A Guide to the Other Side

To Mom and Dad— the first readers, the biggest fans, and the best parents

MY DAY CAN'T BEGIN WITHOUT
my routine.

1. Wake up and light a candle. (I prefer a simple white candle, though I've been known to shake it up during the holidays and use a pine scent.) I breathe deeply and encircle myself with positive energy.

This first step is crucial to having a good day.

2. Check my dream journal to see if I scrawled any messages in the middle of the night. (There are a couple of lines on the page sometimes, but I'm pretty good at remembering my dreams, not to brag or anything.)

3. Check in with my twin, Kristina, and ask her how her night was.

4. Ask for only good vibes to emanate from the Beyond before I blow out my candle and start my day.

  *  *  *  

A chilly Thursday morning just two days before Halloween, the worst holiday ever created, I lit seven candles and placed them around me, creating a fiery barrier. I'd been doing the same thing at night, too, for the past week. Halloween may be fun for everyone else, but for someone who can communicate with ghosts, I can assure you it's not fun at all. Halloween is the one time of year where it can be tricky to control the malevolent spirits. So many of them try to break through, even if I ensure through my protections they can't communicate with me directly. It's all because of the morons who wear those grotesque, bloody masks and costumes without realizing the very real effect it has on my life.

Those costumes summon negative energy, and I can literally feel the forces floating around, circling me like sharks around a bloody seal. Kristina hates Halloween more than I do. I can forbid those spirits from entering my vision, but she can't, so while I'm walking down the street, choosing to be oblivious, she's turning left and right, looking at one horror after the next. I don't envy her.

It was on our walk to school that she mentioned how it was getting pretty bad already.

“Everyone must have tried on their costumes last night,” she said. “You would not believe how many murderers and politicians we're passing.”

“Are they saying anything to you?” I asked. My shoes crunched up the yellow leaves that covered the sidewalk.

“No, they're mostly grunting a lot. They know not to mess with us.”

“I still don't get how they know that. Who would come rocketing over to this side to punish them?”

“I'm not entirely sure, but I know it would be bad,” she said. “I think it's better not to know.”

She was wrong. I wanted to know so bad. She always said stuff like that to me: “We're not permitted to know that yet,” “We haven't learned enough to earn that knowledge.” It was so frustrating that I couldn't grab her and shake more information out of her like I could with my little brother, Jack.

“Can you hear that?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Some man was screaming about a lost dog, but I'd been awake for only twenty minutes and didn't want to deal with ghosts yet. “Does he expect me to knock on his wife's door and deliver a message for him? He knows that's not how this works.”

“Give him a second,” Kristina said lightly.

Three seconds later a door opened two houses ahead, and a woman walked out wearing a green bathrobe and pink slippers. Her arms were clenched across her chest, and she was looking around, confused.

“Why did I come out here again?” she mumbled.

Kristina raised an eyebrow at me, and I rolled my eyes and muttered, “It's too early for this,” before I slouched my way up to the woman and said, “Excuse me, ma'am?” She turned my way and looked at me like I'd just personally caused her dog to run away.

“Yes, young man?”

“My name is Baylor Bosco, and I can communicate with people who have crossed over.” I must have repeated that exact sentence more than two thousand times by now. “Your husband wanted me to let you know that your dog is with him on the other side now, and, well, it's time to move on, Trish. The animal shelter has a small brown terrier he thinks you might like.”

I braced myself for her reaction. I might have done this more than two thousand times by now, but I was never sure how people would react. I got off easy this time, though. The woman's mouth dropped open, and her eyes filled with tears.

“How did you know that?” she asked. They always ask that too, even though I've just told them I can communicate with dead people.

“I was born with a gift,” I said, shrugging. “Oh, he also wants me to tell you that you need to change the curtains because they're hideous.”

“That is just like him to say.” She laughed so heartily that I found myself wishing everyone would react as well to weird messages like that. “Is he doing okay?”

I nodded. “Just fine.”

Then I kept on walking. Normally, I would engage with the alive person more, but her husband was still shouting nonsense in our ears and I needed him to stop. It was 7:30 a.m., and no one, dead or alive, should have permission to scream that early. After I broke the connection, the shouting stopped, as it always did after I shared a healing message. It was Kristina's job to seal the ghosts on the other side and make sure they no longer disturbed us.

