My voice betrays me too by breaking at the end of my tirade, my hurt seeping through into my words. Andy’s face is covered in guilt, from his downward-cast eyes to his quivering lips. I know I shouldn’t be yelling at him like this – not when he’s the only real friend I have left. But I need to let the anger out somehow, and yelling seems to be the only thing I can do right lately.
And I must be doing that wrong, too, because a split second later Andy starts to cry.
Seeing a ghost cry is jarring; there are no tears, but the same wet, hiccupping sobs and pained expression are present. It would be kind of funny under any other circumstances, seeing Andy with his face all screwed up making noises like a dying whale, but right now all it does is stab at my chest with guilt.
It’s even worse to see this new, masculine version of Andy cry. He looks so much more vulnerable than he did just a few minutes ago, and I’m not used to seeing him like that in this body. It’s like watching a grown man break down; it feels so wrong, I can’t help but want to look away.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Terra,” he says between broken sobs. “Mellie promised that I would be happier like this. That I could be a man and you wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally touching me.”
I can feel panic building in my chest and creeping up into my throat. I don’t want to hear that this is my fault – not again. That part of the reason Andy killed himself is because of me. I didn’t want to know that.
Andy takes a deep breath and swipes at his eyes with the backs of his hands. Some of his composure seems to have returned, but his voice is still raspy and thick. “It’s not like the thought had never crossed my mind, obviously, but…”
“But you said I was helping. You promised me you weren’t going to try to off yourself after that. What could Mellie possibly say that would make you think things would be better this way?”
“What did you think, when you killed yourself? I wanted to be happy. After last week, with Jeremy and you… I just didn’t know anymore. You can’t blame me for that when you did exactly the same thing.”
I want to be mad at him right now, because I need to let my anger out at someone, but I can’t. Not when he’s looking at me like that, with his puppy-dog eyes and sad pout. Not when I know he’s right.
I’m being a hypocrite again. I can’t get upset with him for doing the same thing I told him I never once regretted. I made him feel like it was a viable option. In a way, meeting me might have been what pushed him over the edge, even if it was a couple of weeks later than intended.
“You’re right,” I say with a sigh. “But I still need to talk to Mellie. She can’t just forbid me from interfering with human lives and then turn around and do just that herself. It completely goes against her own rules. She wouldn’t do something like that without a really good reason.”
Or a really bad one, my mind unhelpfully supplies. She could be the bad guy here. Every story needs to have one, right?
“I can call her for you,” Reece says, finally speaking up after a long stretch of silence. He looks relaxed, despite the tension in the air. “But not here. Not with him around.”
I get the feeling Reece hasn’t quite taken to Andy yet. I can’t blame him, with what Mellie has probably said about Andy to him,
but now that he’s met him in person he should at least be giving him
the benefit of the doubt. Andy’s kicked-puppy look should have
swayed him in his favor a long time ago.
“Okay,” I say, ignoring Andy’s indignant expression. As much as I don’t want to agree with Reece, he’s right about this. Andy doesn’t need to hear Mellie and I going at it on his behalf; it’ll only make him feel guiltier about his decision.
“Meet me at the cemetery in two hours. That should give her enough time to finish up.”
I nod, and Reece stands and looks at me for a moment before flying back through the wall behind Andy’s bed. Andy gives me a look that tells me that this is going to be the longest two hours of my life. Well, death, but you get the point.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mellie’s reason, as it turns out, is a lot more complicated than I initially thought.
I’m surprised she even agrees to meet with me, but I’m guessing Reece probably didn’t tell her I would be here, because her eyes widen as soon as I come into view and she looks about as shell-shocked as can be. She’s sitting on the edge of a grave when Reece leads me to her, but she stands when I reach her. There’s something… off about the look on her face; it’s like she was expecting me, but she’s still surprised I’m here right now. It’s conflicting, and makes her look slightly manic – I don’t like it. There’s nothing sympathetic in her face at all.
“I’m guessing he’s dead, then,” she says as soon as I’m within earshot. “Or, not exactly?”
“You knew. You made him take those pills even though you knew how bad it would be for me. What do you have against me, Mel? Why aren’t you this strict with Reece?”
Reece glances in my direction and flies toward the end of the
cemetery, positioning himself just outside of the fence. He doesn’t
leave, and I assume he’s sticking around just in case this turns into a fight. It’s a good call, but it still makes me angry; does he honestly think I can’t even have a conversation with someone without it turning physical?
Granted, my track record isn’t that great, but when I was alive I was practically a saint. Practically.
“Reece has nothing to do with this.”
“Answer me.” I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself down. I honestly don’t want this to escalate to fighting, I just want Mellie to tell me the truth for once without dodging my questions. “Please. I need to know why you did it.”
Mellie’s serene expression flickers slightly. “I already told you, it was his time. He wasn’t going to do it on his own, and I couldn’t just let him off the hook that easily. Not if I wanted the future to remain unaltered.”
