Crossing Over (3 page)

I felt dizzy. I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. I wasn’t sure what it was saying, though I knew from our most
recent vocab quiz that
fenêtre
meant window. And
mal
meant bad. The window was bad? How could a window be bad?

“… Okay, guys, so we’re gonna go into the
little chapel in the back now, so you can see how they rebuilt it after the fire…,”
Sid was saying.

“Kat, are you coming?”

Jac was standing right next to me, peering into my face a little anxiously. It was only then that I realized I had totally
spaced out for some time. Our group had followed Sid almost to the very front of the church. Brooklyn had abandoned her “look
at me” pose and followed. Only Jac and I were still standing in the aisle.

And one other person.

Ben Greenblott was still standing by the wooden pillar I’d seen him touching.

“We’ll get in trouble if they realize we’re not with them,” Jac said. “Come on!”

She began marching up the aisle, shooting looks over her shoulder to make sure I was following her.

“I, um… think we’re supposed to go now,” I said, awkwardly directing my voice in Ben’s direction. He looked at me. I looked…
away.

“Wow, yeah,” Ben said. “I kind of zoned out. Thanks, Kat.”

He was so nice.

We began to walk up the aisle—our group had disappeared around the back of the altar in the direction of the little chapel.
Think of something to say, you nitwit
, I silently screamed at myself.

“It’s hard to picture it was ever there, isn’t it?” Ben asked.

He had spoken again. To me. We. Were. Talking.

“Yeah. I mean, what? Picture…”

Oh. Prizewinning banter, Kat, great job.

“The window,” he said.

Wait. What?

“The window?” I asked.

I did not see any windows anywhere in the direction Ben was pointing, which was by the altar and the golden towered thing
with the statues, a painted blue sky peeking out from behind.

“Sid said there used to be a huge stained glass window there,” Ben replied. “And the sun would come directly in during mass
and everyone complained it was too bright and too hot. So they eventually plastered the window over and built that.”

The window was bad.
Trop claire, trop chaude.
Too light, too hot. But who had been telling me this?

People get information from the dead in all different kinds of ways. Both my mom and I are what you call clairvoyant—we see
ghosts. We can interact with them and talk to them and stuff, but the main connection at first is usually visual. But some
mediums do
it differently—and the ones who hear voices are called clairaudient. I wasn’t supposed to be one of those.

In the seven months since I’d turned thirteen and seen my first spirit, it had taken all that I had to start getting used
to the fact that I saw dead people. One way or another, I knew I was going to be able to deal with it.

Unless I started hearing voices, too.

When we were all back in our seats on the bus, Sid and Mrs. Redd began another of what I was sure would be hundreds of head
counts. I thought life might be considerably improved if we returned to the U.S. with a couple fewer Satellite Girls than
we’d come with, but I wasn’t making policy. Sid counted in English, and Mrs. Redd translated his counting into French, like
we were at the United Nations or something.

“
Seven, eight, nine
…” Sid pointed to each person as he counted.

“
Sept, huit, neuf
…” Mrs. Redd echoed. She didn’t point, because I guess there was no way to accurately do that in French.

Jac had sloshed some of her Sprite onto the floor and was bent over double mopping it up. I tucked my feet under me so my
sneakers wouldn’t get sticky, and out of sheer boredom began silently counting along with Sid. When he got to seventeen, he
gave a satisfied nod and stopped counting.

Except I got to eighteen.

I guess I counted someone twice.

Jac was still in cleanup mode, so I counted again. And came up with the same result. Four adults including Sid, and eighteen
students.

But there were only seventeen of us on the trip. There had been only seventeen of us in the cathedral, and seventeen in the
gift shop behind the little chapel.

I leaned into the aisle and examined each row as nonchalantly as I could. We had pretty much taken the same seats we’d had
for the trip up. In the back, I could see Shoshanna and Brooklyn, orbited by other girlcraft I recognized only too well, totaling
one planet (Shoshanna) and six Satellite Girls.

Directly in front of the girls were four Random Boys, two of them super jocks and loud, one of them a sporty hanger-on type,
and a techno guy named Phil who had successfully morphed his image this year from geek-freak to geek-chic. When someone’s
iPod or cell phone got messed up, Phil became even more popular.

