Snap (9 page)

“What did you tell that girl?” I asked. “What was it—Avon?”

Delilah smiled. “I said that something bad was going to happen to someone she loved—or maybe to someone close to someone she loved. I threw that in to cover my butt. I said I couldn't see the picture clearly, but I thought it was going to happen outdoors.”

“Did it?” I asked.

“A month later, her cousin had a car accident.”

“Oh, my God.” That was kind of creepy.

Delilah made a little waving motion. “She was fine. And I'm not sure Avon even loved her. But it was enough to establish my
reputation.” She slid off the rock. We all followed, Duncan helping me down with both hands, being super-careful even though I was, like, two feet from the sand.

“Do you still tell fortunes?”

She shook her head. “I gave it up when I started high school because it was wrong—and also because I wasn't charging enough. I mean, five bucks a reading? Ridiculous.”

“So you don't have any psychic abilities?” I pressed. “Because I've heard they can be genetic.”

Delilah leveled her gaze. “Madison. Get real. No one has psychic abilities. My mom is a loon. There are rational explanations for all supernatural phenomena.”

“What about ghosts?” I asked.

“No such thing,” Delilah insisted, brushing a bit of sand off her overalls.

“But my photographs…” I said.

Delilah sighed. She sounded like an exasperated adult talking to an especially irritating two-year-old. It annoyed me.

“Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean it's supernatural,” Delilah said. “That's the kind of thinking that once made people believe in rain gods and the man in the moon.”

We were quiet for a moment. Duncan squeezed my hand. I didn't squeeze back. I wanted Lexie. I wanted to go home.

Leo tapped his chin, thinking. “The figures in Madison's photos have to be ghosts. It's the only thing that makes any sense.”

Delilah said, “Ugh,” and rolled her eyes.

“They could be,” Duncan added.

“Sure,” Delilah said. “And I'm the Easter bunny.”

“Guess that explains the fuzzy coat,” I said.

Delilah's mouth dropped open. I wished I could undo my words; Delilah wasn't the kind of person you talked back to. But after a moment she smiled. “Hey, Leo, let's walk back to the fire. I'm getting kind of cold.”

 

“So what's their deal?” I asked Duncan. We were at the end of the beach, where the rocks jutted into the ocean, just past the point where I'd taken the first creepy photograph.

We took a few steps into the ocean. Foamy water scurried around our bare feet. Duncan had told me that stingrays swam out here during the day, but he was pretty sure they slept at night.

“Whose deal?” he asked. He'd rolled up his jeans, but the bottoms were getting splashed anyway.

“Delilah and Leo. And Rose. Especially Rose. How old is she?”

“Thirty-one next month,” he said. “It's totally freaking her out that she can be that old. Rose is great, but she can be a real drama queen.”

The numbers whirred through my brain. “So she had Leo when she was…”

“Fifteen,” Duncan said. “Delilah says that's why Rose is, like, emotionally stuck. But that's just the kind of thing Delilah says because Delilah acts like she's forty. Rose is cool.”

“What about their father?” I lifted my camera and snapped a random shot, as I'd been doing ever since Delilah and Leo had headed back to the bonfire. Duncan leaned over me, and we peered at the screen: no ghost.

“They don't talk about it. Though Rose mentioned something about bad chakras.”

“And what about your dad?” I asked. “How are his chakras?” I pictured Larry with his heavy eyebrows and bandannas. He and Rose seemed like a really weird combination.

Duncan reached into the foam and pulled out a rock. He peered at it for a moment before tossing it far into the surf. It landed with a splash.

He said, “Rose says my dad's magnetic field is all screwed up, which is why he can't stay in one place. We've been in Sandyland over a year. That's a record.”

“So you're staying?”

He stared into the distance. “Nah,” he said finally. “I think we'll leave soon.”

“Why?” Since I wouldn't be sticking around, either, that shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did.

“My dad's getting restless. He'd stay if Rose was more into him, but he's asked her to marry him, like, four times, and she won't commit.” He snorted. “She says she's too young.”

“How did they meet?” I asked.

“Rose was visiting a meditation center in this town where we were living. My dad was working at a convenience store, which he hated because he likes to work with his hands, but it was the only job he could find. Anyway, Rose came in for a cup of herbal tea. Three days later we moved here.”

