BACK INSIDE THE HOUSE, THE kids were all settled in the family room as the adults putzed around in the kitchen.
“Mom and Dad will be here closer to dinner,” Mom said to Uncle Glenn. “Aunt Hilda’s taking her sweet time getting ready.”
“Of course she is,” chirped Uncle Horty from the table. I wondered if Aunt Hilda and Uncle Horty had ever spent a long time with each other. Surely their paths had crossed here and there at various family events, but it seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, like two storms set to converge into a hurricane of unpleasantness.
“Ella, Elllllla, Elllllllaaaa,” sang Oli, who was playing with Ella in front of the TV. She was chucking blocks at his head, and he was swatting them away.
“Oli, seriously?” Gillie said from the couch. “Could you be more annoying?”
“Oh, sorry I’m playing with our baby cousin, Gillie!” he said back. “Sorry I actually want to spend time with my family.”
She rolled her eyes. “You can spend time with the family and not be such an annoying freak at the same time,” she said.
“Do you think I’m an annoying freak, Ella? Do youuu, Ellaaaa?” he said.
“Oli!” Aunt Cathy snapped from the kitchen, a bright pink Band-Aid over her eyebrow. “Don’t say that word in front of Ella!”
“What word?”
“ ‘Freak!’ We don’t want her learning words like that.”
“She’s never going to remember that word,” he said. “It’s not even that bad of a word.”
“Did I ask you for your parenting advice, Oli? No. I didn’t. Have you raised two children and know what’s best for them? No. You haven’t. Don’t say that word again.”
I looked at Kristina and snickered. She and the colonel were leaning against the wall near the kitchen, so they could hear each conversation perfectly. Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table next to Uncle Horty, inches away from his face, studying his every wrinkle.
I motioned in their direction to Kristina. She glanced at them and grimaced.
“Charlie, what are you doing?” she asked.
“How is his skin so tight for such an old man?”
Kristina and I heard a commotion from the other side, and I made a face at her. I hadn’t even realized I was tuned out. I didn’t think much about it at home thanks to the various protections in place. I squeezed the amulet under my shirt, amazed at how quickly it had helped me.
“I think . . . I think that’s Horty’s sister,” she said.
“It’s his wife,” the colonel corrected her.
“She’s complaining at the moment. Delivering a message, ironically, from the other ghosts wanting to deliver a message. Saying you’ve been tuning them out too much recently. They haven’t had a chance of getting through.” Kristina smiled. “I think that means the amulet has really been helping you, though. But, oh wow, she’s a talker. Going on about how it’s your life’s purpose to deliver healing messages to help people, not to spend all your time traipsing around other people’s dreams like some kind of Peeping Tom.” She rolled her eyes. “Listen, lady, Baylor can deliver any and all messages at his discretion.”
I could hear the woman talking back in the same way you might hear a muffled conversation through the thin walls of a cheap hotel.
“Well, if you don’t like it, you can take that up with the Higher Powers,” Kristina growled back, her body highlighted in a faint blue glow, growing more intense as she said every furious word. “Quite frankly, your opinion has as much value as a pile of demon dung, and if you want to have even a glimmer of a chance of Baylor delivering your message to Horty, I suggest you silence yourself now.”
By the time she finished, she was hovering several inches off the ground, illuminated in a swirling blue energy that eagerly lapped off her in flares and bursts, like she was commanding a small but vigorous ocean. The light slowly faded away, and she sank back to the earth, looking a bit embarrassed as she tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.
“Now that’s an O’Brien woman!” Charlie hollered, standing up from the table and pointing at Kristina. “That’s it, girl. You tell ’em!”
Kristina couldn’t blush, but had she been alive, she would have been burning red from Charlie’s compliments and the colonel’s proud smile.
“Baylor, what are you doing?” Gillie said from behind her phone.
“Huh?”
“You’re totally spazzing!” she said, sounding interested for the first time all day. She put down her phone and looked at me in amazement. “Was that . . . were you just . . . ?”
Now it was my turn to blush. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I’m so used to talking to ghosts at home. Sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Was . . . was that”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“was that Kristina?”
I looked at her overly made-up face, her cheeks shiny and pink, her eyes dark with ashy blue shadow, and I nodded. “Yeah.”
She squealed. “Oh wow,” she said. “That was so cool. My friends are going to freak!”
“Gillie!” Aunt Cathy barked. “What did I just say to your brother about that word?”
“Sorry,” she said, looking at her mom and sounding zero percent sorry. “But Baylor was just channeling Kristina, and it was awesome.” She turned back to me. “You have no idea, Baylor, but my friends think you’re, like, the coolest person ever. When they found out I was your cousin, they nearly died.” She covered her mouth and giggled. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. But you know what I mean. My friend Erin is, like, the biggest Bayliever around.” My cheeks burned. “She checks this crazy website all the time, BaylieversUnited.com, have you heard of it?”
Somehow, my cheeks burned more, hot enough to make a pan sizzle.
“Um, yeah, I have,” I said.
