"Taylor, wake up."

"Well, at least it starts with a T," I sighed. "

Belmont smacked my unconscious self repeatedly across the face. He had slapped me at least twenty times in the past five minutes, as if a single hard slap would jolt me awake, and for a moment, I thought he was showing compassion for someone other than himself. That tiny bit of hope was dashed when he muttered about being blamed for my supposed death and needing his father to bail him out of jail.

I rolled my eyes as he contemplated dumping me in the bathtub with the water running and framing my death as a suicide. Despite being in separate planes of existence, I wanted to physically touch him, to allow myself the glorious opportunity of strangling him. It would be a story that I would be proud to tell my grandchildren one day: how I killed the infamous Fin Belmont a second time.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" he mumbled, with a harsh slap. "Where is this water coming from? You better wake up right now. I can't have this happening to me again. If my dad finds out, he'll take away my car and credit cards."

I clutched my chest. "Oh no, not the car and credit cards. How will you ever survive?"

"Don't you people have a bracelet to call your special hospital?" he asked, lifting up the sleeve of my oversized Avengers shirt to search for a medical bracelet.

Belmont reached for my phone beside my pillow. "Hey! Get off my phone!"

He continued to rattle off ideas. "I could text a friend, pretend to be her, ask them to come over, and then they'll get blamed for this. Wait, does she have friends besides that nerd? It doesn't matter. There you are, Nelson. Who the hell texts about books? Can you two get any lamer?"

"I am going to love letting you pass on and rot," I growled.

Reading through our texts, Belmont imitated Will in a mocking, nerdy tone. "I thought your presentation was—hey. Belmont and his gang of morons couldn't understand the book unless it had a bunch of pictures. It's not their fault, Will. They have the combined IQ of a goldfish. Look who thinks they're so funny behind a text."

"I happen to be hilarious. You don't notice because you're either ditching class or too busy with your tongue down a girl's throat," I replied, trying to rid the muddy, metallic taste from my tongue.

The door creaked open and Ryan sleepily stumbled into the room with his teddy bear. Its left ear partially torn off, it was a present that I had given to him when he was born at the hospital.

I remembered how I went to the toy store with my father and paid for it with my own money, a combination of my allowance and money given to me by a group of elderly women at the church. As a joke, Hilton told the women that I was dying from a dreadful disease and heading to the hospital later that day for surgery, not to visit my newly born brother.

The women, feeling sympathetic, gave me about a hundred dollars between them for buying a present after I survived the surgery and the speechless expression on Hilton's face as her plan backfired was enough incentive to play along with the cruel lie. With the money, I decided to buy him a teddy bear that recited a recorded message when a person squeezed its hand and ever since, he had slept with it every night, my recorded lullaby putting him to sleep.

"Tessa, Teddy and I had a nightmare," he said, stifling a yawn. "Can we—Tessa?"

"Shit. Kid, you're sleepwalking. Go back to bed," said Belmont, hiding my phone behind his back.

Ryan's eyes grew wide and he rushed to my side, checking my wrist for a pulse. I bent down beside him, wishing that I could hug him to prove that there was no reason to worry despite my weak pulse and the water dribbling down my chin. It was three months ago, a week after his birthday, when he learned about the special gift in our family that was passed from generation to generation. Being five years old, he struggled to understand that when I experienced a person's death, I was simply unconscious for a brief amount of time, not truly dead.

Shouting for my mother, he opened the bottom drawer of my dresser to search for a bottle of the herbal extract that she used to wake me in Nurse Simpson's office. My mother tended to blend it together with water to dull its bitter taste and kept bottles in multiple spots, such as the kitchen, her car, and her purse, in case I experienced a death in a public place.

Belmont seized his wrist, hissing for him to be quiet. I jumped to my feet, angered that he was hurting my little brother. Ryan, knowing that it was a ghost but unable to see them yet, surveyed the room.

"W—who's there?" he whimpered.