“Weren't you mad?” I asked. “I mean, having to leave your friends and stuff?”

He shrugged—just one shoulder, like it was no big deal. “We'd only been there a couple of months. I didn't have any friends.”

“So…do you want to leave Sandyland?” I had to admit: tonight it seemed like a pretty nice place.

“No,” he said simply. “I like it here. But—I kinda gotta go with whatever my father wants. He's the only family I've got.”

He reached into the surf and pulled out a shell. He held it up to the moonlight and then handed it to me. “It's a sand dollar. For good luck.”

I tucked the shell into the hoodie pocket. And then I aimed my camera toward the beach and snapped the darkness. We bent our heads over the screen. Half of me was afraid that another figure would appear, and the other half hoped that one would. But there was nothing there but water.

 

Nothing says romance like an overlit parking lot, an open-all-night McDonald's, and the haze of freeway fumes. Still holding hands, Duncan and I stood within view of Home Suite Home on a tiny patch of grass by the curb, in the shadow of a mangy-looking pine tree.

Duncan took my other hand and pulled me closer. He was only a couple of inches taller than me, which meant I could look straight into his eyes.

“Can I buy you a Big Mac?” he asked. The golden arches (the real ones, not my mother's eyebrows) glowed behind him.

I shook my head. It was almost midnight: my curfew back home. Did I have a curfew here? Did it matter?

“Then can I kiss you?” he asked.

The air between us felt electric. My stomach fluttered. Had I felt this nervous before Rolf had kissed me?

I held Duncan's gaze. I wanted to kiss him so much, but it felt like I should know him longer or better. I didn't even know his last name. Come to think of it, I didn't even know his
first
name.

“Tell me your real name. Then you can kiss me.”

His mouth turned down at one corner. He frowned, thinking. Finally, he gave my hands a final squeeze—and dropped them. “Well, good night then.”

“Good night?” This was not going the way I had planned it.

“I had fun.”

“Oh.” I crossed my arms over my chest and thought about how much boys suck.

He looked cold, standing there in the shadows. I yanked his sweatshirt over my head.

“You can give it to me tomorrow,” he said. “When we print out your photos.”

“I don't need it anymore.” I rubbed the goose bumps on my arms.

He nodded once and yanked the sweatshirt over his head. “It smells like you.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“No, that's a good thing.”

“Not always,” I admitted.

He touched my cheek and put his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie before pulling out something round and white. “You almost forgot your sand dollar.”

I took the shell. “Oh, yeah—for good luck.” Fat lot of good it was doing me.

“I'll wait here,” Duncan said. “Till you get inside.”

“You don't have to.” Across the parking lot, a faint light glowed in the window of my room.

“I want to,” he said. “So, I'll see you at the shop tomorrow? It opens at ten. And by the way, my last name is Vaughn.”

 

My parents were both awake, lying in bed with the light on. My mother turned her head when I opened the door.

“Did you have fun?” she asked quietly.

I shrugged. “It was okay.” (He didn't kiss me.)

She was quiet for such a long moment, I thought she'd fallen asleep. “We're glad you're home,” she said finally.

“This isn't home.” It just popped out.

I walked toward the bathroom, but she stopped me just as I was about to turn on the light. “Madison, we have something to tell you.”

L
OOKING BACK ON THAT MOMENT
when I stood in the bathroom door is like seeing another girl. I thought I knew who I was: Madison Sabatini, fifteen years old. Lexie's best friend. The newest yearbook photographer. A shopaholic with cute accessories and great hair. Well, maybe not so much anymore.

I wish someone had taken my picture at that instant. I would have called the shot “Before.”

My father stayed lying on the bed. “I'm sorry, Madison.”

As a general rule, if someone says, “I'm sorry,” for no apparent reason, you're screwed.

“Okay,” I said, thinking,
Let's just get this over with.
Were they getting divorced after all?

My mother got out of bed and stood in the middle of the floor in her nightgown, arms crossed over her chest. She glared back at my father like she was waiting for him to say something—or at least open his eyes, which were closed now.

I'd live with my mother, of course. Weekend visits with my
dad. They wouldn't make me choose.

Finally, my mother spoke. “We lost the house.”

At first, I didn't understand. “But it's just where we left it,” I replied stupidly.

