Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,50
chance to be alive again and you have to walk around in disguise.
Billy stretched out on the bed. “Here’s where that picture of us was taken.” He examined the room from this position. I lay down beside him, my head next to his on the pillow—he put his arm behind his head to make room.
“Think of the stuff they probably talked about,” he said. “How did you die? And why are you a ghost? Didn’t heaven or hell want you?”
I rolled on my side to see if he was joking. “You think heaven wouldn’t take them?”
“Well, how do you become a ghost?” He shrugged. “It’s not like everyone who dies ends up like that.”
That seemed sad, but at least they had each other. For a while. “I wonder when they first met,” I said. “She was haunting Mr. Brown.”
“I had Mr. Brown for English,” said Billy. “So they were in the same classroom every day for fifty minutes.”
He was lying on his side now, his head propped in one hand. A sheet of cold air came over me and I had a random thought that didn’t seem like my own: You have to step into a body if you want to smell grass again.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
I closed my eyes and hid my face on his chest. As he put his arm around me, the wintry feeling lifted off my skin and I breathed in the heat coming through his shirt. I wasn’t nervous anymore. I relaxed into him, safe and at home. I imagined we were lying under the stars, stretched out in a field of grass.
“I thought of a knock-knock joke,” he said.
I must have heard him wrong.
“You know,” he said. “Something you can’t do alone.”
I opened my eyes and used his arm as a pillow. “Okay.”
“You really remember me from junior high?” he asked.
“I do.”
“Will you remember me from now on?” he asked. “If you see me on the street someday, you won’t pretend you don’t know me?”
“I don’t go around sharing amnesia ghost possessions with just anyone,” I reassured him. “I will always remember you.”
“Good.” He sighed. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Billy.”
“Billy who?”
“I told you you’d forget me.”
I groaned. Sometimes he seemed like a twelve-year-old.
“Sorry,” said Billy.
I laughed, but then I explained. “I’m not laughing at the joke. Do not take this as encouragement.”
I jumped when the bedside table gave a shake. Nothing there but a clock. It was already almost eleven. Billy narrowed his eyes and pointed his hand at it like Darth Vader trying to strangle the clock to death.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m trying to stop time.”
CHAPTER 21
Jenny
IT WAS A SIMPLE, DORKY THING for him to say, but it felt like a comet went through my chest. He stopped time for me.
“There,” he said. “Now we can lie here as long as we want.”
He’d kissed me once before, when we were standing in my bedroom—a quick touch of the lips, but now he gave me a real kiss. My first. It should have been awkward, but it was like we’d been together forever. The room seemed to expand and the ceiling disappeared. I was loved and I was in a huge open field with all the air I could ever need.
I felt the seams of his shirt, turned wrong-side out, and the warm skin of his back as I slid my hand underneath. He pulled out of the kiss long enough to tug the shirt off, forward over his back and head. I could see the ceiling behind him, and the stars, too. I was afraid he would disappear, so I rose up and threw my arms around him so he wouldn’t fly away. As we kissed he pulled the sleeves of my cardigan off one arm and then the other.
As long as we’re touching, I thought, wherever he goes, I’ll go too, and wherever I go, I’ll take him along. It felt natural when he untucked my shirt from my pants so he could lay his palm flat on my stomach.
I thought someone was in the room. I turned my head to the side. He kissed my cheek, my temple, under my jaw, pressing me into the pillow. With my face turned to one side, I saw that there was someone beside me—too dim to see clearly, though. A boy on the grass, speaking, but I couldn’t hear him. He sat up—he was trying to tell me something. I knew him, but I couldn’t see him well enough.
“Wait.” I gasped in a