“Kristina, he was wearing shoes,” I said once they’d left. I’d decided to leave out that detail earlier in case my mom ran home and lit all our shoes on fire. “He showed them to me in the band room. They looked nice. Brown, leather, had some sort of fancy buckle on top of each one.”
“It had shoes on?” she said incredulously. “Wow. I’ve never heard of a demon that wears brown loafers.”
“That’s the thing, Kristina: How do we know it’s a demon? What if it’s something else? What if it’s someone who needs help?”
“Baylor,” she said slowly, as if I were the dumbest person on Earth. “I understand that you think seeing shoes is a good thing in this situation, but let me remind you that neither I nor my spirit guides can control this thing. We can’t be in the same space as it. I don’t care if it was wearing gold shoes and dancing to jazz music, if I can’t be in the same space as it, that’s bad. Very bad.”
I swallowed. “All right. They’re evil shoes, then.”
She nodded. “Good twin.”
But in the back of my mind I still thought I was right.
“Aiden was here with his mom, by the way,” Kristina said. “You were still passed out, so Mom and Dad told them to go home, because they didn’t know how long it would be before you woke up.” She eyed me with a sly grin. “Though I think the real reason was that Mrs. Kirkwood was sobbing uncontrollably and making everyone feel uncomfortable.”
I chuckled and grabbed my phone. Twenty-seven texts from Aiden, three from J, one from Bobby, and a few more from some other friends. Aiden’s were mainly a steady stream of panicked thoughts.
AIDEN: ARE YOU OK!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
AIDEN: That tuba was SO heavy!
AIDEN: FREAKING OUT DUDE!!!!!
AIDEN: Mom’s baking everything for you. Jack’s not allergic to peanuts anymore, right?
AIDEN: Can’t wait to reenact Mr. G’s reaction to your fall!
I texted back.
BAYLOR: Finally awake. Have to spend night at hospital. Getting monitored for a concussion. Hopefully my tuba career isn’t over.
Aiden responded almost immediately, first with a million exclamation points, then with
AIDEN: Glad you’re alive!! Eating mom’s cookies, really good!
“Should we go deliver some messages?” I asked, setting my phone down. “Might as well. If there’s one place to offer some healing guidance, I guess it’s here.”
“Okay, but you’re not telling that guy that his girlfriend is a thief.”
“She is, though!” that same earnest voice echoed yet again. The man who’d said it materialized before us. He had a case of male-pattern baldness so severe that even a trip to the Beyond couldn’t fix it. “He’s thinking about marrying her, but it’s only a matter of time before that klepto gets caught with five pounds of raw chicken stuffed in her underwear.”
I frowned. “Well, okay, maybe I’ll just talk to him first and feel out the situation.”
Kristina shook her head. “That isn’t a healing message, Baylor, you don’t need to pass it on.”
“Kristina, we’re in a hospital filled with hundreds of sick people and all their dead relatives, and I can’t tune them out right now. If I get picky about which messages to deliver, we’re going to have a bunch of annoying ghosts on our hands, and you’re going to be zapping them away all night with your new blue magic.”
“I wish I could sigh,” she said, shaking her head. “This would have been the perfect time for one.”
* * *
The next couple of hours were the most hectic I’d ever experienced. Ghosts swarmed me: I was a flame, and they were moths.
I had to stop saying my introductory sentence to people because I had too many messages to deliver. Floor after floor, room after room, person after person, I was chased by loved ones and spouted off as many messages as I could breathe, each one as nonsensical as the next, but filled with meaning for the receiver.
“Ma’am, don’t go visit her, your husband says she’s not worth your time, especially since you’re in the hospital and it could be limited.”
“She was right about the first one, sir. I don’t know who the ‘she’ is or what the ‘one’ is, though—sorry, that’s all your sister told me to say.”
“You need to make the trip. Huh? Oh, sorry, you need to make the trip soon, like tomorrow. I know you’re in the hospital. Sorry, I’m just delivering the message from your mom.”
“I’m supposed to mention a green duck to you. That’s all they want me to say. I know it’s weird, but your grandparents are the ones who said it, not me.”
Toward the end of my time walking the halls, the messages were thinning out, so I was able to stop and chat a little bit more. As I passed by one room, I noticed a little boy staring intensely at the woman resting on the hospital bed.
I walked in slowly and knelt down next to him.
“Hey there, buddy,” I said. “My name’s Baylor, and if you want to say something to your grandma, I can help you out.”
He turned to me, his eyes full of concern. “How’d you know she’s my grandma?”
That was a tough question for me to answer. The ghosts don’t need to tell me. Sort of like how Kristina can show me auras, I can sense the energy running between the loved ones. I can tell right away what sort of relationship people shared, and continue to share.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Louie.”
“Well, Louie, I guess I just know certain things,” I said.
“Can I help you with something?” the woman in the bed asked. She had a shock of tidy white hair, which didn’t move an inch as she leaned over the side of her bed to watch me.
“Hi there,” I said, standing up. “My name is Baylor Bosco, and I can communicate with people who’ve crossed over.”
“You what?” Her voice quivered.
“Um, I can talk to dead people.”
