CHAPTER NINE
“You have a cat?” Penn asked.
Anne Shirley was stretched out on my pillow, taking her midmorning nap—not to be confused with the early-morning nap she took on the bathroom rug while I tried to blow-dry my hair and not step on her tail.
The fancy memory-foam cat bed Del left had sat unused in the living room for forty-eight hours.
Penn was barely here for two minutes but was already all about the sleeping ginger creature. He hovered close enough to track every little flutter and snore the cat made in dreamland.
“Temporarily,” I told him. “And hello to you too.”
Abashed, he pivoted and flashed me a coy grin. “Hi, Sylvie.”
His smile was contagious, splitting my face in a way that made it feel like I was exercising an underused muscle but also letting my self-consciousness run free.
I wish I’d thought to drag a brush through my hair before I’d turned the crown and summoned him.
At least my favorite tinted lip balm was wedged into the front pocket of my cutoffs.
I quickly swiped on a cherry-pink layer.
Penn moved toward the bed and sat near the footboard.
This simple act got me wondering what he could do when he appeared in this world, the bounds and rules of his form.
Had the horror novels and movies gotten the details right?
While it might not be crucial to discovering his identity, I wanted to know him more.
“Do you ever get tired and feel like you need to sleep or sit?” I asked as I pulled the brown leather notebook from my nightstand and perched at the edge of my bed.
“Good question,” he said. “I’m as new to whatever I am, or what I can do, as you are.
But I don’t think so. I mean, I think I’d be fine just standing for a while.
But this is also good.” Another smile. “Nice, even though I don’t get much sensation from the mattress or the bedding.
” He scooched closer, but the bed showed no indentations or ripples along the patterned quilt. “It’s like I’m just . . . here.”
At this, the light left his eyes, and he ran his hand over the scruff along one side of his jaw.
“I feel this, though—myself. Just like normal.” He tugged at the same tan shirt he’d had on last visit.
The T-shirt layered underneath was gray this time.
“These feel pretty much the same.” He dragged his hand along the comforter.
“But I can’t describe what this is like.
Not at all like how I remember cotton, but it’s not nothing either. ”
Outside, Tía was at her table saw. Anne Shirley was still sleep-purring.
The soft leather notebook sat on my lap; I felt the weight of it in a way I’d never appreciated before.
And before I thought better of it, my hand was reaching toward Penn.
He’d touched me before—or at least I thought he had.
But that moment in town had been fraught with shock.
Would it be different if I touched him this time?
My hand jutted out only a few inches before I lost my nerve.
I balled a fist at my thigh and studied the window frame.
“Sylvie.”
I hated how good my name sounded inside his signature rasp, the gentle deepness of it. More than anything, he said my name like it was important.
I had to look over. His arm was outstretched, hand splayed. “Go ahead. I’m curious too,” he said. “But I’m always curious, right?”
Always, even though our time together had been little more than fleeting blips. “Curious” was one of my silly search words for who he might’ve been. Touch him, just try and see. He was outright offering, and I nodded.
Memories shuffled through me like a deck of cards.
Picture after picture of the times I hadn’t waited.
Nights I’d rushed toward boys in similar shirts, at their collars and buttons and hems. Locations varied—from cars tucked inside the overgrown foliage along Laurel Canyon, to hidden spaces carved into rocky cliffs during Malibu beach parties, smoke and embers and the crash of the Pacific close by.
Sophomore year, October of senior year, and March and April.
None of those times were like this. Penn wasn’t like that, but touching a ghost was never something I wondered about until now.
Giddiness swept in and all over my nervous nostalgia.
Because no matter what grand event or A-list concert my mother was hosting on the Mercury right now, a one-to-one ghost experience was a wish she could never grant for her billionaire boss or his guests. She couldn’t make that happen.
But Penn could. I could.
I didn’t know what I was expecting as I leaned toward him, aiming for his palm with my index finger. There was warmth. An entire force field of it, but one I could breach with barely any pressure. I said that word out loud—“warm”—but I lost my next breath as my finger sank all the way through.
Penn let out a messy laugh. “For me it’s the opposite. You’re cool, a little different from the bed or other stuff around here.”