The future doesn’t matter to me, I want to say. Andy does. But I hold my tongue. My own personal feelings have no place here; this isn’t about my school-girl crush or the bully I killed a few years too soon. This is about Mellie’s decision to end a life on purpose without any sort of remorse. Even though she knew that it would destroy me.
“There has to be another reason. You’re all about rules, Mellie. You wouldn’t just kill someone over something so stupid; you don’t have it in you.”
Mellie had seemed so broken up about my mother’s death – was that all an act? If she really isn’t a cold-blooded killer, then she
needs to prove it soon, because I’m starting to believe that she’s capable of anything.
Mellie sighs. She looks like she wants to tell me something, but she bites her lip and shakes her head almost imperceptibly.
“He’s still alive,” she says instead, “isn’t he? So I didn’t kill him. As much as I wanted to, I obviously failed. Isn’t that enough for you? I won’t go after him again. I promise.”
“You know I don’t believe you.”
A breeze blows through the graveyard, rustling trees and the sparse grass on the ground. Mellie’s hair doesn’t move an inch, even as the wind picks up and gusts around her. She looks so composed, it makes me feel nervous.
“You’re upset because your boyfriend died, even though that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You can be with him now. If he never wakes up, he’ll be stuck just like you.”
I narrow my eyes and glare at her; she doesn’t even flinch. “You have no idea what I want. I did what I did to protect Andy, to keep him safe! I never wanted any of this to happen.”
Mellie looks like she doesn’t believe a word I’m saying. To be honest, I’m not so sure I do either. A small part of me – miniscule, really, super tiny, I swear – is just a little bit excited by the prospect of Andy being the same as me now. I can touch him without being afraid of destroying him; I can teach him things and I won’t be so alon
e anymore. And Andy doesn’t seem too broken up about being dead. I think I’m the one who’s been affected by it the most.
But to wish something bad would happen to him – that’s something I would never do. Mellie has no right to accuse me of that. She may be a Grim Reaper, and she may have powers that I’ll never have, but there’s no way she can read my mind or put thoughts into my head.
But she can make me doubt myself and my feelings, and that’s exactly what she’s doing right now.
“You’re just upset that you pulled his soul out of his body, right? I can make you feel better about that, if you want.”
“How?” My voice cracks despite the anger I’m trying to uphold. Mellie looks completely unfazed.
“Because you didn’t do it,” she says. If my emotions edge any higher, I’m going to break; I think my anger and confusion have already peaked. “You touched him, right? But it was an accident. That’s what Reece said.”
So Reece really is her lap dog after all. Has he been spying on me this whole time, making sure I’m behaving according to Mellie’s plan? I was just starting to like him, as strange as he is; we could have been friends. So could Mellie and I, but that opportunity passed as soon as she told me to stop seeing Andy.
I nod, not trusting myself to speak. If I do, I might say too much.
“You can’t accidentally pull someone’s soul out. I told you that because you were getting too close, but it wasn’t completely true. What you did to Jeremy – that was on purpose. But Andy’s spirit would have come out on its own, as close to death as he was. He still is.”
My mind is reeling. I was never the smartest person in my class – Olivia was a genius compared to me – so it takes me a little while to process exactly what it is she’s saying. My brain pieces together ‘accidentally,’ ‘on purpose,’ and ‘wasn’t completely true,’ and I realize Mellie just admitted to having lied to me this whole time. About probably the most important thing possible.
So I could have touched anyone I wanted to, at any time, without fear of hurting them. I didn’t have to dodge elbows and duck behind lockers at school, or stand so far away from Andy I might as well have been in a different room. But it’s what she said about Jeremy that gets to me the most – if what she’s saying now is true, I took his life on purpose. I meant to do it.
“That’s not true,” I say immediately. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody - even someone like Jeremy. I just wanted to stop him from beating Andy to death, but I didn’t want to kill him.”
“Deep down, you did.” Mellie’s smile makes my stomach churn. “You know I’m telling the truth.”
“And my mom?” I say before I can stop myself. “What about her?”
Mellie is silent for a long moment, the grin fading quickly from her face. She looks like she’s just been slapped; if I thought it would make any difference, I really might have hit her. She would have deserved it.
“That’s not what we’re here to talk about,” she mutters, a fraction of her composure waning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look this nervous; it makes me feel better, but only slightly. We’re
talking about my mother and how she died, and now I know her
death wasn’t as accidental as Mellie had made me believe. It hurts, and it only makes me angrier.
“Isn’t it, though? You were all set to accuse me of killing Jeremy on purpose; you can’t just say that without expecting me to bring up my mom. Did you plan to kill her the whole time you two were friends, or just towards the end?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then enlighten me. Please. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
I cross my arms and take a small step forward, my feet squelching in the sticky mud. Somebody is buried here, I think absently. Just underneath my feet.
“Your mom was dying. I couldn’t have saved her, and I knew it. But…” she pauses, biting her lower lip. Even her posture has tightened, her back rigid and her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides. “She wasn’t going to die when she did. It was supposed to happen over a month later, but I couldn’t just watch her suffer like that.”
