A Guide to the Other Side (13 page)

“I bet,” he said, his lips threatening to smile.

I shook my head and glared at Kristina, who said, “Sorry! I wasn't paying attention.”

After that she and Colonel Fleetwood stood guard around my seat, making sure no other spirits could goof with me.

I stayed mostly silent for dinner, only giving short answers whenever someone asked me a question. I stole a blue crayon from Jack and kept drawing the shape of a candle flame, over and over again, until I realized I had created what sort of looked like a massive thunderstorm, the blue flames doubling as raindrops. I chuckled to myself as my food came out, and for that moment I felt pretty good about my spaghetti and meatballs.

Then I just had to ruin everything by going for the cheese.

I picked up the little jar of Parmesan cheese sitting in the middle of the table, unaware as usual that there was a memory attached to it. I was sucked into a vision of a man arguing with his wife at our same table. The vision was just a split second, but once it ended, I gasped and dropped the jar of cheese, causing it to plume all over my shirt and the table.

“I'm sorry,” I said, still breathing heavily, “I'm sorry, I'm so clumsy.”

Grandma noticed right away that something was wrong. I'd bet money that my face was as white as the ruined Parmesan.

“Baylor, why don't you get cleaned up in the bathroom,” she said helpfully.

Except the second I stood up, I realized it wasn't helpful at all. Navigating through a minefield would have been easier than navigating through all the people in the restaurant. I shot a look at Kristina, and she nodded, leading the way for me.

Kristina made sure the ghosts didn't disturb me while I was sitting with our family, but as far as they were concerned, I was fair game while walking to the bathroom.

“Finally, you're up!” a twentysomething shouted at me excitedly. “I need you to tell my mom that I didn't kill myself! It was an accident, through and through. Look at me, I'm too good-looking to have wanted to die that young.”

I glared at him, and he smirked. “What, are you a mute now? I know you can speak English, and some really bad fake Italian, too. Go tell her, she's right there.” He pointed to his right at a woman with short black hair.

I shook my head and tried to communicate with my eyes, but it didn't work.

“You can't leave me here,” he said, his voice faltering. “I'm not comfortable going to the Beyond until I know that she knows that.”

Kristina and I exchanged glances. I was given this gift for this exact reason, but at the same time I was only five feet from my table, and if Aunt Hilda overheard me, she was going to say that I ruined her birthday by parading around the restaurant and that I couldn't even give her one special night.

Kristina bit her lip, clearly thinking the exact same thing.

Finally Colonel Fleetwood stepped in. “Perhaps you could use your energy to direct your mother toward the back of the establishment, so they could engage in a conversation in private?”

The ghost looked at him, then back at me.

“Are you kidding me with this guy?” he asked. “Really?”

I didn't respond, but he shrugged. “Whatever.” And then he turned to his mom, bent over, and whispered in her ear. Midconversation, as her friends watched in confusion, the woman got up from the table and nearly ran to the bathrooms at the back of the restaurant, down a narrow hallway. I followed her path, listening to her son describe the sordid details of his death while sidestepping all the dead people, and cornered her before she went inside.

“Ma'am!” I hissed. “Ma'am, stop!”

She turned around. “Are you talking to me?”

“My name is Baylor Bosco, and I can communicate with people who have crossed over,” I said. “Listen, Terri, what I'm going to say won't be easy to hear, but you need to hear it. Chad didn't kill himself. He needs you to know that it was an accident, that he would never have taken all those pills if he'd known it was going to kill him.”

She recoiled in shock, then looked around the hallway and clutched the walls. Her mouth was moving, but no sound came out. Her hands shot to her chest and she stared at me in panic.

“Oh man, this is bad,” Chad said.

“What's wrong with her?” I asked.

“She's having an asthma attack,” he said. “You need to go get her inhaler from her purse.”

My eyes bulged out. “What? No! I can't just go rummage through her purse!”

“Just say you found her back here like this and you saw where she got up from!” Kristina said.

“Oh my God,” I said, turning around and sprinting to her table the same way I'd just come. An old woman was walking toward the bathroom, and I ran right for her, thinking I'd pass through her just fine.

It was like a rhino colliding with a bowling pin. The whole restaurant went silent as we tumbled to the floor, our limbs flying in every direction.

“Dear Lord!” my dad yelled, running over to help us as a few others from random tables did the same.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” I said, overwhelmed by all the people around me, confused that no one was speaking and that the only thing I could hear was a loud man singing about pizza pies and
amore
. “There's a woman by the bathroom! She collapsed and needs her inhaler!”

A man turned, peeked around the corner to see the other woman on the floor, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “He's right! That woman needs an inhaler!”

As my dad pulled me up from the ground to brush me off and examine the cut on my elbow, another man ran toward the bathroom, presumably with the inhaler in his hands.

I honestly didn't think things could get worse, until they did.

The woman I had stampeded over wasn't responding, so they had to call 911. Then a couple of patrons got into an argument about whether I ran into her on purpose, with one of them swearing I had been looking right at her and had known exactly what I was doing, and the other saying that I had panicked trying to help the woman who was having an asthma attack and simply hadn't seen her.

Once Terri recovered from her asthma attack, she started spouting off that I had caused her attack by telling her I could talk to dead people and that I'd told her that her son didn't commit suicide. She wasn't saying it in an accusatory way, though. Rather, she was thrilled, saying she had heard of me before and wondered if she'd ever get the chance to meet me.