Lumped together on the other side of the bus were the only four kids not in our French class: They were from the Foreign Students
Club and had therefore been eligible to join the trip. I knew and liked the quiet, sweet-
faced Mikuru Miyazaki, an exchange
student from Japan, who sat with her lethally overprotective brother, Yoshi. Next to them was the terminally silent Alice
Flox, and directly across the aisle was the bubbly and outgoing Indira Desai.

Then, of course, there was the seat I was most trying to pretend I wasn’t looking at, in which sat Ben Greenblott. Across
the row from him, in the window seat with her face pressed to the glass was… was…

Who was that?

She was nondescript from the back. Her hair was shoulder length, sandy colored, and straight. She wore a beige sweater that
my mom could have worn like fifty years ago, and khaki-colored pants.

Maybe she’d gotten separated from her own group and had accidentally gotten on our bus.

I decided to do a good deed.

“Back in a sec,” I told Jac, who responded with a “Mmph” while she continued to do damage control on her soda spill.

I got up, stretched, then moved into the empty row of seats in front of Beige Girl. I stuck my face into the gap between the
window seat and the window. I could see her profile, but her face was masked by a hand pressed against the glass.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “How’s it going?”

I thought she might have moved a little, almost like a flinch of surprise, but she made no indication she’d heard me.

“Hey,” I said again. “You’re not from our school, are you?”

Nothing.

I put my hands on the back of the seat, rose on my knees, and peered directly down at her.

“Hey,” I repeated, much louder.

This time she looked at me, dropping her hand away from the glass.

She was very delicate looking, with porcelain skin and huge, pale blue eyes. There was a buzz of energy around her.

She was, to put it bluntly, very dead.

When, when, when was I going to stop confusing the living with the dead? It was so totally uncool.

“I can see you,” I said very quietly. I could not remember the French word for
see
. “
Je
… um…
see-ez vous
.”

She looked at me with mild interest and no readable expression, then turned back to the window, obscuring her face from mine.

I was getting ready to ask her if she needed help, or maybe find an extremely tactful English-French phrase for “Do you know
that you’re dead?” when I happened to glance across the aisle.

Ben Greenblott was looking at me.

Ben Greenblott, more accurately, was watching me have a conversation with an empty seat.

There are no words to describe the mortification I felt.

Without saying goodbye or even sneaking another look at Beige Girl, I faced forward and slumped down in the seat. I closed
my eyes, trying to make myself disappear. Then I felt rather than saw someone standing over me. Living? Dead? I kept my eyes
squeezed shut. All the possibilities seemed equally agonizing at this moment.

“Kat? Are you okay?”

I opened my eyes.

“Mom.”

I felt an initial tide of relief sweep over me. She probably realized something
embarrassing had just happened to me. My mom
could almost always fix things. If not fix them, improve them a great deal. I almost patted the seat beside me, ready to whisper
secrets about Ben Greenblott and how Brooklyn called me Spooky and the disembodied French voice in the Basilique Notre-Dame.

Then I saw my mother glance very quickly at the seat behind me.

She was a medium. Naturally, she saw Beige Girl, too. And suddenly I was overwhelmed with frustration. She had come back here
to check out the ghost, not probe my feelings on the subject of the perfect boy.

Was it not enough that I had the gift of second sight dumped on me without any say in the matter whatsoever? Was it not enough
that there were times a virtual village of dead people followed me around, trying to get my
attention? Was it not enough that
if there was a demon within a five-mile radius, it would sense my presence and come at me?

I just wanted to be normal. Not forever. Just, say, for the Montreal trip. Just while Ben Greenblott was sitting a few feet
away. Just for the moment. I did not want to talk about ghosts.

“I’m fine,” I mumbled.

“Are you sure?” she pressed. She tucked a strand of baby-fine blond hair behind one ear and stared at me, her forehead creased.
I have my father’s coloring—jet-black hair and green eyes. For a split second, my mother looked like a complete stranger.

“I just need some space,” I said. I could have said it more nicely. But Ben Greenblott was sitting right there. I had been
talking to air. He had seen it.

