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  Even though Rakesh would go to great lengths for a laugh, this seemed out of his scope. Everything else on the Brighton Times website looked completely legitimate. More than that, the details were too real. He hadn’t told Rakesh — or anyone — that Lacey had a brother named Luke. And really, when you thought about it, nothing about this situation was funny.

  He glowered down at his laptop accusingly. A very small part of him wanted to hurl it out the window, walk out of his room, and never think about Lacey again, but a bigger part of him needed to get to the bottom of this. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure his door was shut — the last thing he wanted was for his mother or, worse, Mark, to casually saunter in to drop off his laundry or inquire about the homework that was definitely not getting done — and reopened his browser.

  The article was dated in October. Three and a half months before he and Lacey had begun talking. Right around the time he’d messaged her the first time. Slowly, nervously, he read the entire story again. His eyes scanned the words “body discovered” and “her loss will be felt deeply by those who knew her” and the sensation of a sharp dagger slicing through his entire world was replaced by a dull throbbing in his gut. It was an upgrade, he decided. Maybe the next phase would involve numbness kicking in.

  He clicked back to his search results and opened the next story. This one was dated in January. He did some quick calculations in his head and figured it had been written shortly before he’d first heard from Lacey.

  AFTER TRAGIC ACCIDENT,

  TOWN STRUGGLES TO RECOVER

  Three months after the sudden loss of a beloved teenager, her family and friends gathered together on a cold but bright morning in Brighton Park to celebrate her life. The school year, which started out promisingly for Lacey Gray, has been cast with a dark pall since October when Gray fell to her death during an unsupervised party hosted by a classmate. Her passing has been called a tragic accident, and Brighton High’s class of 2014 has felt her absence deeply. “We didn’t want to wait to dedicate a yearbook page to her,” says Gray’s friend and classmate Jenna Merrick. “We wanted her family to know we think about her and miss her every day.”

  Merrick led fundraising efforts to open the memorial in Brighton Park, and tears shone from her eyes yesterday as she stood next to the copper sculpture depicting a young girl dancing. Ed and Leslie Gray, Lacey’s parents, and her brother, Luke, looked on, at times breaking down into tears, other times laughing as their daughter’s friends took turns remembering Gray as a charismatic, promising young woman whose time on this earth ended entirely too soon.

  Belinda Burns, longtime Brighton High English teacher, spoke of Gray’s passion for poetry, and read verses from Rumi aloud to honor Lacey’s memory. Those lines were engraved on a plaque that was unveiled beneath the sculpture. The plaque was a gift from the Palmer family, whose son Troy is a Brighton senior and one of Luke Gray’s closest friends.

  After attendees observed a moment of silence, they were invited to share their memories of Gray. “There wasn’t a band she didn’t know,” recalled Max Anderson, a friend who had gotten to know Gray during their guitar lessons together. Anderson, who regularly performs in Brighton’s smaller venues, played one of Gray’s favorite Bright Eyes songs in her honor.

  To close the ceremony, Ed Gray offered a few words. “This morning I would have traded anything in the world to spend even one more day with my daughter. But hearing what she meant to all of you, to this community … it makes me feel like her spirit is still with us. Thank you for keeping her alive.”

  Jason massaged his temples and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was surprised to find tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was grieving. Wiping them away, he clicked through the photos that accompanied the story. In the first, the smiling Lacey he’d been falling for over the past several weeks gazed out of the screen at him. He took a moment and stared back, trying to figure out what she was trying to tell him, but her face remained forever stuck in that moment of joy, inscrutable as ever. The sculpture Lacey’s friends had dedicated to her depicted a girl dancing, arms out to her sides, palms open, head tilted, a serene smile spread out across the copper face. In the third picture, a photograph showed Lacey as a young girl, twirling with a friend in a grassy field. It was clearly the moment the sculpture had been modeled on. “Lacey was as much a sister as a friend,” Jenna Merrick (pictured at age 8, with Lacey, above) remembered. “I can’t imagine what life looks like without her.”

