ترجم النص التالي الي اللغة العربية the janitor passed by, Cara understood that, even though most people
couldn’t see ghosts, the dead made their presence known in other ways.
“Seriously, though.” Charlotte crossed her arms, leaning forward, curls
bouncing. “You guys want to study at the tree house after school?”
Felicity shook her head. “I gotta get some time in with my cello. My
recital’s coming up, and my parents are making me use all my free time to
practice.” She pushed up her clear-frame glasses. “Not sure they understand what ‘free time’ means.”
Cara poked Felicity on the arm. “But you just had a recital!”
“Convincing point, although not one I think my parents would respond
to. Besides, I made a deal.” Felicity’s eyes glinted. “If I practice every day
this week, they’ll let us go to that new haunted house next Friday with Ben
and the guys.”
“That’s the one people are saying really has ghosts, right?” Charlotte
asked haltingly.
Oh, no.
Felicity nodded. “Ben and the guys are all making bets on who gets
scared the most. And because I know it’s illegal to gamble, I only made one small bet—”
“Felicity,” Charlotte admonished.
“—that was fifty dollars,” Felicity finished.
Charlotte sighed.
“It’s not too late to join in on the fun. My bet is Ben won’t be able to last
twenty minutes—”
“What about our usual Halloween tradition?” Cara tried. “What’s wrong
with staying inside, watching stupid movies, and eating ten pounds of
Reese’s Pieces in one night?”
“It’s what we’ve done for forever,” Felicity said, chomping down on a
carrot stick. It sounded like the crack of a gavel declaring Cara’s death
sentence. “Not to mention, this is a way better way to celebrate your
birthday, don’t you think?”
Cara hid a grimace. There was that. Being born on Halloween and cursed with the unwanted ability to see ghosts—she couldn’t find it more ironic.
“Also,” Felicity continued, “I’m going as a woman of science, to prove
there aren’t any ghosts at this house, because ghosts aren’t real.”
Here was the problem: unfortunately, ghosts were most certainly real. If
there weren’t any ghosts at that alleged haunted house, then the worst things
that could happen would be that Cara and her friends wasted the five-buck
entrance fee and the annual gorging on Reese’s Pieces would be slightly
postponed. But if there were ghosts …
They’d be walking right into the specters’ domain on the most haunted
night of the year.
Halloween was the day the veil between the planes of the living and the
dead thinned. The day all ghosts, not just the most powerful Class As,
possessed the ability to act upon the breathing. Non–ghost speakers still
weren’t able to see them, but you didn’t need to see to be scared when a
phantom reached into your chest and pulled out your beating heart.
Which, by the way, was entirely possible on Halloween.
Laolao, for her part, tried to get the local spirits to behave this time of
year, including forbidding them from showing up at haunted house
attractions to “show the living how it’s really done” in case someone got too suspicious and it ended in people discovering that ghosts were real. But
Laolao was just one person, and the dead were many in number—and also
bored.
“Please, Cara?” Charlotte said.
“You would think after what happened at the animal shelter last night
you’d want to hunker down,” Cara said.
“Don’t remind me.” Charlotte groaned. “That’s precisely why I need
something to take my mind off it.”
Charlotte had texted them from where she worked at the animal shelter
that the dogs wouldn’t stop barking and whining at thin air. At first she’d
joked about how they must be haunted—much to Cara’s chagrin—until the
deer appeared. It was the end of her shift when the dogs went wild again—
and when Charlotte glanced out the window, a deer was standing in the
parking lot, looking right back at her, dripping in putrid black blood. When
she went out to see if she could help it, it had vanished, a pool of dark
viscous liquid on the asphalt the only trace of its presence. Even Cara didn’t know what to make of that.
“Oh, yes, your zombie deer.” Felicity said these last two words in a
spooky voice, wiggling her fingers at Charlotte. “Maybe we should visit the animal shelter on Halloween instead.”
Nope. Absolutely not. Cara had to shut this down. “I’m sorry, guys, but I
just don’t think I can swing the haunted house.”
