As if Reena reads my thoughts, she says, “Leo’s a good guy. He’s a little . . .” She pauses and looks ahead, across the sand. “Troubled,” she finishes.
I nod like I understand, but the truth is that I’m not sure I do. What I do know is that I’m way more comfortable with her. She gets me in a way that Thatcher doesn’t.
“Dying young can do that to people,” says Reena.
And then I look up at her and say, “Tell me about it.”
She laughs. “Yeah, I guess I’m not telling you anything that you haven’t figured out.”
When we get to the edge of the beach, it’s almost completely dark. A girl and a guy are standing by the fire pit—they both have the glow of ghosts, but they’re in normal clothes, too, like Reena.
“Hey, you guys,” says Reena. “Norris, Delia, this is Callie.”
“Hey,” I say, giving them a wave.
Norris I’ve seen before—he’s the guy who was in the graveyard with Leo during the ghost tour. He has an oval-shaped face and a sharp nose; everything about him looks stretched out—tall torso, long legs, and stick-straight brown hair. He has a blue hoodie pulled up over his head, but I can see that his eyes are bright and amused.
The girl, Delia, has those tight curls that always seem to frizz in the Charleston humidity, but hers shine like spun gold—they’re round and thick and perfect. She collects them up into a bun as I smile at her, and she ties a knot into her hair to hold it in place. That’s when I see a black mark on her neck—like Leo and Reena have. It’s just above the collar of her light cotton shirt.
I suddenly remember that I still have this aura around me—but their clothes show normally, without the cloaking glow. I look down at my body self-consciously.
“Don’t worry,” says Delia. “We all had that aura once.”
“It’s very eye-catching,” says Norris with a wry smile.
“Why don’t you guys have it?” I ask.
The three of them share a secretive look but they don’t answer, and I decide not to press the issue. Reena just leads me closer to Norris and Delia, and we sit down with them on a fallen log bench. That’s when I notice that there are other people here—of the non-glowing sort. Living people.
Three guys in T-shirts and shorts and with bare feet are hovering around the start of a fire. I recognize them from the soccer team—they’re my year: Eli, Hunter, and Brian. They’ve got a giant blue cooler and Eli grabs three beers from it. He tosses two to Hunter and Brian, and when they open up the cans, they make that delicious metal pop sound.
I’ll never open a can again, I think, knowing it’s a silly thing to be sad about.
“I know them,” I say to Reena.
“Fun,” she says, her eyes glowing bright in the firelight. “Do you like them?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are they cool?” asks Delia, leaning across Reena’s lap to get in on the conversation. “Are they friends of yours?”
“No,” I say. “I mean, not really, but they’re okay guys. They’re on the soccer team. . . .”
I almost say “with my boyfriend, Nick,” but I stop myself. I don’t want to talk about anything that’s going to bring me down, that’s going to remind me of what I’ve lost when I’m trying so hard to pretend that nothing has really changed.
We’re just a few feet away from Eli, Hunter, and Brian.
I look down at the log where I’m sitting and realize with some surprise that I’m not actually touching it. I’m doing that hover thing again, which I guess is what happens now. I’m remembering sitting, but not actually making contact with my seat. Weird. I notice my skin, how it isn’t touched by the breeze that I know is coming off the water. The trees are moving back and forth, almost like a storm might roll in, but I don’t feel the air. I lean forward a little bit to determine if I can sense the heat from the fire, but I don’t. I wonder if I could walk right through it without a trace of a burn, and I guess I could. Being dead, not having a body to protect or even experience, is so new. Will I ever get used to my senses fading away?
“Y’all, I feel good,” says Delia. She’s sitting to my left, leaning back and looking up at the stars. “My energy is on point tonight.”
“It’s Callie,” says Reena from my right. And I think about energy; maybe that’s my new sense, my new way of feeling.
“Let me get in on that!” says Norris, pushing Delia gently so he can sit next to me.
She laughs and moves over.
I wonder for a moment if I’m like the fire, sharing my warmth. Maybe I have more energy because I’m newly dead, and they’ve been gone for a while. I like the sense of togetherness I have here with these three.
“Do you feel it, Callie?” asks Reena.
“Feel what?”
“We’re sharing energy,” she says. “The four of us, I mean. Can you tell?”
“I feel something,” I say, tuning in to the buzzing current that runs through me, has been running through me since I got here. “But it doesn’t hurt or anything.”
“No, it doesn’t hurt,” says Delia. “It’s nice, actually. Thanks for sharing.”
“No problem,” I say, not sure what I’m doing but glad everyone’s happy. I can hear the crickets going now, hiding in the forest as the waves rumble on the beach.
“God, I wish I could have a beer,” says Norris, pantomiming drinking from a bottle.
“Do we ever eat?” I ask, and I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me sooner.
“No,” says Delia. “It’s the most incredible bummer.”
“Stop, you guys,” says Reena. “If we start talking about food, we’ll want it. Don’t think about it.”
“Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger!” chants Norris.
Delia puts her fingers in her ears and sings, “Lalalalalalala . . .”
It’s too late for me, though. I’m already thinking about the blue- cheese burger from my favorite fancy diner at Hilton Head. I don’t crave it, exactly—not like when I was alive and my mouth would start to water—but I remember it, the way it felt on my tongue and the way it slid down my throat.
“Oh, no,” says Delia, looking at me with a distraught face.
“What?” I ask.
“I can tell you’re remembering food,” she says. “It’s a slippery slope.”
“Thatcher won’t like it,” says Reena ominously.
I meet her gaze, and it’s almost as if she’s challenging me to do something else that Thatcher won’t like. Suddenly she cracks up into laughter, the dare gone. Maybe it was never there. Delia and Norris join in and I smile. “You guys!” I shout. “I got scared that thinking about food was dangerous or something.”
“Only to your sanity,” says Norris. “Just try to put it out of your mind until we figure out a way to get into a body and go for an ice cream.”
“Ice cream . . . oh!” Delia flops down on the log dramatically.
I laugh and pull her up again, feeling a flash of heat that radiates out from where our hands touch to encompass all of me. She didn’t move away, I notice—she’s not like Thatcher. With Reena and Delia and Norris it feels like there are no walls up, no boundaries.
More than that, they see me. They hear me. When I’m haunting, even though I’m with the people I love most in the world, I’m invisible. Right now, I’m not.
We move on to discuss how great it is to be on the beach without getting sandy, since we’re not physically touching it, and then I hear something from over by the fire that gets my attention.
“Dude, have you guys seen Carson Jenkins’s ass lately?” Eli puts down his beer and gestures in a lewd way.
“Yeah,” says Brian. “It’s getting big, and I like it.”