2 Empath (8 page)

Cool with the supernatural,
I thought to myself. Was I? Just a month ago, I would have said No with a capital N. But now?

As much as I shrank from the idea of having some assigned cosmic role that I didn’t want to play, it was equally disheartening to think that everything I had gone through — and still went through — had no purpose at all. Could this sensitivity of mine have some practical use? Clearly, I could not change history. But could my ability to see the shadows affect the present? What if the people in that village in Vietnam
had
believed the man like me?

Before Zane faded away from me in Oahu he had begged me to look at my abilities as a gift, to be honest with my family and friends. He wouldn’t even remember saying those things now, but he had been right. Despite the rough reactions from both Tara and my dad, I did feel better now. Less like a freak. Less alone.

More cool with the supernatural?

Maybe.

“It’s okay,” I said, getting up. The shadows might repeat any time now, and despite the new and intriguing thoughts swirling inside my head, I really wasn’t up to that. “Look, guys, this has been fun and all. But could we just, like, go get some ice cream or something?”

Kylee leapt up with a grin. “We’ll do better than that. We’ll get a quart of vanilla and a bunch of toppings and make suicide shakes in my blender.” She reached down and grabbed Tara’s arm. “Come on, you hopeless skeptic,” she said good-naturedly. “You’ve had a shock, but you’ll survive.”

Tara rose without complaint and followed us to the car, walking like a zombie.

“I think
I’ll
drive this time,” Kylee announced, taking the keys and getting in the driver’s door. Tara shuffled to the back, got in, buckled, and sat staring blankly forward. I slid into the passenger seat next to Kylee.

“Tara?” I said worriedly. The girl still had no blood in her face. “You going to be all right?”

“Peachy,” she mumbled.

“Don’t worry,” Kylee told me. “We’ll throw an energy drink in her shake.” She started the car and pulled back out onto the road. “It is kind of a sad story,” she said sympathetically. “I mean, a teenaged girl takes her first teaching job, and her reward is to get whacked by some crazy paranoid farmer’s wife?”

“The wife was crazy,” I agreed. “But she wasn’t paranoid.”

Kylee’s eyes widened. “You mean, the teacher
was
messing around with the other woman’s husband?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“But how do you
know
that?”

I remembered again the girl’s feeling of terror, and how absurdly mixed it was with anticipation and a certain macabre excitement. She felt guilty, but not that guilty. She felt… smug. As if she knew she’d done wrong, but expected to get away with it. Even
deserved
to get away with it.

Miss Sarah Plimpton had been a serious piece of work.

“I can’t really explain how I know,” I answered, marveling at my own certainty. “Some things, you just have to feel.”

Chapter 6

My mother watched me with an amused smile twitching at the corner of her lips. “You could always just call him, you know.”

I slipped my phone self-consciously back into my pocket. Yes, I checked it occasionally, just in case I had gotten a text but didn’t hear the ringtone. Maybe I checked it often. And just maybe I had gotten into the habit of staring at it mournfully every other second of every waking moment of the day. What of it?

“Mom,” I reminded her with frustration. “Nobody
calls
anybody anymore.” To give her credit, my mother was reasonably well up to date on the real world, despite the fact that she and my dad were older than the parents of most kids my age. She was a technical writer, so she was computer savvy, and she did text and send pics. But some things, she would never get. Like the fact that it was perfectly okay to go around with your bra straps showing, but that it was
not
okay — under any circumstances — to wear jeans with an elastic waistband.

“Of course not,” she teased. “Why would you call, when you can take six times as long sending short little typed messages back and forth with no nuance or context?”

“I cannot just call him,” I explained. “It would be too awkward. I don’t have anything to say.”

My mother gave a shrug. “Maybe he feels like he doesn’t have anything to text. After all, he’s probably not doing much besides physical therapy. I imagine it will take quite a while for him to recover his strength. Oh, look at this one. How pretty!”

She held up a cream-colored formal with delicate spaghetti straps and an unusual layered skirt that looked like it would float when you moved. It actually was really pretty. And I had been thrilled when my dad — of all people — insisted I buy myself a new dress for the upcoming junior/senior prom. It would be my first real formal dance. So why couldn’t I get excited about it? About
any
of the dresses we’d looked at?

