Free Body & Soul (Ghost and the Goth Novels) by Stacey Kade

even before I’d grabbed his wrist. He saw it somehow. He knew his sister well.
    And sometimes I wondered if he knew I wasn’t her. That would be trouble. Big trouble.
    Tyler shook his head at me. “You went out for a walk through the window ?” he scoffed. “Right. Better not try that one on Mom.”
    This is what I’d been missing by not having siblings? No thanks. My only experience with younger brothers came from being around Misty and her family. But her half brothers were still in diapers, and the worst they ever did was steal a lipstick to use as a crayon.
    I sighed and backed out of the window, preparing to climb in properly. If he was going to sound the alarm, I wanted to be inside, at least.
    In an awkward motion, I swung my bad leg and then my good one over the sill. I grimaced, bending my head to fit beneath the frame, and let myself down in a barely controlled fall to the floor. The impact sent a jolt of pain through my injured leg, and I stumbled forward a step, bumping into the desk. The desk lamp and a bunch of books and magazines crashed to the ground.
    “Shhh!” With a quick glance at my bedroom door, which was half open, Tyler edged closer to me. “Do you know how close it was?” he demanded in an undertone. “Mom sent me down here to tell you we were back early. What if she’d come down here herself instead?”
    I stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. So he wasn’t going to tell on me? “She would have been pissed?” I felt that was a fairly safe—and true—answer.
    Now it was his turn to stare at me. “What is wrong with you? Of course she would have been—” Tyler shook his head impatiently. “Never mind. You didn’t even tell me you were going this time.”
    He sounded almost…hurt. I shifted, uncomfortable. I really wanted to sit down, take the weight off my leg, but obviously he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon without some kind of conversation. Great.
    “Okay,” I said slowly, trying to piece all of this together and come up with some kind of Lilyesque response. Clearly, because Tyler and I had never had a discussion about my sneaking out before, he and Pre-Coma Lily must have. So, wait, Pre-Coma Lily had been sneaking out? Where? Why? I knew she wasn’t perfect, but this went even beyond what I’d suspected. Then again…Lily had “dated” Ben Rogers for a while, and he wasn’t exactly the show-up-at-the-front-door-and-meet-and-greet-with-the-’rents type. Kind of interfered with his whole pillage-and-plunder-the-naive-but-willing plan.
    But she hadn’t mentioned sneaking out to meet him in her diary. Then again, maybe Lily was brighter than I’d given her credit for. It was one thing to describe a date you probably weren’t supposed to be on; another to spell out in big bold letters the specific crimes for which you could be punished if a parent went snooping. Besides, everything she wrote about back then was Ben-related. The getting-out-of-the-house part probably hadn’t been all that important to her.
    I realized Tyler was still waiting for a response. “Uh, sorry?” I offered.
    “Forget it,” he muttered. He plopped himself down on the edge of my bed.
    Fabulous. Was there a polite way to say “Get out”? How would Lily have said it? She probably wouldn’t have. For all I knew, she and Tyler had been best buds, blah, blah, blah. You know, it would have been so helpful if Lily had written about this kind of stuff in her freaking diary instead of pages full of her name intertwined with Ben’s in every conceivable fashion.
    “So, were you with Ben and those guys?” Tyler asked.
    Aha, I knew it!
    “Not this time,” I said carefully. “Just visiting some other friends.”
    He nodded. “Don’t forget, though, Ben said that one time he’d let me try driving his car.”
    Um, okay. I didn’t know what to say to that.
    Tyler looked so hopeful…and relentlessly dorky with the cowlick at the back of his head and his oversized polo