"I'm standing next to you," said Belmont, incredulously. "Are you blind? What, does your whole family have problems? Be quiet."

"Let go of my brother!" I shouted, clenching my fists.

My lamp flew across the room at lightning speed, hitting Belmont in the face. He fell to the floor as the broken lamp rolled under the bed. Ryan and I shared the same stunned expression though in his childish imagination, a sort of ghost fight was occurring in front of him.

When my mother opened the door, she witnessed three very different sights: Ryan kneeling beside my unconscious self and waving his hands as if he was attempting to catch an invisible fly, my other self staring at the broken lamp, and Belmont wiping blood from the fresh cut on his cheek.

"She's not waking up, mommy," said Ryan, his hands hovering over my body. "Teddy says it's a ghost fight."

She ruffled his hair. "Don't be afraid, sweetie. Let me help your sister."

My mother found the bottle in my dresser and poured drops into my mouth. As the herbal extract took effect, I sat up and used my sleeve to dry my chin. She rubbed my back gently, ignoring Belmont's whining about needing stitches.

Ryan's tiny arms wrapped around my neck. "Teddy and I were really scared."

"I wouldn't leave you behind," I said, reassuringly. "You should get to bed."

He gave me another hug and returned to his room, talking to his teddy bear. "So your little brother's not blind. He's just messed up in the head."

My mother clasped my shoulder, stopping me from throwing the broken lamp at Belmont. "I will not have you insulting my children in my own home."

"Oh, now you notice me?" he asked, dizzily scrambling to his feet. "Before you think of calling the cops, I didn't hurt your daughter. She fainted out of nowhere. Maybe you should keep her in the hospital. Speaking of, you can take me to get stitches."

"That's quite a nasty cut on your head, dear," she said, keeping me seated on the floor. "Are you a friend of Tessa's?"

"I'm Fin Belmont," he snapped.

Never one to respect his elders, especially those of a lower class, he spoke to her like she was a fellow teenager. My mother was unfazed by his rudeness.

He pointed between the two of us. "Do I look like someone who would hang out with your daughter? Take me to the hospital."

"There's no need for that, Fin," she said, somehow remaining calm.

"Maybe you didn't hear me. My last name is Belmont...as in the family who owns this town," he said, losing patience. "If you don't take me to the hospital, my dad will sue you until you're broke. Judging by this place, it wouldn't take much for that to happen."

My mother patted my arm. "Tessa will explain everything."

I was dreading this conversation even more than usual. Belmont, clueless as to why my mother left the room without offering to drive him to the hospital, turned to me for an explanation. I knew that this would end in disaster.

He insulted my mother, implying that his family would bankrupt mine and get us kicked out of Belmont Falls. Fed up with listening to his voice, I picked up a squirt bottle on my nightstand, used to train our cat, and sprayed him in the face.

"Stop talking," I said, spraying him a third time. "It's my turn. You got hurt at the party."

"Yeah, you hitting me with a tree branch," he muttered.

I sprayed him again, mostly for personal enjoyment. "No. You don't remember but in time, it'll come back to you. The reason my brother acted like that before isn't because he's blind. It's...it's complicated but only my mother and I can see you."

"You're not making sense," he said, prepared to snatch the bottle.

I decided to treat it like ripping off a bandage. The sooner he made his choice, the faster he would be out of my life.

"You died at the party," I stated, bluntly. "I don't know how but that's why you ended up in my room. What happens next is up to you. I can't force you to choose one way or the other. You can choose to pass on and wherever you end up, you end up...or you can stay behind. The second option is if you're not ready to leave behind people you care about or to accept your situation. If you choose to stay, you can see everybody and interact with things in this world but to everyone but me, my mother, and other people like you, you'll be invisible. The choice is final. There's no do-overs days or years later. I can give you a minute to mull it over."

Belmont sniggered, an odd yet common reaction. How could anyone react calmly to their death? He believed that it was an elaborate prank concocted by Will and me, payback for years of torment.

