A Guide to the Other Side

by Robert Imfeld

  To Mom and Dad— the first readers, the biggest fans, and the best parents

  TIP

  1

  A good routine is KEY.

  MY DAY CAN’T BEGIN WITHOUT my routine.

  1. Wake up and light a candle. (I prefer a simple white candle, though I’ve been known to shake it up during the holidays and use a pine scent.) I breathe deeply and encircle myself with positive energy.

  This first step is crucial to having a good day.

  2. Check my dream journal to see if I scrawled any messages in the middle of the night. (There are a couple of lines on the page sometimes, but I’m pretty good at remembering my dreams, not to brag or anything.)

  3. Check in with my twin, Kristina, and ask her how her night was.

  4. Ask for only good vibes to emanate from the Beyond before I blow out my candle and start my day.

  * * *

  A chilly Thursday morning just two days before Halloween, the worst holiday ever created, I lit seven candles and placed them around me, creating a fiery barrier. I’d been doing the same thing at night, too, for the past week. Halloween may be fun for everyone else, but for someone who can communicate with ghosts, I can assure you it’s not fun at all. Halloween is the one time of year where it can be tricky to control the malevolent spirits. So many of them try to break through, even if I ensure through my protections they can’t communicate with me directly. It’s all because of the morons who wear those grotesque, bloody masks and costumes without realizing the very real effect it has on my life.

  Those costumes summon negative energy, and I can literally feel the forces floating around, circling me like sharks around a bloody seal. Kristina hates Halloween more than I do. I can forbid those spirits from entering my vision, but she can’t, so while I’m walking down the street, choosing to be oblivious, she’s turning left and right, looking at one horror after the next. I don’t envy her.

  It was on our walk to school that she mentioned how it was getting pretty bad already.

  “Everyone must have tried on their costumes last night,” she said. “You would not believe how many murderers and politicians we’re passing.”

  “Are they saying anything to you?” I asked. My shoes crunched up the yellow leaves that covered the sidewalk.

  “No, they’re mostly grunting a lot. They know not to mess with us.”

  “I still don’t get how they know that. Who would come rocketing over to this side to punish them?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but I know it would be bad,” she said. “I think it’s better not to know.”

  She was wrong. I wanted to know so bad. She always said stuff like that to me: “We’re not permitted to know that yet,” “We haven’t learned enough to earn that knowledge.” It was so frustrating that I couldn’t grab her and shake more information out of her like I could with my little brother, Jack.

  “Can you hear that?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Some man was screaming about a lost dog, but I’d been awake for only twenty minutes and didn’t want to deal with ghosts yet. “Does he expect me to knock on his wife’s door and deliver a message for him? He knows that’s not how this works.”

  “Give him a second,” Kristina said lightly.

  Three seconds later a door opened two houses ahead, and a woman walked out wearing a green bathrobe and pink slippers. Her arms were clenched across her chest, and she was looking around, confused.

  “Why did I come out here again?” she mumbled.

  Kristina raised an eyebrow at me, and I rolled my eyes and muttered, “It’s too early for this,” before I slouched my way up to the woman and said, “Excuse me, ma’am?” She turned my way and looked at me like I’d just personally caused her dog to run away.

  “Yes, young man?”

  “My name is Baylor Bosco, and I can communicate with people who have crossed over.” I must have repeated that exact sentence more than two thousand times by now. “Your husband wanted me to let you know that your dog is with him on the other side now, and, well, it’s time to move on, Trish. The animal shelter has a small brown terrier he thinks you might like.”

  I braced myself for her reaction. I might have done this more than two thousand times by now, but I was never sure how people would react. I got off easy this time, though. The woman’s mouth dropped open, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “How did you know that?” she asked. They always ask that too, even though I’ve just told them I can communicate with dead people.

  “I was born with a gift,” I said, shrugging. “Oh, he also wants me to tell you that you need to change the curtains because they’re hideous.”

  “That is just like him to say.” She laughed so heartily that I found myself wishing everyone would react as well to weird messages like that. “Is he doing okay?”

  I nodded. “Just fine.”

  Then I kept on walking. Normally, I would engage with the alive person more, but her husband was still shouting nonsense in our ears and I needed him to stop. It was 7:30 a.m., and no one, dead or alive, should have permission to scream that early. After I broke the connection, the shouting stopped, as it always did after I shared a healing message. It was Kristina’s job to seal the ghosts on the other side and make sure they no longer disturbed us.

  It might seem harsh, but some of them just don’t get it. I’m here to relay the message, and it’s not up to me whether the person on the receiving end listens or not. When I first started delivering messages, before Kristina helped me tune out most spirits, I’d have these horribly persistent ones poking me over and over to deliver the same message I’d just passed along.

  “They didn’t believe you, you need to go back over and try again,” they’d say.

  Later Kristina established a rule with the ghosts: If you’re going to use Baylor to deliver a message, you’ve got only one shot to deliver it. They could come back with a different message, and that’d be fine, just as long as it wasn’t the same one.

