Free Crossing Over by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

weren’tsupposed to leave the Biodome without the group for any reason. But this
was no ordinary situation, no ordinary boy. Not even the bus, at this point, was ordinary.
    “Sure,” Ben said.
    My heart jumped a little.
    “Hi!” came Jac’s voice.
    “Hey,” I said.
    “I couldn’t find the, uh, book I was looking for, but look what I got!”
    Jac held out a small stuffed penguin with a sweet face and a stylish tuft of hair on the top of his head.
    “I couldn’t resist buying him. Isn’t he adorable? His name is Osbert; it says so right here on his name tag.”
    “He is adorable, Jac,” I said. “Listen, Ben and I need to run outside for a second. Alone.”
    Jac’s eyebrows practically shot clear off her forehead like little rockets.
    “It’s not… we just need to… it isn’t,” I stammered.
    Jac pulled me to one side. “Does this involve ghosts?” she whispered.
    Oh.
    See, if I said yes, Jac would want to come. If I let her think perhaps this was more of a glockenspiel moment, she would send
me off alone with Ben with her handprints firmly on my back.
    “No,” I said. Could she hear the guilt in my voice? I was lying to my friend.
    Jac raised one hand in the international “stop” position.
    “I don’t require any explanation,” she said primly.
    I took a breath. I’d explain later, but right now there was no time.
    “If Sid does a head count and we’re not back, tell him we…”
    “One of us dropped a cell phone and we went back in to look for it,” Ben suggested.
    “Got it. Cell phone.” Jac said. Then she winked at me.
    The girl was relentless.
    “We better hurry,” Ben said.
    We darted out the front door together, me and Ben Greenblott.
    Voices, spectral penguins, and pouring rain notwithstanding, it was turning out to be an outstanding afternoon.

Chapter 11
    Tim the Motor Coach Operator was fast asleep in the front seat with a huge cup of coffee balanced between his knees. We had
to stand in the rain banging on the door for about a minute before we could wake him, by which time we were soaking wet. Tim
opened the door and closed it after us, took a slurpy sip of his coffee, and immediately went back to sleep. He seemed completely
unconcerned with what we were doing there, and that was fine with me.
    “Come back here,” I told Ben, leading the way down the aisle. “To where your seat is.”
    When I got to Ben’s row, Britches stared up at me expectantly.
    “
Hochelaga
?” he asked.
    Beige Girl gave me a brief glance, then resumed staring out the window.
    “Okay,” I said, stepping to the side to make room for Ben and gesturing toward the spirit seats. “Do you see anything there?”
    Ben looked carefully.
    “No,” he said. “Is there something there?”
    “Two people,” I said. “Spirits. The first one, I call her Beige Girl because, well, her skin and her sweater and her hair
are all kind of that color. She got on the bus at Notre-Dame. Hasn’t said a word. There’s a big guy sitting next to her, who
looks about eighteen or nineteen and is wearing sort of old-fashionedbeat-up clothes. He started tagging along at Mont-Royal
and then followed us down to the bus from there. I call him Britches.”
    Britches looked up when I said that.
    “
Hochelaga
?” he asked. Britches looked like even he was getting tired of hearing that word come out of his mouth.
    “He keeps saying the same word, and I don’t know what the word means,” I said. “Sometimes he says other stuff, but it’s in
French, I think. I can’t really make it out.”
    “I didn’t hear it,” Ben said. He looked genuinely disappointed.
    “I guess it’s because these two are purely spectral,” I said. “There’s nothing physical from that time period that you could
touch now to connect with them.”
    “So you can see them, and they can see you. Can they see each other?” Ben asked.
    “From what I can tell, no,” I said. “Eitherthey don’t see each other at all, or they register each other