It was not okay.

My mother nodded, like she understood about the ghost situation without my having to say anything. Which made me even more
irritated with her. She could sense a spirit a mile off, but she couldn’t sense that I had just humiliated myself in front
of the only boy I wanted to impress. Wouldn’t a regular mother have noticed that?

“I’m going to go sit down, then,” she said.

Part of me wanted to call after her. She was going to sit by herself, and Jac’s mom wasn’t going to talk to her, and I loved
her and didn’t want her to be alone.

But I didn’t. I stayed where I was. When the bus’s engine started up, I ducked my head, got up, and slipped back into the
seat next to Jac.

“Where’d you go? Did you try the bathroom? Was it terrible?”

I said nothing, just shot her a smile.

It was definitely not okay.

“I cannot eat this,” Brooklyn Bigelow was declaring loudly. “I cannot eat anything on this menu.”

The waitress stared at Brooklyn with mild amusement. She was young and chic, with wild thick black hair and perfectly applied
bloodred lipstick. She wore a black T-shirt, skinny jeans that clung to her as if their life depended on it, and shiny black
gladiator boots laced all the way up to her knee. She looked like she had tumbled out of the latest edition of
Vogue Paris
.

“Do you have a salad?” Brooklyn asked, very slowly and loudly. Brooklyn appeared to think that raising the volume of her English
would make it more understandable to those who spoke other languages.

“Sahh-ladd?” Brooklyn repeated.

“Brook, it’s a poutine restaurant,” Shoshanna said. The Satellite Girls had commandeered one end of the long table. “That’s
what they have. That’s all they serve. Poutine. Get over it.”

Frankly, I had assumed Sid was having a bit of a joke on us when he described the fare available at our first official meal.
Poutine was essentially a plate of french fries covered in gravy and liberally doused with chunks of something he called squeaky
cheese. We had arrived at the restaurant with voracious appetites—even Jac’s stick-thin mother was casting anxious looks in
the direction of the
kitchen. The adults had their own table, and the rest of us were sitting at one long table clutching
menus.

I was at the end opposite the Satellite Girls, with Jac to my right. Directly across from me was Ben Greenblott. I had so
far pretended, I think very convincingly, not to have noticed he was there. Instead I focused on the unfolding drama around
Brooklyn.

“Havez-vous le steamed vegetables?” Brooklyn asked. “Knowez-vous les foods on le Zone Diet? Le South Beach?”

“Brook, zip it,” Shoshanna said, not bothering to conceal her irritation. She twisted a lock of shiny dark hair between her
fingers, opened her phone and snapped it shut again, then physically turned her back on her number one Satellite Girl and
began talking to number two, Lacy Fowler, instead.

“Havez-vous le grapefruit?” Brooklyn pressed.

Jac snickered.

“Havez-vous,” she muttered. “Does she actually think that’s French?”

The waitress took the menu from Brooklyn and pointed at it, the way you’d show a kid in kindergarten an illustration from
a picture book.

“We don’t
havez
anything but poutine,” she said in perfect unaccented English. “You can have fries plain, with meat, Italian style, Mexican
style, or extra cheesy. What’s it gonna be?”

“Brooklyn, come on,” shouted one of the sporty boys. “We’re starving here. Just pick one.”

“Just pick one,” chimed in other voices, most of them male.

Alice leaned over and whispered something to Indira, who began giggling wildly. On Alice’s other side, Mikuru gazed down at
her plate and smiled. It wasn’t often one of the Satellite Girls made a scene.

Shoshanna turned and gave her devoted slave a pointed, unpleasant look.

“Pick one,” she commanded.

Brooklyn instantly pointed at something on the menu, pressed her thin lips together, and made a sour face.

“Small, large, or extra large?” the waitress asked.

“Small,” Brooklyn whispered. “And a Diet Coke.” A cheer erupted from the Random Sport Guys.

“There better be a Stairmaster at this hotel,” Brooklyn muttered.

Once the obstacle of Brooklyn had been overcome, the waitress made swift progress
taking orders around the table, ignoring
the worshipful glances the guys threw her way.