Queen of the Dead

6 Alona

I was used to seeing Will in all sorts of disarray first thing in the morning. Hair standing up, covers in a tangle, arms flopped wide, eyes half-open, and a grumpy expression. Very grumpy, usually. (He is not a morning person. I had never had that luxury in life — zero-hour gym waits for no woman — and didn’t now, either. I couldn’t have been killed on my way out to lunch?)

This morning, however, was different.

He was laying facedown on the bed, on top of the covers, fully dressed, Chucks still on with fresh grass clippings all over them. In short, nothing like how I’d left him last night.

It was enough to stop me in my tracks, distracting me momentarily from my goal of getting him up and moving immediately.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

He jumped a little, like the sound of my voice had startled him, and then groaned in response without lifting his head.

“What time is it?” he muttered.

I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn’t see me. Like I’d suddenly start showing up at noon. “What time do you think it is?”

He shifted onto his back and raised his hand to block the light coming in the window. “Too early.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. Something had happened. “Did Liesel come here last night? Because I told her—”

“What? Liesel? No.” With an effort, he managed to push himself up into a sitting position. “I’m fine. I just need to wake up.”

“You look like you barely slept.” I might have taken credit for my exemplary make-out skills, except he’d also been wearing fewer clothes the last time I’d seen him.

His pale blue gaze, bloodshot around the edges, met mine. “It’s nothing. Just…I heard a noise outside last night.”

“So you got dressed to go check it out and forgot to get undressed when you came back in?” I asked in disbelief.

“Something like that.” He rubbed his face with his hands.

Wait a minute…“Did Erickson stop by?” I demanded. The strain of tuning out spirits for all the years before I’d come along had given Will a couple of bad habits I hadn’t been able to break him of yet. The first was his tendency to stick his earbuds in whenever he was being pissy and didn’t want to hear what I had to say. The second was his occasional “smoke away your troubles” attitude when his friend Erickson was around, which, thankfully, wasn’t all that often. I mean, whatever, but after watching my mother lose herself in the bottle in an attempt to forget, I was a little leery about seeing someone else, who I might also care about a little bit, showing some of the same tendencies every once in a while.

“No, he’s in California, remember?” Will stood up slowly, like he ached all over, and shuffled to his closet. Why, I don’t know, since half his wardrobe still needed to be put away after its most recent trip through the laundry and stood in piles on his desk, as usual.

I moved around the bed to follow him. “You just seem out of it,” I said with a frown.

“I didn’t sleep well.” He raked a hand through the mostly empty hangers, making a loud, crashing racket. “What’s going on?”

I frowned. Something was still not right here, but I could feel time slipping away from me. I’d already lost all of last night, and every minute that passed, more of my life was being pitched to the foot of the driveway in a Hefty bag, and my dad was growing more and more attached to Gigi’s replacement spawn.

“I need you to talk to my parents,” I said.

He went very still. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. They’re just being dumb, and I want to remind them I used to exist,” was what I intended to say in a very cool, nonchalant voice.

But what came out was, “She threw away my Homecoming Queen sash!” and I could barely squeeze that out over the unexpected lump in my throat. Crap. I’d thought I was past the point of being upset about it…at least in front of someone else.

Will turned around. “She did what?”

That he took it so seriously (though, it might have been more that he didn’t quite understand what I’d said) broke whatever little bit of restraint I had left and tears leaked out…again. Damn it.

He looked alarmed. “It’s okay.” He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder hesitantly. I leaned into his touch, and he wrapped his arms around me.

He smelled faintly of outside, a little of sweat, and something else, almost like cinnamon but not quite. It made my nose itch like a trapped sneeze. Which was annoying, to say the least. But I wasn’t about to move away from this unexpected bit of comfort.

“Your mom did this? Threw your sash away?” he asked. I could feel his voice in his chest against my cheek. He was evidently still trying to piece together what I’d said to him.

