First thing when she arrived at school the next day, Harper headed for the back door of the library. She made sure no one saw her.

She walked in tentatively, keeping clear of the big window at the front. Her breathing was shallow as she searched the room. It wasn’t like looking for a missing book or anything solid. Her gaze was somewhere in between herself and the library walls, like trying to find a dragonfly in sunlight.

Then she smelled that familiar burning smell.

‘Will? I can’t see you,’ she said.

‘I’m right here.’ It was his voice, but far away.

Harper turned around on the spot and wanted to shout Where? but she was too shy. Finally, in the near distance, over by the place where the photo of him hung, there was a disturbance in mid-air that caught her eye like a downy feather. She focused as he’d taught her.

There he was.

She tried to hide how anxious she’d been. ‘I can see you now,’ she said.

The first bell rang and Will looked disappointed. ‘Guess you have to go already.’

Harper shrugged. She’d never missed a lesson on purpose in her life. ‘I’ll stay. I’ve got things to tell you.’

She told Will what she’d found out about his house and his family on the internet. Will didn’t say much, but she could see it was sad news for him—especially about his little sister Elsie. Hearing about his friend Vince who’d won the war medal brightened him up again. He said he’d love to know what else Harper could find out.

Now it was his turn to explain a few things.

‘Can you walk through walls and locked doors?’ Harper asked.

‘I can if I have to,’ Will replied. ‘But it feels like… well, I never drowned but passing through solid things feels the way I imagine drowning would feel, until the moment I’m through to the other side.’

‘That sounds horrible,’ said Harper. ‘Can you teleport?’

‘No idea. What’s that?’

‘It’s when you go from one place to another as if there’s no distance in between,’ said Harper. ‘Like if I started here and went straight to where I live without the bike ride.’

Will’s eyes popped. ‘Is that a thing people can do? I thought the internet was strange enough.’ He was funny about what life was like now.

‘We can’t,’ Harper said, smiling. ‘But what about ghosts, like you?’

‘Oh! Maybe some can,’ he said with a brief downturn of his mouth. ‘Even the trick with the leaf took me a while. I wasn’t good at much when I was alive so it’s no surprise I’m just as bad now.’

Harper took a second to hear the sadness in what he was saying. He put himself down a lot, but he never scowled or pouted.

‘You picked Corey right up off the ground, Will. That was amazing. But how does it work?’

‘It’s more or less the same as how I used to decide to do something. Y’know, climb a hill or pick up a rifle. Except that now the thoughts feel further away—they come from me but they don’t stay inside me for long.’ He smiled. ‘Am I making any sense?’

‘A bit, keep going,’ Harper replied, trying hard to understand.

‘Never tried to put it into words before. So… wanting to do a simple thing feels big and wild. When I was alive, I might think to myself: I want to eat that pie. And it’d be a small, private thought and I’d pick up the pie and bite into it. But now, say I want to take a book off the shelf.’ He looked at one. He was really concentrating. ‘Wanting the book already feels like it’s outside of me, almost like the wanting doesn’t belong to me.’ His voice sounded strained.

Then the book fell to the floor and Harper flinched.

‘There. At first, it was hard to put one foot in front of the other because I can’t feel the ground. But I can remember what the ground feels like. So I use my memories. I think that’s it.’

‘Do you ever take off your boots?’ Harper asked. ‘They look heavy.’

He found that funny. ‘Never crossed my mind. I can’t feel my uniform. Or anything. I can see my boots but that’s the only way I know they’re there.’

‘Do you get hungry?’

‘Never. I do feel tired though, but I never sleep. I can’t feel heat, or rain.’

‘What about happy and sad?’

‘Yes. But the strongest feeling is that I’ve walked into a room but forgotten why, and the reason is right’—he raised his hand and grabbed the air—‘there.’ After that he paused, then did a quick shake of his head and said, ‘I just want to find out what I’m doing here. I’m grateful for your help. Thanks, Harper.’

‘I haven’t done anything yet.’

‘You have. And I never thought about what it would be like for you. The leaf. The page in your book. Your little dog. You must have been scared. Not scared now, are you?’

She still was, a bit. But she didn’t want him to know.

‘I had a dog when I was in Gallipoli,’ Will continued. ‘He wasn’t really mine but sometimes that’s how it felt. His name was Arthur. He belonged to a sergeant, who’d smuggled him onto the ship. When we landed on the beach, we were hit from above by so much gunfire and we lost half the regiment. But my strongest memory is little Arthur barking at the guns, running towards each man who fell and then running again in another direction.

