DISORIENTED FROM THE FLASH OF light and the ringing in my ears, I lunged backward, trying to fling myself away from the spirit, but I must have stepped away from my shooting star during the chaos because I was still in the Starry Night.
“Really, kid? You’re still that mad at me?”
I untangled myself and stood up to find an old woman staring down at me in amusement. She looked familiar . . . actually, she sounded familiar, her voice deep and gravelly, like sandpaper had withered away her vocal cords.
A rough laugh croaked out of her. “Aw, come on, kid, it’s only been a few weeks!”
I didn’t appreciate her tone. It had been an eventful few weeks, and I’d come across a ton of spirits. But there was something so distinct about her voice that it unlocked a memory in my brain.
“You’re Aunt Hilda’s friend,” I said slowly. “Marjorie!”
Earlier this month, my aunt Hilda had celebrated her eighty-eighth birthday at an Italian restaurant, and it was a disaster. For some unknown reason, Kristina and I can’t tune out spirits in Italian restaurants, and I wound up causing a scene and ruining her birthday.
Afterward my parents forced me to go to her apartment and apologize in person. Except when I got there, I ended up delivering a message from Marge, who’d just crossed over the night before, and Aunt Hilda didn’t know her friend had died. It was not a great situation.
“Good news,” she said, throwing her hands up. “My cats didn’t eat my body!”
I grimaced. “That’s . . . great.”
“You’re telling me. I just wish I’d asked you to erase my Internet browser history. My daughters . . . oh boy, did they get a shock.”
“Marge, can I help you with something?” I said quickly, slapping my hands to my eyes, hoping she would go away, or at the very least stop talking. “What are you even doing here?”
“I’m visiting Hilda, of course,” she said. “I like to check in on her.”
“You’re what?”
She frowned at me. “You new to this, kid?”
“Well, I’m not exactly an expert yet, considering the fact that I’m still, you know, alive and everything.”
“Show off,” she grumbled, crossing her arms across her chest. “Well, we not-alive people can visit alive people in their dreams.”
“What? But isn’t this my Dream Portal? Why would you have to go through me to visit Aunt Hilda?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, your majesty!” she said in mock concern. She snorted unpleasantly. “Do you think you own Loved Ones’ Lane?”
“Loved Ones’ Lane? Is that”—I motioned to the blackness and the shooting stars all around us—“what you call this? I’ve been calling it the Starry Night.”
“The Starry Night? Original. I’ll let van Gogh know about your tribute when I run into him. I call it Loved Ones’ Lane as an homage to my checkered past.” She giggled at a passing memory that I had no desire to hear about. “This is the entryway to our loved ones’ dreams.”
“What? So all ghosts use this lane to enter dreams?” Kristina had neglected to mention that tidbit.
“Pretty much,” she said. Her voice was so cacophonous that she may as well have been gurgling rocks. “It’s not like I can visit just anyone, though. I can’t drop in on the president and give him an earful on his antismoking initiative, as much as I’d like to. The lane is personalized to each ghost. And you and I happen to have Hilda in common, kid.”
“So you can’t drop in on my baby sister?” I pointed to the door across from me.
“Sure can’t,” she said, looking at the door. “That’s the entryway for my grandson.” She sighed. “I probably don’t have nearly as many doors as you do. You’re young. You’ve got a lot of living people around—friends, cousins, siblings. I’ve got, what? Maybe ten doors left.”
I looked down my lane and smiled. It was pretty long.
Marjorie looked down at Aunt Hilda’s shooting star; it was getting noticeably dimmer.
“Sorry, kid, wish I could stay and chat more, but she’s about to head off,” Marge said. “Gotta go.” She took a step forward, but before she tumbled away, she looked at me once more. “You should really visit her more, kid. She’s an old lady and doesn’t have many friends left. She’d be glad to see you.”
Before I could argue and say that Aunt Hilda would actually hate to see more of me, she somersaulted through the door and disappeared.
A part of me wanted to follow her through the door. What would happen if two souls suddenly infiltrated Aunt Hilda’s dream? Maybe she’d start getting nicer! I could sneak in every night and slowly hypnotize her into accepting my gift.
You love Baylor’s gift.
Baylor is your favorite.
Send Baylor ten dollars every week.
I doubted Kristina would approve of that sort of subterfuge, but how would she ever find out? Maybe she’d get suspicious if she noticed Aunt Hilda suddenly treating me better. She couldn’t prove anything, though, and if the plan worked and Aunt Hilda and I became pals, then, really, what would be the problem?
