Dust to Dust by Melissa Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

uncomfortable electricitythat’s shocking in its intensity. I let go of Carson and stumble off the bench, sinking to my knees as I close my eyes and let my hands feel the soft, mossy earth.
    â€œCallie? Are you okay?”
    Carson is bending by my side but her voice sounds far away. All I can feel is the sparking and burning that’s happening inside my body. I open my eyes, forcing my mind to stop tricking me, letting my eyes and ears show me what’s real, what’s solid. My hands grip the ground until my fingernails hit dirt, and then the crackling pulses that undulate in every fiber of my physical body start to ebb.
    I lean back against the leg of the bench with a long breath.
    â€œI’m fine,” I tell Carson.
    â€œMaybe you need to rethink the meds,” she says. “Just for another few days until your body’s healed some more.”
    I shake my head no. I try to tell myself that the jolt of pain I just felt is normal after what my body has been through. It’s because of the accident, whatever’s left in my system of the pills, the physical trauma I’ve experienced.
    But a part of me wonders if it was something else. Something more ominous.
    I look up to ground myself in the world around me before my mind gets carried away. And that’s when I come face-to-face with the plaque on the center of the bench.
    Of course, the memorial bench.
    Three names:
    Thatcher Larson
    Leo Cutler
    Reena Bell
    â€œCallie, what is it?”
    Carson catches me staring at the names, and I realize that she knows me too well to be kept in the dark.
    â€œThose people,” I tell her, gesturing at the plaque. “I met them . . . on the other side.”
    â€œYou did?” Her eyes light up.
    I look up at the branches of the tree above us, and I remember a moment in a cemetery like this one, where Leo and a friend were shaking branches and frightening people on a ghost tour.
    â€œReena and Leo, they were the types of ghosts who liked to mess with the Living.”
    â€œLike moaning and slamming doors?” asks Carson. I can tell she’s letting her mind run wild with the ghost stories she’s heard.
    â€œSomething like that,” I say. And then I start to tell her what I’m remembering as it comes to me. Because maybe sharing it out loud will help everything come together inside my brain. “I spent time with Leo and Reena, walking on the beach, going to a café, almost pretending we were alive. They made me laugh; I had fun with them at first.”
    â€œThat sounds cool!” Carson smiles at me. “But why do you look so sad?”
    â€œThey weren’t really my friends,” I say, and as I talk to Carson my memories are becoming clearer. “The way Reena taught me to move objects, the way she asked me about my life and shared her friends with me, it was nice. But something wasn’t right.”
    â€œWhat wasn’t right?”
    The word poltergeists reenters my mind, and now the underside of Reena, Leo, and their friends is coming into full view. When their smiles faded, I saw that they were angry and bitter, hatching some kind of insane plan to live again. Reena was just using me. I had a special kind of energy in the Prism, and she drew on it because she knew it might get her what she wanted. All the poltergeists did. Thatcher tried to protect me from them as much as he could but . . .
    Now that I’m alive, back on Earth, am I safe from them?
    â€œCallie, what is it? What’s wrong?”
    I’ve gone silent, because it’s getting harder and harder to fill up my lungs with air.
    The further away I get from my last pain pill, the crisper my otherworldly memories become. And suddenly, nothing makes sense and the world seems mad. At first I thought it was the meds that were bringing on these visions, these phantom voices. The truth is, they were dulling them, erasing my memory of what happened during the time I