My mother shook her head. “Not that kind of lost. We have loans. A lot of them. For the house, the pool, the cars. We're six months behind on our mortgage. So now—the bank is taking the house.”

I shook my head. She wasn't making any sense. And did this mean no divorce? “So ask the bank for a little more time.”

“We did.”

“But why don't you just sell the house? And then we can buy something smaller.” I'd already kind of, sort of accepted that this might happen.

My father finally sat up in bed and opened his eyes, though he still wouldn't meet my gaze. “We can't sell. The real estate market has gone down since we bought the house. We owe more money on it than it's worth.”

“What about your credit cards?” I asked, my stomach growing queasy. This couldn't be happening.

“They're already maxed out,” my father admitted.

“But what about our things?” My voice cracked. Maybe this was all a big joke. Tell me it's a joke. Tell me they're getting divorced and this is their weird way of softening the blow.

“Most of the furniture, the TVs—they were all bought on credit,” my father said, still gazing at nothing. “The stores sent trucks to our house last week. Picked everything up.”

My mother cleared her throat. “Your father talked to the bank today. They're giving us one week to get everything else
out. After that, the sheriff will change the locks. Your father is going back on Wednesday to move everything into a storage unit.” She blinked: must have had something in her eye. Tears were out of the question.

She continued. “After that, the bank will auction off the house. The signs are probably out on our lawn already.” Her voice cracked. With her two index fingers she wiped tears—they really were tears—from below her eyes.

The bank was going to auction off our house?
My mind began to whirl. What else did that mean? How long would it take before things got back to normal?
How could they be so stupid?

I held on to the doorjamb and tried to steady my breathing. I'd already considered the possibility of selling the house, but this just sucked. And it
was
kind of embarrassing. At school, I'd play it down. My mother was bored with the house. My father wanted to rent until the real estate market hit rock bottom.

“Why a storage unit?” I said. “I mean, we're going to have to rent another house anyway—might as well find something now.”

My parents didn't answer. That's when it hit me.

“We are going home, aren't we?” Still nothing.
“Aren't we?”

“I've spent months trying to drum up work,” my father said.

“You've spent months watching TV in your bathrobe,” I said, not caring that I hurt him.

“Nobody around us is building anymore,” my mother said, her voice tight.

“So Dad can get a different kind of job.”

“It's not that easy,” my mother said.

“People are still building at the beach,” my father said.

I pictured a sand castle.

My mother said, “There's money at the beach.”

I imagined a quarter gleaming in the sand.

And then I got it. “We're moving to
Sandyland?”

“We can get back on our feet here,” my mother said, her voice back to its usual steadiness.

“I can't just leave my friends and my school!” I shouted. “How can you do this to me?”

If my camera had captured this moment, I would have deleted the shot immediately. And then I would have backed up to the picture I wished I could have taken before my parents had said anything: of me coming in from a night out with my summer boyfriend, with no real care in the world.

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP ON
S
UNDAY,
about two hours later than usual, my mother said, “Do you want me to make you coffee?”

I nodded. My brain was still fuzzy with sleep but not muddled enough to convince me that last night's conversation had been a dream.

The room was oddly quiet: the TV was off. “Where's Dad?”

“Working.”

“On a Sunday?”

“Just till noon. It was some kind of emergency. They're paying him double.”

The gurgling coffee filled the silence between us. “You want me to pour you some cereal?” she asked finally.

“No,” I said. My mother was trying to play nice, but I wasn't going to let her. Okay, except for the coffee, which I really needed.

Once it was ready, I took a mug and my camera out to the patio and shut the sliding door behind me. I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing.

It didn't work. I thought about all of my friends from home. What would everyone say? How would I tell Lexie? And what about Rolf, who, according to Lexie, was so into me again? Not that I cared about Rolf anymore.

But there was Melissa Raffman and the newspaper—they still mattered. A lot. I remembered the day Melissa called to congratulate me. As soon as I got off the phone, I called Lexie, and we screamed and screamed because we were both on
The Buzz
staff, which meant our lives were going to be perfect.

My mother opened the slider. “We're going apartment hunting this afternoon.”

I clutched my coffee mug. “Will we shoot to kill or just maim?”