"I get it. You and your geeky boyfriend are playing a prank." He clapped slowly. "It was to get back at me. Nice try."

"It's not a joke," I said, too tired to show sympathy. "You're dead. I know how hard it can be to accept but—"

"Shut up," he interrupted.

Anger was another typical reaction. "I've dealt with it for years and you're not the first to—"

"I said shut up!" he shouted. "I'm not dead!"

With a deep breath, I held out my hands. "With people like you, it's better to pass on to get peace. Let's get this over with so I can get some sleep."

He angrily slapped my hands away and stormed out of the room. I chased after him, finding him in the kitchen where he stole my car keys from a basket on the counter.

"You can't drive a car," I said, blocking the doorway. "If someone sees it moving without a person behind the wheel, it'll lead to a lot of questions that me and my mother can't answer."

"Then you can drive, Byrne," he snarled, tossing the keys at me.

"Drive where?" I asked, my brain running on half empty.

"To the Falls," he replied, as though it was obvious. "It's not that late so people will be there. You're taking me back and depending on my mood, I'll consider not destroying your reputation so badly that you'll want to transfer to a school in Antarctica."

"F—fine," I agreed, considering a terrible but necessary idea. "Let me tell my mother that I'm going out. Wait for me in the car."

As he left the house, slamming the front door, I dialed a number on my phone. "Belmont Police Department. This is Isabelle speaking."

I tried to disguise my voice. "Hi. I was at a party by the Falls tonight and I lost my wallet. I uh was walking on the bridge and I thought I saw something in the water. I—it might've been a person."

Outside, Belmont honked the horn. "I'll send someone to check it out. Thank you for the tip, miss."

I scribbled a note for my mother, telling her the truth about bringing Belmont to the Falls. Any other teenager likely would have lied about meeting with friends but considering my only real friends were Will and Elena, that cover story would not fool her.

After putting on a pair of jeans and sneakers, I left the house. Belmont was impatiently rapping his fingers on the dashboard. Holding onto the tiniest bit of sanity left in me, I walked over to the car.

The drive to the Falls was filled with silence and awkward tension. Repeating the dying speech would set off an argument so I settled for turning on the radio to make the ride bearable.

"Your taste in music isn't awful," he said, looking out the window.

"Can we please talk about this?" I asked, hoping to change his mind. "It's a bad idea if you see—"

"Drop the act, Byrne." He played with the dial. "To be honest, the prank was dumb but I'll give you credit for you and your boyfriend sneaking me out of the party."

"You find it believable that we staged this prank to explain how you ended up in my house, which you've never been to, in the middle of the night?" I asked, to poke holes in his thought process. "Oh and like I told you earlier, he's not my boyfriend. We're friends."

Belmont snorted. "You're really that naïve? He may be a geek but he's also a guy. He's being nice to get laid."

"Maybe with your friends, that's normal but thankfully, not every guy is like you," I said, increasing the volume to drown out his voice.

"Dress like an actual girl for once and you get a backbone?" he shot back, tactless as ever.

I gripped the wheel to contain my rage. "Just because I don't dress like Claire and her robots, it doesn't mean I'm not a girl. Clothes don't define a person."

He raised his brow. "You sound like a fortune cookie."

Upon arriving at the Falls, we discovered that the entrance gate was locked shut. When I noted the parked police cars to Belmont, he brushed it off, claiming that his friends hid their cars in a secluded spot to avoid the cops. He was adamant that his friends were still partying at the Falls and suggested climbing over the gate.

A No Trespassing sign was hanging in the middle. "I know you have a limited vocabulary but you should at least know what that sign means."

"You should at least know what that sign means," he repeated, in a mocking tone.

It took every ounce of restraint not to punch him. "I don't talk like that."

"Quit being a baby," he said, walking towards the gate. "We do this when the cops come to bust a party."

