“Neither,” says the smiling boy. “You’ll want to tell me your name now. I’ll write it down in case you forget it.”

“Very funny,” says the skateboarder, and yet as he tries to say his name, it takes him a moment to pull it up. “Kyle.”

“Nice to meet you, Kyle. I’m Nick.” He shakes Kyle’s hand, writes his name on a piece of paper, then sticks it in Kyle’s shirt pocket. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Yeah,” says Kyle, scratching his head. “I came out of that alley, and almost got hit by a garbage truck.”

Nick shakes his head. “Hate to tell you this, Kyle. But it wasn’t ‘almost.’”

“No way, man. That’s not even funny”

The smile never leaves Nick’s face. “Check your pockets,” he says.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

Kyle reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bunch of spare change, and out of the change, Nick retrieves a funny-looking coin with a faded face.

“You’ll want to keep this,” Nick says, and puts it in Kyle’s shirt pocket as well. “Be careful not to lose it.”

Now as Kyle looks at the people around him—how they don’t see him, how they actually walk past him, and some walk right through him, he realizes the truth.

“I’m . . . dead?”

“I’m sorry, Kyle. I’m also sorry that you didn’t make it into the light, but you will. In the meantime, I know a place you can stay for free right here in New York. You can even have your own apartment there. The only rules are that you have to do something different every day, and you can only ‘rent’ for one month at a time.”

“Why? What happens at the end of the month?”

“At the end of each month, you check with the coin,” Nick says. “It will tell you if you’re ready to move ‘uptown.’”

And although it doesn’t make much sense to Kyle yet, he follows Nick. Something inside Kyle tells him he can trust this kid—that Nick truly has his best interests at heart.

“So this place I’m staying . . . ,” asks Kyle. “Am I gonna like it?”

“I think you’ll love it,” says Nick, with a smile that’s just a little bit mischievous. “And you won’t believe the view!”

1 In her book, Mary, Mary: Trite, Contrary, Allie the Outcast points out that A, B, and C paint an accurate description of Miss Hightower herself.

* Arnaud Amalric, Archbishop of Narbonne and Grand Inquisitor under Pope Innocent III, 1204 AD.