She shook her head, her mouth slightly open. “My drugs are really messing with my head right now.” She shut her eyes tight, clenching her face together like she was bracing for a punch. Then she opened them again, looking disappointed to see me still standing there.
“Grandma’s funny,” Louie said, smiling sadly.
I smiled at him and looked back at his grandma, whose face had contorted into a pained expression. “I’m too afraid to ask why you keep looking down at that one spot.”
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Elmira,” she said. “Elmira Ashworth.”
“Elmira, your grandson Louie is here.” He’d walked to the bed and peered over the foot of it, his eyes just barely peeking over the edge. “He’s wearing a blue baseball hat and uniform. All that’s missing is a glove.”
She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, terrified.
“Louie, do you want me to tell your grandma anything?”
He seemed just as upset as his grandma was. I bent down again to talk to him quietly.
“Hey, buddy, it’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
Elmira clenched her covers. “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” she said in a small, tense voice. “He’s mad at me.”
Louie nodded.
“Uhh,” I said awkwardly. “Yeah, he’s nodding.”
She reached for the tissue box on the Formica table next to her bed, speaking in a calm, controlled voice that made me think she was seconds away from totally losing it. “It’s my fault he’s dead. I’m such a careful driver. I always check the road three times to make sure everything’s clear before I go at a green light. And that day . . . this guy came out of nowhere.”
“That’s not why I’m mad,” Louie said quickly.
“He’s not mad about that,” I said just as quickly, hoping to staunch her crying.
“He’s not?” she asked, horrified. “What else is there?”
“Tell her I’m mad that she stopped going to the park. I’m mad that she stopped playin
g cards with her friends and going dancing. I’m mad that a nice old man asked her to dinner last month and she said no.” He turned to me, his eyes bulging. “I’m mad that she’s using me as an excuse to stop living.”
I paused for a moment, trying to figure out if there was a way to deliver his message that wouldn’t totally crush her soul. Maybe if I just sounded casual enough . . .
If I thought I was phrasing my words gently, Elmira’s reaction immediately tipped me off that I didn’t do a good enough job. She wailed, profusely, for ten minutes, doing her best impression of a hungry newborn baby. Four times I had to turn the nurses away with some vague excuse.
“This is the worst message I’ve ever given,” I said to Kristina out of the corner of my mouth.
“Just wait,” Kristina said.
Louie’s anger had reconstituted itself as concern after he saw his grandma’s reaction, and he’d climbed into bed next to her. Several times she’d massaged the spot on her arm where his head was touching.
Finally, once her sobs had sputtered out, she caught her breath and looked at me.
“Where is he?” she said. “I want to look at him for a moment. Or I want him to look right at me.”
“He’s right next to you,” I said. “He’s the reason why your arm’s been tingling.”
She gasped. “Is that so?”
She looked down at the nothing beside her, the nothing that used to be her everything, and she smiled.
“Louie, I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I’ve been dishonoring your memory by sulking at home for the last year. This guilt, though, it’s just . . . so unlike anything I’ve felt. I can’t escape it.”
“Tell her it wasn’t her fault. She was taking me to get ice cream at the park that day. She’s the best grandma ever.”
When I repeated his words, Elmira smiled, still trying to spot her grandson next to her. “It was going to be such a good day. You and your orangesicles.”
“You need to have more of those good days, Grandma! Don’t think of me and be sad. Think of me and be happy about all the memories we made.”
As I said that to her, she seemed in danger of howling again, but she held it together.
“I love you,” Louie said. And with his message delivered, he faded away.
“He’s gone,” I said. “But the last thing he said was ‘I love you.’”
“I know,” she said. “I could feel it.”
“Well, that was intense,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. That happens sometimes with these messages.”
“No, no, are you kidding?” she said. “Come here and give me a hug, Baylor Bosco.”
As I hugged Elmira, a horrible sensation came over me and, like I’d touched a hot pan, I shot away from her, a distant hiss penetrating my ears.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Kristina.
Eyebrows raised, she shook her head no.
“Hear what?” Elmira asked.
“I just heard and felt something . . . odd,” I said. “Odd” was far too positive a word, but I didn’t want to upset her again. “It was just a whisper, though. It said, ‘You left me,’ and it made me want to vomit.”
That was all it took for the color and joy she’d just gained to drain from her face. She started fidgeting with a ring on her right middle finger.
“Do you know who that was?” I asked.
“I think you’d better go,” she said icily, staring at the beige curtain.
“Elmira, who was that?”
“Someone . . . from a long time ago.”
“Someone bad?”
She stiffened but didn’t say anything else, so I apologized and left the room.
“What was that?” I asked, walking quickly back to my room.
“I didn’t hear or feel anything, Baylor,” Kristina said. She sounded worried, and when Kristina worries, I panic.
“Kristina, whatever it was, it was bad. How did an evil spirit just communicate with me?”
“I don’t know.”
“The Sheet Man just stares at me with his weird black eyes, but he never says anything, and he never actually touched me. But whatever just happened, that was new. And it’s not good, especially since Halloween’s over.” We entered my room and I shut the door. “It’s not just the Sheet Man anymore. They’re all starting to break the barrier, aren’t they?”
