Under the Light

Chapter 4





Jenny


IN THE MIDDLE OF WHO KNOWS WHERE, in a huge abandoned field, I stood in the grass and watched this boy walk toward me as if it was a perfectly normal way for him to meet a girl.

He strolled right up to me. “Hey.”

I wasn’t afraid of him, but I felt nervous. “Where did you come from?” I asked.

He gestured with a flick of his head. “That way.” Then he smiled. “Is this your place?”

I glanced around to make sure I hadn’t imagined where we were standing. “This field?” I said. “Are you asking me if this is my empty field?”

He shrugged, looked me up and down. I scanned my feet, my hands and arms, and I could see myself but I wasn’t sure if he viewed me the way I did. And I was too embarrassed to ask him what I looked like. In my own eyes I wore jeans and a white T-shirt and, strangely, the soft black jacket my father had thrown out. Even stranger, my feet were bare.

“Are you dead?” he asked.

“What?” It seemed almost insulting. Did I look like a corpse? “No.” I thought I knew how these things worked. The spirits I had seen on my travels weren’t ghosts—they were people out of their bodies temporarily. “You’re not dead, are you?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Do you remember dying?” I asked.

He put his hands in his pockets. He wore jeans too, with a black shirt rolled at the sleeves and open at the throat. But he had the good sense to be wearing sneakers.

“I don’t want to remember that.” His face went gray and he held out a hand as if he wanted to protect himself from me.

And then he was gone.

Weird. I just stood there, doing nothing, for a long time. He was a stranger—it would be impossible for him to hurt my feelings. I couldn’t miss him, seeing as how I’d only known him for a few seconds. It wasn’t as if he had made me doubt the truth—I wasn’t dead. And neither was he: he just didn’t know it. What was it that bothered me about him?

I sat down on the grass and replayed our conversation. I couldn’t figure out why we had looked at each other and spoken to each other when I hadn’t been noticed by any of the other souls I saw floating outside their bodies: an old woman napping in a wheelchair while her spirit danced around her, a man meditating on the beach with his spirit levitating a foot over his head. They hadn’t seen me.

And what made this boy and me fly toward each other literally out of the blue? It felt as if we’d been running along trying to launch kites and then our strings got tangled and swung us back toward each other.

But what were the kites we were hanging on to?

I realized why I missed him—he could see and hear me, and it was almost like being real again. But there was nothing I could do about it—he’d run away. I finally got myself up and went to some of my favorite locations: museum, beach, theater. But by the next day, I had to return to that field. It was haunting me.

But why would he be back? What were the chances that he was still thinking about me?

Then he dropped down out of the air and went into a skydiver roll a dozen feet away from me. He brushed himself off, an unnecessary gesture that cracked me up, but I wouldn’t let myself be charmed. I didn’t trust him yet. Hadn’t he said I looked dead and then run away?

“You don’t think I’m a ghost?” he asked, as if our previous conversation were still on the table.

“I don’t think I can see ghosts,” I explained. “Only spirits.” He waited for more. “Spirits on vacation from their bodies,” I explained. “You know, not done with their bodies.”

“Like when someone’s asleep?” he asked.

“Or meditating.”

He strolled up a little closer. “Which one are you?”

“None of the above. I just left my body, you know, like breaking out of prison.”

“What made your body a prison?” he asked me. When I didn’t answer right away he lifted one eyebrow. In another setting it would have been cute, but everything about him was annoying me for some reason.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, I don’t want to tell you.”

“No questions about the past. I get it,” he said. “If I’m not dead,” he went on, “I guess this isn’t heaven.”

“No.” More like hell, I wanted to say, but why spoil his fun. Maybe he was still rejoicing in his freedom the way I had at first.

“Well, it can’t be hell.” He gestured at me as if I were proof of that. “Is it like a parallel universe?”

That didn’t sound good. Too much like purgatory. I felt a ripple of fear spread through me. Maybe it felt like hell because it was hell.

“It’s the same world as before,” I insisted, trying to convince myself. “Just the outside edge. My house is the same. All the street signs have the same names.” It was scaring me, the idea that he might be right, that we were in some kind of limbo. “Didn’t you see your house and family after you left your body?”

