The ground shook, and a boom like thunder rolled across the beach.
Then there was nothing. I watched the churning tide, my eyes scanning the foaming peaks and valleys.
“H-how can we do…that?” I whispered.
Puck stood still beside me.
“Because we’re ghosts, right? That old…moving the table trick? Slamming the cupboards? Making Aunt Fanny’s tea jump out of her hand, right?”
Puck made the see-saw gesture again—ugh, I wanted to kill him. Again? God, I didn’t even know if he was dead. If I was—
It wasn’t until Morgan touched me on the shoulder that I turned away from the ocean.
“What...what—?”
Her face twisted in confusion, and her eyes rolled up white. She passed out and hit the sand with a wet
whump.
Zack looked up from the mess he’d made in the sand, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and frowned. When he spoke, he sounded genuinely disappointed.
“Why didn’t
I
think of that?”
Zack didn’t say much while Puck and I tried to wake up Morgan. That was probably a good thing—I was kind of freaked out at the eerie look of calm on Zack’s face. One minute he’d been standing on the lawn of Benny’s house, watching us fight some crazy guy. A second later, he was on a beach, watching his crush—
God, hopefully
—being menaced by a nine-foot gangling light-monster. All in all, I think Morgan reacted with the most sanity by checking out.
I glanced at Zack, watching the smooth lines of his too-relaxed face as he scanned the sea of endless grey. Maybe he
had
checked out too.
“Lucy?” Zack said.
I nodded to Puck, who leaned over Morgan and did his best to wake her. I walked over to Zack and sat down. The sand was wet under my butt, and I was pretty sure my cute skirt was ruined, and worse, see-through. If it was, Zack didn’t seem to notice.
“Zack. I don’t know what to s—I didn’t mean this. To, to bring you guys here. Wherever here is. I—”
I stopped. My voice was breaking down, and so was I. I clamped a hand over my eyes, took a deep breath, and leaned forward across my knees, mimicking Zack’s pose. I could feel him breathing next to me, steadily. I could feel his warmth, just inches away.
“Lucy,” Zack said. “I’m sorry about the party.”
Whoa.
Brake lights.
“W-what?”
I took a deep breath, trying to still the hysterical note in my voice.
“I just wish…I’m sorry about the fight. And about Wanda.”
I pulled my hands away from my eyes and looked up at him.
“Zack, I don’t think you’re okay.”
“Oh, I know I’m not okay,” Zack said, and presented the beach in front of him with a sweeping gesture. “I just hope Wanda is going to be okay.”
“Zack.”
“Lucy,” he said, and turned to me. “I’m glad I’m here with you. If it had to be anyone.”
I rubbed my face, trying to get feeling into my cold cheeks. He thought...
well of course he did
. God, what had I thought, the first time I’d woken up here? What did I think now? I looked at Puck, and he seemed to be listening to our conversation.
“Zack, I don’t think you’re dead.”
I looked at Puck while I said it, and he nodded.
Oh thank God
.
“But this—we were fighting that guy. Did he have a gun or something?”
I sighed, “Zack, you aren’t dead.”
At that moment, a huge wave crashed against the shore. It didn’t help make my point, I’ll be honest. I reached across the insurmountable gap, the one between two nervous teenagers, and grabbed his hand with mine. I almost yelped—his hand burned me, like it had just come out of an oven. Zack sucked in a breath.
“Jeez, Luce, you’re freezing.”
He threw an arm over my shoulder and pulled me in tight next to him. He rubbed my shoulder vigorously—I sighed and tucked in close to him. The heat baked me, and I shivered against the sudden influx of warmth.
“You are freakishly warm,” I said. I knew why, or at least I thought I did, but I didn’t want to think about it.
“Pretty good for a dead—”
“You
aren’t
dead.”
“How do you—?”
“Trust me,” I said.
“Luce. Where the hell are we?”
I laughed. Truth was, “Well—”
I flrrrppped my tongue in an epic raspberry and shrugged.
He smiled, said nothing, and leaned his head against mine.
We sat in blissful silence. Every part where we touched—shoulder, arm, hip, leg, calf, cheek—I tried to memorize. To note every detail, every curve, every twitch of muscle. To absorb his nearness, to keep it forever. I could have painted Zack’s body blindfolded.
