Preloved (22 page)

My white dress streamed behind me. Our roles had been reversed. Logan was a boy travelling through the city and I was the ghost that had come drifting down from the empty sky and landed without a sound behind him.

The boy was going to ride all the way home and take me with him. I was wearing my mother’s wedding bracelets.

Chapter 14

There was still a light on inside Buy Gones. Through the window of my beloved shop, I could see Mum sitting in a dressing-gown, nodding off to sleep into her mug.

“I want Mum to meet you,” I said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Hi, Mum. You know all those times you’ve warned me? Well, now I’ve finally brought a ghost home to you. Can I keep him? I will never need to feed, brush or walk him
.

“I don’t think it works like that,” Logan said into my ear.

It almost felt like he was going to kiss me there on the side of my head. I was disappointed when he pulled away.

I got off the back of the bike and I held out my hand.

Logan propped the bike back in its usual spot. It looked like it had never left.

He stretched his arm towards me. I went to take his hand, but …

“What happened to the magic?” I said bitterly as my fingers passed right through his in the moonlight. I thought I was going to cry.

“C’mon,” said Logan, and he smiled at me. “You’ll get over me. It’ll be like that time when you were ten and your mother wouldn’t let you get a pony. You thought back then that you’d never get over it. Things happen so that you can learn to grow. It’s time, Amy Lee.”

“How did you know–” I started and then I stopped. Whatever illusions I still had, I wanted them to last as long as they could.

I followed Logan into the shop.

The bell on the handle twinkled. Mum, sitting with Ollie the owl, startled herself awake.

“You’re home!” she exclaimed. She looked down at her wrist, found that her watch wasn’t there, and looked confused.

“Are you up waiting for me, Mum?”

“No,” she replied sheepishly. “I was just heading to the fridge for some water.” She was clutching a mug of half-drunk coffee.

“I need you to do some ghostbusting,” I said, and it came out as a croak. I glanced at Logan. He smiled back at me. I smiled at Mum with tears in my eyes.

Mum came up to me and stood there, with her arms at her sides, a movement that felt well worn, as if it had happened a million times before.

“There was never a hungry ghost was there?”

“No.”

“Or a war veteran. Or a fox.”

“No and no.” I stared at Mum as she intently searched my eyes for the truth. “It has always just been a boy,” I said.

“I know,” replied Mum. “Isn’t that always the way?”

I couldn’t think of any other thing that could be so true.

“Are you ready?”

No!
I screamed on the inside. But my lips formed the words
yes
.

Mum took two small pink envelopes from a drawer and got a dish and matches down from a shelf. I followed her as she went to the centre of the room.

She took my hand and we kneeled alongside each other. She drew from the first envelope a dark green paper, inked with red script that looked like blood, placed it into the bowl and set fire to it. I watched as the paper came alive like a fiery little dragon before it fell into ash.

I was filled with incredible sadness.

“That’s to clean the store.” Mum got up from the floor. “Follow me.”

She reached the foot of the stairs before she realised I was rooted to the ground where I kneeled.

“Amy,” she said, and she slowly came back to me. “We have to go to your room now.”

“I can’t,” I replied. My throat closed up and I couldn’t give the hundred and one reasons I had as my answer.

I expected Mum to stand there and give me her pep talk, to tell me how much harder things were for our ancestors, who had to go outside to use the toilet.

In the dark.

In the middle of winter.

While it rained.

Instead, I felt something warm touch my hand.

It was Mum’s hand. Without a word, she took my hand in hers and led me. And I followed, because I didn’t want to let go of her. Ever.

I was overwhelmed to see my room. I saw those three ugly papered walls and the bare concrete one every single day of my life, but I never appreciated or wanted them as much as I did then.

“I need you to take off your dress,” said Mum. “I will need to cleanse it by throwing it into a river from a bridge. Don’t ask me how. I’ll guess I’ll figure it out when I reach that particular hurdle.”

“Will I get it back?” I surprised myself with how worried I sounded. I didn’t want to give up my dress. I wanted to hold it and stroke it and press it up to my nose and see if it smelled like Logan.

“Of course, sweetheart,” said Mum. My knees almost gave way. She called me sweetheart.

I took off the dress and got into a pair of pyjamas. They were white with little rainbows on them. I felt so small, like I was five years old.

I got into bed and I drew my blanket up to me. When I turned my head, Logan was sitting there and I wished I could snuggle into him.

Mum moved her bowl to the middle of my room and dropped the second emerald-green paper into it. She kneeled down.

“It is always better to have a ghost leave willingly than to force them to go. With hungry ghosts, we can promise to send them somewhere never devoid of food. For vengeful ghosts, a place that can provide forgiveness and healing. For lost and wandering ghosts, a place where they will be found.”

“Say what you need to, Amy.” Mum looked downwards. “And then we will wish him on his journey. To a place that I promise will be better than this in-between, a place where he will become whole.”

“I guess this is goodbye,” I whispered.

“Of course not,” replied Logan, and he looked at me tenderly. “This is just until we see each other again, in another lifetime.”

Tears streamed down my face.

“And it’ll be the same lifetime, and we’ll be the same age and you’ll be a boy and I’ll be a girl?”

“Of course,” said Logan. “And you will be the owner of a little vintage shop, and one day I’ll just wander in and find you there. I’ll be looking to buy an old VHS copy of
The Princess Bride
.”

I smiled and sniffed and tried to rub my cheeks at the same time.

Logan’s hand automatically went to my face to wipe away a tear, but he stopped himself midway. We both watched as he dropped his hand down.

