Hereafter Page 3

  Terror raced through me. I could have run into him. If that had happened, I would have either felt him, skin against glorious skin, or I would have felt nothing but the numbing, impossible barrier. Either way, he surely would have realized something was wrong and do exactly what he should: get away from me.

  “So,” he began, casually enough.

  “So,” I responded, my eyes going to my bare feet. I felt ashamed, terrified, excited.

  “I’m Joshua.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought so.”

  The humor in his voice made me look up, finally meeting his eyes. As I suspected, his eyes were very dark, but not brown. They were a strange, deep blue—an almost midnight sky color. I was certain I’d never seen eyes that color before, and they had a disconcerting effect on me. I felt even more flustered just staring into them.

  I was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of my own appearance: the tangles in my hair; my deathly pale skin; my hopelessly inappropriate dress with its strapless neckline, tight bodice, and filmy skirt. I probably looked as if I was headed to some sort of dead girls’ beauty pageant. For the first time in a very long time, I wished I had access to a mirror, whatever good it would do someone who couldn’t cast a reflection or change clothes.

  He didn’t seem to notice my discomfort, however. Instead, he looked right into my eyes and grinned at me, although his expression had lost some of its amusement. He looked more speculative now, as if he knew there were mysteries between us. Questions.

  “So,” he started again.

  “You already said that.”

  “Yeah, I did.” He laughed lightly and looked down at his shoes, absentmindedly running one hand through his hair and then leaving it on the back of his neck.

  There went my little ache again, flowing out of my core like a pulse. That absentminded gesture—the guileless sweep of a hand through his hair—was utterly endearing. He looked so vibrant, so alive, that the words spilled right out of me.

  “You want to know what happened, don’t you?”

  I recoiled from my own words, blinking like an idiot. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Yeah, I do. I really do.” He dropped the hand from his neck and stared at me more intently, the playfulness entirely gone from his eyes.

  Crap.

  “Well, that’s a matter of opinion, Josh,” I said aloud.

  “Joshua. Joshua Mayhew,” he corrected instantly. “But my name’s not really important right now.”

  Deflect. I had to deflect, and fast, so I blurted out the first question that came to mind.

  “Why am I supposed to call you Joshua if everyone else calls you Josh?”

  “You’re not everyone,” he said bluntly. “Anyway . . .”

  He knew I was stalling and meant to lead me back to the original trail of conversation, that much was clear. What was less clear was whether or not he meant any flattery by his words.

  “Um . . . ,” I floundered, and did something I hadn’t done since my death: I fidgeted. I grabbed at my skirt and began to twist it. I had no idea where to go from here.

  Neither did he, it seemed. He watched me worry at my skirt and then he stared at my face until I eventually met his gaze.

  “What’s your name?” His question was soft, gentle. He wasn’t trying to lead me back to the conversation. He really wanted to know.

  “Amelia.”

  “What’s your last name, Amelia?” His voice wrapped so well around my name, I flustered out yet another stupid answer.

  “I don’t know my last name.” Or, at least, I’d never felt brave enough to try and find it in the graveyard.

  He blinked, taken aback.

  “Huh. Where do you live?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  Disarmed. I was completely disarmed. That was the only reasonable explanation for my stupidity.

  “O-kay.” The long O again. He wasn’t as playful with the sound this time.

  He stared down at his canvas sneakers, frowning and digging the toe of one shoe into the grass. He shoved his hands back into his pockets and rolled his shoulders forward, a reflexive gesture that made him look boyish and sweet. After a few more silent moments, he looked back up at me.

  “You know, we have a lot to talk about.” His eyes, serious and urgent, met mine. My little ache curled out even farther in my chest as he continued. “I would have come and found you sooner, but they wouldn’t let me out of the hospital. Apparently my heart may have . . . Well, I may have . . . died, a little. In the water.”

  He tilted his head to one side, clearly gauging my reaction. I shivered, but I didn’t look away. I probably didn’t look too surprised by his choice of words, either. After all, I was there when it happened. My face obviously answered some unasked question of his, because he nodded again.

  “So,” he went on, “after I got out of the hospital, I started asking around about you. But nobody saw you that night. Not my family, not my friends, not even the paramedics. Not only did nobody see you on the shore, but nobody saw you in the water with me. Which I find weird. Because you were in the water with me, weren’t you?”

  I bit my lower lip and nodded slightly.

  “I knew I didn’t imagine you. Well, maybe when I was, you know, dead.” He said the word as if he was afraid of it. “But not after. Not when I swam to the surface or when I made it out of the water.”

  Still biting my lip, I shook my head. No. You didn’t imagine me. You saw me.

  “I practically had to steal my dad’s car to get out of the house today, and I came right here—to the scene of the crime. And here you are.”

  “Yes,” I whispered, totally lost for a clever response. “Here I am.”

  “So,” he whispered back, “we have a lot to talk about.”

  “You already said that.”

  He laughed, and the sound surprised us both. Then he nodded decisively.

