hand stops level to the door frame and I can't get it to go any further.

  Relief washes over me.

  “I'm sorry,” Finn says, sounding honest.

  I shrug, trying to act nonchalant, hoping he'll think I'm hiding my upset behind the motion.

  “Finn, honey, that's you isn't it?” A woman laughs from the back of the house. Finn gives me a panicked look, glances around as if trying to find a place to hide me as footsteps come up the hall.

  “Yeah, Mom,” he calls back. “I thought I heard the door.”

  Finn's mom comes into sight around the stairs and I realize with a jolt that I know her from the library. She was the one at the circulation desk the other day, the one whose cheerful love of the place had to have been irking the resident spirit.

  She's tall and slender, not model skinny but athletically lean. She has to be around forty, but she doesn't look like she's even reached thirty yet until you notice the lines around her eyes. Her hair, pale brown bordering on dark blond, is tied into a sporty ponytail. Her eyes are exact matches for Finn's, but the smile she gives me has nothing in common with his. “And I guess you did,” she says.

  Someone's forgot her happy pills today.

  “Hi, Mrs... Um, Ms...” It occurs to me all of a sudden that, assuming she reverted to her maiden name when she divorced Finn's dad, I don't know what to call her.

  Her eyebrows raise with a hint of challenge. “Ms. Finnegan.”

  Oh. Duh.

  “This is Drew, Mom,” Finn moves to stand between me and his mother. “She's a friend of mine from school.”

  Her eyes light up at that, the tension in her evaporating all of sudden. The look almost seems like she's happy to hear her boy has friends. Like she doesn't realize the whole school thinks of themselves as his friend. Except, ironically enough, for me.

  “We're working on a physics project,” he adds.

  My theory is given more fodder when his mother slumps a little, like she was hoping he'd say we were going out, or at least doing something more social than schoolwork. She recovers to offer me a bright, if somewhat strained, smile. “Well, I'm glad to meet you.”

  Her cheer falters again as she finally takes a good look at Finn. “You're covered in paint,” she blurts, her hand jerking almost instantly toward her mouth. She stops the motion before the hand makes it higher than her waist, but the move's still an acknowledgment that she just did something very maternal and possibly embarrassing to her son. At least she didn't lick her fingers and try to wipe the paint off.

  “I'm early,” I tell her. “He told me he'd need time to change after work, but I guess I forgot.”

  “Oh.” She nods, her expression distant. Her eyes go to Finn. Her lips move a few times, like she's wanting to say things but keeps filtering them.

  Putting my hand in my pocket so it looks like I'm reaching for something, I announce, “I remembered the thumb drive. Where's the computer?”

  “My room,” Finn answers quickly with a dramatic gesture up the stairs. “Right this way.”

  “Call down if you need anything,” his mom offers.

  She watches us go up the stairs.

  “You're remarkably good at that,” Finn says as soon as his door closes. “Nice touch with the thumb drive.”

  “No, I bombed. Sure, I sold the homework thing, but I don't think she appreciated the name gaffe.” I crash onto the couch.

  “Yeah, well...” Running his hand through his hair, he shakes his head at me. He frowns down at his fingers for a second, looking at the paint flakes on them. “They divorced four years ago. It was nasty enough that not only did she revert to her maiden name, but she changed mine and Fiona
's too.” He gives me a lopsided smile that must have come from his dad. “I'm officially Cooper Finnegan Finnegan now.” He rolls his eyes as he wipes his hand off on his shirt. “Still can't believe the judge let her get away with that.”

  “Seriously,” I agree. I guess that explains why he goes by a nickname based on his family name. It's based on his middle name. A lot of people around here go by their middle names. It's one of those Southern things I've never understood. “She could've at least given you a new a middle name while she was changing things.”

  In response to Romeo's pleading look, Finn sits in the floor to fulfill his duty as a ferret toy. “She's been forgetting her pills a lot lately.”

  He sounds thoughtful, but not worried. “Is that a good thing?” I ask.