  Me and J Money have been friends practically since we were born — we’re family at this point.

  Lacey had typed those words to him. Except maybe she hadn’t.

  The strangest part was that this was what he’d wanted to find. Not her obituary — that had never even crossed his mind. But evidence that the girl he’d been talking to was real. That she was as beautiful and smart and lovable as she seemed over IM. And she was all of those things. Everything she’d told him about the bands she loved, about learning to play guitar, about the New Age English teacher, all of that was exactly as he wanted it to be. It was like he’d been searching for a glass of water and instead found himself at the edge of an ocean armed only with his hands. As he tried to scoop out the water, it slipped through his fingers and a moment later he was up to his waist in it.

  Half an hour before, he’d been sure Lacey was the solution to all of his problems; now he had no idea what to think. His head had filled with fog, and his body felt more tired than it ever had in his life. It was quickly becoming clear this wasn’t a minor mix-up or a joke Rakesh was playing on him. But the truth seemed impossibly distant and dark. If it wasn’t a prank, did that mean he was talking to a ghost? Or did it mean Lacey Gray was still alive?

  Moreland! You’re slower than my grandmother, and she’s in a wheelchair!” Coach Caroline Walker’s PE class was tough even on the best of days. On this particular morning, exhausted from sleeplessness, Jason wondered if collapsing on the spot might provide some relief from the suicide drills she was forcing them to run.

  When he’d said good night to his mom the night before, she’d taken his laptop to the living room — it was something she did casually, as if she were grabbing a load of his laundry or straightening up his schoolbooks, but he knew she did it to keep him from going online when he should have been sleeping. He’d considered sneaking downstairs to retrieve it, but he also wanted to forget every strange, confusing piece of information it contained about Lacey Gray. Maybe if he left it there, he reasoned, the news stories about her death and her friends would disappear. And so he’d spent the night kicking at his sheets and staring at the ceiling, trying unsuccessfully to separate the girl he knew from the girl in the obituary he’d read.

  He wasn’t sure what time he’d finally drifted off, but when his alarm sounded in the morning he jolted up from a dream where he’d been falling from the sky, plummeting toward an Earth that was nowhere in sight. For a moment, as he wiped the sleep from his eyes, he’d groggily thought the horrible news of the day before had been part of the same nightmare, but the very real memory of finding the Brighton Times article came flooding back in an icy rush. He’d hoped school would distract him from the questions he didn’t even know how to begin to ask, but so far he’d had little luck.

  PE was a class most kids slacked off in, but Coach Walker took the obesity epidemic very seriously, and, Jason thought, perhaps a little personally. She seemed determined to turn all of her students into Olympians, no matter how un–athletically inclined they were. This morning she wore a red and black Windbreaker and barked directions from beneath a yellowing basketball net.

  “Three more sets to go! Slowing down isn’t going to make this any easier, O’Donnell!”

  The ancient gym was freezing. The air inside was damp, and it reeked of generations of sweaty teenagers. Jason had spent entire pickup basketball games and volleyball matches wondering whether kids in the ’90s just didn’t use deodorant. Smells like teen spirit i
ndeed.

  The whistle sounded and he reversed direction, gasping for breath as Meredith Singer, a stocky blonde who played trumpet in the school jazz band, blew past him. He pushed the mess of brown hair back from his forehead and did his best to keep up. The problem was that the faster his mind raced, the slower his legs wanted to go, and try as he might, he couldn’t turn off his brain.

  Snippets of conversations with Lacey floated through his head. Things are sort of … complicated right now. Complicated because you’re dead? You just have to give me a little time to figure out what’s going on with me. Well, yes, I imagine a dead person does have a lot to figure out.

