Crossing Over Read Online Free PDF

Jac could offer to go with me, which she usually did,
I walked away. Fortunately the little shape-in-a-dress symbol that means ladies’ room in America looks the same in Montreal,
so I locatedit easily. As I walked across the restaurant, I noticed that the man in the dark suit was visiting every table
in the room to declare his disdain for the only dish on the menu. Nobody seemed to see him. Big surprise.
    I paused by the bathroom door and shot a look over to the adults’ table. My mother was watching the phantom poutine hater
with a small smile on her lips. As usual she seemed to feel me looking at her. She met my gaze, widened her smile, then nodded
toward the poutine hater and gave a small “Whatcha gonna do with these crazy ghosts?” shrug. I felt unaccountably mad at her,
and turned away without acknowledging her. As I walked through the bathroom door, I felt a rush of guilt and a bad heat rising
in my stomach.
    I had pretended not to see my mother.
    Not okay.

Chapter 6
    “Is that all? Kat, I thought it was something really serious. I thought you were dying or expelled or maybe you’d made friends
with Brooklyn.”
    I gave my friend an amused look. She was lying on one of the two double beds, munching on a Twix bar between slurps of some
sort of Canadian canned chocolate drink. Our hotel room was small, the TV worked, there was free stuff in the bathroom, and
it all seemed blessedly unhaunted. Good times.
    “Isn’t it enough? Jac, in one breath I just confessed to liking a boy and being mad at my mom for no reason. Throw me a bone
here.”
    Instead, she threw me a piece of her Twix, which I bit into.
    “Okay, well, let’s start with Ben Greenblott. I think he’s perfect for you. I actually thought so even before you told me
you liked him. Didn’t you notice how I was trying to get a conversation started at dinner?”
    “I noticed,” I said, ruefully. “I was trying to pretend he wasn’t there.”
    “You shouldn’t do that,” Jac said. “He’ll think you don’t like him. He’s a nice guy—you should talk to him. And it’s not like
he’s hanging out with anyone else on this trip.”
    It was true. Ben was friendly to everyone, but he didn’t seem to be friends
with
anyone in particular. He was hard to categorize.Though I knew he was a straight honor roll kid, he was not clearly a geek,
a brain, or another brand of outcast. People seemed to like him well enough. But he kept a low profile at school, and kind
of kept to himself.
    “Okay, but what about the part where he saw me talking to an empty seat?”
    “Saw you talking to
yourself
,” Jac corrected. “Plenty of people do that. Einstein talked to himself—and so does Shoshanna Longbarrow.”
    Wow. It was a sure bet this was the first time in recorded history Shoshanna Longbarrow had ever been mentioned in the same
sentence with Einstein.
    “It still isn’t good,” I said.
    “It isn’t a reason to write him off either,” Jac insisted. “And you need a little encouragement sometimes. Did you ever e-mail
that guy from the Mountain House?” she asked.Jac enjoyed bugging me about the not-so-cute boy I’d met at the massive old
hotel we’d been to that spring.
    “Just the one time,” I said. “Jac, I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to become Mrs. Ted Kenyon. The guy’s going to end
up working at the most haunted mountain resort ever.”
    “He liked you,” Jac said, licking the inside of the Twix wrapper fastidiously. “That’s allz I’m saying.”
    “That doesn’t mean Ben Greenblott likes me,” I declared.
    “It doesn’t mean he
doesn’t
like you,” Jac countered. She reached below the bed and produced a Mars Bar. I couldn’t help but laugh.
    “What? They’re like Milky Ways but better. Everybody says so.”
    There was a knock on the door. Jac shovedthe Mars Bar under a pillow, so she obviously felt it was her mother stopping by.
    I got up and opened the door, confirming Jac’s unspoken suspicion.
    “Oh,