  “It could be.” There's a sad sigh. “The ghosts were part of the reason for the divorce. He couldn't stand that they were always flocking to Mom. Moving from Boston to Colorado was supposed to help all that, but there are plenty of dead people anywhere with living ones.”

  “Boston?”

  Half his mouth curls. “I only got here a year before you did.”

  But... “You don't sound like you're from Boston.”

  He shrugs. “I was in preschool when we left. My first memories are from Denver.”

  Hmm... My eyes flicker to a battered pair of skis on Finn's wall. He's got a lot of shirts from resorts in Colorado, which I always thought he wore to brag about being able to afford ski vacations. But maybe he just gets homesick.

  “How long since you've seen your dad?”

  His smile says it all, but he uses words too. “Four years. But, hey, I got several gaming systems out of him.”

  “Yay.” Somehow I find myself hating Finn's father more than I ever thought I hated Finn himself.

  “It was almost funny that she didn't start medicating herself until after he'd left. But if she's willing to go without them, maybe she's getting over the whole thing.”

  “And the teddy bears will go?” I grasp my hands infront of me in hope.

  He laughs. “If we're lucky.”

  Juliet leaps on Romeo's back and the pair roll around while we watch them. “So...” I wonder eventually. “What do I do now? I can't say goodbye and leave.”

  “She goes to bed really early.” Finn shrugs, seeming unworried. “We'll just tell her we aren't done yet and let her go to sleep. She's a deep sleeper, she won't expect to hear you leave.”

  “And from now on, I have to stay in your room?”

  The question pains him. “I'm sorry,” he says yet again. There's been an awful lot of apologizing going around lately.

  “So, got any other movies?”

  After taking a second to get the worst of the blue out of his hair and another second to change shirts, he puts on something absolutely awful about a cult of vampire worshipers and we spend the whole film making fun of it. If every movie in his series of huge binders is as horrible as this, we won't get bored for years.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sun shines bright on Halloween morning. Not a cloud in the sky, let alone a piece of cloud on the ground.

  As I look out the window at the glittering daylight, Finn leans over his computer and mutters at his printer for jamming yet again on the essay he's trying to print. I smile at the sound of the perfect Cooper Finnegan arguing with a mindless machine. “Just do it at school.”

  “Why have a printer if I'm going to print shit at school?” The words are snarled, but not necessarily at me. I think they're meant as a threat to the printer.

  “Chill.” Leaving the window, I flop back onto the sofa, turning to sit upside down with my legs up on the backrest and my hair hanging down to the floor. “It's an international holiday celebrating me.”

  He snorts at that. “Yeah. You and everyone else who ever died.” Pressing some buttons on the printer gets it to emit a long, disgruntled sort of beep. “You're about to be recycled,” Finn grumbles before poking his finger at something else.

  The device thinks for a second, then makes a friendlier beep followed by a pleasant hum. When Finn feeds another stack of paper into the tray and tells the computer to try printing again, the printer goes at it with a soft purr.

  Finn gives me a triumphant grin that makes me roll my eyes and grab a ferret toy from the ground to throw at him. He ducks it easily before disappearing into his closet.

  Getting into Finn's closet isn't as easy as getting into mine. You not only have to undo the latch on the door, but step over the ferret gate. Apparently there's a story about Juliet and the foam from a football helmet behind that. Suffice to say, ferrets and closet access don't mix well.

  My toes tap on the underside of the bed while I ponder what I'm going to do all day. Oddly enough, I'm disappointed Finn's leaving me alone to go to school despite the fact that I should be upset he's going to come back. My thoughts jerk to a halt as Finn comes back out in a black zipped hoodie decorated with the image of Marilyn Manson. “Where'd you get that?”

  “Concert.” He shrugs and goes over to check on the paper, letting me see that the back of the hoodie has a bunch of tour dates on it. My eyes latch onto the Atlanta date. The closest city on the tour to here. He invited me there. Said his cousin was driving. I assumed he was making fun of me.

  My feet freeze. That was two years ago, right after I got here.

