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enough to swallow my anxiety. I couldn't think of an educated response to Elaine's suggestion that a mutual hallucination is not a hallucination.
    "Can you take us to the Lightning Field?" I asked the girls.

FOUR

    O UT IN THE PARKING LOT I gave Lanz the remainder of _ Mrs. Hayden's meat loaf along with a Ziploc bag full of dry dog food from my luggage. We waited for the three girls to get their takeout order, which Katy said they would eat in my car.
    RayAnn seemed less perturbed about going to the field than going to the woods where the corpse had been. She leaned against the car, describing the bright moon as an almost perfect gold circle with one piece sliced off the side. I turned and found it, smiling a little. It was big enough that I couldn't see it all at once.

    "I can't think of any way to leave Elaine out of this," I said. "She means no harm. But I'd rather be punched in the gut than go around with someone like that. Take your pain all at once."
    "People who ... are not warm? Who break down your good mood?" she said, trying to vocalize it.
    "Yeah, and they're not satisfied until you feel as bummed out as they do. What am I trying to say...?" I reached down to pet Lanz, who bumped his cold nose affectionately into my hand while chewing his food. "She'll try to ram that story down our throats about seeing Chris Creed's ghost out there. I just don't buy that stuff."
    "About Chris being dead, or about ghosts in general?" she asked.
    "Both, but mostly that second thing," I said. "Put it this way. I think if someone came back from the afterlife, it would be either to say something profound or do something significant. For someone to come back just to scare the crap out of a bunch of tripping, high school ne'er-do-wells ... that's a problem for me."
    "How do you explain them all seeing the same thing?" she asked. "That's a hell of a story. She sounded so ... adamant."
    Rather than bust my nerves trying to answer that, I shoved my mind into another subject, some school reality: "I'll need to borrow your laptop sometime tonight or tomorrow morning."
    "I expected nothing less," she said, but sighed anxiously. "I can't believe you sold your laptop just before you've got a huge research paper due."
    "Journalism first, school second," I said, knowing no self-respecting newspaper would care about my GPA if I had a year or two of good published stories under my belt. "Besides, I might get Claudia to publish some of my findings somehow. It's a paper that should write itself."
    RayAnn knew about my research. I'd actually gotten participants off ChristopherCreed.com by posting in the "Bullied2" forum. She recited the assignment I'd posted for them because it had intrigued her: "Think of times you've been bullied. Then make up a person who is kind, merciful, and was there to see it. Write the story of what happened to you from his or her eyes instead of from your own."
    I took a bow with a chuckle. I'd gotten five respondees. Three said things like "This didn't help me. It's too hard to see the world from somebody else's view, especially when writing, which is hard." Two, however, wrote of shifts in their thinking that were "amazing."
    One girl said her "kind person" now exists almost constantly in her mind, and reminds her how to view a situation every time someone makes fun of her. Another high school senior said it helped him so much that he was going to rewrite his entire life from his kind person's point of view. I'll never forget his words: "There is something very cool about writing your worst memories through someone else's eyes. You start to see what happened to you...
almost as if it happened to somebody else.
Especially if that made-up person is nice, it's a great exercise because there are many mean people in this world."
    The kid had gone on about how we automatically take our self-esteem cues from mean people, which I felt to be somewhat true. But I was transfixed by his statement about looking at your life as if it