Kissing Midnight (18 page)

If I want her to listen to me, I’m going to need more information. I have to talk to Charlotte, and I need some concrete proof.

Mustering all my concentration, I manage to keep my hand solid long enough to tear the picture from the newspaper, leaving a long jagged scar down the center of the page. Then, holding it as carefully as I can, I hurry up the stairs and towards the front door of the library. I step through the door, as always—and realize I’ve left the picture behind.

It can’t go through the door, of course.

Damn it!

I slip back through the door and find the picture lying on the floor. I spend ten more minutes trying to grasp it again, feeling the paper slip through my fingers over and over. It’s like trying to grasp water—or to grasp something solid
with
water, to be more accurate. I swear a lot, and kick the door (which is totally unsatisfying, because my foot goes right through) then finally get down on all fours and use my finger tips to push the damn thing under the door. Just when I’ve gotten it good and wedged under and I think I can go through the door to the other side and tug it through (maybe), I hear the sound of a key in the lock and the damn door opens right through me and the scrap of paper gets caught by a gust of wind and goes skittering down the sidewalk.

I dodge around the librarian as she comes through the door and dart after it, chasing the scrap as it cartwheels down the path.

And that’s how I spend the next hour, sometimes catching it, sometimes chasing it like a kitten—like a kitten who swears a lot, a really angry kitten. I’m getting tired, but I can’t rest because I have to keep an eye on the picture. A fresh gust of wind grabs it, sending it spinning in the other direction, right toward the clock tower.

I hesitate. I can’t help it. And that split second is all it takes for the wind to snatch the picture out of my reach. “No!” I yell and leap to catch it, but there’s no way. The harsh December wind drags it up and out of sight in seconds.

I freak out. I call myself every name in the book. I kick at the snow and throw a fit like a two-year-old. That was the only clue I had! How am I going to make Saintly believe me now? God damn my stupid hands! Why can’t I ever hold on to anything that matters?

For a long time, I just stand there, staring up at the gray sky, wishing to vanish the way an insomniac wishes for sleep.

But I stay put.

So I decide to search for Charlotte. She may not be able to tell me what’s going on directly, but maybe she can still confirm my suspicions about Deveraux Renard. Maybe she could answer my yes-or-no questions with nods or…okay, I don’t know what, but do something to give me a clue. At the very least, I should tell her I found her picture, let her know that I know she disappeared. Charlotte may not be the friendliest person, but she is trying to warn Saintly, and that puts us on the same side. She deserves to know someone cares what happened to her all those years ago.

But even from my lookout on the arch, I can’t see any sign of her anywhere. And, for all I know, she’s nowhere to be seen. Charlotte isn’t bound to campus the way I am. Maybe she followed Saintly and Deveraux to wherever they went. Maybe she’s trying to warn Saintly right now.

I’m about to climb down from the arch again when something catches my eye. It’s just a motion, something dark slipping around a corner of the arts complex, but it’s swift enough to seem out of place, just a little too quick to be human. On a hunch I lower myself off the arch and sprint across the frozen playing fields. As I round the corner of the theatre wing, I catch sight of it again and my heart begins to pound.

It’s a ghost, all right, but definitely not Charlotte. This woman is African American, with long legs that look even longer in her short denim skirt and high fringed boots. Her back is to me, so I can’t see her features, but judging by her fluffy halo of hair I’m guessing she died sometime in the ’60s or ’70s.

I trail along behind her, careful not to draw attention to myself. It feels strange, having to worry about being seen. I’ve spent so much time watching living people who can’t watch me back—so much easier than stalking ghosts who could see me if they looked! I’m not sure why I feel the need to hide, but some instinct tells me to keep quiet. Maybe it’s the memory of Charlotte that makes me hesitate, the way her voice seemed to multiply into a ghostly chorus.

Or maybe it’ just that this woman seems like a person to be reckoned with. She walks with the confidence of a general, the fringe on her boots swinging with each leggy stride. We’re headed for what the art department euphemistically calls “the sculpture garden.” It’s really more of a sculpture graveyard, a vacant lot behind the visual arts wing where they stash the students’ senior projects. In warmer weather, students come back here to work and the air is filled with plaster dust and the chink of chisel on stone and the whirr of pottery wheels, but this time of year the lot is abandoned. Snow covers the half-finished sculptures like a shroud, mutating them into strange, half-recognizable shapes.

