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I glanced at her, then back at the photo. “That’s really funny.” I made myself look her in the eyes, my best fake smile plastered into place. “You almost had me. Ha-ha. Joke on the new guy. That’s really good. Now if you’re finished, I have to go to class.” Preferably before everyone starts staring again.
“Can I come?” she asked all chipper, like she hadn’t just pulled the world’s lamest joke on me. Pretending to be a dead girl—that was seriously messed up. And stupid.
I’m such a moron.
“No, it’s school. You go to your class; I’ll go to mine.” I knew I should feel flattered that a hot girl wanted anything to do with me, but there’s a saying about what you don’t do with crazy people.
Ever.
She jumped in front of me. “Listen, Jeff.” She said my name like it was a bad word. “You don’t get it. I’m dead. Ask anyone. I’ve been stuck for a year and a half and no one has been able to see or hear me except you.”
“Look, your little trick worked, Kim. Isn’t that—”
“Kimberlee.”
“What?”
“Kimberlee. With two e’s. No one calls me Kim.”
Unbelievable. “Forget it. Just leave me alone, okay?” I stepped around her and continued walking. Maybe I could blend in with the other sweater-vests all over the place and get away. Sadly, this wasn’t my old, overcrowded public high school, and disappearing would take more work than I was used to despite the matching uniforms.
“Wait. Please?”
I didn’t.
She trotted alongside me. “What class do you have?”
“Like I’m going to tell you.”
“I’ll help you find it.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I stopped and turned to her. “Then you could get me totally lost and ditch me. A special welcome for the new guy. Just leave me alone!”
A tall brunette edged away from me like a first-grader who had just learned about boy cooties. “What a dork,” she said, loud enough for everyone within ten feet to hear her.
“Really, Jeff,” Kimberlee said, far too calmly. “You should stop yelling at me. People are going to think you’re schizo.”
I looked down at my schedule and pretended Kimberlee wasn’t there.
“You gotta go upstairs for Bleekman’s classroom.”
I gritted my teeth, and hurried up the stairs hoping I could lose her. In the hallway I slowed down and counted off room numbers.
204.
205.
206.
Damn. She was standing outside room 207.
“Clever boy. You found it all by yourself.”
There must be an elevator . . . somewhere. I let my eyes slide by her and walked into the half-full classroom, hurrying to plant myself in the last seat on the back row.
“I wouldn’t sit there if I were you. That’s Langdon’s spot,” Kimberlee said, sounding almost bored.
Ignore, ignore, ignore.
“Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I kept my head down and pulled out a notebook as more students filed in, quickly filling the remaining seats.
“Dude. If you’re not out of my desk by the time I count to two, I personally guarantee your life will end before lunch hour.”
I looked up at what appeared to be a non-green version of the Incredible Hulk.
“One. One and a half . . .”
I jumped up from the desk so fast I cracked my knee against one of the legs and had to bite off a yelp. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Didn’t know.”
“Liar!” Kimberlee yelled from across the room, where she was lounging on a windowsill.
Shut up! I glared at her and looked for another seat. The only one left that wasn’t in the front row was over by Kimberlee’s windowsill.
I sat in the front row.
The bell rang and Mr. Bleekman rose from his desk. He was a perfect caricature of every English teacher on TV: tall, painfully thin, with a comb-over sprayed crispy, and thick glasses. Finally, some normalcy. He stood in front of my desk and studied my name tag. “Mr. Clayson, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Bleekman and Kimberlee corrected in stereo.
I refused to even look at her. “Yes, sir,” I repeated.
“Take notes for now, but stay after and I’ll give you the material you’ll need to catch up.”
I nodded as Kimberlee walked over and plunked herself down on top of my notebook. “I’ve taken this class already. I’ll help you.”
I raised my hand.
“Yes, Mr. Clayson?”
“Could you please tell Kim to get off my desk, sir?”
“Excuse me?” Bleekman asked, looking right past Kimberlee and staring at me like I’d sprouted an extra head.
I glanced at Kimberlee for just a second. Something was seriously wrong. There was no way this teacher was part of the joke. “Oh, shit,” I said, the words slipping out before my brain caught up enough to stop me.
Bleekman’s eyes widened. “Mr. Clayson. I will let you off with a warning because this is your first day. But in the future, any use of profanity at Whitestone Academy will result in detention. Do you understand?”
I gaped at Kimberlee, unwilling to believe she could possibly be telling the truth.
“I told you,” she said, studying her fake nails. “No one can see or hear me but you.” Her eyes flicked to Mr. Bleekman. “You’d better say ‘yes, sir,’ before Bleeker has a coronary.”
“Yes, sir,” I said quickly, snapping my gaze back to the front of the room.
Bleekman stared at me for a few seconds as the rest of the class snickered. He finally looked away and started droning on about Victor Hugo.
I waited a few minutes for everyone to turn their attention away from me. “You’re not joking anymore, are you?” I hissed at Kimberlee through clenched teeth.
“Never was,” she said at full volume.
No one even glanced in our direction.
“What do I have to do to get you to stop acting like the freak you are?” She paused. “You want me to walk through a wall?”
I glared at her but refused to snap at the bait. This can’t be real.
She slid off my desk. “No, I mean it. If I walk through that wall, will you believe I’m dead?”
I rolled my eyes. But I nodded.
She stuck her nose in the air and lifted an eyebrow. Her eyes never left me as she walked to the wall and, without slowing, slid right through it.
