Body and Soul

Lea

Forget choking. I hoped that cookie dough was chock-full of salmonella.

“It’s called a near-death experience. You should try it sometime,” I said sweetly. “Maybe without the ‘near.’”

Lea

I turned to Misty. “So?” I asked briskly.

She nodded, wide-eyed. “Uh, sure.”

I stepped out of the way and let her lead me back into the hall and up the stairs. I couldn’t help noticing the changed photos on the stairwell wall. I was no longer in any of them.

Not that that was entirely shocking. Kevin, who was about ten years younger than Misty’s mom, was obsessed with documenting his new family, which had included Misty and me at one time. He had a bunch of these artsy, wrought-iron picture frames/art pieces all the way up the wall. He changed the photos out about every month, swapping in the latest family images.

This particular selection appeared to be about summer activities. The twins, Owen and Ian, with their older brother, Colin, all in matching water wings. Colin attempting to drink from the hose but mostly spraying his face. Misty and her mom sitting together on the porch swing, talking to each other, their faces serious and their dusty toes dragging across the boards. And some kind of picnic with all of them…and Chris, my ex and Misty’s current boyfriend.

There were a few pictures of Chris, some with him in the background, as I would have been once, and others focused on him.

In the one closest to me, he had Colin on his shoulders and a twin (don’t ask me which was which, I’d never mastered that) wrapped around each ankle. He was pretending to struggle to move forward, but I could tell that beneath the faked strain on his face, he was having fun. His eyes were crinkling up at the edges like he was fighting not to laugh. And behind him, Misty was out of focus, but I could still see her gri

They were happy. Kevin was a good photographer, catching the truth in a moment like that.

“So you and Chris Zebrowski, huh?” I asked, and immediately wished I could pull the words back.

She glanced warily over her shoulder at me, pausing on a step.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, but it wasn’t like that,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s what you said. So what was it like?”

I could see her weighing the moment, deciding whether she should have to answer me or not. After all, who was I to her? “He sees me,” she said. “And I see him.”

I frowned. Huh?“I saw…I mean, I’m sure Alona saw you.” I mean, I’d been a lot of things, but visually impaired was definitely not one of them.

But Misty wasn’t done yet. “Alona…Alona was like this giant storm, you know?” Her voice was distant, like she was seeing something other than the stairway. “You got swept along with her, and after a while you weren’t really sure where you were or who you were except as it related to her. I wasn’t Misty. I was Alona Dare’s best friend. Chris was Alona Dare’s boyfriend.” She shook her head. “Know what I mean?”

Not exactly.

“But Chris and me, we found each other, and it’s real.” Her voice rang with fierceness, and her gaze met mine without hesitation, as if she was daring me to challenge her words. “We see each other for who we are, not as accessories to somebody else.”

In that second, I felt a wave of envy so strong it nearly knocked me backward down the stairs. Not because it was Chris, but to have someone know me like that…I wanted that with a craving I felt in my borrowed bones.

She started up the steps again.

I followed, taking each stair one at a time with my hand on the railing, and wrestled with the mix of emotions churning in me. I’d had Chris in my life, but he’d never looked one-tenth as content as he did in those photos. It hurt, seeing proof that it wasn’t him but me who was flawed.

My eyes stung with tears. Every instinct told me to blame the two of them—Misty and Chris. They had been greedy, selfish, and cruel. They’d done this to me. But how can you deny something when the proof is right in front of you? The truth was, they’d done this regardless of me. I was a nonentity, which somehow hurt more than if it had been a deliberate strike against me.

She reached the top of the stairs and turned to wait for me.

“So why aren’t you wearing his ring?” I asked in a voice that was probably harsher than it should have been. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, either.

“I didn’t say yes yet,” she said, looking at her bare left hand as if making sure the ring hadn’t somehow appeared there suddenly. “I’m eighteen. We’re going to different schools.” She gave a little shrug.

On the top step now, I waited, sensing, hoping, there was more.

“And how am I supposed to say yes to him when Alona is still so upset?” she asked in a small voice. “She’s, like, not at rest because of us.”

I let out a silent breath of relief. I hadn’t lost her completely. I still mattered to her, even if it wasn’t really me who was doing the haunting that had her so concerned. That somehow lifted a burden from my shoulders I hadn’t even known I was carrying.

“Well.” I cleared my throat against the lump of unshed tears. “Let’s go see what we can do about that.”

She gave me an odd look—and why not? Ally Turner had no reason to be emotional about any of this—and gestured for me to walk ahead of her. Her room was the last one at the end of the narrow hall, past the tiny guest room and the former master bedroom that her three brothers now shared. Dr. E. and Kevin had renovated the study downstairs last year, turning it into their room.

Misty’s room looked much the same as when I’d been there last, a couple of months ago. Yeah, I’d visited her a few times after I’d died. Her grandmother’s quilt was still on her bed, rumpled from where Misty had slept beneath it. The television on her dresser blared a rerun of The Hills, and all the dresser drawers hung open from the last time she’d searched them for socks or whatever. She always did that, left the drawers open, arguing that it saved time. Over the years, I’d banged my hip or knee on their sharp edges more times than I could count.

The major difference in her room appeared to be the pile of college stuff—a new comforter still in the plastic, a laundry basket stuffed full of notebooks, folders, and other school supplies, and a stack of plastic plates and utensils—in the corner.

She caught me looking at it. “Millikin in the fall.” She rolled her eyes. “Free tuition because of my mom. But at least I get to live on campus.”

I nodded, knowing that had been the plan for years. I’d been considering going with her. The school had fit my dad’s requirement of being close enough for me to drive home to check on my mom on a regular basis; hence, the car I was supposed to get as a graduation gift. Only, that car had been traded in for a minivan with a car seat for my new half sister, as I’d discovered last month.

I forced away thoughts of my evil stepmother—and her potentially evil spawn—to focus on the task at hand. “This is where you sense her presence most often?” I asked, trying not to squirm at the supreme cheesiness of that line.

But Misty apparently saw nothing amiss in it. She nodded, rubbing her hands over her arms as though chilled.

I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary besides amped up air-conditioning, which I knew was Misty’s standard protocol whenever her mother was out of the house. Dr. E. was very environmentally conscious and probably wouldn’t have installed A/C at all if she could have handled the whining from the other members of her family.

I didn’t see any obvious blurry spots, but seeing ghosts still wasn’t something I was particularly skilled at. So I focused on listening instead, trying to screen out the noise of the television for the sound of whispers or movement nearby, but all that garnered me was Lea