“Right, the other factor.” Felicity snorted. “Is it not on the preapproved list of places your mom says you can go? We all know it takes five to seven business days to convince your mom to let you do anything that’s remotely in the zip code of ‘fun.’ That’s why I’m proposing this now, so you have
plenty of time to get your permission slip signed.”
“Okay, but—” Cara cut off as she noticed someone storming toward their table. Not a ghost this time. Just Zacharias Coleson, blond-haired and blue- eyed, captain of the swim team, and bane of her existence.
And the bane of her existence looked pissed.
“Hey, Tang!” he shouted.
Charlotte, who had abandoned her lunch in favor of drawing Miles
Morales surrounded by sunflowers, glanced up from her sketch pad and
over her shoulder. She turned to Cara and sighed. “I was hoping we would get a peaceful lunch for once.”
“As always, Charlotte, your optimism is endearing but oh so wrong,”
Felicity said. Taking out a book, she turned to the right, her back to Cara, stretching her lanky legs out across another chair. “Impending nuclear
explosion in three … two … one.”
Zach stopped in front of their table, blue eyes iced over and furious. Cara tilted her head and looked up at him calmly.
“Something wrong, Coleson?”
“Don’t act so innocent. Wanna know what I just found in the trash?”
Cara dragged another fry through ketchup. “Oh my God, you finally
found yourself!”
Felicity snickered from behind the book she was pretending to read.
“I found this.” Zach reached into the pocket of his Arctic-blue
windbreaker and slammed a flyer on the table. It was creased and stained from its time in the garbage, but Cara didn’t need to read it to know what it said: Boys Swim Team Tryouts, with details and whatnot. “All the others
were in the trash, too. The hell, Tang?”
People were beginning to look their way, probably intrigued by the
prospect of yet another infamous Tang-Coleson fight, but at least the lunch monitor, Mrs. Scanton, hadn’t noticed. Thank God.
Cara raised an eyebrow at him.
“So … you found all your ads exactly where they belong—the trash—
and decided the best course of action was to go dumpster diving in the
hallway so that you could then march in here and slam it down on the table, where we’re eating?”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “Answer the question.”
“Well, Coleson, maybe your papers wouldn’t be in the trash if you hadn’t put them up over every single freaking flyer for cross-country tryouts,
which I know you know I’m the captain of. Yours didn’t have time stamps on them, so technically they could be removed without any prior notice.”
“AFHS Student Handbook, page twelve, section four point seven,”
offered Felicity smugly. Without taking her eyes off her book, she raised a palm in Cara’s direction. Cara high-fived her.
Zach rolled up his sleeves, baring toned forearms still golden from
summer. He leaned forward, hands on the table. Cara stood abruptly, rolling up her own sleeves, chair screeching against the linoleum.
Zach had to jerk back a few degrees to keep their faces apart.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” he said. “You’re going to take all the
flyers out of the trash and put them back up. Starting with this one.” He
shoved the paper at her.
Cara laughed. Just because his parents are rolling in cash, he thinks he
can order anyone around. “And you think I’m going to listen to you why,
exactly?”
“It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do.”
“I’m sorry, who was the one who stormed in here and interrupted our
conversation? Like, do you ever think about anyone else, or does your ego have a monopoly on all your brain cells up in there?”
“Guys,” Charlotte pleaded, but no one paid her any attention.
“Yeah, sure, I bet you all were talking about something super interesting, like your next test.”
Cara slammed the flyer onto his chest with a satisfying thud. “You know, refusing to study isn’t a personality trait.”
Zach yanked the flyer away, making her hand slip away, too. “Neither is staying in all the time and doing nothing but homework.”
A collective “Ooooh” rose up somewhere to her left, and Cara turned her glare on the perpetrators. A group of theater kids a few tables down had
been watching the entire thing with the same interest as if she and Zach
were putting on a new production of Romeo and Juliet. At Zach’s last
comment, a few faces from Cara’s cross-country team on the other side of
the cafeteria tuned in as well. If this escalated any further, the granite-faced
lunch monitor was definitely going to notice.
“Okay, keep your voice down,” Cara hissed. “You’re going to get us in
trouble.”
