“You were supposed to have your birthday dinner here, remember?” He put the car in park and waited for the valet. “Before the DMP ruined everything.”
“It’s my favorite restaurant.” Which was why Logan brought me here before the Homecoming dance. Not that Zachary would know that.
He examined my face, his eyes dark and serious in the amber dashboard light. “Would you rather go somewhere else?”
The young valet was jogging toward the car. I had to decide in the next few seconds: Would I let the past keep screwing up my present and my future?
“No, it’s sweet.” I let go of my necklace and gave Zachary a quick kiss on the cheek. He beamed like a little boy with a carnival prize.
The valet opened my door, and I stepped onto the sidewalk. A ghost stood in the middle of the street, about fifty feet away, but before I could see whether it was a man or a woman, its violet glow winked out.
Because Zachary was out of the car. Something about him made ghosts flee on sight. Logan used to call him “Mr. Red” because to him, Zachary looked like he was wearing clothes of that color. Ghosts hate red, maybe because it’s the color of life, or maybe because it’s at the opposite end of the light spectrum from their own violet hue. Red isn’t a foolproof repellent like the BlackBox technology’s obsidian, but it helps.
No one knew about Zachary’s power besides him and me, and some friend of his back in Scotland who’d been the first to notice. It’s why he hung out almost exclusively with members of our school’s senior class, who couldn’t see ghosts and therefore wouldn’t notice he was scaring them off.
The hostess showed us to a candlelit table for two by the window. When she left us, I told Zachary in a low voice, “At least with you I don’t have to sit in the back room where it’s all bright and non-ghosty.”
He leaned in closer. “I hope someday you realize, that’s no’ the best part of being around me.”
The memory of the best part stole my speech as my gaze lingered on his lips. If I were his girlfriend, I could kiss him right now. Brush his mouth with mine and make him sigh my name, make our fingertips tingle in anticipation of being alone together.
But how could what happened with Logan last night not change how I felt with Zachary?
Megan might say it was because what I had with Zachary was real, not just a lost dream. I couldn’t deny that something lived between us. Something that had been simmering for months.
Zachary cleared his throat. “So Logan’s back.”
I opened my mouth to explain, then shut it again. After thinking about it all day, I still didn’t know where to start.
“Aura, I’m your friend first, so you can tell me everything.” He drummed his fingertips on the menu. “But hurry up and get it over with, aye?”
“I’ll try.” I slowly unrolled the cloth napkin from around my silverware. “I’d been calling for him every night since he shaded. I played all the mix CDs and playlists he made. Last night I ran out of music, so I just called. That’s when he came.”
“As a ghost?”
“No. He zorched through the window as a shade.” I rubbed my forehead, remembering how my brain seemed to slosh out my ears. “Then I guess I talked him down, and there he was, all violet again.”
“Amazing.” Zachary was listening close, chin on his hand. For now, the fascinated scientist was in charge. “So you think it was the music keeping him away?”
“I don’t know what made last night different. Except—I told Logan to give me a sign if he wanted to stay that way. I thought maybe he was happier being a shade, and if he was, I was ready to let go. Maybe he was trying to prove me wrong.”
Zachary’s brows lowered. “Or maybe he knew you were slipping away from him. I mean, if you were.”
“I was.” Maybe I still am. Being with Zachary, even just as friends and research partners, made me feel at home in the world. Like I might not be crazy for wanting to dig deeper, find bigger truths. About the Shift, about life and death. About us.
“Where is he now?”
I swiped my hand over my neck, adjusting the garnet pendant. “At my house.”
Zachary sat up straight. “Was he—when I came in—”
“He was upstairs. Sulking.”
“In your room.” When I nodded, he added, “And he’ll be there when you get home.”