I made a mental note to try that out in the future. I still needed to explore the Starry N—uh, Loved Ones’ Lane before committing to that kind of action; plus, I really didn’t want to have to keep dealing with Marge.
I decided to walk down the lane and see how many doors I could count. As far as I could tell, there was no way to distinguish between them. I wondered how Marge knew which one was which. Maybe it was different for ghosts. It was possible her time spent in the Beyond, however short it had been thus far, had already prepared her on how to navigate the lane. In a way, that made sense—the lane was meant for ghosts, not for curious thirteen-year-old mediums.
I counted fifty-seven doors down the lane before the shooting stars disappeared, and I was struck by a wave of confusion. Assuming my door was in the middle of the lane, I could easily have access to 114 people. And not just people, but loved ones, as both Kristina and Marge had said.
I didn’t have 114 loved ones. No way. I thought I’d max out at forty, tops.
Off the top of my head, I could only count my immediate family, my three living grandparents, Aunt Hilda, Aiden, J, Bobby, Reverend Henry, and probably Aiden’s mom, too. Then a bunch of aunts and uncles and cousins, so that brought the number to just over forty.
I’m not sure who on the other side decided on the definition of “loved ones,” but they needed to dial it down a notch. The shooting star in front of the last door on the lane shimmered brightly, and curiosity got the better of me. I needed to find out who had barely made the cut.
I tumbled through the door, somersaulted forward, and drifted down into a large lecture hall, where all the students were furiously taking notes as the professor rambled on about bloodstain patterns. Everyone seemed much older than me, so I guessed it was a college course. Then I noticed most of the students weren’t using pens to take notes. They were using their bloody fingers to jot down the professor’s words about spatter and arterial spray.
“I’m so pleased to have such a dedicated group of students,” the professor purred, observing his class with a disturbing hunger in his eyes. The only thing missing from his evil professor look was a bald, wrinkled cat for him to lightly stroke. “Extra credit to all those who bled for their education today.”
Students were pale and groaning in pain as the blood dripped out of them. The guy sitting in front of me brushed his hand through his hair, leaving a streak of bright red, and as the hair settled back into place, the blood flicked off and landed on my face.
It was time to go.
“Gross,” said a voice to my right. I knew it instantly. I’d gotten into major trouble a few weeks back just to hear that voice for a few minutes.
Will Parker, son of the Sheet Man, wiped away blood from his left cheek and swatted it from his hand toward the ground.
“I hate this class,” he muttered.
He was getting his masters in criminology in Boston, and it didn’t take long to piece together that he was stressed out about one of his forensics classes.
“Everything all right, Will?”
He turned toward me and frowned.
“I didn’t know you were in this class, Baylor.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m definitely going to drop it, though. It’s a little bloodier than I’m used to.”
He nodded. “This guy’s a pyscho.”
“Any idea how I can get out of here?”
“Go out the door,” he said. “Obviously.”
“Right,” I said, standing up, “I’ll see you later.”
“Come to my study group later so we can prep for finals.”
“Will do,” I said, heading up the aisle toward the exit. I pushed through the doors and tumbled back to Loved Ones’ Lane.
Will Parker? Really? He counted as a loved one? That seemed like a real stretch to me. I liked the guy just fine, but I hardly knew him. I guess I did feel a bizarre kinship with him since his father haunted me for a few weeks and kidnapped Kristina, all thanks to his mother. Not to mention the fact that his mother was suddenly taken away to God-knows-where by a Bruton. I doubted we’d ever see her again. He and his sister didn’t get a chance to say good-bye, which was sort of sad, even if she was a lunatic who tried to murder me.
I wanted to keep exploring the fringes of my loved ones, but just past Will’s door the ocean and brilliant night sky had appeared again. I squinted hard, wondering if anything was out there, when I suddenly spotted it—a weird misshapen figure, like one of Jack’s bad LEGO creations, just barely reflecting the moonlight.
I hopped off the edge of the lane, swan-diving down through the air and into the ocean, heading straight for it.
The figure transformed before my eyes as I got closer. There was a big horizontal part, slightly curved and shiny white, and on either side of it were two more shapes, but I couldn’t tell what they were.
