Body & Soul (Ghost and the Goth Novels) (6 page)

Unfortunately, the dead look pretty much like the living, unless their clothes are obviously outdated or you catch them passing through a solid object, which they can’t do when they’re around me anyway. So, checking to make sure the strange guy behind you on the sidewalk is, in fact, breathing and not a ghost trying to stalk you is a little tricky.

As it turns out, ghosts don’t usually mind being asked about their status in the living world—it’s attention, and for most of them, they’ve been running short of that for years—but the living tend to kind of…freak out.

I’d done the best I could to be careful when coming to and going from my house, but it only took one or two of them to track me down and then spread the word. Consequently, my bedroom at times now had more ghosts in it than a hospital, cemetery, and funeral home combined. Fun.

As soon as I hit the hallway, someone noticed me, and the whispers that I’d been able to ignore in the kitchen started to rise in volume until they hit what could only be described as a clamor. Five or so ghosts were crowded into the hall in a half-assed kind of line that started at my bedroom doorway and crossed in front of the bathroom.

Doing my best to project a calm that was in complete contrast to the sweaty nervousness I was feeling, I ignored the voices and the hands reaching out to grasp me.

“Will, please—”

“I need you to tell them—”

“—you help us?”

“—stop him from selling the house?”

No one tried to pin me down—that was good—and I managed to slip through into my bedroom. I shut the door, catching someone’s fingers between it and the frame. An indignant and surprised yelp followed.

Yeah, some of them were still trying to adjust to the idea of having physicality around me. That was actually a good thing. It meant they weren’t as likely to try physical coercion or violence to get what they wanted…yet.

In my room, the ghost situation was worse—probably ten of them—but at least I recognized most of them as people from the list Alona had begun assembling for me a few months ago. They knew I’d been working on helping them. They’d seen Grandpa B., one of their former fellow haunters, go into the light, and I’d told them about how Liesel and Eric had finally found their peace last month. So they wouldn’t get too pushy…most likely.

“Any luck?” a ghost in a poodle skirt asked hopefully, her ponytail swinging as she got off the foot of the bed to greet me. A bunch of faces turned toward me expectantly, including that of a vaguely familiar-looking woman wearing a tight blue business suit, her dark red hair in a fancy twist. She actually pushed her way forward from the back to hear my response.

They all thought I was looking for Alona. It was, again, a story I’d been forced to come up with on the fly to explain her absence and my diminished ability to help them. There were too many of them, and without Alona, I couldn’t get as much done. Not to mention the time suck that researching anything and everything to try to separate Alona from Lily had turned out to be.

Leaning back against the door, I shook my head. An audible groan went up from them at once, as if they’d rehearsed it. And I suppose, in a way, they had. They were showing up here two or three times a week now, with the same question, and I was always forced to give the same answer.

Telling them the truth would have been a mess. If other ghosts knew what Alona had been able to do—taking on a body, possessing it, for lack of a better term—there might be a run of them trying to do the same on anyone they found who seemed to be in an unconscious or comatose state. And that was the last thing we needed. Most of them probably wouldn’t succeed…or not for very long, at least. It took a great deal of power, apparently, to do what Alona was doing. A red-level spirit or above, according to the classification system the Order used. Still, we weren’t entirely sure of the effects these attempts might have on the living, nor did we want a rash of five-minute-long possessions, which would, frankly, be creepy as hell.

So as far as anyone in the spirit world was concerned, Alona had taken off for locations unknown after we’d had a fight. That last part, at least, didn’t require much of an imagination stretch.

The poodle-skirt girl shook her head, ponytail bobbing with the movement. “You should have apologized right away,” she said disapprovingly.

“How do you know I was the one in the wrong?” I asked, offended in spite of the fact that we were talking about an argument that had never happened.

“Please.” She rolled her eyes and flounced over to perch at the foot of my bed again.

