A Guide to the Other Side (5 page)

I shrugged but didn't say anything. It was pretty standard communication for the two of us when we were in front of people. She'd make a comment, and I'd find some way to respond. She'd told me that we might be able to communicate with our thoughts one day, but I didn't like the sound of it. What if she accidentally caught some of my private thoughts? There'd be no coming back from that.

“Did they run out of the cute nurse costumes at the store, J?” I asked.

“What are you talking about? I'm Clara Barton.”

I blinked, not sure if I was supposed to know what that meant.

“The founder of the American Red Cross,” she said, as though it were immensely obvious. Then she pointed at Bobby. “Can you believe this idiot?” He was posing like a Cali girl in his short jean skirt and red top, complete with a stuffed bra, bright-blond wig, and atrocious makeup.

“I thought he was your patient, actually,” I joked, and I turned to glare at Aiden. He still hadn't recovered from seeing his crush in her costume, and he needed to get it together. He caught my eye and jumped.

“You guys look great,” he managed to choke out. I shook my head while Kristina scoffed from her perch at the table.

“The haul's going to be great this year,” Bobby said, his mouth doubled from its normal size thanks to the smeared lipstick covering it. “All the parents who usually hang out on the streets are going to be home, since it's so cold, which means more houses to go to, which means”—he shook his hips excitedly—“more candy for us.”

“It's not going to be good candy, though,” J said. “They're just going to give us whatever they had lying around, since they didn't have time to run to the store.”

“Where,” Bobby said, turning to her dramatically, “is your optimism?”

She laughed, and Aiden turned back and forth between them, smiling with a vague look of panic beaming from his eyes.

“Oh, wow, this is like watching a train wreck,” Kristina said, exasperated. “Pull it together, Aiden!”

I chuckled, but I didn't know what to do. I had already given Aiden as much advice as I could. I had dropped hints on his behalf to J. I wasn't sure how to help them, and now it looked like a lost cause. He had wanted to ask her to the Back-to-School Bash in September, but she had been very vocal about wanting to go with a group of friends. When I told him to ask her to the Fall Ball coming up in November, the look on his face suggested that I'd just described a murder scene in gory detail.

“Let's take a picture,” J said. She whipped out her cell phone and handed it to Mrs. Kirkwood, who'd been leaning against the fridge the whole time and grinning like a madwoman.

“You all are just so cute,” she said under her breath as she squinted at the screen and tapped it aimlessly, while we all pressed together in front of the table. I had specifically positioned myself between Bobby and J so that Aiden was on her other side. “There! I think it worked! I'm not sure, though.”

J took back the phone, giggled, and said, “I'm gonna post it right now.” She showed it to us, and even though we all looked like fools, the main thing I noticed was a strange light in the corner. Kristina had managed to find her way into the picture in her own special ghost way, and I winked at her. She smiled and nodded.

I wondered, sometimes, what it was like to have only one person to talk to. To be invisible your whole life—could you call what she was experiencing a “life,” even?—at the mercy of someone else. I had never asked her, but I wondered why she was the one who'd had to die and I was the one who'd gotten to live. And I wondered if she ever got sad about it. Whether or not she did, on nights like these, when I got to hang out with family and friends and she had to hang out in the corner, silent and unnoticed and effectively nonexistent, I felt sad for her.

  *  *  *  

“This candy sucks!” Bobby yelled as we walked to the next house. “Dum Dums and Tootsie Rolls? I mean, come on, they may as well have opened the door, flipped us off, and spit in our faces.”

“I actually like Tootsie Rolls!” J said, her floppy cap bopping up and down with every step she took.

“Me too!” Aiden said quickly, close behind.

“Whatever, you freaks can have them, then,” Bobby said. “I'll trade you for the good stuff.”

We'd been going for nearly an hour, walking as fast as we could between the houses, since it was only getting colder. Our bags were bulging, and I could tell I had gotten some decent treats. Three houses so far had given out king-size candy bars, which was akin to finding the Holy Grail three separate times.

“Okay, let's turn left down Acorn Road, since that's a good cul-de-sac,” Bobby said. “We can hit a bunch of houses really fast.”

“Perfect!” said J. “Then maybe we can think about heading back to Aiden's? My legs have only got twenty more minutes, max, before they're going to be classified as medically worthless.”

“Are you kidding, J?” Bobby asked. “It's barely been an hour!”

“But we've gone to so many houses!” she said. “How much candy do you need?”

“All of it, J,” he crooned. “I want as much as I can get.”

She shook her head. “Twenty minutes, then I'm done.”

“I'll go back with you, J,” Aiden said quietly as Bobby ran ahead. “Don't worry.”

J looked up at him and smiled. She couldn't see his face, since it was covered by a black-and-white skeleton mask, but I would have bet an even $1,000 that he was bright red.

When we turned onto Acorn Road, we passed a group of kids in the grade below us. Bobby nodded to them and kept walking, but when I got a look at their costumes, it was like a lightning bolt had hit my spine.

One had on a zombie mask with ripped flesh and bloody eyes. Another was dressed in a white shirt covered with blood and tire marks. And still another wore a hockey mask and carried a fake machete.

I had been doing fine all night, focused on hanging with my friends and running from house to house and ignoring everything else, and I had barely noticed a spirit around. But when I saw those costumes, it was so jarring and unexpected that I lost my concentration and an invisible wall crumbled. I was immediately surrounded by spirits, good and demonic alike, and the deafening chatter of a thousand ghosts.

