Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  Her breath solidified, a block in her throat. She would have screamed, but what would Ethan think if she was afraid of simply getting to the ghosts, not just the ghosts themselves? Then his head popped up near her ankles. "Are you waiting for an invitation?" he asked, and she realized he was holding fast to a ladder that led into the pit of the quarry.

  Ethan said there was a ghost here, a quarry supervisor who'd been killed by some crazy guy. He said seeing the spirit was a sure thing. He'd told her they might have to avoid a guard, but she and Ethan seemed to be the only ones around. Maybe that was luck, maybe it meant it was okay to be there. At any rate, Lucy started to climb down. Huge pillars of stone reared up around her, seeming to move in the lack of light. The soles of her sneakers skidded down a slope of granite, and she wound up in a heap on a pile of rubble. "You okay?" Ethan called. He probably turned around too, but it was too dark to see him.

  She realized that this was what life was like for Ethan all the time.

  They crawled through crevasses so narrow Lucy had to hold her breath, up columns of rock where their only foothold was hope, underneath listing piers and over great craggy tablets. They balanced on thin needles of stone, toppled like a giant's game of pick-up sticks. Every now and then their forward motion would dislodge some careful equilibrium, and the granite would crumble with a roar and a flurry of dust. "You all right?" Ethan's voice would float back to her, and then they would keep going.

  Lucy's hands and shins were scraped over and over, and she had one really bad cut that she was afraid to even look at. She smacked into Ethan's back and realized that they had reached the other side of the quarry, across from the ladder. "We'll hang out there," Ethan said, and pointed to two fallen slabs of granite that had haphazardly formed an A-frame and a ledge.

  He climbed first. Then Lucy grabbed onto his hand so that he could pull her up, but their fingers, dusty, slipped away from each other and with a tiny shriek Lucy landed on a crumbled bed of rock. "Jeez, Lucy, are you okay?" Ethan called.

  Tears came to her eyes, but she made herself get up. "Yeah," Lucy said, and she made her way up to the ledge with great care, firmly jamming her feet between cracks in the granite before she released her handhold to climb again. On the ledge, she collapsed on her back and closed her eyes while Ethan set up his ghost-hunting equipment. When she'd caught her breath, she sat up and flicked on a flashlight, swinging its beam across the expanse they'd just traveled.

  Lucy's eyes went wide at the spires and jagged edges, the sheer distance. The ladder they'd climbed down was so far away it might have been forever since they'd started.

  She had already been braver than she thought she was.

  "So what do we do?" Lucy asked.

  "Nothing. Now's the part where we wait." They sat with their shoulders touching, shivering from the cold and the awareness of what they had done. "You know what a star is?" Ethan asked after a moment, and Lucy shook her head. "An explosion that happened, like, hundreds of years ago, but that we're only just seeing now."

  "Why?"

  "Because that's how long it takes light to travel."

  Maybe, Lucy thought, it was the same for ghosts. Maybe sadness moved at a different speed than real life, which is why they showed up years after they'd died. She squinted up at the cloudy sky, trying to find a single star. When it happened-- the explosion--it had to have been loud and bright and terrifying. But what she saw, now, was beautiful.

  Maybe everything looked better, with some distance.

  Even before that radio thing that Ethan held in his hand began to beep, Lucy knew something was coming. She felt it in the weight of the air on her skin, in the hollow echo that came into her ears. The fine hairs on her arm stood up, and her stomach did a slow roll. "Is it me," Ethan whispered, "or did it just get about a hundred degrees colder?"

  The little radio began to twitch like crazy. "Lucy," Ethan whispered. "Stand up."

  She did. She walked all the way out to the edge of their ledge and she thought as hard as she could in her head, You can't scare me.

  Ethan had told her that ghosts couldn't materialize without energy. Fear was a type of energy, the kind you wrapped tight into a ball. So Lucy summoned all the terror she'd tucked into the creases of her bedsheets and behind the wall of clothes in her closet. She thought of all the asthma attacks she'd had when a spirit got right into her face. She squinched her eyes shut and focused and a moment later, when she peeked, she saw a man walking toward her.

  It was a man, but it wasn't a man. This one was transparent, like the lady who came to her bedroom, and Lucy could see the jagged edges of rocks right through his shoulders and spine. He was dressed weird, too, in a striped shirt that looked like an old mattress and a pair of pants with no loops for the belt, and a vest with a shiny gold pocketwatch. He had a mustache that twirled at the ends like a circus strong-man's, and his hair was plastered down to his head. Get to work, he said, right in the middle of her mind.

  Lucy felt her knees shaking so hard they knocked into each other. Get lost, she thought right back at him.

  To her surprise, the ghost did exactly as she'd asked. He took two steps forward, one of which brought him directly through her, icing her bones and her blood so thoroughly that for a second she was still as these rocks surrounding her, and then he vanished.

  Lucy smiled. She even laughed a little. She looked around, but there was nobody else haunting this pit. And sure enough, the tightness in her belly was gone. Slipping into their cave again, she sat down beside Ethan, who was banging the side of the EMF meter into the slab of granite. "Well," he said, "this is a piece of crap."

  Lucy stared at him. "You didn't see anything?"

  "Nah, it was a false alarm." He glanced up. "Why? Did you?"

  "Yeah," Lucy said with wonder, and she sat down to tell Ethan all about it.

  Shelby had been saving up words for this: velutinous, sybaritic, hedonic, effulgent. She had imagined them painted across the ceiling--paroxysm, tumult, fillip, whet. Yet as Eli's hands skimmed over her skin, as her nails dug into his back and urged him closer, Shelby found that she could not think at all.

  His body was long and lean and sculpted, his touch as light as the promises he whispered. She followed his lead through the moment when she was certain she would not recall what to do or how to do it right, and by the time their limbs were tangled together, Shelby could not remember ever having doubts.

  He kissed his way from her ankles up, calves and knees and thighs, until she was shaking for him to settle. When he did, when his mouth came over her, she arched into him and closed her eyes to see vistas of gold, glowing emeralds, scatters of rubies. They burned hotter, smaller, into quasars and novas and filled a universe. Eli moved as if he had all the time in the world. Then, just as she could not hold on any longer, he was suddenly above her, forcing her to look at him so that she would know exactly what road her life was heading down. "Where have you been?" Eli murmured, and he filled her.

  Their bodies rocked at a fulcrum; their rhythm told a story. And at the moment they both let go, Shelby lost every word she'd ever learned except for one: Us.

  When Eli fell asleep heavily in her arms, Shelby slipped out from beneath his weight and curled up against him. She tried to memorize the constellations of his freckles and the crooked line of the part in his hair. She smelled herself on his skin.

  Something bit into the soft side of her thigh, and she shifted, trying to get comfortable. But whatever it was moved with her, and Shelby reached down between herself and Eli to grab a small, sharp item. She held it up to the pink sliver of daylight that fell diagonally across the covers and frowned. This particular setting, this combination of stones, was all too familiar.

  "Hey." Eli reached for her.

  "Hey yourself," Shelby said against his lips, forgetting everything but Eli as she dropped the diamond solitaire Ross had once given to Aimee, and then lost months ago in a room at her own house.

  It was the prettiest thing Ethan