Hereafter, Page 2

  Cries of both joy and fear rose up from the crowd that had gathered on the grass embankment and the bridge above us. A man, the one who had pulled the boy from the water, stretched the boy out upon the muddy red riverbank. As I rose out of the water and walked onto the shore, I could see the man flutter his hands over the boy’s body, checking for some sign of life.

  The boy instantly rolled over, coughed once, and began to vomit water. Audible sighs of relief rose up from the crowd. Their faces were illuminated by headlights from the cars parked in a jumble on the grass as well as on the bridge. The onlookers’ expressions varied from tense to excited to scared.

  “Josh. Josh,” they called like a chorus.

  They all seemed to know his name.

  It was then that I noticed the multicolored flash of lights coming from the emergency vehicles that had formed their own sort of crowd behind the bystanders on the bridge. Within what seemed like only seconds, two uniformed paramedics had made their way down the embankment and knelt beside the boy, doing their own, more effective sort of fluttering over him. Within less than a minute after that, the boy—my boy, if I was honest in my suddenly possessive thoughts—was placed on a gurney and hoisted across the bank, then up toward an ambulance. The crowd surged forward with the paramedics, and I lost sight of him.

  That should have been the end of the ordeal. Yet I couldn’t stand still. I couldn’t watch strangers take away the only living person to see me. My boy. My Josh.

  Determined, I pushed through the crowd. They couldn’t see or feel me, of course, but I still had to fight to find a clear path.

  By some miracle I made it through. I shoved in between two figures and suddenly found myself at the side of the gurney just as the paramedics began to raise its wheels so they could slide it and its passenger into the ambulance.

  I leaned over the boy. He looked pale in the moonlight, his face gaunt and drawn. For some reason I had to hold back a sob.

  “Josh?” I moaned, unsure of what to do. Unsure of everything.

  He opened his eyes then. Dark-colored eyes—too dark a color to identify at night. He looked at me and held my gaze in the moment before the paramedics moved him out of my sight, possibly forever.

  “Joshua,” he croaked, his voice rough from the river water. “Call me Joshua.”

  Then the gurney was shoved into the ambulance, the doors slammed shut, and he was gone.

  I stood there on the riverbank, motionless. Some of the onlookers remained after the departure of the ambulance, milling around to discuss what I could only assume was the near tragedy. I barely noticed when the last member of the crowd left and the last set of headlights disappeared into the darkness of the night. I wasn’t really paying enough attention to hear or see anything going on around me.

  What I saw instead were his eyes, looking right into mine. What I heard was his voice . . . talking to me? Yes, I’m sure he’d been talking to me. No one had asked him to identify himself as they loaded him into the ambulance. He’d had no reason to give his name to anyone but me. Most of the crowd seemed to know him. Maybe they’d known him all his life. Maybe they’d sensed, as I had, how important he was.

  Of course I knew his importance now. I knew it deep in my suddenly very awake core. I knew nothing about him—not his age, his last name, the way his voice would sound if it spoke my name. But I knew things had changed for me. They had changed forever.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Chapter

  Three

  Two days passed.

  Their passage, although probably not remarkable to the living, was extraordinary to me. I’d never really had a reason to count the passing days. The sun’s rising and setting had no effect on me except to obscure my vision at night. I didn’t need sleep, and my lack of company in daylight didn’t change at sunset. When the nightmares had begun—wrenching me from wakefulness into unconscious terror and then unfamiliar daylight—I’d lost the will to mark time altogether.

  Until now.

  Now I couldn’t stop counting each lonely moment as it passed.

  On the first night, while I watched the ambulance drive away, I’d thought fleetingly of following it on foot. But I’d ultimately rejected the idea. Even though I could travel instantly through space and time in my nightmares, I hadn’t discovered a way to do so while awake. I still moved at a normal human pace, and I could probably walk for years before I found the hospital where the ambulance had taken the boy.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until after the last car had left the riverbank that I could’ve snuck into an empty backseat, maybe gone with the driver to the hospital . . . and then what? The idea of stowing away with a living stranger on the slim possibility that I would end up at a hospital, wandering lost through its corridors in search of another stranger—well, I felt silly and irrational just imagining it.

  Of course, milling around the scene of my death didn’t seem very rational, either.

  From the bank of the river, I’d watched as police barricaded the gap in the bridge above me. I’d looked on as a wrecking crew, completely oblivious to their audience of one, towed the boy’s sodden car from the water. While these activities took place, I hardly questioned my desire to stay here—really, who wouldn’t be interested in such things?

  But after the activity had ended, each subsequent moment I’d spent at this site made me feel more and more foolish.

  For a while I’d tried to justify my need to linger. I told myself that I just needed some time to reorganize my thoughts before I began wandering aimlessly again.

  Deep down, however, I knew the truth. I knew the real reason I didn’t leave this river.

  I didn’t want to wander aimlessly anymore. I wanted to wander with a very specific aim. I wanted to wander to someone.

  Someone who had nearly died (or actually died; I couldn’t be sure) in this river. Someone who, in doing so, had changed me irrevocably.

