by Cassia Leo
Now I recognize the look on his face. It’s the thousand-yard stare of a soldier who’s just come home from a battlefield: shell-shocked. Frankie must have seen something horrific tonight.
“I’m not going home,” Frankie whispers. “I’m going to the beach.”
Of course. It’s Sunday. Frankie has been planning to get back in the water today. He’s spent four days away from the ocean; he must be lusting for a mouthful of seawater by now.
I nod and we continue toward the beach in silence. As always, he parks in the back end of the parking lot, farthest from the sand. This usually infuriates me because I hate plodding across the scorching asphalt in flip-flops, but today I’m wearing my sneakers and the sun has yet to rise so I don’t mind. As soon as we reach the sand, I tear off my sneakers and follow Frankie toward the water.
“What am I going to tell my mom? She knows I was with Conor last night?”
“They haven’t found Conor’s car yet, which means they still don’t know he’s missing. Chances are the cops will come around your house sometime this afternoon, after Conor’s parents realize he didn’t spend Saturday night with his buddies. It’s 5 AM. We have at least seven hours to think of something. But you know I think better in the water. Are you coming in?”
I shake my head as I crumple onto the sand and hug my knees tightly to my chest. “I’ll watch from here to make sure you don’t split your head open again.”
Frankie yanks off his T-shirt and tosses it onto the sand next to me. He jogs toward the water with his surfboard under his arm. The small area on the crown of his head where the surgeons shaved his hair down to the skin gleams in the waning moonlight.
I dig my hands into the cool sand and wriggle my fingers. My mom used to tell me not to stick my hands in the sand, there could be bloody hypodermic needles buried down there. My mother’s paranoia about ridiculous things only got worse after my father’s death. I’m now required to carry pepper spray everywhere I go. If she knew what happened last night, she’d probably never let me out of the house again.
Frankie’s face is pure concentration as he cuts a snaking trail across the surface of the waves. The intense focus and joy that mesh in his face when he’s surfing fill me with a sense of longing. I wish I loved anything as much as Frankie loves the water.
Love. It will break you in half then prop you up in a sling just so you can get knocked down all over again. Like Mara.
She fell in love and it drove her off the edge of a cliff. She fell in love again and it drove her to murder. Now she’s trapped in some netherworld after trying to create love between Conor and me.
Frankie and Mara spoke to me so briefly about shadow spirits that I don’t think I fully understand what they do. I can’t help but wonder: can a human enter the spirit realm without the guidance of a carrier spirit? Can I try to get Conor back myself?
Frankie taps my shoulder to wake me up. I push myself up from the sand and catch sight of a pink sunrise behind us. Frankie looks down at me as if he’s expecting something. I reach up to brush the sand off my cheek and realize I’m hugging his T-shirt.
“Sorry,” I mutter groggily as I hold his shirt out to him.
He struggles a little to pull the shirt over his wet body then he holds his hand out to help me up. Standing next to him, I glimpse a stream of blood running down the back of his head and neck.
“You’re bleeding.”
He swipes his hand over the back of his head just beneath his stitches and shrugs when he sees the blood on his fingers. “I’m leaking.”
“Yeah, your brain is leaking. I knew you shouldn’t have gone in the water.” I grab his hand and pull him toward the parking lot. “Let’s go to your house so you can get cleaned up.”
“Don’t you want to know the idea I came up with while you had your face buried in the sand?” He smiles as I stop next to him. “If Conor’s not back by Saturday, I’m going back for him and Mara after the competition—and I’m taking you with me.”
“Really? You can take me with you?”
“Well…. Technically, someone else will be taking both of us.”
“Who?”
Frankie squints his eyes as if he’s trying to figure out how to describe this person to me. “Someone who owes me a big favor.”
“And what do we do in the meantime? What do we tell the police when they ask about Conor?”
“Just tell your mom that Conor dropped you off at my house last night and you don’t know what happened to him after that. My dad will vouch for you.”
“Your dad would lie to the cops for us?” I say. I hardly believe that Michael Briggs would lie for anyone, even Frankie.
“He will if I tell him the truth.”
“The truth?” I scoff. “You’re going to tell him Conor’s been abducted and taken to the spirit realm?”
Frankie sighs as if he’s becoming impatient. “Belinda, my mom is a carrier spirit.”
Chapter 51
The water is thick as blood. I can’t see the surface. I kick and kick but I get nowhere. My chest convulses, overwhelmed by the urge to breathe. I finally give up and inhale. The black liquid explodes in my lungs and my body falls gently downward until there’s nothing but cold blackness.
I wake on the cedar floor of the plank house. Sunlight pours through the doorway on my right. On my left is the basket where I hid from Tuket and my father. Samuel appears in the doorway silhouetted by the glaring sunlight.
“Lily?” he mutters, his voice still garbled by the water in his throat.
I close my eyes and curl into a ball on the floor, covering my ears with my arms as he continues to call my name. Someone grabs my hair and yanks me up from the floor. My father’s broad features are smudged over Samuel’s young face. He drags me to the table and she’s sitting there. He forces me to sit next to her and when she smiles at me her teeth are black and crumbling out of her mouth.
