Free The Everafter by Amy Huntley Page B

with Gabe. He’s smiling. He helps me sit back up. “No keys?” he asks.
    “Not under there,” I say. “At least, not the ones we’re looking for right now.”
    We look some more for his keys, and he finally locates them on the ground just outside his open door. He holds both sets of keys up to show me that we’ve succeeded in our quest to find them.
    “Ready to see the river?” Gabe asks, dropping my keys into my—
     
    Back in Is, I feel startled—and stalked.
    By death.
    Gabriel is dead.
    Like me.
    That moment when Gabriel couldn’t find his keys…at the time, I thought our affinity came from us both losing the same thing.
    But that wasn’t the only experience we were sharing.The tugging, binding, magnetizing pull of that moment…I have only felt it one other time on my journeys back to haunt my own life. It was during that slumber party where a ghostly Tammy was hanging out.
    My ghost and Gabriel’s made some kind of spiritual contact, just as Tammy and I did at the slumber party. And the tragedy is that I didn’t realize it at the time, while the ghostly me was reliving those moments in the car.
    And I can’t go back.
    Neither can he.
    We both found our keys.
    A profound sense of loss is oddly accented by the presence of Gabe’s companionship.
    But I don’t want his company now. Not like this. Not in death. Not as a ghost.
    I want him to be alive.
    I shouldn’t be surprised to discover that Gabe is dead, too. I’ve sensed all along that he belonged here with me in Is. But somehow I’ve always imagined he was back on Earth, still living the life I knew him in.
    I can’t help grieving that I’ll never return to that moment in the car…that moment when he first kissed me…that moment where I slid so gently from insecurity at being with him to the greatest sense of togetherness I’d ever had.
    But I’m glad I can’t, too. Those other moments that I’ve been re-returning to seem to fade a bit every time I go tothem. It’s kind of like reading the same book over and over. You keep trying to capture what you felt when you first read it, but the feelings just aren’t ever as…magical.
    I can’t bear to have that happen to this experience with Gabe.
    I guess I’m glad, too, that I can’t go back to that moment and keep myself from finding these keys. What if I ended up ruining the moment of our first kiss?
    Not being able to re-experience our first kiss is, in a way, heartbreaking, but to have never experienced that kiss at all…that would be self-breaking. I wouldn’t even be me without that exact moment.

the underwear
    age 12
    Even though it’s dark out, I feel completely exposed as I drop my underpants onto the ground. The water will be cold, but I don’t care. At least when I’m in that pool I’ll feel more covered up than I do standing here naked. Why was I stupid enough to play Truth or Dare in the first place? I was sure that if I chose “truth,” Tammy was going to—horror of horrors—ask me if I had a crush on Gabe…and he was sitting right across from me. He and Roger had been biking down the road in front of Tammy’s. They normally don’t spend any time with us, but tonight they stopped. Andpretty soon they were just hanging with us. Maybe they were bored, nothing else to do on a warm Saturday evening two weeks before the end of the school year.
    But choosing “dare” was a mistake—definitely a mistake, I realize now, as I slip into the water as quickly and quietly as I can. It’s freezing, totally freezing.
    “They better not be watching,” Sandra says.
    Just exactly what I’m thinking.
    “And you owe me for this,” she adds.
    No doubt about that. Not many friends would be willing to put themselves through this agony just so their BF wouldn’t have to do it alone. I still can’t quite fathom that Tammy has done this to me. “I dare you to go skinny-dipping in the neighbor’s pool,” she said just ten minutes ago. Hard to believe my whole life has