After a few more minutes I got to the shape and discovered the curved horizontal piece had that white, shiny gloss that has made up the surface of every boat I’ve ever seen. Except this one was capsized, and lying on top of it were two kids, both about my age. One was a dark-skinned boy, the other was a girl with a mane of wavy brunette hair, and both looked like they’d been through hell. Their skin—hers a deep olive, his as black as the shadowy ocean—was burned and mottled, their lips dry and cracked. Their clothes were tattered, wet, and sticking to their skin.
Who were they? Was this real? Was I in a dream?
“Hello?” I said gently. “Can you hear me?”
The boy slowly cracked open an eye and stared at me.
“I’m starting to hallucinate, Helena,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep. He clutched a half-full water bottle that was strapped around his wrist. “There’s a kid floating in the ocean.” The girl didn’t respond.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Me? You’re the one in my dream. Who are you?”
“My name’s Baylor,” I said. “So, this is a dream then?”
“It could be,” he said. “But it might not be. All I can remember anymore is the water. It’s everywhere, all the time; when I’m awake, when I’m asleep. It’s all I know now.”
“But why?”
“Because we made a mistake,” he said. “And now, it’s too—”
But he didn’t finish. A huge wave smacked into us, and before I knew it, I’d zoomed back to Loved Ones’ Lane and saw that the giant ocean had evaporated.
* * *
Tuesday passed by in a mix of euphoria and discontent. It was the last day before Thanksgiving break, and none of the teachers were even bothering to try. In fact, before I left home that morning, Dad was humming merrily as he fiddled with the coffeemaker.
“It’s one of the best days of the year, Baylor,” he said with a grin as he snuggled with his mug of coffee, clasping it between his hands and holding it just below his chin. He breathed in deeply and sighed.
“Why’s that?” I asked, totally drained from the dreamwalking. I couldn’t get the image of those two kids out of my head. Had that been real? I needed to talk to Kristina about it, but I wanted to discuss it in depth and wouldn’t have time for that until later.
“Because I get to play games with my students all day, and then it’s a five-day weekend.” He chuckled. “I love the holidays.”
He worked at the high school, but all the teachers at the middle school got the memo, too. English class turned into an open reading period, and during social studies we watched battered VCR recordings of classic news segments.
It was clear the day was a joke, and by lunchtime I was wondering if I could escape the premises and slip home unnoticed. As I was plotting out a strategy in the lunch line—today was the Thanksgiving special, complete with slimy turkey slices, cold corn, and mashed potatoes that tasted like recycled cardboard—someone grabbed my shoulder and yanked me out of line.
“What’d you do to my brother, Bosco?” asked Cam Nguyen, his sizable cheeks looking rosier than usual after he’d dragged me a few feet away where no one could hear us. Cam was in the grade below me and also in the band, and I instantly remembered the incident on Saturday. It was his little brother I’d accidentally scared.
“Oh, listen Cam, I’m sorry if I scared him,” I said. “I thought he and his friends were bullying Jack, but it was all a misunderstanding.”
“Minh’s not a bully,” he said, still furious. “If anyone’s a bully here, it’s you. He hasn’t slept for the last few nights because you scared him so bad.”
“Scared him? But . . . but I didn’t scare him,” I said. “I just talked to him.”
“He said you were talking to a ghost,” he hissed, lowering his voice as he said the word “ghost.”
“His grandpa,” Kristina said, flittering over. “You never actually delivered that message because all the kids ran away scared.”
“That’s true,” I said, nodding. “It was actually your grandpa, now that I’m, uh, thinking of it. He said to tell you—well, actually Minh, but I’m sure you’re a good alternative—that he misses you.”
Cam’s eyes turned dark. “This . . . this is the problem! You go around thinking everyone wants to hear stuff like that, Baylor, but not everyone does,” he said, throwing his hands up. “Especially not a seven-year-old who’s still afraid of the dark. He used to get by with three night-lights, but lately we’ve had to leave all his lights on just so he doesn’t feel scared in his room.”
“Is there a problem here, gentlemen?” asked Mr. Connell, the toad-voiced vice-principal. He scuttled over from the end of the line and gave us each a once-over. “You’re not going to make the last day before break a difficult one for me, are you?”
“No, sir,” Cam said, though he was still glaring at me. “I was just leaving.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said as Cam walked to his table, crushing his brown paper lunch bag in his fist. “Baylor Bosco, I don’t know what’s gotten into you this year, but trouble seems to have taken a liking to you.”
I shrugged. “It’s my calling, I guess.”