"It's like ten feet high," I said, a giant lump in my throat.

"You're going to be there when I embarrass you so you're climbing that fence." He snapped his fingers. "Let's go."

The initial ascent up the fence was easy. At the top, I made the mistake of peeking at the ground and it felt like I had climbed a skyscraper. My heart was beating out of my chest and I clung to the fence. I counted backwards from a hundred, taking shaky breaths.

Hearing Belmont shout for me to move faster, I continued to climb, my fingers digging so deeply into the metal that my fingertips were red, and once I swung my legs over, I quickened my pace to get to the solid ground.

While I cupped my trembling hands over my mouth, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, Belmont searched, through squinted eyes, for his friends in the darkness. It was impossible to see past the trees.

"That must be them." Bright lights shined in the distance. "Bet they're playing manhunt. What's up with you?"

"N—nothing," I stuttered.

"You're that winded from climbing a fence? Don't give them extra reasons to make fun of you, Byrne," he said, yanking me down the path. "I mean, your social status can't plummet any lower after I get through with you but this isn't doing you any favors."

"I'm fine," I said, my fingertips stinging from the cold metal. "I don't like climbing fences at two in the morning."

We walked in the direction of the lights and I realized that we were nearing the bridge. Belmont tuned out my pleas to turn back, dismissing it as a desire to escape humiliation.

The entrance to the path that led to the bridge was blocked off by yellow tape with the words Crime Scene - Do Not Cross written in large black letters. It extended on both sides to two wooden signs for diverging trails.

"You can't do that," I said, as Belmont tore the tape.

He waved his hand nonchalantly. "It's a gag. Chace steals this kind of stuff from his dad's office."

Was he crazy or heavily in denial? I never met someone so unwilling to accept the truth. Trying to be a voice of reason, I questioned why Parker would put up the tape.

"Because it's funny," he said, tossing it to the ground. "You wouldn't know what that is even if it bit you in the ass."

A sane person would put two and two together when they saw the police cars and crime scene tape. I found his level of denial simultaneously astounding and depressing. He seemed more determined to prove that his friends had not left the party at the Falls to himself than to me, though he masked it by teasing that Hilton would not let me forget my failure of a prank.

We stopped at a hill overlooking the bridge where instead of his friends, half a dozen cops and German Shepherds were scouting the area. Judging by their grim expressions, they did not drive out to the Falls for a late night swim. One of the cops, a young man in his early twenties with swept-back golden blonde hair, trudged out of the lake, drenched from head to toe and carrying a Belmont High varsity jacket.

Recognition of the grisly situation did not register with Belmont. "Chace probably got wasted. He can't handle his liquor too well."

"We need to leave," I said, watching the blonde cop haul something else out of the water.

"Relax," he said, amused by my panic. "It's not that serious. He fell into the lake, a loser sophomore dialed 911, and they're waiting for his drunk ass to sober up. That's weird that he's got my jacket."

"Can you please listen to me?" I pleaded, grabbing his arm. "If the cops see us—"

His smile faltered as the cop moved towards his colleagues, revealing the body sprawled on the ground. Belmont was staring at his own body, a deep gash on the side of his head, his lips pale blue, and his lifeless green eyes gazing up at the starless sky.

His face was blank but the longer he stared at his dead body, the stoic façade faded, a fearful gleam in his eyes. My compassionate nature overriding my loathing, I hugged him to give him some comfort. He tensed, his arms hanging stiffly at his side, and shoved me.

"What was that?" he growled.

"A hug," I said, unable to imagine the complex emotions weighing on him. "I—I know this is a lot. You're upset and—"

"I'm not upset and I don't do hugs." Even in death, he retained his tough guy image. "Is this another part of your prank? You and Nelson made a lifelike doll of me and hired guys to play cops? You two really went all out."

"There is no prank," I said, weary from his denial. "You know the truth but you don't want to believe it so you're choosing insane theories over the reality."