“I keep telling you, she’s gone.” Evan, the creepy janitor dude from my former high school, spoke up, smashing his mop down impatiently into the bucket/wringer that was always with him. “Disappeared, poof, vamoosed. She doesn’t respond when you summon her. She’s not here at her time of death.” He shook his head. “The bond is broken. She ain’t coming back.”

Which was all true, but not the direction I wanted this conversation to go. I held my hands up and tried soothing. “We don’t know what—”

“No, I think we do.” He jabbed a finger in my direction. “And you need to start focusing on what’s important, not chasing after your piece of ghosty tail.” He smirked.

A barely muffled round of snickering emerged from the crowd, and I felt my face get hot. Evidently, Alona and I had not been as discreet as I’d thought. Technically, there wasn’t anything wrong with our relationship. Except, I suppose, the part where I was alive and she was…not. Still, it wasn’t like
that
. We’d known each other when she was alive, and we were the same age…Oh, forget it.

I tried to rally and regain control over the room, despite all the smirking faces. “And I take it you want me to start by helping you?” I asked Evan.

“I’ve been waiting.” He leaned his mop against the wall and stepped forward, hands out in an “I’m here” gesture and a grin stretching across his acne-scarred face.

Except he’d been sent to the back of the line by Alona, I knew, which meant that most, if not all, of these people should have been ahead of him. To my surprise, though, none of them protested his advancement, which could only mean they’d given up on the order Alona had established and were desperate enough to see someone, anyone, helped to give them hope that they would one day be in his position.

Not good.

It was also a problem because it was Evan.

“Well, come on, then.” He stepped around several of the others and patted my desk chair eagerly. “Turn on your machine and let’s get cracking.” He looked from my computer to me expectantly, and the ghosts shuffled and shifted around in my room, moving closer like they wanted to be sure not to miss any of the show.

I sighed. “Evan, you killed people.”

“It was an accident!” he protested.

“I know,” I said wearily. Sort of. To hear Evan’s side of it, he’d only intended to scare the kids he’d caught tagging and egging the school in the middle of the night. Actually, he hadn’t even caught them. He’d heard gossip about the intended midnight prank during the day and planned to stake out the school until they showed. It had, apparently, become a point of pride for the Groundsboro students in the early nineties to torture him by making messes they knew he’d have to clean up. And he’d become equally determined to catch them in the act and turn them over to the cops. Unfortunately—or not, as it turned out—they’d moved up their plans, and by the time he arrived, they were already done and trying to make a not-so-clean getaway. Per Evan’s description, it looked like a chicken factory and a paint factory had exploded simultaneously—minus the feathers…and the fact that there is no such thing as a chicken factory. But whatever. This was Evan’s story.

The perpetrators scrambled to get back into their pickup, even as they taunted Evan on his late arrival. Infuriated and humiliated, he’d accelerated at them in his van, intending to brake and swerve at the last second. Except he didn’t.

He said his brakes had failed, but the police hadn’t been able to find evidence of that. Two kids had ended up dead, and a third one was badly injured. It didn’t help that one of the kids who’d died was the son of a prominent lawyer. Evan had been convicted, given the death penalty, and executed by lethal injection in 2002, right before they put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, which still rankled him to this day.

“You’ve already tried apologizing,” I pointed out. He’d attempted to make amends to the affected families before his death, but it hadn’t helped. He was still stuck here, in between. “What else do you want to do?”

“I don’t know!” He folded his arms over his jump suited chest. “That’s your job to figure out.”

Like I didn’t have enough to do? Like my own problems weren’t already trying to hold my head under the water until I quit breathing? At least I was
trying
to solve them instead of dumping them in someone else’s lap. So, blame it on frustration, momentary insanity, or just forgetting for a second that the guy was a killer—no matter what he said—but suddenly I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. “How about telling the truth, for a change? You didn’t swerve because you didn’t want to, and that’s what’s keeping you here.”

Dumb, Will, definitely dumb.

He lunged at me, and the room exploded in noise.

The woman in the suit, the one who I’d noticed earlier, appeared in front of me suddenly, blocking Evan’s path. “Back off.” She shoved at him, and he stumbled, looking stunned. “And the rest of you, shut it already,” she said to the others. She glanced at me, as if expecting my gratitude and/or approval.

