Aprilynne Pike - Life After Theft

I shrugged.

She sighed dramatically. “Come with me.” I followed her down a hallway and into the main foyer, where she backed up against a wall and gave me a cheesy, toothy grimace—more sarcasm than smile. She gestured grandly to her left at an eleven-by-fourteen framed picture of herself.

“So . . . your parents paid for the school?” I asked. Maybe it was the only way they’d let this psycho in.

She rolled her eyes and pointed a long, fake fingernail at a small bronze plaque beneath the portrait.

IN MEMORY OF KIMBERLEE SCHAFFER

I glanced at her, then back at the photo. “That’s really funny.” I made myself look her in the eyes, my best fake smile plastered into place. “You almost had me. Ha-ha. Joke on the new guy. That’s really good. Now if you’re finished, I have to go to class.” Preferably before everyone starts staring again.

“Can I come?” she asked all chipper, like she hadn’t just pulled the world’s lamest joke on me. Pretending to be a dead girl—that was seriously messed up. And stupid.

I’m such a moron.

“No, it’s school. You go to your class; I’ll go to mine.” I knew I should feel flattered that a hot girl wanted anything to do with me, but there’s a saying about what you don’t do with crazy people.

Ever.

She jumped in front of me. “Listen, Jeff.” She said my name like it was a bad word. “You don’t get it. I’m dead. Ask anyone. I’ve been stuck for a year and a half and no one has been able to see or hear me except you.”

“Look, your little trick worked, Kim. Isn’t that—”

“Kimberlee.”

“What?”

“Kimberlee. With two e’s. No one calls me Kim.”

Unbelievable. “Forget it. Just leave me alone, okay?” I stepped around her and continued walking. Maybe I could blend in with the other sweater-vests all over the place and get away. Sadly, this wasn’t my old, overcrowded public high school, and disappearing would take more work than I was used to despite the matching uniforms.

“Wait. Please?”

I didn’t.

She trotted alongside me. “What class do you have?”

“Like I’m going to tell you.”

“I’ll help you find it.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I stopped and turned to her. “Then you could get me totally lost and ditch me. A special welcome for the new guy. Just leave me alone!”

A tall brunette edged away from me like a first-grader who had just learned about boy cooties. “What a dork,” she said, loud enough for everyone within ten feet to hear her.

“Really, Jeff,” Kimberlee said, far too calmly. “You should stop yelling at me. People are going to think you’re schizo.”

I looked down at my schedule and pretended Kimberlee wasn’t there.

“You gotta go upstairs for Bleekman’s classroom.”

I gritted my teeth, and hurried up the stairs hoping I could lose her. In the hallway I slowed down and counted off room numbers.

204.

205.

206.

Damn. She was standing outside room 207.

“Clever boy. You found it all by yourself.”

There must be an elevator . . . somewhere. I let my eyes slide by her and walked into the half-full classroom, hurrying to plant myself in the last seat on the back row.

“I wouldn’t sit there if I were you. That’s Langdon’s spot,” Kimberlee said, sounding almost bored.

Ignore, ignore, ignore.

“Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I kept my head down and pulled out a notebook as more students filed in, quickly filling the remaining seats.

“Dude. If you’re not out of my desk by the time I count to two, I personally guarantee your life will end before lunch hour.”

I looked up at what appeared to be a non-green version of the Incredible Hulk.

“One. One and a half . . .”

I jumped up from the desk so fast I cracked my knee against one of the legs and had to bite off a yelp. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Didn’t know.”

“Liar!” Kimberlee yelled from across the room, where she was lounging on a windowsill.

Shut up! I glared at her and looked for another seat. The only one left that wasn’t in the front row was over by Kimberlee’s windowsill.

I sat in the front row.

The bell rang and Mr. Bleekman rose from his desk. He was a perfect caricature of every English teacher on TV: tall, painfully thin, with a comb-over sprayed crispy, and thick glasses. Finally, some normalcy. He stood in front of my desk and studied my name tag. “Mr. Clayson, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Bleekman and Kimberlee corrected in stereo.

I refused to even look at her. “Yes, sir,” I repeated.

“Take notes for now, but stay after and I’ll give you the material you’ll need to catch up.”

I nodded as Kimberlee walked over and plunked herself down on top of my notebook. “I’ve taken this class already. I’ll help you.”

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Mr. Clayson?”

“Could you please tell Kim to get off my desk, sir?”

“Excuse me?” Bleekman asked, looking right past Kimberlee and staring at me like I’d sprouted an extra head.

I glanced at Kimberlee for just a second. Something was seriously wrong. There was no way this teacher was part of the joke. “Oh, shit,” I said, the words slipping out before my brain caught up enough to stop me.

Bleekman’s eyes widened. “Mr. Clayson. I will let you off with a warning because this is your first day. But in the future, any use of profanity at Whitestone Academy will result in detention. Do you understand?”

I gaped at Kimberlee, unwilling to believe she could possibly be telling the truth.

“I told you,” she said, studying her fake nails. “No one can see or hear me but you.” Her eyes flicked to Mr. Bleekman. “You’d better say ‘yes, sir,’ before Bleeker has a coronary.”

“Yes, sir,” I said quickly, snapping my gaze back to the front of the room.

Bleekman stared at me for a few seconds as the rest of the class snickered. He finally looked away and started droning on about Victor Hugo.

I waited a few minutes for everyone to turn their attention away from me. “You’re not joking anymore, are you?” I hissed at Kimberlee through clenched teeth.

“Never was,” she said at full volume.

No one even glanced in our direction.

“What do I have to do to get you to stop acting like the freak you are?” She paused. “You want me to walk through a wall?”

I glared at her but refused to snap at the bait. This can’t be real.

She slid off my desk. “No, I mean it. If I walk through that wall, will you believe I’m dead?”

I rolled my eyes. But I nodded.

She stuck her nose in the air and lifted an eyebrow. Her eyes never left me as she walked to the wall and, without slowing, slid right through it.

“I’M HOME,” I YELLED. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been so happy to see my own house. After Bleekman’s class—and seeing Kimberlee walk through the wall—my head basically exploded. I still couldn’t digest what I’d seen, or figure out how it could be real. I didn’t believe in ghosts! Somehow, for some reason, I was hallucinating; Kimberlee was a figment of my imagination—and that meant ignoring her for the rest of the day.

Easier said than done. She followed me everywhere and got louder and louder. By the time I dropped my schedule card full of signatures in the basket at the front office I had a pounding headache and a ghostly companion.

“Jeff, there you are.” My mom sniffed as she came into the room. Her eyes were red and wet.

“What’s wrong?”