  “Well, here’s how I see it, Amelia. We don’t have to talk now. I have to get the car back to my dad soon anyway, since I’ve spent the whole morning stalking you. Besides, this doesn’t seem like a conversation you want to have, especially in this place. Can’t say that I blame you.” He glanced quickly at the hole in the railing, shuddered, and then looked back into my eyes. “So, tomorrow I’m going to be at Robber’s Cave Park. Do you know where that is?”

  Stunningly, impossibly, I nodded yes.

  I knew the park. I suddenly knew it as well as I knew my first name, and I knew the direction of the park from where I stood now. I knew it from memory, a genuine one that hadn’t flashed into and out of my mind but just . . . was.

  What was this boy doing to me?

  “Okay, good. I’m going to sit at the emptiest park bench I can find. I’m going to be there at noon, because, unfortunately, I’m healthy enough to go back to school tomorrow. I think I can talk my parents into letting me skip fifth period—play the sympathy card with them—but noon’s the earliest I can get there. So I’m going to go to the park. And I’m going to wait for you.”

  “And if I don’t show?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll respect your privacy. Or I’ll pursue you all over the earth like I’ve been trying to do since they let me out of the hospital. Probably the latter.”

  I should have been afraid. I should have run away again, hid until the years passed and Joshua became an old man and the fog wrapped around my dead brain again.

  Instead, I smiled.

  He gave me a slight nod, grinned, and walked past me back to his car.

  “Till tomorrow,” he called out with one small, backward glance.

  I watched him walk away, once more unsure of everything. But when he opened his car door, my incapacitating ache curled again. My impulses, it seemed, were still doing unfamiliar things to me, because the ache seemed to have incapacitated everything but my big mouth.

  “Joshua?” I called out, a slight hitch in my voice.

  “Yeah?” He spun around immediately. I could swear he look
ed expectant, maybe even eager.

  “What do I look like to you?”

  He tilted his head to the side, frowning.

  “What do I look like to you?” I repeatedly urgently, afraid that if I didn’t talk fast enough, I would have time to realize how absolutely, mind-bogglingly stupid I sounded.

  Joshua smiled. He answered me, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him.

  “Beautiful. Too beautiful for people not to have noticed you the other night.”

  “Oh.” The little sound was all I could manage.

  He stood up straight then and cleared his throat. “So . . . um . . . I’m going to leave before I say anything else that makes me sound like an idiot. Tomorrow?”

  I nodded, stunned. “Tomorrow.”

  Joshua, too, nodded. Then he got into his car and reversed it back off the bridge, giving wide berth to the gap in the railing. With one quick, final spin, the car pulled away, disappearing from sight around a curve.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Chapter

  Five

  Hours can pass like years when you wait impatiently for something, especially something you crave and dread in equal measure.

  What I craved, in a manner so intensely I nearly ached from it, was to see Joshua’s face and to hear his voice. Wandering and dreaming of him, I’d never imagined Joshua would be able to see me and talk to me again, much less that he would want to. I hadn’t anticipated how much I would want it too. How much my longing to be seen, and specifically by him, would intensify each time I was.

  But seeing him again meant telling him the truth.

  Sitting on the riverbank after Joshua left, I felt certain I wouldn’t be able to lie to him the next day. Not if my completely ridiculous behavior on the bridge proved any indication of my ability to deceive him. If I saw him in the park, and we spoke, I would undoubtedly tell him everything: what I’d seen under the water, and what I really was. Which, in turn, would undoubtedly drive him away from me.

  So even if I went to the park, I probably wouldn’t see him again afterward. Presuming this, I had to ask myself what would hurt worse: the numb loneliness of invisibility or the aching loneliness of an outright rejection from the living world? I knew the awful boundaries and depths of the former, but I had no idea how excruciating the latter could, and likely would, be.

  Following this line of reasoning, I came to a decision about my course of action the next day. I wouldn’t go. I would hide. I would protect my dead heart from anything worse than numbness.

  And I would probably feel miserable about it for years. I lay my arms across my knees in a posture of defeat.

  That’s when something made my head jerk upward and then made me jump up into a crouch on the grass. At first I couldn’t be sure what made me react this way. When I tried to glean some clue from my surroundings, I noticed that the sun had nearly set while I sat feeling sorry for myself. It threw a fiery glow across the water and cast deep shadows into the woods.

  Yet it wasn’t the dying sunlight that had frightened me. It was instead the thing that contrasted so sharply with the burning light of the sunset: a bitterly cold wind that now lashed across my bare legs and through my hair.

  I’d been experiencing so many unexpected sensations lately that perhaps I shouldn’t have been so alarmed by the wind. But I was.

  Late summer was not the season for a freezing wind. Worse, nothing around me had ruffled in the wind—not the tall grass on the bank or the needles of the nearby pines. The wind came from the wrong direction, too. It didn’t blow off the water behind me or down the wide alley that the river made through the woods. It came directly from the shadowed tree line in front of me.

  Realizing all of this, I actually felt the hairs on my arms stand on end. I couldn’t help but raise my forearm to stare at the goose bumps there, marveling at the revival of my long-dead fight-or-flight response.

  Without warning, the wind became a gale, whipping my hair across my face and obscuring my vision. I stumbled backward, knocked off balance by its force. It howled out from the trees, and my hands flew up to protect my ears from the sound. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the wind stopped. The bank became deathly still.