“If you’re so worried about making a scene, just take the flyer already!”
Zach shot back, very much not keeping his voice down.
“Fine!” Cara snatched the flyer off the table, pretending she was
surrendering. Then in the blink of an eye, she balled it up, arm swinging to
pitch it into the trash.
Just as fast, Zach caught her wrist, sending the throw wide—
Straight into the back of the lunch monitor’s head.
The cafeteria quieted. Even Mr. Toole, who had been studiously
scrubbing the floor, raised his wizened skull to see what had seized the
attention of the living.
Slowly, Mrs. Scanton turned around. Cara swallowed at her stony
expression.
“I told you,” Cara said out of the corner of her mouth, watching Mrs.
Scanton approach. The lunch monitor’s pace was slow and unhurried, as if
she were relishing the anticipation of laying down a punishment. “Oh, my
mom’s going to kill me.” Her grandmother, too. Cara could already hear
Laolao’s disapproving exhale. The old ghost had had all of life—and death
—to perfect that so-disappointed-but-I-won’t-say-it-out-loud sigh that made Cara shrink instantly.
“Relax,” Zach said, leaning back against the lunch table with his hands in his pockets, completely at ease even as Mrs. Scanton got close enough that
the red veins of her eyes were visible. “I’ll handle this.”
Before the lunch monitor could open her mouth, Zach grinned, broad and winning. “How are you doing today, Mrs. Scanton?”
Mrs. Scanton gaped. “How am I doing today?” she sputtered. “You two
threw trash at the back of my head. I should give you detention.”
“Over a simple misunderstanding?”
“A simple misunderstanding,” Mrs. Scanton said flatly.
“We were playing a game of catch when Tang’s throw went wide.”
Cara shot him an incredulous look. He was lying through his perfect
white teeth, and he was still finding room to blame her.
Ignoring her glower, Zach continued smiling at Mrs. Scanton. “Last time
you tried busting us, Principal Olan just let us go. You wouldn’t want to
waste his time again, would you?”
When Mrs. Scanton was silent, a grudging look on her face, he added, “Your sister’s charity auction is next week, right? I’ll have to ask my mom if she’s still donating that Sargent painting—it was worth half a million
dollars the last time she got it valued.”
“Oh. Oh, yes.” Mrs. Scanton opened her mouth, flapping her hands, then nodded sharply, seeming to come to a decision. “I’ll leave you two with a very harsh warning, then. And I’ll see your mother’s painting next week.”
As Mrs. Scanton retreated, Zach turned to Cara with a smug look. “See? No problem.”
Unbelievable. “Unfortunately, the problem is you.” She scowled at him. A six-foot-two-tall problem with messy dark gold hair, unjustifiably
impeccable cheekbones, and the unique ability to get under her skin and make her lose her cool like nothing else. “Not everyone can pull out their rich-parents card, Coleson.”
So what if Zach’s dad was the inheritor of the largest logging company in the region and his mom was the curator of what was allegedly the most
prestigious—and pretentious—art gallery in Autumn Falls? So what if their house had been in their possession for generations and was newly renovated and could fit Cara’s home in three times over with room to spare? So what if he got a new car for his sixteenth birthday last year and didn’t have to rely on car pools to get to practice like some people?
It didn’t make him any better than anyone else, despite what he thought.
Zach crossed his arms, leaning closer. “You know, you should be
thanking me. I got us both out of trouble.”
Cara ground her teeth. She hated his privilege, but she had also benefited from it, however reluctantly. It wasn’t like she wanted her mother to know about the weekly arguments with him she somehow got herself into, and she definitely didn’t want to be lectured for hours by Laolao. Being a ghost —and Chinese—her grandmother never ran out of breath during a scolding.
“You got yourself into trouble by taping your dumb swim team flyers over my cross-country ones.”
He smirked, cocking his head toward the bulletin board on the cafeteria wall. “You missed one, by the way.”
Indeed, a blue swim team flyer hung between a homeroom bake sale
advertisement and a poster about some silent auction. It shouldn’t have been
possible for a piece of paper to look smug, but because it was Zach’s, it managed it.