“I never saw her suffering.”
“Then you didn’t look very closely. Think about the way she looked, how she acted. She changed in those last few weeks. She had heart failure, Terra. She was a walking corpse by the time I got to her.”
“No. No.” Every word she says hits me like a punch. My memories of her float around in my brain and I pick them apart,
searching for anything that might prove Mellie either wrong or right. I don’t know which option I’d prefer.
But she seems fine, she seems fine. She looks… a little older, a little more tired, but that’s normal. That was just the way my mother was. And she may have had a heart attack, but that isn’t what killed her – Mellie is.
No matter what she says, Mellie is at fault here. Not me.
“Then you could have waited,” I say, scrambling for words now. “You could have waited and she could have lived an extra month and died on her own. You wouldn’t have felt the guilt that made you save me in the first place, and all of this would have been avoided. Andy might even have died ahead of schedule, just like you wanted.”
Mellie sighs and smooths down the sides of her dress. Her hands look like they’re shaking, but that’s impossible. She doesn’t have enough feelings left in her to be unhinged by something like this.
I look over at Reece, who’s watching us closely. His hands are up and he’s hovering a foot above the fence; he looks like he’s ready to pounce on me at any moment if I so much as say the wrong thing. What did Mellie say to him to get him on her side like that? Everything that’s come out of her mouth so far has just made me angrier.
So what if my mom was sick? Does it really matter if Mellie took pity on her and killed her to spare her more pain? She took her life, regardless of the circumstances. But I did the same with Jeremy, and my reasons were far less pure.
If Mellie’s telling the truth, that is.
“How many pills did he take?” Mellie asks, changing the subject. I think about it but don’t answer. “How many, Terra?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. A lot, obviously.”
“Twenty-eight,” she says matter-of-factly. “He didn’t count them before he took them. He should have.”
My feet sink through the squishy mud on the end of the grave Mellie’s standing on and I kick it off, spraying it onto the headstone to my right. What’s the point in all of this? If Mellie’s just going to run me around in circles again, I might as well not be here. I should be with Andy right now, making sure he’s okay – because, as much as he pretends to be, there’s no way he actually is. You can’t go through something like that and come out alright on the other side.
“Does it really matter?” I ask her, some of my annoyance seeping into my tone. “He’s in the hospital right now because of what you did. I don’t even know if he’s going to wake up, or if he’s gonna be alright after he does. You honestly think the number of pills he took matters when they clearly did what they were supposed to?”
Mellie holds up one hand and stops me in the middle of my rant. “Clearly they didn’t,” she says. “If he’d taken the full thirty-six he counted out for himself a month ago, he’d be dead right now. But he didn’t.”
It takes a minute too long for me to figure out what she’s saying, and even longer to sort it into a thought I can actually process. He was supposed to take more pills than he did. Where did the rest of them go?
And then I realize exactly what Mellie did – what her plan was all along. She knew Andy was going to try to kill himself sooner or later. She made sure he wouldn’t succeed.
“You…” I begin, scrambling for the right words. “You saved him.”
A small smile curls at the corners of Mellie’s mouth. She nods, her eyes twinkling, and in a moment every trace of anger vanishes from my body.
“Not exactly, but I didn’t kill him either.
”
“Why?” I ask as soon as I find my voice again. “You could have. You wanted to, I know you did.”
She told me that Andy was supposed to die, and that it would happen whether I want it to or not. How can she say that and then turn around and prevent his death? It doesn’t make any sense; although, Mellie’s actions rarely do anyway.
“I didn’t want to. I wanted to restore order, but playing God is what got me in this mess to begin with. It’s the reason why I can’t move on, and how I came to be in this position. I didn’t tell him to take the pills, but I didn’t tell him not to. I just gave him the option.”
“The option to kill himself, you mean.”
“The same option I gave you.”
My chest feels so tight, it feels like it’s been wrapped around with the same ace bandages I snuck to Andy when he was in the hospital.
“Is that why I can’t remember killing myself? You were there, weren’t you?”
Mellie doesn’t answer, but inclines her head just enough for me to understand. Even at the end, she was trying to talk me down. It wasn’t enough that she saved my life twice – now she’s saved Andy’s too. And, technically, she helped my mom as well, even though I’d never admit that aloud.
This entire time she’s been doing nothing but good, trying to repent for whatever past she has that brought her here in the first place, and I’ve been blaming her for everything.
“Why didn’t you just tell me this in the beginning? I wouldn’t have been so hard on you then.” Well, I probably would have, just because that’s who I am, but she could have spared me a lot of anger and misplaced emotions. “Let me guess – it’s against the rules.”
Mellie winks at me. “You’ve got it.”
Somehow, I don’t quite believe her. But I guess I don’t have much choice now, do I?
Chapter Thirty
Andy isn’t in his room by the time I get back from talking to Mellie, so there’s only one other place I can think to look for him – the hospital.
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