‘That first night, when I couldn’t believe I’d survived the landing, Arthur curled up with me. He’s the only reason I got to sleep that night, and every night after that.’

Harper said, ‘That’s how I get to sleep, too. With Hector.’ And then she wondered if Will would think less of her for not being able to sleep when she wasn’t at war, just at home. But it didn’t seem like he did. He just said, ‘I feel like I owe that dog.’

They talked until the end of recess. She wanted to ask Will how he died and what it felt like to be dead, but maybe he wasn’t that sort of friend, yet. He had questions, too, about the food he saw people eating, and serious questions like had there been other wars, and was there still a king of England.

Harper told him what she knew and showed him where the books were that could fill in the gaps. But Will’s reading wasn’t up to most of the books she opened.

At the recess bell, when Harper slipped outside, she pretended to her friends that she’d had a dentist appointment and had only just arrived. Ro nearly caught her out by saying he thought he’d seen her bike in the rack. But she told him it must have been someone else’s, and he dropped it.

Lunch was the next time she saw Will. She told him about her parents being away. He listened, seriously. Then she changed the subject to Lolly and the pets to make him laugh.

They got onto the virus, masks, why the school had been empty, and how the rest of the world was doing. Will had questions about cars, planes, computers, clothes, haircuts, buildings, words—everything.

If she was a ghost in a hundred years, she’d want to know everything too.

She asked him what Riverlark was like in his day.

‘More strict in some ways, I reckon, bit less strict in others. If you were late in the morning, the gates were locked. Tough luck, off you went to the headmaster and you’d get lines if he was in a good mood. Had to salute the flag every morning and say, “I love God and my country, honour the flag, serve the king and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the laws.” Some kids used to stay quiet for the “teachers” bit.’

‘Didn’t you like them?’

‘Hard to like someone who gives you the strap. Though often they’d send us to the headmaster for him to give it to us and we’d run our hands along the brick wall to make them red, and go back pretending we’d had a hiding.’

‘I can’t imagine a teacher hitting us. Ours are mostly nice. A bit annoying sometimes. Were you one of the naughty ones?’

‘More an observer of trouble. Kids used to drop wattle seeds in the ink wells, and good luck if you were nearby when that happened: the smell was foul. We’d shoot peppercorns through pea shooters.’

‘And then you were in a war.’

Will blinked a few times like she’d noticed he always did when he was thinking back. ‘It was my pa who was going to join up first. He’d taken me down to the parade a few days earlier. They were marching soldiers through to drum up new recruits. He goes, “This time tomorrow I’ll have a uniform like that. What’ll you think of me then, Willo?” But it turned out they wouldn’t take him. Too old and not fit enough, they reckoned. He was a strong man, with big rough hands, thick arms. Watching him come home after they turned him down was terrible. I’d never seen my pa like that.’

Harper knew her parents would have been crushed if they hadn’t been able to go off to help people.

‘So you joined up in your dad’s place. You did it for him.’

‘I wouldn’t say that exactly. I really wanted to go. Vince was going. I would have done anything for Vince. All my friends wanted to go. Can’t understand it now but that’s what we felt. Telling my folks was almost the hardest bit. They were hurt that I was leaving them but the call to join up felt bigger than anything else. It was all wrapped up together—wanting to go, loving them, my country, my friends.

‘They were about to have supper: just tea and Mum’s fruitcake. I can see the cake and everything. I can smell the kitchen.’ He stared as if he was somewhere else.

Harper started to think about Liz and Larry. The night they’d told her they were both going away. The days when they were packing. The times she’d caught her mum crying when she walked into a room, and then her mum would pretend everything was fine. The phone calls she hadn’t wanted. The emails that hurt to read.

She hadn’t let herself think about that properly until now. For a moment, she could see it their way.

Cleo was being quiet, which wasn’t like her. Harper started to get a bad feeling. After last bell she asked her, ‘What’s up?’

Cleo shrugged and shook her head. She was definitely annoyed.

‘Cleo, I can tell there’s something.’

‘You can’t cos there’s nothing. Come on, we’ve got netball.’

A netball game seemed to be the cure. Cleo was louder, faster and fiercer than ever.

All week, Harper went to see Will every recess and lunch. The first few days she was on edge, wondering if Corey had told everyone what had happened to him. But just like it was after the time she got spooked in the library in front of him and worried he’d tell, no one had been giving her strange looks. She didn’t sense any whispering.

Harper hoped that Will was right: that Corey had realised no one would believe him.