Liv, Forever (12 page)

AS WE WHISKED ACROSS
campus something kicked in, a drive to figure things out. I hardly knew my adoptive grandmother, but when she died, I remember fixating on my mother. I don’t think she cried once those first few weeks. She immediately started taking care of business—making calls, folding clothes, cleaning the kitchen, posting the online obituary. She couldn’t really deal with her loss so she started doing other things instead. I felt like that.

“Can you still hear me?” I asked.

He nodded. Classes had just ended, so students were crawling all over.

“Can you see me?”

“No, I told you, I can only see the—” he started to say “ghosts” but stopped himself—“
them
in certain spots.”

“I need to know what happened to me.”

He nodded, with his head down. We crossed through the Art Center’s outside atrium, passing a cluster of students.

“Just follow me,” he muttered.

“Are we going to the well?”

He kept his head down as we passed another set of Wickies, then quickly ducked behind the dumpsters by the Art Center. “I can’t just talk to you out in the open. You understand? They’ll lock me up. They’ll send me away somewhere. They’re desperate to get rid of me!”

“Okay.” Of course, I hadn’t been thinking of him at all.

“And,
yes
, we’re going to the well. Of course we’re going to the well.”

Gabe walked so fast I had to run to keep up. I noticed
I was lighter on my feet than I had been before. I could move fast, and I didn’t lose my breath.

As Gabe arrived at the well, he squinted over the edge. “Nothing. I can’t see a thing.” He scoured the ground at its base. He studied its sides and its edges, looking for any clue, peeking over his shoulder nervously. As I approached, his gaze shifted to me, and he stepped back, almost as if awed. He looked directly into my eyes.

“You can see me?”

He nodded.

I smiled. I never thought I’d feel so delighted just to be seen.

“So well, too. You look so much more real than the others. More solid. Less …” he stopped himself again.

“Don’t edit, Gabe.”

“
Ghosty.
You look less ghosty. And that’s a good thing. It means you’re different from them.” He heard a sound and lurched around, looking, then turned to me to explain, “Sorry it’s just there’s a girl, the one with the bloody neck, who’s always hanging around here near that tree.” He gestured to the weeping willow.

“I saw her here.” I paused. “And not just here, I saw her in my dream a few weeks ago.”

He tilted his head, puzzled. “Okay, now
you
sound crazy.”

He was right
—he
was supposed to be the insane one. “It’s true, though,” I insisted. “I mean, I think it was her.”

“Well, I don’t know. That never happened to me.”

“Tell me what
has
happened to you,” I said urgently. I drew closer, but not too close. I didn’t want to risk touching
him, feeling that burn. “You have to tell me
everything.
I want to know everything you know.
Why
am I here?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know why any of them are. I don’t think
they
know.”

“Well, what
do
you know?”

“I’ll tell you, but not here. I don’t feel safe.”

He glanced one last time at the well, then led me through the woods, explaining as we went. “I only see them in specific places, in charged spots. But I’ve heard them pretty much everywhere. Same way I hear you right now. But they mostly linger in the places where they died I think.”

“What do they say?”

“I don’t listen to them. I can’t stand to. I bolt every time I hear one.”

“Can you think of anything you’ve heard them say?”

He took a deep breath. “I think Lydia’s the only one who knows I can hear her. But she doesn’t make sense. She mumbles and laughs like a maniac about being powerless and weak. Losing her strength. She says they’re stuck here—lingering, that’s the word she uses—and she wants out.”

I didn’t feel powerless or weak. Not exactly. I mean, I felt different—and there were clearly different rules and constraints—but at least I was able to talk to Gabe.

“Who did it, Liv? Why were you out there? What were you doing?”

I hesitated, and Gabe immediately knew. “You were with him. I
told
you about him! I warned you.”

“I was with him. But it
wasn’t
him.” Of course it wasn’t him.

By now we were approaching the cemetery. He looked
around cautiously. “There’s another one who lingers here, so let’s hurry.”

I moved quickly, again getting that floating feeling. With little effort, I got several paces ahead of him.

He looked up, amazed.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re coming and going as you cross the graves. Appearing and disappearing.”

