“Why have nightmares,” said Allie, “when you’re in one?” Could all this be true?
Could she really be dead? No. She wasn’t. If she was dead she would have made it to the light at the end of the tunnel. Both of them would have. They were only half-dead.
Nick kept rubbing his face. “This chocolate — I can’t get it off my face. It’s like it’s tattooed there.”
“It is,” Lief said. “It’s how you died.”
“What?”
“It’s just like your clothes,” Lief explained. “It’s a part of you now.”
Nick looked at him like he had just pronounced a life sentence. “You mean to tell me that I’m stuck with a chocolate face, and my father’s ugly necktie until the end of time?”
Lief nodded, but Nick wasn’t ready to believe him. He reached for his tie, and tried to undo it with all his strength. Of course, the knot didn’t give at all.
Then he tried to undo the buttons on his shirt. No luck there, either. Lief laughed, and Nick threw him an unamused gaze.
The more frustrated Nick and Allie became, the harder Lief worked to please them. He brought them to his tree house, hoping it might bring them out their sour mood. Lief had built it himself out of the ghost branches that littered the ground of the dead forest. He showed them how to climb up to the highest platform, and when they got there, he pushed them both off, laughing as they bounced off tree limbs and hit the ground. Then he jumped and did the same, thinking they’d both be laughing hysterically when he got there, but they were not.
For Allie the fall was the most terrifying moment she ever had to endure. It was worse than the crash, for that had been over so quickly, she had no time to react. It was worse than the Greyhound bus passing through her, because that, too, had come and gone in a flash. The fall from the tree, however, seemed to last forever. Each branch she hit jarred her to the core. Jarred her, but didn’t hurt her. Still, the lack of pain made it no less terrifying. She screamed all the way down, and when at last she smashed upon the hard earth of the dead forest with a hearty thump, she felt the wind knocked out of her, only to realize there was never actually any wind in her to knock out. Nick landed beside her, disoriented, with eyes spinning like he just came off a carnival ride. Lief landed beside them, whooping and laughing.
“What’s wrong with you?” Allie shouted at Lief, and the fact that he still laughed when she grabbed him and shook him made her even angrier.
Allie put her hand to her forehead as if all this was giving her a killer headache, but she couldn’t have a headache now, could she, and that just made her all the more aggravated. The rational part of her mind kept wanting to lash out, telling her that this was all a dream, or a misunderstanding, or an elaborate practical joke. Unfortunately her rational mind had no supporting evidence. She had fallen from a treetop and had not been hurt. She had passed through a Greyhound bus. No, her rational mind had to accept the irrational truth.
There are rules here, she thought. Rules, just like the physical world. She would just have to learn them. After all, the rules of the living world must have seemed strange when she was very little. Heavy airplanes flew; the sky turned red at sunset; clouds could hold an ocean full of water, then rain it down on the ground below. Absurd! The living world was no less bizarre than this afterworld. She tried to take some comfort in that, but instead found herself bursting into tears.
Lief saw her tears and backed away. He had little experience with girls crying—or if he did, his experience was, at best, a hundred years old. He found it highly unexpected and disturbing. “What are you crying for?” he asked her.
“It’s not like you got hurt when you fell from the tree! That’s why I pushed you—to show you it wouldn’t hurt.”
“I want my parents,” Allie said. Lief could see that Nick was fighting his own tears, too. This was not at all how Lief had imagined their first waking day would be, but maybe he should have. Maybe he should have realized that leaving one’s life behind is not an easy thing to do. Lief supposed he would have missed his parents, too, if he could still remember them. He did remember that he used to miss them, though. It wasn’t a good feeling. He watched Nick and Allie, waiting for their tears to subside, and that’s when the unthinkable occurred to him.
“You’re not going to stay here, are you?”
Nick and Allie didn’t answer right away, but that silence was enough of an answer.
“You’re just like the others!” he shouted out, before he even realized what he was going to say.
Allie took a step closer to him. “The others?”
Lief silently cursed himself for having said it. He hadn’t meant to tell them.
He wanted them to think it was just the three of them. That way maybe they would have stayed. Now all his plans were ruined.
“What do you mean others?” Allie said again.
“Fine, leave!” Lief shouted. “I don’t care anyway. Go out there and sink to the center of the Earth for all I care. That’s what happens, you know. If you’re not careful, you sink and sink and sink all the way to the center of the Earth!”
Nick wiped away the last of his tears. “How would you know? All you know is how to swing from trees. You haven’t been anywhere. You don’t know anything.”
Lief bolted away from them. He climbed his tree to the highest perch, up in the slimmest branches.
They won’t leave, he told himself. They won’t leave because they need me. They need me to teach them to climb, and to swing. They need me to show them how to live without being alive.
Here on his high perch, Lief kept his special things: the handful of precious items that had made the journey with him, crossing from the living world into Everlost. These were the things he had found when he woke up after the flood that had taken his life—ghost things that he could touch and feel. They kept him connected to his fading memories. There was a shoe that had been his father’s.
He often put his own foot in it, wishing that someday he would grow into it, but knowing that he never would. There was a water-damaged tin picture of himself— the only thing he had to remember what he looked like. It was pocked with so many spots, he couldn’t tell which spots were dirt, and which were freckles. In the end, he just assumed they were all freckles. Finally there was a rabbit’s foot that was apparently no more lucky for him than it had been for the rabbit.