She didn't think that was funny, and okay, maybe it wasn't, but you have to give a girl credit for trying.

“I'm going for a walk,” she said. “If you go out, make sure you're back by noon.” She closed the slider.

I reached for my camera and turned it on. I scrolled through the photographs until I reached the ones I'd taken of Lexie and her sisters on my last day in Amerige.

How could that life be gone if I could still see it glowing on the little screen? Larry had said that pixels capture energy. Didn't that mean that my world still existed, if only in a small way? I wished I could crawl into the camera, back into my old life.

Looking at the pictures made my chest hurt with sadness, so I flicked forward: nothing like a few ghosts to take your mind off things. There was the old lady on the beach. There was the young man in the window.

The shots from the night before showed moonlit waves and shadowy sand—nothing strange or spooky. If there had been ghosts
on the beach with Duncan and me, my camera hadn't seen them. For some reason, that made me feel even worse.

 

When I got to Psychic Photo, Duncan was sitting on the green bench outside the purple front door. When he saw me, he popped up and tucked his hair behind his ears. He was wearing the same thing he'd had on the first day I'd met him: long shorts and a black T-shirt. “Be careful,” I said. “Some crazy-ass skateboarders hang out around here. They might run you down.”

I almost hadn't come—but then I figured I could just as easily be miserable downtown as in my motel room. To my surprise, the misery drained away—at least temporarily—the moment Duncan flashed me a big smile.

God, he was cute—whatever his name was. I'd totally overreacted the night before.

“You just get here?” I asked.

He shook his head. “My dad was afraid that the guy in the window would sneak in during the night, so we stayed over.”

There was a motorcycle parked in the space right in front of us.

“But there was no guy in the window,” I insisted. As long as I could concentrate on ghosts, I didn't have to think about the rest of my life.

Duncan nodded. “I know. And I said to my dad, ‘No way do I want to sleep someplace haunted,' but he was all, “I have to protect Rose.” He rolled his eyes. “Sometimes I think my dad needs to be protected
from
Rose, but—whatever.”

Inside the shop, Rose and Larry sat behind the counter, Rose sipping out of a chunky ceramic mug and Larry fiddling with some big electronic thing. They were such opposites, the tough biker
and the wispy psychic, but they seemed to go together somehow—like each one alone was too extreme but together they balanced each other and made a normal couple.

Okay, maybe “normal” is an overstatement.

“Any luck?” Duncan asked Larry, pointing to the electronics.

Larry shook his head.

“It's a Wii,” Duncan told me. “Got it at a yard sale for ten bucks. Smokin' deal.”

“Not if it doesn't work,” I said.

“Larry will get it working.” I'd never heard someone call his father by his first name.

“You want a cup of green tea, Madison?” Rose asked. “Larry can make you some.”

“Um, no thanks.”

Larry put down his screwdriver and wiped his hands on his jeans. “You got the camera?”

I handed it to him. He slipped out the memory chip and stuck it in the photo printer. Even though the initial shock had worn off, it still freaked me out to see the man's face looming in the window, lit up on the big screen.

“You sure you don't recognize him?” Larry asked Rose without taking his eyes off the man's face.

“Positive.”

“I'm going to print this out,” he said. “Give it to the police.” His mouth in a hard line, he punched some instructions into the machine.

“There's nothing the police can do,” I said. “He wasn't there when I took the picture.”

Larry didn't respond, but Rose said, “I believe you,” and Duncan
hooked his pinky around mine and murmured, “Me, too.”

It wasn't until the photo had printed and I could see the shot without the computer screen's brightness that I noticed it.

“The man is shining,” I said. “Like he's lit from within or something. Just like the old woman.” A chill washed over me. I squeezed Duncan's pinky with my own.

“It's just a ray of sun,” Larry said.

“It was overcast that day,” I insisted.

“The sun could have come out for a minute,” Larry countered.

“But it didn't. And anyway, if the sun hit him, there'd be shadows.”

Before I could worry about how ridiculous the question might sound, I blurted, “Rose, what does a ghost look like?”

She gazed into the distance with her enormous pale eyes, utterly unsurprised by the question. “Like nothing.”

“Huh?”

“A ghost doesn't have a body. You don't see it—you feel it. Like an energy field or a gust of cold air.”

I shuddered.

