When we were all back in our seats on the bus, Sid and Mrs. Redd began another of what I was sure would be hundreds of head counts. I thought life might be considerably improved if we returned to the U.S. with a couple fewer Satellite Girls than we’d come with, but I wasn’t making policy. Sid counted in English, and Mrs. Redd translated his counting into French, like we were at the United Nations or something.
“Seven, eight, nine…” Sid pointed to each person as he counted.
“Sept, huit, neuf…” Mrs. Redd echoed. She didn’t point, because I guess there was no way to accurately do that in French.
Jac had sloshed some of her Sprite onto the floor and was bent over double mopping it up. I tucked my feet under me so my sneakers wouldn’t get sticky, and out of sheer boredom began silently counting along with Sid. When he got to seventeen, he gave a satisfied nod and stopped counting.
Except I got to eighteen.
I guess I counted someone twice.
Jac was still in cleanup mode, so I counted again. And came up with the same result. Four adults including Sid, and eighteen students.
But there were only seventeen of us on the trip. There had been only seventeen of us in the cathedral, and seventeen in the gift shop behind the little chapel.
I leaned into the aisle and examined each row as nonchalantly as I could. We had pretty much taken the same seats we’d had for the trip up. In the back, I could see Shoshanna and Brooklyn, orbited by other girlcraft I recognized only too well, totaling one planet (Shoshanna) and six Satellite Girls.
Directly in front of the girls were four Random Boys, two of them super jocks and loud, one of them a sporty hanger-on type, and a techno guy named Phil who had successfully morphed his image this year from geek-freak to geek-chic. When someone’s iPod or cell phone got messed up, Phil became even more popular.
Lumped together on the other side of the bus were the only four kids not in our French class: They were from the Foreign Students Club and had therefore been eligible to join the trip. I knew and liked the quiet, sweet-faced Mikuru Miyazaki, an exchange student from Japan, who sat with her lethally overprotective brother, Yoshi. Next to them was the terminally silent Alice Flox, and directly across the aisle was the bubbly and outgoing Indira Desai.
Then, of course, there was the seat I was most trying to pretend I wasn’t looking at, in which sat Ben Greenblott. Across the row from him, in the window seat with her face pressed to the glass was… was…
Who was that?
She was nondescript from the back. Her hair was shoulder length, sandy colored, and straight. She wore a beige sweater that my mom could have worn like fifty years ago, and khaki-colored pants.
Maybe she’d gotten separated from her own group and had accidentally gotten on our bus.
“Back in a sec,” I told Jac, who responded with a “Mmph” while she continued to do damage control on her soda spill.
I got up, stretched, then moved into the empty row of seats in front of Beige Girl. I stuck my face into the gap between the window seat and the window. I could see her profile, but her face was masked by a hand pressed against the glass.
“Hey,” I said quietly. “How’s it going?”
I thought she might have moved a little, almost like a flinch of surprise, but she made no indication she’d heard me.
“Hey,” I said again. “You’re not from our school, are you?”
Nothing.
I put my hands on the back of the seat, rose on my knees, and peered directly down at her.
“Hey,” I repeated, much louder.
This time she looked at me, dropping her hand away from the glass.
She was very delicate looking, with porcelain skin and huge, pale blue eyes. There was a buzz of energy around her.
She was, to put it bluntly, very dead.
When, when, when was I going to stop confusing the living with the dead? It was so totally uncool.
“I can see you,” I said very quietly. I could not remember the French word for see. “Je… um… see-ez vous.”
She looked at me with mild interest and no readable expression, then turned back to the window, obscuring her face from mine.
I was getting ready to ask her if she needed help, or maybe find an extremely tactful English-French phrase for “Do you know that you’re dead?” when I happened to glance across the aisle.
Ben Greenblott was looking at me.
Ben Greenblott, more accurately, was watching me have a conversation with an empty seat.
There are no words to describe the mortification I felt.
Without saying goodbye or even sneaking another look at Beige Girl, I faced forward and slumped down in the seat. I closed my eyes, trying to make myself disappear. Then I felt rather than saw someone standing over me. Living? Dead? I kept my eyes squeezed shut. All the possibilities seemed equally agonizing at this moment.
“Kat? Are you okay?”
I opened my eyes.
“Mom.”
I felt an initial tide of relief sweep over me. She probably realized something embarrassing had just happened to me. My mom could almost always fix things. If not fix them, improve them a great deal. I almost patted the seat beside me, ready to whisper secrets about Ben Greenblott and how Brooklyn called me Spooky and the disembodied French voice in the Basilique Notre-Dame.
Then I saw my mother glance very quickly at the seat behind me.
She was a medium. Naturally, she saw Beige Girl, too. And suddenly I was overwhelmed with frustration. She had come back here to check out the ghost, not probe my feelings on the subject of the perfect boy.
Was it not enough that I had the gift of second sight dumped on me without any say in the matter whatsoever? Was it not enough that there were times a virtual village of dead people followed me around, trying to get my attention? Was it not enough that if there was a demon within a five-mile radius, it would sense my presence and come at me?
I just wanted to be normal. Not forever. Just, say, for the Montreal trip. Just while Ben Greenblott was sitting a few feet away. Just for the moment. I did not want to talk about ghosts.
“I’m fine,” I mumbled.
“Are you sure?” she pressed. She tucked a strand of baby-fine blond hair behind one ear and stared at me, her forehead creased. I have my father’s coloring—jet-black hair and green eyes. For a split second, my mother looked like a complete stranger.
“I just need some space,” I said. I could have said it more nicely. But Ben Greenblott was sitting right there. I had been talking to air. He had seen it.
It was not okay.
My mother nodded, like she understood about the ghost situation without my having to say anything. Which made me even more irritated with her. She could sense a spirit a mile off, but she couldn’t sense that I had just humiliated myself in front of the only boy I wanted to impress. Wouldn’t a regular mother have noticed that?
“I’m going to go sit down, then,” she said.
Part of me wanted to call after her. She was going to sit by herself, and Jac’s mom wasn’t going to talk to her, and I loved her and didn’t want her to be alone.
But I didn’t. I stayed where I was. When the bus’s engine started up, I ducked my head, got up, and slipped back into the seat next to Jac.
“Where’d you go? Did you try the bathroom? Was it terrible?”
I said nothing, just shot her a smile.
It was definitely not okay.