Ghost of a Chance (3 page)

And then I get it. This isn't a make-up box at all. It's a BFF
breakup
box.

“It's all here,” Ellie's saying as she pulls more things out of the box and drops them onto the porch. One sleeve of my red sweater dangles over the edge of the porch and falls into a mud puddle. Ew.

“Um,” I say. “Okay. But, um, don't you think we should talk about this?”

“Here's your purse that you left at my house after the sixth-grade dance, and I have your watch somewhere, but I couldn't find it, so I can give it to you when I see you at school.” She stands up and brushes her jeans off and then looks at me. “Or maybe I'll just mail it to you.”

I don't say anything, mostly because I don't know
what to say. I've never seen Ellie so angry before. It doesn't make sense. She's usually so levelheaded and calm. And now she has shown up at my house like some kind of crazy person and has begun throwing my stuff all over the porch.

“Well?” she demands. “Aren't you going to give me my stuff back?”

“Your stuff ?”

“Yeah.” She pulls a piece of folded paper out of her jeans pocket. “You have my fuzzy gray slippers, my dangling heart earrings, and my curling iron, plus that book I lent you, the one about the girl who lives in Victorian England and falls in love with the servant boy.”

“Oh. Right. That book was really good.”

“I know,” she says. “I'm the one who told you to read it.”

“Yeah.” I swallow hard. It's just starting to hit me now how upset she is. I never would have imagined Ellie acting like this. It's like she's a different person.

“Listen, Ellie,” I say, “can't we talk about this? I mean, this is pretty drastic, don't you think?”

“Is it?” she asks.
“Is it?”

“Well, kind of,” I say. I sidestep the dress that's on the front porch and sit down. I'm hoping she's going to sit down next to me, but she doesn't. She just stands there.

I pull my sweatshirt tighter around me. The sky has turned completely gray, and the air is cold against my skin.

“Unfortunately, the drastic-ness of this situation is not really for you to decide,” Ellie says.

“You didn't seem that mad when I saw you at the Y earlier,” I point out.

“I'm allowed to change my feelings,” she says defensively. “Besides, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how upset I was. It was not cool to lie to me, Kendall Williams. Not cool at all.”

“I know.” I look down at my hands, shame and horror bubbling up inside me. I don't know what to do. I want to tell Ellie why I lied to her about being with Micah, but I can't. I can't risk her having the same reaction as Brandon. I've probably lost him forever, and I don't know what I would do if I lost Ellie forever too.

I start to cry, the warm tears making tracks down my face. One of them hits my lip, and I lick it away, tasting the sad saltiness.

My crying must soften something in Ellie, because she sits down next to me. Her body language is still pretty obvious, though—her legs are tilted away from me and her arms are crossed, her knees pulled up close to her body.

“Why did you do it?” Ellie asks. “I wouldn't have been upset if you'd told me you liked Micah. I wouldn't have cared. You're my best friend. We're supposed to talk about everything.”

“I don't like Micah,” I say.

She stands up and starts to walk away, like she doesn't believe me and she's done with this conversation.

“Ellie,” I say, and she stops. “I swear, I don't like Micah.”

She turns back around toward me. “Then why did you bother lying about being with him? When you could have been with me and Brandon and Kyle?”

I take a deep breath. This is the moment I should tell her the truth, about me and the ghosts, and just hope that somehow, some way, she believes me. I mean, if I lie to her now, eventually I'm going to have to lie to her again—there will always be some other ghost, some other situation. And at some point my lies are going to catch up with me. Look what happened with my mom and Julie Dunham.

So I should definitely tell Ellie the truth.

Right now.

“I just . . . I felt bad for him,” I lie.

“You felt
bad
for him?” she repeats incredulously.

“Yeah. I didn't want him to not have any friends—you know, because he's new—so I decided to hang out with him.” This excuse makes no sense, and the words sound strangled and hollow, even to me. Ellie knows me better than anyone else in the world, and so there's no way she's going to believe me.

Sure enough, she says, “You wanted Micah to have friends so bad that you were willing to lie to your
best
friend and your
boy
friend about hanging out with him?”

“Yes. Um, because I knew Brandon wouldn't really want me hanging out with him. Even as friends. And I knew you'd probably be mad about it too.”

“You didn't even give us a chance!” Ellie yells. “You didn't even try to explain to us what was going on. You just lied and snuck around behind our backs.”

“I know,” I say, glancing down at my hands in shame. “I'm sorry.”

Ellie shakes her head. She stands there for a minute, just looking at me. She has an expression on her face that I've never seen before. It's a mixture of sadness and disappointment, and it makes me feel like my heart is breaking in two. I can tell that even though she doesn't believe me, she
wants
to believe me. She wants to go back to being friends. She wants to convince herself I'm telling the truth.

It's actually pretty horrible, when you think about it. That my best friend cares about me so much that even when it's obvious I'm lying, she's still struggling with it because she wants so badly to believe me.

But the absolute
worst
part about the whole situation is that I
want
Ellie to believe me. I want her to believe my lie. Because I'm too much of a coward to tell her the truth and risk losing her friendship.

She takes a step back toward me, and for a second I think she's going to sit down again. But then she shakes her head.

“I'm sorry, Kendall,” she says, her face hardening. “But I don't believe you.”

And then she turns around and walks away before getting back on her bike and pedaling down my driveway.

I sit there in the cold for a few minutes, hoping maybe she's going to change her mind and come back. But of course she doesn't. And so when my hands go numb and my nose gets cold, I finally get up, pick up all the stuff Ellie brought over, and head back into the house.

If you were to
guess that the rest of my weekend is a complete nightmare, you'd be totally right.

All I want to do is hide out in my room, but instead I end up having to help my dad and Cindy arrange their new furniture. You'd think they'd be able to handle it themselves, but apparently not. Apparently they need the help of a twelve-year-old who's not even that strong.

