“I am,” I interrupted. “I just can’t be seen, you know, talking to myself.”
His shoulders slumped. “So it’s true . . . no one can see me. Except you? But—why?” About fifty emotions crossed his face, from disbelief to confusion, before he finally settled on accusatory. “What makes you special?”
“Wow. You’re charming, you know that?”
“I am when I’m not scared out of my mind, Miss Day.”
I winced. Even though I was walking at a pretty fast pace, he was keeping up on his long legs without even breaking a sweat. There was no way I’d outpace him. Sometimes, I hated being short.
Often, actually.
On top of my father’s funeral, Benji Andor’s ghost was something I didn’t need.
But . . . I couldn’t ignore him, either.
Especially hearing his voice crack like that, begging for me to see him because—
My dad would tell me to help him. My dad would say it was our job, our duty, our responsibility. A responsibility I hadn’t risen to in about ten years. Not since I left Mairmont. And of course I felt like I had to now, because if Dad was here, he would have.
I stopped at the street corner, and decided, well, to make my dear dead dad proud, and spun on my heels to face Benji. He came to an abrupt stop a few inches away, and I realized just how silly I probably looked to him from his angle. I didn’t care. “You’re a ghost,” I started. “A spirit. Working through a post-living experience.”
“Working through a post-living—what?” Baffled, he ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m not dead. This is a bad dream. A nightmare. I’ll wake up and—”
“Everything will be exactly the same,” I interrupted. “Because you won’t wake up.”
“No—no.”
His voice wound tight again, like Alice’s used to when she began to have a panic attack. I’d never encountered a ghost this adamant about being alive before. When I was a child, every ghost that came looking for me knew they were dead. It wasn’t a hard leap to make, but Benji Andor seemed to be the kind of straitlaced guy who dealt in facts and figures instead of midnight ghost stories and myths.
And I couldn’t believe I was doing this.
“Mr. Andor,” I said, because Benji or Ben sounded too informal, and I wanted to keep as much distance as I could. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not dead—”
I punched my fist straight through his chest.
“That tingles,” he murmured, frowning down at my fist that should’ve been massaging his heart in his chest if he were alive.
“See?” I pointed out. “Dead.”
“I can’t be. I don’t—I don’t feel dead.”
I removed my fist. Touching a ghost tingled for me, too. It felt cold, and a bit crackly—like my fingers had fallen asleep. “Not even inside? Not even a little?”
He ignored my very funny joke. “I can’t be dead because I don’t remember dying, thank you very much. And ghosts don’t exist. It’s scientifically proven.”
“Is it now.”
“Yes.”
“Then, buddy, I’m not sure what to tell you.”
We came to the roundabout in the middle of town. There was a green park in the middle with a white gazebo, and a man who looked like my old orchestra teacher on the steps practicing a rousing rendition of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’？” on his cello. He was really tearing up the strings.