A little something flashed in my mind—my phone had gone off, right before Abraham had showed up at Benny’s. I dug my phone out of my purse and brought up the message menu. Sure enough, a text message, from my mystery-texter.
Bad Bad Vibes, Luce.
I Think He Might Be Near.
I growled and turned my phone off. That was
extremely
helpful. No shit he was near. Still though—who could possibly be sending the messages? It wasn’t Puck, and it wasn’t Abraham. It couldn’t be Zack or Morgan. Who else could know what was going on? And why the sudden interest in my safety?
Morgan mumbled something, and I woke up and looked over my shoulder. She was sitting up, her blonde hair covered with wet grey sand. She stared up at the sky, then at the ocean. Then at me. I took a deep breath.
“What?” she asked. “Luce?”
I disentangled myself, reluctantly, from Zack’s embrace and skidded across the sand to her side. I wish I’d been surprised by the heat of her hand when I squeezed it with mine. She hissed reflexively the instant I touched her skin—just like ice, I’ll bet.
The cold of the grave? Ugh
. I needed clichés like a hole in the head.
Or another hole in the stomach
.
“Morgan—you aren’t dead. Okay? Nobody is d…”
I stopped and looked up at Puck, and bless him—he didn’t make that see-saw gesture.
“…dead. We’re just, a little lost, okay?”
Puck stood up, suddenly, jerking to his full height with a stiff sense of danger. He reminded me of a prairie dog, and I felt a bubble of panicked laughter rolling up from my stomach.
Puck’s eyes widened and he turned toward Morgan with an apologetic look on his face. I wondered why, but for only a split second.
“We have to go. Now,” Morgan said in that robotic voice, the Puck-voice. “More phantoms are coming. Hungry ones.”
I frowned, but began to stand. Even in their
is-this-a-dream
stupors, Morgan and Zack both hopped to their feet with twin looks of concern. Puck checked Morgan once more, slapped her shoulder, and re-wrapped his red scarf around his neck. He pointed toward the road.
“Was Abraham…is that what he was? What he’s called?”
Puck shook his head.
“That’s what we’re called,” Puck said, through Morgan, “and not all of us have retained…humanity. We have to go.”
Phantoms.
I stopped, rooted to the ground. Phantom means ghost. And ghost means dead. I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt black dots swirl in my eyes and a sense of lightness flood through me. I think I was fainting.
“Get it together, Lucy,” Puck said. “Or Zack and Morgan won’t live another hour. We can get them out.”
I shook my head, took a deep breath, and tried to steady myself.
Focus, Lucy. One thing at a time.
No time for self-pity, self-reflection or—really anything with the word
self
in it. Thinking of Zack and Morgan being attacked was all I needed.
All right then. Get them out. Easy, right
?
“Can we just…shift?”
Puck shook his head, and oddly, Morgan’s head matched his gesture as she spoke for him. Poor Morgan.
“W
e
can. For them it’s a one way trip. They have to return to their bodies. We don’t.”
That was more information than I could decode. I shook my head.
“In English.”
“They didn’t shift anywhere, not really. Their bodies are lying slumped on the lawn. If they don’t return to them the proper way, they don’t return at all.”
I shook my head. I did everything I could to not ask the obvious question—where’s my body?
Zack looked up and mumbled, “Benny must be freaked the hell out.”
“How do we do it? How do we get them back? What’s the right way?’” I asked.
Puck held up one finger.
“What does
that
mean?”
Puck smiled impishly, turned, and started jogging up the dune leading to the road.
“What does
that
mean?”
The three of us followed after him in silence.
We crested the hill together—why wasn’t I surprised to see a beat-up, rusted out convertible sitting on the cracked asphalt of the road beneath us? It didn’t look much different from the other wrecks of cars scattering the road, except for two key differences. One, its tires hadn’t worn away to long disconnected flaps of rubber, and two, the engine was running. In the cold air, long puffs of white rolled out of the exhaust. Puck was half-running half-sliding down the dune towards the road, his lanky body scrambling, limbs flying, as he ran.
Without thinking, I reached to the right and grabbed Zack’s hand. My other hand took Morgan’s, and I led them down the long slope.
“Hey,” Zack said, doing a double-take. “Is this a Falcon?”
Puck nodded.
