Free DEAD GOOD by D A Cooper

reconstructions started anyway.’
     
    ‘Reconstructions… plural? As in there will be more?’ My head starts to tingle with apprehension. Brilliant. Just what we (don’t) need.
     
    ‘That’s something we can’t seem to control, though,’ he winces sadly. ‘It just happens. They don’t have a pattern and we don’t even really remember them properly when they have happened. We just know they have because we’re in the same place we were when we died. I’m flat out over there…’ he points at the doorway. ‘Mia is back in her bed…. Nonno is on the landing and Nonna is….’
     
    ‘In the screaming room…. I know – it’s horrific.’
     
    ‘So… your parents…’ I try to steer the conversation away from the dead to the living. ‘Where are they now?’
     
    Leo draws his legs back up and into his chest when I ask this. He has a name. Leo. It feels funny having a ghost with a name in my room. Well, I guess it’d be funny for anybody having a ghost in their room – called Leo or anything else for that matter. He looks sad now, though and I’m beginning to wonder if I should have asked him this question. I bet he misses them. I bet they miss him. Oh god, what a horrible thing to have happened to them all.
     
    ‘It’s heartbreaking,’ he lifts his eyes and they look huge and dark and sad. ‘The way our parents are so alone now. I don’t visit them anymore. It hurts me so much to see the pain our death has caused them. The last time I went to see Mum it was too upsetting. Ghosts have feelings as well, you know. It’s just too, too much to bear.’
     
    I feel a pain through my heart now. He looks so unhappy. Like he’s trapped and can’t do anything about it. I need to ask him something less agonizing.
     
    ‘So then – you can visit anywhere you like then, can you? I mean if you can visit your parents… not that you want to I mean, like you said… but… you can visit other places too…?’
     
    He sniffs slightly but I’m pleased to see he has a small smile on his spectral lips.
     
    ‘God! I wish!’ he laughs. ‘We’d be at Disneyland every day just to keep Mia amused! No – it seems we can only go to the places we visited when we were alive…’
     
    ‘So…oh… okay. And how exactly do you get around… travel about?’
     
    ‘It’s weird,’ he says, leaning forward again over his crossed legs, a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘I just have to remember what I was doing last time I was someplace – when I was alive I mean – and then voila! I’m back there. ‘
     
    ‘So how do you visit your parents then? If they don’t live here anymore I mean?’
     
    ‘Oh, they live with my uncle now – at the restaurant. They moved in there after the fire. The council wouldn’t re-house them because they didn’t have kids… not a good thing to happen to them on top of everything else.’
     
    I nod my understanding again and then as I’m nodding, a little thought starts to worm its way into a deeper part of my mind and I get to thinking…
     
    Okay – so let me work this out - without the use of a calculator. He can visit all the places he visited while he was still alive.
     
    Here.
     
    His uncle’s restaurant.
     
    School, presumably (now that’s gonna be fun).
     
    So how come he was in Amber’s bedroom this afternoon?
     

 
     
    eleven
     
     
     
    Predictably he disappears the minute he hears me think that – and I haven’t even got to ask the question can you hear everything everybody thinks? And the question after that one would have been how do I stop you doing it to me? Because frankly I think it’s an invasion of my privacy. No, I do.
     
    Alright, so he’s not exactly going to be able to turn in an expose or anything to the local newspapers, and even if he did I doubt it would make particularly interesting reading – it wouldn’t get on the front page that’s for sure. In fact the only slightly interesting secret he’s likely to be able to