Life After Theft. Aprilynne Pike

hope so,” she said, putting on her special-moment face. “You deserve to go to a great college. You have so much potential.”

      “Thanks, Mom.” I don’t know why she has to be so mushy about stuff sometimes. Maybe it’s an actress thing. Still, I wasn’t above taking advantage of her good mood.

      I wasn’t sure quite how to start—maybe there wasn’t a good way—so I just dived right in. “Hey, I was thinking . . .” I paused. “Is there any history of . . . craziness in our family?”

      She looked at me with one eyebrow cocked, a smirk ticking at the corner of her mouth. “You mean before you at this moment?”

      “I’m serious,” I said. She had no idea just how serious I was. “Do I have any crazy old uncles or anything? Murderers, public nudity”—I hesitated—“schizos?”

      Mom thought about it for a second. “Well, my granddad had dementia pretty bad for the last two years before he died. And I think your dad’s uncle Fred—you know, the one with the yogurt-carton collection?—I’m pretty sure he doesn’t play with a full deck. Why the sudden interest?”

      “Uh . . . we had a discussion about mental health in . . .” Oh, great. I wasn’t in any classes that this particular subject fit into. “Lit-er-a-ture,” I finished, dragging the word out syllable by syllable.

      “Literature?”

      “Yeah, you know, Les Mis.” Whatever that meant. “I’m gonna go play some games,” I said, making my escape before Mom could ask any more probing questions.

      I went upstairs to my sitting room—no lie, I have a sitting room—and turned on the TV, lying back on my humongous beanbag. This whole Kimberlee thing had to be my imagination. Stress of the first day in a new school and all that. Or maybe I’d wake up tomorrow and realize this was just a long, very vivid dream and that I was about to start my real first day of school.

      “Okay, don’t freak, but we seriously need to talk.”

      I sprang to my feet and spun to find Kimberlee standing right in the middle of my room.

      “Listen, I know you’re wigging out, but the fact is, I have no one else to turn to, so I’m not going away.”

      I closed my eyes and counted to ten before opening them and turning my head. There she was, looking far too real to be a figment of my imagination.

      “You’re not real and you need to leave me alone,” I said slowly, carefully.

      She rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m trying to make nice here, and trust me, I understand where you’re coming from. You know how long it took me to convince myself I was real? Ages.”

      You’d think that if my head was going to make someone up it would give me someone nice. I was feeling officially betrayed. “Not real, not real, not real,” I whispered under my breath.

      “This’ll be a really long year if you’re going to walk around muttering that all the time. I am real; it’s just that no one else can see me.”

      “How convenient!” I laughed. “Give me one logical reason for that.” Why am I still talking to it? Her. No, me. I’m talking to myself; it is not real.

      She crossed her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow. “Beats the hell out of me. I’ve been screaming at every student in that school—new kids included—for ages. Apparently, you won the medium’s lottery. Wait,” she said, stepping forward. “Maybe that’s why. Do you see other ghosts?”

      I backed away from her as though she had some kind of contagious disease. A not-real contagious disease. “No! I don’t see anything. Technically I don’t see you; you’re not real.”

      “Oh,” she said, her mouth drooping. “Well, whatever. You can see me and that’s all that matters. I need your help.”

      “No! No help. No nothing. Not for fake people.”

      She shot me a nasty look and put her hands on her hips. “Fine, I’ll prove it. Get out your computer, now!”

      There is something irrationally terrifying about being ordered around by a hallucination.

      I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and set it on my messy desk. Couldn’t hurt. If nothing else, I could catch up on XKCD while she spouted her nonsense.

      “Go to Google.”

      At least my alter ego knew what Google was.

      “Type in my name.”

      I had gotten to the first of the double ee’s when I stopped. “Wait a second,” I said. “If I Google your name, all that proves is that there is some dead girl out there named Kimberlee Schaffer. You tell me about yourself first and then I’ll Google and see if you’re right.” Oh yes, outwitting my own brain. Sweet.

      But Kimberlee shrugged nonchalantly. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

      “How’d you die?”

      “Drowned.”

      Drowned? That’s the best my subconscious could come up with? “You drowned? Like, you didn’t know how to swim?”

      “Of course I know how to swim, moron; I live . . . lived on a private beach. The same one I drowned at, actually.” A touch of something resembling real emotion clouded Kimberlee’s eyes for an instant before she ran her fingers through her hair; whatever it was I’d seen was erased by that casual gesture. “I got caught in a riptide,” she said softly. “It happens.”

      “But why—?”

      “Dude, riptide. Move on!” Kimberlee snapped, scowling.

      “Fine. Uh, what color of flowers did you have at your funeral?”

      She bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know,” she admitted. Score one for me. “I didn’t go. I was so busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on that I didn’t really start going anywhere until about two weeks after the funeral.”

      “Convenient,” I scoffed.

      “What else do you want?” she said. “I drowned in a riptide, I went to Whitestone, I was seventeen, my dad’s a judge, my mom’s a CFO, I’m an only child. Good enough?”

      “I guess,” I muttered, turning back to the screen and typing the rest of her name.

      “S-c,” Kimberlee corrected from behind me.

      “Get over there!” I said, pointing to the opposite side of the room. “You are not allowed to see this!”

      “Fine!” she said, sulking away.

      I pressed Enter, fully prepared to bask in the proof of my own brilliance.

      But the first page of more than 4,000 results popped up on my screen.

      Teen Dies in Tragic Accident. Local Judge Mourns the Death of His Only Child. Prominent Prep School Suffers Tragic Loss. Teen’s Body Found on Private Beach. Missing Seventeen-Year-Old Confirmed Dead.

      I skimmed the articles, my jaw dropping as the details swirled in front of my face, complete with a number of photographs that were unmistakably Kimberlee. Not the least of which was one of her in her freaking coffin.

      “I—I could have read this last year,” I said, scrambling for an excuse—totally not ready to accept this.

      “Eventually you’re going to have to stop trying to talk yourself out of this and believe me. Besides,” she said, turning to face me now. “Who tries to convince themselves they’re insane instead of accepting the fairly rational explanation of someone being a ghost? Maybe you really are a nut job. Like a hypochondriac, but for craziness.”

      I’m agnostic, but that moment was the first time in memory I wished I did believe in a god. Then I would have someone to beg to deliver me from this demented undead. “Whatever,”