Where the Staircase Ends(4)

But if I’m dead can I die again? It didn’t seem likely. At least that was what I told myself when my curiosity finally got the best of me and my feet started inching closer to the ledge.

I expected to see green treetops or the brown and emerald patchwork of the earth below, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just the same empty sky stretching down and up and all around me. My head swam with the sameness of it all.

I leaned out farther, trying to catch a glimpse of anything other than the gray-blue mix of stone and sky, but my head stopped just short of the edge. It was like a wall ran along the side of the stairs, only there wasn’t anything there.

Weird.

I tried again, this time pushing and shoving with all my strength, trying to kick a leg, a hand, or even a toe over the edge, but nothing could break past the farthest perimeter. Not even my middle finger, which was exactly the digit I wanted to show whoever might be watching from below. As far as I could figure, it wasn’t a physical thing trapping me. I just couldn’t move anything beyond the edge, similar to the way I physically couldn’t turn my body around no matter how hard I tried.

I gave up, resigned to the fact that climbing was my only option.

That’s when I saw Sunny standing three steps in front of me, watching with a wicked smile.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

It looked exactly like her, only it wasn’t really her. It couldn’t be, because I could make out the zig-zagging stone through her image, as though she was a reflection in a pane of glass rather than an actual person.

I narrowed my eyes at the gauzy hallucination. Her skirt billowed around her, the hem rising and falling as if it was blowing in the breeze even though the air around me stood perfectly still. I remembered the white eyelet dress well from the previous summer. She wore it to the mall almost every Saturday because it made her boobs look bigger than they really were. It used to annoy the crap out of me, because my boobs were actually bigger than hers, but somehow that dress made her look like the chesty one.

The wind lifted her hair from her shoulders, twirling and twisting it until she finally reached up and pulled it back from her face.

If I’m dead, shouldn’t I be the one doing the haunting? That, at least, had some upsides. I would have haunted the shit out of Sunny and gone all Jacob Marley on her ass with the chains and moaning and all. Why did she get to be the ghost?

I remembered reading that people went into shock after traumatic events. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe I imagined the whole thing, and Sunny was a figment of my car-thwacked brain. Which led to only one question: could you punch a figment of your imagination?

“Go away,” I said through clenched teeth. She blinked back at me as if I hadn’t uttered a word, and smiled her bitchy smile until I couldn’t take it anymore. I tipped my head back and screamed at the empty sky, letting out a lupine snarl that surprised even me.

When I looked back at Sunny’s ghost, it began to fade into the steps, her eyes holding mine until they completely evaporated from my view. Maybe I was dead and crazy. Or maybe crazy came with the territory.

Just move. Keep climbing. Don’t think.

I marched ahead, my eyes stretching upward in the hopes of seeing the top. Instead, I saw another ghost.

“Justin,” I said, a smile bending the sides of my mouth even though I knew he couldn’t be real. Out of habit, I smoothed my dress down against my thighs and checked my ponytail for flyaways.

His long, lean body stood off in the distance, and his infamous half-grin played at the corners of his lips like he didn’t have a care in the world, like he somehow missed the fact that we were stranded on a gigantic staircase. Then I realized I was stranded on a gigantic staircase with Justin Cobb. Hallucination or not, maybe the being dead/crazy thing wasn’t so bad after all.

I took the steps three at a time to catch up with him as familiar butterflies danced a jig inside my stomach.

When I got close enough to touch him, I stretched my fingers out in his direction, wanting more than anything to prove that he was real. Before my fingers made contact with his hand, his image swam away from me and reappeared several steps ahead.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, looking for sanity behind my eyelids. When I opened them he was still there, backed by the flat expanse of endless blue sky.

He wagged his finger at me as if to say, no touching please, then tipped his head to the side like he wanted me to follow him. I took a hesitant step forward. Which was crazier—seeing ghosts or following them? But I would go anywhere as long as I could be with Justin.

He grinned once more before turning on his heel. I followed, quickening my steps in an effort to catch him, but he managed to stay two steps ahead of me, just out of my reach. The ghost-Justin wasn’t much different than the real Justin.

I broke into a run and threw my hand out toward his back. If he were real, I would’ve felt the soft cotton of his T-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders, but my hand passed right through him, and I was hit with a wave of nausea. A shudder ran the length of my body, and I had to place my hands on my knees to keep myself from falling forward. Everything around me turned gray, as if the stairs had somehow swallowed the sky. It felt like they were trying to swallow me, too.

“Justin, what’s happening? Where are you?” I couldn’t see anything except gray, gray, gray.

The ground shifted beneath me. The stairs flattened out, and I thought I caught a glimpse of the hideous brown-and-black speckled carpet that covered my high school’s corridors. And then suddenly I was in my high school, standing just outside the door to a classroom. But how …