  Copper Finnegan asked me out? Or at least on a friendly outing. To a city four hours away. Which would have involved a lot of time in a car together. I don't remember what I said to him, but I'd be willing to wager it involved profanity. It honestly never occurred to me that he wasn't setting me up for ridicule, that he might actually have been reaching out to the only person in school who might have wanted to go. It was only after that things between us turned actively nasty.

  Mind boggled, I turn myself around until I'm sitting upright. Maybe my last position put too much blood in my head.

  “You okay?” Finn frowns at me with concern. If he remembers what happened, he's not connecting it to my current daze.

  “Yeah.” I smile weakly. “Just wishing I could go trick-or-treating. I love those little candy bars, you know?”

  “Who doesn't?”

  Something incredibly subtle in his expression makes me suspect he does know what I was thinking about. How annoying. “Not much of a Halloween costume, you know.”

  “Who says it's a costume?” he replies.

  Snorting, I fold my arms and give him a withering look. “Come on, you usually dress like a prep.”

  His grin is pure evil. “What makes you think that isn't the costume?”

  “What?” My eyes roll. “Every other day of the year you're just pretending to be someone else, but today you can be yourself? Give me a break.”

  “We can't all be as brave as you, Drew,” he says, his voice soft and completely serious. “Or as self-destructive.”

  “Whatever.”

  I move again, putting my feet on the couch with my knees pulled up to my chest and tilt my head back until I'm staring at the springs of the bed. A day of doing absolutely nothing stretches out before me and I wonder why I woke up to see Finn before he left.

  “Drew...” He sits by my feet, twisting to look at me. One arm stretches along the back of the futon, coming close to my head. The other reaches out to put a hand on my knee. “Drew?”

  I'd meant to ignore him until he goes away, which he'll have to do soon if he doesn't want to be late for class, but I can't stop myself from responding with a quiet, “What?”

  “I've been thinking maybe if you were locked in here to haunt me, then you'd be able to leave with me.”

  I bend my gaze to him, frowning as I think about that. The times I tried to leave before, it was just me. He never had any intention of going anywhere. But he's right. If I'm here because someone wants to force me to spend time around Finn, then I should be able to go where he goes. Except... How complicated does that get? Am I free of the spell as soon as we get past the d
oor or will I be locked into a vicinity of him later?

  “We can try,” I say, unable to summon much excitement. “But the ferrets will miss me.”

  “The ferrets'll get over it.”

  Wow. Placing my happiness above that of his beloved fuzzies? He either really likes me or really wants me gone.

  Finn locks the critters away and grabs his bag.

  “Don't forget the print out,” I remind him.

  With a shake of his head, he turns and grabs it from the printer tray. “Thanks.”

  We trot down the stairs while Finn flips through the papers to make sure they're all there. At the bottom, he opens the door in silence and gives me a look of solidarity. His mother's car isn't in the drive, so we don't have to worry about her seeing me come out. If I can.

  Finn takes my hand and we spend a second bracing ourselves before moving forward.

  The doorway is filled with air. And only air. We, both of us, pass straight through it.

  “Bravo,” Fray says, leaning against the porch railing and giving us a slow clap. “And it only took you, what? Two? Three? Days to figure it out?”

  “Screw you.” I drop Finn's hand and glare at my fellow ghost. “You could've told me.”

  “No, I couldn't. It keeps people out too.”

  “Seriously?” I peer at him, then look back to the door. “Why?”

  “How should I know?” Fray shrugs. “You think I did it?”

  “Did you?” Finn asks, not sounding very friendly. His eyes are narrow as he looks up from shoving the essay into his backpack.

  “Call that a costume?” Fray asks back. The shade himself is decked out to look like some sort of demonic jester. He even has one of those little sticks with bells on them. Except the bells are skulls.

  “Boys,” I chide, feeling like a kindergarten teacher. “Finn, this is Fray. Fray, Finn. I think you've met before.”

  “Yeah,” Finn says, not happy about it. He closes his bag with a zip that manages to sound angst-ridden.

  “What're the rules now I'm out?” I ask Fray, who's watching Finn with raised eyebrows and a barely contained grin.