by Suzy Cox
Just go with it, I silently said to them. Follow the Living and it’ll all be okay.
And if it’s not, in the future, we will think a bit more carefully about the consequences before we possess people.
There was a flash of blue as Jamie ran forward to take her place. She went to her group of three helpers, and lifted up her right foot. She stood on the girls’ hands, as they crouched to get more power, then raised their arms, throwing her into the air. She popped up, straightened, and smiled at Kristen. Jamie was up. The first part of the ’mid was in place. Only three more of the top level to go.
Nancy looked at Lorna and smiled. And before I could even hide my eyes, she had mimicked Jamie’s movements perfectly, making Five’s body run onto the field and—ping!— with the other cheerleaders’ help there she was, up in the air, being held in place by the three girls below her who were holding on to her feet.
She beamed. “That. Was. The. Coolest! Come on, Lorna, this is so much fun! I can’t believe we didn’t try this months ago!”
“Lorna? Who’s Lorna?” Kristen asked.
Lorna had no choice but to go. She looked at me, grimaced, then followed Nancy’s lead. I thought she’d panic at the last minute, or refuse to go through with it, but she kept right on moving. Within seconds, she’d jumped and been pushed up there too. Okay, so she wasn’t smiling—I didn’t get the impression Lorna was loving three strange girls holding on to her feet—even if they weren’t actually her feet—but she stood tall. I felt Mom-at-sports-day proud.
Only Tess to go. Once she was up there, the Agency would have totally infiltrated the squad—and the major part of Nancy’s Plan could really begin. Once they were in, they could start asking questions about me without any of the girls thinking it was superweird—and see if any of them reacted strangely. If the Dead Girls could do that and keep their balance, that is.
“Kaitlynnn, where are you?” Kristen shouted from her position in front of the triangle of gently swaying girls. Being the captain didn’t seem so bad. You got to shout orders and look good, but without doing the tricky stunts. Well, that was how Kristen ran things anyway. “You need to get on top NOW! If this was a competition and it had taken us this long to form the pyramid we would so be getting penalty points.”
Even from my position a few meters away, I saw a couple of the squad shudder at the thought. To my right on the benches, Alanna nodded in agreement, as if she were the five boroughs’ only judge. Even Brian shook his shaggy-dog head.
Unfortunately Kristen had no idea that the final piece of her pyramid had authority issues and was seriously not impressed that she was being told what to do. Tess walked Kaitlynnn’s body over to the others as slowly as she could. So slowly that some of the girls at the base of the ’mid started to sweat. Major squad sin. Suddenly Blonde Four swayed dangerously—any second Lorna was going to cause a cheeralanche—but the girls below her tightened their grip on Four’s legs as Nancy held her hand. She stopped wobbling. Phew.
“Kaitlynnn, come onnnnn!” Kristen fumed. “Honestly, I’ve had relationships that have lasted less time than this.”
Kaitlynnn/Tess smirked and took her place. She put her left foot on the human hand trampoline and bounced it up and down, testing how sturdy it was.
“OMFG, Kaitlynnn,” Kristen screamed. “Will you just push yourself up here? Jamie and the others will grab your hands and pull you up. If you do not move in the next three seconds, I am replacing you with that fat kid sitting on the benches”—she pointed straight at poor Brian—“because compared to you, he’s as fast as Lance Armstrong avec bike.”
Tess looked at me and shrugged. She took a big step, bounced unenthusiastically, and launched Kaitlynnn’s body into the air.
Just not quite hard enough.
Instead of landing up on the same level as Jamie and the Blondes, Kaitlynnn’s body side bounced. Head-butting Jamie right in the ass.
“Wahhhhhh!” Jamie screamed, as three years of hard-practiced cheerleading poise failed her. She wobbled, heroically tried to grab Four to steady herself, then toppled, taking the whole ’mid down with her.
The resulting pileup of blond hair, blue shirts, and toned thighs looked like an explosion in a Barbie factory.
“Mess up much, Kaitlynnn?” Jamie said from somewhere under the heap. “And BTW, if whoever has her foot in my chest does not get off me in the next three seconds, I swear to God this squad will be running one member down.”
