Chapter 3
I have to admit something.
Snooping around William Noemi’s place when I was a ghost wasn’t one hundred percent altruistic. It wasn’t a high percentage of boredom, either.
A couple of years ago, when my body hadn’t yet been discovered, Sage was staying at Nadia’s, and crying a lot.
A lot—a lot. Poor thing was going through it, between her fighting with Teal and Nadia and the high emotional roller coaster of falling in love with her now-husband, Tenn, all at the same time.
Because of all that weeping, I was called to her, by her side through the connection between us with her tears, sometimes multiple times a day.
She still hasn’t the faintest idea why tears drew me to her like bees to early spring dandelions…
only that it was just some mysterious side effect of being a Flores bruja. I know better, though.
Anyway, one night, I stayed with her after she’d cried herself to sleep. Once I made sure her breath was deep and sound, I took a walk.
If there was anything to like about being a ghost, it was that the laws of physics didn’t apply to me.
I could walk through stone garden walls and somersault through the wide trunks of old trees.
I could punch someone right in the eye and my fist would go through them as though they were nothing more than a figment of someone’s imagination.
What I loved best, though, was jumping.
From the balcony of the attic floor of Nadia’s home that night…I jumped. Without hesitation. It didn’t seem like I was any lighter when jumping—my ghost-body hit the ground with as much force as any regular, still-very-alive body. Maybe that’s why I loved it so much. It made me feel alive.
Or maybe it made me feel like I was about to die all over again, and perhaps that time, everything would end for real.
It didn’t end for real that night, obviously.
So I walked around Catalina Street, stepping in and out of yards, gardens, homes.
I walked past Jackie Piper, the single mom who had fallen asleep on the sofa between her two children, a huge, almost empty popcorn bowl in her lap, a Disney movie finishing up on the television.
I stepped next into the huge, three-story Victorian-style home that Carter Velasquez, my sister Teal’s husband, used to live in with his whole family when we were growing up, multigenerational style.
It had been purchased by a man who was trying to flip it, but it was turning out to be more of a hassle than he’d anticipated.
I stepped over piles of pipes and torn-out cupboards, trying to run my hand over the huge quartz countertop piece leaning against the kitchen wall, to no avail—my hand simply went through the smooth crystal, as brilliant as a slice of moon under the streetlights glaring in through the windows.
The actual moon was full that night as I wandered into William’s yard. I stopped short when I realized there was a vehicle in the driveway I hadn’t seen before—a brand-new Jeep, even shinier than the quartz countertop under the blue moonlight. And then I heard the sound of giggling.
It was a man and a woman. I watched in awe as they stepped into the porchlight, him tall and slim, and her short and thick. “Let me just check on him and we’ll go back to my place,” he promised her with a voice as slow and deep as hot honey drizzled over some impossibly sexy dessert.
I followed him inside and watched as he picked up an umbrella that had fallen to the floor by the front door, as he made his way into the hallway and flipped on the light switch, and as he opened the door of his grandfather’s bedroom.
“Gramps?”
“Go away.”
Adam let out a deep chuckle that made my stomach drop.
I hadn’t even seen him yet—he was still covered in shadows—but something about him even all the way back then…
even with me, as literally just a ghost, listening to him laugh with his voice as rich as tiramisu…
I knew Adam Noemi was…God, the word special doesn’t convey him properly.
Extraordinary sounds like too much. But there was something intense and strange and wonderful about him that made me want to know him, even though this was an impossible, impossible want.
He walked deeper into the room. “Guess you’re okay if you can begin with your classic rudeness.”
William was sitting up in bed, wearing pajamas with blue and green stripes. “Don’t you have a date with your girlfriend or something?”
“You know I don’t do relationships.”
William snorted. “When I was your age, you know what I was doing? Not cavorting around like a teenager, I’ll tell you that much.”
Adam sat on the edge of the bed and said, “I know. You’d already met her. Love at first sight.”
