Chapter 18
“Have you ever used one of these?” Theo asks the second I walk in the back door. He is brandishing a drill.
I’m just getting home from a three-hour morning shift at the library. Mr. Hargrave and Jesse were moving excess pieces of drywall out of the house, so I figured it would be easier to go around the back.
I meet Theo’s gaze. “No, but I understand the general concept.”
“Want to help?” He nods to the pile of cabinet hardware on the kitchen island.
This is the first time we’ve seen each other since everyone left Saturday.
Theo and Matt headed home right away, talking excitedly about editing their footage and getting it on their page.
Theo’s eyes caught mine as he made his way toward the door, and the right corner of his lips tilted in a small smile.
Arden hung around for a bit longer, helping me demolish the rest of the doughnuts and pressing me about Theo.
When I didn’t have much to say, we drifted to talking about plans for the second floor again.
That night, I stared at the ceiling for hours, remembering the way Theo’s hand had felt in mine, and panicking that I’ll never get to experience it again. I’d finally pushed him too far, doubted him too much.
That tension is still crackling in the air between us now.
I shrug. “Sure.”
He hands off the drill to me, and there might as well be a million miles between his fingers and mine even as we grip the same tool. I feel every bit of that distance in my pulse.
He kneels next to one of the bottom cabinets on the long row that lines the interior kitchen wall. With his measuring tape, he determines the right spot for the hardware, then scribbles a black dot on the inside of the door. “Put the hole right here,” he says.
I grip the edge of the door with my free hand, line up the drill tip with the dot, and press the trigger.
The sound that it makes as it eats through the wood is oddly satisfying, especially when it pops out the other side.
I tip my chin triumphantly at Theo. “Just call me…” I pause, thinking. “Who’s a famous carpenter?”
“Jesus. His dad. I think Nick Offerman builds stuff.” Theo lifts his shoulders half-heartedly as he preps the next cabinet door for me to drill.
When I finish, I say, “Look at that. Perfect form. Just call me Jesus’s dad.”
That earns me a real, honest-to-goodness laugh. “Judging by some of the trauma to the wood here, I think your mom tried to screw the hardware in without predrilling holes. Which may be why they didn’t stay in.”
“That sounds on-brand.”
We finish the rest of the bottom cabinets in silence, the two of us working around each other with precision, like we’ve been partners in carpentry for ages.
Standing up, I brush dust off the knees of my jeans and reach for a pile of hardware and screws. “Has Matt deciphered the sounds from the spirit box yet?” I ask.
Theo’s face hardens for the briefest second, then he half smiles at me. “I think he conked out when he got home. He works some long shifts that are exhausting, especially in the summer when it’s so hot.”
“Will you let me know when he figures it out?” I am, for real, mildly intrigued by that humming sound. And whoever spoke the word go. It has been days and I still don’t have an adequate theory for either.
Something hopeful brightens his eyes. “You got it.”
I turn from him to attach one of the stainless steel knobs to the cabinet door. “How long have you been doing this ghost stuff?”
“The Harlow stuff or in general?”
“Both.”
“I’ve always been into spooky stuff. As a kid, I read every Goosebumps book in the library in one summer, and I would sneak into the living room at night when I was supposed to be in bed to watch the scary movies my brother loved.
I used to make my action figures fight monsters instead of wars. I named our cat Scooby.”
I laugh at that, and he grins. Then I see him square his shoulders.
It takes him a moment to get out the next sentence.
“But the thing that really did it was the ghost I saw when I was twelve.” He sets down the screwdriver he’s using and settles on the floor.
“A real one. Pretty much no one believed me except Matt, so now I’m set on proving them wrong.
This place has so many unexplained phenomena that exposing the ghosts here seems like the best place to do it. ”
I’m careful about how I ask my next question, because he’s never looked so serious before. “How did you know it was a ghost you saw?”
His right hand presses over his tattoo. It’s the first time I realize that it faces inward. Like it’s for him alone. “Because I knew her. And she was dead.”
I nod.
His gaze is heavy on me. I sit down too, and though my heart is screaming in my chest, and my brain tells me this is the stupidest thing I could do, I scoot close enough that my shin is pressed to his knee.
I make sure the pressure is solid so he knows it’s deliberate.
He doesn’t move away. I’m pretty sure neither of us breathes for a good thirty seconds.
“There is no other way that she could have been standing at the foot of my bed, saying my name, unless she was a ghost,” he finally says. He still hasn’t mentioned who the person was. I have my guesses, but I want him to want to tell me, rather than me asking.
“Did you only see her once?”
He nods. “It was maybe two weeks after she died. My mom. It was a car crash. The road was covered in black ice and it was dark. The person coming from the other direction was going too fast and spun out. They collided head-on. Everyone died.”
For the first time since I met him, there’s no sun in his green eyes. I set my hand on his knee, and he immediately covers my knuckles with his palm.
Then, just like on Saturday, he slots his fingers between mine.