  My hands still covered my ears, and I’d unknowingly squeezed my eyes tightly shut. I’d curled almost completely over, clutching my bent knees together with my elbows.

  “Hello, Amelia.”

  A male voice floated silkily out from the tree line. I remained curled over and opened only one eye, refusing to believe I could actually hear someone speaking directly to me. Someone other than Joshua.

  “Do you hear me, Amelia?”

  I opened the other eye and straightened myself slowly, still keeping my hands over my ears as if they afforded me some protection from this stranger’s voice. I couldn’t seem to force my vocal chords to work. He sighed impatiently, obviously waiting for me to provide him with an answer.

  “Really, Amelia, you’re being terribly rude.”

  “E-excuse me?” I managed to stammer.

  The owner of the voice clicked his tongue in admonishment. “Still rude.”

  His tone broke through the terrified frost that had begun to creep over my skin. I felt myself flush with the warmth of anger, as though I were able to blush from fury.

  “You can see me, but I can’t see you. Don’t you find that a little rude?” I demanded.

  He laughed, a smooth sound that didn’t do much to dispel the skin-crawling feeling. “Oh, I suppose I could remedy that problem, if you wish.”

  The tree branches directly in front of me stirred as something crept out from behind them. I could tell that, whoever the speaker was, he moved deliberately, possibly to put me at ease and keep me from bolting from this place. It wasn’t a very effective tactic, because I could feel the twitch of impending flight in my muscles.

  Before I made the final decision to run, however, the owner of the voice stepped out of the gloom of the woods and into what little sunlight still filled the bank.

  I knew instantly that he wasn’t a living being, although at first I wasn’t sure why. As I stared openmouthed at him—another action he would likely find rude—I noted all the details of his appearance. He looked about my age, or maybe just a few years older, but he wore strange, wild clothing: an unbuttoned black shirt, its sleeves rolled up to reveal metal cuffs on both his wrists; impossibly tight jeans slung low on his hips; and several necklaces bunched together on his bare chest. Beneath the ashy blond hair that fell in messy curls to his shoulders, he looked terribly pale. As if someone had scrubbed all the color from his face.

  Despite his pallor, I supposed you might call him handsome. Sexy, even.

  The contrast of his skin against the darkness, however, gave away his otherworldliness. His skin was too bright, too unaffected by the dying sunlight. It had its own, nearly imperceptible glow in the dark, reflecting neither sunlight nor moonlight but illuminated by his very nature. Like a black-and-white photograph that had been given a slight sheen and then centered in front of the darkened scenery. Out of place and otherworldly, just like me.

  “What are you?” I breathed.

  “You know exactly what I am. I am what you are. The better question, Amelia, is who am I?” He halted his approach, folded his arms over his bare chest, and smirked at me.

  So I was right. He was a ghost. A ghost of whom I wasn’t growing any fonder. I threw back my shoulders and raised my head high.

  “I don’t think I’m really interested, but thanks anyway.”

  “Funny girl. Of course you’re interested.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I’m the first of our kind you’ve ever seen.”

  I stifled a gasp. How could he know that?

  I thought briefly of retorting that it didn’t matter anyway, because he certainly wasn’t the first pe
rson to see me. Yet some protective instinct told me not to mention Joshua. To keep the very thought of Joshua out of my head, if possible.

  The other ghost was too sharp—he noticed my pause and narrowed his eyes.

  “I can understand your shock, Amelia. I’ve been watching you for years, keeping my distance. You’ve never seen me, and I’ve never noticed you encounter any of our kind. Unless you’ve been sneaking around behind my back.” He smiled, showing off a slightly chipped front tooth. The effect would have been charming were he not so creepy.

  “But . . . how do you know my name?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, “you spent a lot of time screaming it at the living, didn’t you?”

  I felt myself wretch.

  This ghost, this dead thing, had been watching me—for years? If so, then all of my private moments had been exposed to him. Shared with him.

  I came to another, quick conclusion: if he’d been watching me, then he’d let me wander, utterly lost and alone, for God knows how long. He’d left me without a guide or a friend, amusing himself with my humiliation and loneliness. How cruel did someone have to be to silently watch another’s suffering for so long?

  Anger sparked within me, glowing like a small coal in my core. I found myself suddenly grateful for the implication that this ghost apparently hadn’t seen Joshua and me together.

  “Why haven’t I ever seen you?” I tried to speak evenly, carefully choosing my words to reveal as little as possible.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve always been too lost, too blind, to know I was there, sometimes right at your side. Except for those odd times when you disappeared all at once and I had to hunt for you afterward.”

  I exhaled quietly in relief. He couldn’t follow me into my nightmares. Strange that I would now appreciate the solitude they afforded me. Luckily, he didn’t notice my change in expression but instead continued to explain himself.

  “You have to know, Amelia, it was quite the momentary surprise to see you turn around tonight. You see, the wind you just felt is . . . well, a kind of supernatural announcement of my entrance. My calling card perhaps.” He smiled, almost proudly. “You’ve always been too unaware to feel the wind, just as you’ve never seen me before. But now you do.”