But I had no defense, because I’d earned it. Ten times over I’d earned that look.
“Lucy Day,” Cheryl said. “If the cops find you in a ditch or in some rusted out car…tell me how that won’t be my fault?”
I felt the tears again.
Stop it. Stop it, you stupid girl.
I sighed to steady myself, squared my shoulders, and looked her in the eye.
“I don’t have…it’s not like that. I don’t have a death wish or whatever you’re thinking.”
This time Morgan spoke. I don’t think she could help herself.
“Then what is it?”
Funny story, actually, Ms. Veers. When I sleep, I get beamed like Captain Kirk to a spooky beach with monsters and nice old mute men—oh, and this is weird—how far I travel in this imaginary place corresponds to how far I travel in real life. Also I’m dead and I partially ate a car crash victim.
“I don’t know.”
Another lie.
An understandable one, I
think
, but another lie.
You’re getting better at least, Lucy
.
I felt the warmth in my eyes, the wet feeling of a puddle of tears clinging to my eyes, getting ready to rain.
No. Stop.
I sneaked through the back door of my house—it was always open, because Mom was a ditz. I expected Mom and Dad to be sitting in the arm chairs in the living room, with the lights off, getting ready to bust me and ground me forever. It didn’t happen. They were asleep.
God bless Morgan’s cool mom for the benefit of the doubt.
I went up to my bedroom and tore off the clothes that were making it feel like a sauna. I laughed at myself as I jumped into bed. I kicked off the huge quilt, pulled the thin sheet over my bare legs, and sat back against my headboard. Just hours ago, in that bed, I’d been praying for just a hint of warmth. Now I found myself half-naked and still sweating like a…well, like me in a Calculus class
.
The sheet began to cling
muy
grossly to my sweat-soaked legs, so I kicked it off in a fit of extreme tantrum.
I didn’t feel tired. In fact, I felt more awake then I had been in a while. Well, that and sleeping meant being taken to the beach, where a monster wanted to eat me.
I’ll pass thanks
.
I thought of Puck, that weird, oddly playful, old mute. I knew he was fine—he’d seemed a hundred times more capable than me. But what about the man in the car? Had the paramedics arrived in time? I felt like I was bashing my head against a wall for answers. I closed my eyes and tried to calm down.
I grabbed the book from my nightstand—
Sabriel
—and dug into it for at least the third time.
I read until morning.
The next three days went by in a blur. School was beginning to feel normal again—people were beginning to feel normal again. Fewer looks of confusion and worry, less hugging. Just normal Lucy, back to normal school, doing normal stuff. The morning of the first day, Morgan had flashed me a look she had earned—a look that said, “Okay, Luce, take your time, but I’m not forgetting.” I nodded at her, and that was it.
I did my schoolwork, I did my homework—well, at least in their normal percentages. Zack stayed mostly at his group during lunches, but every once in a while he’d float over and say hi. The flirting in Spanish had ratcheted up a few blissful notches, and we were getting in trouble daily with Mr. Halloway.
My only reminder of my incident was one Ms. Marian Crane. Old Nosy. She scooped me out of one of my classes daily and took me back to her office for counseling. She asked me run of the mill, getting-to-know-you questions. She asked about my parents, my family, my classes. What I wanted to be when I got out of college. What I wanted to study in college. My favorite part about high school, my least favorite. If I showed interest in boys—or girls, which I’m pretty sure she only said to show how hip she was—did I hear voices, you know, the usual. While I knew her intentions, I was having a hard time relaxing in her office. I just kept wondering when she was going to lay me out—when the dreaded questions were going to hit. Questions I didn’t want to answer. Questions I couldn’t answer. But she never asked. I left her sessions feeling gradually more relieved. Maybe she just wanted to check to see if I wasn’t on drugs or joining a cult or something.
I still hadn’t eaten—my calendar marked off more days than I liked. Still, I wasn’t hungry, and I had a morbid urge to see how far it could go. Not an anorexic urge—as far as I could tell, I wasn’t losing an ounce of weight. I checked on my scale a few times, and I hadn’t changed a bit. Too bad, really.
