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my name.
    I rest my head in my hand, and fight with myself. Don’t indulge the joke, don’t play along. I would have made sure she was okay if I’d seen her hurt in the bushes last night—if I knew she was even real. But she’s an actress and she’s trying to make me feel bad … I take in the face and the tears. He probably hired her just for her tragic looks. Or maybe—
    Maybe Logan is fucking with her, too?
    No, that’s too much, even for him. She has to be in on it. I should test her; see if I can poke a hole in her story. I rack my brain for every weird sci-fi book, story, movie, or TV show I’ve ever seen. I remember one show about strange encounters where a hunter said he was in the woods when a man appeared out of thin air, walking through the trees, and disappeared again. He’d been dressed in a uniform from the Revolutionary War.
    “What’s the date where you’re from?” I ask gamely.
    She points at today’s newspaper spread over the counter. “Same as today. I thought of that. I’m not a time traveler.” She focuses intently on the paper in front of her, and then steals a glance at me. “But I think I know … how to get back.”
    “Then why don’t you do it?”
    She tears at the edge of the paper, turning the margin into neat shreds.
    “I tried. I went back to the corner during the day today. I thought—since that’s where it happened before—maybe there’s a way back. But I couldn’t find anything.”
    And there it is. “So, Logan sent you to lure me back to the corner. What’s he got planned? Has he invited the whole school to come out and laugh at me—call me crazy? Make sure I don’t try to get back on the team?”
    She looks me straight in the eye. “My skin tingled when we touched last night.”
    Whatever words I was going to say next die on my lips. I curl one hand into a fist, the same hand she grabbed yesterday. I can almost feel the electric sensation still dancing under my skin. How could Logan have orchestrated that ?
    “You felt it too?”
    She grimaces and nods. “It made me think … maybe I need you to get back.”
    “No.”
    “You pushed me …”
    “No way.”
    “And I ended up here—”
    “I can’t—”
    She slips off her stool and comes right up to me, desperate. “Maybe if we try the same thing again, I’ll go back!”
    I jerk away from her. “I’m not going back there with you!”
    I rub my eyes and stare at her, looking like a frightened animal, yet sitting in my kitchen like the very fact she’s here is nothing new. Logan can’t make me look dumb if I know what he’s up to … but something nags at me deep down.
    A tingling under my skin.
    When we reach Fowler High School, it’s obvious we’ll have to wait until dusk. The weather is chilly but clear, and the campus is crawling with activity. The track team runs laps around the block, jogging past Viv’s shrine, again and again. A group of skaters do ollies in the parking lot. I don’t look at the athletic field.
    Since I’m exhausted, and ghost girl looks like she’s ready to claw her way back wherever she came from, I buy us each a cup of coffee at the gas station down the block. I lean against the bus shelter. She sits. Neither of us says much. I can’t help looking at her. Her cheeks are pink with cold, which looks kind of odd against the color of her hair. Not striking, the way Viv’s looked with her dark eyes and curls, but pretty enough in her own way. I turn my Zippo over in my fingers, think about lighting a cigarette, but I don’t. A bus pulls up, the door opens. When neither of us moves, the driver gives us a look that probably sums up his Monday, and drives on.
    “That means a lot to you?” she asks.
    I follow her gaze to the lighter in my hand.
    “You just keep staring at it,” she says. “But you don’t smoke.”
    “I thought I lost it,” I mutter.
    “When I came to the corner the other morning, it just came clattering out of the bushes.” Her voice brightens.