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couldn’t be sure about yet. Some anger issues there but at least he
was honest. At the same time, Jamie was right about me needing to recover a
little. I definitely needed some alone time to try sorting things out.
    Just then, another door caught my eye at the end of the
hall. “Is that Curtis’s room?”
    “No, he’s on the third floor,” Naomi said. “He kind of
likes his privacy.”
    “Nice way of saying he’s a total creep,” Nikki said.
“There was no third floor before he came along.”
    Okay, so the verdict definitely remained out on Curtis.
    “That room belongs to Martha,” Jamie said. “You’ll meet
her soon, I’m sure.”
    Even though this was the third time someone had mentioned
Martha, I guessed she was probably just a shy dead kid. I figured I’d meet her
sooner or later.
    ~~~
    Once I closed the door, I checked out my room. It wasn’t
gigantic like the spaces downstairs but it was still pretty big. I noticed
right off that it had a desk holding a computer. You guessed it, an iMac, which
kind of creeped me out at first. But I checked to be sure. It went right to
Google, no scenes from my life popping up. For a minute, I got my hopes up but
it was all incoming, no outgoing. Social networking with the living was out of
the question. Come to think of it, my parents might have approved.
    The thing is, they’d been at Bethany lately about this
guy she met through her Tumblr blog. In a way, I understood. What did anyone
know about Will other than he was a friend of one of Bethany’s online friends
and that he was also into poetry? The poetry part was weird enough, if you
asked me. But he was also twenty-four, getting ready for graduate school. Yeah,
my parents loved that part. At least he lived in a different state, which made
my parents feel a little better. The whole thing had been an ongoing issue but
now it seemed so small. If only we could go back to that being the big problem.
I felt pretty sure that right now my parents weren’t all that worried about
Bethany’s friendship with Will.
    My room also had an HDTV, DVD player and an iPod with
docking station. There were cabinets for storing things (not that I’d brought
anything along) and shelves lined one wall loaded with all sorts of books,
including the manga and graphic novels I loved to read. A quick check of the
closet and dresser showed an array of jeans and T-shirts pretty much the same
as I had back home, not exactly my old clothes but close enough. As promised,
the room had windows at both the front and back, sunlight flowing from two
directions at the same time—kind of strange, but cool at the same time.
    Still, it was beyond weird to think that this was where I
now lived. I’d drowned, met a bunch of kids in a tree, slept in a hammock that
had turned into a house which had disappeared again, then gone to my own
funeral. Now I basically had an apartment in a house the size of Texas with an
arcade, food court and inside pool.
    I didn’t know what to do with any of it, so I grabbed a D.
Gray-Man from the bookshelf and went to stretch out on the bed. I read
about three pages and felt myself fading out again. I remembered what Jamie had
said before. Transitioning was huge, no doubt about it. I just couldn’t keep my
eyes open any longer.
    ~~~
    Again, I didn’t really remember any other dreams. Just the
one about Bethany. This time she was sitting in a room I’d never seen before.
There was almost no light, just a little coming in through one small window. She
sat on a bed staring straight ahead, her eyes dull, her mouth hanging
half-open.
    “Bethany,” I said. “I’m here with you. Where are we?”
    Bethany didn’t move or look up. Her expression didn’t
change. It was like someone had taken her soul, leaving just this empty shell.
    “Bethany, look at me! Can you hear me?”
    I heard a noise and looked to see something starting to
cover the window. The room kept growing more dark, the light slipping away.
Soon, Bethany