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I was only half listening. I was still thinking about the owl—the way its wings cut into the gray winter sky. The way you could see its knobby feet tucked up against its body. Cold, miserable envy consumed me.
You might wonder why a person who’s afraid to even look at a photograph would go out specifically to take them. But my afternoons with Jared weren’t really about pictures. They were about hanging out with someone who knew me—but not too well. Who was interested in me—but not too interested. He was kind of the only person I could bear to be around. Besides, he was the only non–blood relative who ever asked me to do anything.
Even if I didn’t want to take photos, I still needed the air and the distance from my suffocating home and my suffocating (though well-meaning) family. I always brought my camera, because I was afraid that if I didn’t, Jared would think I was weird and stop inviting me to go with him. So it was basically a prop. My entrance fee. I rarely took pictures, but I got pretty good at faking it—taking just enough to avoid suspicion.
But thinking about the swooping arc of the owl’s flight made me reckless. I raised the camera to my eye, and Jared fell silent and wandered away, as if he knew this was something I needed to do by myself.
First, I aimed my lens at the sky, toward the spindly, bald branches of the trees. I liked how they seemed to grow from the bottom of the frame like blades of grass.
I lowered the shot slightly and took another exposure. Then I let it fall a little lower and took another. I kept checking for the first hint of a ghost, but there was nothing. Relief washed over me, and I fell into a rhythm as natural to me as breathing—click, move, click, move. Jared was a few feet away, and we were like two dancers onstage—always aware of each other, but focused on our own work first.
Gradually, I forgot to worry about ghosts.
Then, as we rounded a bend in the trail, I scrolled back through the frames and glanced down at the display screen.
There was a person in my photos.
It took my brain a moment to catch up and process the sight of him: a little boy in a faded winter jacket, dark blond hair combed neatly across his forehead. He couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. The knees of his light brown pants were muddy, like he’d fallen. He was looking off the path into the distance.
In the next picture, he stared at the lens through angelically big blue eyes, like a young Carter Blume—who was kind of the last person on the planet I needed to be thinking about at that moment.
In the third photo, he was gone.
“Um…” I said, suddenly feeling totally off balance, like one of my legs had shrunk six inches. I glanced at Jared to see if he’d noticed anything, but he was honing in on the gnarled trunk of an old tree.
I looked around again—and heard the sound of rustling leaves in the distance.
I can’t hear the ghosts I see in pictures. I can only see them. So if I’d heard the boy walking—could he have been real? He certainly looked like a real boy. No oozing anything or deathly gray skin. Nothing seemed to be wrong with him—except that he was out in the wilderness all by himself.
“What’s up?” Jared asked.
“I—I think I might have seen someone,” I said. “A little kid.”
Jared’s eyebrows went up. “Out here? Alone?”
“Maybe.” I gazed doubtfully down the path. “Do you think we should look for him?”
“Of course,” he said, capping his lens and letting the camera hang around his neck. “Let’s go.”
I tried not to notice the sensation of his hand pressing gently on my lower back as we walked.
Jared and I had met when we were finalists in a photography competition back in September. Even after a few months of hanging out two or three times a week, we’d never come close to having any kind of romantic episode. The couple of times he’d dropped a hint, I’d replied with a carefully clueless response. And things never went further than that.
Which, honestly, was just the way I liked it. A rebound relationship was out of the question. Just the thought of being close to anyone but Carter made my whole body go numb.
We rounded a corner. Still no sign of the boy. My heart sank at the prospect of yet another crushing paranormal smackdown. If I’d been alone, I would have stopped.
But Jared was hurrying now, urging me along. “It’s too cold for a little kid to be outside.”
We walked so fast that I began to get hot under all of my layers, and my worn old thrift-store satchel-slash-purse banged against my side painfully. Jared kept searching the distance, as if the boy would pop into view at any moment. His unquestioning belief half convinced me that it had been a real live child I’d seen, not some ghostly apparition.
Call me foolish, but I felt like if I wanted it bad enough, he really would appear on the trail ahead of us.
Only he never did.
“Wait.” I slowed down. “I think maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw.”
Jared turned to me, his face flushed pink from exertion. “What does that mean? You imagined seeing a little kid?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it was a shadow.”
“But I’m sure I heard something ahead. Didn’t you?” He stood still. “Listen—there it is again.”
And sure enough, I heard snapping twigs.
A surge of hope traveled through my chest. “Okay,” I said.
But as we went around the next curve, we stopped.
Ahead on the path was an opossum. It saw us and scurried noisily away into the brush.
“Oh,” Jared said.
Before he could say more, I lifted my camera and took two pictures. As I looked down at the readout, all the muscles in my body tensed.
There he was. Five feet away, staring up at us.
The little boy.
So he was a ghost.
Of course he was.
I veered to the outside edge of the path, well clear of the ghost, then swung around and clicked off a few more exposures. As I looked at them, the breath caught in my throat.
The back of the boy’s head was caved in.
What did you expect?
“Alexis? Are you all right?” Jared stood on the other side of the boy. Then he walked straight forward, right through him.
I stiffened.
Jared pulled his jacket around himself tightly. “I just got cold. Did you feel that breeze?”
That’s what happens when you pass through a ghost. I nodded and hugged myself, even though I was still sweaty after rushing up the trail.
“The sun’s going down, I guess,” he said.
I didn’t want to stick around and talk about the weather. The only thing worse than seeing dead people in photos is them seeing me and getting in my face. I grabbed Jared’s arm and pulled him along with me, away from the little boy.
After a hundred yards or so, I stopped and stuck my shaking hands into my pockets. “I was wrong,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you when you were working.”
“There’s no need to apologize.” Jared’s voice was soft and urgent. “Alexis…I’m worried about you.”
I was embarrassed and miserable and still freaked out by the sight of the boy’s caved-in head. “I don’t know—I’m sorry—”
Jared stood right in front of me, his brown eyes as gentle as a deer’s, and put his hands on my shoulders. “It’s okay. Calm down. It’s okay.”
Without meaning to, I burst into tears.
Ugh.
I never would have done this before, not in a million years—cried like a maniac in a public place, especially in front of someone else. It was as though, along with losing control over my pictures, I’d lost control over myself.
Jared pulled me close, let me rest my head against his shoulder, and stroked my hair with his cold, gloveless hands.
“Cry if you need to,” he said. “It’s all right.”
A second later, I swallowed hard and backed away.