Under the Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    “You’re my only spirit friend,” he said. “There’s no one else to talk to.” Then he held up a hand. “That sounded bad. I meant, even if there was a hundred spirits standing around here, I’d want to talk to you.”
    Again, how could I blush? “‘My only spirit friend’? Are you a third-grader?”
    “We said we weren’t gonna talk about our pasts, including what grade I’m in or if I’m flunking out. That was then. Now I’m a superhero. I can fly, and dematerialize, and I’m working on turning back time.”
    It was funny that he thought being out of body made him powerful, because most of the time it made me feel powerless. I couldn’t move a blade of grass or be heard by anyone no matter how loud I yelled in their ears; I couldn’t even make a shadow in the blazing sun. I felt just as trapped in this out-of-body world as I had in the old one. But he was right—we could fly. That had always been at the top of my wish list when I was little.
    “Where did you fly to when you left me?” I asked.
    “I went to this coral reef I like and jogged around awhile, and then when you left me I went to this park near where I used to live, but I couldn’t steal any of the roses.”
    He didn’t wait in the field when I flew away from him. I felt a little hurt, but I also admired his self-confidence. And he’d thought of roses. “You jogged around a coral reef?” I asked. “On top of the coral?”
    “No, it’s under water.”
    At first I didn’t get it, but then I realized the weight of the water wouldn’t slow him down. He could run on the sea floor as easy as he could’ve run down the sidewalk when he was in his body. “I haven’t tried that,” I said.
    “Yet.”
    “Yet.” I smiled.
    “Under water is really cool. And running on the surface is fun too.” He demonstrated by jogging around me in a circle, dipping down into the earth so that only his head and shoulders showed, and then back up again. I guess I looked surprised because he said, “You could run through a mountain, if you want—it’s dark, but it’s not like it hurts or makes you tired.” He nodded at my clothes. “Won’t even get your dress dirty.”
    I was shocked to find I was wearing a party dress that I’d never owned or even seen before, as far as I knew—rose pink. And still I was barefoot. My mind had conjured up clothes without my permission. Was there something about him that made me want to look more girlish?
    He sat beside me. “Where did
you
go?”
    “A cliff,” I said. It sounded so boring.
    “When you jump from here to some other place, can you go anywhere, or do you have to have a place in mind?” he asked.
    “Sometimes I picture a kind of place, like I’d think of pine trees, and then I’d be in a forest,” I told him.
    “At first I thought I had to have been to a place before if I wanted to land there, but then I decided to try to go somewhere famous I’d never been, and zap, I was right there. It was freaky.”
    “Like where?” I felt a lift inside me, as if the crest of a wave were taking me up for a moment.
    “I went to the pitcher’s mound of Yankee Stadium.” He counted on his fingers so as not to miss any of the really good ones. “The top of Mount Everest. The Hollywood sign.”
    This started to feel like a dream. Not just the crazy things we were discussing, but the way he was looking at me. Guys at school never flirted with me.
    “Do you have to know what it looks like? I mean, you’ve seen pictures of the Hollywood sign,” I said. “Or can you just make up a spot? Let’s say one mile directly east of where I’m standing?”
    He shrugged. “Try it.” When I hesitated, he said, “I won’t ditch you. I promise.”
    So I decided to go and was suddenly sitting in the same position, but in a brushy patch of weeds beside a wire fence. I looked west, but there must’ve been a slight rise in the land between me and our field—I couldn’t see him in the distance. I zapped