  If he hadn’t been so distracted, he’d have enjoyed the sight of his gym-short-clad classmates all panting like Labradors, sliding to a stop and turning on their heels each time they heard the shriek of the whistle. On an average day, he would have daydreamed about swapping out prom portraits in the yearbook with ones from gym class, everyone sweaty and pink-cheeked and breathless. But this wasn’t an average morning, and his normal disdain for his fellow students had morphed into envy at their Facebook feeds, which contained nothing more threatening than evidence of their latest breakups or unflattering photos from the sophomore camping trip.

  He limped through the last of his sprints and then dragged himself into the dank locker room to change for history. The school had showers, but Jason had never seen anyone use them, and for all he knew water wouldn’t even come out if you turned them on, but gym teachers were required to give their classes ten minutes to clean up — a rule Coach Walker followed only grudgingly.

  Jason quickly pulled on a gray-and-white-striped T-shirt and narrow black corduroys, and drew his phone from his bag. He had nine minutes until history started. For a moment he just stared at the screen. What was he going to do — Facebook Lacey? He glanced over his shoulder and watched as Marcus Segal painstakingly folded his Roosevelt High basketball shorts and lined his sneakers up perfectly in his locker. Sometimes other people’s problems were so obvious from the outside. If Marcus wasn’t so anal about everything, people would like him more. He wished someone would sit Marcus down and explain it to him, but now wasn’t the time. He’d told Rakesh he’d meet him in the quad before history. He checked his watch. If he hurried, he wouldn’t be late, and it would leave him exactly five minutes to explain what had happened the night before. Jason had no idea where he would even start.

  “Hey, man.” Rakesh was leaning comfortably against the flagpole with mirrored Wayfarers on, the white frames popping brightly against his brown skin. “You ready to drop some crazy civil war knowledge?”

  Jason had entirely forgotten about his homework. Briefly, he returned to his real world problems, and then he remembered he’d shoved the Robert E. Lee printout into his book bag before tumbling down the Lacey Gray Google rabbit hole.

  “I’m just hoping she doesn’t call on me,” Jason said. “I have, like, two letters, and I barely even looked at them.”

  “Yo, even I did this one. What, were you busy last night?” Rakesh was skeptical. Online assignments weren’t hard.

  “Something, uh, sort of happened….” Jason trailed off as they made their way into the main building and down the hall. Rakesh already rolled his eyes every time Lacey was mentioned. Was he going to think Jason was stupid — or worse, crazy — for getting tangled up with someone who was … Jason still wasn’t sure what exactly Lacey was.

  “What does ‘something, uh, sort of happened’ even mean?”

  Jason looked around to see if anyone was listening. “You have to promise not to say anything.”

  “Dude, what’s with the secrets all of a sudden? It’s like one of us is James Bond, except that I’m not sure it’s me, and I have a serious problem with that.”

  “Will you please just lower your voice?” Jason snapped, looking over his shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about this here. Can we go to Michael’s?”

  “Leave school in the middle of the day?” Rakesh said with mock horror. Then he shrugged and grinned. “Sure, why not?” Rakesh kept smiling as they exited toward the parking lot. “But for the record, I am totally the James Bond of the two of us.”

  “So walk me through this again,” Rakesh said ten minutes later as a waitress slid a plate overflowing with steak, eggs, potatoes, and pancakes in front of him.. Michael’s was an all-night diner on the edge of town. It boasted an all-you-can-eat salad bar that consisted mostly of iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing, but the real draw was the roomy booths and the cheap menu that offered breakfast all day. It was where kids went after parties got broken up, and on nights when there were no parties but everyone was sick of the Wawa parking lot.

  “While I was doing my history homework last night, I Googled her.”

  “You hadn’t Googled her before?”

  “I’m not some sort of stalker.”

  Rakesh scoffed.

  “No, really, I’m not. I mean, I know you think I get a little carried away when I like someone —”

  “Last year you read every post on Julia Granholm’s wall dating back to eighth grade, and then you made me read them, too. Forget carried away — try obsessed.”

