Giving Up the Ghost
Read Giving Up the Ghost Online
Authors: Phoebe Rivers
Contents
Chapter 1
Snowflakes swirled around me as I clenched my arms against my middle and
shrugged my shoulders, shivering in my thin T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. The wind
whipped my hair around my face, but I was too cold to reach up and tuck it behind my
ears. My body shook. My teeth chattered. Why hadn't I worn a coat?
I worked my half-frozen fingers into my front pocket, searching for my
Christmas list. But my pocket was empty. I scuffed my sneaker through the powdery snow
in frustration and immediately regretted it. Snow quickly soaked through the thin canvas
of my sneakers, sending fresh shivers up and down my spine.
Holiday shoppers bustled past me on the busy street, laden down with
packages and looking warm and happy, bundled up in their parkas, wrapped in scarves,
cozy in their knit hats. The shops along Beach Drive were brightly lit, twinkling with
lights and decorated with Christmas stuff. Again I wondered why I was outside with no
coat on.
Then I saw her.
The crowd seemed to part like curtains. She stood alone on the sidewalk,
wrapped in a fancy-looking winter coat. Her head darted back and forth like a bird. She
looked nervous. Wary. Suspicious. I'd never seen her before, yet I couldn't
shake the feeling that she was somehow familiar to me.
She was a very strange-looking woman. Her eyes were the color of
antifreeze. She had thin lips and a long, hooked nose. Her hair was snow white, but her
smooth skin made me wonder if she was old enough to have white hair. She could be
anywhere from thirty-five to sixty-five. Maybe she was one of those people, I thought,
who have had such a sudden, nasty shock that their hair turns white overnight.
And then, as if someone had just turned up the volume on a radio, I heard
her thoughts.
. . . can't take
this . . . get away from the crowd . . . that way,
that way . . .
Followed almost immediately by the thoughts of everyone else who was
passing by.
 . . . get that scarf for Uncle
George? . . . Did I send a card to the Nelsons? . . .
The flight gets in tomorrow morning . . .
They were all just snippets. Fragments.
I had been able to hear other people's thoughts for weeks now. Not
always. And not everyone. But it was happening more and more. This was a new power. To
add to the ones I already had.
I'd been able to see spiritsâdead peopleâfor as long as
I could remember. Recently that power had intensified, and for a while now I'd
been able to interact with the spirits, to talk with them. Since I'd arrived in
Stellamar last summer, I had gradually come to accept these powers. Before moving here,
back when I lived in California, I'd hated them. They made me feel different, and
I just wanted to be normal. But with my great-grandmother's help, I was actually
starting to look at them as the “gift” she insisted they were. Most of the
time, anyway.
But this new power was different. I wasn't sure I liked being able
to listen in on what people were thinking. Sometimes you heard things you wished you
hadn't.
Now my head was poundingâthe thoughts of multiple passersby crowded
inside my head, bouncing around inside my brain and practically deafening me. It was
like someone tuning a radio, from station to station, rapidly and on high volume. Or
like being in a very crowded, noisy room with terrible acoustics.
Suddenly I realized that the strange woman could also hear people's
thoughts, because she jumped when people passed by, as though their thoughts grew
louder, the way they were doing in my own mind. And she looked as though she hated this
scrambled, deafening noise as much as I did.
The woman hustled across the street, weaving her way between shoppers. She
scurried under the huge sign that announced the Stellamar Boardwalk. Ignoring my
instincts, which were telling me to run, not walk, as fast as I could away from the
woman, I followed her. My feet seemed propelled by a will of their own.
As I emerged onto the windy, weather-beaten boardwalk, I saw her leaning
on the railing and looking out at the slate-gray, choppy waters. Curling wisps of snow
tumbled and danced between us. We were the only ones. No one else in their right mind
would willingly stand there, bearing the full brunt of the icy December wind off the
ocean.
The woman didn't notice me. She seemed way too absorbed in her own
thoughts, staring out at the ocean. Now I could hear her thoughts clearly, because they
were no longer mixed up with the thoughts of all the other people.
Must stop . . . Can't do this
anymore . . . Why? Why did I not stop when I had the
chance?
As I watched, a scrap of paper fluttered and swirled around the woman in
an erratic figure eight on the whirling wind. It hovered gently in the air in front of
her, like a butterfly about to alight on a flower. As if in a daze, she plucked the
paper from the wind and stared at it.
I was at least ten steps away from her, but I could clearly see what it
was. A copy of one of the flyers my best friend, Lily Randazzo, and I had made last
fall. We'd made a bunch of them to help advertise my great-grandmother's
business and hung them all over the boardwalk.
lady azura! psychic, healer, mystic
.
The woman stared at the paper. I heard her thoughts.
Lady Azura is still in business? Well then, I will go
to her. I will make her help me.
She seemed to know my great-grandmother! Maybe I should approach her.
Offer to help. But something stopped me. She seemed angry. Hostile. And what did she
want
? Suddenly I felt wary. Protective of Lady Azura.
My teeth began to chatter. From the cold or from my fear, I wasn't
sure. But probably both.
