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went to a different drawing bench.
    Mr. Connelly had been helping another student figure out the angles of the ceiling, but he glanced up when he saw I was moving around. “Is there a problem?”
    “Nope. Just wanted another perspective,” I said.
    He nodded. “Next time, though, pick a spot and stick with it. All right?”
    I nodded and got settled again, then started sketching furiously, trying to finish. I was angry and elated and terrified at the same time. Why had I done that? I’d just outed myself and the whole ghost thing to the entire class.
    I could still hear Head Jock and Cherry Cheerleader muttering to each other. Cherry looked almost agitated enough to cry—not a good idea, considering the gobs of mascara she wore. “How could she know about Dirk?”
    “Lucky guess?” Head Jock was shaken, too, although he was making a huge effort to hide it.
    “The accident was two years ago!”
    “It was big news. She probably saw it on TV or something. Or maybe she memorizes obituaries when she’s not busy hanging out with dead bodies.”
    Cherry shook her head. “I don’t know. That was really spooky.”
    Still standing nearby, Ghost Jock, otherwise known as Dead Dirk, glared at me and gave me the finger. Now that was interesting. The ghosts who didn’t want me around were most often the ones with unfinished business. They were unsettled and fussy, not ready to accept the reality of their deaths. I figured Dead Dirk was still hanging around his teammates because he just wasn’t ready to man up and move on.
    I got maybe five more minutes of sketching done before someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Busy,” I muttered.
    “Can you really see ghosts and stuff?” It was a boy’s voice again, but hesitant and genuine and almost hopeful instead of teasing and disdainful.
    I sighed, leaned my drawing board against the front of the bench, and turned to my right. “Yeah. Why?”
    It was the boy I’d seen get pushed into the lockers. He was small, with the kind of slightly awkward features he might eventually grow into. His black hair, an obvious home dye job, was tousled and unkempt, and he had dark eyeliner smudged around his eyes. Unlike the jocks and Cherry, he wore the requisite collared shirt and khaki trousers, but he’d doodled in permanent ink on the left knee of his pants, and despite the late August heat, he wore black-and-white striped arm warmers that ended in fingerless gloves.
Cheer up, emo kid,
I thought.
    “You’re Violet, right?” he asked.
    I narrowed my eyes a little. “Yeah. And?”
    “The same Violet who went to Palmetto Elementary?”
    Well, this was a different line of questioning. I nodded; that was where I’d gone to school before switching districts.
    “We were both in Mrs. Green’s class in second grade.”
    “Oh. Okay.” No lightbulbs of recognition went off.
    “I’m Tim Williams. We sat at the same table whenMrs. Green made us do those science activities in groups.”
    I vaguely recalled something about sitting in groups of four while Mrs. Green frumped around the room and made us do boring experiments with things like magnets. Magnets! Oh yeah. “You’re the kid who swallowed a magnet that one day.”
    Any thrill over being remembered was flushed right out of him. “I went to the emergency room because of that.”
    It was all coming back to me. Timmy Williams had had light brown hair and huge teeth. He’d worn T-shirts with puppies on them, and he’d had a habit of picking his nose and eating whatever he dug out. He looked pretty different now. I hoped his eating habits had also changed.
    “So anyway,” he said, “that’s cool about the ghosts.”
    “Uh, okay.” No one had ever described my abilities as “cool” before.
    “What’s it like? Do you get to cross them over and send them into the light and all that stuff?”
    I tried to draw and whisper at the same time. “Not really. I mostly just see them around. I can talk to them, but they don’t always