Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,7

but I felt nervous. “Where did you come from?” I asked.

He gestured with a flick of his head. “That way.” Then he smiled. “Is this your place?”

I glanced around to make sure I hadn’t imagined where we were standing. “This field?” I said. “Are you asking me if this is my empty field?”

He shrugged, looked me up and down. I scanned my feet, my hands and arms, and I could see myself but I wasn’t sure if he viewed me the way I did. And I was too embarrassed to ask him what I looked like. In my own eyes I wore jeans and a white T-shirt and, strangely, the soft black jacket my father had thrown out. Even stranger, my feet were bare.

“Are you dead?” he asked.

“What?” It seemed almost insulting. Did I look like a corpse? “No.” I thought I knew how these things worked. The spirits I had seen on my travels weren’t ghosts—they were people out of their bodies temporarily. “You’re not dead, are you?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Do you remember dying?” I asked.

He put his hands in his pockets. He wore jeans too, with a black shirt rolled at the sleeves and open at the throat. But he had the good sense to be wearing sneakers.

“I don’t want to remember that.” His face went gray and he held out a hand as if he wanted to protect himself from me.

And then he was gone.

Weird. I just stood there, doing nothing, for a long time. He was a stranger—it would be impossible for him to hurt my feelings. I couldn’t miss him, seeing as how I’d only known him for a few seconds. It wasn’t as if he had made me doubt the truth—I wasn’t dead. And neither was he: he just didn’t know it. What was it that bothered me about him?

I sat down on the grass and replayed our conversation. I couldn’t figure out why we had looked at each other and spoken to each other when I hadn’t been noticed by any of the other souls I saw floating outside their bodies: an old woman napping in a wheelchair while her spirit danced around her, a man meditating on the beach with his spirit levitating a foot over his head. They hadn’t seen me.

And what made this boy and me fly toward each other literally out of the blue? It felt as if we’d been running along trying to launch kites and then our strings got tangled and swung us back toward each other.

But what were the kites we were hanging on to?

I realized why I missed him—he could see and hear me, and it was almost like being real again. But there was nothing I could do about it—he’d run away. I finally got myself up and went to some of my favorite locations: museum, beach, theater. But by the next day, I had to return to that field. It was haunting me.

But why would he be back? What were the chances that he was still thinking about me?

Then he dropped down out of the air and went into a skydiver roll a dozen feet away from me. He brushed himself off, an unnecessary gesture that cracked me up, but I wouldn’t let myself be charmed. I didn’t trust him yet. Hadn’t he said I looked dead and then run away?

“You don’t think I’m a ghost?” he asked, as if our previous conversation were still on the table.

“I don’t think I can see ghosts,” I explained. “Only spirits.” He waited for more. “Spirits on vacation from their bodies,” I explained. “You know, not done with their bodies.”

“Like when someone’s asleep?” he asked.

“Or meditating.”

He strolled up a little closer. “Which one are you?”

“None of the above. I just left my body, you know, like breaking out of prison.”

“What made your body a prison?” he asked me. When I didn’t answer right away he lifted one eyebrow. In another setting it would have been cute, but everything about him was annoying me for some reason.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, I don’t want to tell you.”

“No questions about the past. I get it,” he said. “If I’m not dead,” he went on, “I guess this isn’t heaven.”

“No.” More like hell, I wanted to say, but why spoil his fun. Maybe he was still rejoicing in his freedom the way I had at first.

“Well, it can’t be hell.” He gestured at me as if I were proof of that. “Is it like a parallel