We’d nearly made it to the door to Ms. Wolters’s classroom when a series of giggles erupted behind us. Immediately, O’Reilly and Scott skidded to a stop and spun around. Joshua, however, sighed heavily before turning in the same direction.

I turned, too, and saw a group of teenage girls crowded together in a mass of low-cut tops and cheerleader skirts. In its center stood Jillian, surrounded by what was apparently her entourage. Unlike her friends, she looked bored and irritated. I got the sudden impression they’d forced her to come over here.

“Ladies.” O’Reilly greeted them with a suggestive raise of his eyebrows. Unfortunately, the flock ignored him entirely and focused their attention on one thing, and one thing only: the handsome, dark-haired boy standing beside me.

“Not ditching today, Josh?” one of the girls called out from the back. In unison, the flock began fluttering eyelashes and flipping hair.

Joshua cocked his head to one side and smirked. “Not today. I’ve decided to grace everyone with my presence.”

Jillian snorted and, true to form, rolled her eyes. But most of her friends obviously didn’t share her derision; all of them giggled as if Joshua had made the most hilarious joke they’d ever heard. A few girls even began to flip their hair more frantically, like showy birds in some weird mating ritual.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I grumbled under my breath.

Oblivious to both my and Jillian’s irritation, one girl disentangled herself from the pack. Once free, the girl drew herself up to her full height, which was still several inches below mine, and flashed Joshua a brilliant smile.

“Josh,” she purred, her voice throaty and deeper than I’d expected. Like her friends, she flipped back a strand of her honey blond hair. On her, though, the gesture seemed decidedly less childish, and her pale blue eyes had a calculating glint in them. “You can tell me—is Jillian being mean to you again?”

“Well, she’s trying.”

To my eternal relief, Joshua directed his answer at Jillian and not her pretty friend. The girl, however, wasn’t deterred. She slunk forward, passing her friends without a backward glance.

“You just let me know if you need protection from mean old Jillian.” Her words dripped with innuendo, aided in no small part by the suggestive way she leaned toward Joshua.

When he squirmed away from her, I felt the strangest mix of emotions. First, I wanted to jump into Joshua’s arms and give him a series of grateful kisses—rewards for his apparent disinterest in her. Next, I wished I was substantial enough to tackle this stranger and pull out her pretty hair.

I shook my head, shocked at myself. Who was I to think such terrible things? The impulse unnerved me and made me think back to my fears about my nature. The nature Eli so strongly insisted would condemn me.

Thankfully, Joshua shook his head, too, in response to the girl’s offer. “I appreciate it, Kaylen,” he said. “But I’ll stick with my regular bodyguards.”

He nodded to O’Reilly and then to Scott. The boys, however, didn’t look as if they wanted to pull bodyguard duty. They looked as if they would let this girl protect them, any day, in any way.

Kaylen merely shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said with a smile, not moving an inch away from Joshua.

Jillian sighed and rolled her eyes again, her irritation now barely concealed. “Let’s go, Kaylen.”

Finally—a few infatuated sighs and surreptitious second glances later—the crowd wandered off. Kaylen, of course, looked the most unwilling of all. She continued looking back at the boys as did Jillian, although I could swear Jillian’s eyes kept drifting to the spot in which I was standing. Though I felt a little foolish doing it, I wriggled behind O’Reilly and out of sight until Jillian rounded a corner.

Once the girls were gone, O’Reilly and Scott released big, gusting breaths they had apparently been holding during Kaylen’s performance.

“Dude, Kaylen Patton is smokin’ hot.” O’Reilly’s proclamation sounded worshipful.

Hesitantly, I turned to see whether Joshua also intended to chime in with his own awe and reverence. Without taking his gaze from mine, Joshua shrugged.

“I’ve seen better, boys. Much better.”

Like an idiot, I giggled and had to grab a fold of my dress to keep my hand from reaching up to flip my hair.

I sat on the edge of Joshua’s desk, trying not to distract him from a particularly dull lecture about integers. Soon enough, though, Ms. Wolters turned the class over to free study.

Almost immediately after the room quieted, Joshua slid a piece of lined paper across his desk toward me. On it he’d written in thick, capable-looking script: I have a brilliant plan. Want to hear it?

I laughed, but then instinctively slapped my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound. Without looking at me, Joshua grinned and wrote in the margin of the paper: You do realize no one else can hear you, right?

“Don’t be so sure,” I whispered, picturing Jillian’s expression at lunch. Then I shook my head at my own ridiculousness and, louder, said, “Okay, I give in. What’s your brilliant plan?”

Joshua tore another page out of his notebook and began to scribble furiously. Once finished, he pushed the paper over to me and then pretended to return to his Calculus book, watching me from the corner of his eye while I read.

Okay, his note began, my plan sort of fits into a theory I came up with last night. We know you died in the river, and you’re still hanging around here. So, maybe you’re from here. You said you remembered these buildings, right? Maybe you even went here, before or after you were home-schooled. This is what I’m thinking: my study hall is in the library, where the old yearbooks are. We can go through all of them, starting with the most recent, and see if we can find your picture.

Upon reading the last few words, I had the strangest sensation of the floor dropping out from under me.

“Aren’t you supposed to, I don’t know, study, in study hall?”

Joshua stared fully at me for a moment and then wrote again.

Bad idea?

I thought about that for a while. What was it about his suggestion that frightened me so much? After all, it might lead to some shred of information about my life. It might provide answers to so many of the questions that had plagued me the last few days, about who I had been, who I might become. Something that could combat what both Eli and Ruth had implied about me.

But therein lay the problem, too. Because once I knew this information, once I pieced together the missing parts of my identity, I would become real. I would be a real person, with a real story. A story that had ended.

Maybe that was the entire reason I’d never tried to find my headstone in the graveyard. Because, with such information, I would finally know—not just intuit, but truly know—I was dead.

And so would Joshua. This was a milestone for which I wasn’t completely sure we were ready.

“Joshua,” I started, my voice soft, “do you really believe . . . no, do you really know I’m dead? That I’m not alive? And I never will be again?”

As he looked up at me, all the playfulness, the relaxed confidence, left his face. His expression softened and became one that was simultaneously sad and sweet. Very slowly, he nodded.

I continued to stare at him. I really had no idea how to move forward from here. With my teeth clenched against the soft skin of my lip, I twisted my mouth to one side in frustration. In return Joshua gave me a small, close-lipped smile.

I wasn’t imagining the hope I saw in that smile. In it I could almost read his thoughts: yes, he knew I was dead; but he still hoped that this deficiency of mine wouldn’t be a problem. Or maybe he thought he could find some kind of solution for me. For us.