3

M iles woke to the insistent squawk of his alarm. He blinked and stretched in the weak morning sunlight streaming through his windows. His feet were sticking over the edge of the bed—an unwelcome side effect of his last growth spurt—and his toes were numb. A rank odor hung in the air, and he was pretty sure it was him.

Yuck. He seriously regretted not mustering the energy to shower before crawling into bed. The realization he'd been sleeping with graveyard grime and corpse dust on his sheets was… not pleasant. A feeling that intensified when he made the mistake of running his hand through his hair, encountering something crusty. Morbid curiosity came with the territory, but even he knew better than to check and see what it was.

Jenna and Amy, his twelve-year-old twin sisters, were arguing outside their bedroom door. They simultaneously wrinkled their noses at his filthy appearance when he stumbled out of his room, blue towel and a change of clothes in hand.

"Eww, what happened to you?" Amy asked, her neon pink dress blinding in the dimly lit hallway.

"Wrestled a corpse," Miles got out around another yawn.

Jenna looked more curious than disgusted. She hadn't started showing any gifts yet—their dad said being a late bloomer was nothing to worry about, that his Uncle Grant hadn't shown signs of being a seer until he was nearly thirteen—and she bounced between feeling left out and asking a thousand questions whenever a job came up.

Everyone said she'd start showing any day, but Miles could see the worried scrutiny his parents gave her when she wasn't paying attention. Having a kid without an ability in the gifted bloodlines was rare, but not unheard of. To the more traditional families, it was treated with shame and embarrassment. A few years ago, rumors had spread that the Ambroses had disowned a distant ungifted cousin.

Miles couldn't even remember a time when he hadn't been empathic. It had always been part of him.

"Was it a skeleton?" Jenna questioned, chewing at the end of her blonde braid. "Or still decomposing? Did it smell?"

All the color drained out of Amy, her mouth pinching tight. She was too young to start working any of the physical jobs and despised anything to do with dead bodies. Already gifted as a medium—they could all see spirits, but mediums had an easier time connecting or compelling them—she had no problem with ghosts, but the first mention of a corpse sent her running in the opposite direction.

"You'd better get cleaned up for school," Amy said, hastily changing the subject. "This is not a good look for you."

"What are you talking about? Graveyard filth is all the rage right now," he teased, earning himself an eye roll. "And Jenna, don't say ‘it' like that—she was a person, someone's mom and grandma. Her name was María Mendoza, and she was… dusty."

Jenna leaned forward, ready to ask more questions, but Amy beat her to it, crossing her arms and glowering at Miles. "Mom said you're all going to a fancy party tonight. Why do you get to go and we don't?"

His stomach dropped. He'd forgotten all about the Hawthorne party for a few blissful minutes.

God, it was tonight .

He had zero desire to go. From what he'd heard, it would be a lot of thinly veiled insults hidden behind fake smiles. And finger foods. He hated how awkward it was to hold them, and never knew if you were supposed to eat the whole thing in a single bite or nibble. Finger foods were created by a sadist.

"Feel free to take my spot," he told Amy. "I'll give you ten bucks if you can convince Mom."

She inspected him, clearly wondering what the catch was, before running down the hall.

Ha. Miles didn't feel remotely bad for unleashing that monster.

He crossed the hall to the bathroom, feeling vaguely nauseous. Social situations made him anxious, especially ones with other psychics. It was hard to not feel vulnerable, even with his protective charms.

His shower should have been heavenly, but it was tainted by the knot sluggishly twisting up his insides. What if people tried to talk to him and his brain went blank? What if they expected him to dance, like in those old historical movies his mom loved? The only thing he knew how to do was square-dancing from a ridiculous section of PE a few years ago.

He pictured trying to remember square-dancing steps in the middle of a fancy ballroom full of strangers. In his mind, he tripped over his own feet and took out a whole group of oblivious dancers.

The churning in his gut tried to climb up his throat.

He stayed under the borderline scalding spray long after all the graveyard muck had washed down the drain, long after his usual ten-minute limit so everyone could get hot water in the morning. His skin was pink and tender by the time he was done, but it was worth it.

The bathroom was freezing so he dried off and got dressed quickly in a pair of jeans and a striped knit sweater he'd found on sale at the thrift store. It would look ridiculous with his scarf—really, what wasn't going to look ridiculous with his scarf—but he was beyond caring. He couldn't believe his life had reached the point where there was something worse than being that scarf guy at school, but here he was. He could thank the Hawthornes for that.

He ruffled his wet hair with the towel and wiped the condensation off the foggy mirror.

A stranger stared back at him.

