The Ghost and the Goth Read Online Free PDF

culture did, thanks to TV shows like Medium and Ghost Whisperer (Jennifer Love Hewitt is hot, but that show sucks ass) and various movies. But try telling one of the three adolescent psychiatrists in the dinky town that is Decatur that you see dead people. See what happens. It’s called a twenty-four-hour involuntary commitment.
    “We’re done here.” Brewster stepped out from behind his desk and jerked his door open. “Get to class.”
    As much as I hated being in his office, it was safer here than the hallway or even the classrooms. The fewer living people in the room, the fewer dead follow. In here I only had Grandpa B. to deal with, but out there, I’d be surrounded, engulfed, drowning in a sea of people dying to be heard. One of them in particular also seemed willing to kill me to get his point, whatever it was, across.
    The thought of confronting him without Marcie or anything else to serve as a distraction made my palms damp with sweat. If he found me here and now, exposed like this, I’d be lucky if I ended up in the psych ward.
    “Look, I only have a few weeks left here.” Focusing on a splotch of white on the nubbly carpeting where someone had obviously tried to bleach out a stain, I forced the words out, keeping my gaze down. I couldn’t stand to see him gloating. “I want to be out of here as much as you want me gone. Just let me have my music back. Please.”
    “Means that much to you, hmm?” His highly polished black shoes, within my range of vision, rocked back on their heels and then forward again.
    “Yes—” I grimaced and forced the next word out “—sir.”
    “Good. Then the consequences of going without will hold some significance for you.”
    I jerked my gaze up from the floor to stare at him in shock. “Bastard.”
    “Watch it, kid,” Grandpa Brewster muttered next to my ear.
    An arrogant smile spread across Brewster’s face. Without taking his gaze from me, he called to the outer office again. “Mrs. Piaget, set Mr. Killian up with an after-school detention as well.”
    “Oh … okay,” came the distant and faintly dismayed reply.
    He gestured to the open doorway. “Time to collect your winnings, sport.”
    In the process of hitching my backpack over my shoulders again, I stopped dead. Of all the stupid little names he could have chosen … “Don’t call me that.”
    “What?” Brewster looked confused for a second before understanding dawned, along with an evil gleam in his eye. Never give a bully more ammunition, I know, but I couldn’t let that one go. I just couldn’t.
    “What’s wrong with sport, sport?” Triumph rang in his voice. He’d found a weapon to get under my skin, and he wielded it with glee.
    “Don’t.”
    “Why not … sport?”
    I could have told him the truth—that had been my father’s nickname for me, and hearing it from him with such disdain and condescension made me want to beat his face in. But that would have only given him more to work with. I could also have gone the human rights way—I’m a person with a name, use it—but he wouldn’t care about that. So, instead I went for the more direct route.
    “Don’t call me that, or I’ll tell you things that’ll make you wish to God you’d turned your service weapon on yourself that night instead of chucking it in the Sangamon River.”
    His mouth worked helplessly, but no words emerged.
    Brewster had nearly offed himself thirty-some years ago, a few years after he’d come back from Vietnam, a young man who’d seen and done too much in a jungle half a world away. He eventually chucked his gun into the river instead, embarrassed about the fact that he’d even thought about suicide—a quitter’s way out. His grandfather—dead only a couple of years at that point—had been right beside him the whole time. The dead see everything, man, whether you want them to or not, and they tell a lot of it to me, even if they don’t know I’m listening.
    “That’s nothing you should be