“I’m a fake student,” she said. “With a fake age. Anyway, my friend Violet and I were coming home from a club. She was driving. I knew she was drunk. I should never have gotten in the car. I should have stopped her. But I was kind of drunk myself, and I didn’t always make the best decisions back then. We ran smack into a bollard. There was smoke, we were bloody, Violet was unconscious. I heard this voice telling me to keep calm, to get out of the car. I looked over, and it was Jo. She was standing there. I was crying, completely freaking out, but she talked me through it. We’ve been best friends since then. Actually, I tried to get her a phone for Christmas. She can carry things—not big things, but she can lift things like phones. But it’s kind of hard owning things when you’re a ghost. You don’t have pockets or anything. And people would just see a phone floating around, which would be weird. She picks up trash because she likes to keep busy, and apparently people don’t notice trash moving. They think the wind’s blown it or someone’s thrown it. You have to think about these kinds of things when you’re a ghost.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“This thing. This thing that I am.”

“Course you can. There’s nothing to do, anyway. It’s just natural, yeah?”

“How am I supposed to do all this work?” I said, running my hands through my hair. “This essay. I have to write it this weekend. I have to write an essay on Samuel Pepys and his stupid frickin’ diary and I can see ghosts.”

I walked around the room, picking up my things, putting them back down again, trying to establish some baseline of reality. Everything seemed the same. Same room. Same Boo. Same ashtray. Same unwashed mug with red wine residue in it.

Boo ate her sandwich and watched me.

“I’ve got it,” she said, brushing the crumbs from her lap onto the floor. “The library.”

As it was a Saturday night and just before dinner, there were only a handful of people in the library, and those who were weren’t the kind who paid much notice to other people. They were all deep in their zones—headphones, computers, books. Boo walked the floor quickly, weaving in and out of all the stacks downstairs, then going upstairs and doing the same thing. Alistair was sprawled on one of the wide windowsills at the end of the literature section, authors Ea–Gr row. He had one leg stretched high, his Doc Martens boot planted flat against the side of the window, the other hanging down. He seemed to be the focus of Boo’s search, because she walked right up to him.

“She knows now,” Boo said.