“Can you even imagine,” Rima said, laughing, and did a little mock shiver. “No powers!”
“Powers aren’t all that, Harriet,” Kasper said. “You’ll be fine.”
Harriet really wanted a power. She wanted one right now. “But how do they work? Where does the magic – thing – power come from?” She hadn’t felt the slightest urge to cast magic spells yet.
“Well, when you tried to leave the hall and started disintegrating, it was because your energy was weakening with distance, right?” Rima said. “Energy is what keeps us all here as ghosts. It’s what our powers run on.”
Harriet’s head felt like it was going to explode. “What happens if you use it all up?”
“Then your time’s up,” Rima said. “You disintegrate.”
She remembered the feeling of her atoms dissolving when she’d left Mulcture Hall and shivered. “OK. This is a lot to take in. Are there any other hugely important things about the afterlife that you haven’t told me yet?”
“Nah, mate. You’re good to go,” Kasper said.
“Though I do have one question for you,” Felix added. “It’s something I’ve been dying to know. How much do Freddos cost now?”
The rest of them don’t understand Harriet quite yet. But you don’t need to be able to see the future to predict what she’s going to do.
Let’s go back to 1994. You haven’t been there yet, and it’s about time I looked back at it from this angle. It’s funny how you can see different things, each time you look. Like turning over an object to see it from different sides.
So. Here’s Felix on the first day he met Rima and Kasper. He’s nervous. He’s unpacking his things in his room when his brother, Oscar, brings him a bin bag full of clothes that had been taken to the wrong room by accident. He’s brought a girl with him, someone who has a room near by. This is Rima. Felix has no idea that she’ll become one of his best friends.
It’s strange to me, that when everyone else meets people for the first time, everything about them is completely new. Nobody has any idea of what is to come. How do you all know which stranger to remember? Which conversation to pursue?
When Oscar introduces Felix, Rima grins at him, a little shy herself. Oscar suggests that they all go and grab lunch – he wants to help Felix make friends, so that he doesn’t spend all his time alone. But he also likes Rima. She never even noticed. I don’t think she knows about his crush, even now.
As they’re walking down the stairs, talking about what A-levels they studied, whether they applied to Oxbridge and where their second choice of uni was, Felix bumps into a boy by accident. They both stumble, and an alarm clock falls out of a box he’s carrying. It smashes on the ground.
The boy is Kasper, obviously. He sneers at Felix, annoyed. Embarrassed, Felix forgets to apologize and flees down the stairs. Kasper yells something sarcastic after him, looking at the broken clock in dismay. It was brand new – a gift from his dad for starting uni. He wanted to make sure that Kasper didn’t sleep in and miss his lectures (he’d nearly missed one of his exams last summer).
Later, Kasper and Felix will both be mortified when they realize that they are neighbours and must share a bathroom for the next year. But that’s still to come. For now, Oscar tells Rima he’d better go after Felix and make sure he’s OK. That they’ll do lunch another day.
Rima nods her understanding, then kneels to help Kasper pick up the pieces of smashed glass. They go their separate ways without even introducing themselves. (That would take another three weeks.)
But do you see yet? How hard it is to stop yourself from caring, even when you know you shouldn’t? How much family matters?
Oscar knew. Felix knew. Harriet doesn’t know yet. But she will.
Chapter 5
HARRIET
Harriet’s power was locked up somewhere inside her where she couldn’t reach it. She tried to create clouds out of her fingers, imagining rain and thunder, but nothing happened. She needed to talk to this Qi person right now.
While the others were cooing over Rima’s fox, she turned to Kasper, and pleaded, “Will you take me? To see – er, Chi?”
“Qi, yeah,” Kasper confirmed. He squirmed and looked at Rima. “I don’t know, though. Qi is kind of busy.”
Harriet remembered the way his eyes had been filled with longing when he looked at her earlier. Her gran had taught her when she was very young that if you wanted something from someone, you had to work out what they needed. If you could find a way to offer it to them, then you’d have them eating out of the palm of your hand.
Kasper wanted love. Or the excitement of first lust, at least. That was the simplest thing in the world to give to him. She’d watched a lot of people flirting, especially in freshers’ week. There were girls who drew constant attention simply by tilting their head in a certain way, or rearranging their hair over their shoulders. She drew on those memories.
“Please, Kasper,” she said, pitching her voice low and intimate, so quiet that the others didn’t hear her speak. She lifted one side of her mouth to make her cheek dimple. “Can’t you make an exception, as a favour to me?”
Out of sight, she took his hand and rubbed his thumb with hers.
Kasper looked down at their entwined fingers. There was a moment when she thought he might be about to say no again, but then he mumbled, “I guess we can go and talk to Qi. It can’t hurt.”
He stood up, pulling her to her feet. “Catch you guys later,” he said to Felix and Rima, who stared at them in bafflement.
Harriet bit down on her victorious smile. That flirting thing had been a lot easier than she’d expected. Making friends was far tougher, but this, she was good at.
“How are you dealing with everything?” Kasper asked as they walked to Room 4E, where the mysterious Qi apparently lived. “It’s a lot.”
“It is, at that,” she said dourly. “I don’t know. I guess … I just thought it’d be different, you know? I didn’t believe in the afterlife when I was alive. I assumed once you died, then that was it, fade to black. But I always thought, if there was something after death…”
Harriet picked at her fingernails, trying to work out what she wanted to say. “I thought it would be so incredibly amazing that I wouldn’t care about my old life any more. I wouldn’t want to return to real life, because it would be even better afterwards. Being stuck here, I feel kind of cheated. The afterlife should be less … dusty, I think.”
She fell silent, aware that she had been talking for far too long. Kasper had stopped in his tracks and was staring at her, wide-eyed. He had long, pale eyelashes.
“Wow. I prefer your version.”
She let out a low laugh. “Me too.”
His hand crept onto her lower back again. “Listen, I think you should be prepared for this to fail. Qi will try her best to help you, but it would be easier if you accepted that it’s not going to work.”
She let out a noise of exasperation. “Never,” she said firmly. She was going to find a way to go home, with or without a power.
With infinite care, he took her hand in his again. He did it in a way that made her suddenly regret ever initiating contact.