“I am,” said the boy.
Allie decided to call him Lief, since they had found him in the forest, and he blushed at the name as if she had kissed him. Then Lief led them up the steep stone slope to the road, climbing with a recklessness that not even the most skilled rock climbers would dare show. Allie refused to admit how terrified she was by the climb, but Nick complained enough for both of them.
“I can’t even climb a jungle gym without getting hurt!” he complained. “What’s the point of surviving an accident, if you’re going to fall off a mountain and die?”
They reached the road, but found very little evidence of the accident. Just a few tiny bits of glass and metal. Was that a good sign or bad? Neither Allie nor Nick was sure.
“Things are different up here,” Lief said. “Different from the forest, I mean.
You better come back down with me.”
Allie ignored him and stepped onto the shoulder of the road. It felt funny beneath her feet. Kind of soft and spongy. She had seen road signs before that said SOFT SHOULDER, so she figured that’s what it meant.
“Better not stand in one place too long,” Lief said. “Bad things happen when you do.”
Cars and trucks flew by, one every five or six seconds. Nick was the first one to put up his hands and start waving to flag down help, and Allie joined him a second later.
Not a single car stopped. They didn’t even slow down. A wake of wind followed each passing car. It tickled Allie’s skin, and her insides as well. Lief waited just by the edge of the cliff, pacing back and forth. “You’re not gonna like it up here! You’ll see!”
They tried to get the attention of passing drivers, but nobody stopped for hitchhikers nowadays. Standing at the edge of the road simply wasn’t enough.
When there was a lull in the traffic, Allie stepped over the line separating the shoulder from the road.
“Don’t!” warned Nick.
“I know what I’m doing.”
Lief said nothing.
Allie ventured out into the middle of the northbound lane. Anyone heading north would have to swerve around her. They couldn’t possibly miss seeing her now.
Nick was looking more and more nervous. “Allie …”
“Don’t worry. If they don’t stop, I’ll have plenty of time to jump out of the way.” After all, she was in gymnastics, and pretty good at it, too. Jumping was not a problem.
A harmonica hum that could only be a bus engine began to grow louder, and in a few seconds a northbound Greyhound ripped around the bend. She tried to lock eyes with the driver, but he was looking straight ahead. In a second he’ll see me, she thought. Just one second more. But if he saw her, he was ignoring her.
“Allie!” shouted Nick.
“Okay, okay.” With plenty of time to spare, Allie tried to hop out of the way…only she couldn’t hop. She lost her balance, but didn’t fall. Her feet wouldn’t let her. She looked down, and at first it looked like she had no feet.
It was a moment before she realized that she had sunk six inches into the asphalt, clear past her ankles, like the road was made of mud.
Now she was scared. She pulled one foot out, then the other, but when she looked up, she knew it was too late; the bus was bearing down on her, and she was about to become roadkill. She screamed as the grill of the bus hit— — Then she was moving past the driver, through seats and legs and luggage, and finally through a loud grinding engine in the back, and then she was in the open air again. The bus was gone, and her feet were still sinking into the roadway. A trail of leaves and dust swept past her, dragged in the bus’s wake.
Did I…Did I just pass through a bus?
“Surprise,” said Lief with a funny little smile. “You should see the look on your face!”
Mary Hightower, also known as Mary Queen of Snots, writes in her book Sorta Dead that there’s no easy way to tell new arrivals to Everlost that, technically, they are no longer alive. “If you come across a ‘Greensoul,’” as new arrivals are called, it’s best to just be honest and hit them with the truth quickly,”
Mary writes. “If necessary, you have to confront them with something they can’t deny, otherwise they just keep on refusing to believe it, and they make themselves miserable. Waking up in Everlost is like jumping into a cold pool.
It’s a shock at first, but once you’re in, the water is fine.”
Chapter 3
Dreamless Lief, having been so long in his special forest, never had the chance to read any of Mary Hightower’s brilliantly instructional books. Most everything he knew about Everlost, he had learned from experience. For instance, he had quickly learned that dead-spots—that is, places that only the dead can see—are the only places that feel solid to the touch. He could swing from the branches of his dead forest, but once he got past its borders to where the living trees were, he would pass through them as if they weren’t there—or, more accurately—like he wasn’t there.