Kristen looked on, her expression a mix of horror and superiority. One by one, the girls pulled themselves out. Not one helped another up.
“That was intense,” a tiny brunette who I recognized from my literature class said. “We haven’t had a fall like that for, like, days.”
“Still, I, um, bet that didn’t hurt as badly as it did when Charlotte Feldman went under the F train,” Five said, totally out of nowhere.
Subtle, Nancy. A million miles away from subtle.
A couple of the girls nervously giggled, not sure how to respond.
“I heard she hit the track so hard, it took them two hours to clean things up,” Jamie said, grimacing.
Okay, less with the gnarly details. Been there, got the tombstone …
“Ladies?” Kristen came over and pulled herself up to her full five foot seven and a half. “You have just performed the worst pyramid I have ever witnessed in five years of cheering and what are you doing—are you running to do it over, this time properly? Are you apologizing for wasting my precious time with your total lame-ility? Or are you standing around, talking about some dead girl that nobody cared about until a week ago?”
Kristen put her hands on her hips, then turned to Four and pulled a piece of grass out of her hair. Whoa, Lorna must be in a state not to have taken care of that by herself.
“We were just—” she started.
“Just what?” Kristen asked.
“What she means is that we were just talking about Charlotte because it’s really heartbreaking what happened to her and she’s only been dead for a few days, so we’re completely entitled to talk about her if we want,” Blonde Five said, desperately trying to bait Kristen.
Watch it, Nancy, I thought. I’m not sure Five would use that many words of more than one syllable in a sentence.
“Yeah, I thought Charlotte was cool actually,” said lit class brunette. “Her eyes were pretty and she always had the straightest eyeliner ever. And one time, she helped me with a Shakespeare assignment, because I’d just finished reading Harry Potter and I kept getting confused between Hamlet and Hagrid and it was completely messing up my essay on why he had issues.”
Sweet. Unfathomably stupid, but still sweet.
Kristen looked around at her squad, balling up her freshly pressed skirt in her right hand. I got the impression that she was imagining it was one of their pretty heads. Was she actually about to … blow?
“Charlotte? Will somebody please tell me what is the sudden big obsession with Charlotte?” Kristen ranted. “Ever since that idiot girl tripped, I seem to hear her name, like, thirty times a day. First from David, then the teachers, and now you guys? What is with the dead-girl mania? She didn’t disturb our practices when she was alive, so why are we talking about her now that she’s dead?”
“Because she was smoking hot,” a gruff voice next to me said. I turned to see it had come from … Brian? “I’m sorry I never got to spend enough time with her lately to tell her that.”
Well at least someone got what David saw in me. Even if it was my ill-advised fourth grade boyfriend. Mina grabbed her red Amoeba tote bag and scurried away.
Tess sat Kaitlynnn’s body on the grass and put her head between her hands. Much as she was not my favorite person, I had to agree with what her body language was saying. This was getting us nowhere. Whoever my murderer might be, she wasn’t going to confess just because someone provoked her.
But that didn’t stop Nancy.
“That’s quite a strong reaction, Kristen.” Nancy h
ad clearly watched too many Columbo reruns and was taking a page out of his detecting book. “I don’t think any of us are obsessed with Charlotte. It sounds more like you are.”
Kristen narrowed her blue eyes. “Me? Obsessed with her? Hello, as if! What is up with you?” She spun around. “In fact, what is up with all of you? Standing around here aimlessly after that performance. My housekeeper’s ironing board could have put on a better show. It was pathetic. About as pathetic as Charlotte Feldman. Honestly, if you don’t improve soon, I’ll push you all onto the nearest subway track.”
What?
Nancy and Lorna swung the Blondes’ bodies around to me as if to say, See! See!
That wasn’t a confession, was it? If it was, something didn’t feel quite right.
“No one said Charlotte was pushed, Kristen. Everyone says she tripped. So where did that come from?” Lorna made Four say. “I think you need to be careful when you’re talking about the dead.” Lorna nudged Five in the ribs. “Because if you have wronged them, you never know when they’re going to come back and call you out on it.”