But I was too distracted. I recognized her now. It was Spring Break Girl from Malachi’s place…except she was dressed differently. She’d ditched her bikini top and shorts for a suit that clung to her curves and a fancy, twisty hairstyle, both of which made her look older than the nineteen or twenty she’d probably been. How was that even possible? Ghosts couldn’t change their appearances, not like that.

“Do you really think this is going to get you anywhere?” she demanded of the other spirits, hands on her hips. With her attention on them again, I got a better glimpse of the back of her head, which appeared slightly, uh, dented.

I grimaced.

“Who are you?” Evan asked her, sulking. Defeated by a girl—one more float for his pity parade.

She turned and beamed at me with determination and maybe the faintest hint of crazy. “I’m the help he’s been looking for.”

Oh. Crap.

I
waited until Will’s car pulled away before I crossed back over to Sacred Heart. I wasn’t ready to be Lily Turner, even for pretend, at this exact moment. Fury and hurt burned in my gut in a potent mix.

I didn’t object to Will caring so much about her; my problem was more that he didn’t seem to care nearly as much about me. I was the spirit here, the soul. Lily, the realLily, not this body, was probably up on a cloud laughing her ass off at all of this. Or…since this wasn’t a cartoon, in the light, completely at peace, unaware and unconcerned about the corporeal struggles of the rest of us. That was more likely.

Bitch.

I’d been there once. In the light. I don’t remember any of it, other than fleeting memories of this sensation of overwhelming peace and acceptance. Then I’d found myself back here on this ball of dirt, stuck between the living and the dead once more, no explanation, no “thanks for playing,” nothing.

I’d told Will what I’d had to, what made the most sense—that I’d been sent back to learn more and to help him. It was easier than explaining that I’d been rejected—me!—and I didn’t even know why.

Actually, if I were being honest, it was even worse than that. Getting rejected without knowing why was one thing. But I’d been in the light for nearly a month before they’d decided to boot me. Like there was some flaw with my character that was visible only upon closer inspection. Or someone had decided I needed a further taste of karma, and offered acceptance only to yank it away, just as Misty and I had done on occasion to those petitioning for first-tier status. At the time it had seemed almost a kindness to at least let them believe they had a chance when most of them didn’t. But now…now I saw things a little differently.

I didn’t think the light was vindictive like that—it kind of went against the whole principle of what the light was supposed to be—but who knew for sure?

Everything since my return had been one big guess, including saving Lily last month when she was dying in that broom closet and I was disappearing.

And what did that get me? Nothing but more trouble.

Whatever.

It took me a while to find my grave again. I hadn’t spenta lot of time here since my funeral. To be honest, graveyards are kind of, well, dead. The only people who come here are the living, and they are always respectful and fairly boring when here. The dead who are stuck in between have only each other and watching the living as their entertainment, so they aren’t sticking around places like this. Cemeteries are, in that respect, a good place to go for some alone time, for those on both sides of the great divide.

The other problem, I eventually realized, was that I was looking for the temporary placard they’d put up immediately after the funeral to mark my grave. But when I found the right spot, it was only because I recognized the headstone my father had special-ordered. It had finally come in.

Made of Italian rose marble with weeping angels on top, the stone was big and beautiful and a little obnoxious, standing about six inches taller than the stones on either side. But that was my dad for you. He’d given me the headstone he thought his princess deserved. Which was pretty much the last thing he’d done for me, by the looks of it.

The marble was dirty with clean splotches from the last rain, and the built-in vase was empty, without so much as a dried leaf hanging around. The grass had finally grown in over the bare dirt, but it was a tough old summer green rather than the baby stuff of spring, and it was starting to rise above the base of the stone.

Had my dad even been here since they’d put up the stone? It didn’t appear so. He’d been busy with Gigi, my step-Mothra, and the new baby on the way. His replacement daughter.

