(Do Not Read Back Up Copy)

Chapter IX

Hailey

I was beside myself—very literally, beside myself.

I don’t know exactly how it happened; but there I was, “Hailey the see-through doppelganger”, standing next to my pale, unconscious, body which was sprawled out on the slaughterhouse floor. I’d never believed in spirits, and I’d never believed in ghosts, at least, that’s what I thought was the case until the shock of Rusty’s death turned me transparent.

The closest thing I’d ever felt to an out of body experience was falling asleep in biology. My sudden, unexpected transformation into “Hailey the friendly semi-ghost”, was shocking to say the least, so naturally, I was a little freaked out. Had I been in my actual body, I would have had a large-scale panic attack; but, I wasn’t, so physically blowing a gasket was on hold for the time being.

“Spirit” me was strangely calm, eerily calm—one of the few fantastic side effects of being “ethereally detached”. I looked over at my actual body with the kind of tragic pessimism that police officers do when they file through pictures of deceased kidnapping victims.

I wondered if I would die before the day was out—if Liam would put eighteen years to rest with a stolen gun or dip me in a vat of battery acid so my parents would have to bury me in a beaker.

Maybe he’d stab me, strangle me, or leave me in a field where the German Shepherds would have to sniff me out. Either way, my odds of getting back home in one piece were slimming by the hour.

I didn’t know if God could hear me where I was, or if the prayers of missing people went missing along with them; but if He could, there were miles between my mouth and His ear. Still, I hoped he was listening. What I needed was a loophole, but I wasn’t sure where I’d find it.

Rusty’s death was doing a Broadway musical number on my sanity, not to mention shredding my nerves into frayed confetti. The day’s circumstances had turned me into a bleeding, sweating, half-crazed mess, who was stuck in a madhouse with The Brothers Grim.

While “spirit” me was flipping through morbid outcomes like movie rentals on Netflix, “actual” me was starting to look pretty terrible—my armpits were practically peeing themselves and leaving lukewarm sweat stains on my t-shirt. Sexy.

My feet started tingling, and as far as I knew, spirits weren’t supposed to feel much of anything, so I’d either crossed over, or was seconds away from coming to. I kept my fingers crossed for the former. Heaven seemed a nicer alternative to waking up sprawled out on a rotting wooden floor.

The electrical fireworks in my feet suddenly spread to my ankles, politely telling the rest of my body that it was time to come back inside from spiritual recess and deal with reality—as awful as it was.

Pins and needles crept up the back of my calves, washed over my thighs, and spurted out at the top of my spinal chord. My nervous system fired a few warning shots across my body, unpleasantly reminding me of how much pain I was in before I’d gone into shock.

As my ears tuned the world back in, I heard Caleb shouting at someone loud enough to steal my attention. When I opened my eyes to see who it was, everything within twenty feet of me looked like shapeless smudges on a windshield; but I knew there was someone else in the room—someone who didn’t want me immediately aware of their presence.

I heard heavy, hurried footsteps headed towards the slaughterhouse door, and a final muffled exchange between the unnamed stranger and Caleb before the room settled back into silence. I blinked until the world blurred into focus and found Caleb sitting directly across from me. We were alone and the sudden solitude was unnerving.