Page 6 of Almost You

“Okay, look, I have some time. I know a few tricks that might help you remember something. No promises.”

“Thank you!” He flung himself at me, but I quickly sidestepped the hug.

“Don’t thank me so fast,” I growled. “If you do recall things, I’m charging you somehow for my time. I’ll bill you the hours if we get lucky. And I’m still stopping the moment I see my actual paying-client’s father.”

The truth was, I could spend days in the ghost world and it would be mere minutes at home with my client. But he had no clue about how time was. Ghost-boy had no clue about anything.

FOUR

Ghost

Under my hair was an egg-shaped lump. When I’d first arrived, my head was hurting behind my left eye, and the lumpy spot was tender to my touch, making me flinch. Before Christopher, it had been the only other thing that felt real. The pain disappeared, though, the lump was the same size. With dread, I waited for it to shrink.

It was so weird being without memory. Although there was an advantage: no pain or recollection of dying.

If I’d encountered toxic assholes—and who hadn’t? I had no clue. If I’d had an unhappy period, where I’d struggled or been a sad teen, it didn’t haunt me.

And I still seemed to have wants. Desires. Like I’d love to eat a fresh mango right this minute. Any fruit dipped in chocolate sounded perfect. Except when I said as much, Christopher warned me not to do it.

“You can get one, but I wouldn’t swallow. The taste is off-putting when you’re a ghost.”

“Okay.” I held back a stream of jokes about not swallowing. Whoever I used to be, whatever my life had been, I must’ve had a dirty mind.

“Do you want the mango?” he asked. “Simply imagine it in your hand.”

“What?” I blinked, forgetting about my raunchiness. “I can do that?”

“If you give it a chance. You can control how things look and are in this realm. Whether it’s a mango or an entire world. If it’s all a white blank, it’s because you’re imagining it this way. I’ve located ghosts in all types of settings. They create them. Concentrate on images. I’ll say a word, and you try and picture it. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Mountain.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them. Nothing.

“Maybe I should start with something simple like that mango.”

“You can do this. And when you do, you’ll see. The spirit world is fucking fun for ghosts. Let’s try again.” He steepled his hands under his chin. “All right, how about a deep woods, a forest of trees?”

I thought hard about trees.

“Evergreens, trunks of trees, think of trees,” Christopher coached.

A palm tree emerged to my right.

“Fuck!” I jumped.

A whole cluster of palms emerged.

“Keep looking at it,” Christopher instructed.

As I did, a beach formed nearby. White sand. A turquoise ocean with a light chop of waves. I could taste the salt. Smell the tanning oil. Feel a light breeze, the warm sun that was the color of a butterscotch. Overhead, a seagull squawked.

“Holy fuck,” I murmured, stunned. “Is it real?”

“It’s as real as anything our brains dream in the human world.”

“Oh, God! I know this somehow, somewhere.” I searched my mind for a name, a specific memory. “Why can’t I figure this out?”

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