Free Afterlight by Rebecca Lim Page A

outside Floyd Parker’s house.
    Right-o. I sank down in my seat to avoid any telephoto lenses trained on the area
while Jordan turned the corner and began telling me about what I’d missed at school.
I closed my eyes, just listening and pretending I hadn’t heard it all already from
Biddy Cole.
    God, he and I are breathing the same air.
    Jordan was so close . If I put my hand out, I could rest it on his shoulder. It was
unreal.
    My destructive train of thought screeched to a halt when Jordan added, ‘So that’s
when I worked out my theory about you. You’re kind-hearted to a fault. You let people
walk all over you, all the time. And you never speak up for yourself, which is perfect
for someone like Eve. She’s incredibly strong-willed. She must have been interesting
to know when she was…’
    He hesitated, and the knuckles of his hands went white on the steering wheel, sunlight
glinting off the silver around his wrist.
    ‘Alive,’ I interrupted gently. ‘Say it, Jordan. When she was alive .’

9
    I told him the two things I knew about Eve: that she was somehow the spit of my own
mum and that her biker boyfriend had tried to gun her down in a city street, taking
out innocent people instead.
    ‘After that, she disappeared, he disappeared, the news story said. And then about
a fortnight later, she shows up at my place and keeps showing up until I do what
she wants.’
    Jordan was silent for a long time. Though as he eased the car into the
bumper-to-bumper traffic on Brunswick Street, he said abruptly, ‘I can say this stuff
to you, right? Because you’re okay.’
    Since, like, when? I almost blurted. I had to bite down on the insides of my mouth
to stop the words tumbling out.
    His grey eyes found mine for a moment before he looked away. ‘Even Hendo and Seamus
don’t know,’ he murmured, pushing a fall of dark hair off his face. ‘It’s not something
you want to…advertise.’
    I stiffened in surprise. Hendo and Seamus were Jordan’s too-cool-for-school wingmen.
Jordan had a secret too big even for the both of them?
    I found myself holding my breath so hard that purple spots and squiggles started
dancing in front of my eyes. Who knew that getting to the bottom of the mystery of
Eve would involve seeing inside Jordan’s head, too?
    He said, in a rush, ‘Mum gets impressions, inconclusiveness. She has to work out
what they want from the context.’
    He swung the car into a narrow side street on the fringes of the city. Old pairs
of sneakers hung by their knotted-up laces from overhead wiring like bunches of dingy
fruit.
    ‘Mum’s… clairaudient ,’ he added hesitantly, like I knew what that meant without a
dictionary handy, ‘but that’s about the extent of it. She hears things, you know?’
    I shook my head, still baffled.
    ‘Voices. She says, I’m more…“gifted”. I’ve always been able to see, hear, smell .
God, how weird does that sound?’
    He glanced across at me and I knew I was supposed to react, but it felt like I was
hearing him through a heavy veil. None of what he was trying to tell me was really
coming together.
    ‘So what I think is Eve—uh, Monica—used you to get through to me . It’s the only explanation.
I mean, you’re not one of us , are you? The people who “see” dead people. And the
rest.’ He sounded faintly disgusted.
    I opened my mouth to tell him about the glowing man from when I was five then shut
it again with a snap. I didn’t want to be one of those people. After Eve, I wasn’t
going to be one of those people ever again.
    Jordan swerved around a cyclist going the wrong way up our street.
    ‘I hate it,’ he growled, staring sightlessly at the pollution-stained façades sliding
by, the cracked and uneven sidewalks. ‘I wish they’d leave me alone.’ He shot me
a sideways look. ‘Like how she smells of violets?’ he said fiercely, scrubbing at
his left arm through the leather of his jacket. ‘You get that, right?’
    I nodded in confusion: so it was