Afterlife Academy (7 page)

“Only if people piss me off
enough.”

I laugh. I don’t think she’s
serious. Probably not, anyway.

“And don’t be put off by the
horns,” she says, pointing to her forehead as if it was possible for me to have
missed them. “I’m harmless, really.”

Usually I would be put off by
someone telling me they were harmless. If someone is harmless, they probably
shouldn’t have to tell you, but for some reason I believe her.

“Actually, I kind of like the
horns. They add character. And colour.”

She smiles at that. “Come back
at lunchtime,” she says. “I’ll have something nice for you.”

“Thanks,” I say. Then the girl
behind me coughs, so I have to go because chit-chatting with the cook is
holding up the queue.

I stand with my tray and look
around. I almost expect to see Sophie beckoning me over or a bunch of girls I
barely know begging me to sit with them. But there is nothing. I find an empty
table in a dark corner and sit down.

I hate being alone.

I look over at the kitchen and
see that there’s no one else there. The horned lady is at the counter by
herself. I half expected to see a bunch of dinner ladies flapping around like
headless chickens like they do in my old school. I can’t believe she could run
this on her own. But then again, who knows, maybe she
can
breathe fire. The other horrible girl who was behind me in the queue is also
being rude to her now.

I can’t believe the nerve of
some people. Especially dead ones.

No one even so much as glances
in my direction as I sit and eat my wonderful and horrifically fattening
breakfast.

I wish Sophie was here. I just
want someone to talk to. I don’t deal well with sitting on my own.

My first class starts in approximately
thirty minutes and I’m terrified. It’s on the schedule that Mr Burgrove gave us
yesterday. Ghost Laws. Whatever that might be. I didn’t even know that ghosts
could have laws. It doesn’t sound exactly riveting. But at least Anthony will
be there. Not that he’s exactly riveting either, but at least he’s a familiar
face.

CHAPTER 8

Ghost Laws is in the classroom where English should be.
While English usually bores the very soul out of me, today I would give
anything to be back at home with boring Miss Jones blathering on about William
Shakespeare or someone equally dead. Instead I am here, with people who
are
dead.

I guess I’m lucky to know my way
to the classrooms. Getting lost here would just be another thing that these
people would probably laugh at me for.

I walk into the classroom and am
quite surprised to see the layout of desks is the same as in my usual school.
Immediately I go for the desk I usually share with Sophie, but it’s occupied by
two grey-looking boys who glare in my direction. I spot Caydi near the back of
the room and walk over to her instead. There’s an empty seat so I sit down next
to her.

“Hi.” She smiles at me. “Did you
enjoy your breakfast?”

Before I have a chance to
respond, a voice behind me snarls, “You’re in my seat.”

I turn around to find another
Goth girl staring at me angrily.

“Oh, Riley, this is my friend,
Clare,” Caydi says. “Clare, this is the roommate I was telling you about.”

Clare continues to stare at me.

“Clare usually sits there,”
Caydi says. “But you can squash on the end, if you like.”

So I do. Me. People are usually
begging me to sit by them. If I was somehow without a seat in English class
there would be five people standing up to offer me theirs.

I stalk to the back of the room
and grab an extra chair, then I squish onto the end of Caydi’s desk while Clare
glares at me.

This is not fun.

I see Anthony come in with
another boy. They are chatting away. It must be his roommate. He couldn’t have
made friends this quickly. He didn’t have any friends at our old school and
he’d been there for nearly five years.

He looks over and waves at me. I
wave back and then look around to check no one has seen me. Back in our school,
I would have been ridiculed for waving to the maths geek.

“Welcome, class,” the teacher
shouts. I’ve been so preoccupied that I hadn’t even noticed he was there. The
desk at the front where Miss Jones would normally be sitting is now occupied by
a fifty-something man. He has dark, charcoal-coloured hair, and everything else
about him is grey.

