On the Fringe Read Online Free PDF Page B

to it.
    When the tardy bell stopped ringing and the last door swung shut, I exited B-Hall and floated across the empty quad toward the gym. The giant octagon was surrounded by a bunch of old benches and sorry-looking planters holding a couple of half-dead bushes. I wasn’t used to seeing the place look so empty. I should’ve been stuck behind Matthew in first period economics, not floating around out here like a cloud taking note of all the bad landscaping.
    About halfway across the quad, I got the chills—a strange phenomenon when you’re dead. I zoomed back and forth, trying to shake the sensation off, but that didn’t work. Frustrated, I stopped near a tree and hovered above a bench, wondering what the deal was. That’s when I saw her—a crazy-looking lady with unruly hair, leaning against a vending machine by the cafeteria. I could tell she was dead because she was actually looking at me. Plus, she happened to be wearing a ratty pink robe and fuzzy slippers. High school girls aren’t really known for letting something like that slide.
    Still, it wasn’t her outfit or even the crazy hair that had me staring, but my own curiosity of meeting another ghost for the first time. Obviously this being stuck thing didn’t happen to everyone who died, or else there’d be a lot more of us bumping into each other. So what was her deal? Why was she here?
    I gave her a nod, hoping for some sort of response, but she just looked away, disinterested. Fine . I ignored her and kept looking for Claire as the chills faded along with any interest in my fellow ghost.
    After two more classrooms without any luck, I finally found Claire in room E-9 sitting at her desk and looking off in the other direction. But she didn’t look like the Claire I remembered. Something was definitely wrong. She was gazing out through the towering wall of windows reflecting the morning sun, past the bald, blabbering teacher and the ticking clock, beyond the present and off to some other place. She seemed stuck…just like me.
    Her face said it all.
    That was when I understood there was no message for me. At least, not one with some magical spell capable of sending me off to heaven. No, Claire was broken. Lost . Alone. I’d never seen her eyes look so tired. I could feel her emotions like heat from the sun as they bounced across the room toward me and soaked into my soul.
    Outside the classroom, I sunk down beneath the pane of windows next to a yellow rosebush and a busy anthill, wishing to wring out this swelling sadness inside me that had suddenly appeared without warning. But nothing could be purged without a body—no crying, no exertion, no pills to take away the pain or calm me down. Nothing . Instead, something ballooned inside me until I felt like I might explode. All I could do was sit there and drown in it, wondering why Claire affected me so much, wondering if she always would.

CHAPTER THREE
THE FOG
     

Claire
    Matthew, Addie and I tried acting normal around each other, but everything felt strange and different and wrong. How could we have expected anything else? It was like I lost everyone that day, not just Daniel.
    Addie floated away in her own bubble of counterfeit composure, fooling everyone else but me, refusing to let anyone see her in pain. She seemed unreachable, at least for anything more than the current configuration of the school’s popularity chain. It bothered me to watch her act so alive and unaffected knowing it was just that: an act. I felt much better shut up inside my self-made pity cocoon instead of faking happiness in front of the world. Of course, Mom and Dad were not happy with the way I chose to cope. They kept comparing me to Addie, asking me why I couldn’t turn to them or to my friends for support instead of keeping everything inside. I told them it was none of their business, and to get lost (okay, that part I just said in my head when I was really mad at them).
    Pretty soon, Matthew was hanging around us less