I spent the nights reading or surfing the internet or playing solitaire or watching old TV shows. Sometimes all of those things, sometimes none. But I never slept, and I never allowed my eyes to close for too long. The grey beach had been a strange place at first, but after the second appearance of the light-thing, it was off-limits. I had no desire to see it ever again.
On the third night, I felt the cold returning.
The scorching heat had been fading steadily, something I’d written off as acclimation. Thursday, just after school, it disappeared completely. I pulled my jacket around myself, but I felt no warmth.
Morgan asked me to come over to her house after school—the only place she was allowed to be outside of class. I wanted to go with her, but I canceled last minute. I thought of Kent, and I thought of the black ring around his wrist and the things I’d taken.
After school Thursday I ran up to my room. I pulled up Google and typed in a name I had no business knowing—
Kent Isaac Miller, Anaheim, CA.
The first page that came up was a class reunion website, and then a recent article in the Register. I went to the OC Register site first. It was a tiny piece, just a blurb near the back of the paper that had been faithfully reprinted in the Local News section. Still, the headline caught my eye—CAR ACCIDENT TURNS MEDICAL MYSTERY.
I took a deep breath and began to read:
ANAHEIM—A local high school History teacher who crashed into a telephone pole early Tuesday morning also suffered from frostbite, doctors at St. Elias Hospital say.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning KENT MILLER, 33, who teaches History at Kennedy High School, allegedly lost control of his vehicle and collided with a telephone pole on the corner of Broadway and Gilbert in West Anaheim. An unknown bystander—
I stopped reading. I took a long breath. I blew out frost. Not good.
An unknown bystander made a call to Miller’s wife, MARIA MILLER, 34, who called 911 with the location of the accident. Emergency services arrived to aid the wounded man and brought him to St. Elias Hospital’s emergency room.
“It was a girl,” Maria Miller said. “A girl called me and said my husband was hurt. I didn’t get her name. I don’t understand why she didn’t just call 911, or how she knew which number was mine.”
How had I not looked this up before, I wondered? Had I just been ignoring it? Had I just hoped something as weird as that accident wouldn’t attract some sort of attention? I could feel my heart slamming in my chest and my pulse throbbing in my ears.
After being treated for minor lacerations and a sprained shoulder, doctors found what looked to be frostbite on his wrist. Frostbite, or congelatio, is damage to the skin and nerves caused by extreme cold. No such condition could have existed either during the accident or during the car ride, police say, and upon questioning, Miller had no idea where it came from.
Doctors are keeping Miller at St. Elias, Chief of Medicine, Arnold Tierez, explained, while they run tests and try to discover the source of the strange injury.
Miller is in stable condition.
I glanced up at the date on the article. The Wednesday morning paper. Kent Miller might still be at St. Elias. It wasn’t that far—if I grabbed my mom’s bike it would probably only take me an hour to get there. But an hour there, an hour back…what explanation did I have for a two-hour bike ride?
Why did I want to go see him? To make sure he was okay? To ask him—to see if he remembered me? I didn’t have a good reason, but I felt like I had to do something. Bring him flowers, or apologize. Then again, anyone at the hospital, including his wife, would guess immediately that I was the person who phoned in his location. And he seemed okay. Stable. Just a minor case of ghost-induced frostbite.
“I’m not a ghost,” I whispered. I slammed my quite-solid fist on the table and rattled my keyboard.
“See,” I said to my room with a puff of white breath.
It was the first time I’d said the word. The first time I’d allowed myself to think about it. Was I a ghost? Did I even want to start thinking down that road
? Stop being a wuss, Lucy.
Nothing wrong with objective assessment.
I didn’t fit any of the usual ghost symptoms. Not that I was an expert or anything. I couldn’t float, I was quite solid, most of the time anyway, and I had no binding reason to stay if I had died. I’d read enough ghost stories to know that ghosts had a reason for living. Or, unliving. Insurance policy information, unrequited love, buried treasure, unfinished book, sole knowledge-possessor of some terrible secret.