“For the benefit of our new
arrivals, welcome to Ghost Laws class. This is where we learn about the
parameters of being a ghost. I am Mr Bosenak, I will be your teacher. Any
questions, ask me. If you cast your eyes downwards towards your desk, you will
both find a textbook with your names on it. Keep it safe, study it, and don’t
fail this class. To the rest of you, sorry you have to hear this speech so
often.”

I do as he says and look
downwards. To my surprise, there actually is a textbook with Riley Richardson
printed on the front of it in the upper right-hand corner. I’m so surprised I
nearly fall out of my chair. I swear it wasn’t there a minute ago.

Ugh, this place is so weird.

“Don’t look so shocked,” Caydi
whispers. “This lesson sucks anyway.”

“Yeah, all he does is tell us
all the things we can’t do,” Clare adds. She’s still frowning at me, but that
remark wasn’t completely unfriendly.

They’re right, of course.

Mr Bosenak drones on at the
front of the room. Caydi doodles something in her book while Clare stares out
the window.

I open the first page of my
textbook and read it.

Being a ghost might sound like fun at first, but like
everything else in this world, there are rules. Nothing can exist without law.
Without law, there would be anarchy. Rules must be followed.

You must NOT:

- Interact with the living.

This includes:

- Attempting to talk to them via a medium.

- Attempting to talk to them via some other method.

- Attempting to talk to them via Visualisation.

- Attempting to send messages to them via technological means.

- Attempting to send messages to them via physical means.

When you return to Earth, you must NOT:

- Attempt to contact the living. This includes but is not
limited to contact via letter, email, text message, the Internet, medium, or otherwise.

- Attempt to visit your loved ones.

- Attempt to touch them.

- Attempt to alert anyone of your presence.

“Wait a minute,” I say suddenly.

“Yes, Miss Richardson?”

Oops, I didn’t mean to say that
aloud.

“Um…” I stutter. “It says here
that we go back to Earth. Is that true?”

“I’m afraid that’s not my area
of teaching. If you would kindly keep your mind in
this
class, Miss Richardson.”

“Is that true?” I whisper to
Caydi when Mr Bosenak has gone back to droning on.

She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

I think about that for a moment.
So maybe we get to return to Earth? That would be brilliant. I could go and see
Wade. He would be so shocked. But thrilled, obviously. And Sophie. Sophie would
just
die
to see me again, I know she would. And
my parents. Mum and Dad. Poor things, they must be devastated. I have to find
out about this. I have to know if it is possible to go home. I
have
to go home. I’m sure this has all been some kind
of huge mistake. Girls like me don’t die. And I don’t fit in here, so obviously
I don’t belong.

Who cares about some stupid
Ghost Law textbook? I have to get back to Earth, and when I do, there is
nothing that will stop me communicating with Wade. Certainly not some stupid
ghost law.

Eventually the class ends and Mr
Bosenak tells us to go for lunch. I hope all the classes here aren’t this
boring. No wonder everyone is dead. If they weren’t, they’d probably all die of
boredom anyway.

Caydi and Clare go off together.
I thought they might ask me to eat lunch with them but they don’t.

I’m just about to go and sulk in
a quiet corner of the canteen when Anthony grabs my arm.

“Want to get lunch?” he asks.

“Oh,” I say, surprised. I
thought that he might want to avoid me at all costs. “Yeah, sure.” Because
sitting with the school loser is better than sitting on my own and
being
the school loser. It’s not like Sophie or any of
the crowd back home are going to see me here.

“That was boring,” Anthony says
as we walk over to the canteen. It’s strange how the walk is one we know so
well and yet it’s so different.

“I thought you liked all that
boring junk. You know, chemistry, maths, physics, laws of the universe, etc.”

“I like stuff that’s useful,” he
says. “Not stuff that’s just a teacher standing there telling you all the
things you’re not allowed to do.”

“Hopefully there’s a different
class that tells you all the stuff you
are
allowed to do. There are certainly some weird things on the curriculum here.”

“No kidding.”

