As Dead As It Gets

I was fairly certain that the ghost who’d been in my room—though really she was more than just a ghost, kind of a superghost—was somehow the key to everything that was happening. If she was the source of the buzzing noise, the yellow roses, and the purple dress, then it was fair to speculate that she was the one who’d lured Kendra and Ashleen from their houses in the middle of the night to wander in the woods.

So if she was at the center of it all, the next logical step would be to find out her identity and her story.

It might help to take a closer look at my pictures. “Do you have the card reader?”

Chad wheeled back over to me, card reader in hand, and looked at my screen again. “‘Dead girl in purple dress’?”

“It’s…one of their songs.”

“I never really figured you for the emo death rock type,” he said. “But I guess it makes sense.”

“Thanks,” I said, grabbing the card reader and pushing his chair back toward his own computer. Then I hooked the reader up and inserted the memory card from my camera. The pictures loaded, and I leaned closer to study them.

Nothing stood out to me in the daylight that I hadn’t noticed at night.

But…the white spots…

“Hey, Chad?”

“Yes, Death Rock?” He wheeled over. “Should I just sit here with you for a few hours?”

“Help?” I’d opened Photoshop and loaded one of the pictures of Ashleen and the white spot.

Chad squinted. “This is your best work?” To him, it just looked like a poorly composed picture of a tree.

“No.” I looked closer at the screen. “How do I make it darker?”

“You mean lighter.”

“No, I mean darker.”

“You do know this picture was taken at night, right?”

“Darker, please,” I repeated.

“Image menu…adjust…exposure. Or levels. Play around until you have the extreme, black, ruined photograph of your dreams. Are we done here?”

“Like this?” I used the mouse to move the exposure slider down, keeping my eyes on the white spot.

It worked.

“Yeah, like that,” Chad said. “Now you can’t see anything. Mission accomplished. So, tell me why you’re doing this?”

But I was too busy looking at the picture to answer. The white spot in the picture of Ashleen, faded down, was the exact same ghost I’d seen in my room.

“Live via satellite,” Chad was saying. “It’s Alexis Warren…”

She was still shaking. And she looked at me again.

Then—she moved closer.

I jerked away from the desk and pushed off of Chad’s back, slamming him forward into the desk and shooting my own chair across the room.

“Turn it off!” I said. “Turn the computer off!”

“What—why would you—my stomach!”

I ran back and hit the power button on the underside of the monitor.

“I hope you didn’t break my ribs,” Chad said. “I mean, I’d kind of heard you were supposed to be mental, but I didn’t know you were violent.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, breathing heavily and not taking my eyes off the darkened monitor. “I thought I saw a spider.”

“Um, okay,” he said, wheeling his chair away. Under his breath he whispered, “Crazy.”

After a minute, I went back and disco

“Um, excuse me. You’ve used computers before, right?” Chad asked, looking up from his screen. “You know how to go to the menu to turn the power off? And how to eject a memory card? Are you trying to corrupt the hard drive?”

I couldn’t answer. My fingers fumbled getting the card out of the reader and sticking it back in my camera. I went to the menu and selected erase all.

There was probably important information in those photos. Clues that could help me figure out what that thing was, and how it was co

But I couldn’t bear to let it live in my memory chip.

I looked at Chad, stuffing the camera back in my bag. “Did I hurt you?”

The way he looked at me, I knew he knew something was wrong.

“Nah,” he said, his voice a shade gentler than usual. “You’re just lucky my rock-solid six-pack broke the impact.”

* * *

I completely ignored whatever my first period teacher was talking about, and spent the whole class sketching what I could remember of the purple dress. When the bell rang, I went over to the 200 wing, where my sister and her friends had lockers.

Keeping an eye out for Kasey, I went up behind Mimi Laird, whose bouncing red mane of curls made her visible from a hundred feet away. I tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around, obviously surprised to see me.

“Can we talk for a minute?” I asked.

Mimi glanced around. If I had to put a word to it, I’d say she looked nervous. (Which further confirmed my suspicions that the whole ex–Sunshine Club thought I was a murderer.)

“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Not here.…In the bathroom, maybe?” I didn’t want Kasey seeing us.

She put on a brave little smile and followed me. When I unfolded my drawing, she visibly relaxed.

“That’s…nice,” she said. “Are you into fashion now?” She cast a doubtful look at my non-fashionista outfit—jeans, T-shirt, and a hoodie.

“No,” I said. “I saw this dress somewhere and I’m trying to figure out where it came from.”

Mimi knew more about fashion than anyone I’d ever met. She read every magazine and had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the designers and trends.

She made a skeptical face. “Where it came from?”

“Like, any particular store or whatever?”

Mimi quirked her mouth up. “Um…I don’t know. Like, literally thousands of dresses come out every season. And a lot of designers did stuff that looked like that.”

“Did? What do you mean?”

“Nobody’s done tulip sleeves for two years,” she said. “You…weren’t going to try to wear this to prom, were you? Because I’m sure Kasey and Adrie

“No,” I said. “I just liked it.”

Mimi nodded slowly, with the kind of caution you’d use around an unstable person. “Well, I’d say that style’s two years old, at least.”

“At least?” I said. “So it could be, like, ten years old?”

She bit her lip and looked down at the dress. “No. Two to three years, max. If that helps.”

“It does, actually,” I said. It gave me a window to look into. “Thanks. And…could you not mention this to Kasey?”

“Um…sure,” she said. “Anytime.”

I stopped at home after school to drop off my backpack and have a snack before Brighter Path. As I was sitting on the couch, with the TV droning on as background noise, the front door opened and slammed shut.

I sat up to see Kasey in the entryway. She left her backpack in the foyer and came over to the couch. Then she just stared at me.

“Um, hi,” I said.

“What is it, Lexi?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Why would you go to Mimi for help instead of asking me?”

I tried to hide my a

“Don’t be mad at her,” Kasey said. “She didn’t tell me anything specific. She just said I should check on you.”

“Great,” I said. “Now Mimi’s gossiping about me.”

“It’s not like that,” Kasey said. “Mimi wouldn’t gossip about you. She’s just worried.”

“Why would she worry about me?” I asked. “I didn’t ask her to.”

Kasey rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to ask your friends to worry about you. That’s just what they do. It’s why they’re your friends.”

Did Mimi really consider herself my friend?

I’d certainly given up thinking of her that way. I’d lumped her in with the rest of the Sunshine Club girls—the ones who avoided me.

“If you need help with something, I’ll help you,” Kasey said. “I’m your sister.”

She sat forward in her chair, her hair hanging in two loose braids over her shoulders, her jaw set, and a fierce look in her eyes.