This revelation caused nearly all the ghosts and patrons in the restaurant to talk at once, and all I could do was stare as the people and sounds blurred together into one, while a couple of paramedics worked on the still-unconscious lady on the ground.

Moments away from passing out, I looked at Kristina, who pointed to the table next to her and said, “Spread the light.” I looked at the candle for a second, forgetting what it could do for me, and then I stumbled over, picked it up, and imagined the white light surrounding me. Suddenly my mind cleared.

Feeling rejuvenated, I stood on a chair and shouted, “Everyone, shut up!”

For the next ten minutes I acted as the conductor of a symphony of healing messages, one after the other, pointing at person after person and delivering messages rapid-fire.

“You,” I said, pointing at a woman in a purple dress, “your husband says buy the green house, not the blue one.”

“But I like the blue one more!”

“You,” I said, pointing at the man with extra-large ears, “your brother says thank you for taking care of his children after he died.”

He nodded, a strong blush blazing across his face.

“You,” I said to the man with too much hair gel, “your mother says lay off the hair gel.”

“But it's in style!”

“You,” I said to the teenage girl who had been weeping for the last few minutes, “your father says you won't believe this is really him, and that the only way you'll believe it is if he brings up the giraffe tattoo you got on your back in memory of him, and he wants you to know that he hates it, and that if you get another one, he's not going to be able to rest in peace.”

And so on and so forth until everyone in the restaurant was stunned into silence.

Everyone except for one person.

“He's a
fraud
,” Aunt Hilda croaked from her seat, refusing to look at me and studying her necklace with great interest. “He's nothing more than a parasite feeding off your sadness. He made it all up, you fools.”

Everyone looked at her for a few seconds, no one saying a word. Then the weeping girl walked over, lifted up the back of her shirt to reveal a tattoo of a giraffe with the word “Dad” scrawled between the spots, and silently walked away.

THE AFTERMATH OF THE DINNER
wasn't pretty. Even though nearly everyone in the restaurant was satisfied with their messages, and the woman whom I'd plowed to the ground woke up and got a message from her husband, and a journalist showed up to write an article about the event, my mom was still mortified.

“You turned her birthday into a sideshow for your gift, Baylor,” my mom ranted on the drive home. “Aunt Hilda will always look back on her eighty-eighth birthday and remember your . . . your . . .
shenanigans
.”

“Shenanigans?” I said incredulously. “It's not like I stood on the table naked and danced, Mom. You're the one who forced me to go to that Italian restaurant, so if you didn't want that to happen, we shouldn't have gone there in the first place.”

“Never in my wildest dreams,” she said, side-eyeing me while keeping her face forward, “did I imagine you would hijack an entire restaurant and do a group healing session.”

“Well, spirits can make you go crazy sometimes,” I said.

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?” she scoffed. “Your aunt Hilda is so upset.”

“Who cares? Even after I delivered messages to more than a hundred people, she still called me a parasite, like I'm some nasty tapeworm that lives in your stomach. I couldn't care less that she's upset.”

“Well, that's really too bad,” she said, “because your father is going to take you to visit her this weekend so you can apologize in person.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said. “I'm not sorry. The best I can do for you is write her an e-mail and tell her that I'm sorry she's so offended by me.”

She gripped the wheel, her fingers flying up and down in waves, while she took a deep breath. “Baylor Douglas Bosco,” she growled, “you will visit your aunt Hilda and you will apologize sincerely to her, or else you will not get your driver's license till you're eighteen.”

She had me in a death grip.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine, I'll do it, but if you ever make me go to an Italian place again, you better believe it's going to be a hundred times worse than tonight was.”

  *  *  *  

That night I asked Colonel Fleetwood to give me a moment alone with Kristina, and she got an earful.

“Your job is to protect me, Kristina, from all those crazy spirits,” I said, my voice firm and tense. She was sitting in my desk chair, staring guiltily, while I paced in front of her. “And you and Colonel Fleetwood were so busy joking with each other that you couldn't even do the one thing you're supposed to. You might as well not have even been there. You might as well have been one of the ghosts crowding around the tables and making noise and distracting me.” I shot her a look. “Oh, wait, you
were
one of those ghosts crowding around and distracting me.”

“Baylor, I know, I'm sorry,” she said. “You just have to understand, it was such a nice change for me to have a friend on this side for once.”

“I'm your friend, Kristina. Talk to me.”

“Oh, stop, you know what I mean,” she said. “A friend who can talk to me instead of having to make weird faces at me.”

“Well, that's the way it is!” I said. “There's a reason someone like Colonel Fleetwood isn't usually around, and tonight made it very clear why. You totally failed me. You should have been paying attention to me the entire time instead of letting me down.”

“Oh, Baylor,” she said, gazing at her feet, “shut up.”

I stopped pacing. “What?”

“You heard me. Shut up. Just stop talking.” She stood up, walked over to where I was staring at her, dumbfounded, and got in my face. “It must be so hard for you to be alive, and to be surrounded by your family, who can touch you and love you and hug you and kiss you, and it must be such a
challenge
for you not to be able to eat in one certain kind of restaurant, and to talk to anyone you want whenever you want, and to feel the sun in your face and the cold on your skin, and to be able to cry when you're upset and
feel
things.”

She paused, her eyes searing into mine. “I am so sorry that you feel so put upon. I apologize for not banishing that creepy guy at the restaurant fast enough, and sure, maybe I shouldn't have let that ghost trick you into thinking he was the waiter, but if that's really the worst I've ever screwed up, then you know what, Baylor? You should just
shut up
.”