“Well, it wasn’t the whole thing,” I said, trying to catch my breath between sobs. “Just this little scrap that I cut off before I had to give it back. No one gets to keep the sash.” And now even the bit of it I’d had was gone. A fresh wave of tears started.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, stroking my hair, which felt so good it was almost worth losing some — not all, though — of my treasured possessions. “What else?”

“What else did she throw away? Like, everything that wasn’t nailed down.”

“No, I mean, did something else happen?”

I pulled back to look up at him with a frown. “Is that not enough?”

“Yes,” he answered quickly. “Of course. I just thought—”

“My dad is having a baby.” I sniffed. “Not him directly, of course. My step-Mothra.”

“Step-Mothra?” he asked, and I could hear the repressed laugh in his voice.

I nodded against his shirt. “Because she swoops in and destroys everything.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “You do know that in some of the movies Mothra is actually kind of the hero, right?”

I jerked away from him. “So not the point.”

“Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in defense. “You’re right.”

Slightly mollified, I allowed him to pull me close again and resume that soothing stroking of my hair. “Gigi is her name. My stepmother, I mean. And she’s pregnant.” The last word escaped like an exhausted sigh.

“I would think that might be a good thing,” Will said cautiously.

“You’d think so, maybe, if Gigi wasn’t this total bitch, and if you didn’t know that my dad always used to tell her he didn’t need more kids because he had me. And now he doesn’t have me anymore.”

“Alona, I’m sure—”

“He took the ultrasound picture and covered up my photo with it.” The words came out in a humiliating rush, and I buried my face against his shoulder so there wasn’t even a chance of meeting his gaze. I didn’t get into the whole thing about how mine was — or used to be — the only photo in his office. It was just too sad and pathetic.

His fingers stopped in my hair. “You know they still love you. They always will, no matter how many rooms they clean out or kids they have.”

Yeah, right. He didn’t know my parents. “So, you’ll talk to them?” I asked.

He stiffened.

“I don’t mean you have to talk to them directly.” He hated the face-to-face missions. I could be flexible, though. “Just send them a letter or whatever, like we usually—”

“Is your mom drinking again?” he asked quietly.

“What?” I pulled back to look up at him. His expression was too serious. It sent a spike of inexplicable fear through me. “No. Not that I know of.”

“And your dad is happy?

“Only because he doesn’t know,” I argued. “He probably thinks I’m off learning how to play the harp or relaxing on a cloud or something.” We have the most ridiculous ideas of the afterlife.

He let me go and turned to his closet again. But he didn’t take anything out, just stared into like it held answers to questions I didn’t even know.

“What is your problem?” I demanded. This wasn’t anything different than what we did for other people every single day.

“How will it help them?” he asked.

“What?” I asked, certain I’d heard him wrong.

“If they’re finally getting to a point where they can move on and—”

“Finally? It’s only been two months!”

He faced me, his expression tight with frustration. “And what if it makes it worse for them? What if your mom falls off the wagon because she feels guilty about you still being here, or what if your dad decides he can’t love this new kid as much because it might hurt your feelings? Then what? How many people end up worse off than they were before?”

I resisted the urge to scream, “So?” because I didn’t really want any of those things to happen, but some acknowledgment that I’d been there, that I’d mattered, would have been nice. Instead, it felt like everyone was better off without me. And Will was just not getting it.

“Since when do we even worry about this?” I demanded. “How many letters and phone calls and whatever else have we done without even thinking about the people on the receiving end?”

He flinched. “Maybe we should have,” he said.

“No,” I said with exaggerated patience. “Our job is not to worry about the living. They can still change things for themselves. It’s the rest of us who need help.”

“Says who?” he argued. “The light? You can’t even tell me for sure what happened while you were gone, can you?”