I couldn’t feel a thing. Nothing looked different to me; I could always see myself.

“It’s magical,” he mused, sounding almost unafraid for the first time since he saw me. “Or really creepy. I’m not sure which.”

“So you could see me in that nook, you could see me at the well where I died, and now here.” I was trying to make sense of it all. “You can see me where there’s death.”

He nodded. “I guess. Wait, stay there. So I can see you.”

I paused on a grave. He slumped down beside a headstone nearby.

“Tell me what happened last night,” he demanded. “You snuck out?”

I nodded.

“You met him?”

“In the woods near the well. Then we heard something. We ran in opposite directions. He was
protecting
me, distracting whoever it was so
he’d
get in trouble, not me.”

Gabe didn’t buy it. “And then what?”

“I paused at the well, to catch my breath. And I guess I was hit from behind.”

“By Malcolm.”

“No. It
wasn’t
him.” I wanted to tell him what Malcolm had said—that he
loved
me—but I couldn’t. It was too private. I scrolled through my memory trying to think about who might want to kill me and why. Suddenly I saw flashes of a face—glowering at me as I arrived on the steps late to the tour, a look of disgust as I danced with Malcolm, laughing at me in Old Homestead, hiding in the shadows as Malcolm and I arrived back at my dorm or ate in the Tuck Shop. It was so obvious.

“Abigail Steers!” I knew it was her. “She’s hated me since the moment I interrupted her tour. And then Malcolm’s interest just made it worse. There’s something seriously wrong with her. I
knew
it.”

Gabe waved a hand dismissively. “She doesn’t have it in her. Getting her hands dirty like …” He stopped abruptly when he saw something past me. I looked over. It was Headmaster Thorton, leading a team of police officers with sniffing dogs.

The headmaster scowled. He’d just seen Gabe talking—talking to nobody. “Mr. Nichols, do you not have a shift you should be working at present?” he called.

“I do, but …” He shook his head, dangling his long hair over his face.

One of the dogs started to growl, perhaps sensing me. Sensing
something.

“Tell them to check Abigail! Tell them!” I yelled.

Gabe ignored me, but I needed them to know. At that moment, I didn’t care if they all thought he was crazy. They
had
to know. “Tell them to look in the well and that it was Abigail Steers! You have to tell them!
Now
!”

Then I turned and saw a girl had appeared, standing on a gravestone silently beside me. It was the same girl I’d seen here that Headmaster Holiday night, the one like Warhol’s
Jackie O
. I was certain of it. Only now she didn’t look alive at all. She looked faint and translucent like the others. But her wrists were still cut open, and her skirt and jacket were now covered in dried blood. She recognized me.

“You,” she said as she started toward me. I screamed and lurched away.

Gabe shouted, “Stop!”

“To whom are you speaking, Mr. Nichols?”

“No one,” Gabe snarled.

The headmaster exchanged a look with the police. “I’d like for you to go to the infirmary, Mr. Nichols. Immediately. I’ll inform Nurse Cobbs of your pending arrival.”

“Yes, sir.” Gabe stood and shuffled away.

“I’ll meet you there, but first I want to go with these guys and see what they find,” I said. His lips tightened in anger. All eyes were still on him, including the police dogs. “I’m sorry, Gabe. I won’t do that again.”

THE DOGS BARKED DOWN
the well as if a cat were in there. But it wasn’t a cat. It was my dead body. While crime scene investigators dusted the roughhewn stone, other officers designed a contraption to hoist my corpse up the deep, narrow hole.

My body was cold and dull. Plump with death. My eyes were clouded, but I looked almost serene. My dark hair spread around my head, kind of like that famous painting
of Ophelia floating in the river. Funny, I’d made so many self-portraits and yet I’d never really looked at myself and realized I was actually kind of pretty.

A female officer inspected me and quickly ascertained I’d been hit from behind, knocked out, and I’d died from the fall. She jotted a note that read “blunt trauma to the head.”