She pursed her lips. “That’s the last straw. Tonight I’m bringing in reinforcements.”
TIP
9
Not all ghosts stick around.
AS IF I WEREN’T ALREADY freaked out enough, the next morning I woke up to discover two horrible things.
First, I didn’t have a candle. Candles weren’t allowed in hospitals, according to some nurse with an attitude problem, because they were a fire hazard.
“Not having a candle is a hazard to my life,” I replied. “Do you want me to die? You need to find me a candle right now.”
“You’re not getting a candle,” she said flatly, and walked out.
Second, Kristina was nowhere to be found. When I go to bed, she goes somewhere in the Beyond to learn, to update her spirit guides, to ask for advice, to socialize (I assume), and essentially to become a better ghost, all while loosely monitoring my dreams and making sure no one’s attacking me in my sleep.
When I wake up, she’s always there. It was completely and incontrovertibly unlike her to be absent.
Except for that brief period when she was gone for a while.
Just before I turned eight, I woke up early one day to find my grandpa sitting at the kitchen table. He lived out of town, and my parents hadn’t told me he was visiting from Ohio. I ran over to him in my Ninja Turtle pajamas and gave him the biggest hug I knew how.
At least, I tried to hug him. Ghosts may not be transparent, but they’re definitely not solid.
“Hey there, Baylor, my buddy boy,” he said, kneeling down. “Things are a bit different now, huh?”
I backed away, not sure what to do or how to react. I looked at Kristina, who seemed just as confused. Until then I’d never interacted with anyone on the other side except for Kristina, and as far as I knew, Kristina hadn’t either.
Grandpa smiled, but in a strained way that looked more like a frown.
“You don’t need to be sad or scared, Baylor. It’s just me.”
In my head I definitely wasn’t sad or scared. I’d been putting things together. Grandpa had lived far away when he was alive, but now he was dead. And I could communicate with ghosts. So that meant I’d get to see him all the time now. This was great news!
I told him so and then said, “I’m hungry. Want to watch me eat breakfast?”
Grandpa definitely wasn’t reacting the way I’d expected. He looked heartbroken. “I . . . I came to say good-bye, kiddo,” he said. “I just want you to know how much I love you. And your parents and brother, too.”
“Huh?”
“And there’s something else, too.” He reached out to Kristina, beaming. “My granddaughter. My beautiful granddaughter.” He stroked her face like it was the first time he’d seen her. . . . It was the first time. “You get to come with me for a little while.”
“I do?”
“You do,” he said, nodding. “It’s time for you to learn some things in the Beyond. You just needed someone to show you how to get there.”
Kristina shot me a look of panic, and I shot her the exact same one back, and before I knew it, he took her hand and held tight.
“She’ll be back soon, Baylor,” he said. “I promise.”
And with that, both of them walked forward and disappeared. They were gone. It was just me standing alone in the empty kitchen, stunned.
That’s when I started crying. I ran to my parents’ room, and I sobbed to them about how Grandpa had taken Kristina to somewhere else and I couldn’t see them anymore.
The kicker, of course, was that my dad didn’t know his father had passed away yet. Both of them shot up in bed and l
ooked at me, each distinctly terrified of the answer to their next question.
“Which grandpa was it, Baylor?”
“Grandpa Bosco,” I whimpered, and I watched my dad fall apart in bed. I didn’t get why he was so upset, and frankly, I was more upset that he was crying harder than I was and getting all the attention from my mom.
“He said to tell you he loves me and you and Mom and Jack,” I said, trying to return the focus to my problem, but it only seemed to make him feel worse. “Then he grabbed Kristina, and they both left!”
“Honey, I’m sorry they’re gone, but your father is very sad right now,” my mom said with quiet exasperation, clutching my dad’s head during his heaving.
“Mom, I’m sad too!” I cried. “What am I going to do without Kristina?”
That was a tough year for everyone. Just as my father mourned his father, I mourned the loss of my sister. Strangely enough, it was the first time I began to understand death.
The questions. The permanency. The heartache.
It took her 367 days to come back. I had never felt so lonely, and now that she was gone for the first time in years, a small but very distinct part of me began to panic.
Kristina had apparently learned a lot about her role in my life during our year apart. Whenever we mention that year, she always laughs because it didn’t feel that long to her. To her it seemed like a long day of classes.
But she always emphasizes the long part. She’s told me only bits and pieces—what she’s allowed to tell me so far—but one thing she learned is that she was never meant to be alive. Kristina was always meant to be my companion in life, just as I was always meant to be able to communicate with dead people. We were slotted to be a two-person team from the very beginning, and maybe even before then. I was to be the message giver, and she was to be a sort of spirit manager—a buffer between the physical world and the Beyond.
Before she disappeared for that year, I could see ghosts, but I never communicated with them, nor could I block them out. Even during that year she was gone, the ghosts kept their distance, though I could still see and hear them. When she got back from the Beyond, she seemed different—older and more confident—and she told me it was time to start relaying messages to allow people to heal.
A Guide to the Other Side Page 6