Everlost by Neal Shusterman Read Free Book Online

way to make them all see me.”
    â€œBut what if they never see you?” Nick said. “What if they just keep on living their lives like you’re not even there?”
    â€œThat’s not gonna happen.”
    â€œWhy not?” said Nick. “Because you say so? That’s not how the world works.”
    â€œHow do you know? You don’t know how this world works any more than I do.”
    â€œExactly. That’s why I say we learn more about it before we go home. We’ve got to find other ghosts with more experience.”
    â€œOther
Afterlights,”
Allie corrected, still refusing to admit she was a ghost.
    The thought made Nick look at his hands and arms, studying his own peculiar incandescence; his gentle Afterlight glow. The lines that ran across his palms were still there. He could see his fingerprints—but perhaps that was just because fingerprints are what he expected to see. He wondered if he would still look the same if he had made it all the way to the light at the end of the tunnel, or if the memory of flesh would completely dissolve into the glowonce he reached his final destination—a destination where his family might already be.
    â€œWe have to accept that there may be nobody to go home to,” Nick reminded Allie.
    Allie pursed her lips. “Maybe for you, but it was just my Dad and me in our car. Mom stayed home because my sister was sick.”
    â€œDoesn’t it even bother you that your Dad might not have made it?”
    â€œHe made it somewhere,” Allie said, “which is more than I can say for us. It’s like Lief said—everyone else in the accident either survived or they got where they were going—which means that either way they’re sort of okay.”
    Allie did have a point; it was some comfort to know that there truly was some place they were all ultimately going—that the end wasn’t the end. Even so, the thought of his whole family making that mysterious journey all at the same terrible time … Then something occurred to Nick. “I didn’t see any dead-spots where the accident happened. We got thrown into the forest, but there were no dead-spots on the road!”
    â€œWe weren’t looking for dead-spots then,” Allie pointed out, but Nick chose to believe there were none. It was better than the alternative.
    â€œWhere were you going that day?” Nick asked.
    Allie took her time before she answered him. “I can’t remember. Isn’t that funny?”
    â€œI’m starting to forget things, too,” Nick admitted. “I don’t want to forget their faces.”
    â€œYou won’t,” she said—and although there was no evidence to back it up, Nick chose to believe that, too.
    ***
    By the third day, they had passed out of the mountains, and the highway became wider and straighter were still in Upstate New York, many miles away from their respective destinations. At this rate it would take weeks, maybe months to get there.
    They passed town after town, and soon learned how to easily identify dead-spots. They were different from the living places. First of all, there was a clarity to them—they were in sharper focus, and the colors were far more vibrant. Secondly, when you stood in one of those spots, there was a certain sense of well-being—a sense of belonging—as if the ghost places were the
true
living places, and not the other way around.
    It was that fundamental grayness of the living world that struck more deeply than any chill. Although they wouldn’t speak it aloud, it made both Nick and Allie long for the lush and comforting beauty of Lief’s forest.
    At dusk, on the fifth day, they found a nice patch of solid ground, beneath a big sign that said, WELCOME TO ROCKLAND COUNTY! Leaves poked through the pavement, lush and green to their eyes, eternally unaffected by the changing of seasons. The spot was large enough for both of them to