“You said something about an old woman?” Rose asked, her voice calm and soothing. I'd bet anything it was the same tone she used with her clients.

“She was the first one to show up in my camera,” I said. “In a shot down by the rocks. And I'm positive there was no one there.”

“And she was shining as well?” Rose asked.

“This isn't about an old woman!” Larry burst out. “Or about lighting! Don't you get it, Rosie? Some sicko is spying on you. We've got to deal with it!”

Larry looked at Rose with such intensity: love mixed with sadness mixed with fear. Rose, meanwhile, just raised her eyebrows and sipped the tea that Larry had fixed for her. No wonder Larry was threatening to leave town. It couldn't be easy for him to be around her.

“The old woman's on the same memory chip, right?” Duncan asked.

At the printer, I zipped through my shots until I reached the picture.

“My first ghost,” I said, trying to sound funny (and failing completely).

Rose put her tea on the counter and crossed the room to the printer. She leaned forward to get a better look. “That's not a ghost.”

“Because she has a body?”

She shook her head. “Because I know her. She's one of my clients.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. Something drained out of me, and I felt…disappointed? First I'd lost my house. Now I'd lost my superpower.

“I could have sworn I was alone,” I whispered.

“Francine can be real quiet when she wants to be,” Rose said. “Plus, she's pretty sick, so she can't move very fast.”

Wait a minute. “Francine?”

“Yes, Francine Lunardi. We do our sessions at her house because it's hard for her to get around. I'm surprised she went all the way to the beach.”

I suddenly felt very cold. “Francine Lunardi died,” I croaked. “Delilah was supposed to tell you.”

Rose began to blink. “Delilah doesn't even know her.” Her voice sounded tense, not airy-fairy-psychic at all.

“Delilah talked to some lady at the thrift store yesterday. Mrs. Voorhees? She said that Mrs. Lunardi died on Friday.”

Rose's huge eyes grew even wider. She covered her mouth.

Duncan touched the screen. “So she is a ghost. Which means the guy is, too.”

“There's no such things as ghosts!”

We all turned to face Larry, still stationed by the printer, fists clenched, the cross in his ear swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

Rose began to say, “Just because you can't see or touch something doesn't mean that—

Larry cut her off. “When did you take that picture of Mrs. Lunardi, Madison?”

My mind whirred until I came up with the answer. “A week ago. Sunday.”

And then I got it: I'd taken the picture five days before Mrs. Lunardi died. She wasn't a ghost, after all.

Either I was completely insane, or there was another explanation.

 

“You want to go for a walk?” Duncan asked me outside the purple door. “We can go back to that spot by the rocks and take pictures or…whatever.”

The thought of “whatever” made me smile. Maybe living in Sandyland wouldn't be so awful. Maybe it would even be…okay.

“I'd like that,” I said. “But I have to do something with my parents.” He didn't have to know about the apartment hunting.
Not yet. I was still getting used to the idea.

“So you and your parents are pretty tight?” he asked.

I snorted. “Hardly. We each kind of do our own thing.” I shrugged. “It works out okay.” Except for when it doesn't.

“That's cool,” he said.

“You and your father seem close.”

“I guess.” He bit his lip. I really liked that little chip in his tooth. “But we're like buddies, you know? Like, he'll go out on the boat for a couple of days, and it's cool. Or, I'll stay out all night, and he doesn't care. So—I guess I'm lucky. You know, because I can do pretty much whatever I want. Larry's a cool guy. We get along.”

“I always wished I had a sister,” I said. “Or maybe even a brother. Just—someone besides me.”

He glanced at Psychic Photo's front door. “Yeah—me, too. Hangin' with Leo and Delilah, it almost feels like we're related. And…it's nice.” Something passed over his face—thoughts about leaving Sandyland, maybe?

He took both of my hands in his and looked straight at me, his eyes like sea glass. “Can I see you tonight?”

I moved toward him. “I think that can be arranged.”

We held each other's gaze, and he might have kissed me if a married couple in matching red polo shirts hadn't completely ruined the moment by making us move so they could get to the door. (As he looked at the shop's sign, the man remarked, “Do you think we'll have to tell them we want some photos printed or will they just
know?”)

I gave Duncan's hands one last squeeze. “Nine o'clock?”

“Meet you here.”