Tired suddenly and my leg aching, I knelt awkwardly at the edge of the new grass, careful to avoid sitting above any portion of my former body. That would be just too weird.

Neglect I would understand—had understood for years—from my mother. She was not capable of focusing on anyone other than herself, even now that she was trying to get better. Maybe even especially now that she was trying to change. She needed every bit of willpower she had to keep herself on track, and I’d seen all too well what happened when she went off the rails.

But my dad? I was special, his favorite. The one good thing that had come out of his marriage to my mother, or so he used to say. He spoiled me, and I would have done anything for him. And I had done plenty—corralling my mom into resembling a reasonable human being when he needed her for legal meetings or whatever, not complaining when he’d left me to manage our bills and the money we received from his monthly check, keeping my mom from pestering him every thirty seconds, taking the calls from the neighbors when my mom was parked halfway on the front lawn again so my dad wouldn’t have to interrupt his staycation with Gigi, etc.

He was always grateful, quick to tell me he knew he could count on me. That I was a “team player.”

Except I wasn’t. Not really. Because no matter how grateful my dad claimed to be, no matter what he bought me to say thank you…he never did anything differently. To be a team player, there had to be an actual team, people working toward a common goal. And all I’d had was one parent making a mess of everything while the other avoided acknowledging said mess, leaving all the responsibility to fall on me.

I cleaned up after him.

I froze, the realization ringing through my head loud and clear. Yes, my mother had needed me to take care of her alcohol-induced messes…but my father had needed me to take care of her so he’d have the luxury of avoiding it. He’d used me, every bit as much as my mom had.

I felt sucker punched. He’d dumped his responsibilities on me and then forgotten all about me as soon as I was gone. Buying one pretty headstone was all it took for his guilt to be assuaged, apparently.

My mother had long accused him of always chasing after the newest, shiniest object in the vicinity without feeling or regret, be it the latest car, gadget, or wife. I’d thought being “special” had exempted me from that. Guess not.

With effort, I leaned over and yanked some of the too-tall grass away from the base of my ridiculous headstone, my eyes stinging suddenly.

This is why people shouldn’t stick around after they die. It’s lonely and miserable, and it makes you think too much. Or, if you have to stick around because of unresolved issues, then you sure as hell shouldn’t be sent back after you’ve addressed them. I mean, what is that about?

I tossed the loose blades of grass away, but the breeze caught them and sent them fluttering across my grave, just as it would the leaves in a few months and then the snow after that.

I pictured my former self snug in the white casket in the ground below, immune to all the drama and chaos going on up here. And for a second, I wished I was with her. Just gone.

“Why am I here? Why did you send me back?” I asked for probably the millionth time in the last two months, this time aloud instead of in my head.

But the answer was the same. Silence.

Of course. Because that was
so
helpful these days.

I spent longer at the cemetery than I meant to and had to hurry to get back home before Mrs. Turner and Tyler returned. Still, hurrying or not, I should have known something was wrong the second I reached my bedroom window. If I’d stopped and thought about it, I would have remembered that I’d left the window open, and it was now closed. I might have checked things out before barging in.

But my brain was on a constant loop of unhappy thoughts, and I was in a rush. So, it was only after I’d pried the window up from the sill—it’s much harder to do that from the outside than you’d think—and stuck my head into the room that I realized two very important things.

First, unless I wanted to end up on my face, it would have been better to start with my feet.

Second, Tyler Turner, Lily’s younger brother, was standing in the middle of the room and glaring at me, his arms folded over his skinny chest.

Busted.
“I went for a walk,” I said weakly.

Tyler was the second hardest thing about this gig, coming in just behind Mrs. Turner. It wasn’t his fault, exactly. I had no idea how to be an older sister, any more than I knew how to be
his
older sister, specifically. He was three years younger than Lily (four years younger than me) and a complete and utter mystery to me.

Sometimes he seemed to hate all the attention his parents, particularly his mother, put into me. He constantly pointed it out when I answered their questions incorrectly (“No, purple is your favorite color”) or I didn’t “remember” something I should have (“But you hate mustard!”).

