Through to You (3 page)

A green light glows behind the utility pole.

In it stands a girl.

A girl I can see
through.

“Cam!”

Her skin, clothing, and hair are transparent and tinted green in the strange light. Through her body, I watch leaves on the bushes rustle in the wind.

I’ve lost my mind.

My stomach feels like it’s digesting a cannonball, but I raise my gaze to her face, waiting for it to shape-shift into something demonic and horrifying, because I’ve seen more than enough horror movies to know this is what I should expect. She stays girl-shaped, for now, but she has an odd expression. There are streaks down her face—as if she’s been crying.

This is definitely
not
Viv. I don’t know who this is.

I panic, trying to decide what to do. The most obvious thing would be to run.... My left leg aches with the urge to pound pavement, but my right one disagrees. Injury always wins. For the moment, though, neither fight nor flight seems necessary.

She stands still, staring at me.

“Cam?”

I’m not sure how to respond to an apparition that knows my name, so I just nod.

She clasps her hands together and wipes her face. “Oh my God.”

And then it hits me—I’m hallucinating. I’ve finally cracked. I reach for the phone in my pocket, ready to call Dr. Summers, but before I can think of how I’ll explain this, the girl says something else that shocks me.

“Are—are you a ghost?”

I hesitate, and look her up and down. She’s still transparent, still slightly green, but her clothes seem normal enough. She’s got on boots and a short skirt with a jean jacket. Her hair falls straight around her shoulders. For good measure, I inspect my very opaque arm. Am
I
a ghost?

“Are
you
?” I say.

My hallucination bites her lip.

Why didn’t I hallucinate Viv?

And then a new thought occurs to me: That car that drove by—maybe it didn’t swerve in time. Could it have hit me? Am I dead? Did I get my wish after all?

And if I’m dead, where’s Viv?

The wind whips my hair, slicing through the fabric of my shirt. I must be hallucinating. I’m too goddamn cold to be dead. I stamp my foot and shove my hands in my pockets. She just stands there, wiping at her face, not speaking.

“I
said
, are
you
a ghost?”

The girl’s eyebrows knit together, which is disarming because she stands between me and the school, and I can see the art classroom window through her forehead.

Her lip quivers. She reaches into her pocket and holds something out to me. I take a step closer, think better of it—in case she
isn’t
part of my brain—and squint. There’s a metallic green rectangle in her palm. On the front, in block letters, it’s engraved—
C.P.

A ghost is holding the lighter I threw away this morning.

Holy shit.

“Cam—”

“Where did you get that?” I snap. “How do you even know my name?”

Her face crumples, and she covers her eyes with her hands.

I run. I don’t even consider my old injury until I’m halfway down the street. All I can think is
go-go-GO, get away
—but can you even run from your own brain? Pain shoots through every bone in my right leg, and my muscles buckle to a stop. I clench my jaw so tightly the tendons in my neck compete in agony with my leg. I look back, terrified I’ll see some ghost-girl vision coming down the road after me.

But I’m alone.

TWO MONTHS, ONE DAY
.

Halfway through my shift at Smith’s grocery store Saturday, I give in and let myself think. Sleeping didn’t make the memory of what I saw go away, and herding shopping carts is a shitty distraction for my brain. Every time I turn around, I half expect to see the girl—hear her voice. Maybe I was mistaken and she’s a normal human being. Ghosts don’t wear jean jackets. You’d hardly think that’s what she was … except for the whole transparent green thing. I try to stay focused on the shoppers, the parking lot, but my mind keeps leaping from the rows of plastic carts to what did or didn’t happen on the corner last night.

Maybe none of it was real. It might have been a dream, except I’m walking with a limp today because my right leg aches—like I actually ran from something.

Or am I imagining the pain, too?

I wasn’t prepared for the two-month anniversary, that’s all. I try to forget there will be more anniversaries—three, four, five, six months, a year—one thing at a time. Dr. Summers says stress does weird things to people. She’ll never leave me alone if she thinks I see ghosts and hear voices.

I could call Dad.

The thought catches me so off guard, I’m almost hit by a cart a lady shoves in my direction. As if he and I could even have a normal conversation.

I snake my earbuds up the collar of my jacket and crank the volume. No lyrics, just synth, drum, and bass. Everyone entering and exiting the grocery store walks in time to the drumming in my ears. No, I won’t call. There’s nothing to tell. I had another messed-up dream about the corner, like I have ever since Viv died, that’s all. I’m not buckling now. I limp out to the farthest parking spaces, retrieve a cart marooned on a curb, and crash it into another basket.

I wouldn’t call him even if the girl I saw
was
a ghost.

When I clock out of work, I don’t head right home. I wander Fayetteville without any real destination, except I stay far from the corner and the school. My calf muscle is still sore, but walking will stretch it out. I go down First Avenue from the grocery store, past all the fast-food places and a couple of strip malls. Our local grease pit, Fast Break, reeks of chili fries even from the street. They’re playing
Casablanca
at the Chez Artiste—the first place Viv and I kissed. She got a job there one summer because it was close to Smith’s Grocery. She’d sneak me into the projection room when I got off work and we’d stuff ourselves with popcorn, making up dialogue for the foreign films instead of reading the subtitles. She used to stroke the nape of my neck during the credits to make me shiver, and I’d trace kisses over the arch of her brow just to hear her gasp.

