By the time they rolled me into an examining room, I could sit up. My blood pressure and body temperature were normal, my pulse steady, and the blue tinge of hypothermia had faded from my skin.
Shudders kept rolling through me, but after the doctor put six stitches in my forehead, he declared that I didn’t need anything but fluids. He was most confused by how little the tear gas had affected me. Nothing but an inflammation on one cheek, where that single tear had somehow burned my skin.
The paramedic who’d pronounced me dead brought a cup of hot water and lemon to me. Then there was a call that casualties were coming in, and for a few minutes I was left alone. It was a car accident, I think, nothing to do with the airport, but the staff was keyed up by the news blaring from a radio. People in scrubs hurried past my door.
I blew on my hot water, blinking at the antiseptic whiteness of everything. It was so noisy back here in reality, buzzing and chaotic. The paper cover on the bed crinkled. A black plastic widget clipped to my fingertip transmitted my vitals to a small screen, where they pulsed in colored lights.
Exhaustion was creeping over me, but I was too wired to sleep. Besides, on this narrow bed with its slippery paper cover, I’d probably roll off onto the floor.
I wondered if anyone had called my mother and told her I was alive. They hadn’t even asked my full name yet.
My hand went to my pocket. But my phone was gone. Of course, I’d dropped it. I sighed and zipped my hoodie closed over my sliced T-shirt. At least no one had put me in a hospital robe. Maybe they would just let me leave.
I had no ride, of course, or much cash, and my luggage was back on the plane. . . . My mind spun away from everything that had happened back at the airport, and focused on how annoying it was to have no phone.
“Fucking terrorists,” I said softly.
“You shouldn’t say that word.”
I looked up. There was a young boy in the doorway, maybe ten years old. He wore a red plastic raincoat, glossy and wet.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay.” He took my apology as permission to step into the room. “I’m not supposed to tell grown-ups what not to say. Even if they use bad words. Are you a grown-up?”
“Only sort of. But compared to you, yeah.”
“Okay.” He nodded once. “I’m Tom.”
“I’m Lizzie.” My head felt heavy again. Terrorists, the afterworld, doctors, and now this little kid. No one wanted to let me sleep.
His raincoat was dripping water on the floor.
“Is it raining?”
“No. But it was.”
“Right,” I said. But it hadn’t been, and it was freezing out, too cold for anything but snow. Tom’s bare legs showed beneath the hem of his raincoat.
“When was it raining?” I asked.
“When the car hit me,” Tom said.
I felt a sliver of the cold that Yamaraj’s kiss had forced out of me, like a cool finger sliding down the middle of my back. The hospital seemed to go still outside my room, as if the sound had been sucked up by something thirsty for noise and clatter and life.
I closed my eyes, but opened them again instantly. Tom was still there, looking at me funny.
“Are you okay, Lizzie?”
“I don’t know. I died tonight, I think.”
“Don’t worry. It only hurts at first.” He frowned at me. “But you look shiny, like the nice lady who comes.”
“The nice lady?”
“The one who’s not dead. She’s my friend.”
“Oh.” My own voice was distant in my ears, as if I’d already fallen asleep and this was someone else’s conversation leaking into my dreams.
“She comes every week to talk to me.” Tom reached into his pocket and pulled out something soggy. “Want some gum?”
“No thanks.” I could hear my heart beating a little faster, thanks to the machines by my bed.
I was shiny, like Yamaraj. And this woman who visited ghosts.
“Listen, Tom. Tonight was really weird. I’m kind of tired.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to go now. But get well soon!”
“Thanks. You too . . . I guess.”
Tom turned and walked back out into the hall, turning to wave at me.
“Bye, Lizzie.”
“Bye, Tom.” I let my eyes close again, counting out ten long breaths until the beep that was tracking my heartbeat steadied a little.
When I looked again, he was gone, and the bustle of the hospital had returned. People in blue and green scrubs went past the doorway, no one looking in on me.
I pulled the black plastic clip from my finger, slipped from the bed, and took a few steps to the door. I sank to my knees to place a palm flat on the spot where Tom had stood.
The hospital floor was cool and gleaming, but completely dry.
“Oh dear. What are we up to in here?” came a voice from the hall.
I looked up. It was one of the nurses who’d brought me to the room. He knelt and took my wrist gently, feeling for my pulse.
“Did you get dizzy?”
“No,” I said. “I was just checking something.”
“Down here on the floor?” His big hands took my shoulders. “What say we get you back to bed?”
I stood up on my own, and he gave me an encouraging smile.
“I just thought it was wet there, and someone would slip.”
He looked at the floor. “Looks okay to me. Why don’t you lie down, sweetie?”
“Of course.” I lay back obediently, but his hand stayed on my elbow.
“I’m going to get Dr. Gavaskar now. Are you going to stay here in bed?”
“I don’t think anyone called my mom,” I said. “She must have heard on the news. She must be freaking out!”
“I think the airline and TSA are contacting relatives. But how old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
His eyes widened a little. “I’ll get you a phone. Just sit tight.”
“Thank you.”