"That's not me." He gestured to himself. "I'm right here. This is...no, I'm not..."

"Let's go back to my house," I offered.

During the drive home, Belmont was completely silent, twisting a frayed string on his seat belt. Plates of cookies, sugar and chocolate chip, and two glasses of milk were on the kitchen counter.

My mother, taking a tray of cookies out of the oven, greeted Belmont with a warm smile. Seventeen years of experience taught me that whenever she felt anxious, she baked to calm her nerves. She was extremely chipper, as if a dead teenage boy, a Belmont no less, was not standing in her kitchen.

"How can you see me?"

It was the first time he spoke since seeing his body at the lake. "Do you like chocolate chip or sugar, Fin? I made both to be safe," she said, transferring the cookies from the tray to a plate. "Would you like brownies? Have you had mantecaditos? I don't mean to brag but at the church bake sales, they are a—"

The counter shook under his grasp. "I just saw my dead body! How can you see me?!"

She delicately rested her hand over his. "I know this must be difficult for you. It's tragic to have one's life cut so short but we can't fight these things. We can try to escape our fate but in the end, it catches up with us. That is why Tessa and I were gifted with our abilities. It's our job to guide souls to the other side."

"More like mine," I said, biting into a sugar cookie.

"Tessa has already explained your choices. Most people don't wish to see their bodies that were left behind but perhaps it helps the truth sink in," she said, handing him a glass of milk. "Both choices have their appeal. It's common for children your age to choose to stay behind because they're not ready to leave their loved ones. Have you decided yet?"

"I'm not choosing either," he stated, leaving the glass and cookies untouched.

Only someone as spoiled and conceited as him would choose a third non-existent option. "Por dios," I muttered, scrubbing the tray.

"You're telling me no one has ever decided that they don't want to be a ghost or move on to whatever is on that other side?" he questioned, stubbornly.

"No, they haven't," I replied, willing to make the choice for him to end my misery. "It's the rules. You're a ghost or you pass on. No third option, right, Mami?"

Looking reluctant, my mother confessed that it was possible to choose neither option, a rare choice. If Belmont made that decision, he would remain a ghost but as time passed, his ghostly existence would become permanent and he could not choose to move on to the afterlife.

She warned him against choosing this third option, with the caveat that those older and wiser than him regretted it when they realized that they wanted to be with their loved ones but found themselves trapped as ghosts.

It did not discourage him. "I'm picking neither."

"Well, as I said, it's your choice," she said, drying her hands with a rag. "Our kind tends to frown on it, which is why I never taught it to Tessa. They view it as a cheat to the natural flow of life. From what I've read, you'll be a partial ghost until a year after your death and if you decide to pass on before then, Tessa will be your guide. I do hope you won't regret it."

She left the kitchen to check on Ryan. I had a nagging feeling that she was not being honest about why she left it out of my teachings.

Belmont stuffed his face with chocolate chip cookies. "So do you do those séance things for money?"

I glared at him. "We're not mediums. We're called reapers. My mother doesn't agree with what you chose but we're not allowed to decide for you. It's against the rules. Let me explain how this ghost thing works, Belmont. No one can see you except for a reaper. In this town, it's me and my mother. Other ghosts can see you too but they like to keep to themselves. You can interact with things in the physical world but you need to be discreet."

Clearly not listening, he chugged his glass of milk. I did not bother repeating myself, now that I was finished with my role in his death journey. He could enjoy his new ghostly existence somewhere far away from Belmont Falls.

"You were drowning because of me?" His question made me freeze in the midst of washing his empty plate and glass. "It's why you were spewing water?"

"Yeah, if someone within a specific radius of the town dies, I feel it. I don't faint in the middle of class because I've got some medical problem," I explained, switching on the dishwasher. "It's from that death experience. It's like an out of body thing. I'm not in the same place as ghosts but I can be seen by reapers. I don't understand much of it myself. I'm going to bed. Have fun being a ghost."