That gets my attention. I swing my legs over the side of my bed and lean as far toward her as I can. I mean it to be a come-on-spill-the-details, girl-talk sort of move, but Abigail was raised in the late 1800s. To her, it’s probably the rich-girl-is-going-to-get-me-in-trouble-if-I-talk move. “Abigail, what do you know?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve said too much already. I’ve said too much.”
“Nathan says the reason we’ve been slipping up and calling each other Nate and Mercy since we met is because we were Nate and Mercy back when the school was a hotel,” I say. “Do you think that’s true?”
“I think he could be on to something, miss,” Abigail says. “It’s a very likely reason. Memories stick with us—especially when there is unfinished business in our souls.”
“You were alive then, weren’t you?” I press.
“I was, miss.”
“Did you know Nate and Mercy?”
Abigail flickers, which means her emotions are running high. “I’d rather not say. I’m not sure if it’s proper or not to give you too much information about your past.”
“It’s a simple question, Abigail. You either knew them or you didn’t.”
“I’d rather not say,” she repeats.
Something she said catches in my brain. “Wait, did you say my past? Don’t you mean Mercy’s?”
Abigail turns almost translucent in her fear. “Please, please don’t make me say more.”
“Fine.” I flop back onto my bed. “But if you could tell me, you would, right?”
“Oh, yes, miss, I’d do anything for you.” Abigail wrings her hands in front of her. “I just don’t know the rules, that’s all. I can ask someone, if you like. There’re rules about these things you know, even in the afterlife.”
“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
The tension leaves Abigail’s spirit. She even smiles at me. “It’s not a problem, miss. If our places were reversed, I would ask questions too.”
I pick up my English text book to reread the poems we’re being tested on tomorrow. I don’t mean for it to be a signal of “get out of my room,” but Abigail takes it as that. She’s just too polite to say it.
“Will you be needing anything else tonight, miss?”
“No, thank you, Abigail, and please just call me Meredith. I can’t get used to the whole ‘miss’ thing.”
Abigail bows, which is even weirder, before disappearing.
What did she mean before by “my past” instead of “Mercy’s past?” Did it mean the dream is more than I thought it was? Could Mercy and I be the same person—the same soul? I haven’t read much about reincarnation and past lives, but I know enough to keep quiet about that too. Potential past lives. Ghosts at school. The quieter I am about those, the better.
I shake my head. It is all too much. I need a distraction. I grab my English Lit textbook and study until I’m positive I will dream about these poems. Instead, when I close my eyes, I dream I’m dancing under the lights of the dining hall, but it’s not the dining hall; it’s the ballroom, and I’m not me, I’m Mercy. I’m wearing a blue dress, and I twirl and twirl until I’m dizzy. Someone—a waiter in a white tuxedo jacket and black pants who I know is Nate—hands me a glass of champagne. He gives me a wink and a smile and mouths, “Later, our spot.” I wink back before downing the entire glass of champagne in one gulp. I’m happy, I’m young, but, most of all, I’m in love. The part of me that knows I’m dreaming, the part that knows I’m not twirling around the ballroom, tries to pick up on all the intricate little clues and relationship patterns I’m supposed to be learning from so I don’t repeat the mistakes of the past in the present, but I can’t. Everything is whirling by so fast. I know I’m missing something. But what is it?
He’s as inviting as sunshine.
The words slip through my mind like they’re my own thoughts in that moment right between wake and sleep the next morning. It’s like a whisper pulling me into another time and place. I roll over and check the red illuminated numbers on my alarm clock. 2 a.m. Abigail once said that, back in her day, they knew 2 a.m. as the “witching hour”—the time when the veil between our world and the afterlife was the thinnest. Charles Haunting himself was big into the occult and held séances in the rotunda at 2 a.m., hoping to make a stronger connection to the spirit realm. Maybe that’s another reason the ghosts that linger have such a hard time moving on. There were too many people messing around with forces they shouldn’t have been. Despite Charles Haunting founding the town and turning it into a tourist trap that hasn’t let up even today, from what I’ve learned about the real man from Abigail versus what I heard in the legends, I don’t like him very much. He ruled the hotel with an iron fist. That fear still reverberates long after everyone has been dead and buried.
I flop onto my back and watch my ceiling fan glide around and around. For a hot second, I think about sneaking down to the second floor and knocking on Jay and Nathan’s dorm room, but even I don’t know which boy I’d be asking for or which one I’d want to answer the door. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem. Instead of dealing with my suddenly complicated love life, I force myself to recall the details of my dream. It wasn’t the first time I’ve dreamed of being Mercy. They started after Mom died. This is the first time I feel like I might be seeing the same thing as Nathan, but from a different perspective. When we hung out in the hospital, Nathan talked a lot about dreaming of his past as Nate. I think my past as Mercy is where the “he’s as inviting as sunshine” thought comes from. I’ve never thought anyone looked as inviting as sunshine. Sunshine is hot and burns and isn’t as magical as it’s cracked up to be. Sunshine means no ski season, and no ski season means Jay needs something else to focus most of his attention on. When you live in a state that claims three hundred days of sunshine a year, you’d think sunshine would be inviting, but not to me. Not now. Sunshine means confinement, possession, being put in my box and being told to stay there. It’s not inviting. Not in the least bit. That’s why it can’t be me thinking the thought. It has to be her. It has to be Mercy.
Everything I see in the dreams plays out like a first-person video game from Mercy’s point of view. I can’t tell any “normal” details about her like what her clothes look like or what color her hair is, but I know she sneaks off from the fancy-pants hotel her father runs—this fancy-pants hotel—every afternoon to meet him.
Nate.
I can tell you everything about him. He’s not that tall, he’s thin, and he has reddish-brown hair and freckles across his nose. I could sketch him a thousand times over if my art skills were any good. It’s like she memorized every detail about him in case something happened. Nate’s Irish but tries to hide the accent. Maybe they were still being discriminated against back then, and he didn’t want to be taken for just another “mick” looking for work. His smile could light up a room, and his laugh is so contagious that sometimes, even now, I wake up from laughing out loud right along with him. Every night, Mercy and Nate show me what it’s like to be in love with someone. I can pick up on those blatant clues enough to know that how Mercy feels about Nate is not how I feel about Jay. With Jay, it feels like I’m just marking time. I’m not even sure what I’m waiting for. Maybe I’m waiting for him to graduate as an excuse to drift apart.