The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl)

by Paige McKenzie

  The top of the hill is flat and dry and open, like an enormous stage. It’s gotta be the size of a football field. Or at least a baseball diamond. Whatever trees grew up here have long since been cut down. Which means no respite from the sun beating down overhead.

  “Welcome to the playground.” Lucio holds his arms out at the emptiness around us. He hops up onto a boulder and perches on it like an agile cat, running his fingers over his closely cropped black hair. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but back in the day this was the coolest place on Earth.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Used to be covered with luiseach pulling spirits to them from all across the world. Not just young luiseach in training with their mentors, but experienced luiseach honing their skills, practicing exorcisms, gathering strength. I’d sneak up here and watch, just itching for my sixteenth birthday so I could feel all the action myself.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “It was. ’Course, by the time I took my test, things around here were a whole lot quieter,” Lucio gestures to the empty space around us. I close my eyes and try to imagine what it must have looked like when this enormous plateau was covered end to end with luiseach in training. But I can only picture it as empty as it looks now. I guess I haven’t been a luiseach long enough to know what it’s really like on an average day.

  Lucio hops down from his boulder, nodding at the space behind me. Aidan’s walking across the playground to meet us.

  “I just took an inventory,” Aidan says once he’s close enough for us to hear. “But do another head count before you turn in.”

  “A head count?” I ask. “I thought we were the only people here.”

  “We are,” Aidan answers.

  “Got it, boss.” Lucio starts jogging down the mountain, his steps as easy and assured as a cat’s.

  “And Lucio!” Aidan calls after him. “Get some rest. I need you strong.”

  “Strong for what?” I ask.

  “Let’s not lose our focus,” Aidan says. “We’ve got a lot of work of our own to do.”

  “My mom really wants me to get better at handling multiple spirits,” I begin. “She’s worried that what happened in the parking lot might happen again.”

  “It will happen again. But we’ll get you stronger before it does. Before someone uses that particular weakness against you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A luiseach can draw spirits toward him or herself. Which means a crafty luiseach could draw spirits toward a weaker luiseach nearby as well.”

  “Why would someone—”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Aidan interrupts. “I’d like to start small. Close your eyes.”

  The look on Aidan’s face tells me he’s not the type of teacher who tolerates students who talk back too much, so I let my eyelids fall shut. The sun is so bright that even with my eyes closed, I see brightness; a collage of reds and oranges play against my eyelids.

  “Concentrate,” Aidan commands, like he knows I’m already distracted, paying attention to what I see instead of what I feel.

  It’s there, that feeling I first felt in the hospital, the electric hum of spirits in the air around me, spirits who may have departed from this very spot, spirits who may have come into being close by. I can feel what’s left of them, like shadows falling over my skin. I’m filled with an odd sense of calmness, a connection to the past, to that moment of peace so many spirits have felt in this place.

  “As you know,” Aidan begins, sounding like Mr. Packer at the start of one of his lectures. Should I be taking notes? I can hear his footsteps as he paces slowly around me on the smooth stone surface. “Spirits are drawn toward the nearest luiseach, like moths to the flame. However, we can help them find us sooner. We can pull spirits toward us from miles away, from across the country, from across the continent. If you concentrate, you can feel the instant a spirit is released from its body. Do you feel it?” I take a deep breath, pressing my eyes shut tight. Somewhere, right at this moment, a spirit is being set loose. At first there’s only the hint of its presence, barely enough to raise goosebumps on my skin. Last night Lucio said he was looking for a spirit and couldn’t find it. Is this how he searches? By closing his eyes and waiting for the chill to set in? As suddenly as I begin to feel the spirit’s presence arrive, it vanishes.

  I open my eyes. Much to my surprise, Aidan’s face is close to mine, our noses almost touching. “Don’t let yourself get distracted,” he says. I press my lips together. How did he know my mind was wandering? “Focus only on the task at hand. Seek it out. Concentrate.”

  I tense all of my muscles until I feel the chill again; my heart begins beating fast.

