My So-Called Phantom Love Life

by Tamsyn Murray

  Still eying me with uncertainty, he nodded. Grinning, I dropped the paper ball onto the keyboard and slid it towards him. ‘Trust me. You’re going to love this.’

  An hour and a half of frustrated shouting and the occasional rude word later, he was just starting to get the hang of it. Some ghosts never summoned up enough emotion to move objects in the physical world. Others, like Mary, used their internal rage and were masters of smashing ornaments. They took great delight in hiding the everyday things the living took for granted, like shoes and keys. Or toothbrushes, in my case. It wasn’t an easy thing for ghosts to learn how to do but, once they had, it opened up a lot of possibilities.

  ‘Are you sure I need to be able to do this?’ he asked, as his finger passed through the ball and into the keyboard once more.

  ‘Do you want to log into Facebook or not?’ I answered, flicking the ball up in the air. ‘Dontay told me this is the hardest bit, honestly.’

  ‘Dontay?’

  I reached around him to grab the paper, careful not to lean in. I knew most ghosts hated people passing through them, even though the living rarely felt much more than a shiver down their spine, as though someone had walked over their grave. ‘A friend of mine. He passed across to the astral plane a few months ago.’

  Owen watched me for a moment, then aimed his outstretched finger at the ball I’d placed back on the keyboard. ‘Not the one you went to see The Droids with?’

  ‘No. Dontay was a ghost and —’ I wanted to say that it would have been stupid to fancy a ghost but, sitting there with Owen, it didn’t seem stupid at all. My crush on him wasn’t going away; if anything it was getting worse. ‘We were just mates.’

  At that second, he connected with the paper and it tumbled onto the bed beside me.

  ‘Hey, you did it!’ I cried, beaming at him. ‘See? All you had to do was find the right emotion.’

  He stared at the ball. ‘Again.’

  I replaced it in front of him and his face creased in concentration as he poked at it. As before, it rolled off the keyboard.

  ‘What you need to do now is find something to practise on,’ I said, picking the paper up and placing it on my outstretched palm. ‘The lake should have plenty of litter around, even if it is a bit waterlogged.’

  His finger stabbed at the ball and it flew off my hand. Then I felt the lightest of tickles on my palm as his fingertip brushed my skin. It was gone almost instantly but one look at Owen told me he’d felt it too.

  ‘You touched me!’ I breathed.

  His eyes locked onto mine. ‘Did that really just happen?’

  ‘I think so.’ Scrabbling for the paper ball, I put it on my hand. He poked his finger towards it, slower and more controlled than before. The ball toppled onto the duvet and I felt the graze of his finger again. This time, instead of a feathery light whisper, I felt a cool pressure and he didn’t lift it away. Then the sensation vanished and I realised he’d let go.

  I blinked at him. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Haven’t you ever touched a ghost before?’

  I shook my head. Apart from that moment in the park where I’d imagined kissing him, the idea had never crossed my mind before. Wait a minute . . . my eyes slid guiltily to his mouth and I couldn’t quite believe what I was thinking. If his finger could touch my hand then surely his lips would be able to brush mine?

  ‘Skye?’ Owen asked, as my hands flew to cover the crimson blush racing across my cheeks. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Mortified, I couldn’t look at him. ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’

  He dipped his head until his eyes met mine. ‘Did I do something I shouldn’t?’

  ‘No!’ The word shot out of me. ‘I’m the one with the problem.’

  ‘Right. And what problem is that?’

  I didn’t answer. Owen watched me in silence for a minute, then asked, ‘Does it have something to do with whether or not I had a girlfriend?’

  I closed my eyes. This was a nightmare. It was bad enough when someone found out you fancied them but, when you knew your feelings were completely inappropriate, it was a zillion times worse.

  Owen was waiting for me to reply. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and looked at him. ‘Maybe.’

  A faint smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘Good,’ he said and leaned closer towards me. ‘Because I like you, Skye. And I don’t see why the living should get to have all the fun.’

