“Whatever, Lex,” she says. “What-ever. You’re in some kind of trouble. I can feel it.”

Silence builds between us. I think, Of course I’m in trouble. Haven’t you been paying attention for the past two months? And: What do you care if I’m in trouble? We haven’t been close for years. It’s none of your business. But then the urge to tell somebody—the urge to get the past week off my chest—crashes over me like a tidal wave. Sadie’s still my friend. And she’s not like my other friends; she’s not super rational and scientific, and maybe she won’t jump to conclusions about my dubious mental health. She could be open-minded.

She could listen.

I do a quick survey of the shop. Counter Guy is nowhere to be seen, probably in a back room somewhere. The Jamba Juice is empty.

“I was running, because . . .” I take a deep breath. “Because I thought I saw Ty. And so I had to get out of my house, for a while.”

Sadie leans forward. Her eyes are absolutely serious.

“Okay,” she says after what I swear are the longest sixty seconds of my life. “Tell me everything.”

An hour later we’re holed up in my bedroom watching Long Island Medium. After I finished giving Sadie the basic details of the Ty-could-be-a-ghost story, she insisted that I bring her home and take her down into the basement to show her the mark on the wall from where I threw the phone at Ty, like she wanted to see the evidence herself, even though there’s no real evidence. She peppered me with a barrage of questions: At what time of day, precisely, did I see my brother? Did I feel hot or cold in his presence? Was he wearing white or black? Did he look normal or was he altered in any way?

I tried to answer the best that I could.

Then she stood in the middle of his bedroom gazing into the mirror like she expected him to appear at any moment. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when he didn’t show.

“Is this the note?” she asked, her eyes lingering on the Post-it in the center of the glass.

Sorry Mom but I was below empty.

I nodded.

She stared at it for a few more seconds, and her voice was low when she asked, “Did he talk to you?”

“No,” I answered, and I thought, This is crazy. How is it possible that we’re having a conversation about this like it really happened? “He was only there for one or two seconds, both times. It was like a flash.”

“Well,” she said gravely, “he’ll definitely try to find some way to express what he wants. He’s here for a reason, and you have to figure out what that reason is.”

Right.

“How do you know so much about ghosts, anyway?” I asked.

And that’s how we ended up watching Long Island Medium on my laptop upstairs. I’ve never seen the show before, but apparently Sadie’s caught almost every episode.

“Theresa’s hilarious,” she says now, stretched across the foot of my bed on her stomach with her feet dangling in the air. “It’s almost like she can’t help herself. She has to talk to the spirits wherever she finds them.”

This is true. So far in this episode Theresa—the medium, who has a thick Long Island accent and huge bleached platinum hair—has felt compelled to deliver a message from beyond to the guy at the Chinese takeout place and a girl she meets at a cooking class.

“She always bites her lip when she hears the spirits,” Sadie adds. “I love how she tells people, too. She just comes out and says, ‘I’m a medium. I talk to dead people.’”

I’m not sold. Not that the show isn’t entertaining, because, if I’m being honest, it is. But it seems to me that the medium is simply telling people what of course they want to hear: that the person who died is safe and happy and at peace, and they shouldn’t feel guilty about whatever they feel guilty about, and everything’s okay.

In my experience, everything is not okay.

“So,” Sadie says after the show wraps up. “What do you think Ty’s trying to tell you? Why is he here?”

I hesitate. Then I retrieve my backpack from where I left it in the corner and dump the contents out on my desk.

“Whoa, is that rose made of paper?” Sadie asks, swinging herself around to sit up. “That’s amazing. Where’d you get it?”

“Nowhere.” I stab a pin through the wire stem and tack the rose up next to last year’s daisy before Sadie has a chance to inspect it. I really, really don’t want to get into my love life right now. Instead, I pull Ty’s letter out from between the pages of my notebook. I hold it for a minute, feeling its weight in my hand, unwilling to relinquish it, and then I hand it to Sadie.

“I found it in his desk,” I explain, a detail I’d kind of skimmed over before. “After I saw him—later, I mean, I found it.”

“Who’s Ashley?” she asks immediately.

I sigh. “The girl he took to homecoming. Outside of that, I have no idea.”

I show her my typed list of prospective Ashleys.

“Damn,” she says, scanning down the page with her finger. “That’s a lot of Ashleys.”

“You’re telling me.”

“And you don’t have any other clues?”

I swallow. “She’s blond. I only saw her once, from the back.”

“That’s not a lot to go on.” She looks at my face and scoffs. “Ah, don’t feel guilty. I never know who my brothers are dating. It’s like an episode of The Bachelor in my family these days. I have to find out what their relationship status is on the internet.”