I gaped at him. “Who are you? Since when do you even think like this? It’s like you transformed overnight into some kind of—”

I stopped. Pieces tumbled and clicked in my brain. Will, in bed and happy when I left. Will, dressed and crazy when I came back this morning, and smelling like some kind of night time adventure and unfamiliar spicy-girlie scent, and asking questions about my very purpose here, his purpose, our work together.

“Oh.” The word escaped involuntarily, more like a rush of air to accompany the socked-in-the-gut sensation I was currently feeling.

His eyes widened, and he knew right then. He knew that I knew.

“You met up with her again, didn’t you?” I asked. Just saying the words felt like bleeding.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said quickly. “She found me. She came in my window and—”

I shook my head. Of course. Stupid, Alona. A total beginner’s mistake. I’d underestimated my enemy. I’d thought I wouldn’t have to worry about him here at home, just when we were out and about together. She didn’t know his name or his address. But it occurred to me now she could have gotten his name from any number of spirits around town. Will was relatively famous, at least among the dead-but-not-quite-gone community. I wasn’t used to there being other people around with access to that particular population.

After that, it would just be a simple matter of Googling him on her phone or even going old-school and finding an actual phone book. The Killians were probably listed, and I didn’t think there were enough to make it a very long task to find the right one.

I stepped backed from him slowly, not sure what I was going to do, just that I couldn’t stand this close to him right now.

“It wasn’t like that,” he insisted, following me. “She needed my help to box Mrs. Ruiz.”

I froze. “Box Mrs. Ruiz?”

Color rose in his pale cheeks. “She wasn’t gone. She was too powerful for the disruptor. So we…contained her, so she wouldn’t hurt anyone again.”

“And then?” I asked with a calm I did not feel.

“Then what?”

“And then what did you do with Mrs. Ruiz?”

He grimaced. “Mina took her. The boxes, I mean. The pieces of…never mind.”

I felt like I was going to be sick.

As someone who’d been knocked around by that particular spirit, I could fully understand the motivation behind stopping Mrs. Ruiz, but to just give a spirit over to someone he didn’t know? Someone who might or might not — and I was leaning toward the latter — share the same concerns about Mrs. Ruiz’s fate. Someone who boxed her…in pieces? Not that she was any great or wonderful person, but I didn’t think it was our decision as to who gets to go to the light and who’s trapped in some kind of box. How would we know where to draw the line? More importantly, where would he draw it?

And what about me? All that about not wanting to change things, about not wanting to do this with anyone but me?

What if he decided I belonged in a box?

Will stepped toward me, and I backed up immediately, my hands up in front of me, like he might lash out at me. “I don’t know you,” I said.

He paled. “I didn’t…she didn’t…we just talked. She said she could tell me more about people like me. But it turned out she was just using me to locate Mrs. Ruiz. Once she had Ruiz, she left.”

But she would be back. Or, he wouldn’t stop until hefound her. She’d almost guaranteed that just by leaving. I could tell already.

“Now I don’t know how much of it was a lie and how much of it was—”

“Wait.” I couldn’t believe this. “Are you actually expecting me to feel sorry for you?”

“She lied, but I don’t know—”

“So did you.”

“No,” he said emphatically, shaking his head. “No, I wasn’t trying to change anything. I just wanted to know more about who I am, what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“You know what you’re supposed to be doing!” Even I could hear the shrill-sounding panic in my voice.

He just looked at me, and through the blurry veil of tears I refused to shed, I could see he wasn’t so sure anymore. Whatever she’d said to him last night, it had planted a seed of doubt in his mind. And that was more than enough to ruin everything.

He wasn’t going to help me. He might not help any of us anymore. If he had Mina the Magnificent with all her little toys, he wouldn’t need to. And he wouldn’t need me.

I angled away from him, narrowly avoiding the edge of the desk, searching for the place where that field around him would give out and I could pass through the wall. I needed to get out of here before I started crying.

“Alona,” he said. “Please don’t.”

I ignored him and kept going.

He sighed. “I’m not saying I’m going to stop what we’re doing, just that maybe we need to think about it from another perspective.”