  I stared into his gunmetal eyes. Now that I was really close to him, I could see tiny flecks of gold around the iris of each one and long golden lashes framing them – so different from Nico’s dark, intense stare. Mesmerised, I gazed at Owen as we edged closer together and a sense of unreality stole over me. Were we actually going to try this? Was I really about to kiss a ghost?

  For the first few seconds, I wasn’t sure if our lips were touching. But then I felt it: a soft fluttering, like the silken brush of butterfly wings against my mouth. It was the strangest, most sensuous feeling I’d ever experienced and completely unlike any kiss I’d had before. It teased the nerve-endings in my lips, making them tingle as the blood pulsed through them. I leaned into Owen, seeking more contact, and raised my hand to cup his cheek. It wasn’t until my fingers met thin air where they expected skin that I opened my eyes and the full enormity of what we were doing hit home.

  Then the door of my room opened. Owen and I jerked apart to see Jeremy framed in the doorway. I sagged with shame-faced relief; I’d expected it to be Celestine, and at least Jeremy couldn’t see Owen.

  ‘Sorry to barge in, Skye,’ he said. ‘I did call out but I don’t suppose you heard me over the music.’

  Yeah, I thought, or over the roar of my own raging hormones. Forcing myself to breathe normally, I swallowed. ‘It’s OK.’

  Jeremy frowned. ‘Warm in here, is it?’ he asked, giving me a long appraising look. ‘You should open the window, you look a bit flushed.’

  He started to pull the door closed and Owen and I exchanged relieved glances. Then Jeremy stopped and poked his head into the room. ‘By the way, if you’re going to start bringing friends up here, we should probably set some ground rules.’ He looked straight at Owen and dropped him a knowing wink. ‘Ghostly or not, boys will be boys!’

  Chapter 9

  I thought I would actually die of embarrassment. If you’d asked me, I couldn’t have told you which was worse; Jeremy’s toe-curling hint that something was going on between me and Owen, or the shameful knowledge that he wasn’t a million miles from the truth. A groan of mortification escaped me. I didn’t want to think about what might have happened if he’d walked in a few seconds later.

  ‘I thought you said he wasn’t psychic,’ Owen ventured, once the door had closed on Jeremy’s self-satisfied chuckling.

  I gritted my teeth. ‘No, I said he was part psychic, although I’m beginning to wonder if that was all an act just to catch me out. He isn’t normally home this early, either.’

  Owen grimaced. ‘Well, he definitely knew I was here.’

  Which meant that pretty soon Celestine would know and I’d have some explaining to do. And that left me with a dilemma; how much should I tell her? That Owen had helped me at the lake and nothing more, or confess how close I was to crossing the line between the acceptable and the downright wrong?

  ‘You should probably go,’ I said out loud, checking the time on the laptop. ‘Mary will be back soon and you’ve met quite enough of my family for one night.’

  He stood up and stretched. ‘Thanks for letting me come over. I had fun.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said, trying not to wonder what would have happened if Jeremy hadn’t interrupted. ‘I don’t invite many people here, for obvious reasons.’

  ‘I can see how it might be a bit awkward,’ Owen agreed. His eyes strayed to the laptop. ‘I suppose I’ll have to wait to log into Facebook.’

  I got to my feet and smiled encouragingly. ‘At least now you can. If you spend a bit of time practising then you’ll ha
ve no problems using the track-pad next time you come over. If you wanted to come over again, I mean.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘Thanks for sharing the secret with me. You know, how to touch things.’

  I felt myself start to go red as I thought about what he’d actually touched. ‘No worries,’ I said, willing my cheeks to cool down. ‘Happy to help.’

  He paused to look at me and I wondered if he was going to mention our kiss. Then his gaze skittered away. ‘So I’ll see you soon, then?’

  Nodding a bit too fast, I replied, ‘Absolutely. I’ll pop by the lake after school on Thursday, bring some magazines.’ Then my brain seemed to switch off and my mouth took on a life of its own. ‘Shall we go and see that film at the weekend?’

  Owen’s face lit up. ‘Yeah, OK. As long as you let me sniff your popcorn.’

  I grinned. ‘I think that could be arranged.’

  ‘So it’s a date, then.’ He smiled and my stomach went zoing. ‘I’m looking forward to it already.’