She folded up the paper and shoved it into her coat pocket. I had just
decided that the best thing to do would be to run the other way when she wheeled around
and faced me. Bored a hole through me with those eerie green eyes.
I forgot all about how cold I was. My heart pounded in my ears. I felt as
though that green, probing stare was hypnotizing me. Like it was drawing me toward her,
and I could fall in and drown. She was so strange-looking. Not old, not young. Fierce.
Determined-looking. I thought about running home to warn Lady Azura that this weird
woman might be showing up.
She tilted her head back and laughed. “Weird woman?” she said
in a mocking voice. “You want to warn Lady Azura that I might be showing up? That
is an excellent idea. But there's nothing she can do.
Nothing!
”
She'd heard my thoughts. Read my mind.
“The damage has been done!” she said, pointing at me.
“The energy has been released.”
Now I was officially freaked out. I turned to run away. Fast. I ran.
Tripped and fell.
And then I woke up.
I was in my darkened bedroom. I was all twisted up in my sheets. My hair
was plastered to my forehead with sweat. My heart was thudding like a big bass drum.
I managed to kick away my covers. I sat up and looked at the clock. My
mind was groggy. It felt like the middle of the night. But the clock read seven fifteen.
Why was it so dark in my room? It was too dark to be past seven a.m. on a morning in
March. For a moment I had the strangest thought, that there was a cloud in my room,
hovering over my bed. I stared up into it and tried to make sense of how this was
possible, wondering if I was still asleep.
After closing my eyes and opening them a few more times, I realized it
wasn't dark in my room at all. It was a bright, sunny day. The window was open. I
could smell the fresh sea breeze blowing off the ocean. I could hear birds twittering,
and smell coffee brewing. The darkness in my room had been my imagination. It had to
have been. It was a beautiful, sunny morning. Not a cloud in the sky, let alone one in
my bedroom.
I swung my legs around and got out of bed.
That had been one weird dream.
Chapter 2
Yesterday's jeans were lying on the floor next to my bed. I tugged them on. They were nicely stretched out and comfy where my body had molded them the day before. I grabbed a T-shirt from the pile of clean laundry on my dresser and quickly surveyed my outfit in the mirror. Fabulous it wasn't, but it would do. I quickly ran a brush through my long blond hair and pulled it into a ponytail.
I wasn't all that concerned about fashion. A stark contrast to Lily, who always looked great. We were total opposites on a lot of things, but it somehow just worked for us. She was from a huge, bustling family. In the town of Stellamar, practically every person you met was a Randazzo or a close relative. I had just my dad and my great-grandmother. Lily was outgoing; I was shy. She loved being the center of attention. The idea of being the center of attention gave me palpitations.
Having a best friend still felt new and strange. In a good way. I smiled a little. I loved saying the phrase “my best friend.”
As my eyes scanned my bedroom, looking for my sneakers, I spotted my favorite picture of my mother, which I kept on the bedside table. In it, she was sitting on a big rock, her legs pulled up to her chin, and she was grinning at the photographerâmy dad. She was so beautiful. My dad told me that people used to stare at her all the time because she was so pretty, and I believe it. She died giving birth to me.
My dad and I had come to live with Lady Azura, my great-grandmother, at the end of last summer. She and I had something in common: the power to see the spirits of the dead.
We'd moved from California to this seaside town in New Jersey and into this ramshackle Victorian house owned by my great-grandmother. My dad was slowly making repairs to the house, and it was looking better than when we had first arrived. And we were just a few blocks away from the beach, which was pretty cool. Dad and I lived on the top two floors, and Lady Azura lived downstairs, but we shared the big, roomy kitchen. Slowly the boundaries between her space and ours had blurred. Now it mostly just felt like a family living together.
In the large bay window near the front door of the house, Lady Azura had hung a gold-and-purple-lettered sign, advertising herself as a psychic, healer, and mystic. She met clients on the first floor, although over the fall and winter they hadn't been coming around very often. Maybe once or twice a week at most. Her business tended to pick up during the summer tourist season. On rainy days, when people weren't able to go to the beach, business could get downright busy, or so she'd told me.
As I headed down the stairs to breakfast, I glanced into the sitting room. I glimpsed one of the spirits who inhabited our houseâthe grumpy Mr. Broadhurstâpacing near the window. It felt weirdly comforting to see him there. I saw him most mornings, along with a handful of other spirits who shared the house with us: an older woman spirit, sitting in a chair on the porch, knitting; a younger woman in the upstairs pink bedroom, who often rocked in a rocking chair, crying, I had learned, about her son who had died a long, long time ago. There were others, too. I no longer got the nauseous feelings, the unpleasant tingling in my leg, when I felt the presence of the spirits in our house. I was used to them. They were part of my house.
As I entered the kitchen, I was surprised to see Lady Azura sitting at the kitchen table, gloomily stirring her tea and staring into space. She was not one to get up early. We rarely saw her up and around before eleven a.m. And when we did, she was always fully dressed and made-up. Today she sat wrapped in a deep mauve dressing gown trimmed with white lace. Her dyed-mahogany hair was hidden in a turban. Andâshocker of shockersâshe wore no makeup.