“Apparently some lady has been posting articles about you. Did you know that?” she said, her eyes wide and hopeful. “Have you read them?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s not a very good reporter, though.”
“Oh, totally not,” Gillie said. “But still, it’s pretty cool having people write about you.”
My mom must have noticed me nearly drowning in my own saliva because she chimed in to pivot the conversation in another direction.
“Have you guys seen Baylor’s gifts for us?” she said happily, though I could tell from the shape of her eyes that she was slightly concerned for me. “I’ll show you the one outside first! Follow me.”
She led the way to the backyard through the door by the kitchen table. Uncle Horty stayed put, saying he was still feeling a bit too fragile to move, but everyone else went out to see the stone I had made to mark Kristina’s presence in the world. It’d bothered me that she was such a big part of our lives but there was nothing to indicate as much. With the help of Madame Nadirah, I’d commissioned a memorial stone that read: For Kristina, our beloved daughter and sister, whose love lives on in our hearts.
“I hate to ask,” Aunt Cathy said, “but how did . . . how did she get named?”
“I don’t know, actually,” I said. “It just kind of happened.” I turned to Kristina. “I think you said Mom was going to name me Kristina if I’d been a girl, so the glove just sort of fit, I guess.”
“That’s true,” Mom said, her voice high. “Yes. Of course, I wouldn’t have spelled it that way, though. I would have spelled it Christina, with a C.”
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
“I have no idea where the K came from,” Mom said, shrugging. “It kind of fits, though. It makes the name seem . . . oh, I don’t know . . . mystical?”
“That’s not what we were going for,” I said, looking at Kristina in shock. She looked a bit dazed herself, actually. Charlie, standing behind her, had his fist over his mouth, stifling his laughter. “I think . . . it just made more sense with a K when I was younger!”
Charlie burst into laughter.
“The O’Briens aren’t the smartest men around, I’ll give you that much,” he said through his giggles, slapping his knee. “I’ll give you that much.”
“Shut up, Charlie!” I said, feeling horrible. “Sorry, Kristina. I had no idea.”
Jack, who’d been standing next to me, suddenly lunged away, realizing ghosts were nearby.
She shrugged. “It really doesn’t matter. I never write my name anyway.”
“Who’s Charlie?” Mom asked.
“Don’t ask,” I said, crossing my arms across my chest. “It’s freezing. Let’s go back inside.”
Charlie, through his laughter, sputtered, “Y-you’d never know it was freezing, based on those—those burning cheeks of yours, kiddo!”
Once we’d resettled inside the house, we somehow still had another hour to kill before dinner was served at four. Gillie turned the TV on and started flipping through the channels while Jack and I lazily watched it. Oli and Ella had moved on to coloring, which really meant that Oli had to repeatedly pluck crayons out of her mouth as she tried to suck on each one. Meanwhile, the adults had opened the first bottle of red wine and were sitting around the table catching up.
It was pretty boring for a while until Gillie flipped to a random news channel, and Jack, Gillie, and I gasped at the same time. A big photo of me was staring back at us from the screen.
“What is it?” Mom said, standing up and running over to look at the TV, wineglass still in hand.
“. . . the young man from Keene, New Hampshire, who claims to have the ability to talk to dead people. He’s made headlines in recent weeks for his involvement in the disappearance of Rosalie Timmons, and he’s making headlines again for his involvement in the missing persons case of Helena Papadopoulos and Archie Perceval, the teenagers from Florida who are believed to be missing at sea for several days now . . .”
“No!” Mom shrieked, spilling wine down her hand and across the hardwood floor. “Off! Off! Off!” Gillie fumbled with the remote, desperately trying to find the power button after her aunt had yelled at her for the first time ever. Meanwhile, I was sitting in shock after seeing my face pop up on TV—on a national news channel, no less.
Aunt Cathy rushed to the room with a roll of paper towels. She wiped off Mom’s hand first before crouching to mop up the liquid on the floor. Mom was also in shock, trying to make sense of not only seeing her son on the national news (again), but also having a son who possessed a gift so beyond her ability to comprehend that she was paralyzed altogether.
I turned to Dad. “You should refill Mom’s glass,” I said, my voice colder than ice.
He seemed confused, not having seen or heard the news report, but he grasped my tone and quickly got up, wine bottle in hand, to replenish the glass and guide her back to the kitchen. Uncle Horty stared at me, his expression pleasant but curious, while Aunt Cathy and Uncle Glenn pretended nothing had happened at all.
Jack, his eyebrows nearly to his hairline, was staring at me like I was a ghost, while Gillie was smirking at me with a mix of admiration and jealousy. Oli had ignored the whole scene thanks to Ella’s Crayola craving.
Thankfully, Grandma Renee and Grandpa By decided to show up with Aunt Hilda not a moment too late. The ring of the doorbell cut through the silence, and I hopped up.
“I’ll get it,” I yelped.
I ran to the door and threw it open to find the three of them staring at me happily.
“Happy Thanksgiving!” Grandma Renee said, holding a crumbly apple pie in her hands. “Are you ready to eat?”
I shook my head. “I think everyone’s ready to throw up, actually.”