The Dead Romantics (30)

The man beside me went rigid.

“Your dad comes here every Saturday,” the cashier went on. “Always orders the same thing—the All-Star with extra hash browns. Scattered, smothered, and covered. Where is the old man today?”

“He passed away the other night,” I said, and the man glanced over. We locked eyes. Dark hair, brown eyes, an angular face. He didn’t have anything in front of him—no food or coffee—and no one seemed to pay him any attention. And that was a feat when you sat up at the counter at a Waffle House. You had to be either highly disliked or—

Or not really there.

And worse yet, I recognized his dark hair and navy trousers and the articulate way he had rolled up his sleeves tightly to his elbows. He looked like he could’ve been a painting of a forlorn businessman . . .

. . . of the slightly dead variety.

I paled.

“M-Miss Day?” Benji Andor asked.

The cashier’s smile faltered. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry to hear about your father—”

Suddenly, the jukebox gave a loud screech, and the lights flickered with a start. It picked a random album and inserted it into the player. The neon lit up, and a song crackled from the forty-year-old speakers.

I winced. And whispered, “Stop it.”

His wide eyes darted to the jukebox, then back to me. “I—that’s not me.”

“It is.”

“That thing keeps acting up,” the cashier apologized as she counted out my change. “Got a mind of its own sometimes, I think.”

The piano beat. The tambourine. And suddenly I’m back in the red parlor after a wake, dancing on Dad’s feet as he sings “buttercup, don’t break my heart” in an awful key, golden afternoon light streaming through the window. It fills me with bitterness, because it’s gone. The moment’s gone—all those moments are gone.

My throat constricts.

“Four dollars and thirty-seven cents is your change. Have a great day, miss,” the cashier said as she handed me a few bills and coins. I quickly pocketed them into my coat and left the diner. Ben followed, squeezing through the open door as it swung shut.

“Last night—at that door—it was you, wasn’t it? You answered the door,” he said, following me.

I trained my eyes at the sidewalk in front of me. “This isn’t happening.”

“What’s not happening?”

Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him.

An older gentleman walking his dog decided to cross to the other side of the street, and I didn’t know if it was because of me or because the dog had to take a poo in an azalea bush on the other side, but it didn’t stop me from guessing. I fished my phone out of my pocket and mimed answering a call.

In two steps, he had caught back up with me. “Please don’t ignore me—everyone is. Everyone. I sat in that diner for—for hours—trying to get someone to see me. No one could! No one! What’s happening to me? Last I remembered I was at your front door, and then I was in the diner and—things don’t make sense—and you’re not listening—”

“I am,” I interrupted. “I just can’t be seen, you know, talking to myself.”

His shoulders slumped. “So it’s true . . . no one can see me. Except you? But—why?” About fifty emotions crossed his face, from disbelief to confusion, before he finally settled on accusatory. “What makes you special?”

“Wow. You’re charming, you know that?”

“I am when I’m not scared out of my mind, Miss Day.”

I winced. Even though I was walking at a pretty fast pace, he was keeping up on his long legs without even breaking a sweat. There was no way I’d outpace him. Sometimes, I hated being short.

Often, actually.

On top of my father’s funeral, Benji Andor’s ghost was something I didn’t need.

But . . . I couldn’t ignore him, either.

Especially hearing his voice crack like that, begging for me to see him because—

My dad would tell me to help him. My dad would say it was our job, our duty, our responsibility. A responsibility I hadn’t risen to in about ten years. Not since I left Mairmont. And of course I felt like I had to now, because if Dad was here, he would have.

I stopped at the street corner, and decided, well, to make my dear dead dad proud, and spun on my heels to face Benji. He came to an abrupt stop a few inches away, and I realized just how silly I probably looked to him from his angle. I didn’t care. “You’re a ghost,” I started. “A spirit. Working through a post-living experience.”

“Working through a post-living—what?” Baffled, he ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m not dead. This is a bad dream. A nightmare. I’ll wake up and—”

“Everything will be exactly the same,” I interrupted. “Because you won’t wake up.”

“No—no.”

His voice wound tight again, like Alice’s used to when she began to have a panic attack. I’d never encountered a ghost this adamant about being alive before. When I was a child, every ghost that came looking for me knew they were dead. It wasn’t a hard leap to make, but Benji Andor seemed to be the kind of straitlaced guy who dealt in facts and figures instead of midnight ghost stories and myths.