Ben sleeping over felt oddly normal. Although he did spend a lot of time at ours already, so I supposed the only weird thing really was that Fadil wasn’t there. Based on the texts I’d had that morning, Fadil seemed to have slept well overnight and enjoyed having the house to himself for the first time. He had spent four thousand years on his own, so it wasn’t like being alone bothered him.
‘Look who it is,’ said Tessa, appearing in my face as I left college that day. Thankfully, she was to my side, so I didn’t have to barge past her to get away. If I did that, she’d know I could touch her. Which risked moving her torment to a whole new level. As if it wasn’t bad enough already.
I kept my head down, looking anywhere but at her. If I acknowledged her, that’d only encourage her to keep going. Not that ignoring her seemed to work all that well, either.
‘Did you find out what happened to me yet?’
Tiled floor. Feet walking along the floor. Gross things I didn’t want to know what they were on the floor. Focus on those, not on Tessa. Focus. Focus…
I’d never had such an intense focus on the crappy flooring before.
Josh was a few feet away, walking away from me. I could tell it was him from his shoes and his walk. He was turned away, with his head bowed. Was he ignoring me, too? Or was he just being quiet because he was grieving?
Even though we’d known each other for so long, it was hard for me to figure out what was going on in his head. In just a few weeks, I’d gone from knowing everything about him to feeling like he was a total stranger.
Shaking my head to get rid of the building tears, I kept going.
‘What’s the matter? Disappointed he hasn’t rebounded back into your arms? You obviously weren’t as good as you thought.’
Don’t punch her. Don’t do it. Think happy thoughts. Think getting out of there. Don’t punch her.
I sped up, charging towards the exit. Tessa cackled in my ear. Her laugh was even worse when she was dead because she was even closer to me.
‘It’s OK, there are places you can go to learn how to—’
Before I could punch her, or she could finish her sentence, she was pulled away. Thank god Josh had been power walking, so he was now far enough away to keep her far away from me.
What was Tessa’s problem with me, anyway? She was dead! Shouldn’t finding her murderer have been more important than bothering me? It felt like she just assumed I’d be figuring it out to help her even though she was still being a bitch to me.
Ugh.
*
When Fadil had offered to help me revise, I’d assumed it was a kind, but otherwise empty, gesture. I hadn’t expected him to turn up at my door after college, a bunch of Ben’s stationery in hand, and a huge grin on his face.
‘What’s with the stationery store?’ I asked as I let him in.
‘To help you study!’ He was the first person I’d ever spoken to who sounded excited to study. I didn’t get it, but as long as he was happy to let me, I was going to take full advantage of his enthusiasm. Maybe it’d rub off on me.
‘Don’t look so confused,’ he said as we settled into the living room. His nose was red and he was snivelling pretty badly, but he seemed determined to help. Mum wasn’t quite so interfering – she preferred to nag – and Ben stayed out of it. Fadil was taking a much more active approach to ensuring I studied.
And I supposed it did benefit him as well, in a way, since he’d get to learn stuff from my revision too.
Tilly was out for a walk with Mum, so, for once, he wouldn’t get a westie face wash when he walked in. He’d get one when they got back instead.
‘I love learning. This is another way for me to do that.’
‘All right, I’ll give you that,’ I said. ‘How’s your cold?’
He opened the bag he was carrying to reveal a giant box of tissues. ‘I feel terrible, but we have work to do.’ He sounded weirdly enthusiastic about the prospect of revising. It was unnerving. ‘How was college?’
I fell back onto the sofa with a thud. ‘Confrontational.’
He sat beside me, his brow furrowed. ‘That’s not normally a word I hear associated with college. Not from everything I’ve watched, read, or listened to, anyway.’
‘Tessa got in my face again.’ I ground my teeth as I relived her crude comments. ‘I don’t get it. She’s dead! Shouldn’t she be trying to figure out who killed her?’
‘She’s haunting Josh, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She probably can’t do much to solve her murder from there. Unless he can suddenly see ghosts too.’
I shook my head. ‘No. Maggie is a chef and Harry is an accountant.’
Fadil tapped his foot against the sofa. ‘Maybe what she’s looking for is the same thing she was looking for in life.’
‘Which is?’
‘Connection. Affection. Love.’
I snorted. ‘Tessa doesn’t know what love is. She’s too self-centred.’
‘She has an idea of what it means to her, even if it’s not genuine love. She chose Josh over her parents and other friends.’
I shuddered as I realised how right Fadil probably was. ‘Josh is the first person she’s felt truly connected to. That’s why she chased him so hard.’
Fadil nodded. ‘Seems likely, yeah.’
‘It doesn’t explain why she won’t leave me alone. Even after she got with Josh she still made a beeline for me whenever she wanted to wind someone up. I’m tired of being her favourite target.’ Crossing my arms, I slumped deeper into the sofa.
‘Could it be more about her than you?’
Deja vu ripped through me. Dominic had said something similar. And while he’d had a reason to lie about most things, this didn’t feel like something he would’ve lied about. Dominic had tricked me so easily because he was good at figuring people out. He could’ve easily been telling the truth about Tessa to earn my trust so that I’d do more for him. I felt sick.
Fadil didn’t know what Dominic had said. But if two unrelated people who’d never spoken about it thought the same thing…
‘Your family has been through a lot, and no family is perfect, but your parents – and even Dumb Dan – come across a lot more caring than her parents did when I saw them on TV,’ said Fadil.
Dumb Dan came across as more compassionate than her parents? That was impressive.
‘How did they come across?’ I didn’t have the mental capacity to watch people talk about how nice Tessa was every time she was mentioned on the news. It was too nauseating.
Fadil ran his hand back and forth over the arm of the sofa, caressing the worn fabric. ‘They seem a lot like Tessa. They talk more about how their lives have been affected by her death than about how much she’s lost. They also seem to be loving the limelight. It’s all very self-absorbed. It makes me feel a little queasy.’
Of course. ‘Entitled and selfish parents having an entitled and selfish child.’
‘Is it just entitlement and selfishness?’ Fadil asked. The conversation was getting deep. Did he want me to empathise with Tessa? That wasn’t going to happen.
‘If her parents are entitled and selfish, it probably means the love she got from them was conditional. That’d make anyone insecure and seek affection elsewhere.’
As much as I hated to admit it, I understood where he was coming from. Just not where he’d learned all this psychology. ‘Where did you get all this from?’
He’d been comatose for four millennia, unable to even hear any outside conversation because his sarcophagus had been hidden deep in an Egyptian pyramid. There’s no way he could’ve learned so much about people from there. Then again, he probably spent more hours studying per day than I did at college, and every week he had a new topic of interest.
He chuckled, a blush forming on his cheeks. ‘I’ve been reading a lot of psychology books lately. And, uh, watching a lot of romance films.’
I nudged him, laughing. ‘You softie, you.’