  “Now draw him close. Trust your instincts.”

  Aidan must feel the spirit too, an eighty-year-old man named Miguel from San Antonio who smoked his first cigarette at thirteen and whose lungs slowly turned black and finally gave out.

  “Don’t lose your focus!” Aidan shouts, but his voice sounds terribly far away. “Draw him closer. Give him the peace he deserves.”

  I can taste smoke in my mouth as if I’m a smoker. As if I’m feeling what it was like to be this man. It’s overwhelming.

  “Concentrate. Remember what happens to spirits who don’t move on in time.”

  “What’s happening to me?” I manage to say right before I see him there, in front of us. He’s so close that I’m shivering. I stretch my arms out in front of me, drawing him close enough to touch. His face, leathery and dried from years in the sun, has an expression of wonderment and fear all at once, as if he’s unsure of what’s happening. The taste of smoke is overwhelming, and I can hardly breathe as I touch his shoulder and send him on his way.

  And then, suddenly, peace. I’m so surprised that I fall to the ground, gasping for air like a fish out of water.

  Aidan stands over me. I expect him to bend down and offer me some water or a hand, but instead he says, “Interesting.”

  “What?” My voice is hoarse.

  “That man died from emphysema.”

  “I know.” I also know that he left behind a son who begged his father to stop smoking every year on his birthday. I know that every year Miguel tried. And every year he failed.

  I press my hand to my chest. I’m happy to breathe clearly again and relieved I never let Vincent Warner talk me into trying cigarettes in eighth grade.

  I wince at the fading taste of nicotine on my tongue. This has never happened before. Am I getting stronger? Is it the playground? But before I have time to ask, Aidan says, “Let’s try again.”

  By the end of the day I’ve helped four more spirits move on and, in addition to knowing what it feels like to die from emphysema, I know what it feels like to die from sugar (a diabetic woman in Arizona who went into insulin shock), lack of water (a man who got lost in the desert and ran out of supplies), and too much water (a surfer who drowned on the Cortes bank just south of San Diego), and my chest aches like a rock is beating where my heart should be (an elderly woman in Costa Rica whose heart gave out).

  “You did well,” Aidan says. “Five spirits on your first try, some of them from great distances.”

  I know he’s trying to be reassuring, but it doesn’t feel like I did well. I’m exhausted from experiencing, even for the briefest moment, what it was like to be all those people when they died.

  “Does this always happen?” I ask Aidan breathlessly when we finally leave the playground behind.

  “No.”

  “You mean, over time, as I get stronger, I won’t be so”—I search for the right word—“sensitive?”

  Aidan shakes his head. “I mean I’ve never seen a luiseach feel the lives of the spirits she helps move on. It’s as though you’re experiencing their lives—and their deaths—yourself.”

  My breath quickens. “This doesn’t happen to anyone else?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  There may not be any spirits close by anymore, but now my h
eart is pounding for a different reason entirely. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You appear to be particularly sensitive.”

  Mom used to say that too. I mean, not about spirits, obviously, but just about life in general. When I was five, I developed a whole plan to help save a homeless man we passed every day on the way to day care. When I was seven, my mom caught me stuffing an envelope full of pocket change. When she asked me what I was doing, I told her I planned to send it to the nice lady on the commercials with all the sad animals. Mom never seemed to think it was a problem, but it looks like Aidan would disagree. “Can you fix it?” I ask finally.

  “I can certainly try,” Aidan answers, as he writes a note in a small notepad he’s pulled from his back pocket.

  Worn out from my first full day of luiseach work, I shake my head. That doesn’t sound as reassuring as I’d hoped.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Playtime Is Over

  Another day, another lesson on the playground. This time Lucio’s with us. As Aidan outlines today’s goals, Lucio plays with his tattoo, runs his hands over his closely cropped hair, and bounces from one foot to the other like he’s preparing to run away. More than once he cocks his head to the side like he’s listening for something.

  Maybe for the missing spirit?