My mother hung the gown back up on the rack with a sigh. “Kali,” she said heavily. “For heaven’s sake, I know you miss this guy and you can’t stop wishing he was the one taking you to prom, but you can’t just put your whole life on hold! You should be enjoying these last few months in Cheyenne with your friends.”

I hated it when my mom read my mind.

I hated it even more when she was right.

“So has Dad mentioned anything about… you know?” I asked, changing the subject.

My mother frowned. “No, I’m afraid he’s still not ready to talk about it. He’s worried about you, and he wants to help, but he doesn’t know how. He can’t wrap his mind around what you told him, and his way of coping with things that he can’t act on is not to think about them.”

“I know,” I said with a sigh. “Maybe it’s better that way. Scientific minds seem to need their happy little cut-and-dried boundaries.”

“Any improvement with Tara?” she asked, reading me again.

I shook my head. “She’s the same. Acts like everything’s fine, but doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said sympathetically. “Maybe she’ll still come around. Does she have a date to prom yet?”

I shook my head again. It was a sore subject among the three of us. Kylee would be going with her current boyfriend, Eric, and she desperately wanted Tara to go with his best friend, Steve. But Tara was less than excited about it, and — perhaps because he could tell that — Steve hadn’t asked her yet anyway. I hadn’t been asked either, but two guy friends of mine had been hinting at it. They seemed to be waiting for some kind of encouragement, but I wasn’t capable of giving any. I didn’t want a “friend date.” Not this time. I would rather go alone. At least then I wouldn’t have to pretend I was enjoying myself.

I took out my phone and stared at it again. Then I realized I had taken out my phone and stared at it again. I stuffed it angrily back into a hip pocket.

Sheesh, this was bad. Zane
did
text, just not nearly as often as I wished he did. I missed him terribly and was always anxious to hear from him, but I had to get a grip on the anxiety of it all. If Kali Thompson did not go postal in seventeen years of seeing dead people, she was
not
going to lose it over some guy!

Any guy.

“I like this one!” I said with enthusiasm, pulling out the first dress I saw. Too bad it was bright orange with full ruffled sleeves, a high neck, and a gargantuan yellow daisy at the waist.

“Really?” my mom asked, her face pained.

I laughed out loud. “No. I hate it. But maybe this one over here—”

My phone made a sound. It was the sound I heard in my dreams all night long.

Zane’s ringtone. And it was
ringing.

I pulled the phone out so fast my butt cheek got friction burn. “Hello?”

“Hey, Kali! What’s up?”

My heart started beating like a jackhammer. The voice on the other end of the line was not the hoarse, thin croak I had heard back in Nebraska. It was the beautiful, smooth baritone that had warmed my days in Oahu like sunshine, and hearing it now took me back like a whirlwind to sandy beaches, blue water, swaying palms, and a brisk ocean wind.

“H-hey,” I stammered back. “I’m just out, looking at… stuff. What’s up with you?” My mom stood four feet away, pretending to be focused on the clothing racks. I grabbed up two random gowns and headed for the dressing rooms.

“Oh, same old, same old,” he answered cheerfully. “All physical therapy, all the time. I know you’ve been thinking about running your car head-on into a concrete overpass too, but I really wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds.”

I grinned broadly. “But you know how I idolize you.”

“Yeah,” he returned. “I know. But maybe you can imitate some of my surf moves instead.”

“I should probably learn how
not
to drown, first.”

“Chicken.”

I laughed as I swung into a dressing room, closed the door, hung the gowns on a hook, and settled onto the wooden bench in the corner.

“Seriously, are you feeling better?” I asked.

“I am,” he answered. “Just bored out of my mind.”

“Aren’t you studying for the GED?”

“Oh, I passed that already.”

My eyes rolled. He
would
pass the test after studying about two seconds. For all his efforts to act chill, he was obviously wicked smart.

Call me crazy, but I liked that in a guy.

“I’m applying to the University of Hawaii for fall term,” he added.

