CHAPTER 15

By the time the game was nearly over, I still didn’t really understand basketball, but I did learn that Dex’s Nana texted him about every ten minutes any time he was away from the house, that Romy twisted one strand of hair around her finger every time Anderson said something to her, and that Anderson had, up until junior high, actually been a pretty decent basketball player himself.

“Busted my knee waterskiing,” he told me, tapping the kneecap in question. “But it was all good. Led to me looking for other ways to spend my time, and then I found Ro—uh, found the club. Ghost hunting seemed like a lot more fun than throwing a stupid ball into a basket, anyway.”

“Anderson here is a reformed jock,” Dex said. “Which he didn’t bother to tell me until we’d already been friends for a month. By then it was too late to shun him, as I should have.”

Grinning, Anderson reached over me and thwacked Dex’s head, sending his sunglasses tumbling.

Dex gave an outraged cry. “I am affronted! That’s it, friendship rescinded.”

Anderson just leaned back against the wall and laughed. “Like you said, bro, too late.” He turned his gaze down to me. “Of course, if you want to escape this madness while you still can, I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Hey!” Romy leaned over, laying a proprietary hand on my arm. “We finally have another girl in the group. Please don’t run her off just yet.”

It was weird watching their easiness with each other, and then seeing them treat me like that, too. I’d never really missed having friends—you can’t miss something you’ve never had—but I hadn’t realized how, well, awesome they could be, either.

I stood up. “I’m gonna run to the bathroom. Be right back.”

Romy looked like she was about to get up, too. “Do you want me to come with you?”

I hesitated, one foot awkwardly lifted over the bleacher below me. “I know where it is,” I told her, remembering that I’d seen a girls’ room in the gym lobby.

But that must’ve been the wrong answer, because Romy seemed puzzled. “Oh, okay.”

I made my way back down the bleachers, and when I got to the front of the gym, I suddenly saw why Romy had offered to come with me. There were…groups of girls huddled outside the bathroom, talking, laughing, some sharing lip gloss. Crap, was that a thing girls who were friends were supposed to do with one another?

Sighing, I turned to the gym doors, noticing that just up the hill there were lights on in the school. There were bathrooms up there, and maybe they wouldn’t be so crowded.

It had gotten colder, and I shivered a little as I jogged up toward the school. Luckily, the main breezeway door was unlocked, and I knew the bathroom was just inside, past the lockers.

Flyers pinned to a bulletin board ruffled in the breeze as I yanked open the door. The hall was dark, although there were two rectangles of light from the bathroom doors. I was headed for them when a glow suddenly filled the hall.

For one second I thought someone had just flipped on another light, but no. This wasn’t the harsh fluorescent of the hallway lighting, or the dull amber of the bathroom. This was slightly bluish and very, very familiar.

Taking a deep breath, I steeled my nerves and turned around.

Mary Evans floated in the hall just behind me, her long white dress barely brushing the ground. In the picture Romy had shown me, her hair had been styled into some sort of fancy updo, but now it straggled down her back. She didn’t speak, but her eyes roamed over me, confusion on her translucent face.

“Hi, Mary,” I said, my voice loud in the quiet hall. Okay. This was good. This was confirmation that the ghost stalking Mary Evans High was in fact Mary Evans. But it was hard to feel glad about that when I remembered that the same ghost had nearly killed a guy.

“You need to leave this place.”

Her head jerked up, lips curling back in a snarl, and I stepped back. The cold metal of the lockers pressed against my shoulders, and I swallowed hard. “You can’t stay—” I started, and then there was a rush of wind as she suddenly surged forward.

It was like I’d been dunked into a tub of ice water. I couldn’t see anything but that blue light, and all around me there was this horrible sense of pressure, like hands were pushing on me as hard as they could. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was her voice in my mind, shrieking so loudly I could barely make it out. Pay they have to pay have to pay, over and over again. Images played behind my eyelids. I saw blood on a microscope, saw Mary’s ghostly hand clutched around the base. Then there was a cave, and fire? Something bright, something that burned.

And then suddenly the cold and the pressure were gone, the shrieking was silent, and Mary was no longer up against me, all around me.

She hovered there in front of me, chest heaving in and out as though she were still breathing, and she had a frantic look in her eyes. Her mouth opened in a silent scream, head tilting back to cry at the ceiling.

And then she rose up, hovering high over my head before vanishing.

I stood there against the lockers, nearly panting. My knees felt watery, but I made myself stay on my feet. Brannicks don’t slump to the floor just because a ghost gets up in their face.

Still, as I pushed myself off the lockers and scrubbed a shaking hand over my mouth, I had to admit that that had not been your run-of-the-mill ghost. I’d seen ghosts before. I’d seen them sad and confused, maybe a little irate. But I’d never seen one as furious as Mary Evans, and I’d certainly never had one try to… God, what had she been trying to do? It had almost felt like she was trying to climb inside my skin.

Shuddering at that thought, I pushed open the bathroom door. Inside, I splashed cold water on my face and tried to get my heart rate back to something resembling normal. Reminding myself that coming face to face with Mary Evans was a good thing—hey, now I knew what I was up against—I stepped back into the hallway.

A shadowy figure suddenly appeared in front of me, and with a choked shriek, I reached out and grabbed the front of a shirt, slamming the person against the lockers.

Anderson blinked back at me.

“Oh!” Loosening my fingers, I let him go, smoothing his shirt out with the flat of my hand. “Sorry, you scared me. I startle kind of easily.”

Tucking his hair behind his ears, he nodded. “I noticed that.” I waited for him to give me the “You Violent Freak” Look Ben McCrary had given me, but to my surprise, Anderson just smiled and said, “I knew you dressed like a ninja, but I didn’t think you actually were one.”

I laughed. “I didn’t hurt you, right?” I asked, but Anderson waved me off.

“No harm, no foul. Romy was looking for you. She took the gym while I headed up here.”

“Where’s Dex?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Anderson shrugged. “His Nana needed him, so he went home.” He frowned, looking more closely at me. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’re kind of pale.”

We opened the breezeway doors, stepping back outside. “Yeah, just…” I trailed off, and Anderson nodded.

“Overcome with the majesty of team sports. I understand.”

Chuckling, I shrugged. “Something like that.” The air didn’t feel so cold now that I’d had a ghost trying to snuggle me, and I took a deep breath as we walked down the hill. We had just gotten to the gym when Anderson said, “Hey, Izzy.”

I turned and he stood there, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. “Uh…thanks for being so cool with Romy. I know she likes hanging out with me and Dex, but with you…with you being, like, you know, a girl and stuff—”

I stopped Anderson before he could actually choke on his tongue. “It’s easy to be cool with Romy. She’s a cool girl.”

Anderson wasn’t as good-looking as Dex, but the goofy grin that spread across his face was seriously beautiful. “She’s the coolest girl,” he enthused, and even though I’d just been scared half to death not ten minutes before, I discovered I was grinning, too.

“Who is?” Romy asked, coming up behind him.

Anderson’s ears reddened and he kicked at a nonexistent rock. “This girl,” he babbled. “This girl who’s cool.”

Romy raised her eyebrows. “Huh. Informative, Anderson.” Tugging at my hand, she started pulling me toward the parking lot. “Come on, Iz, my mom’s here.”

“Bye, Anderson,” I called, waving to him with my free hand.

He gave a sheepish wave back and then turned away.

“So,” Romy asked as we stepped into the parking lot, “other than getting ditched by Jerk-Face Adam, how was your first Official Mary Evans High Event?”

I looked back at the school, and even though I couldn’t be certain, I thought I saw a flash of blue light.

“Eventful.”