“Our house was the only safe place for him to hide while Gina got his order of protection. Out in the world someone might recognize him. He can’t go to his family, because they moved somewhere he’s never been, and besides, their house is totally BlackBoxed.” They’d needed it, since shades can go anywhere, and they could afford it, after winning the lawsuit against Warrant Records. “It’s just for one more day. Tomorrow we’re going public, and then he’ll be safe from the DMP.”
“So where will he sleep tonight?”
“Ghosts don’t sleep. You know that.”
“Where will he be while you sleep?”
“Downstairs again. Zach, you said I could tell you anything.”
“Right. Right.” He rubbed the side of his face, as if to wipe away evidence of his feelings. “Maybe we should eat first. Dole out the truth in wee digestible bits.” He lifted the menu. “So what’s good here?”
Zachary ordered one of the homemade pasta dishes I recommended, something Logan never did. Not that I was comparing them. Even when Zachary spent most of the dinner conversation asking about me instead of talking about himself, I didn’t compare them.
And when I went to the ladies’ room, it was the hot pepper in the penne arrabiata that made me sniffle and need to blow my nose with toilet paper. Not memories of Homecoming dinner. Not seeing “our” table, the one Logan had reserved because it sat under a light bright enough to blot out ghosts. Not remembering how Logan’s hair had gleamed in that golden light.
I returned to the table, dry eyed and dry nosed. Zachary stood to push in my chair, wearing an excited smile.
“What’s up?” I sat and picked up my fork, then realized I had no appetite for the rest of my pasta.
“I was sitting here thinking.” He returned to his own seat, smoothing his tie to keep it out of his food. “What could be the same about last night and that other night—you said Logan had become a shade once before but turned right back to a ghost.”
“On my birthday.” Logan’s jealousy—combined with an obsidian necklace my aunt had given me and the red sheets she’d put on my bed—had driven him over the edge.
“Our birthday,” Zachary corrected. “The first day of winter. The solstice.”
“Usually.” Memories of that night would always haunt me. Logan’s shady energy had made me so dizzy, I fell off the roof of my porch, where I’d been sitting while we argued. Right before I blacked out, Logan came to my side, as a ghost again, brought back by his love for me and fear for my life.
“Aura, listen.” Zachary’s urgent voice caught my attention. “Last night was the beginning of spring. The equinox.”
I gaped at him. “So Logan un-shaded on both the solstice and the equinox. That can’t be a coincidence. How come I didn’t think of that before?”
“You were probably a bit distracted by his return. So was I, until you left the room and I could think straight about it.”
Maybe we were finally getting closer to the truth. I smacked the edge of the table. “Zach, this totally fits with our research, all the stuff about Newgrange.”
He pulled out his phone and started a web browser. “We can check the exact times of the last solstice and equinox right now. Should we tell Professor Harris when we see her tonight?”
“Not yet. Listen, there’s something else.” I paused, wishing I could lock up the words before they escaped. “Remember you wouldn’t let me tell you everything until we ate?”
He slowly set down his phone. “What did I miss?” His voice dripped with dread.
“Last night was different from December twenty-first in one major way.” I looked down at my lap, di
smayed to see a splotch of tomato sauce on my dress. “Logan didn’t just turn back to a ghost.”
“Would you like this wrapped up?”
I started at the sound of the waiter’s voice. “Um, yeah. Thanks.”
“Dessert or coffee for either of you?”
I shook my head.
“Just the bill, please,” Zachary said.
“Right away, sir.” As the waiter reached for my plate, Zachary’s eyes widened.
“No!” he said. “Just bring the box.”
“He’s here. Might as well let him take it.” I lifted the plate to the waiter, then gasped.
On the table lay a note, slipped under my plate while I was in the restroom: Want to go to the prom? (With me?)
The waiter chuckled. “I think that’s my cue to bring the check.”
“No hurry.” Zachary watched the waiter depart, then turned back to me. “Well, that could have been better timing. What were you about to say?”
I lifted the note. “I was about to say yes.”
“Really?”