It’s enough to give a ghost the creeps.

But it also gives me plenty of places to hide. I duck behind a reclining nude, now dressed in a parka of snow.

The woman I’m following doesn’t share any of my unease about this place. She walks confidently to the center of the lot and stands there, one fist on her hip. “Charlotte Croft, where are you?”

“Here.”

I jump at the sound of Charlotte’s voice, so close I’m afraid she’ll see me. But she doesn’t. She just seems to materialize out of thin air, a few feet in front of the woman. She looks like she did before, of course—red-blonde hair in ringlets, long copper-brown dress—but the expression on her face is very different. All the haughty pride is gone. Instead, she looks nervous.

The woman frowns down at her. “Have you warned her yet?”

Charlotte tugs anxiously at the edge of her gloves. “We’ve done our best, Leticia, but you know there’s only so much we can do. The spell keeps us from saying anything to her directly, and we’ve tried every other way we can think of—showing her passages in books, speaking to her in songs on the phonograph. I’ve even appeared to her in dreams, but everything comes out garbled and she’s too afraid to make sense of it.”

“Meanwhile, she and Deveraux just get closer and closer.” Leticia snaps her gum so hard it makes Charlotte jump. I wonder what it’s like to be stuck with the same piece of gum in your mouth for eternity. “And where is she now?”

I straighten a little in my hiding place, eager to hear Charlotte’s response, but she only bows her head, ashamed. “We’ve lost her, I’m afraid. She seems to have left campus, and we don’t know where she’s gone.”

“With him? She left with him?”

Charlotte nods, her eyes on the snow at her feet.

Leticia lets out a colorful string of swears and snaps her gum rapid fire. She stamps her foot in frustration, so hard it seems strange it doesn’t leave a mark in the snow. Then she sighs, a resigned, defeated sigh. “Well, we both know what this means.”

Charlotte looks up suddenly, her eyes wide. “But there’s still time!”

Leticia shakes her head. “Just two days! It’s not enough. I’ve seen the girl with Dev, and she’s already too far gone. We can’t warn her. We gotta do her like we did the other one.”

The other one? What other one? Do what? My stomach feels like it’s wringing itself out slowly.

Charlotte’s voice is quiet. She keeps her eyes on the snow. “I don’t like it, Leticia. If we kill this one, too, how are we any different from him?”

“We are not like him!”
Snap snap snap
, the sound of the gum echoes off the stone, like a whip cracking. “We kill one or two, and only to keep him from killing how many more? Hundreds? Thousands? It’s a necessary sacrifice.”

“It’s uncivilized! There has to be some alternative!”

Leticia turns away from Charlotte, and I can see her face. She looks tired. “The alternative is she dies anyway. You know that. At least if we’re the ones to kill her, she won’t be trapped forever. At least she won’t be this.” She gestures helplessly to herself. “Or worse, caught in the castle forever.” She turns back to Charlotte. “I don’t want to do it either. Believe me, I don’t. But this is the strongest we’ve ever been. This is our only chance. We kill her and Dev is finally done. We kill her and she can go to her rest.” She looks Charlotte in the eye. “And maybe—just maybe—we can go to ours.”

That’s what does it. The expression in Charlotte’s eyes shifts, and I can see a longing there, a hope. She nods slowly. “Very well,” she says quietly. “If there is no other way.”

Leticia pulls herself up to her full height, her expression as hard as the stones that surround us. “Tell the others, then. The plan has officially changed. By midnight New Year’s Eve, Mariana Santos has to die.

Mariana Santos has to die.
The words echo off the icy stones and they echo in my mind, too. The world swirls around me. I don’t know why, but they’re going to kill her, the only living being who cares I exist, the only one who sees me, and they’re going to kill her. Instinctively I reach for the stone sculpture to steady myself, but my hand passes through it. I sink down to my knees in the snow.