The dusters found some fingerprints. They were delighted. I jumped up, also excited, until I realized they were probably Gabe’s. I had to do something. I pushed their makeshift table with all my might, but it did nothing except gently shake as if from wind. I recoiled, palms stinging as if I’d touched a hot stove, and collapsed on the ground, sapped from the effort, powerless as they sealed up evidence.

As I sat there with my head slumped, recovering, I looked down and noticed my body—my ghost body—looked different. It was slightly less opaque than it had been before. The fall wind stirred around me. I heard a gentle murmur from the trees nearby. “Preserve your strength, girl,” a female voice warned.

I looked up, trying to locate the voice, then heard feet approaching through the pines behind me, leaves crunching. That same crunch I’d heard last night. I feared it might be the bloody girl, so I backed away from the well and hid behind a tree.

It wasn’t her. It was Malcolm. His face was drawn and haggard. Dark circles under red eyes. He exchanged a few words with the headmaster then pushed past into the crime scene. And that’s when he saw me—my body, at least—stretched out on the damp ground next to the well.

He recoiled, shocked. He’d had no idea I was dead. Perhaps he’d heard I was missing and had gone to look for me. But this was clearly not what he’d expected to find. He made a sound that wasn’t quite human and gathered his strength to look at me again. His eyes searched my body as if looking for a sign of life or a clue of some kind. When he realized there was none—no breath, no life, no clues to anything—sadness set in. But his eyes weren’t just sad, they were guilty.

“It wasn’t your fault!” I yelled at him, pointlessly.

He kneeled on the ground next to my body and kissed my cheek. I felt my cheeks—my ghost cheeks—start to quiver as they always did when I was about to cry. But, again, there were no tears.

The crime scene people were all over him of course, telling him to move away from the body. But he resisted and quickly whispered some words to the dead me that I couldn’t hear. I felt sick. What a lousy ghost, not even close enough to hear what her first love, her
only
love, tells her dead body.

The crime people gently picked him up. One of the officers approached him, notepad in hand, and asked his name (“Malcolm Astor”). His relation to me (“friend”). Where he was last night (“in my dorm”). A lie. Obviously. So he wouldn’t get in trouble, right? Of course that was why.

Then they sent him away. They had work to do, they said. And, as desperately as I wanted to go with Malcolm, I had work to do, too. As I walked away, I glanced back toward Old Homestead. In one of the second-story windows, I saw the red-headed girl from the weeping willow
tree—the one with pin curls and severed neck—standing with a dark figure. But when they saw me looking, they quickly shifted out of view.

I WAITED OUTSIDE THE
entrance to the infirmary, but nobody came. I knew from my visit there on that first day of school that it wasn’t a popular destination. Unless somebody opened the door, I wasn’t going anywhere.

Stuck outside, I thought about my capabilities, reviewing everything that had happened. If someone was able to walk through me, surely I could walk through something, too. It might hurt, but I was fairly certain it was possible if I used some force.

I tried to push myself through the thick metal doors but immediately fell back. The pain, that all-encompassing burning—it was unlike anything I’d experienced while alive. I collapsed on the steps. My energy and capabilities were clearly limited, but I didn’t quite understand in what way. I waited until a student with a nasty cough arrived and followed her through the doors as she was buzzed in.

Over the years, plenty of kids must have died there, so I assumed it’d be chock full of people like me. As I wandered down the hall looking for Gabe, I braced myself for an apparition. But there were none. It was oddly quiet. I found Gabe in an examination room. Alone. Door open. He sat up suddenly, so I knew he saw me. It proved my theory that he could see me wherever someone had died—there had certainly been death here.

“Gabe, I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged. “Hey, you lost it. You just died, so you have a pretty decent excuse.”

I smiled, noticing he was hooked up to some monitor. “What are they doing to you?”

“Psych profile. Don’t worry. I’ll pass. But you need to go. If they hear
this
, I’m toast.”

Right then, Nurse Cobbs entered, startling me. I withdrew to the corner of the room. “Yes, Mr. Nichols? Something about toast?”

Gabe was unfazed. “Oh, yeah, I’m starving.
Desperately
need toast.”

“Saltines should suffice, I think.”

“Sure, salt me up, corn on the Cobbs.”