He disappeared into the corridor, and I was left alone with the beeping of my heartbeat again. I decided that there was no need to tell him—or anyone—about Tom. My resolve to stay quiet on the subject of ghosts and afterworlds remained firm that night, through conversations with Dr. Gavaskar, a relentlessly nice woman from the airline, and two field agents from the FBI.
My mother arrived four hours later, and I didn’t have to say anything to her at all. She just held me while I cried.
CHAPTER 7
MAX, MOXIE UNDERBRIDGE’S ASSISTANT, CAME to collect Darcy for YA Drinks Night at exactly six that evening.
Darcy had been ready since five, which wasn’t like her. But the little black dress demanded makeup, which she’d never worn often enough to get any good at. Usually after her first attempt, Darcy had to start over completely. But today’s ventures at the mirror had gone perfectly, leaving her fidgeting for a solid hour, afraid to touch her own face.
It would have been easier to wear jeans and her fancy black silk T-shirt, with no makeup, like she’d planned. When Max arrived, he was in chinos and a Thundercats pullover.
“Am I too dressed up?” Darcy asked as they rode the elevator down.
“You look great!” Max eyed her up and down. “But Drinks Night isn’t what you’d call a party. It’s just a thing Oscar does every month.”
“And I’m really invited?”
“Anyone with a published YA novel is.”
“Oh,” Darcy said, wondering if Afterworlds really counted as published. It wouldn’t come out until late next September, almost two years after she’d finished it. Didn’t “published” mean your book was actually in stores? Or did it just mean you’d sold it to a publisher? What if you’d signed a contract but hadn’t written a word?
The elevator doors opened, and a moment later they were outside, Max leading the way. The sky had turned a watery blue overhead. The sun was low and the streets in shadow. The heat of late afternoon was cooking up a thickish smell from the sidewalks, as if the city had worked hard all day and needed a shower.
Darcy tried to memorize the storefronts passing by, so she’d know the way home. An organic coffee place, a small theater, a bicycle repair shop.
“Are you online yet?” Max asked.
“Um, I have this Tumblr. But I don’t update it enough. I don’t know what to say, really.”
He laughed. “I meant, did you get online at Moxie’s?”
“Oh, sorry. Not yet.”
“It’s You_Suck_at_Writing.”
Something twisted inside Darcy. “Pardon me?”
“Moxie’s wifi network is You_Suck_at_Writing, with underscores. The password’s ‘DearGenius,’ no space. You found the note on her desk, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Darcy took a few slow breaths while the echoes of alarm faded. She’d seen a handwritten page pinned beneath a flickering white blobject on Moxie’s desk, but Darcy hadn’t even cracked open her laptop yet. After the family’s tearful farewells, she’d sat in Moxie’s bedroom, staring into the fabulous closet and arguing with Sodapop about whether birds could talk or not.
Living here in New York felt somehow fragile, breakable if Darcy moved too quickly. She wanted to wait until more realness had settled over her before daring to email her friends with photos of the apartment. Putting on the little black dress and daring Drinks Night seemed positively foolhardy, but she’d promised Moxie that she would go.
She felt a strange moment of jealousy for her friends Carla and Sagan back home, who had the whole summer to read novels and relax beside Carla’s pool before heading off to college. Darcy had an apartment to find, a city to learn, and rewrites to finish in the next few months.
Without looking up from his phone, Max stepped over the stripped frame of a bicycle chained to a NO PARKING sign. “Did you get your ed letter yet?”
“Nan said it’s coming this week,” Darcy said, feeling new jitters. The editorial letter would be the official list of everything wrong with Afterworlds. It seemed perverse for her editor to go into detail, when Darcy herself had spent the last six months wallowing in the novel’s shortcomings. But at least she had an excuse to procrastinate before the rewrites.
“And one last thing she wants me to ask . . .” Max was still reading from his phone, an email from Moxie, apparently. “How’s Untitled Patel going?”
That was the contractual term for the sequel to Afterworlds. But said out loud, the words sounded wrong, like one of Nisha’s verbal tics.
“Um.” A tiny dog tied to the stanchions around a sidewalk café skittered and yipped as Darcy went past. “I’m still outlining, I guess?”
“Still outlining,” Max repeated in a neutral tone, typing with one thumb as they walked.
Darcy wondered why she’d just lied. Afterworlds had simply poured from her fingers, and she had no intention of outlining Untitled Patel. Darcy was fairly certain she didn’t know how to outline.
It was possible she didn’t know how to write novels either, and that last November’s efforts had been some sort of statistical fluke. If a hundred thousand novels were written all at once, surely one would be good purely by accident, like passages of Shakespeare typed by a monkey. But that lucky primate would never write another sonnet, even if someone gave it a publishing contract.
Why was Moxie asking about Untitled Patel already? The first draft wasn’t due for a whole year. Did agents yell at you when you were late? Or were they more like the teachers at Darcy and Nisha’s school, quietly but deeply disappointed when you fell short of your full potential?
Max came to a halt, at last looking up from his phone. “And here we are.”
Candy Ruthless looked like a quaint Irish pub, with its odd name painted in a kelly-green Celtic font on the picture windows. There were loading docks to either side and the faint smell of a fish market in the air. Over the ten-minute walk the neighborhood had changed from refined old edifices to working warehouses. Darcy had no idea of how to get home.