Other times, like when I had a headache (or found it convenient to say I did), it seemed to send him into a panic. He would sneak around to check on me every fifteen minutes, while pretending not to, or bring me a glass of water and Tylenol with an anxious frown.

I couldn’t figure him out.

But Tyler was the one who’d first noticed that something was different about Lily, the day that I’d first taken over, even before I’d grabbed his wrist. He saw it somehow. He knew his sister well.

And sometimes I wondered if he knew I wasn’t her. That would be trouble. Big trouble.

Tyler shook his head at me. “You went out for a walk through the
window
?” he scoffed. “Right. Better not try that one on Mom.”

This is what I’d been missing by not having siblings? No thanks. My only experience with younger brothers came from being around Misty and her family. But her half brothers were still in diapers, and the worst they ever did was steal a lipstick to use as a crayon.

I sighed and backed out of the window, preparing to climb in properly. If he was going to sound the alarm, I wanted to be inside, at least.

In an awkward motion, I swung my bad leg and then my good one over the sill. I grimaced, bending my head to fit beneath the frame, and let myself down in a barely controlled fall to the floor. The impact sent a jolt of pain through my injured leg, and I stumbled forward a step, bumping into the desk. The desk lamp and a bunch of books and magazines crashed to the ground.

“Shhh!” With a quick glance at my bedroom door, which was half open, Tyler edged closer to me. “Do you know how close it was?” he demanded in an undertone. “Mom sent me down here to tell you we were back early. What if she’d come down here herself instead?”

I stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. So he wasn’t going to tell on me? “She would have been pissed?” I felt that was a fairly safe—and true—answer.

Now it was his turn to stare at me. “What is wrong with you? Of course she would have been—” Tyler shook his head impatiently. “Never mind. You didn’t even tell me you were going this time.”

He sounded almost…hurt. I shifted, uncomfortable. I really wanted to sit down, take the weight off my leg, but obviously he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon without some kind of conversation. Great.

“Okay,” I said slowly, trying to piece all of this together and come up with some kind of Lilyesque response. Clearly, because Tyler and I had never had a discussion about my sneaking out before, he and Pre-Coma Lily must have. So, wait, Pre-Coma Lily had been sneaking out? Where? Why? I knew she wasn’t perfect, but this went even beyond what I’d suspected. Then again…Lily had “dated” Ben Rogers for a while, and he wasn’t exactly the show-up-at-the-front-door-and-meet-and-greet-with-the-’rents type. Kind of interfered with his whole pillage-and-plunder-the-naive-but-willing plan.

But she hadn’t mentioned sneaking out to meet him in her diary. Then again, maybe Lily was brighter than I’d given her credit for. It was one thing to describe a date you probably weren’t supposed to be on; another to spell out in big bold letters the specific crimes for which you could be punished if a parent went snooping. Besides, everything she wrote about back then was Ben-related. The getting-out-of-the-house part probably hadn’t been all that important to her.

I realized Tyler was still waiting for a response. “Uh, sorry?” I offered.

“Forget it,” he muttered. He plopped himself down on the edge of my bed.

Fabulous. Was there a polite way to say “Get out”? How would Lily have said it? She probably wouldn’t have. For all I knew, she and Tyler had been best buds, blah, blah, blah. You know, it would have been so helpful if Lily had written about this kind of stuff in her freaking diary instead of pages full of her name intertwined with Ben’s in every conceivable fashion.

“So, were you with Ben and those guys?” Tyler asked.

Aha, I
knew
it!

“Not this time,” I said carefully. “Just visiting some other friends.”

He nodded. “Don’t forget, though, Ben said that one time he’d let me try driving his car.”

Um, okay. I didn’t know what to say to that.

Tyler looked so hopeful…and relentlessly dorky with the cowlick at the back of his head and his oversized polo shirt (orange, this time) and khakis. I had no idea why Mrs. Turner kept dressing him like a middle-aged golfer, or why he let her.

Huh. By comparison, Lily was the cool one in this family.