Life After Theft

She crossed her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow. “Beats the hell out of me. I’ve been screaming at every student in that school—new kids included—for ages. Apparently, you won the medium’s lottery. Wait,” she said, stepping forward. “Maybe that’s why. Do you see other ghosts?”

I backed away from her as though she had some kind of contagious disease. A not-real contagious disease. “No! I don’t see anything. Technically I don’t see you; you’re not real.”

“Oh,” she said, her mouth drooping. “Well, whatever. You can see me and that’s all that matters. I need your help.”

“No! No help. No nothing. Not for fake people.”

She shot me a nasty look and put her hands on her hips. “Fine, I’ll prove it. Get out your computer, now!”

There is something irrationally terrifying about being ordered around by a hallucination.

I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and set it on my messy desk. Couldn’t hurt. If nothing else, I could catch up on XKCD while she spouted her nonsense.

“Go to Google.”

At least my alter ego knew what Google was.

“Type in my name.”

I had gotten to the first of the double ee’s when I stopped. “Wait a second,” I said. “If I Google your name, all that proves is that there is some dead girl out there named Kimberlee Schaffer. You tell me about yourself first and then I’ll Google and see if you’re right.” Oh yes, outwitting my own brain. Sweet.

But Kimberlee shrugged nonchalantly. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“How’d you die?”

“Drowned.”

Drowned? That’s the best my subconscious could come up with? “You drowned? Like, you didn’t know how to swim?”

“Of course I know how to swim, moron; I live . . . lived on a private beach. The same one I drowned at, actually.” A touch of something resembling real emotion clouded Kimberlee’s eyes for an instant before she ran her fingers through her hair; whatever it was I’d seen was erased by that casual gesture. “I got caught in a riptide,” she said softly. “It happens.”

“But why—?”

“Dude, riptide. Move on!” Kimberlee snapped, scowling.

“Fine. Uh, what color of flowers did you have at your funeral?”

She bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know,” she admitted. Score one for me. “I didn’t go. I was so busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on that I didn’t really start going anywhere until about two weeks after the funeral.”

“Convenient,” I scoffed.

“What else do you want?” she said. “I drowned in a riptide, I went to Whitestone, I was seventeen, my dad’s a judge, my mom’s a CFO, I’m an only child. Good enough?”

“I guess,” I muttered, turning back to the screen and typing the rest of her name.

“S-c,” Kimberlee corrected from behind me.

“Get over there!” I said, pointing to the opposite side of the room. “You are not allowed to see this!”

“Fine!” she said, sulking away.

I pressed Enter, fully prepared to bask in the proof of my own brilliance.

But the first page of more than 4,000 results popped up on my screen.

Teen Dies in Tragic Accident. Local Judge Mourns the Death of His Only Child. Prominent Prep School Suffers Tragic Loss. Teen’s Body Found on Private Beach. Missing Seventeen-Year-Old Confirmed Dead.

I skimmed the articles, my jaw dropping as the details swirled in front of my face, complete with a number of photographs that were unmistakably Kimberlee. Not the least of which was one of her in her freaking coffin.

“I—I could have read this last year,” I said, scrambling for an excuse—totally not ready to accept this.

“Eventually you’re going to have to stop trying to talk yourself out of this and believe me. Besides,” she said, turning to face me now. “Who tries to convince themselves they’re insane instead of accepting the fairly rational explanation of someone being a ghost? Maybe you really are a nut job. Like a hypochondriac, but for craziness.”

I’m agnostic, but that moment was the first time in memory I wished I did believe in a god. Then I would have someone to beg to deliver me from this demented undead. “Whatever,” I mumbled, clicking through website after website, skimming each for mere seconds before scrolling to the next one. It was possible, wasn’t it? That my brain had unconsciously stored the details of something I’d read and “forgotten,” then used that info to spit out a made-up person? Now I was really starting to sound crazy. About being crazy. I was double crazy.

“Your email,” I said, coming up with one last test. “You have a Yahoo or Gmail account or something?”

“I did,” Kimberlee said, clearly not following my stream of logic.

“Okay, tell me your username and password. There’s no way I could know that, so if it works it would prove that you’re not some figment of my imagination.” Cool, calm, logical. I can do this.

“Not a chance,” Kimberlee said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you cyberspying on me!”

“It’s not cyberspying—it’s proving your story.”

“My email is private. Don’t go there.”

I hesitated. “Facebook?”

She snorted. “That’s hardly better.” After a moment of hesitation: “How about my MySpace page? I didn’t use it for, like, years before I died, but it’s still there and definitely mine.”

I nodded. “That’ll work. What is it?”

After a few moments’ thought she rattled off her MySpace username and I found the page. Not surprisingly, it was pink and seizure-inducingly sparkly.

And covered with pictures of a definitely alive Kimberlee from junior high school. She looked a little different but it was definitely her. I squinted at a couple of group shots and recognized Langdon, the guy who had almost squished me to a pulp today. “Hey!” I said, pointing. “That’s Langdon.”

Kimberlee rolled her eyes. “So?”

I turned back to the computer and took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said, “this is definitely Kimberlee Schaffer’s MySpace page. What’s the password? And none of this guessing stuff. You nail it the first try, or I ignore you for the rest of my life.”

“Fine,” Kimberlee said, leaning forward with a predatory look in her eye, “but I get a part in this deal, too. If the password works you believe me, one hundred percent. No more made-up-person stuff. Deal?”

I swallowed hard. “Deal.”