  “Are you ready to get started, Sunshine?” Aidan asks finally, tucking his notepad and pen in his back pocket.

  “Sure,” I answer, not wanting him to know I haven’t actually been paying attention to him so much as I’ve been watching Lucio.

  “Lucio is going to demonstrate first.”

  It feels like I’ve been in training forever. I’m now an expert at drawing willing spirits close: Aidan taught me to be perfectly still, to sense the nearest spirit—even if it’s miles away. He taught me to control my breathing, flex my muscles, and draw that spirit close so I could help it move on. I’ve sought out spirits from clear across the country, spirits from as far away as El Salvador and Guatemala and even once a strange hermit-like man from all the way up in Vancouver who no one even knew was alive for the past fifty years. His strange, lonely aura made my skin feel icy cold as I helped him. Despite that, each time I helped a spirit move on I felt that same otherworldly sense of peace, as though I was exactly where I was meant to be, even if where I am is on an abandoned campus in the Mexican wilderness, thousands of miles away from the people I love.

  If only that were all I felt.

  “Do you see the way he’s focused?” Aidan asks, forcing me to pay attention. I nod. Lucio closes his eyes and holds his hands out as though he thinks he can physically pull the spirit toward him.

  Light spirits come to us easily like we’re magnets, just like Victoria said. But today Lucio is dragging a more resistant spirit to him. He closes his eyes, and his chest and forearms clench.

  It’s not long before she appears in front of us, a frail-looking young woman, not much older than me. Her skin is a sickly yellow, and she’s bald. It looks like she’s been fighting an illness for some time.

  I see the expression on Lucio’s face change as the spirit moves on: his grimace becomes the slightest hint of a smile as the peace washes over him. Then he opens his eyes and shakes himself like a puppy after a bath.

  “Why didn’t she want to move on?” I ask.

  Lucio shrugs. “Eighteen. Leukemia. Wasn’t ready to stop fighting, but her body was.”

  How can he just rattle it off like that? I mean, he says it perfectly nicely—solemnly even—but he doesn’t look sad. “Didn’t you feel her sadness when she passed through you? You didn’t feel the cancer destroying her blood?”

  Lucio looks from me to Aidan. Finally Aidan explains, “Sunshine seems to be more sensitive than most.”

  Talk about an understatement.

  Each time I’ve helped a spirit move on, I sort of absorbed some part of them; I felt what they felt at the instant they died—grief, relief, surprise. And the feelings stayed with me for hours after they’d vanished. Sometimes it’s no more than a shadow: memories of the people they loved, the feeling of sunlight against their faces. But sometimes it’s the ache of their deaths, the pain they suffered, the fear they faced.

  Aidan thinks I just need to practice. A few dozen more spirits and I’ll grow a thicker skin. I’m not so sure. It feels to me like the absorption is just getting stronger with each spirit who passes through me. Like with every spirit I help move on, I hang on to a little bit more of them, and I see them a little bit clearer.

  “Now,” Aidan says. “You try.”

  He takes my hands and I close my eyes. I concentrate on feeling that electric hum he showed to Mom in the hospital that day, the echo of spirits that have moved on, the pulse of those who haven’t yet. I’m getting better at feeling connected to this energy.

  “No,” Aidan says as my focus lands on a ninety-eight-year-old grandmother named Marie. “Not her.”

  I open my eyes. “How did you know what I was about to do?” He squeezes my hands in his, like his touch explains the connection. “Luiseach can work together. For particularly tricky spirits, sometimes we have to join forces.”

  “So you’re going to help me?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “You’re not reaching for anyone that tricky today. I’m going to watch you.”

  I get the feeling Aidan is the kind of dad who’d have thrown me into the deep end of the pool to teach me to swim. I’m supposed to be looking for resistant spirits, the kind that, left to their own devices, might turn dark. I know what’s at stake when that happens.

  So I close my eyes again and concentrate.

