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minute, boiling, anger turning all of those cold prickles of pain into flames. I did not need this shit right now. I didn’t need him telling me what a disappointment I was. He didn’t care if I had a good life—he wanted a trophy, another damn accomplishment to hang on his wall. But if I did happen to make anything out of my life, I’d be damned if he got credit for it. I didn’t need his approval any more than I needed him. What I needed was someone who could actually help me get my life back.
    “Damn it!” I threw my phone across the aisle. I wanted to hit something. I wanted something to hurt as badly as I did. Where was the numbness when I needed it? I balled up all of the anger and hurt inside and tried to force it out of my body on an exhale. It didn’t work. Why did I think it would? Nothing worked out anymore.
    I shivered under my coat as goose bumps rose along the back of my neck, unable to shake the feeling that someone was here. Watching me. An almost painful current spread through my fingers, the strange buzz throbbing in each fingertip, and I flexed my hand trying to get it out.
    I sat up, heart pounding, searching for shadows and not finding any. My eyes caught the flicker of a gray coat disappearing around the end of the book stack and I jumped up, clutching the book in my hand.
    “Hello?” I made my way down the aisle, listening. It was him. The kid I’d seen in the hall that day. It had to be. He’d seen the shadows. Hell, he hadn’t just seen them, he’d seemed… amused by them. These books didn’t have the answers I wanted. He did. “Come on man, I just want to talk.”
    No answer. When I got to the end of the aisle, I stopped and looked around, completely alone. Was I seeing things? Was this even real? I knew my insides were broken, failing a little more each and every day. I could feel it, the echo of death, tainting every breath of oxygen I took. What I didn’t want to accept was that my mind might be going, too. I pressed the cool cover of the book in my hand against my forehead and cursed.
    “You’re not going to find any answers in those,” a girl’s voice split the silence. “And last time I checked, you had to open them to read the words inside.”
    “Maybe I’m trying to read by osmosis,” I replied, dropping the book to my side. I turned around, expecting to see a fellow student giving me crap, but froze when my gaze fell on the unfamiliar girl in front of me.
    “Hi,” she said. She leaned with her back against the stacks, holding my cell phone, just a few feet away. Her gold eyes glinted as they looked at me. She looked like a shined-up pearl next to the dusty old books.
    Finally, she tossed my cell phone to me and I dropped the book to catch it with both hands. I had to let the words roam around in my mouth for a minute before I could get them out.
    “Do I know you?”
    “Sort of.” She shrugged. “I know you.”
    I squinted at the pretty, unfamiliar girl in front of me. Long brown braids tumbled over her shoulders, and her skin looked like honey against the bright-white straps of her dress. The laces of her gold sandals wrapped around her calves. Though I wasn’t sure if you could call her sandals gold. Not next to those eyes. Those eyes were a color all their own. They didn’t even look real. Neither did the faint glow that bathed her from head to toe.
    A warm sensation swept over me and a shiver exploded across my skin. I looked around, but there weren’t any shadows. Hadn’t been for a while.
    My heart stuttered in my chest before seeming to stop all together. It was…her. Her eyes. Those were the same eyes I’d seen at the fire. And that same warmth that settled over me like a blanket of safety any time she came around. It had to be her. Normal girls didn’t look like that.
    “It’s you.” It was stupid, but I didn’t really know what else to say. Seriously, how often do you meet a dead girl?
    “‘You’ works,” she said. “But you could also