Eventually I find myself heading away from the bright restaurants and shops, following the road up the highest hill around until the pavement runs out. The water tower stands there, sentinel over town. Its massive gray cylinder isn’t a destination in itself, though there’s plenty of colorful graffiti around the base proclaiming who’s been here and when. The dirt lot just beneath it is the real draw. If you drive up here at sunset, the sky is spectacular—not that anyone spends that much time actually admiring the view. Viv and I came our fair share in her little blue car. It’s one place no one bothered us because they had better things to do.

I hang back when I reach the edge of the lot. Saturday night it gets pretty full. Music pulses into the darkness from several vehicles. The windows are mostly rolled up, but every now and then I catch a murmur of voices, laughter … two voices for every car.

I have no right to be here.

My lungs feel like they’re filling with quicksand. Without Viv, I’m a creepy guy lurking outside other people’s cars while they make out. I can’t do this; I don’t remember how—to get out of bed, to live my life, to
breathe.
I listen to the laughter, the conversations, and imagine the things gasped too low to hear. Things I used to have, that somehow made me complete.

Something brushes my neck, and I almost fall backward down an embankment. I paw behind my head—turning around and around, looking for ghosts, hoping for Viv. But there’s nothing there. I step back up to where I’d been standing, under a low branch. The naked twigs on the end reach out to touch my neck. I break them off—tear at the branch until it twists and bends, but that part is alive and doesn’t give in.

The house is quiet. I lie with my eyes closed, but sunlight streams onto my pillow. I sit up, swing my right leg over the side of the bed, and rub the scar that runs from the top of my thigh over my knee. It still throbs. I close my eyes and try to remember if I dreamed, but if I did, it’s blissfully forgotten. I’m starting to debate which is worse: the part of my life I spend awake, the part I spend in nightmares … or maybe the part when I can’t tell the difference. I glance around at my bare walls, the pile of clothes next to my bed. My desk is still a mess, the chair still knocked over from when I came in last night. But
no one
else is here—real, imaginary, or dead.

The newspaper is spread all over the kitchen counter. The dishes are starting to pile up in the sink, and the dishwasher is beeping despite the fact that it hasn’t been run since last week. I pull it open, close it, and the beeping stops.

There’s a new note in the fruit bowl.

I drop the note back into the fruit. Lawyers always work
more
on weekends, especially single-parent lawyers. I pour some leftover coffee into a mug, stick it in the microwave for thirty seconds, and drink it black while I stare at the business section of the paper. It beats the sports section, and I haven’t looked at the full-color front page … well, since August.

My stomach growls. I open a cupboard and pull out a box of Toasty O’s and one of our mismatched bowls. Half of them are gone, as are half our plates, half our silverware, half our glasses. Dad might as well have taken them all; Mom and I hardly eat at home anymore.

I grab the kitchen phone and dial his number to tell him off.

It rings twice—

“Hello …?”

I yank the phone from my ear and hold it at arm’s length, shocked that he
answered—
what was I going to say? In the milliseconds that pass, I hear him breathing, waiting …

“Cam? Buddy, are you there?”

I squeeze the receiver—I want to choke it.

I smash the phone into the cradle, stare at it, and repeat, slamming plastic against plastic, over and over until a piece of it snaps off. I let go, and the receiver crashes to the floor and starts to beep that it’s off the hook.

I lean against the counter and look at the shattered plastic on the floor.

My leg hurts.

If Viv were here, she’d make this all go away.

Or at least she’d know what to say.

I have to go back to the corner. Tonight. If there’s any chance I’ll see her again, this is it. I
saw
a ghost, there’s no other explanation. And even though it wasn’t Viv—there are lots of dead people—she has to be there too. Because if she isn’t …

The universe just wouldn’t
do
that to me.

I STAND ON THE STREET CORNER BY THE SHRINE, AND THE STARS
are out.

Viv smiles at me from her pictures.

I walk halfway down the block and back, in both directions. No one’s here.

Nothing happens.

The air is finally starting to get that crisp, fall texture in addition to being cold. At least this time I have a jacket. I sit on a rock and blow into my hands, itching for a cigarette. There’s a pack in my pocket, but I don’t take it out. I guess I could look for ghosts anywhere, but the only time I’ve seen one, I was here. I wish I’d paid more attention to those ghost-hunting shows Viv always wanted to watch.
We should be prepared, Cam,
she’d say.
What if someday we need to catch one?
I swallow hard and try to remember any episode where people actually made contact with the supernatural, but it seems like it was all lights turning on and off and crackly audio recordings. I don’t remember any apparition showing up on camera and speaking.

But I know what I saw the other night. Why couldn’t it have been
Viv
?

I stand up, pace, and peer around each side of the utility pole.

Nothing.

I feel slightly pathetic, desperate, but somehow close to her.

And then a faint sound reaches my ears. I strain to listen. It’s soft at first, but grows more distinct, as if it’s getting closer. There’s a grating quality to it, but the tone is unmistakably human. It sounds like someone …

Crying?

In three strides I’ve made it from the sidewalk, past the shrine, and into the bushes where it’s louder, and I’m wondering if I should run again. There’s a green glow behind the pole where there wasn’t
anything
before.

Until the girl steps into view.

The light intensifies and it’s impossible not to stare when she wipes a tear from her transparent cheek.

She studies me with the same haunted look as yesterday and holds my gaze a second too long. I have to glance away. The ghost girl wraps one arm around her waist and covers her mouth with the other, muffling a noise that seems to echo, like someone sobbing far away.

“Is there anyone else there with you?”

She looks confused. “What?”