  Then I find him. Sixteen years old, just like me. Lived in a suburb outside Tucson, Arizona. Riding his bike home from school—his parents promised him a car by graduation—when some car missed a stop sign and hit him. He was wearing his helmet, but the impact of the fall knocked it right off of his head. He lay on the ground, blood dripping from his skull, waiting for the ambulance to come. As he waited, he ticked off a list of the things he had yet to do: See the pyramids in Egypt. Drive his own car to and from school. Go to college. Pitch a perfect game, or even just a no-hitter or a one-hitter would do. Ask Meghan Waters out on a real date. Hold Meghan Waters’s hand. Kiss Meghan Waters good night. Tell Meghan Waters how he felt about her.

  Talk to Meghan Waters at all.

  He didn’t want to die without talking to Meghan Waters. And yet, as his eyes filled with blood and his brain swelled until it was simply too big for the skull around it, he knew that was his fate.

  And now he’s angry. Not at the tree that obscured the stop sign and not at the driver who hadn’t slowed down when driving through a residential neighborhood. No, this boy—Eddie Denfield was his name—is mad at himself for all the chances he’d had that he hadn’t taken.

  So instead of being drawn to the nearest luiseach, he’s been lingering by Meghan Waters’s locker. Now I have to make him move on in spite of himself.

  Even with Aidan’s hands on mine, I reach my arms out just like I saw Lucio do. This must be why Lucio’s muscles are so big: pulling spirits from across the continent takes strength. I’m flexing muscles I didn’t even know existed. Tonight when I climb into bed, my entire body will ache from the effort of the day. My abdominals will be so sore that it hurts to take a deep breath, my legs so tired that it will feel like they weigh a million pounds.

  Eddie Denfield wants nothing to do with me. At first loose papers in the hall begin to swirl about, and Eddie’s former classmates take notice. They begin looking around for the source of the mysterious wind, but they won’t find it. As I pull harder, Eddie gets angrier, holding on for dear life, literally. Lockers begin slamming shut one right after another all throughout the hallway. The girls are screaming and the boys are shouting. And then it happens. Meghan runs out of a classroom, trying to see what all the commotion is about, and Eddie spots her one last time. “You have to let her go,” I say, unsure whether he can hear me. I can feel his resi
stance as I pull him farther and farther from the girl he’s had a crush on since sixth grade. The sweat on my face turns cool as he comes close.

  For a brief moment he’s there right before me, his eyes filled with anger and blood and regret, his head smashed in and bleeding from the accident. He’s been so focused on Meghan that he never noticed his leg was badly broken too, part of the bone sticking out of his flesh. As I quickly reach out to touch him he screams furiously at me in anger, feeling betrayed, even though I never knew this boy. Then he’s gone, moving on with only the slightest sense of peace at the very last moment, but mostly with just one thing. Anger.

  When I open my eyes, I’m angry too.

  “Why did you make me do that?” I shout, pulling my hands from Aidan’s grip. “He just wanted a chance to say good-bye!”

  “Sunshine, do you hear yourself?” Aidan doesn’t raise his voice. “It’s your job to help spirits move on even when they don’t want to.”

  “But he just needed a little more time—”

  “I know,” Aidan says softly. “We all struggle with that sometimes. But you know what happens if too much time passes.”

  He’s right. A demon nearly killed my mother. Why did I want to let Eddie stay? Why am I so angry when I should feel peace?

  Lucio whistles. “She really does take on what they’re feeling, huh? Freaky.”

  What he really means is freak. I’m a freak. A luiseach with a sensitivity problem no luiseach has had before.

  “Maybe a protector could figure out why I’m so different?” I try. “That’s what they do, right? Find information that might help us?” I bite my lip, hoping Aidan is about to launch into a lengthy explanation of protectors’ duties.

  Aidan shakes his head. “We’ll keep working on it.”

  Something tells me we’re not making as much progress as he’d like. He pulls out his notepad and writes something down as he walks away. I begin to follow, but Lucio grabs my hand and holds me back.