Stitch by Samantha Durante Read Free Book Online Page A

rapidly about something, gesticulating enthusiastically as she went.  Alessa caught wind of the words “party” and “delegate” and quickly scurried up to her room before anyone noticed her presence.
    Alessa switched on the light and flopped onto the bed, letting out a deep sigh.  It had been a long day.  At least she could expect a little respite before her next encounter with the ghost, since he didn’t seem to drop in more than once every other week or so.  With the way she was feeling at the moment, she thought she might need that much time to recover.  She ached with exhaustion right down to her bones.
    Alessa rolled over facing the wall and pulled her knees toward her chest, her long hair strewn out behind her.  She rested her head on her arm and closed her eyes.  She still hadn’t fully processed everything that had happened earlier, the emotions that had tugged at her from seemingly every direction.  She wondered if there was any validity to Janie’s theory that they were actually the ghost’s emotions being projected onto her.
    She didn’t want to think about it.  It was bad enough that she was seeing the apparition.  Did she really need to feel it too?  She didn’t like the idea of some foreign entity hijacking her emotions, making her feel like someone she wasn’t.  It was troubling to think how little control she had over her own faculties during those moments.  And now it was hours later and she was still feeling the effects.
    She needed to get to the bottom of this.  With a weary sigh, Alessa rolled back over and swung her legs to the floor, pushing herself out of bed and over to the desk.  Sinking into the chair, she snatched up her backpack from the floor and slid out her laptop, dropping it onto the desk with a clunk.  She popped the lid open and reattached the power supply while she waited for the system to boot up.  Once the familiar startup chimes sounded, she opened her browser and navigated to a search engine.
    Alessa wasn’t even sure where to begin.  She decided to start broad and entered “ghost stories.”  120 million results.  Perhaps she was going to need to be more specific.
    This time she tried “real ghost stories.”  That narrowed it down to 5 million results.  She tested to see if adding “emotion” or “feeling” to her query would help, but scanning the results, she didn’t see anything that looked useful.  Alessa backed up to the “real ghost stories” search and randomly opened the first few results.
    They were all stories from people who claimed to have experienced a ghost encounter, but the only emotions they reported feeling were the expected ones: that something was “not right,” like they weren’t alone, and of course terror, anxiety, panic.  It sounded pretty similar to Alessa’s first few experiences.
    She tried entering “ghosts projecting feelings” which narrowed it down to 3 million results, but still nothing seemed quite right.  One of the top results was a general information page about ghosts, so she decided to check there.  Scanning the page, she noticed that the words “projecting” and “feelings” were there but nowhere near each other, which didn’t really answer her question.  However, there was a list of alternative hypotheses attempting to explain the existence of ghosts, so she decided to read further.
    Of course there was all the usual theorizing about the existence of spirits on another dimension or plane, a soul caught between life on earth and the afterlife envisioned by most major religions.  This was generally thought to be caused by “unfinished business” on the part of the deceased or a great trauma experienced at the time of death.  Both scenarios seemed reasonable enough to explain her own experiences, though Alessa didn’t know enough about her ghost to guess what might have been his particular hang-up.  And another issue, of course, was that this entire theory hinged on the premise of