I marveled and said, “It’s still so wild that I can go right through you.
” I tried again, this time resting my hand against his arm.
Slightly more intense, like passing through a thousand moth wings dipped in heat, a spiderweb strung with it.
But my hand fell through his skin again.
“This is messing with me. You look so solid.”
“My best party trick of all,” he teased.
I smiled and bent around so he’d have access to my left arm. The watch lived there.
Penn didn’t hesitate, as if he’d been wondering if he could feel the most curious part about us—the source that ticked and brought him here, to me. “Huh. It’s the coldest thing here. More than, um, the rest of you.” With little force, his hand dropped through the watch and my wrist.
After a couple minutes experimenting, we discovered he could sit or simply be on objects like my bed or a chair, or even cross-legged on the ground. But with intention, he could—and would—just appear on the other side of things.
He tried touching me again, cupping his hand around my fore-arm, leaving it there.
My heart hammered as I absorbed the strange sensation.
He pulled away. “Weird that we’re opposite temps at the same time, like, to each other.”
Cool and warm.
Moon and sun.
Dead and alive.
Knowing the how, and when, and who of Penn yanked at my gut. I exhaled and flipped open the leather notebook. “Catch-up time. Everything you remember here, you keep remembering, right? Like, your memory doesn’t reset each time we meet.”
“So far, yeah. Sylvie from Los Angeles, and last time you had on black Chucks. Your tía’s a famous woodworker,” he added, proving our theory.
I showed him my growing list of things about his life.
He scanned and pointed to the final list item. “The web searches. You tried?”
“Yeah, and that’s the bad news,” I said, and filled him in about all the keywords I’d tested that had led to nowhere.
“Jeez, high school football star, lead actor bound for Broadway?” He gave a short laugh. “Still, there have to be plenty of people who don’t show up on Google searches just from their first name and state of birth.”
I swallowed hard—Del had shown up online.
But I waved Penn off, deflecting. “I just thought you would have, complete with pictures,” I said.
“You seem like one of those Most Likely To guys. You know, most likely to succeed or make his first million by twenty-five. Most talented, most athletic—that stuff. At my high school we called them Senior Standouts.”
His face was edged with a little mischief. “I doubt I’m any kind of prodigy like your tía. It’s perfectly okay if you discover I’m just an ordinary dude. Nothing special or worthy of a list of internet search results.”
Impossible. This word, instantly. I kept it to myself. But right then, I was convinced that Penn from Oregon couldn’t have been anything but special and noteworthy, and maybe even extraordinary.
“There must be something about me that’s important enough to keep me, well, like this. We just have to find it, right?”
For the state of Penn’s future—wherever that may be.
For mine that hinged upon a watch I couldn’t bear to sell with him still trapped inside.
For the summertime adventure and the big, big thrill of it.
To answer, I added an entry noting what he confirmed earlier.
His memory here, with me, was cumulative.
“Wait,” he said. “Go back. What are all those little drawings?”
On instinct, I shut the notebook and moved it aside but then paused.
How long would this ghost really be in my life—two weeks?
Three, maybe? There was something freeing about his mortality and current state.
I realized I didn’t need to guard myself around him like I did with other people.
Grier and Ana were the biggest exceptions.
But even they never got the whole of me. No one did.
And Penn was the kind of boy who, by nature, could never have that much of me. Who cared if I let him see the way I curved and looped through the letters of my full name, or my badly drawn roses, or a tree I loved that grew its own way?
Sitting here, with him, I didn’t care—not as much as I usually did.
“I’ve always been a doodler,” I admitted, cracking open the notebook once again. “Even before I could spell.”
His mouth softened as I slowly flipped through the marked-up pages. A few times, he traced one finger over my silly drawings, his smile moving in and out of focus.
Such a small snapshot moment. But I knew that I would never forget it. I ran my hand along the soft leather edge. “I bought this notebook the same day I got the watch.”
“That’s why you’re using it for stuff we learn?”
That we again. It was as constant as his curiosity. “Maybe they go together.”
“That curved tree looks like the one by the creek.”