I had none of those things.
I’m just a 15-year-old high school student
, I thought to myself.
I wasn’t class president. I wasn’t even in choir or band or sports. Nothing. I had a crush on Zack, but I didn’t fool myself into thinking we were one for the ages. We weren’t Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, or even Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy. Hell, Ron and Hermione had one up on us.
So maybe I wasn’t a ghost.
Beyond that, I didn’t have many ideas. Vampires drank blood, plus I had no problems with daylight. Zombies ate brains. And not to toot my own horn, but I was at least thirty-times better looking than any zombie I had ever seen.
My toes were frozen. I wiggled them in their slippers, letting my thoughts drift away. Maybe I wasn’t anything. Maybe something strange had happened. Just a hiccup in the system. God made mistakes, right? Or rather, God’s system? There had to be a bureaucracy in there somewhere. A heavenly DMV if you will. Maybe someone just didn’t sign the right form someplace and I was just a goof up. A misplaced comma, a one not carried.
I sighed and shivered.
It was getting bad again, that I was sure of. I couldn’t fool myself into thinking it was going to go away this time. I’d had to
take
it before. I’d had to rip warmth out of someone. Could I do it again?
I thought about the strange daydream I’d been having since that Monday. Just a picture at first, then a stuttering grainy video of a little boy running through corn fields. Wearing a pair of overalls and tiny dirty sneakers. Laughing wildly but still running, sucking in huge gulps of air between his giggles. I couldn’t place the image—it looked like something out of a movie, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
When I tried to summon the image that time, it flickered and went white. Nothing.
I rubbed my temples. I stood up. I went downstairs. I could feel that edge of madness again, the hysteria I’d felt in Morgan’s apartment. It made me want to laugh or cry or jump up and down. I suppressed it. I tucked it away. I swallowed it and shut my mouth.
I clicked on the TV and paced in the living room.
“Lucy?”
“Hey, Mom,” I said, biting my lip. “How’s it going?”
Mom walked into the room, paging through a newspaper. She sat down on the couch and glanced up at me. She hid her look of concern poorly.
“Is everything okay, hon?”
I had to look crazy. Pacing, the nervous look I could feel on my face. The short, quick breaths. I just hoped she didn’t notice the frost. I glanced at the thermostat on the wall and wasn’t surprised to see a “78” in the tiny window.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just nervous.”
“What about?”
I twisted my lip.
Wow, honesty.
Where did that come from?
“About…Friday,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about Friday.”
Mom sat up. “What happened Friday, hon? Is there more—”
“No,” I said, then shook my head. “Sorry, sorry. I actually meant, this Friday. Not last Friday.”
“Oh,” she said. “I just thought—”
“Yeah, no, not that. I kind of wanted to ask you if I could go to a birthday party. Friday.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Oh, well yeah, I guess tomorrow.”
I was so glad that my mouth was faster than my brain. Not only had my mouth managed to deflect my mom’s current questions, but it actually got the party-permission thing out of the way. Zack had mentioned Benny’s party every day since he had invited me, and I’d told him I’d find out every day. After last Friday, I didn’t know how lenient my parents might be. It could go either way, I knew. The grounded forever protective route or the go out and be normal, we’re totally cool route.
The look on my mom’s face told me she hadn’t decided which way yet, either.
“I’ll have to talk with your dad,” she said. “But for now it’s a tentative maybe.”
I nodded, but my heart sank. Dad was more liable to throw up the shields and lock me in my room forever to keep me safe.
“Do you mind if I go for a bike ride while you deliberate?”
Mom twisted in her seat. She glanced at the clock.
“Luce, it’s after seven,” she said. “I don’t know.”
It was dark outside. Really dark. Stupid daylight savings time, ruining my strange, illogical plans. Would I really go to the hospital? I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. And then there was the cold to consider.
“I just want to get some exercise,” I said.
“What about dinner?”
I frowned.
What about dinner?
“I ate a huge lunch—”
“Lucy,” Mom said, and to my surprise, stood up. She walked over to where I was pacing and put her hands on my shoulders.