Long minutes pass before I can force myself to stand again. When I do, I see the other two ghosts have gone. I stand in the shadows, letting the snow blow around and through me in little circular eddies, listening to my thoughts as they go around and around, too, in the same panicky questions. What should I do? I have no allies now. Charlotte isn’t on my side. The only good news is that Saintly is gone, and Charlotte and the others don’t seem to know where.

The bad news is that I don’t know where she is, either.

I’m not a problem-solver. I’m not even a problem-facer. If I were, I would have turned around and faced my own problems back when I was a student here, instead of doing what I did. There’s an icicle dripping off the roof beside me, adding its own cold sculpture to the graveyard. The
drip drip drip
reminds me of the ticking of a giant clock. How can someone else’s life depend on me when I couldn’t even handle my own?

Keeping people alive is not what I do best.

But I have to try. I don’t know why Charlotte and the others have turned on Saintly, but they have, and I can’t let her die.

But God, I’m so tired. Being dead, it seems to me, is like being a convalescent. I’ve spent twenty years trying to recover from my own death, and I’m still not strong.

But I can’t disappear just yet. I decide to try to find Saintly’s room. Maybe I’ll find some clue as to where she went, come up with some way to contact her and tell her not to come back. Or, at the very least, I can camp out in her room so I’ll be there when she does.

I’ll admit, the thought of being in Saintly’s room makes me feel flushed. It has been a while since I’ve been in a beautiful girl’s room. I mean, I could, technically, just let myself into people’s rooms all the time and they wouldn’t know any different, but I decided early on that, no matter how bored and lonely I got, I wasn’t going to act like a perv. When you aren’t physical, you pretty much have to set up boundaries for yourself and decide what stuff you will and won’t do, just to stay
you
, if you know what I mean, and I guess for me that means acting as alive as possible and playing by the rules as much as I can. Which means I’ve pretty much kept to the common areas and respected people’s privacy.

But this is a special set of circumstances, and if I have to stick my head through every door in Wallace Hall until I find Saintly’s, so be it.

But, as it turns out, I don’t have to. Saintly’s dorm room is only on the second floor and it’s clearly marked: There are paper comedy and tragedy masks taped to the door with the smiling one labeled “Delia” and the frowning one labeled “Mariana.” The rest of the door is decorated, too, with a postcard from Mexico and a few newspaper clippings of smiling actors in costume.

But what I’m interested in is the picture of Saintly. It looks like it was taken a while ago. She’s standing beside a boy with a thick, dark shag of hair and an infectious smile, and she’s smiling, too. I haven’t seen her smile much, and it transforms her. Beautiful though Saintly is when she’s serious, she is stunning when she smiles. I wish I could take the picture with me somehow, but I think we’ve seen how awful I am at carrying pictures, so instead I close my eyes and take a step through the door, letting the photo pass straight through my head, as if that will somehow imprint the memory of that smile in my mind. I wish I would find Saintly on the other side of the door, smiling just like that.

Instead, I find the blond girl I saw with her in the student union. This must be Delia, the roommate, I guess. She’s sitting at her desk, twisting one of her pigtails thoughtfully around her finger as she writes something in a pink notebook. At a glance I can tell it’s not schoolwork: the margins are filled with doodles, her writing loopy and little-girlish, the i’s dotted with little circles. I lean over her shoulder to read it, so close that our faces are almost touching.

It’s clearly her diary, but most of it’s not that exciting. She’s worried about an exam she thinks she failed, debating which costume to wear to the New Year’s ball, rehashing an argument she had with her mom about returning a Christmas gift. I’m about to give up and try searching the rest of the room for clues when Delia writes
“But that’s not the reason I’m upset. Dev and Saint went away together.”

“I know,” I say. “But where? And when are they coming back?”

Delia pauses to take a sip of her coffee and I bounce impatiently on my toes behind her. Then she writes,
“I was pretty shocked when she called to tell me she was going. Obviously, no one can blame her for falling for Dev, but I just didn’t think they were that serious. Her mother would shit a cow! Saintly sleeping with a guy! She held off so long, I was starting to think she was a lesbian.”

A little prickle of excitement moves through me, but I squash it. Obviously Saintly isn’t a lesbian. Didn’t Delia just say Saintly was planning to sleep with Deveraux? And besides, what would it even matter if she were queer? It’s not like I could ask her out…