Miles yelped, jolting in surprise and tripping over the bathroom rug. He caught himself on the sink and when he peeked back in the mirror, he found his own dirty-blond hair and brown eyes staring back at him in confusion.

What the hell?

He blinked a few times, ducked his head in and out of view, but nothing changed.

A knocking sounded on the bathroom door. He jumped out of his skin for a second time, cursing to himself.

"Hey," Charlee's voice called. "You alive in there? You're going to be late."

Miles yanked the door open in a billow of steam. "Something super weird just happened. I thought… I thought I saw someone else in the mirror." A boy with dark hair and a pale face.

Her eyebrows shot up. "A spirit?"

What would one be doing in his bathroom? Unless he'd been visited by Casper the Pervy Ghost, there was no way.

"Never mind," he told her, feeling silly. He was tired and stressed and now, apparently, seeing things.

"If that's the best excuse you can come up with to get out of going tonight, you need to try a bit harder," she warned. "Pretty sure being haunted is going to get you cleansed, not a free pass to skip."

Ugh, and now his nausea was back. "Thanks. Any ideas?"

"Don't look at me, I don't have to go. Guess there's one benefit to my mom being a mess—pariahs don't get party invites."

Aunt Robin had been a gifted seer, but after she'd failed to foresee the death of Charlee's father in a car accident a few years ago, she'd sunk into an all-consuming depression.

It was no secret Charlee had little sympathy for her mom. She'd told Miles once that she hated her mom's sheer refusal to move on, the memory of her dad a cold void between them. They never spoke anymore, pretended they couldn't see each other on the rare occasion Robin came out of her room. When Miles visited her, she never asked about Charlee. He reasoned it might be guilt, but Charlee didn't see it that way.

Miles loved his aunt, but he could see Charlee's point—she was losing her mother to a ghost.

Not a literal ghost. As far as Miles knew, Uncle Shaun hadn't stuck around.

His death had demolished Charlee. Miles had spent night after agonizing night with her while she sobbed into her pillow, curled in on herself, a hole carved out of her. Her grief and pain had battered him, relentless and inescapable. It was the first time Miles could remember resenting his gift, how helpless it made him feel that he couldn't do anything to take her pain away. All he could do was share it.

Aunt Robin hadn't come to see Charlee the whole time she was grieving. Not even once.

In a way, she'd lost both parents the day her dad died.

"I can't believe they're making me go," Miles lamented, Charlee following into his room. "It's going to be literal torture. I might die."

Charlee grimaced. "I wasn't going to tell you, but… your mom was talking earlier about trying to set you up with some girls there. She mentioned dancing."

The horrifying twang of square-dancing music echoed in Miles's ears. " No ."

"Sorry."

"No. I—I can't. I seriously can't."

Charlee didn't call him dramatic or tell him to suck it up. As the sole person Miles had told he was gay, she got that this was about more than the horrors of public dancing.

The charms they all wore didn't work on Charlee. She was a psychometrist, someone who could touch objects and get an echo of their history or energy, impressions left by the person who interacted with them, so her gift exclusively worked on inanimate objects. Last year, full of fear and gay panic, Miles slunk around the house, avoiding Charlee's casual contact with desperate resolve. Until one day, he hadn't heard her coming and she'd tugged on his sweater to get his attention.

She immediately knew. He knew she knew. But she'd still given him space, waited for him to come to her.

It had taken him two whole days to work up the courage.

Since then, she'd been his only ally against his mom's relentless efforts to find Miles a girlfriend. The only person who understood how much her assumptions hurt him.

His parents wouldn't care if he told them he was gay. If he explained that the reason he hadn't taken a girl on a first date, the reason he didn't care about meeting his dream girl at this party, was because he wasn't interested in any girl. But he still hadn't found the right time to say it, the right words to tell them.

Part of him figured it would happen when it was meant to. When he had a boyfriend, or his parents inevitably overheard a teasing comment from Charlee, or he slipped up and outed himself. It was easy to tell himself he could put it off until then.

The truth was, he wasn't ready.

"What am I supposed to do?" he asked, plopping down on his bed to pull on his boots. Maybe if he wallowed in misery long enough, the universe would take pity on him and swallow him whole.

"Hide," Charlee said, without hesitation. "You have to go to the party, but once you get there, find a quiet place to bunker down. I'm just saying, most bathrooms have locks."

She made it sound so easy.

Boots laced up, he stood and grabbed his backpack from the floor. "I've got to go, or I'll never get a parking spot."

On his way out, he peeked at the mirror on top of his dresser. His own face looked back.

He had bigger things to worry about right now than sleepy brain hallucinations.

"Good luck," Charlee called after him.

Yeah. He was willing to bet luck wasn't on his side today.