(They really did need all the help they could get, though. They were trying to move a love seat, a chair, and a sofa all by themselves. It was pretty ridiculous, especially since they had to make three trips back to the store to pick everything up. My dad kept saying, “Paying two hundred dollars for delivery is a waste of money when you can just do it yourself !”

Which I guess is true, but when you accidentally dent the wall in two spots and you're going to have to spend time fixing it, I'm not sure it's that much of a bargain. Plus I'm pretty sure Cindy hurt her shoulder when we moved that last chair. She tried to pretend it wasn't a big deal, but I caught her wincing a few times when she thought no one was looking.)

Anyway, when I'm not playing mover, I spend the rest of the weekend doing my homework and hanging out in my room.

The only upside to the weekend is that, as bad as it is, it's still better than going to school. I mean, how awful is that going to be? Seeing Brandon and Ellie and Kyle, all having fun and being together without me? Shudder.

When my alarm goes off on Monday, I resist the urge to reach out and throw my clock across the room. I snuggle under the covers and wonder if I can fake being sick. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility. Yesterday my dad kept asking me if everything was okay, since I spent so much time in my room. I told him everything was fine, but now that I think about it, maybe I was coming down with something.

I reach for my phone and start to google “diseases that can come on within twenty-four hours and require you to stay home from school” when there's a knock on my bedroom door.

I quickly shove my phone under the covers and shut my eyes.

“Kendall?” my dad asks softly.

I pretend to be sleeping. Obviously, a sick person wouldn't wake up right away.

“Kendall?” he asks, a little louder. I hear the soft creak of the door opening. “Kendall!” my dad says, this time a lot more urgently.

The kind of urgency that would probably wake up someone who was ill. I open my eyes and blink in what I hope is a sick-seeming way.

“Oh,” I say, trying to look startled and confused, like I'm so out of it, I forgot the world actually existed. “Hi,” I croak.

“I'm leaving for work,” he says. “I have an early job.”

“Okay.” I sit up and put my hand to my head. “Does it feel hot in here to you?”

“No.”

“It feels hot in here to me.” It really would have been better to come up with this plan last night. Then I could have maybe put a warm washcloth on my face so I could look all warm and flushed and feverish. Now I'm going to have to depend on my acting skills, which aren't stellar, especially under pressure.

“I'm leaving,” my dad repeats. I'm just about to tell him I'm not feeling well when he says, “And don't even bother to pretend being sick. You're going to school.”

And then he closes my bedroom door without saying anything else.

I sigh and lie back down on my pillow. How did he know I wasn't really sick? Am I that transparent? And what if I really was sick? Then he'd be sorry, sending me off to school when I could be on my deathbed.

Whatever.

It's just school. I've been going to school every day since I was five. And back then I didn't know a single soul. Of course, my day was pretty awful. I ended up standing by the coat closet for, like, five minutes at recess, because I was too afraid to go outside without any friends.

But still. It's not like I don't have
any
other friends at school. There's that girl in my homeroom, Kayla Pies, who has always been really nice to me. And there's another girl in my math class who sits with us at lunch sometimes, Deanna Meacham.

With all my scheming about being sick, I have to get up immediately or I'm going to miss the bus. So I jump into the shower, then quickly arrange my hair into a twisty braid that starts near my forehead and goes all the way down the side of my head. It's super-easy to do, but it's super-cute, and will look even cuter when it dries.

The sun is peeking through the clouds, but it's low in the sky, and I can tell it's chilly out. So I pick out my comfiest pair of jeans and a soft pink sweater, hoping that the
softness of the denim and the presence of my favorite color will calm me.

I top the outfit off with cozy pink socks, my cream-colored UGG boots that I had to do hours and hours of chores to convince my dad to buy for me, and my puffy black jacket.

I pack my book bag, grab a few dollars out of the jar on top of the fireplace for lunch money, and head to the bus stop.

As soon as I get to school, there they are.

The three of them.

Ellie.

Brandon.

Kyle.

All standing in the lobby by the front entrance.

Ellie's cheeks are red from the cold, and she's laughing at something Kyle's saying. She throws her head back, her hair falling away from her face, and then Brandon adds something, and the three of them all laugh together.

My throat gets tight, and tears prickle at the back of my eyes. I stay frozen in place, unable to move. It's like the three of them are a movie or something and I can't stop watching.

A second later Brandon catches me looking. I avert my gaze and start to walk by, catching glimpses of him out of the corner of my eye as I weave between kids that are all hurrying to their lockers before homeroom. He's
not laughing anymore, and I expect him to look away.

But he doesn't, and so finally I turn and look back at him.

We stay like that, just looking at each other, and it's like everyone else fades away. My heart has stopped in my chest. It literally feels like I can't breathe. And for a split second I convince myself I can fix things.

I'll go over there, and I'll tell him I need to talk to him and Ellie, and then I'll explain everything to them, and maybe they'll believe me. Maybe if I can just tell them something that makes more sense, if I can prove to Brandon that—

But then he looks away.

And the first bell rings.

Ellie and Kyle hurry down the hall.

Brandon heads the other way, down toward the science wing where his homeroom is.

And there's nothing left for me to do but go to class.

*  *  *

Math.

Brandon Dunham is sitting right in front of me.

I used to think that I was so lucky. That I could just be in math, sitting behind Brandon Dunham, being able to stare at his neck the whole time. (Brandon Dunham has a very cute neck, in case you were wondering.)

But today it seems like some kind of cruel joke. What a
mistake, dating someone from my own school. Think about it—why would I want to date someone I have to see every single day? Of
course
we were going to break up eventually. And now look what I have to deal with—the back of Brandon Dunham's neck. Every. Single. Day.