I mirrored his grin. “Is that so hard to believe?”
“Some days, yeah.” He grabbed his phone. “Where do you want to go for dinner? We should make reservations right now. Should we come back here or try somewhere new? No, we should try somewhere new. This probably isn’t formal enough, is it? What do you think?”
I stammered in the face of his sudden enthusiasm. Zachary had always played it so cool. Cool didn’t scare me. I was cool with cool.
“I know where we’ll go,” he said, before I could reply. “The restaurant on top of that hotel. You know which one I mean? On Charles Street?” He thumbed through a listing on his phone. “Or is it Mount Vernon Place?”
“Wait, slow down.”
“The view must be stunning,” he said, his words trampling mine. “And after, I thought a late-night cruise along the Chesapeake Bay. I hear it’s—”
“Zach, time-out. We don’t have to make all our plans this second.”
“Of course we do. If we want the best places, we have to reserve early. Everyone says so.”
“But—” I wiped my forehead, suddenly hot. My mind was still spinning from our talk of Logan and the equinox. Compared to that, the prom seemed distant and insignificant. “I can’t think that far ahead right now. Can we just—”
“You don’t have to think. I’ll take care of it all. It’ll be a surprise.”
A surprise, like bringing me to the restaurant I last ate at with my dead boyfriend.
Backed into a corner, I blurted, “Does it have to be just the two of us?”
Zachary gave me a blank look. “Isn’t that the way it’s done?”
“Sometimes.” As I spoke, I folded his note lengthwise, then lengthwise again. “I thought maybe we’d all go as a group. Megan and Mickey, Siobhan and Connor.”
“You want me to go to the prom with the Keeleys.” He said it as a statement, which made it sound ridiculous.
“They’re my friends. Megan’s your friend.”
Zachary went completely still. He stared at the note, which I’d folded into a thin strip. “What were you going to tell me before the waiter came? Something about Logan?”
“The prom issue has nothing to do with him.”
“Doesn’t it?” His voice was low and vulnerable, and it ripped my heart in half.
“Last night, he didn’t just change from a shade to a ghost. He changed from a ghost to a—an I-don’t-know-what.” I looked Zachary in the eye—I owed him that much. “He was human again. In full color. Solid. For at least fifteen minutes.”
Zachary’s face froze. “Solid.”
“Yeah.”
“He was—he was solid. Solid.” Zachary seemed to be testing the word, as if it were in a foreign language.
“Solid, like a person.”
His face stayed rigid even as he started to blink rapidly. “Solid.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You must have been dreaming.”
“No, this was real. Logan remembers it, too.”
“Then he was dreaming, or he was lying to you.”
My voice rose. “Ghosts can’t lie.”
“You know what else they can’t do?” he hissed. “Become solid.”
I felt a surge of indignation. “Since you know everything, then explain how my lips got sore. How did I get stubble burn on my face and my—” I stopped when I saw his eyes, then covered my mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I dropped my hand. “But I need you to believe me.”
Zachary sat back in his chair. Then he pressed the bowl of his spoon, making the handle flip up again and again as he gathered his thoughts.
“What were you doing when he changed?” His voice had chilled, like a police interrogator’s.
“Spider-swear,” I said.
He looked up from the spoon. “Spider-swear?”
“It’s a thing we did when we were kids, to promise something.” I folded my hands to demonstrate. “Our fingers make the legs, and our thumbs are the antennas.”
“The what?”
“Antennas. Antennae, whatever. The things that stick out of their heads.” I wiggled my thumbs.
Zachary opened his mouth, then shut it again.
I remembered the most important detail. “Oh! I was making Logan promise to just be my friend.”
Zachary’s left eyebrow twitched. “But then he became solid, and then your lips got sore. So clearly he didn’t keep the promise.”
“No.” I let my hands fall apart. “I didn’t call him on it at the time.”
“Because everything changed, once he had a body.”