“The living perspective,” I said.

He cleared his throat. “Yeah.” His gaze pleaded with me to understand.

Outside, I heard the distinctive rumble-thump of a garbage truck making its rounds in the neighborhood. It was trash day in Groundsboro. If my mother had been motivated enough to drag all those bags down from my room to the curb, my whole life was about to disappear into a landfill forever.

“I just need time to think about all of this,” he said.

I nodded fiercely. “I guarantee you’re going to have a lot of time to think and a lot more stuff to think about.” In less than a day, I’d been crapped on by just about everyone who’d ever claimed to care about me. So, it was going to take a lot more than a heartfelt plea for understanding to change things now, and I wasn’t about to wait for whatever that might be. No, I was done with waiting. My afterlife was in my hands now.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, looking alarmed.

He knew me too well. Good.

“It means that since I’m pretty sure I don’t meet your definition of ‘important,’ as in ‘living,’ it’s none of your damn business.” Then I turned and walked through the wall.

If nothing else, you have to love being dead for the dramatic exits.

There’s always that one thing, right? A particular action thatis your own personal line in the sand. The nuclear threat youkeep in your back pocket, never even mentioning it because itwill escalate any conflict beyond the chance of reconciliation.

And yet, here I was, declaring war, turning that line in the sand into a mere dot in the distance behind me.

The lobby of St. Catherine’s Hospital was full of people during this time of day. Some of them were waiting for appointments with one doctor or another. Others were holding vigils for loved ones on the floors above. My father had walked through this very space on a Monday morning, not all that long ago, demanding information about his daughter and a bus accident.

For not the first time, I wished for a cosmic do-over, a chance to relive that day again. When my dad called that morning, I would have told him to get over it and deal with my mom himself. Then I would have refused to speak to either one until they got their act together. Immature? Possibly, but it would have solved the problem of me being their go-between, which was what caused all of this in the first place.

Well, not this specifically. This — me being here in St. Catherine’s, preparing to take last-resort measures — that was all on Will.

He left you no choice, I reminded myself. Even still, I knew he’d never forgive me after this. Whatever “more than friends” vibe had been between us would be gone, dead beyond resuscitation. But my message would be delivered, and he’d know that I didn’t need him to do it. That was the important part.

I headed toward the elevators and stood next to a woman with a giant bundle of GET WELL SOON balloons and a huge teddy bear that had one furry arm in a sling. She looked like she would be going to the right place. Now that I’d made up my mind to do this, I didn’t want to waste time riding up and down to all the wrong floors.

My hands were sweating. I’d only done this once before and in desperation. What if it didn’t work?

I shook my head. No, it had to work.

Though, honestly, the thought of what it would take to succeed almost scared me more than the possibility of failing. Almost.

The elevator signaled its arrival, and I followed the woman and her balloons inside. As I’d hoped, she pushed the button for the fifth floor. Pediatrics.

When the doors opened, revealing the same obnoxious smiley faces and rainbows that I remembered from my first trip, the woman headed off with her bear and balloons to the right. I took a left, past the nurses’ desk, acting on the memory of an afternoon I would really have preferred to forget.

As I walked, I counted the doors lining the corridor and stopped when I reached a partially closed one about halfway down the hall. This one seemed right, from what I could recall.

I peeked inside. The room was dim with the blinds mostly drawn and television off, but I could still see well enough to know I was in the right place.

Lily Turner looked much the same as when I’d first seen her a couple of months ago. Not all that surprising, given her permanent comatose state. She lay half elevated in the bed, her shiny light brown hair spread over the pillow behind her. This time, though, at least her eyes were closed. Seeing her staring off at nothing had been creepy as hell.

I stepped inside, passing partially through the door, and couldn’t help but notice that while Lily had stayed the same, her room had changed dramatically.

A couple of months ago, she’d had just a few framed photographs here and there. It was like her family had been expecting her to go home…or pass on any second.