“And I was married with two kids! Not jerking women around!”
“I’m not jerking her around. She knows it’s casual.
” Adam sighed and turned toward the television.
In even the ugly gray glare of the screen, I could tell he was beautiful.
His eyes were blue like the sea. His skin was freckled, his hair kind of pink gold in the dark bedroom.
He looked a bit like an angel, and I suppressed a giggle.
The grumpy old man, the angel, and the ghost. I don’t know why it was so funny to me, but I snorted a bit.
The strangest thing happened then. His eyes tilted left and landed on me. He blinked. Then he blinked again. He stood, and that was when William said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”
Adam shook his head, still staring in my direction. “Nothing. Nothing. Have you taken that cough medicine I got you?”
“Oh, go to hell.”
Adam made sure William wasn’t running a fever (while William bitched the whole while, somehow even with a thermometer in his mouth) and then he was back out the front door.
His beautiful not-girlfriend was leaning against his Jeep, her hair dark like my sister Teal’s, and just as resplendent as the vehicle.
She put her phone down as he approached, his boots crunching the gravel.
“I thought you’d forgotten about me.” She smiled.
She was just as curvy as Sage, all hips and breasts with a round belly, and when she smiled, I could tell that she was just a little bit, or maybe a lot, in love with him.
She knows it’s casual, Adam had said, but just from the sparkling in her eyes, I knew she was hoping she could change his mind.
“Never,” he said, and he picked her up as she squealed, and kissed her.
He put her down slowly, their lips never parting, and he curled his hands around her waist.
I knew I needed to turn around and go back home. Or maybe snoop through some other neighbors’ houses, or even other neighborhoods. What Adam and his not-girlfriend were doing—it was personal and private.
But I stepped closer. I felt like a ghostly anthropologist, observing how contemporary humans kissed. Was it different from when I last kissed a guy, seven years before?
I thought I could maybe make out their tongues.
Her arms were thrown around his neck. His hand lifted to cup her breast, and she moaned a little too loudly, I guess, because he looked up at his grandfather’s house, maybe to make sure William wasn’t on his way to curse them out—but once again, his eyes landed on me.
He looked at me. Up and down, like he could see me.
“We should get out of here,” he said, still staring at me.
I was a ghost and I still got goose bumps in that moment—they flowed over my body as though I’d stepped under a freezing waterfall.
It was like he was saying those words to me. It was like I was alive.
We should get out of here.
Although he only stared at me for all of two seconds, I felt like I somehow had an opportunity to respond. To interact with someone, anyone else. To feel like I wasn’t the most lonely and forgotten ghost in all the worlds.
But before I knew it, before I could even try to respond, his lady friend said, “Yes.” She hopped in as he opened the door for her, and soon, they were driving away, the headlights cutting right through my body like machetes made of light as he swerved toward the road.
And then I was left alone. Just as I always was in the end.
Adam never looked directly at me again, but that didn’t stop me from trying to get him to.
I snooped on him and William every chance possible that summer.
I danced in his face. I yelled in his ears.
I did everything I could to make him see me once more.
I was desperate, absolutely desperate, for someone else to see me other than my weeping sister Sage.
But something happened that summer that I wasn’t anticipating. And it was me accidentally developing a massive crush on that son of a bitch.
It came from the tender way Adam made breakfast for William every morning when he visited—two over-easy eggs, whole wheat toast, sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper, and, to William’s dismay, two slices of turkey bacon.
And how he’d make sure William finished his plate.
How he’d try and refill the bird feeder before it was even half-empty, so William wouldn’t have to balance on his unstable-looking wooden ladder.
How he’d help his pregnant neighbor carry in groceries and, when the baby arrived, mow her lawn after taking care of William’s.
Adam seemed generous and thoughtful with a high emotional intelligence. I had thought he was the perfect man.
And then he had to completely ruin it one year later.