“Hey, you two.”
Startled, Cara looked at Felicity. She’d been so wrapped up in bickering with Zach, she’d almost forgotten they weren’t alone. The irritation his presence always inspired tended to narrow her vision.
“If you’re quite done arguing for the day,” Felicity continued as Cara sat back down, “Charlotte’s been trying to ask you a question, Zach.”
Zach turned to Charlotte, who, under the sudden spotlight of his gaze, ducked her head, shoulders rounded, cheeks aglow.
“You’re still bringing your swim team to the bake sale/adoption day event at the animal shelter this weekend, right?” Charlotte asked shyly.
“Of course. The whole crew,” Zach said, in a tone friendlier than he’d ever used with Cara. “I promised I would.”
Cara scoffed under her breath, a reply about the worth of Zach’s promises forming on her lips, but at that moment, silver flashed through the cafeteria again, and two new ghosts, a man and a woman she’d never seen before, came into focus.
Usually when ghosts stepped into high-traffic areas for the breathing, they drifted about, people-watching. But these ghosts moved with purpose, stopping at each table and peering down, not just people-watching but seeming to observe clinically, conferring with each other before moving on to the next table. Sometimes they would boldly stick their hands into
people, making students choke on their food. But whatever they were
looking for, they didn’t seem to find it, even when they clearly got a
reaction: students looking around for whoever or whatever had flung their jacket or pinched their nose shut or knocked their tray onto the floor.
Dread filled her stomach. They’re testing if people can see them. Table by table, the specters canvassed the cafeteria, slowly making their way toward her.
Should she get up? Could she leave the cafeteria while they were
occupied? Or would the pair notice and look at her even more suspiciously?
Zach had the audacity to snap his fingers in her face. “What are you staring at? I’m right here and you’re looking at something else?”
In an instant, Cara grabbed his wrist and yanked it away from her face. “Could you be any more obnoxious?”
“Is that a challenge?”
“You just can’t stand it when you don’t have my attention.” His voice was low and laced with satisfaction. “And you’re only too
willing to give it to me.”
Heat radiated through the sleeve of Zach’s windbreaker, his pulse
coursing against her fingertips. At the same moment, they both seemed to realize that she was still holding on to him. She dropped his arm with
disgust as he yanked it back, crossing his arms over his chest.
“This is useless,” a crisp female voice said, and only years of training
kept Cara from reacting. “Let’s go. God, I hate teenagers.”
In her peripheral vision, she could see the two new ghosts were standing in front of her table. Now that she wasn’t focused on Zach, goose bumps
prickled her skin from their presence.
“Aw, but it’s free entertainment,” the man said. “Do you think if we
throw popcorn at them, they’ll fight some more?”
The woman shook her head. “The girl didn’t even shiver at our chill.
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and we don’t have much time.” She
turned on her heel.
“You’re no fun,” the man groused, but floated after her a moment later.
Heart in her throat, Cara shifted subtly in her seat to watch their backs
recede out of the corner of her eye. The ghosts crossed the cafeteria and
seemed to ask Mr. Toole questions; what exactly, she couldn’t hear. He
shook his head no, pointing at the exit. With a nod of thanks, the ghosts
floated through, and Cara could breathe again.
“You really are distracted today,” Zach said.
Amateur move, she scolded herself. Usually she wasn’t so caught up in watching ghosts that other people noticed, but she’d never seen ghosts
behave in such a calculated way before. These hadn’t been randomly
messing with people for fun like poltergeists, and it wasn’t the usual pre-
Halloween theatrics, either. They’d been after something.
Glowering at Zach, she made a show of wiping the hand that had touched him on her thigh. “Don’t you have flyers to put up?”
He smirked. “Ouch,” he said in exaggerated offense, and shoved away
from the table to leave.
Cara scanned the cafeteria again. Even though only Mr. Toole remained, sedate and benign, a shiver ran through her bones. She shook off the cold, tried to ignore it like it was another ghost, but it settled, stayed.
That was the trouble with seeing the dead. They never quite seemed to leave.