out of breath and frightened, her chestnut hair wildly disarranged. “You have to come right now,” she said.
“Why? What happened?”
She clutched my arm. “It’s Harry. He’s on the roof at school.”
“If bodysurfing in the freezing ocean didn’t bother him—”
“He’s not playing this time,” she said, and her voice wavered with fear. “I tried to stop him. I didn’t know where else to go. I don’t even have my phone with me. You were the closest.”
I pulled the red parka from the closet and slipped into a pair of snow boots. One good thing about becoming a ghostkeeper: I was learning to handle emergency situations. “Where is he, exactly?”
“The roof of the gym. We’ve been drinking up there between classes. I left him after school, but I started to worry he’d try to drive himself home, so I went back to check on him.”
“And he’s still there.”
“He won’t come down. He’s talking crazy—worse than usual.” She caught me with a desperate gaze. “I drove as fast as I could—I think he’s going to jump, Emma. What if he’s already—”
Her voice wavered on the edge of hysteria, and I found myself starting to panic. I couldn’t take another death. Not Natalie, not Harry. Not any of them. But I still had a chance. One chance.
“He’s not going to jump,” I said, pulling the chain that held Emma’s ring from around my neck. “I promise.”
Tears streamed down her face. “The last time you promised …”
I’d promised her that I wouldn’t hurt Coby. Instead, I got him killed. I swallowed back tears of my own. “This time’s going to be different.”
I shoved my finger into the gold band, and the second it crossed my knuckle, I turned into a ghost.
I didn’t stay long enough to hear Sara’s shriek of surprise. I flew out the front door and over the walls surrounding the museum grounds. Simon had explained that ghosts use some ethereal connection to the Beyond to travel. But even as a ghost, I couldn’t venture into the Beyond. Instead, I thought about where I expected to find Harry, and then I was there.
Harry sat on the flat gravel roof, his legs dangling over the edge, wearing a long black wool overcoat. Just sitting there clasping an almost empty bottle of Stoli to his chest and smiling into the emptiness, the saddest smile I’d ever seen.
“I’m sorry,” he said, to the breeze. “I can’t do this without you, man. Not even for Sara.”
He thought he was talking to himself, that he was alone—but he wasn’t.
Coby sat quietly beside him. He glanced at me, then back to Harry. My appearance as a ghost didn’t surprise him. While he’d been possessed by Neos, he’d seen me turn into a ghost.
The hardest thing is not being able to talk to them, he said.
Yeah.
But you can talk to him. Fix this, Emma.
I nodded and sat on the edge of the roof beside Harry, trying not to look at the ground, still covered in patchy white snow. We were a long way up.
I removed the ring. “Harry.”
Harry started when he saw me. “How did you get here?”
“The question is, how did you?”
“I climbed,” he said.
“You know what I mean, Harry.”
He took another swig; then I eased the bottle from him and took his hand. It was like ice, from sitting in the thirty-five-degree weather. We sat there for a while in silence, the three of us watching twilight turn into dusk.
“Nobody understood why we were best friends,” he said. “The All-American Boy and the … me. Whatever I am. But we knew each other, you know? We never had to explain.” He wiped tears from his cheek with his sleeve. “How could I not know how unhappy he was?”
Tell him I wasn’t unhappy, Coby said.
“He wasn’t unhappy.”
“Yeah. He killed himself because he was just so damned cheerful.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “That’s how I’m going to go, too.”
“He wasn’t sad, he wasn’t depressed.” I took a deep breath: now for the truth.
Tell him what happened, Coby nudged, before I could continue.
Gimme a second!
“He didn’t kill himself,” I finished. “He’s still here.”
“If you say he lives in our memories, I swear I’ll take you with me when I jump.”
“That’s not what I’m going to say. I …” I shook my head. “You’re not going to believe me, not unless I do something pretty ugly.”
Do what? Coby asked, but I ignored him.
“When I was a kid,” I started, “my parents sent me to an institution. A psych ward.” And I