For years I’d been making up movies inside my head: kick-arse girl movies where Rebecca was the heroine and I was the second banana; dysfunctional-family art-house ones where my incompetent dad played an incompetent dad and I played the bitchy daughter. But I never thought that I would be the star of a sad story.

“You promise me? You have to promise me, Logan, or else this would be … I don’t think I could ever get over it. A billion lifetimes and I’d still never get over it!”

“
As you wish
,” Logan whispered. I wished he hadn’t said it. I was definitely going to cry now.

“Thank you. I really mean it.” I rubbed my nose. “Thank you for … helping me.”

“You only need to thank yourself,” replied Logan with a cryptic smile on his face. “Now repeat after me, Miss Matey:
See you on the flipside
.”

“See you on the flipside, Mr Matey.”

I knew before I had finished speaking that he was already gone.

“What about me?” I whispered. “I know you’re going to a better place, but I’ll still be here. I love you. I’ve always preloved you.”

I watched as Mum lit the paper. I watched as the fire took the paper from this earth. More tears came to my eyes. And with that, I burst into a fit of uncontrollable tears. Hiccups and everything.

Mum stared in horror at me. Then she came over and gathered me into a hug.

I was so shocked that for a moment I forgot to cry.

“
Shhh
,” whispered Mum, and she held me in her arms.

I was a ghost, but now I was real.

I was dead, but now I had come back.

She could touch me now, because this time I was all hers.

I belonged to no one but her.

I resumed crying. I cried for Logan. I cried for myself. And I cried because I had never felt as loved by my mum as I did at that moment.

I cried because secretly, something inside me, finally felt like real hope.

An hour and two puffy eyes later, I found myself sitting next to Ollie in the shop, cradling a mug of milo. Out of habit, I picked up the tag tied around his claw and flipped it over. Ollie’s selling price hadn’t gone up. In fact, he wasn’t even for sale any more. Scribbled in red, in Mum’s handwriting, were the words “Sold – to Ivy Lee”.

I smiled and it made my eyes hurt.

The door gently chimed and someone in a lime-green suit stuck his head in.

“Michael!” I exclaimed.

If he wasn’t in such embarrassing clothes himself, I would be embarrassed to be seen in mine.

“Hi, Amy,” he said bashfully and rubbed his hair.

“What are you doing here?”

“I dropped by to make sure that you made it home safely. Since you left by yourself,” he answered. I could almost see him straitening up like a soldier. “I thought it would be the chivalrous thing to do.”

I grinned at him. Michael could be so cute. If he wasn’t careful, we might even become friends. And if I wasn’t careful, I would soon be beating prospective new friends away with a stick.

“Come on in,” I said and Michael walked in stiffly.

“Um, Amy?” Michael slid awkwardly onto the stool next to mine.

“Yes?”

“That Eighties movie marathon is still happening next weekend, and I was wondering … only if you have nothing on that is … if …”

“I’d really like to,” I replied. “It sounds like fun.”

“Really?”

“As friends, though.”

“Of course. As friends. That would be … cool beans.”

Cool beans? I would have laughed if my ribs weren’t so achingly sore from crying and if it hadn’t sounded like something that Logan would have said.

“By the way, I found this outside the State Library. I accidentally saw you ‘drop’ it.”

Michael reached into his suit pocket and took out my locket. I stared at it, but I didn’t move.

“I’m not the true owner,” I whispered.

“Amy, you know how I’m the big cheese when it comes to giving advice based on movies? I’d say that if you find a magic locket and you try to give it back to the true owner, but the true owner doesn’t want it and you throw it away and then a boy comes along and gives it back to you, then the locket belongs to you.”

Michael placed the locket in my hand. I closed my fingers over it.

“So what movie did you learn that from?” I asked.

“Your movie,” he replied.

I laughed then. And it really did hurt my ribs.

I knew that one day it wouldn’t be so painful when I thought of Logan. One day I would move on and meet someone else.

Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would spend the rest of my days pining for him and become a crazy old cat woman.

Either way, right now I was comfortable knowing that it would take me a while to get over him. That my heart would feel like it had somehow stopped working as an organ to pump blood and keep me alive, and was instead some monster bent on killing me.

Just as I was comfortable in this very moment, sitting in my mother’s shop, still awake past midnight and having not turned into a pumpkin.

I thought about Rebecca, and how a friend didn’t need to be perfect match in order to be an important part of my life. I thought about Mum, and how under the layers of superstition and fear lay her beating heart. I thought about Dad. I didn’t feel angry. I thought about Mister Fozziebum and the preloved dog I would soon meet at the shelter, waiting for his new life with me to begin. I thought about Nancy, and how it was funny that two people could find each other even though neither had ever gone.

I even thought about Ollie the owl and how he was now family.

And finally, I thought about myself. I knew who I was. The answer was simple and always there all along: I was Amy Lee. Sipping a Milo in my little-kid pyjamas I felt as if I was at the right place, in exactly the right moment. Sitting with a knight dressed in a lime-green suit who, as it turned out, was kinda awesome, after all.

There is no ending to this story because, as I’ve realised, stories don’t have endings, only beginnings.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my publisher/editor/fairy godmother, Maryann Ballantyne, who is made of magic. Ee Von Loo, my Beta Girl, whose opinion I trust one hundred per cent and who will always be my one and only. My awesome husband, Kim Wisniewski, who so patiently waits for me when I disappear inside my head. Megan Burke, the Party Fairy, who coined the phrase “less paranormal, more abnormal!” And to Declan Neil Fernandez, because sometimes I wish I could just knock on your door, like in a movie and finally say, “Hi. Can we start over again?”

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