He nods. “It’s a university in Boston. You know it? It’s still there?”

“Um, yeah. I just didn’t … I mean …” I blush because there’s no tactful way to say what I’m thinking, that he was uneducated and poor. “So, what happened?”

He looks at me like I have three heads. “I died was what. My dad lost everything in the crash. House was too crowded, so after I graduated I got out and hopped myself a train up north. Ended up on the Bel Del, working odd jobs so I could get up to college. That’s where I met up with Jack.” He bows his head, almost shameful. “You know how that all turned out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t go to Harvard. I’d probably end up living in a house like them friends of yours. One that makes your meals for you and wipes your mouth with a napkin afterward.” He points across the river and laughs. Then he puts his chin to his chest. “Do worry about my momma, though. My body was never found. Not that they looked much.”

“But you said you became a legend in twelve counties. About the boy who couldn’t swim?”

“Where I died, yeah. Not where my momma lived. There were a couple of witnesses, but none of them helped me. All too afraid. They all came up with the rhyme to protect Jack, make it look like an accident. My momma’s the worrying kind. Probably spent her whole life wondering what happened to me. I wrote her letters sometimes, when I was alive. But I never saw her again.”

I think about my father. The thought sends a stab of pain through my chest. I’m never going to see him again.

The little girl on his back has fallen asleep, and she looks like an angel herself with her eyelids fluttering and her cheeks rosy. I look around as we walk past the cemetery I’d spotted a day ago. It’s an old one. Most of the headstones are crumbling and faded, but I can make out some of the years. Most are from the 1700s. The green of the trees frames all the gray stone, making the place look more romantic than frightening. Trey pays no attention to it, just follows this worn stone staircase up a hill, into a line of trees. “Where are we going?”

He stops. “That’s right. You didn’t want to see your momma yet. She’s up at the top of the hill. She likes to greet newcomers. You want to wait here while I bring her up?” He motions toward the little girl.

I look up the pathway, which ends in pine trees the color of new grass, and at the lavender sky. “Does she know about me?”

He nods.

I bite my lip. “She doesn’t want to see me. She was trying to push me away.”

“No, she was trying to protect you, kid. She’ll want to see you. Trust me. Mommas worry.”

He’s staring at me with eyes so intensely blue, almost the exact color the river is now, I wonder if that’s me perceiving things differently or if that’s the way they’ve always been. Before, they’d been so dark, troubled. I look down and realize he has his hand out for me to take. I wrap my fingers around his, expecting to feel the sores I’d seen before, but, strangely, his fingers are soft, maybe even softer than mine.

When we begin to walk again, he mutters under his breath, “You, she’ll want to see. Me, she’ll want to kill. Guess I’m in luck it’s too late for that.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’ll tell her it’s my fault. You did everything you could. I’m just a stubborn pain in the ass.”

“You said it,” he mutters, turning away, but even though his head is down and his hair is in his face, I see the hint of a smile.

“Hey! I think I liked you better when you were all doom and gloom,” I say, punching his arm.

“ ’Cause I was easier to ignore?” he asks, and by then we’ve reached the landing at the top of the hill. Though we’ve climbed pretty far, I’m not out of breath. Maybe because I don’t need to breathe? I try holding my breath to see, but my cheeks bulge like a chipmunk’s, right when Trey turns around to look at me. He laughs. “Are you holding your breath?”

“Um, I—”

“Don’t bother. Every dead person’s tried it out one time or another. But even ghosts need air.”

I feel myself blushing. “But what will happen to me if I don’t breathe? I can’t die.”

“Nah, but you’ll lose your shine.”

“Shine?”

“We all have a light when we come here. We call it our shine. See yours?” He points to my hand. With his bluish, dead fingers next to mine, the difference is striking. My skin is glowing white, not unlike the surface of the moon. His is more bluish. Some of the people who were milling about when we arrived looked almost watery, blurry. Blinking did no good. Their bodies were tinged with dark blue. Even in sun, they were in shadow. “When you pass on, you don’t lose your life all at once. Sure, you lose your body, but your life is still there. Shine’s your human life. The longer you’re here, in our world, the more shine you lose. The more you fade, the more your powers fade.”

I study Trey. Compared to the new souls who’ve just traversed the river, he is faded, bluish.

“Other things affect your shine. Your body being laid to rest is one of them. And, of course, you got to want to move on,” he says. “Some people keep their shine.”

In answer to my questioning look, he says, “Some people don’t want to go. Either they want to be alive or they want something else they could only get in life, and it eats away at them. They become evil spirits. Fiends.”

“Fiends?” I murmur, thinking of Jack, of how brightly he shone, how intensely hard it was to even look at him. But Trey had shone brightly, too. “What do they do that’s so evil?”

He opens his mouth to speak, but stops when he reaches the top of the hill. I come up behind him, and I can see stone walls, crumbling as much as the headstones on the riverbank. It’s a small house, or what remains of it. There is no roof, but the branches of old trees with fresh new leaves hang over it like a canopy. Ivy crawls up the black stones, almost completely claiming them. Here, the only sound is the twittering of birds. The line of people winds up ahead, but it’s perfectly silent; every one of them looks around, awestruck. It’s so peaceful and lush and green. I think I could fall asleep on this carpet of soft spring grass and never wake up.

I forget what we’re talking about when I see her. She is a small woman, as unremarkable in appearance now as she was in life. And yet I can’t take my eyes off her. The world slows and silences. She smiles and welcomes each person with a hug. Her hair and face are fair, and despite the limited sunlight leaking through the leaves above, something about her glitters like gold. She moves like a leaf on the wind, so gracefully, and those she smiles at seem to be affected by her, as immediately they begin to smile, too. She’s wearing an ordinary white baseball shirt with red sleeves, with a giant P on it, for the Phillies. I know it because she’d worn it all the time. She’d gotten it at my first—and last—baseball game at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Somehow I’d expected her to be wearing a long, regal robe, or a crown, or something. But no, it’s just her, just my mom, looking exactly the same. The same as the day she died.

Suddenly I’m back in my bedroom, lying flat on my back in bed, with the summer heat pressing down on me and the iridescent ripples on the walls. My parents were weirdly absent from my life that summer, talking in hushed whispers about “adult things” they said I didn’t need to know about, so Lannie became my best and only friend. One day I’d been playing with Lannie all afternoon, and Lannie had been playing her usual games, pretending to be hanging by the neck from trees, making herself invisible when we played hide-and-seek. It put me in a foul mood, and I just wanted to get away from her. So I was alone in my bedroom with a pillow over my head to keep the visions away when my mother walked in. My mother tried to take the pillow off my head but I yelled at her. She told me she had something to say, something important, but I screamed at her to leave me alone.