For my parents

Text copyright © 2012 by Katie Alender

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

ISBN 978-1-4231-3472-5

Visit www.un-requiredreading.com

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to my husband, who inspires, supports, and challenges me.

Thank you to Matthew Elblonk, who gets right to the edge of “I told you so” but doesn’t ever say it, and the rest of the excellent folks at DeFiore and Company.

Thank you to Abby Ranger, Stephanie Lurie, Laura Schreiber, Hallie Patterson, Marci Senders, Ann Dye, Dina Sherman, and all of the wonderful people doing their collective thing at Hyperion, for your constant and much-appreciated support.

Thank you to my whole entire ginormous family; I love you dearly (all nine hundred of you).

Thank you to my friends, who are like a second ginormous family; I love you guys, too (but I’ll mostly only say so behind your backs).

And thank you, thank you, thank you to the people who have made it possible for me to continue to follow and live this dream: readers, bloggers, fellow authors, librarians, teachers, booksellers, fans and followers, and parents who teach their children to love reading.

I literally couldn’t do it without you…and I mean the real kind of literally, not the fake kind.

THE BAD NEWS IS, ghosts are everywhere.

They’re in your kitchen, your garage, your school cafeteria. They sit dumbly through your pool parties and your fights with parents and make-out sessions with your boyfriend. They hover in the background while you watch scary movies with your friends. You scream when the bad guy in the mask jumps out, but all the while, two feet away from you, a horrible spirit is breathing ectoplasm down your neck.

The good news—for you—is that you’ll never know it.

Even if you’re careless enough to tempt them with your stupid games, spinning around in a dark bathroom, chanting the name of a ghost who would just love to show up and rip your head off your body—and I mean literally pop that nice, round cantaloupe head right off your skinny neck—you’ll probably never, in your entire life, so much as see a ghost.

But I do.

I see them all the time.

The first one I ever saw was at a funeral—appropriate, right? Funerals aren’t exactly awesome to begin with. But they get way less fun when the ghost of the dead girl decides to show up and try to knock you into her open grave. This makes everyone at the funeral think you’re crazy, on top of the fact that they all secretly suspect you’re the one who killed her in the first place.

You spend a day or two wondering if you really saw what you think you saw, and you suspect that the people who think you’re crazy might actually be on to something. Then you start noticing things—weird things that seem to appear and disappear in your peripheral vision—odd, smudgy shapes. Gradually, you realize the weird things are only in photos and on TV, and one day you wake up and realize the shapes and smudges have form, and they’re not just shapes and smudges—

They’re dead people.

At this point, you pretty much know you’re crazy.

That’s how it happened for me, anyway.

For instance, in a snapshot that used to hang over my desk, among the “say cheese” grinning faces is also an old dead woman with oozing sores on her face. Living in the local TV news studio is a man with a railway spike through his chest. And in most of the photographed step-by-step lab instructions in my science book, there’s a pair of petite twin girls with sunken cheeks and hollow-looking eyes, who always have their arms wrapped around each other’s waists. The ghosts in the images are just like regular people—perfectly still, unmoving, caught in a fraction of a moment of their undead lives.

Have you ever tried to go a day without looking at a photograph or seeing a television? My whole existence has become one extraordinarily un-fun game of spot-thes-pirits. But school portraits, the latest issue of Cosmo, the evening news—those don’t mean a thing. Because at the end of the day, the pictures I really care about are the ones I take with my own camera.

Since I was twelve years old, photography has been like a part of me—the best part. When everything else in my life was going wrong, I could retreat into my own little universe and see the world as I wanted to see it.

And now I don’t even want to go near my camera. I don’t want to look at my photos.

Because they’re full of dead people.

So here I am. Life spectacularly in ruins, but nowhere to run. No place to hide. From the stares, the whispers, the suspicion…the ghosts…and worst of all…

From my own thoughts.

JARED MOVED LIKE A HUNTER, light on his feet—branches and leaves barely crackled beneath him. And he was always looking, listening, waiting for the right moment to soundlessly lift his camera and shoot.

Watching him work was like a tiny window into my old life.

“So I said, yes, I’d be glad to respect a substitute teacher, providing she had at least a partial understanding of the scientific method. And then—” His gaze traveled up over my head. He raised his camera and flashed off a quick sequence of photos as a shadow swept over the trail.

A moment later, he turned the camera to show me the viewfinder. “An owl. What’s it doing out during the day? Something must have disturbed its nest.”

My basic rule is: I don’t look at pictures if I don’t have to. But I figured it was a safe enough bet that there weren’t any ghosts hovering above us in midair, so I took the bait and scrolled through Jared’s images. They were perfect: the owl’s belly was striped in vivid black-and-white lines, and its wings were outstretched, the feathers at their edges spread like fingers.

“I love these,” I said.

I realized I was still holding on to the camera, and therefore still holding on to Jared, who had the strap looped around his neck. He didn’t seem to mind being so close, but I gently handed him the camera and took a step back.

He gave me a quick smile. I turned away.

It was a blindingly bleak day. The sky was thick with clouds, and the weekend’s cold snap had scared off the nature preserve’s usual contingent of casual hikers. We’d been following the trail for an hour and passed only two joggers. It was the second day of winter, and the high that day hovered under forty degrees. I was bundled up three layers deep, but Jared just wore a thin jacket over his usual hipster-chic uniform: jeans and a flannel shirt with polished brown shoes.

“Did you get in trouble?” I asked.

He blinked, not remembering what we’d been talking about. “Oh…I got sent to the headmaster’s office.”

“That sucks.”

“Nah.” He shrugged. “Father Lopez gets it. He just told me to be nice.”