Now, though, it was like her bedroom at home had been painstakingly brought over piece by piece and reassembled around her hospital bed.

A bedsheet with castles, fairies, and horse-drawn carriages was tacked to one wall, covering up the cinder blocks. Clearly, Lily had not redecorated at home since she was about six.

Books and photo albums were piled up in a sloppy stack on her bedside table. Stuffed animals, well-worn and missing various appendages, guarded the windowsill. Next to them, a ballerina lamp, her pink tutu the shade, gave the room a pale rosy glow.

And then there were the Ouija boards. They were everywhere. It was worse than I’d ever imagined. Will had told me it was bad, but I’d never thought it would be like this. In addition to the old-fashioned wooden board in the bed with Lily, her limp fingers resting on the planchette, a dozen varieties and multiples of each lay scattered around the room. Made of wood, plastic, in bright pink (something wrong with that, for sure) and standard tan and black, old, new, big, small (travel-size Ouija boards?), even a couple that appeared to be made of that weird see-through yellowish material that would probably glow in the dark.

Some were stacked on the floor; others were haphazardly placed around the room, on the nightstand, on the empty bed that would have belonged to her roommate, on the table with wheels they would have used to serve her meals if she could eat that way. Packaging for at least two new boards stuck out of the garbage can, and a stack of unopened Ouija board game boxes rested on one of the visitor’s chair.

These boards, I knew, had nothing to do with re-creating Lily’s room at home, and everything to do with Will and me.

Last year, Lily had left a party — a first-tier party, one that I’d attended myself — in tears after a confrontation with her “boyfriend,” Ben Rogers. Ben was a player, especially when it came to underclassmen like Lily. She really should have known better, but then again, she evidently hadn’t had much experience in our social scene. This was all according to Will, who’d been one of Lily’s few friends, before she’d tried to gain a few rungs on the social ladder.

In any case, she’d crashed into a tree on her way home from that party and landed herself in the hospital. She wasn’t dying, exactly, but she wasn’t getting any better either.

Will said her spirit was gone. She’d moved on to the light right away, apparently, but her body had just kept ticking along, at least for the time being.

Then a couple of months ago, Will’s other friend, Joonie, had, in effect, kidnapped Lily’s body and brought it to Will in the hope that he would be able to find her spirit and put it back in place. Joonie had pieced together Will’s secret about being a ghost-talker from his strange behavior and various context clues. She felt Lily’s accident was her fault — they’d had a falling out back when the three of them were friends — and she wanted Will to help her make it right. Actually, she’d been beyond crazed to make it right. Will had told her that putting Lily’s spirit back into her body wasn’t possible, but Joonie didn’t believe him. Then Joonie’s negative energy — fear, frustration, guilt, and regret — in combination with Will’s presence and the Ouija board, had manifested itself as a physical force. In frustration with what she saw as his lack of cooperation, Joonie unwittingly targeted Will with that energy. It choked off his air and his ability to breathe, slowly killing him. Joonie had been too caught up in her own misery to see what was really happening. So, I’d done what I had to do to get her attention.

In the heat of the moment, with Will’s life in danger, it had been easy. Using the physicality that came from Will being nearby, I’d spelled out the message Joonie needed to hear on the Ouija board and then put my hand inside Lily’s to touch Joonie. It had worked. Joonie had stopped; Will had been saved.

But I’d evidently also given Lily’s family cause to hope. The quantity and variety of Ouija boards in her room screamed of desperation. If this one didn’t work, maybe another one will. Maybe she doesn’t like the plastic ones. Maybe we should get one in her favorite color. They’d pinned their hopes on every new purchase, never knowing, of course, that there was no perfect board, and even if it existed, Lily wasn’t around to use it.

Lily was gone in the only way that mattered. She had moved on to that peace, that blissful space empty of worry and fear, the one I could only remember in the briefest and most frustrating flashes.