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“I’M HOME,” I YELLED. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been so happy to see my own house. After Bleekman’s class—and seeing Kimberlee walk through the wall—my head basically exploded. I still couldn’t digest what I’d seen, or figure out how it could be real. I didn’t believe in ghosts! Somehow, for some reason, I was hallucinating; Kimberlee was a figment of my imagination—and that meant ignoring her for the rest of the day.
Easier said than done. She followed me everywhere and got louder and louder. By the time I dropped my schedule card full of signatures in the basket at the front office I had a pounding headache and a ghostly companion.
“Jeff, there you are.” My mom sniffed as she came into the room. Her eyes were red and wet.
“What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” She looked at me cluelessly. “Oh, the tears?” She laughed. “I’m just rehearsing, sweetie. I have a funeral scene tomorrow.”
My mom’s an actress. Always has been. Community theaters and stuff. But part of moving to California was so she could pursue an acting career for real, in Hollywood. And apparently she’s good because even without an agent or anything, she went out the first day and came home with a walk-on part in CBS’s latest cop thriller. Now she’s got a couple gigs lined up, dramedies or something. It’s all very surreal.
I reached into the fridge and pulled out a Coke. “That’s great, Mom,” I said absently. “What show’s it for?”
She shook her finger at me and clicked her tongue. “Ah, ah, ah. If I told you that you’d know someone was dying next season.” She reached her hand out and ruffled my hair. “Trade secret.”
My mom’s only thirty-three. I was thirteen when I first realized that I was born while she was in high school. She always wanted to be an actress; she’d been the lead in every high-school play and musical until the year she was pregnant with me. Somehow, her theater director just couldn’t handle an eight-months-pregnant Ado Annie belting “I Cain’t Say No.” Go figure.
The nice thing about having me when she was so young is that now she’s just the right age to start a new career in Hollywood as a “mature woman.” Which means she plays twenty-five-year-olds.
She’s married to my dad. Like, my biological dad. They got married the night they graduated high school; I was one. My dad is supersmart and he always told my mom he’d make up for getting her life off track. So when he was offered a small ownership stake in a startup venture—social networking on the internet; everyone said it would never last, right—he took it and ran with it. The company survived the “Dot Bomb,” but for a while there Dad was drawing stock more often than a paycheck. Fortunately, it was a risk that paid off. After twelve years of accumulating ownership, he cashed out, bought us three new BMWs for Christmas, sold our house in Phoenix, and moved us to Santa Monica so Mom could chase her dream.
And now, instead of an inner-city school with a 62 percent graduation rate, I get to go to a spoiled-brat private school that feeds more or less straight into Yale. Lucky me.
I really should be grateful—the lockers stay closed at Whitestone and I suspect their PE equipment is less than fifty years old, but despite the advantages, I missed my friends. Even after just a week, it was obvious I wasn’t cut out for the long-distance friendship thing. I figured I’d make new friends, but, well, these Whitestone kids weren’t really my type.
“So how was your first day?”
Ummmm. “It was fine.”
“Fine? Is that all?”
I took a breath and smiled. “I think it’s going to be a good school for me,” I lied. Well, sort of lied. It really was a great school, academics-wise. Apparently not so good if you want to keep your sanity intact.
“I hope so,” she said, putting on her special-moment face. “You deserve to go to a great college. You have so much potential.”
“Thanks, Mom.” I don’t know why she has to be so mushy about stuff sometimes. Maybe it’s an actress thing. Still, I wasn’t above taking advantage of her good mood.
I wasn’t sure quite how to start—maybe there wasn’t a good way—so I just dived right in. “Hey, I was thinking . . .” I paused. “Is there any history of . . . craziness in our family?”
She looked at me with one eyebrow cocked, a smirk ticking at the corner of her mouth. “You mean before you at this moment?”
“I’m serious,” I said. She had no idea just how serious I was. “Do I have any crazy old uncles or anything? Murderers, public nudity”—I hesitated—“schizos?”
Mom thought about it for a second. “Well, my granddad had dementia pretty bad for the last two years before he died. And I think your dad’s uncle Fred—you know, the one with the yogurt-carton collection?—I’m pretty sure he doesn’t play with a full deck. Why the sudden interest?”
“Uh . . . we had a discussion about mental health in . . .” Oh, great. I wasn’t in any classes that this particular subject fit into. “Lit-er-a-ture,” I finished, dragging the word out syllable by syllable.
“Literature?”
“Yeah, you know, Les Mis.” Whatever that meant. “I’m gonna go play some games,” I said, making my escape before Mom could ask any more probing questions.
I went upstairs to my sitting room—no lie, I have a sitting room—and turned on the TV, lying back on my humongous beanbag. This whole Kimberlee thing had to be my imagination. Stress of the first day in a new school and all that. Or maybe I’d wake up tomorrow and realize this was just a long, very vivid dream and that I was about to start my real first day of school.
“Okay, don’t freak, but we seriously need to talk.”
I sprang to my feet and spun to find Kimberlee standing right in the middle of my room.
“Listen, I know you’re wigging out, but the fact is, I have no one else to turn to, so I’m not going away.”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten before opening them and turning my head. There she was, looking far too real to be a figment of my imagination.
“You’re not real and you need to leave me alone,” I said slowly, carefully.
She rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m trying to make nice here, and trust me, I understand where you’re coming from. You know how long it took me to convince myself I was real? Ages.”
You’d think that if my head was going to make someone up it would give me someone nice. I was feeling officially betrayed. “Not real, not real, not real,” I whispered under my breath.
“This’ll be a really long year if you’re going to walk around muttering that all the time. I am real; it’s just that no one else can see me.”
“How convenient!” I laughed. “Give me one logical reason for that.” Why am I still talking to it? Her. No, me. I’m talking to myself; it is not real.