  There were signs, other than my unwillingness to leave, that a change had taken place. First, there were what I came to think of as “flashes.” I would be walking through the woods beside the river, or along the bank, and a flash would happen. An image—bright and colorful, and full of smell and taste—would flash across my mind and then disappear as fast as it had arrived.

  Like my nightmares, the flashes occurred unexpectedly. But instead of terror and pain, the flashes brought something infinitely more appealing: what I could only assume were memories of my life before death.

  Nothing significant had appeared yet: a black ribbon fluttering in the wind; the sound of a tire squealing on pavement; the earthy smell of a spring storm. No people, no names, no fleshed-out scenes to give me some clue as to who I was or why I’d died. Nor did I really experience the tastes and smells. The things that occurred in the flashes were more like ghosts of those sensations. But they were enough.

  However little I saw, I became more and more certain that these images were mine. My memories from life, breaking free of the fog that death had wrapped around my mind.

  And it was because of him. Because of his eyes on mine. Because of his hand upon my cheek, placed there as naturally and easily as it would have been had we been made of the same stuff. Skin, blood, bone. Breathing, seeing, touching.

  The mere memory of his skin on mine made me tingle. But not some fleeting, imaginary tingle—this was a sensation. An actual, physical sensation. And the next, most miraculous, change in my new existence.

  The first time I’d felt something had occurred on the night of the accident. While I stood on the riverbank watching the lights of the ambulance fade, I’d become aware of an odd, pins-and-needles sensation in the soles of my feet. I stared down at them, confused and afraid. Suddenly, I could feel the mud between my toes and the tickling of the dry grass upon my bare feet. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the sensation had ended. />
  The event had stunned me, to say the least. For so long I’d been desperate for a waking, physical sensation. I’d wanted to feel something, anything. Yet I could place my hand on an object, press myself against it, and it would never matter. I felt nothing. Nothing but a dull pressure that prevented me from going further.

  My afterlife had proved all the supernatural stereotypes wrong. I couldn’t walk through walls or float amorphously from room to room. The living people who came close to me didn’t walk through my body but instead seemed to move unthinkingly around me, as though I were just an obstacle in their path.

  The only thing I could feel, could affect, was myself. I could touch my hair, my dress, my own skin. After a while this exception provided me no comfort. Actually, it became more of a big, hideous joke: I was trapped in a prison of one. It was as if I existed in my own little dimension, unseen and unheard by others but maddeningly aware of my surroundings.

  I have no words to describe the way that made me feel: not only invisible, but also without the power of smell, taste, even touch. Then, how to describe the way I felt when I realized my only physical sensations occurred in the nightmares through which I reexperienced my death?

  Or, alternately, how to describe the touch of a hand on my cheek after so long?

  Not only was the touch itself extraordinary, but it had also opened some sort of floodgate of sensations.

  In the two days following the accident, and at the strangest moments, I would feel things from the living world. Such as the rough bark of the blackjack oak tree against which I’d leaned, or a tiny drop of rain when a brief shower had passed over the river. These feelings came and went quickly, outside of my control.

  Yet I found I could control one of them: the little thrill in my veins each time I thought of his skin. This thrill bore a haunting similarity to a quickened pulse in my wrists and neck, so I sought ways to replicate it as often as I could.

  I was thinking of his skin again when another flash occurred. Without warning, a scent overwhelmed me, capturing me completely. I froze where I stood, smelling a cluster of late-summer blackberries that clung to a bramble along the tree line. I leaned closer to them, breathing in their smell, tart and overripe under the noonday sun. Although the scent soon vanished and the numbness began to creep back over me, I laughed aloud.

  This was the second laugh of my afterlife, and I wanted more of them. Without another thought, I dashed up the steep, grassy embankment to the bridge.

  Bounding tall hills in a single breath. Or no breath at all. Super Dead Girl. I laughed again, feeling giddy as I arrived at the top of the hill and began to stride across the grass.

  When I crossed the shoulder to the road, however, I froze, one bare foot on the pavement and one on the grass, arms out in an imitation of a trapeze artist.

  High Bridge Road.

  The words whispered like a threat in my mind, and I immediately had an urgent desire to get away from this place. I could feel a gnawing at the back of my mind, an itch creeping up and down my skin.

  Did I sense the stirrings of another nightmare? No, this felt like an entirely different kind of foreboding, one I’d never before experienced.

  I shook my head. I was being ridiculous. After all, I was dead. What could be scarier than me?

  I forced one foot off the grass and the other farther onto the pavement. My legs moved almost involuntarily, and each step along the shoulder of the road sent unpleasant tingles up my spine.

  This is stupid, I thought. I straightened my back. I refused to skulk on the side of the road like a dog with its hair on end.

  “Move it,” I commanded myself aloud. I strode forward with purpose, albeit still a little stiffly. Each step unnerved me further, but I didn’t slow until I made it almost halfway across the bridge.

  I only stopped when I reached the jagged gap in the waist-high metal railing to my right. Yellow police tape and a few wooden sawhorses stood between the gap and the road, ready and willing to keep absolutely nothing from plummeting off the bridge. The torn railing hung out over the edge of the bridge on both sides of the gap, swaying lightly in the breeze. His—Joshua’s—car had torn a hole at least six feet wide into the railing before flying into the river.