But thanks to me, her family thought she was still hanging around, and in fact, I was here today to use that belief to my advantage.

I swallowed hard, looking down at the pale, hospital-thin girl who seemed lost among her bedcovers and pillows. She wasn’t exactly pretty, or hadn’t been, but she could have been striking, with a little confidence and the right education in hair products and makeup. Now there was also the matter of the jagged scar stretching from her hairline down to edge of her jaw on the left side of her face. But even that seemed to be getting better in small degrees. It looked less puffy and red this time. That part of her was healing, even if nothing else was, and probably gave her family yet another reason to hope.

Could I really do this? Once, I probably wouldn’t have hesitated. I’d used people in all kinds of ways when I was alive without thinking twice. My perspective was if you were willing to be used or weak enough to allow it to happen, then you got what you deserved. If you’re not a predator, you’re prey, you know? But now…

One time. That was it. I just needed to get a message across to my parents.

I moved closer to her bed to wait, my heart beating too fast. I half-expected Will to appear in the doorway suddenly and start shouting at me. He knew what I could do. In fact, I was the only spirit he’d ever seen or heard of with this ability. He had to know I’d be thinking of this…right?

But Will did not come.

The room stayed quiet and still with only the steady beeping of Lily’s heart monitor in the background to break the silence.

Then, a woman with the same light brown hair as Lily’s entered the room, bearing a hospital tray with a pathetic-looking sandwich, a wilted salad, and two oranges. Her mother. It had to be. According to Will, her mother rarely, if ever, left Lily’s side, hoping she would wake up enough to communicate again.

I watched her approach. She moved like every step was painful. Her hair-ball — brown cardigan seemed three or four sizes too big for her rail-thin frame.

“I brought you oranges, baby,” she said softly, like Lily was just dozing and she didn’t want to scare her awake. She picked her way carefully around the end of the bed and sat in the visitor’s chair on the far side by Lily’s head. “I know how much you love them. I thought I’d peel them up here so you could smell them. Maybe have a slice or two if you wake up.”

Her voice sounded hoarse with weariness. This woman was giving all she had to her daughter, her every bit of energy, every ounce of strength. If Lily could have been tube-fed the will to live, her mother would have had her up and around in no time.

This was the worst part. To communicate through Lily, I would need someone living to take down my words. I would be using her mother as much as I was using her.

That first time, the consequences of communicating to Joonie through Lily had never occurred to me beyond the immediate benefit — Joonie would stop and Will would live. I hadn’t thought about her family, waiting for months on end to see if she would wake up, only to not be around the few short minutes she had appeared to demonstrate some momentary awareness. It must have been devastating…and cruel.

It hadn’t been intentional, not then. But now it would be, and contrary to what most people, including Will, seemed to believe about me, I did have a conscience. Telling someone she looks like a bloated pumpkin in her new cinnamon minidress (truth) is worlds away from giving somebody’s grief-stricken mother false hope (mean).

Just get it over with. You’ll do this just once, and then maybe once everything settles down, you can come back and tell her family good-bye for her. She’d probably appreciate that.

I waited until her mother was settled and peeling anorange before I started. I did not want to have to do this twice today. I remembered all too clearly the feeling of losing myself that had gone along with using Lily’s body, like we were merging into one person. It had been scary, really scary. And I wasn’t eager to experience it again.

I leaned over the side of Lily’s bed, lining my hand up with hers. Then I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then placed my hand on top of Lily’s.

For a second, I didn’t think anything would happen. I could feel the warmth of her skin against my palm, but that was all. Then, like I’d broken through the surface tension in a pool, my hand slipped down into hers. At our wrists, the boundary between us smeared, becoming a blur of my still sun-darkened skin and hers, a pale hospital-bleached white.