“No,” Five continued, waving her arm up and down—there it was, the Signal for me to get off the bench and get involved—“you never know when they are going to come back, especially if you hurt them. And they want revenge.”
Right, this was my cue. Kristen was staring at the Blondes like they’d flipped their lids, but according to Nancy’s Plan, this was my moment to apparite. Seeing as Lorna’s and Nancy’s undercover interrogation hadn’t got us a full-on confession (yet), it was time to bring out the big guns. I had to make myself appear to Kristen and see if my ghost scared her into saying anything else.
I closed my eyes, concentrated real hard, and tried to make that warm feeling grow.
As usual, it started at my feet. I looked down and watched as the color returned to them. Awesome. Now all I needed to do was make the rest of my body go, haunt Kristen, and we’d know once and for all if she’d killed me or not. I’d scare her into admitting what she really thought of me.
Maybe we’d get a confession. Maybe I’d get my Key.
“Sorry to be a party pooper, Feldman, but you couldn’t scare a five-year-old at a sleepover with those moves,” said a male voice behind me. I breathed out in frustration and felt my power—and visibility—go. I didn’t even have to turn around to see who it was. I recognized that tone. Edison.
“Don’t fool yourself, Ghostgirl.” Ed jumped down off the bench he’d ported onto from who-knows-which-mysterious-place he hung out in all day, and came to stand by me. His T-shirt really was incredibly tight.
Edison stared out at the field, just in time to see Nancy attempt the splits with Five’s body, fail spectacularly, and fall over.
“Nancy Drew seriously thinks one of those vapid rally girls committed your murder?” he asked.
Nancy pulled Five’s body up, tripped, and went down again. Smooth.
“Kinda. Well, it is a possibility. After all, the head one did just threaten to push the entire squad under a train—and seeing as that’s how someone killed me, maybe she’s speaking from experience,” I said.
Looking at Kristen now, bossing Jamie and the others around, I knew more than ever that she was capable of a lot of things: blow-drying her own hair to salon standards, making other girls feel hideous about themselves on an hourly basis, and still being seriously thin despite the fact she always seemed to have a full-fat frappuccino in her hand. But was she actually capable of murder? Despite what she’d just blurted out, I wasn’t so sure.
“You know Nancy,” I said. “She likes to be thorough. We had to cross these suspects off the list before we start investigating the next ones.”
“‘Thorough,’ hey? That’s one way of putting it.” Edison brushed his hair back off his face and squinted in the lunchtime sun. “Though ‘slow’ and ‘criminally dull’ would be another.”
I wondered what Edison wore in the summer when he was alive. I couldn’t imagine him in anything but lead singer black even if someone made him go to the beach.
Ed gave me a slow smile. “Why does Nancy think one of the pom-pom posse had it in for you anyway?” he asked.
“Look, Nancy seems to know what she’s doing,” I said, desperately trying to change the subject. I didn’t want to get into the David Conversation with him now. Things were WTF? weird enough between us already without bringing David into it. “Without her and Lorna, I wouldn’t have even got this far.”
“And how far is that?” Edison asked. “Far enough to be one week dead and still Keyless? Far enough to have watched your ex making out with half the school before you’ve even got one decent lead? Or far enough to be standing here, trying to scare a borderline-anorexic lip-gloss addict into confessing something she doesn’t have the brainpower to pull off?”
“How did you know about my ex?” I asked. Calling David that out loud with Edison there made my stomach turn.
Ed turned to look at me, his green eyes searching, but said nothing.
“Isn’t a ghost allowed a bit of privacy?” I asked.
“Not around here it seems. That guy is a loser if he didn’t know what he had.”
For about the ninetieth time, I wished Nancy had given me a book on understanding Edison along with the Rules.
The squad had pulled themselves back up now. Nancy was madly waving Five’s arm above her head. She still seemed to think that if I apparited it might scare Kristen into saying something more.