  After he’d gone, I looked him up on Facebook. As he’d guessed, his account was protected and I couldn’t see anything except his name and his profile picture. It had been taken on some kind of race track – there was a chequered flag in the background and he was laughing into the camera. I could barely make out his scar but the tell-tale twist of his mouth gave it away. On impulse, I clicked on the Friend Request button. Someone in his family was probably maintaining the account and, with a bit of luck, it might be Cerys so I could talk to her. If I wanted to figure out why Owen was still here, I’d need to find out more about him without crossing the line into snooping. And whether I liked it or not, at the back of my mind was the memory of our ghostly kiss. It had been the sweetest and the most frustrating snog of my life; almost real but not quite. I was looking forward to our date at the cinema; Owen was the perfect way to distract myself from Nico. Maybe – just maybe – we’d find a way to make our next kiss good enough to blow my attraction to Nico away forever.

  By the time Thursday afternoon rolled around, the mere thought of history made me feel like throwing up. My attempts to get out of the field trip had fallen on deaf ears with Celestine, even when I played my trump card and mentioned Nico, and I knew it was because of the row we’d had over Owen.

  ‘Of course nothing was going on,’ I’d lied when she’d raised the subject with me at the Dearly D on Tuesday evening.

  ‘That’s not what Jeremy said,’ she’d fired back, smiling at old Mrs Chester as she tottered through the pews in front of us. ‘He said you were all over each other.’

  ‘I was helping Owen learn how to touch things, that’s all,’ I answered, making a mental note to have a quiet word with Jeremy about his tabloid tendencies. ‘The same as I did with Dontay.’

  She’d scowled. ‘I don’t remember having to prise you and Dontay apart. You knew the rules back then.’ Pausing, she’d lowered her voice. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that getting emotionally attached to a ghost is a sure-fire path to misery. When he passes across – and that’s what you’re supposed to be helping him to do, remember – you’ll both end up broken-hearted.’

  I’d opened my mouth to reply and closed it again. I had nothing. She was one hundred per cent right. It didn’t mean I had to like it, though.

  ‘Break it off, Skye,’ she commanded. ‘Better still, get him to come here so that one of the other psychics can help him. Don’t give him a reason to stay here longer than he needs to. It’s not fair.’

  In the end, I’d agreed to her demand but it had been grudging and she knew it. So she hadn’t been exactly receptive when I’d asked for a letter excusing me from history. She’d argued that I’d have to face up to Nico one day and it was better to do it in a public place like the Tower of London than somewhere quiet and isolated. Never mind that there was more chance of running into a ghost there than pretty much anywhere else in London.

  My hope that Nico would have been struck down by any passing disease came to nothing either; he was waiting in line outside the classroom, his black gaze fixed on me as I pretended not to notice him. Once we were in our seats, the lesson went immediately downhill.

  ‘You’re going to be looking at source material today, ahead of tomorrow’s trip. Split into your working groups and discuss the images on the sheets I’m handing round.’

  Scraping her chair back, Megan waggled her eyebrows at Nico’s back as she looked at me. I sighed.

  Ellie had made her way to Nico’s side at warp speed. ‘I was thinking that we could be partners and give these two losers the push,’ she said, flicking her dark hair over her shoulder and smiling flirtatiously down at him. I rolled my eyes at Amad, who pushed his glasses up his nose nervously and hugged his exercise book to his chest.

  Nico swivelled around in his chair to face me. ‘You’re making it too easy, Ellie,’ he said. ‘You should play hard to get, like Skye here. It’s much more alluring.’

  I snorted. ‘Or impossible to get, even.’

  ‘You weren’t always.’ Nico leaned towards Ellie and lowered his voice confidentially. ‘She pretends to hate me but it’s all a front.’

  Summoning up my most disinterested expression, I pulled Megan’s empty chair out from under the table and pointed to it. ‘Take a seat, Amad. It looks like we’re the only ones who’ll be getting any work done in this group.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather sit here, Ellie?’ Amad asked, his voice a mixture of awed hesitancy and adoration.

  ‘Drop dead, pond scum,’ Ellie snapped, without even a glance, slamming her books on the table and stalking around to perch on the only other available seat, next to Nico.