  “This is different,” Jason continued. “And I’m not just saying that. The thing about Lacey is that, for once in my life, it felt like I might have a real girlfriend. Not someone I fantasized about marrying in the fifth grade like Nicole Trufardi. Not someone like Tanya Bellows, who sends me misspelled notes telling me I’m sweet and not someone I only liked because she looks like a swimsuit model, which I still maintain Julia Granholm does. With Lacey, I thought this is what it feels like getting to know someone you like and who likes you. This is what it’s supposed to feel like. Until …”

  “Until you found out she was dead,” Rakesh said flatly, his mouth full of eggs.

  “I still don’t know if she is dead!”

  “Okay, you found an obituary for a girl who looks and sounds like the girl you’ve been dating online who you’ve never met in person, and then you found another article that adds another nail to her coffin. Literally. Am I missing anything?”

  “No, but …”

  “So you’re in love with a ghost? Is this what those Twilight books are about?”

  “I’m not in love with anyone! Also, don’t pretend you haven’t seen all of the Twilight movies in the theater the weekend they came out.”

  “Would you say no to Katie Betz?”

  “That doesn’t explain why New Moon made you cry. And not the point! Can we go back to talking about me, please?”

  “Sure, yeah, we can definitely go back to talking about how you’re in love with a ghost.”

  Jason slumped against the booth. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Look, as you know, I think it’s a bad idea to date anyone you haven’t met in real life, no matter how alive or dead she is. It’s like I told you when you first started messaging ‘her’” — he used air quotes around the pronoun — “for all you know, it’s a dude at the other end of your messages. Or some lonely middle-aged whack job. But if you really like this girl, then I’m going to help you.”

  “Help me how?” Jason was always wary of the plans his friend dreamed up.

  “Let me do a little digging tonight. There’s something about this story that’s weirdly familiar. Not to mention I want to see what the girl who’s gotten your panties in such a twist looks like.”

  Jason would never have admitted it out loud, but a small part of him worried what would happen if Lacey met Rakesh. With his love of Top 40 radio and popped collars, he wasn’t what he imagined Lacey going for, but he had yet to meet the girl who was immune to Rakesh’s charm. “If I told you to forget it, would you let it go?”

  “Not a chance. But I promise I won’t steal her from you. Bro code, yo! I love you, man.”

  Jason rolled his eyes as he did whenever Rakesh began invoking the bro code or reciting silly, sentimental lines from buddy comedies. He wasn’t happy to
have been so transparent about his fears, but he was a little reassured.

  “Fine,” he sighed. “But you’re buying this lunch. For my emotional hardship.”

  “You should be buying me lunch! I’m about to save you from yourself.”

  “Do you want to find another ride back to school?”

  “I’ll pay for your grilled cheese, but you owe me.”

  When the final bell rang at the end of the day, Jason headed to the library. He’d wanted to start investigating Lacey as soon as possible, but Rakesh had squash practice — a sport his mom forced him to play. He pretended to hate it, but he was one of the best players in the state, and it was no secret Rakesh enjoyed the attention that came with his rank. Not to mention the fact that colleges were already contacting him about playing on their teams.

  Jason studiously avoided the computers and instead settled himself at a desk tucked away behind the biography shelves where he cracked open his copy of Hamlet. The night of their first assignment, he’d sat in front of his computer, skimming the opening act with one eye while the other closely observed his Facebook chat list, waiting for Lacey to sign on. Ghost stories weren’t his thing. At least, as of last week, they weren’t. But this afternoon, with his scuffed-up New Balances propped on the extra chair he pulled up, he began to read in earnest. He went slowly at first, methodically untangling the thorny Shakespearean language, but as he began to get a feel for the characters, he sped up, not minding when he missed a word or two. Jason and Hamlet had more in common than he would have guessed — manipulative jerks for stepfathers, crushes on girls who probably shouldn’t like them back, channels open with the friendly neighborhood ghost. He was fully absorbed in the drama of Denmark when he heard the faint buzzing of his phone in his bag. Fumbling for it, he saw that he’d missed three calls and two texts from Rakesh.