Did it? That was the billion-dollar question. If in another three months I could touch Logan again, if only for a short time, would I let that possibility keep me from getting serious with Zachary?
I had no billion-dollar answer. Not yet.
“At that moment,” I said carefully, “yes, it did change everything.”
Zachary slid his fingers over the crease in the tablecloth, flattening it again and again. “What were you doing when he changed back to a ghost?”
I laid my hands on the table, wishing I could crawl under it. “We were about to make love.”
“Here’s your—oh, dear.” The waiter, who had apparently overheard my last sentence, slid my leftovers and the check onto the table and started to slink away.
“Wait.” Zachary stood, dug four twenties from his wallet, and tossed them on the bill tray. “Cheers. Keep the change.”
Zachary and I didn’t speak in the car. He’d reprogrammed the GPS, and when the Spanish robot lady told us to turn north toward my house instead of south toward the Science Center, I knew our night was ending early.
As I twisted Zachary’s prom invitation into a pretzel-shaped knot, I searched for words that wouldn’t make him feel worse. For both our sakes, I didn’t want to upset him while he was driving.
My street had no parking spaces, as usual. “You could try the next block,” I said, hoping we could sit and talk this out.
“I’ll just let you off.” He slowed as he neared my house. “I’ll ring Professor Harris and tell her we’ll miss the reception.”
I gathered my wrap and purse, flustered by the night’s abrupt conclusion. I had to say something.
“How about this?” I said. “As a compromise, we could go to dinner just the two of us and then party afterward as a group.”
He stopped the car with a sudden brake, jolting my body forward against the seat belt. Then he looked at me, turning only his head, not his body. “Sorry?”
“For the prom.”
He spoke evenly. “Aura, I’m no’ taking you to the prom.”
My stomach somersaulted. “But you asked me. You can’t un-ask me.”
“I just did.” Zachary set his wrists atop the steering wheel, fists clenched, arms rigid. “All the way home I’ve been thinking about this game we’ve been playing.”
“Game?”
My chest tightened. He had to be bluffing. “Are you . . . you’re going to ask Becca to the prom?”
“It’s none of your business.”
I fumbled for a reply, my tongue suddenly parched. “She’ll say no. You’re a junior.”
“It’s a junior-senior prom, aye?”
“Yeah, but she wants to be prom queen. Only seniors can be prom king and queen. You can’t be king.”
His voice flattened. “Then I’ll be her prince consort.”
He wasn’t bluffing. He’d had enough.
“And by the way?” he said. “Spiders don’t have antennae. The bits sticking out of their heads are the chelicerae.”
“The what?”
“They use them to stab their prey with poison.” He spat out the last word.
“No, they’re antennas, because they—” I thought of the Harry Potter movie with the giant spider, imagining the ferocious pincers next to its mouth. “Crap, you’re right. Now I feel stupid. Happy?”
He stared out the windshield. “Not at all.”
The chill in his voice filled me with panic. “Zach, we’ll do it your way. We’ll go to the prom alone. You’ve been so good to me, you deserve it.”
“I deserve it?” He leaned across me and opened the passenger door. “Get out.”
“But—”
“I’m not a dog to throw bones to.”
“I didn’t mean it that way!”
“Yes. You did.” The louder his voice got, the more it shook. “I’ve sat in the corner, being a good boy, waiting for my master to notice me.”
“It’s not like that.”
“You’re bloody right it’s not like that.” He turned to face the front again. “Not anymore.”
A horn honked behind us. I climbed out of the seat. “I’ll call you.”
Zachary zoomed off, the car’s momentum slamming the passenger door shut. The woman driving behind him glared at me as she sped past. I looked away, my conscience too shattered to give her any attitude in return.
My feet felt like lead as I climbed the front stairs. Halfway up, I realized I’d left my leftover penne in Zachary’s car. I wondered if he’d eat it or hurl it into his apartment building’s trash chute.
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