“But when she appeared that night, she looked exactly like she did the last time I saw her. It was like she was coming to say goodbye.”
I flip my hand over so we’re palm to palm and give his hand a squeeze.
Another one of those half smiles finds his face. “So what do you think? Was she a hallucination caused by a late-night snack? The moon reflecting through the window? A case of inattentional blindness?” He smiles for real when he sees me react to the last option. “I’ve done the research too.”
“I believe you believe you saw your mom that night,” I offer. It’s as close as I can get to swallowing my skepticism. Because let’s face it. Dead loved ones don’t swing by to say hi after they die. They’re gone.
Gone does mean lost.
It has to. Because if it doesn’t, that leaves too many unanswered questions. And I can’t live with that.
“Why are you so unwilling to believe in anything?” It is the same question he asked me the other night, but there’s less of an edge to it now. He fiddles with his screwdriver, twirling it like we’re about to play spin the bottle, Lowe’s edition.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in anything.
I just can’t get behind magic or the supernatural or whatever we want to call it.
That’s not how the world works. There isn’t some secret underbelly of magic beneath us, or immortals and other beings walking just out of reach.
This”—I wave my arms around us—“is what we get.”
I don’t want to live in a world where the rules don’t matter, where there isn’t an explanation for everything. In that world, Marjorie and my other friends chose me to be the butt of their jokes because they felt like it, not because I’m weird.
That’s too random. Too unfair. Too out of control. There has to be logic and reason for things.
There just has to be.
Theo’s brow furrows, and his already downturned mouth dips into a deeper frown. He looks poised to ask for more information, so I do the most unhinged thing. I press my finger to the corner of his lips and tip it upward, as if I could pin his mouth back into a smile.
What the hell am I doing? Why do I lose all sense of decorum and self-preservation around this boy? It’s like I’m challenging him not to think I’m a complete oddball.
But things get even stranger because he doesn’t stop me. Or pull away. He just…well, he grins. As if he understands how desperate I am not to talk anymore about this.
“Can I take you somewhere that I think might change your mind?” he asks softly.
I yank my hands back to my lap. For the rest of my life—or until the sheer force of embarrassment kills me—I will relive this moment and wonder what the absolute hell I was thinking.
“Now?”
He nods.
“Aren’t we supposed to be working?” I flourish a hand over the hardware resting on the floor beside me.
He reaches for it, and just the feather of his fingertips against my leg chases sunlight through my veins. I never knew that someone else’s touch could feel like electricity. Like a warm summer day.
Like magic.
When he holds out his hand to help me up, I take it. “Watch this,” he says.
Our hands still clasped, he leads me through the house toward the living room.
How does he do this? Just grab someone’s hand and hold it tight. He’s not even blushing. As if this is normal. I don’t know his middle name, or what his house looks like, or what his favorite color is, but I am deeply familiar with the feel of every microscopic inch of his palm.
“Dad,” Theo calls out as we stumble into the living room.
Mr. Hargrave looks up from the baseboard he’s nailing into place. “Hmmm?” He’s got thick black reading glasses on.
“Amity needs me to help her get this piece of furniture she’s thrifting for her space upstairs. Okay if we go now?”
Mom tips her own glasses down her nose, surveying us from her spot on the couch we finally set up last night. “Furniture, huh?”
My face is the cringe emoji. “The stuff I brought from home won’t be nearly enough.
And it was cheap.” I can tell from the look on her face that she’s more skeptical of what we’re saying than I am of Theo’s ghosts, but she doesn’t respond.
Just observes me with that you’re going to fill me in on everything later expression.
“It’s a bit of a hike, so we’ll be gone awhile. But we’ll finish up the hardware in the kitchen when we get back,” Theo adds.
His dad waves his hand over his shoulder in what I’m assuming is nonverbal permission.
My mother tells us to be safe, yet again with much more subtext in her tone than I care to hear.
It’s not until we’re headed for the door that I understand her assumptions. I forgot Theo and I were holding hands.
I untangle our fingers and grasp his upper arm instead, to get his attention.
That turns out to be a big mistake because his arms are two hundred percent more solid than I was expecting. I stumble down the front steps.
Theo cocks an eyebrow. “You good?”
“What do you have stored in there? Cantaloupes?” I wave at his arms.
He throws back his head in a loud laugh that clings to my insides like melted marshmallow on my fingers.
“You know we’re going to have to actually come back with a piece of furniture now. Otherwise, my mother’s going to think we ran off to”—I widen my eyes at him, hoping that’s enough for him to catch the meaning—“you know.”
“Wow, we just met, Amity.” He pretends to be aghast, a palm pressed to his chest and everything.
My face is an explosion of heat. I practically jog toward his truck. I cannot sit here and joke about sex with him. Not when this is the first time in my life I find myself thinking about it in reality, not the abstract.
God, I have no idea how to do this.
“Come make me believe in ghosts,” I yell over my shoulder.