Read Where I Want to Be for Free Online

Price died and came back to life,” Jane said, her voice full of wonder. “Imagine.”
    Imagine.
Sometimes when Jane used that word, like she did now, it made me shiver. It was the same kind of shiver as when Jane told me that Major Duncan Hobhouse had lost three fingers and four toes in the Civil War. “Look at those flesh stumps,” she’d whisper.
“Imagine.”
    But Caleb was not somebody Jane had made up inside her head. He was for real. It scared me to think of Jane sucking him deep inside her mind and changing him.
    “You don’t know that kid,” I said. “Not for real.”
    “Maybe not. But what I
do
know,” and here Jane paused and looked at me, her eyes widened, “is that if you’ve been dead
and
alive, you’re changed forever. Caleb Price is halfway human now. He’s been on both sides.”
    “He is not halfway human!” I screeched. Jane really knew how to push me into a good screech. “I saw him with my own eyes! There’s two sides to be on. The alive side or the dead side. Jane’s wrong, Mom, isn’t she? Isn’t she?”
    “Of course Caleb is one hundred percent alive, sweetie,” Mom assured me. “Jane’s just making up a story.” Then, with a searching look in the rearview mirror, “Why do you have to act so ghoulish, Janey? I know there’s a happier girl underneath those morbid thoughts.”
    I wasn’t as sure about that.
    Caleb swears he can’t remember anything about our visit to St. Christopher’s.
    “Think, think,” I’ll nudge him from time to time. “Two redheaded girls? One of them in a dress and party shoes, asking you too many questions? The other one hiding in the corner, wishing she could disappear into a hole in the floor?”
    “Nope, sorry. Blank,” Caleb promises. “Actually, my whole accident is pretty much wiped from my brain. To tell you the truth, most of the entire year after is a haze. Doctors say it happens with head trauma.”
    But everyone knew that after the pit-bull incident, Caleb changed. And not just because of the constant visual reminder, since the injury to his right eye had caused permanent pigmentation damage that made it a few shades darker than the left. After his bones healed and his wounds scarred over, he slowly became another Caleb. More of a loner type, who could no longer join in for pickup games of tetherball and kickball, but instead went swimming at the Y as part of his physical therapy. The new Caleb waited for the bus with his nose deep in a copy of Thoreau’s
Walden
. A gift, he told me later, from his uncle Rory. And the new Caleb had a doctor’s excuse to use Peace Dale Middle’s music room every morning for twenty minutes of meditation.
    Sometimes I heard kids tease Caleb about it in the halls. Asking him if he could bend spoons with his eyes or wherehe had parked his magic carpet. Caleb never seemed bothered by it.
    Indifference is weird. It makes kids think you know something they don’t. When Caleb started getting his name in the newspaper for winning regional swimming events, and when he placed second playing his guitar in the eighth-grade talent show, kids, cool kids like Alex Tuzzolino, began to pay attention. Then, eventually, to reverse judgment. Deciding that maybe the new Caleb Price wasn’t such a freak after all.
    But Caleb still didn’t care what people thought, and that only made him more mysterious. In a good way, though. Not like Jane, whose sulks and weird lies and angry outbursts had, over the years, left her quietly disliked all around.
    I prop up on my elbows, lean over Caleb’s face, and blow lightly. Caleb shifts his arm as his eyes flutter awake.
    “Good morning.” I dip to kiss him on the mouth, but he presses in his lips. “Don’t worry, sir,” I say in a TV detective’s voice. “Your breath is safe with me. Hand it over.”
    But Caleb turns his face so that he’s talking to the back of the couch. “You were crying last night, in your sleep.”
    “I was?”
    “Must have been a bad dream.