Veiled (Ada Palomino 1)

What’s really weird is that I can’t really recall the guy. Like in most dreams, he starts off as one person and then morphs. I lose focus. But I just have this image, this feeling, that he was this guy I met at Perry and her husband Dex’s wedding two years ago (still weird to think of Dex as her husband—my brother-in-law—and not some douchecanoe that hangs around).

His name was Jay and I really wish I hadn’t swigged so much champagne at the wedding because, just like the dream, the real-life details of him are kind of blurry. I know he was tall, maybe in his mid-to-late-twenties, which to my then sixteen-year-old-self seemed all sorts of ancient. He had reddish brown hair and manly scruff on his strong jaw. I’m not really sure why I think I know the feel of his rough stubble—I think if we kissed I would have at least remembered that.

Regardless, there was something about him that was vaguely magnetic and, considering my aversion to gingers, that said something. And what it said was that the last time I felt real butterflies around a guy was ages ago, I was drunk, and I never saw him again. How sad is that?

“Are you okay?” Amy asks as we head across the Fremont Bridge, the Willamette River sparkling below us.

I slide my eyes over to her and give her a tepid smile. “I’m heading to Sephora. Of course I’m okay.”

Amy Lombardo is pretty much my closest friend. She’s been there for me through everything from losing my virginity with Dillon (okay, she wasn’t actually there for that, but she helped me deal with the aftermath), to breakups, to cramming for final exams. She, along with her boyfriend Tom and our friend Jessie, make up our little posse that has managed to last throughout the crazy high school years and now into this scary big world of the beyond. Jessie has already gone off to school in California, so our pack has dwindled to me being the third wheel most of the time.

Amy takes her eyes off the road and slides her sunglasses down on her nose, inspecting me with her chocolate brown eyes. “You sure?”

Her voice is soft and I know she’s worried about me. The first year after my mother died, I was practically inconsolable. I’m surprised I even finished high school to be honest. Life was just a blur and when it wasn’t a blur, when I was feeling things too deeply, too much, I made it a blur. I never thought I’d follow in my sister’s footsteps, but I turned to drugs and alcohol in order to get through the days.

But the nights were always worst. The drugs never helped me with the nights. The dreams would come for me, no matter how doped up or drunk I was.

Somehow I got out of it. The days seemed brighter, steadier. When I hurt, which was all the time, which still is all the time, I was able to absorb it, deal with it. I was able to think, to actually see myself, my life, and distance myself from the substances. I leaned on Perry, my father, even Dex. Amy, Tom, and Jessie were there too. My ex bailed when I was too much of a mess, but he was just extra baggage anyway. The heartbreak over losing him was nothing compared to losing my mom.

I know Amy worries about me still. I know I’m not the same person I was before it happened. It doesn’t help that Amy doesn’t know the truth about how my mother died. The truth about me. The truth about my family.

I need to keep it that way. I’ve seen what our ghostly afflictions can do to someone. I know that my grandmother, Pippa, saw dead people and could enter a realm called the Thin Veil, and that in time she was committed and eventually died alone because no one believed her. I know that Perry has been haunted since she was fifteen, that she was put on a cocktail of medications that did no good, that the world wanted to lock her up because it didn’t understand her. I know that my mother saw the truth—far too late.

And the truth killed her.

Even my brother-in-law comes from a lineage of fucked-upness. Dex was also plagued by ghosts from a young age, did a stint in a mental institution, and relied on medication to keep it all away. When he went off the meds—and had his infamous ghost-hunting show with Perry—things only got worse until he discovered his own brother was taken over by a demon and literally tried to take us all to Hell while we were in New York. Worst vacation ever.

Then there’s me. I’ve seen so much, been through so much, that even if I did admit to my best friend that my sister’s now defunct ghost-hunting show was totally true, that I’ve seen the world behind the curtain, I’ve seen exorcisms and monsters and the devil himself, I wouldn’t know where to begin nor how to make it all sound remotely believable.