  Amad crumpled into the seat. ‘O-OK. No problem.’

  ‘See?’ Nico grinned at Ellie and raised a wolfish eyebrow. ‘You’re learning already.’

  When it came down to it, Nico worked harder than I expected. While Ellie didn’t even pretend to look at the letters and images we’d been given to interpret, Nico mostly ignored her blatant flirting and came up with some insightful comments about punishment through the ages. My heart sank when we got to the last question, however.

  ‘Using sources 4A to 4D, give a variety of reasons someone might be tried for witchcraft in sixteenth-century England and explain how punishment for the crime changed over time,’ Nico read.

  His eyes locked onto mine. Steeling myself, I waited for the inevitable jibe but it wasn’t Nico who made it.

  ‘God, this is so boring,’ Ellie burst out. ‘Who cares why a bunch of attention-seeking freaks got what was coming to them? It’s not like witchcraft actually exists, anyway.’

  Nico and I looked away. ‘It doesn’t matter whether the accusation was accurate,’ I said in a careful tone. ‘What matters is how unfairly they were treated.’

  ‘You would take their side,’ Ellie snapped back at me, her mouth twisted in disgust. ‘You’re even weirder than they were. I bet if you’d been alive back then, they’d have burned you at the stake, too.’

  ‘You should have a bit more respect, Ellie,’ Nico said and I thought I caught a glitter of amusement in his eyes. ‘If Skye really was a witch, she might turn you into something even nastier than you already are.’

  Ellie looked like she’d been slapped. ‘She’s really sucked you in, hasn’t she? Don’t tell me you believe in all that hocus-pocus crap?’

  Nico was very still. He tilted his head and studied Ellie intently. ‘Never walked into a room and had the prickling feeling someone else just left?’ he said, his voice low and mesmeric. Outside the window, the sky had darkened to an ominous grey and the light in the classroom seemed suddenly inadequate. The hubbub of the other kids faded. ‘Or lain there in bed at night and wondered if that creaking noise on the stairs is really just the floorboards? Never walked through a silent graveyard in the dark and prayed that the dead stay that way?’

  Ellie was doing her best to ignore him but I could see he was getting to her. Amad kept his head down and looked like he mig
ht burst into tears. ‘We’ve only got ten minutes left to finish this.’

  Leaning closer to Ellie, Nico stared into her eyes. ‘Haven’t you ever been home on your own and been sure there was someone creeping up behind you? But when you spun around, heart thumping, there was no one there?’

  On cue, a crack of thunder rattled the windows and a flash of lightning lit up the sky. Ellie and half the rest of the class screamed, then let out sheepish laughter as they looked at each other. Chatter broke out amongst the groups.

  ‘You’re as much of a freak as she is,’ Ellie said, tossing her hair over one shoulder in shaky disdain. ‘I don’t know what I ever saw in you.’

  Nico leaned back in his seat. ‘Mission accomplished.’

  Miss Pointer’s voice rose above the noise of conversation. ‘Pack your things away now. Don’t forget, you’ll need a packed lunch tomorrow and make sure you’re wearing full school uniform. Anyone going plain clothes will be thrown into the dungeons.’

  Groans rang out around the room. Stuffing her books into her bag, Ellie sneered at me. ‘I don’t know what kind of spell you’ve cast on him.’

  I smiled my sweetest smile. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in all that hocus-pocus.’

  She scowled. ‘Just stay away from me tomorrow, both of you. Amad, make sure you bring a notebook in the morning. You’re going to be doing my work for me.’

  Looking like all his birthdays had come at once, Amad scooped up his notes and nodded. Ellie fired a final withering glare my way and stormed off, with Amad scurrying behind her like a bespectacled Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Nico said, when it became clear I wasn’t going to thank him.

  ‘What for?’ I asked, getting to my feet and swinging my bag over my shoulder. ‘Making Ellie hate me even more than she already did?’

  He grinned, and my lunch flipped over lazily inside me. ‘I thought you needed defending. Besides, if it’s any consolation, she hates me too, and at least we can get on with our work in peace tomorrow.’