  I shivered from the very idea of the crash as well as from the sound of his name in my head. Wrapping my arms around my body, I spared a timid glance at the ground. Streaks of black rubber crisscrossed the pavement where his tires had made a futile attempt to keep him from going over the edge.

  It was then I heard the scream, a terrible, pealing sound that shrieked from behind me.

  I actually jumped up in the air. An expletive, one I didn’t even know I knew, flew out of my mouth as I turned to face the sound.

  Only then did I see that the horrible noise hadn’t been a scream after all. It had been the sound of tires squealing to a sudden stop. Only ten feet away from me, a black car parked, and the door opened.

  Without thinking, I relaxed. My ghostly instincts kicked in and told me there was no need to run, no need to fear anything. Because if it drove a car, it couldn’t hurt me. It couldn’t even see me.

  But, obviously, my instincts had forgotten the one exception to this rule, even if my heart hadn’t.

  A boy climbed out of the driver’s side of the car and slammed the door shut. From his profile I could see he had full lips and a fine nose with just the slightest curve in it, as though it had been broken once but set well. He had almost black hair and large, dark eyes. When he cast those eyes on me, I absently mused that he was a much healthier color than when I’d last seen him.

  “You! It’s you!” he cried, pointing right at me.

  Without another thought, I turned and ran.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Chapter

  Four

  I was just full of foolish impulses lately. There he stood, the boy about whom I’d been thinking—obsessing, really—for the past two days. Yet I ran, as fast as I could, in the opposite direction. Had any of my adrenaline still existed, it would have burned in my legs as I fled.

  Apparently, and as I’d suspected, my ghostly instincts had become as strong as my living ones had been. Ghosts weren’t meant to be seen, no matter how much they wanted to be. Anything to the contrary was cause enough to run away, and fast.

  At least those would have been my thoughts were I capable of any. But at that moment I was only capable of blind terror. Fear buzzed in my brain, and it nearly blocked the voice that rang out from behind me.

  “Stop! Come on, stop! Please.”

  It was the quality of the voice that did it—low, and still a little hoarse from the river water he’d swallowed. Hearing the break in it, I felt a little ache right in the middle of my chest. Just a small, inconspicuous, and completely incapacitating ache.

  I skidded to a stop, almost at the other end of the bridge. Ever so slowly, I turned around to face him.

  “Thanks,” he called out roughly, settling back on his heels. From his stance he looked as if he’d just been about to take off after me.

  I gave him one tense nod. There was a noticeable pause, and then he asked, “So, will you come back here?”

  I shook my head. No way.

  Even this far apart I could hear him sigh.

  “O-kay.” He dragged out the sound of the O as if he was taking the seconds of extra pronunciation to deal calmly with a frustrating puzzle. “Then . . . can I come over there to you?”

  I frowned, not indicating an answer one way or another. I guess he took my indecision as a yes, because he began to walk toward me. He kept his steps intentionally slow, and he held his hands in front of his body in the universal gesture of “I won’t hurt you, wild animal.”

  “I come in peace,” he called out, and I could see him grin just a little. The grin was all at once wry, and sweet, and cautious.
/>   So I couldn’t help but grin right back.

  The boy dropped his hands and smiled fully at me. And, with that, the little ache exploded in my chest like a bomb, warming every limb.

  Warmth. I felt warmth. Really felt it, just like I’d felt the touch of his hand in the water. My smile widened.

  “Does that smile mean I can keep walking toward you?”

  “No,” I said quietly.

  He stopped moving, surprised by my words, or maybe just by the sound of my voice. “Really?” he asked after a moment.

  “Walk over to the grass,” I instructed.

  He frowned, knitting his dark eyebrows together. “Why?”

  “I don’t like this road. I want to go back over there.” I jerked my head in the direction of the embankment I’d only recently left.

  He kept frowning, but that grin twitched at the corners of his mouth again.

  “O-kay.” He gave me a thoughtful look, holding my gaze. The message was clear: I was the frustrating puzzle with which he was calmly dealing.

  Then he smiled, closed lipped and dimpled like a little boy, and gave me a quick nod. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, turned on one heel, and began strolling back to the embankment.

  Slowly. Too slowly. Swinging his legs in an exaggerated, deliberate way. I sighed loudly.

  “Could you hurry up, please?”

  He laughed, still walking away from me.

  “You have a way with giving orders, you know that? Not a master of the casual chat, are you?”

  Given that you’re the first person I’ve talked to in God knows how long since my death . . .

  Aloud I muttered, “You have no idea.”

  I could tell he’d heard me because he hesitated just a little. Then he kept walking forward, minus the mocking swing of his legs. After he’d gone about ten feet, I began to follow him. I walked even slower than he did, trying to think, think, think of what I was going to do, or say, when he stopped.

  Blessedly, he kept going, past the black car and past the end of the bridge. Then onto the grass of the embankment. I was worrying so deeply about our upcoming exchange, I didn’t notice when he stopped and turned toward me. I looked up in time to jerk to a stop just a foot from him, within touching distance.