  “He was loud,” I grunted. I hadn’t slept well last night because I kept getting ruffled by some ghost children who passed through my room.

  “You think it’s loud? Try being on this side of the fence. The man was practically screaming in my ear.”

  “Your nonexistent ghost ears?”

  “Shut up, they hear better than yours do.”

  Oh, there’s one important detail to know about Kristina—she’s dead.

  TIP

  2

  Imaginary friends and dead twin sisters aren’t the same thing.

  MOST PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE ME when I tell them my sister’s ghost accompanies me through life, but it’s true. Well, I take that back. Most people don’t believe me at first. The only reason I can see my sister in the first place is because I can talk to all dead people, so usually there’s a talkative aunt or a doting grandma around who can help me deliver a persuasive message to the doubters. My sister, though, was never born. We were in the womb together, hanging out and growing cells, when one day her body fell apart.

  I was born just fine, and early on I had no idea I didn’t have a real, live sister. She was always beside me, talking to me and playing with me and even fighting with me. My parents thought I just had an extremely active imagination, complete with an extremely realistic imaginary friend.

  When I was five years old, I mentioned something to my mom.

  “Mommy,” I said, “how come you never talk to Kristina?”

  “Kristina’s your imaginary friend, honey,” my mom said for the hundredth time. “I can’t see or speak to her.”

  “But she was in your belly with me,” I said. “She told me she was. She said you cried for days after you lost her, but you didn’t lose her
, because she’s right there.”

  I pointed to my smiling twin sitting in her chair at the kitchen table, rays of sun shooting through the wide window but not quite bouncing off her curly golden hair. I didn’t realize the look on my mom’s face was one of horror. It simply didn’t register with me that she would be stunned to find out her son’s imaginary friend was no friend at all, but rather her miscarried daughter.

  “Baylor,” she said slowly, “how do you know you had a twin? Did you overhear Daddy or Grandma talking about it?”

  “No, Mommy!” I said, so frustrated she wasn’t getting it. “She told me.”

  “Baylor, tell her that the envelope she’s missing fell between the desk and the filing cabinet,” Kristina said, giggling.

  “And,” I said, “she told me to tell you that the missing envelope fell between the desk and the filing cabinet.”

  My mom’s face transformed from horror to confusion to panic. She left me at the table and sprinted to the home office, then returned a moment later holding an insurance document she’d apparently misplaced weeks earlier.

  I saw her hands shaking violently, but I didn’t know what that meant. Now that I’m older—thirteen, in fact—I see those shaky hands a lot, and I try to be as empathetic as possible when relaying messages to people from their loved ones. People can’t help but feel scared when confronted with this sort of supernatural activity.

  After my mom found the letter, she sobbed for an hour, then finally pulled herself together and asked my dad to come home from work. She wouldn’t say why, but since my mom was pregnant with my brother, he thought something bad had happened. When he burst through the door, he found my mom a blubbering mess at the table, and he found me sitting on the kitchen floor, pushing my fire truck along the tiles while Kristina made loud siren noises next to me.

  They talked for a bit, and then my dad walked over to me in the funniest way, like I was a snake that had gotten loose in the house and he was trying to catch me. He crouched down slowly in front of me and took a big gulp.

  “Hey, buddy. Mommy told me about your imaginary friend,” he said. I’ll never forget how his knees wavered as he talked to me, like he couldn’t find his balance.

  “Kristina’s not my friend, she’s my sister, Daddy,” I said, barely looking over. I didn’t get why they were making such a big deal out of it. I didn’t get why they didn’t just love her like they loved me. I had never noticed until a few days before that they never tucked her in, or set a plate for her at dinner, or hung her drawings up, or even had a bed for her. I thought that was pretty mean. “She’s sitting right there.”

  I pointed to the space in front of the fridge, and of course my dad saw nothing. But to me, she was as fully formed and normal as any of my new kindergarten friends were. There was one difference, though, which I had spotted even back then as a little boy: The only way to know for sure if a person is a ghost is to watch his or her eyes.

  Ghosts don’t blink. They just stare at you like they’re trying to break the record for the world’s creepiest staring contest. You’d think there’d be more obvious ways to tell if people are dead or alive, but there’s really not. They don’t breathe, of course, but it’s not like it’s easy to tell if people are breathing when they’re just standing there. And they’re not transparent, either, as much as the movies like to think they are. They’re as normal-looking as the next person . . . well, most of them, anyway.

  My dad looked at the empty space and back at me and then back at the empty space.

  “Baylor, buddy, you’re telling me you see a little girl sitting right there right now?” he said, trying his best to laugh.

  “He doesn’t think I’m here,” Kristina said sadly. At the time she also didn’t totally grasp the fact that she wasn’t alive.

  “I know,” I said, frowning at her. “I don’t know why.”

  “Tell him Mommy’s baby is another boy, so he doesn’t have to worry about having a girl yet.”

  I told him what she’d said, and his mouth dropped open and his face kind of fell forward.

  “Another boy?” my mom squeaked from the table. “Oh! Good!”