“Okay, so I don’t know what’s going on over there, but Nancy’s giving me the Signal that means I really need to apparite now,” I said. “Would you mind porting off someplace else so I can concentrate?”
“Got stage fright?” Edison smirked.
“Hardly, it’s just that when I apparite and Kristen and the squad see me, they are going to be so scared they’re going to run screaming from this field like extras in a B movie—and I don’t know if you have the stomach to handle that.”
“Clearly,” Edison said, raising an eyebrow. He moved toward me, then suddenly stopped, like he thought better of whatever he was about to do. “Look, I know when I’m not wanted. I’ll leave you to it.”
He climbed back up the bleachers. I couldn’t help but notice that his skinny jeans were pretty Ed-hugging too. “Oh and Charlotte? When you want to know how to really scare the bejesus out of someone who might actually need it, you let me know. It won’t be as … exhilarating as our last lesson. I promise. I’m”—he looked deep in my eyes for a second too long—“well, I’m sorry about that. Maybe it wasn’t what you needed after all. But I still have a couple of tricks up my sleeve. All perfectly legal. Just more effective than this.” He smiled.
Pop!
Edison was gone.
I turned my attention back to the field. Thrown as I felt, I couldn’t focus on Edison and his surprisingly toned arms and his wooo!-check-out-all-the-bad-things-I-can-teach-you speeches right now. Not when I had detecting to do. Lorna and Nancy were waving madly at me now. The cheerleaders were packing up their bags. Practice was over. Either I did this now and found out once and for all what Kristen was really made of, or I stopped trying and just accepted the fact that I might never find my Key.
I forgot about Edison, walked forward, and focused until the warm feeling came. Up my legs, my stomach, my arms, whirling around my head. My body took on that familiar pink glow. I looked back to the field, and while the rest of the squad were too busy chattering away to have noticed me, the Blondes were staring at me with their mouths open. Which I figured meant it had worked.
I was a fully visible-to-the-Living ghostly apparition. And Kristen was walking straight at me. Ohmigod, this was it.
She looked at where I was standing, flipped her hair again—urgh, even when I was trying to be scary I could not help but notice that she was like something out of a barf-worthy shampoo commercial—and stopped about five steps in front of me.
Kristen slowly took me in, looking me up and down—twice
—before staring straight into my eyes. Her gaze didn’t flinch or even flicker. If I hadn’t been dead and her immortal enemy, I would have put bets on her launching into an epic put-down about my shoes or my hair right then and there.
Oh God, this was it. She could so see me. Come on, Charlotte, I told myself, haunt her a bit. If she knows anything about your death—if she was the one who pushed you—she’ll be so freaked out, it will totally show. Scare her!
But suddenly I had no idea what to do. Wave my arms? Woooo a bit? Instead I stood rooted to the spot. Every bit as pathetic as Edison had predicted. Unable to do anything apart from watch her stare at me. And stare right back.
Kristen opened her mouth. Here it was: the scream. The OMG!-I’ve-just-seen-Charlotte’s-ghost wail.
But there was no scream. No wail. Instead Kristen rolled her eyes. “For God’s sake,” she said to herself under her breath. “Those idiots have talked about that stupid girl so much, I am actually hallucinating her. It must be the stress. Enough already. I’m not wasting any more of my day on someone dumb enough to trip under a train. I need to go lie down. Or shop.”
Kristen stomped off the field, walking right through me.
I meant so little to her that even when I tried to haunt her, she thought I must be a figment of her own imagination.
I was so shocked, I breathed out, quickly making myself invisible again, so that when Kristen slammed the locker room door shut, and the other cheerleaders looked around to see where their captain had gone, I was nothing more than air.
Crap. Edison was right. It was time to admit that Kristen was many things (an uptight-boyfriend-stealing-mental case for a start), but she wasn’t a murderer. Not mine, anyway. If she had been, she wouldn’t have put me down to a lack of beauty sleep.
Back on the field, I saw Four’s and Five’s bodies shudder as Lorna and Nancy stepped out of them.
“Whoa, that must have been an intense practice,” Four said. “I totally zoned out during the whole thing.”