I smiled. I would be spending my senior year of high school in Honolulu.
Perfect.

“Look, Kali,” he began, his tone suddenly becoming more serious. “We may get interrupted in a minute, but there’s something I wanted to… ask you about.”

I tensed. “What’s that?”

He was silent for a moment. I pictured him running a strong, tanned hand through his mane of curls. I knew he wouldn’t be tanned, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Well, you said you see weird stuff,” he said finally. “You saw me when I wasn’t really there, right?”

“A part of you was really there,” I corrected, feeling a fierce desire to defend… something. I wanted to make clear that I knew the
real
him. Whether he remembered it or not. “But yeah, I see weird stuff. Stuff most other people can’t see. Why?”

A cold surge of dread crept along my veins. He’d had no trouble accepting my supernatural side when we first met… but of course, he’d been a wraith himself then. After he woke up in the hospital, he still seemed to accept my nutball story. But what if, after further reflection, he decided that everything about me was just a little too weird?

I couldn’t stand it.

“I was hoping maybe you could explain—” he broke off awkwardly.

My blood was giving me frostbite. “Just say it,” I encouraged.

Another pause.

“I think I saw a ghost,” he blurted finally.

My limbs flooded with warmth again. “Holy crap,” I murmured to myself more than to him, nearly weak with relief. “Is that all?”

“Is that
all?”
he repeated, sounding insulted. “It was kind of a big thing for me.”

I laughed out loud. “Zane,” I teased, “you being freaked out about seeing a ghost is just too rich.”

After a moment, he chuckled too. “Yeah, I see your point. But it
was
pretty intense.”

My mind went back to my conversation with Kylee and her grandmother. “You’ve never seen anything like this before?”

“Um…
no,”
he said firmly. “I’m pretty sure I would remember that.”

“According to my sources,” I said, trying to sound scholarly, “having a near-death experience sensitizes a person to picking up on the presence of souls who are no longer living. You’ve had one foot on the other side of the curtain — so now what’s over there makes more sense to your brain.”

“Oo-kay,” he said uncertainly. “So you mean, it’s going to keep happening?”

“Probably.” I couldn’t resist a smirk. “You should consider it a gift!”

He was silent for a beat. “Are you quoting me?”

I laughed again. “Yep.”

He grumbled.

Still chuckling, I slid off the bench onto the floor and made myself more comfortable. There was a woman in the stall next door who probably thought I was insane; but for once, I didn’t care.

“What happened exactly?” I asked. “Tell me about it.”

“Well,” he began, “it started with, a couple times, me seeing this guy wandering around the halls. I noticed him because he was wearing a hospital gown, and nobody in this place wears those things — the whole point is
not
to feel like you’re stuck in a regular hospital. But he’s wandering around barefoot, looking confused… I asked a couple staff about him, but none of them knew who I was talking about, which was really weird. How could they not notice? Then one morning I woke up and there he was, standing right inside my door, staring at me.”

“Did you scream?” I teased.

“You could say I was ‘startled.’ Particularly when I noticed that the guy wasn’t right. He looked solid and everything, just like a real person. But his hand was sticking right
through
the door handle. And when he walked toward my bed his movements were bizarre — like not the right speed or something. Too fluid, too effortless. He got up right in my face and said, ‘You can see me, can’t you?’”

“Hmm,” I grinned. “Seems like I’ve heard that line before.”

“I guess it’s a pretty obvious question, coming from a ghost. Anyway, as freaked out as I was about the whole non-living thing, the guy himself wasn’t threatening. He just seemed upset, really sad. He looked like he was twenty-something, too skinny, bad complexion — he had that hollowed-out druggie look to him, if you know what I mean.”

“Check.”

“So I said, yeah, I could see him, and what was he doing in my room? And he said he’d been wandering around the place for years, ever since it was a regular hospital. He told me that he’d died in the ICU after a car accident. He and his cousin had been drinking at a bar, and he tried to drive them home. They hadn’t gone two blocks when he ran a light, swerved to miss another car, and crashed into a brick wall. His cousin never made it out of the ER. He knew because he found his body down in the morgue.”