It might seem harsh, but some of them just don't get it. I'm here to relay the message, and it's not up to me whether the person on the receiving end listens or not. When I first started delivering messages, before Kristina helped me tune out most spirits, I'd have these horribly persistent ones poking me over and over to deliver the same message I'd just passed along.

“They didn't believe you, you need to go back over and try again,” they'd say.

Later Kristina established a rule with the ghosts: If you're going to use Baylor to deliver a message, you've got only one shot to deliver it. They could come back with a different message, and that'd be fine, just as long as it wasn't the same one.

“He was loud,” I grunted. I hadn't slept well last night because I kept getting ruffled by some ghost children who passed through my room.

“
You
think it's loud? Try being on this side of the fence. The man was practically screaming in my ear.”

“Your nonexistent ghost ears?”

“Shut up, they hear better than yours do.”

Oh, there's one important detail to know about Kristina—she's dead.

MOST PEOPLE DON'T BELIEVE ME
when I tell them my sister's ghost accompanies me through life, but it's true. Well, I take that back. Most people don't believe me
at first
. The only reason I can see my sister in the first place is because I can talk to all dead people, so usually there's a talkative aunt or a doting grandma around who can help me deliver a persuasive message to the doubters. My sister, though, was never born. We were in the womb together, hanging out and growing cells, when one day her body fell apart.

I was born just fine, and early on I had no idea I didn't have a real, live sister. She was always beside me, talking to me and playing with me and even fighting with me. My parents thought I just had an extremely active imagination, complete with an extremely realistic imaginary friend.

When I was five years old, I mentioned something to my mom.

“Mommy,” I said, “how come you never talk to Kristina?”

“Kristina's your imaginary friend, honey,” my mom said for the hundredth time. “I can't see or speak to her.”

“But she was in your belly with me,” I said. “She told me she was. She said you cried for days after you lost her, but you didn't lose her, because she's right there.”

I pointed to my smiling twin sitting in her chair at the kitchen table, rays of sun shooting through the wide window but not quite bouncing off her curly golden hair. I didn't realize the look on my mom's face was one of horror. It simply didn't register with me that she would be stunned to find out her son's imaginary friend was no friend at all, but rather her miscarried daughter.

“Baylor,” she said slowly, “how do you know you had a twin? Did you overhear Daddy or Grandma talking about it?”

“No, Mommy!” I said, so frustrated she wasn't getting it. “She
told
me.”

“Baylor, tell her that the envelope she's missing fell between the desk and the filing cabinet,” Kristina said, giggling.

“And,” I said, “she told me to tell you that the missing envelope fell between the desk and the filing cabinet.”

My mom's face transformed from horror to confusion to panic. She left me at the table and sprinted to the home office, then returned a moment later holding an insurance document she'd apparently misplaced weeks earlier.

I saw her hands shaking violently, but I didn't know what that meant. Now that I'm older—thirteen, in fact—I see those shaky hands a lot, and I try to be as empathetic as possible when relaying messages to people from their loved ones. People can't help but feel scared when confronted with this sort of supernatural activity.

After my mom found the letter, she sobbed for an hour, then finally pulled herself together and asked my dad to come home from work. She wouldn't say why, but since my mom was pregnant with my brother, he thought something bad had happened. When he burst through the door, he found my mom a blubbering mess at the table, and he found me sitting on the kitchen floor, pushing my fire truck along the tiles while Kristina made loud siren noises next to me.

They talked for a bit, and then my dad walked over to me in the funniest way, like I was a snake that had gotten loose in the house and he was trying to catch me. He crouched down slowly in front of me and took a big gulp.

“Hey, buddy. Mommy told me about your imaginary friend,” he said. I'll never forget how his knees wavered as he talked to me, like he couldn't find his balance.

“Kristina's not my friend, she's my sister, Daddy,” I said, barely looking over. I didn't get why they were making such a big deal out of it. I didn't get why they didn't just love her like they loved me. I had never noticed until a few days before that they never tucked her in, or set a plate for her at dinner, or hung her drawings up, or even had a bed for her. I thought that was pretty mean. “She's sitting right there.”