Trying to ignore the sensation of heat crawling up my arm, even faster than it had the first time, it seemed, I forced my hand forward and Lily’s lurched in response. The plastic planchette dug into the wood of the board under the weight of her hand, but I could still move it. It had been easier when Will was here and I could just move the piece around on the board myself, but this would work, too, and it would, I admitted reluctantly, have more of an effect.

MOM

I grimaced. It felt wrong, bad to be using this word for someone who wasn’t my mother. Then again, my mother couldn’t even be bothered to hang on to my stuff, let alone relocate it somewhere else entirely. She was just trying to survive in the only way she knew how. I got it. But still.

The heart monitor next to Lily’s bed picked up a beat or two, but nothing too bad sounding.

MOM

It took a few seconds for Lily’s mother to recognize the sound she was hearing — the scrape of the planchette across the board. She jolted up, the tray slipping from her lap to the floor with a rattle of hard plastic and the crash of ceramic, to stare at the Ouija board on the other side of the bed.

MOM

Ugh. I was sweating already from the effort…and I hate sweating. The heat from Lily’s arm had crawled up my arm and into my shoulder, and a strange pulling sensation had started, like vacuum suction, yanking me downward. The muscles in my back ached with the effort of keeping me upright.

This time, though, Mrs. Turner understood. She paled, raising a shaking hand to her mouth, her gaze fixed on the board, like if she looked away it would vanish.

Okay, what now?

Um…

HI

Her mother began this weird laughing, crying thing, with her shoulders shaking and tears streaming, but no sound emerging. She came around to my side of the bed, and she touched Lily’s hand. The strange part is, I felt it on my hand.

DONT B SAD

IM OK

Her mom nodded wildly, tears flying off her face and splattering our arms and the bed below.

Yeah, I would definitely have to come back and say good-bye on Lily’s behalf. I couldn’t leave it like this with her mom. She didn’t deserve this.

She stroked our arms, and I shivered at the odd sensation. “Baby, I’m so glad you’re here. I need you to do me a favor,” she said.

Okay, I had not been expecting this.

“Your father needs to see this. Then he’ll believe me.” She whipped her cell phone out of her sweater pocket and began dialing. “I could record it, but you know your dad, he won’t believe anything until he sees it for himself.”

So I was just supposed to hang out here until Lily’s dad made it in from wherever? I don’t think so. I started painstakingly spelling out my message, hoping her mom understood texting abbreviations.

MSG FRM ALONA

“Just wait, please, baby? He needs to see this.” Her mother covered the phone with her hand. “You know he doesn’t mean anything by it, all that talk about taking you home to…to pass. He just doesn’t understand.”

What?

The strength of whatever was pulling me into Lily gave a great yank, tugging me down until my whole arm was part of her and my chin was melding with her shoulder. And I started to panic.

This force inside Lily’s body was slowly pulling me inside. I needed to get out. Now. My message would have to wait until later.

I tried to pull back and found I couldn’t even force myself into a standing position.

Crap.

“Jason, she’s here! She’s doing it right now,” Lily’s mom said excitedly into the phone. “You need to come see her.”

The voice on the other end said something I couldn’t hear over the roar of blood in my ears. The weak, light-headed sensation that usually accompanied my vanishing act was now cascading over me. By the strength of it, I was guessing I didn’t have much of me left below the knee. The power of my fear was dissolving me where I stood even as Lily’s body tightened its grip on what was left.

Lily’s mother frowned down at our hand on the board. “Nothing right this second, but she was just doing it,” she said into the phone.

The heart monitor in the corner beeped faster and louder now.

“Lily?” Mrs. Turner asked. “Are you still there?”

Calm down. Think happy thoughts. I had to stop the disappearing.

The suffocating heat closed over my face then, drawing me down, filling my nose until I couldn’t breathe.

I freaked and lashed out with everything I had left, tryingto break free…and my fingers, inside Lily’s, spasmed. That was it.

I heard the planchette skitter off the smooth wood, and Mrs. Turner gave an anguished cry. The heart monitor shrieked…and then nothing.