I could see the tension of his own story behind his eyes, but he didn’t share it. “Sorta like there’s safety glass between us and everything else,” he said. To test the rules, he reached out and took my hand. I jumped but didn’t pull away. The warmth of his fingers fascinated me. But I wasn’t sure if I was feeling his hand or the energy of his hand. Or the heat of his thinking of my hand in his.

He let go. “No wall between us, though.”

My blush throbbed hot like a bad sunburn even though I technically had no skin. “I didn’t say you could touch me.”

“Sorry . . .” He paused. “What’s your name?”

The idea of telling him my name and where I lived and what made me leave my body, the idea of explaining about my parents, made my stomach go cold. Again, no organs. Why could I still feel emotions forming in those parts of me I’d left behind?

“I forgot,” he said. “No questions about the past.” He smiled. “So if this isn’t your field, why do you come here?”

To find you, stupid, I thought. Before I landed in the field, I’d been racing toward something I couldn’t name—a boy I couldn’t name. If he hadn’t felt the same force I had, throwing us at each other, maybe that wasn’t real.

I felt deflated, but I told him the truth. “I was rushing toward something—you, I guess. I only stopped here because that’s where I found myself when I passed you going the other way.”

He thought for a moment. “I thought I saw my shadow on the ground. That never happened before. Like the shadow of a bird on the ground before it lands, only the shadow wasn’t bigger than me and it wasn’t getting smaller when I got closer.” He looked uncertain. “I guess that was you.”

A chill fluttered up what would’ve been my neck.

“You’re the only other ghost I’ve seen,” he told me.

“I’m not a ghost.” Odd that he hadn’t seen one single other person out of body. “Where do you usually hang around?”

“Sand dunes and caves. The ocean. The mountains.”

He didn’t travel populated areas—maybe he was a beginner. “How long have you been out of body?”

“I don’t count sunsets,” he said. “I chase them sometimes. Think I could ever make time go backwards?”

He was so immature. “No.”

“But if I flew so fast toward the sunset that I passed it, wouldn’t it be up in the sky again? Would I be hours back?” He studied my face and throat. “Let’s say I flew three hours backwards. Why can’t I fly ten times faster and get to yesterday?”

“Go ahead.” I smirked at him. “I’ll wait here.”

He grinned and flew away so quickly that I could hardly make out the blur of his black shirt, like a faint storm cloud against the sky. Then nothing, as if he’d never been there at all.

The wind still shifted the grass and there was the distant cry of a crow somewhere, the tick of a beetle, but otherwise silence.

I did not miss him. How could I? Our two conversations still totaled less than ten minutes. It was ridiculous. But the idea of leaving our field depressed me. I couldn’t imagine a single inspiring place to visit.

Irritating as he was, I wanted him to come back, but there were no stars out yet for making wishes. It was almost sunset, though. How many hours had passed?

Like a sneak attack, he rushed at me from the side and threw his arms around me, sending me into the grass. He rolled away laughing. The tingle of his touch vibrated up and down and all through me, cold and warm at the same time.

“Did it work?” He sat up. “Do you remember me or is it yesterday?”

I acted without thinking. I sped away, wanting to get back at him. I went to a cliff I’d been to many times. It was twilight there already, and the forest below was dim—only the mountain across the valley still glowed pink from the sunset. It made me smile, thinking of him standing there in the field alone. The same way he’d left me.

But as the light crept away, I started to realize that I might never see him again. How could I find him? Even if I raced around the globe at light speed, the chance of crossing paths with him again might be microscopic. And it wasn’t as if I could go back to my body and look him up in the phone book. I didn’t know his name or what part of the world he lived in. The only thing connecting us was that stretch of grass.

When I came back to the field, the sky was turning a deep shade of purplish blue. I walked around pretending that his absence didn’t hurt. The way the grass refused to part for me, no matter how I kicked as I passed through, made me mad. I walked in smaller and smaller wheels, and if I’d been solid I bet I would’ve made a spiral crop circle—finally I lay down on my back as the stars came out. I don’t think I could’ve been lonelier if I’d been on Jupiter.

“Hey.”

My joy was offset by the look on his face. Zero recognition. He knelt, leaning over me and smiling.

“Who are you?” he asked.