I gasped, and all of a sudden Kristina was in front of me, reminding me to breathe, to shut my eyes and imagine only the good, and to let that image become my reality.

But then she was gone, and my friends were too, and I was all alone on Acorn Road. I looked around at the houses, where all the lights had gone out, yet the decorations glowed an eerie red.

Then, from the gaps in between the houses, a hundred men wearing sheets filed out and charged right at me. They weren't moving their legs; they were floating, their feet angled toward the road like they'd just been hanged.

And there were a hundred pairs of those awful eyes, beady pools of black evil, all illuminated a malicious red from the strange glow, boring into my soul, daggering into my skin.

I turned and ran.

I RACED DOWN ACORN ROAD
, cut a left, and sprinted like I was competing in the Olympics.

I glanced back and saw the Sheet Men zipping toward me, like I was the magnet and they were pieces of iron, like I was the matador with a giant red cape and they were the angry bulls.

No one else was around. No one was there to help.

If these demons caught up to me and somehow attacked, I'd be all on my own.

I looked ahead. I summoned up all the strength I had and willed my legs to compete with the speed of light. They blurred into pink nothings, moving so fast I couldn't even feel them.

I turned out of Aiden's neighborhood and sprinted down the main road. Not a single car was anywhere in sight.

I looked back again to see how close they were, and immediately I wished I hadn't.

The Sheet Men had taken on a V formation, like a deranged flock of murderous geese, and the leader was mere feet behind me, the white sheet not flapping an inch.

I wasn't fast enough. He'd catch up to me at any second. I could feel the energy around me changing, and everything becoming hazy. I could sense that he was about to take over my soul and enlist me into his sheet-wearing army. I knew it was over.

Then, with an almighty bang, Kristina materialized in front of me, shimmering into my view as sparks of blue rained down around her. That red glow suddenly vanished, and after I skidded to a stop, I turned to see all the Sheet Men had gone too.

Except now I was in the middle of a busy road, and a truck was speeding right for me.

“Look out!” Kristina cried. She lunged for me, blasting me to the side of the road in another tornado of blue sparks. I rolled into a cold, muddy ditch, tumbling several feet down into a swampy crevasse.

Once I stopped rolling, I lay there for a second, panting hard and shallow, my pink pajamas now covered in mud and bits of grass.

“Baylor,” Kristina said, “are you okay? Are you hurt?”

I didn't respond because I hadn't attempted to move any part of my body. The shock of the last couple minutes was still too great. I couldn't feel anything.

“Baylor, say something!”

I squeezed my eyelids together, then looked over at her figure, which was still glowing blue, and said, “Did you see how fast I ran?”

“Baylor! You almost just got killed!”

“I guess you're not a very good guardian angel, then,” I said, closing my eyes again, digging my head deeper into the mud.

“You disappeared from my sight! I had no idea where you'd gone, or how. It's never happened before.”

“Well, that's comforting,” I mumbled.

“I had to cross to the Beyond and get one of my guides to help me break whatever trance you were under.”

“That explains the blue,” I said, waving my hand in a figure-eight pattern over her body. The shimmer had nearly faded away.

“Yes,” she said stiffly. “I don't have that sort of power yet.”

“One day,” I said. I raised my torso, resting on my elbows to look around. No one had pulled over to check on me. My friends were probably still on Acorn Road, wondering how I'd vanished. I didn't have the energy to find them and make up some lie. “Let's go to the cemetery.”

She cocked her head at me, but she nodded. Slowly I rose from the ground and tried to brush myself off, but a thick layer of mud and leaves stuck to my hand. I shook it off and started walking.

As we made our way down the road, I couldn't quite keep the spirits tuned out. It was just like listening to the radio and having static come in and disrupt a song. Every few seconds I'd suddenly see ghosts speeding down the highway at sixty miles an hour, surrounding the cars, and then they'd disappear.

The cemetery was only a ten-minute walk, but in my current state it took double that time. We walked in silence. Once we'd reached Woodland Cemetery, I threw myself over the fence that divided it from the road, and landed on the soft grass with a gentle thud.

I let out a big breath as a feeling of relief washed over me. I was in my sanctuary, and I felt safe. It didn't matter that the spirits kept flickering in and out. I was now in the one place where none of them would be.

I walked aimlessly for a little bit, passing by several unfamiliar stones, until I finally spotted the big spruce tree next to the little road that cut through the cemetery.

From there I followed the road for a bit, looking for the tombstone topped by a cherubic angel with a chipped wing. Turning left, I counted seven markers until I got to the one I wanted.

When I was eleven, one of my classmates died in a horrific car accident, the kind where they had to bring in dental records to identify the bodies. His name was Tommy Thorne, and though he wasn't a good friend of mine, he was still someone I had seen nearly every day for almost my entire life.

I got to know him better after he died, after passing on a couple of messages to Tommy's father, from both his son and his wife. Since then, whenever I visited the cemetery, I always found myself back at his grave.

The dark-gray stone was etched with his name, the words
BELOVED SON
underneath. I had traced my fingers through those letters so many times. It was fascinating to me that he had been in the physical world, eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast and then picking out his favorite shirt to wear for the trip to the mall with his mom, not suspecting a thing, totally unaware that his life was going to end. One second he was here, and the next he was there, on the other side, in the place where only I could still see him.

Tonight I wasn't going to say hi. I didn't want to talk to anyone except for Kristina. But I made sure to send over some positive vibes through the mental barrier that separated my sanity from all the roaming souls and spirits, just to let him know I was thinking of him.