This isn’t real. This is a nightmare. It isn’t real.
“Mara?” the girl speaks for the first time since I killed her. She’s stolen my sister’s voice.
Chapter 52
Frankie squirms in his wooden desk chair as I clean the blood from his stitches with cotton balls soaked in a saltwater solution. He refused to let me use hydrogen peroxide, insisting it will only make it worse.
“Quit squirming around,” I demand. “You’re scaring me. I feel like I’m going to rip your stitches open.”
“Just put the bandage on and be done with it,” he replies, handing me a square of sterile gauze.
I cover his stitches with the gauze and tape the gauze in place. “You can’t go in the water with that. It’s not waterproof.”
“I know that,” he says as he stands from the chair then plops onto his stomach on his unmade bed. “Why do you think I went in the water without a bandage today?”
“You need to get waterproof bandages or your stitches are going to get infected. Actually, you shouldn’t even go in the water until they’re healed.”
He pats the bed next to him for me to take a seat. “I’ll get some waterproof bandages today. Will that make you happy?”
I stare at him for a moment and all I can think is that I’m in Frankie’s bedroom, a place where I haven’t spent more than five minutes in the past two months; a danger zone. I take a quick glance around at all the posters of Kelly Slater that paper the walls. With his new hairdo, Frankie could be mistaken for a young Slater—he’s that good.
I sit down cross-legged on the bed next to him and clasp my hands in my lap. Frankie props his head up on his hand and stares at me.
“What?” I say as I begin to feel slightly annoyed and uncomfortable.
“Nothing,” he says with a grin.
“Stop being cryptic and tell me what you’re smiling about.”
He looks down and begins tracing circles on the comforter. “I know I shouldn’t think like this, because I swear I do want Conor to come back, but I really want my mom to know you… the way you are
right now. And I want you to know my mom the way she is now.”
Frankie’s mom was always a bit odd. He told me in junior high that she was on a bunch of pills prescribed by a doctor and that she desperately wanted to check herself into a mental hospital. She thought she was a danger to Frankie. After she left, Frankie completely stopped talking about her.
“When did you find out she’s a carrier spirit?” I ask, because I don’t want to respond to what he just said.
I know he’s sincere when he says he wants Conor to come back, but part of me keeps remembering what he did to Mara and Reno. I’m sick with myself for even questioning his motives.
“A few months before she died, I told her all these memories I was having about my life in Oregon and as a carrier spirit,” he says as he begins tracing circles on my knee. “She thought she had passed on her sickness to me and she left us pretty soon after that. She got a hotel room in San Francisco and downed four bottles of pills. It didn’t take her long to make it out of the realm once she realized what was going on. She’s a different person now. She’s much stronger.”
The repetitive motion of Frankie’s finger on my knee makes me sleepy. “I’m sorry you had to find out like that,” I say, and I’m about to push his hand away, but I find myself grabbing it instead. I give his hand a little squeeze; the way Conor squeezes my hand when he’s trying to reassure me of something.
Frankie gazes up at me with a confused expression on his face. He’s probably wondering why I’m holding his hand or maybe he’s remembering that brief kiss he planted on my lips last night. I pull my hand back into my lap before I can find out. I stare at my hands in my lap and begin tugging at a hangnail to distract myself.
“B?” Frankie whispers.
“C?” I respond automatically without looking at him.
“Are you in love with Conor?”
I’m stunned by the blunt delivery of this question. I’m even more surprised that I have an answer. “I don’t think I know what it means to be in love.” This is the kind of question best friends should be able to ask each other without fear of what the answer will be.
Frankie pushes himself up so he’s sitting up and facing me. I keep glancing at my hands in my lap then at the posters and the surfing trophies, but I can feel him staring at me. He reaches for my face and a chill passes through me as he brushes a strand of hair off my cheek and smiles. “You’ll figure it out someday.”
Chapter 53
The longest week of my life is spent pretending to focus on final exams while dodging reporters and trying not to break down and tell Conor’s parents the truth. I’m worried that every minute Conor stays in the spirit realm brings him one minute closer to death—and I can’t talk to anyone about it. I can’t even talk to Frankie because I have to let him focus on his own exams and getting ready for the competition. Besides, I don’t know how these things work in the realm, and neither does Frankie. He spent so little time there after his death. All he knows is that there’s still hope that Mara may work up the strength to fight the shadow spirits, find Conor, and bring him back.
And now the SurfRiders Junior Pro surf competition has arrived and, though Frankie’s surgeon has strongly advised him not to compete, he removed Frankie’s stitches last night and sent him home. I was sort of hoping the surgeon would hear Frankie’s plans and strap him to a gurney. No such luck.
Frankie’s wearing his competition rash guard and board shorts when he picks me up at five in the morning on Saturday. I slide into the front seat and he has three surfboards in the van today.
“You nervous?” I ask as he pulls away from my curb.
“Like I’m about to give a presentation on colon cancer,” he replies.
“Very funny. Can you stop at Island’s so I can get a coffee, please? It’s too early to be awake on a Saturday.”