  It would take another month for the doctor to be able to confirm that the baby was, in fact, a boy, and when they came home from the doctor’s office that day, they were walking on eggshells around me.

  Looking back, I now realize how scared they were.

  * * *

  At school Kristina tends to keep to herself. She follows me around, but she knows I can’t sit there and talk to her. I don’t try to hide my gift, and although most of the kids at school know what I can do, they don’t really know about Kristina. It would just be too odd to have a full-on conversation with someone that nobody else can see or hear.

  School that day was so slow. For a few periods I thought maybe some evil spirits were playing a trick on me and slowing the clock down. I even excused myself during one class, hid in a bathroom stall, and lit my emergency lighter while casting away all negative energy.

  Kristina giggled from outside the stall.

  “It’s not funny, Kristina,” I said, the flame still lit as I envisioned myself covered in light.

  “Actually, it is,” she said back. “Nobody’s doing anything to you. It’s just a boring day.”

  By lunchtime I was ready to fall asleep, and I still couldn’t shake the feeling that a spirit was at fault. At the lunch table I put my head down on my arms and closed my eyes.

  “You okay, man?” my friend Aiden asked. We’d been pals since fifth grade, when I joined the band in elementary school. I was a band geek by choice, and Aiden was a band geek by default. He played the flute, was pudgy, and had terrible acne, and I was almost positive his mom cut his hair, though I’d never asked. But he was my best and most loyal blinking friend, and he’d stuck by me even after finding out my other best friend was my dead twin sister.

  “I’ve been feeling terrible all day,” I said.

  “Is it because Halloween’s soon?” he asked, opening his red lunch box and unpacking a pepperoni sandwich. “I know all the poltergeists come out to play this time of year.”

  I shot him a look. “I’m actually sort of worried that might be the case.”

  “Oh, sorry, man,” he said. He took a bite of his sandwich, and a glob of mustard oozed down his chin. “Kristina hasn’t done anything to help you?”

  “How can I help you when I’m too busy watching this mess try to eat?” Kristina said from next to me on the bench. I chuckled, causing Aiden to furrow his eyebrows.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said. “She said it isn’t a spirit, so maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

  We changed the subject when two other band members came to sit with us. Plus, I wanted to try to forget about my weird spirit problems, if only for a few minutes.

  The rest of the day passed in a blur, and when the final bell rang, I texted Aiden and told him I was skipping band practice because I needed to get home and rest. I almost always walked to and from school—it’s barely over a mile away from my house—but today I called my mom and asked her to pick me up.

  “You’re being such a baby, Baylor,” Kristina said. “I know you’re not sick.”

  “Then why do I feel so bad?” I leaned back against the brick wall of the admin building and curled myself into a ball.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, if you can’t make it stop, then you’re not allowed to have an opinion.” Maybe I was imagining it, but even the sky seemed darker—a dull, lifeless gray.

  My mom arrived a few minutes later, and I opened the front door of her black SUV to climb in.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” she said. “Is it a fever?” She held the back of her hand to my forehead and frowned, making almost the same face as Kristina, though I didn’t tell her that. It was still weird that she didn’t know what her own daughter looked like, despite talking to her every day.

  “I don’t think it
’s a fever,” I said. “I’m not sure what it is. I just feel terrible.”

  “Let’s get you home,” she said. “Did you say hi to Ella yet?”

  When I was eleven, my parents welcomed a wonderful little accident named Ella into the world. To me and Kristina, though, she was no accident at all, as I reminded them when they told me Mom was pregnant.

  “Remember what I told Dad when I talked to you both about Kristina?” I said. “‘He doesn’t have to worry about having a girl yet.’ I told you both about her six years ago!”

  The look of shock on my dad’s face grew exponentially worse after realizing it was going to be a girl. He had raised two boys so far. What the heck was he going to do with a little girl?

  But it wasn’t something he had to worry about, because Ella soon had him wrapped around her little finger. And I have to admit, I was right there with him. She was the cutest little thing I’d ever seen.

  Plus, there was the whole fact that she could see spirits. Actually, most babies can—Jack was one of the twitchiest babies ever because of it—but Ella’s ability seemed to be amplified thanks to me and Kristina working so well as a team. She couldn’t communicate with them, and her ability would fade away in a couple years, but for now she could interact with Kristina and see the same spirits I could.

  “Hi, baby Ella,” I said, looking at her through the rearview mirror. I was too exhausted to turn my body around. “Seen any scary spirits today?”

  She smiled widely at me for a second before turning her attention back to the baby doll she was holding. She had the most squeezable cheeks of any one-and-a-half-year-old I’d ever met, and they were soon to be overtaken by her ultracurly hair. Now that she was out of her late-night crying phase of life, I loved Ella a ton.

  “Did . . . did Kristina say anything about your being sick?” my mom asked. She always spoke in a hushed tone when it came to Kristina, who could hear just fine at any volume.

  “Nope, doesn’t know a thing,” I said. “Really helpful.” Kristina was probably happy Mom had asked after her, but the thought of turning to look at her made me queasy.