“I want to know what the point
of Ghost Laws is,” I say. “I mean, if there is a chance we get to go back home,
which I assume there is because that guy just spent two hours telling us all
the stuff we can’t do when we get there, then why? What is the point of going
home if you’re not actually allowed to contact the people there?”

Anthony shrugs. “What’s on your
schedule for this afternoon?”

“Free,” I say. “Although I bet I
can’t actually go anywhere or do anything interesting, so I may as well be in
class.”

Anthony laughs at that.

“What about you?” I ask him.

“I have science class,” he says.
“It’s an optional extra. Don’t you think that sounds interesting?”

“Of course you’re taking extra
classes,” I mutter. “I never thought I’d say this, but I would give anything
for a normal science lesson with exploding frogs and leaky gas taps.”

“I think this is exciting,”
Anthony says.

“You would. Don’t you even care
that you’re dead?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t really have
a lot to live for.”

That makes me stop in my tracks
and look at him.

“I know it’s different for you,”
he says. “You ruled your own little world, you had everything a girl could
want, and you loved it. But me on the other hand… I lived with my grandma, who
I love to bits but her health isn’t what it used to be, bless her. I had no
discernible friends and the best thing to look forward to was a maths lesson
where a certain girl and her friends would almost always steal my glasses or my
homework or my bag or my pencil case or something else that would make me look
bad.”

“Sorry,” I say, but it sounds
insincere even though I really do feel bad about teasing Anthony so much.

“What about the future?” I ask
him. “What about what you were going to become? Doesn’t that bother you?”

He shrugs again. “Just because
I’m good at maths and science doesn’t mean that I could afford a decent college
or university.”

“But there are scholarships.
There are ways to get around these things.”

He just gives me a blank look.

The first thing I notice as we
walk in the canteen door is the quiet. In our canteen at home, lunchtime is
like walking into a zoo. Except that wild animals are far more civilised. Here,
there is almost complete silence. It’s like being in a library. There are no
Year Nines screaming insults at each other. No Year Sevens throwing food at
each other or running with precariously overloaded trays. There are just groups
of a few people at each table, sitting down and talking normally to each other.

I glance around and wave to
Caydi when I see her sitting with Clare and a few other Goth-looking girls.

Anthony and I take our place in
the food queue.

I see the woman with horns from
the back of the line and wave to her. She is still working alone. It’s
lunchtime rush and there isn’t another person in the entire kitchen area. This
strikes me as beyond strange. In our old school, there are two cooks and at
least ten dinner ladies.

She smiles and waves back to me.

“Don’t tell me you made friends
with the demon,” Anthony whispers.

“She’s not a demon,” I say.
“Actually I don’t know, maybe she is. But she’s nice. She gave me croissants
for breakfast.”

He laughs at that.

“What?” I ask.

“You won’t be seen within ten
feet of the maths geek but you don’t mind chattering away with the resident
demon lady.”

“It’s not like that,” I go to
protest but we’ve reached the front of the line.

Another thing that’s surprising.
In our old canteen, you’re looking at a good twenty-minute wait if you need to
get to the main counter. That’s why it’s good to have a few people willing to
go for you if you happen to be like Sophie and me. But seriously, what’s that
old saying? Too many cooks spoil the broth? Apparently, because with only one
person in the kitchen things move a lot quicker than with twelve.

“Hello again, my love,” the
horned woman greets me.

“Hi.” I smile at her. “This is
my friend, Anthony.”

She smiles as she greets him
too. “How nice to see you making friends already.”

“Oh no, we came together,” I
say.

“Oh, how unusual.” She smiles
again. “What’ll it be, my loves?”

I shrug. “What do you have?”

“Anything you want,” she says
with a wink. “Especially for you.”

“Well, what’s on offer? Back at
home they have a selection of three things and you have to pick the one that
looks least like it’s going to poison you.”

She laughs and I’m sure her
horns redden in colour as she does.

“We have no such limitations
here. Just pick whatever you want.”