CHAPTER TWO #2
“I don’t know,” he said finally. When my brow furrowed, he added, “Appearing here is the first thing I can remember.”
“You don’t remember . . . dying?”
When he shook his head, I felt the color leach from my face.
“What about how old you were? Your name?”
“No clue,” he said.
“If you don’t know who you are, how do you know you won’t hurt me? What if you were a liar when you were alive? Or a criminal? Like, I’m just supposed to believe you?”
The guy (I’d peg his age somewhere between eighteen and twenty) backed up two steps and dropped his gaze, studying his brown laced boots.
Shame cracked across my face. His current state of being wasn’t anything I understood, but he had been real and human once. And gone too soon. Something like sympathy bloomed in my chest. “Listen, I’m sorry. This is all just extremely strange.”
He lifted his head, nodded. “For me too.” He ran his fingers through his hair as he continued. “I wish there was a way I could prove I’m not some evil spirit or whatever, but all I have is my word. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
I stared down at my hands, frowning when I realized two of my pink gel graduation nails had popped clean off.
My thoughts drifted to my parents, halfway across the world.
Ana and Grier, across the country. None of them had intended to hurt me on purpose.
But they had. And worse, they were oblivious to it.
In the silence that followed, the guy did a quick survey of my room, gaze landing on me and traveling down to my wrist. His brow wrinkled. “What’s that you’re wearing?”
I held out my left arm. “This? Why? Have you seen it before?”
His eyes shot wide, and he planted one foot on the floor, but stopped, as if asking for permission to get closer. I nodded, giving it.
Then he was closer, as if he hadn’t even crossed any space.
He simply appeared next to me, skirting the edge of the bed.
I shivered at the sensation of gentle warmth rolling off his form.
He didn’t touch me or the watch, but looked it over, his forehead creasing.
“It feels familiar, but I don’t know why. ”
An idea began to form inside my jumbled mind. “It started ticking right before you appeared. I turned the crown and you . . .” I trailed off, pinching the crown again, trying to reverse this unholy scenario and send this ghost boy back to wherever. But after ten turns, he remained.
“Where did you get it?” the boy asked, oblivious to my attempt to get rid of him.
I gave him a thirty-second rundown of the antique store.
“My tía—my aunt—tried to wind it before, and nothing happened,” I said in closing. “She’s the one making all that noise—do you hear it?”
He angled his chin, listening. “Sounds like a table saw.”
My belly swerved. “Wait, that you know?”
“Apparently.”
I held up some fingers. “How many?”
“Four,” he said immediately.
I rubbed my thumb across the glass watch face. “What’s the capital of Georgia?”
“Atlanta.”
“Um, what food product does Jif make?”
“Easy—peanut butter. I hate that stuff, though.”
Hate, not hated. Somehow, this drew my sharpest jab of sympathy yet. I paused for two beats before grabbing an item from my nightstand, holding it up.
“An iPhone. Looks like the latest one too.”
So he was a modern ghost. His outfit supported that notion, but knowing Apple’s most iconic product confirmed it. “What city were you born in?” I tried.
His mouth opened, then snapped shut.
“I . . . can’t remember.” He rubbed at his eyes, and I wondered if there was any pain or irritation that came with being his particular kind of ghost. Or were stress headaches and bruised hearts only for the living?
“But all those other things! Numbers, phones, peanut butter. You remember those.”
“There’s a difference between knowledge and memory,” the ghost said, as if that explained it.
I’d never thought of our brains that way, but it felt true. Rapt, I watched as he kicked out his hip, balancing his weight on one foot. (He sensed his own weight?)
He leaned closer to study the watch again. His mouth twisted, and his head bobbed as if he were agreeing with himself. “Well, something about this watch has to be connected to who I . . . was.”
The room grew silent. Outside too. Tía Viv had turned off the saw, and it seemed the birds were grateful for the break. Squawking started up from all points near Bearberry Cabin. The nearby trees were safe havens again.
The ghost’s body gave an overblown flinch.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.” He scrubbed his face. “I just feel like I’m not going to be here much longer.”
“What do you mean by ‘here’? Like, in my room today, or here here?”
“Anywhere.” And before I could respond, he asked, “Have you ever seen a ghost before?”
The truth rose up immediately, but I had never put words to this memory. I studied a long crack inching along the baseboard.
“Okay, there’s my answer,” he said with smug satisfaction. “Was that experience anywhere close to this one? To me?”
My mind flashed to Abuela Rojas, so many years ago, the day after she died. A fleeting wisp of her image had woken me in the middle of the night but had never appeared again. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I told him. And I never would.
“Perfectly fine,” he said, waving me off. “Maybe that’s our first clue about me. Seems like I’m more than a little nosy. Or maybe we could call it curious.”
The corner of my mouth wiggled, dropping off the hard set of my jaw. I couldn’t stop it. “Sure. But ‘clue’?”
“Well, we’re going to figure out who I am, right?”
We? “I mean, ‘curious’ isn’t a lot to go off,” I noted. “A name would be better.”
“Okay, then give me yours,” he said, a lazy smile playing on his lips. Maybe I should’ve added “flirt” next to “curious” on the list of things I knew about him.
“My name is Sylvie,” I said before thinking better of it. “I’m visiting from Los Angeles.”
“Sylvie,” he repeated, almost inaudibly. He cleared his throat over the jagged bits that stuck to my name. “Sylvie from Los Angeles.”
I swallowed hard. “Sylvie Castellano from Los Angeles.”
“Castel—I’ll probably mess that one up.” He held up one finger. “Wait, no, I’ve got it.”
But he didn’t say my last name at all. He shuffled back and lifted a hand to the side of his head, squinting.
“Penn,” he finally said. “I remember.”
“You remembered something about a pen?”
He shook his head as a surge of relief and awe crashed over his face. “No. P-e-n-n,” he clarified. “My name is Penn.”
And in a fraction of a blink, or a split atom of a second, he disappeared. Penn was gone. And the second hand on my gold watch had stopped ticking.