Zack detached himself from my hand and slid around to the front of the car. I glanced at Morgan and rolled my eyes. She gave me a good-natured smile, but it looked like no small amount of normal was going to counter-act the weird. She looked preoccupied, not that I could blame her.
“Sixty-four?” Zack asked. “Right?”
Puck grinned, glanced at me, and flashed his eyebrows. The look was manic, cartoony, but unmistakable—I think Puck approved. Of Zack. I couldn’t believe it, but Puck’s approval mattered.
Puck slid into the driver’s seat, and Morgan, without saying anything, slid into shotgun. Part of me thrilled—me and Zack would be nestled together in the tiny backseat. At the same time, I felt horrible—Morgan had intentionally sat next to the weirdo stranger she didn’t know to avoid me. I shook my head and vaulted into the back seat. Zack climbed over the other side and plopped down next to me.
Well, I’d been right about one thing—the seat was tiny. Zack and I practically shared an ass. We both shifted, trying to get comfortable, and I laughed. Zack reached behind him, grabbed his seat belt, and pulled it across him. The old, frayed belt tore in half. I laughed even harder.
“The car’s pretty old,” Puck/Morgan said. Without seeing her lips, the effect was even creepier. “Just try not to fly out.”
“Try not to ram anything and kill us all, eh?” Zack said.
Puck gave us a thumbs up, re-wrapped the red scarf around his neck. The car lurched forward, and Puck began steering us around the rusted bulks of long dead cars. Going north, I noticed. Toward the dim glowing light.
When I was a kid, I could never stay awake during long car rides. Or short car rides. I could barely stand next to a car and stay conscious. The gentle hum of the engine transformed every surface into the hands of a gentle masseuse. As we drove down that long, lonely highway in the middle of a grey wasteland, I thought of those days.
I snuggled into the little nook formed by Zack’s shoulder and rested my head on his chest. I rolled the hood-tie of his sweatshirt around my finger, watching it twist, then unravel, then twist, then unravel. I inhaled Zack—a mixture of something wonderful and something less-so. The Zack-smell was nice, but it was the light odor of sea and sand and bad teenage piss-beer that stung my nose. I sighed, curled a handful of sweatshirt between my fingers, and closed my eyes.
“Lucy?” Zack whispered. Deathly quiet. I doubt the front seat could have heard it.
I mumbled a positive-sounding noise into his chest.
“I’ve been thinking…adding, I guess.”
I frowned, but the expression was a secret between me and his sweatshirt.
“Okay,” I whispered. My heart started to hammer, something I had no way of hiding as my ribcage was practically on top of his. “Adding what?”
“Thoughts,” Zack said, annoyingly cryptic.
“About—”
“About our date,” he said. “The first one. The Guess-Who’s-On-The-Milk-Carton date.”
I smiled and frowned almost simultaneously. I’m not quite sure how I pulled that off, actually.
“What about it?” I asked. I had some idea what he might be adding together. Whatever had happened to me, my being a weirdo-freak, and shunning people didn’t start until after our date.
“I was thinking—well, I have a question. It’s kinda stupid though.”
I nodded, barely. I blinked, trying to clear my eyes of tear-distortion.
“Was that your first kiss?”
I couldn’t help myself. The sudden release of tension made me snort in laughter. I slapped my hand over my mouth. It didn’t matter. Both Morgan and Puck looked over the back seat and give me nearly identical looks of bemusement. I waved my fingers in a sort of
toodles
gesture until they both turned away. I wasn’t surprised to see that Morgan turned away last.
“Jesus, Lucy, it wasn’t that funny,” Zack said.
There was no mistaking the tone of his voice. Hurt but trying to stay manly. Very cute, in other words. I realized what it must have looked like, him asking me if he was my first kiss and me guffawing my brains out. The laugh made me look like some kind of kiss-whore. Not exactly the most fetching attribute in a future girlfriend/date/whatever.
“I’m sorry, Zack,” I said. I turned up to look at him, and his jaw could have been carved from marble. Veins stood out in his neck.
“I didn’t mean—” I snorted, then took a breath. The look he gave me was not forgiving. “—to say. Or imply. That I was a lip-slut. I just…I guess I thought your question was going to be a little more…hard hitting.”
Zack didn’t seem happy with my explanation. If anything, he looked sourer.
“Uh-huh.”
“Really! I thought—quite naturally—that you might ask about the creepy realm of doom you’re driving through.”