Life After Theft (2 page)

I jumped up from the desk so fast I cracked my knee against one of the legs and had to bite off a yelp. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Didn’t know.”

“Liar!” Kimberlee yelled from across the room, where she was lounging on a windowsill.

Shut up
! I glared at her and looked for another seat. The only one left that wasn’t in the front row was over by Kimberlee’s windowsill.

I sat in the front row.

The bell rang and Mr. Bleekman rose from his desk. He was a perfect caricature of every English teacher on TV: tall, painfully thin, with a comb-over sprayed crispy, and thick glasses. Finally, some normalcy. He stood in front of my desk and studied my name tag. “Mr. Clayson, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,
sir
,” Mr. Bleekman and Kimberlee corrected in stereo.

I refused to even look at her. “Yes,
sir
,” I repeated.

“Take notes for now, but stay after and I’ll give you the material you’ll need to catch up.”

I nodded as Kimberlee walked over and plunked herself down on top of my notebook. “I’ve taken this class already. I’ll help you.”

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Mr. Clayson?”

“Could you please tell
Kim
to get off my desk, sir?”

“Excuse me?” Bleekman asked, looking right past Kimberlee and staring at me like I’d sprouted an extra head.

I glanced at Kimberlee for just a second. Something was seriously wrong. There was no way
this
teacher was part of the joke. “Oh, shit,” I said, the words slipping out before my brain caught up enough to stop me.

Bleekman’s eyes widened. “Mr. Clayson. I will let you off with a warning because this is your first day. But in the future,
any
use of profanity at Whitestone Academy will result in detention. Do you understand?”

I gaped at Kimberlee, unwilling to believe she could possibly be telling the truth.

“I told you,” she said, studying her fake nails. “No one can see or hear me but you.” Her eyes flicked to Mr. Bleekman. “You’d better say ‘yes, sir,’ before Bleeker has a coronary.”

“Yes, sir,” I said quickly, snapping my gaze back to the front of the room.

Bleekman stared at me for a few seconds as the rest of the class snickered. He finally looked away and started droning on about Victor Hugo.

I waited a few minutes for everyone to turn their attention away from me. “You’re not joking anymore, are you?” I hissed at Kimberlee through clenched teeth.

“Never was,” she said at full volume.

No one even glanced in our direction.

“What do I have to do to get you to stop acting like the freak you are?” She paused. “You want me to walk through a wall?”

I glared at her but refused to snap at the bait.
This can’t be real
.

She slid off my desk. “No, I mean it. If I walk through that wall, will you believe I’m dead?”

I rolled my eyes. But I nodded.

She stuck her nose in the air and lifted an eyebrow. Her eyes never left me as she walked to the wall and, without slowing, slid right through it.

“I’M HOME,” I YELLED
. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been so happy to see my own house. After Bleekman’s class—and seeing Kimberlee walk through the wall—my head basically exploded. I still couldn’t digest what I’d seen, or figure out how it could be real. I didn’t believe in ghosts! Somehow, for some reason, I was hallucinating; Kimberlee was a figment of my imagination—and that meant ignoring her for the rest of the day.

Easier said than done. She followed me everywhere and got louder and louder. By the time I dropped my schedule card full of signatures in the basket at the front office I had a pounding headache
and
a ghostly companion.

“Jeff, there you are.” My mom sniffed as she came into the room. Her eyes were red and wet.

“What’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” She looked at me cluelessly. “Oh, the tears?” She laughed. “I’m just rehearsing, sweetie. I have a funeral scene tomorrow.”

My mom’s an actress. Always has been. Community theaters and stuff. But part of moving to California was so she could pursue an acting career for real, in Hollywood. And apparently she’s good because even without an agent or anything, she went out the first day and came home with a walk-on part in CBS’s latest cop thriller. Now she’s got a couple gigs lined up, dramedies or something. It’s all very surreal.

I reached into the fridge and pulled out a Coke. “That’s great, Mom,” I said absently. “What show’s it for?”

She shook her finger at me and clicked her tongue. “Ah, ah, ah. If I told you that you’d know someone was dying next season.” She reached her hand out and ruffled my hair. “Trade secret.”

My mom’s only thirty-three. I was thirteen when I first realized that I was born while she was in high school. She always wanted to be an actress; she’d been the lead in every high-school play and musical until the year she was pregnant with me. Somehow, her theater director just couldn’t handle an eight-months-pregnant Ado Annie belting “I Cain’t Say No.” Go figure.

The nice thing about having me when she was so young is that now she’s just the right age to start a new career in Hollywood as a “mature woman.” Which means she plays twenty-five-year-olds.

She’s married to my dad. Like, my biological dad. They got married the night they graduated high school; I was one. My dad is supersmart and he always told my mom he’d make up for getting her life off track. So when he was offered a small ownership stake in a startup venture—social networking on the internet; everyone said it would never last,
right
—he took it and ran with it. The company survived the “Dot Bomb,” but for a while there Dad was drawing stock more often than a paycheck. Fortunately, it was a risk that paid off. After twelve years of accumulating ownership, he cashed out, bought us three new BMWs for Christmas, sold our house in Phoenix, and moved us to Santa Monica so Mom could chase her dream.

And now, instead of an inner-city school with a 62 percent graduation rate, I get to go to a spoiled-brat private school that feeds more or less straight into Yale. Lucky me.

I really should be grateful—the lockers stay closed at Whitestone and I suspect their PE equipment is less than fifty years old, but despite the advantages, I missed my friends. Even after just a week, it was obvious I wasn’t cut out for the long-distance friendship thing. I figured I’d make new friends, but, well, these Whitestone kids weren’t really my type.

“So how was your first day?”

Ummmm
. “It was fine.”

“Fine? Is that all?”

I took a breath and smiled. “I think it’s going to be a good school for me,” I lied. Well, sort of lied. It really was a great school, academics-wise. Apparently not so good if you want to keep your sanity intact.

“I 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,” I mumbled, clicking through website after website, skimming each for mere seconds before scrolling to the next one. It
was
possible, wasn’t it? That my brain had unconsciously stored the details of something I’d read and “forgotten,” then used that info to spit out a made-up person? Now I was really starting to sound crazy. About being crazy. I was
double
crazy.