“The café on the pier is open. Sorry. I don’t have time to stop. I have to check in and meet up with Scott. He wants to introduce me to the sponsors before I warm up.”
“No worries.”
This time Frankie doesn’t park in the back of the lot. He pulls right up next to the sand and I help him unload his boards.
“Hey, do you want to say hi to Scott?” he asks as he locks up the van while I prop his board up in the sand.
I’m still weighing my options of saying hi to Scott or going straight to the café when Scott and Kira come bounding up behind Frankie. Kira makes a beeline for me and holds her arms out for a hug.
“It’s so good to see you, Belinda,” she says as she hugs me so tight I think my bra is going to snap. “You look gorgeous. I love that shirt.”
I’m wearing a plain white T-shirt bearing the logo of some random surf-wear company. Frankie got the T-shirt free at a previous competition and passed it on to me because it was three sizes too small for him. Kira points at the logo on the T-shirt and nods toward the area where organizers are constructing the bleachers and judges’ station. She must be alluding to the fact that a sponsor from this company is here to watch Frankie.
I’m struck with a sudden irrational fear that once Frankie gets sponsored I’m never going to see him again. He’ll be too busy competing and fighting off his adoring fans to have time for me.
Scott steps forward and his presence, all six-foot-four inches of him, snapping me out of my gloomy thoughts. He holds out his arms for a hug as well, but he’s much gentler than Kira.
“We missed you at the SurfRiders meeting last week,” he says, and I can tell by the look him and Frankie exchange that Frankie told him I couldn’t make it because I blew Frankie off for Conor. “We were really excited that Frank was finally going to bring you along. Kira gets bored with us boys.”
“Bored?” Kira replies. “More like annoyed by all the girl talk.”
“Well, Frank’s been talking about bringing you around since he was a grom and you’re still welcome to come ‘round the meetings anytime,” Scott says before he turns to Frankie. “Hey, cue ball, you ready?”
Frankie nods, though he looks more nervous than the day he asked me out.
I grab his arm to stop him. “Do you want me to come with you?”
A look of relief spreads over his face. “Yes, please.”
Kira smiles at me as I pull Frankie forward.
“Come on,” I urge him.
We almost reach the bleachers when my phone vibrates in the back pocket of my shorts. I release Frankie’s hand so I can pull the phone out of my pocket. I stop dead when I see the name flashing on the screen. Frankie and Kira glance back at me as they climb the steps toward a group of five men and one woman who are chatting and laughing in the front row of the bleachers. I can see the disappointment on both of their faces as I hang back to answer the phone.
“Hello?” I whisper.
“Belinda?” Conor says, and he sounds as though he’s in a car with the windows down and wind whooshing by. “Belinda? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Conor, where are you?”
“I’m on my way home. Man, have I got a story for you,” he says, and there’s something unsettling about his casual tone as if the most important thing he got out of this experience was a good story. “Can I come by your house later?”
“I’m not home. I’m at the beach all day today.”
“Perfect!” he replies quickly. “I have to go home and get cleaned up and I’ll meet you there in a few hours.”
“Okay…. Uh, are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll tell you everything when I see you.”
I climb the steps to see if it’s not too late to join Frankie, but he’s completely surrounded by sponsors and a small group of girls have gathered a few feet away, waiting to pounce as soon as the adults are done with him. Frankie doesn’t need me.
I turn around to head to the pier when I hear Frankie call my name. I look over my shoulder and he’s beckoning me to join him. I trot up the steps and shimmy across the steel bleachers, past the group of adoring fa
ns.
He places his hand on the back of my neck. “Ed, this is my best friend, Belinda Stiles. She’s just learning to ride herself.”
“No, I’m not,” I say as a short man wearing a hat with the same logo as my T-shirt holds out his hand and I shake it. “He’s given me, like, three lessons. I’m terrible.”
“She’s being modest,” Frankie says then he introduces me to the rest of the sponsors as the crowd of girls standing at the other end of the bleachers glare at me.
When the meet-and-greet is over, I’m pleased to see that Frankie looks much more relaxed. We descend the steps to the sand and head toward Scott and Kira. They’ve set up a shaded area with Frankie’s boards and a bunch of other equipment; fins, wax, traction pads, sunscreen, leashes, bottled water, anything he could possibly need. It’s been so long since I’ve been to one of these I almost forgot how serious these competitions get. I think I’m starting to feel more nervous than Frankie.
Kira pulls the sock off the short board and Frankie takes it under his arm. I watch in awe as he races toward the waves and dives in.
“Frankie really cares about you,” Kira says as she scoots around the table topped with all Frankie’s surf gear.
“I know. We’re best friends,” I reply, trying not to sound too annoyed.
Kira purses her lips as if she’s disappointed with my attempt to downplay my relationship with Frankie. “He really needs you here today. This is probably one of the most important competitions of his life.”
“Kira, leave Belinda alone,” Scott says as he keeps his eyes trained on Frankie in the water. “It’s none of our business.”
“I know it’s not my business,” she replies. “I just don’t want to see Frankie get hurt, especially when he has so much on the line today.”