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I took a shaky step away from him, then another. He couldn’t say he loved me enough to let me go. Because it wasn’t true.

I met Zachary’s eyes, which held sorrow, not smugness. Even though he’d one-upped Logan. Even though his own answer to that question would be a clear, quiet, “Yes.”

He whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you!” Logan bellowed, his voice crackling. “Fuck you, you piece-of-shit coward! You can touch her and kiss her any time you want, but you break her heart because you don’t want to see ghosts? What the fuck is wrong with you?” He lurched toward the dining room.

I put my hands up. “Logan, no!”

Zachary stood and moved forward. “What’s wrong? Is he threatening you?”

“Augggh!” At the sound of Zachary’s voice, Logan dropped to his knees, his outline flickering black. He’d stopped just in time to avoid seeing Zachary.

“Zach, I’m fine! Just stay there.” I stumbled, dizzy from turning my head and from Logan’s shady energy.

“Aura!” Zachary rushed toward me.

Logan vanished with a shriek. I clutched the banister at the bottom of the stairs, stopping my fall.

Zachary caught me around the waist. “Are you all right?”

“I told you I was fine.” I brushed him off. “I also told you to stay over there.” I sank onto the bottom step and bent my head, letting my hair veil my face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I couldn’t let him get away with that. I couldn’t let you think I don’t—” He didn’t finish the sentence. “I hope he’s all right.”

“Zach, you better go.” Megan sat beside me and placed a protective hand on my back.

“Right.” He gathered his notebook from the table, then passed the stairs on the way out, so close I could’ve reached out and stopped him.

At the door, Zachary lingered, fingertips tapping the brass knob. The moment stretched on as I waited to hear his next words.

He had only two. “Good night.”

“Tell me how that could’ve gone worse.”

I sat with Megan at the dining room table to smother and drown my dashed hopes with cookies and tea.

“The DMP could’ve shown up. Or the Channel Four news team.” She poured me a cup of tea, which looked lukewarm, based on the lack of steam. “So, I was thinking, you said no other babies were born in the same minutes as you and Zachary, right?”

“Right.”

“But instead of you guys keeping all the other babies from being born at that time, what if no one was meant to be born in those minutes?
But somehow you guys got in.” She licked her finger and used it to dab up her plate’s remaining powdered sugar. “It’s like at a club, when they stop letting people inside for whatever reason, and they put the velvet ropes up? And then the bouncer’s friends, or some hot girls, or famous people walk up, and they get in without having to wait.”

I stared at her, then examined the contents of my plate. “What kind of drugs is my grandmom putting in these cookies?”

“Ah. Skepticism from the girl whose ghost boyfriend came back to life just long enough to get laid. By the way, why didn’t that happen?”

“It almost did. I’m so sick of almosts.” I told her the whole story. It felt good to talk about something as normal as sex (normal for people who were not me).

Megan left an hour later, after I promised she could help me find a prom dress over the weekend.

Once the house was silent, I sat on the couch and turned off the lamp. “Logan, you can come back if you want.”

He appeared at the other end of the sofa, in the same place he’d sat before, but now his knees were pulled to his chest. For once, he said nothing.

“I’m glad you didn’t shade.” My voice was toneless.

“Never going there again.” He rested his hands on his knees. “That’s the truth, as far as I know.”

We sat in silence, contemplating the hardest truths, before he spoke again.

“Why is Zachary letting this power-trading thing come between you? Not that I mind. But I want to know what’s worth making you miserable.”

“He thinks we’re breaching some kind of cross-Shift boundary and that it could hurt us or somehow mess up the world. His father just got lung cancer, like my mom had. So Zachary thinks our power-switching is a sign of something dangerous.”

“Sucks about his dad. I know what that’s like.”

“Yeah, I remember.” I’d been with the Keeleys the night Logan’s father had his first heart attack.

“So you think Zachary’s right about all this?”

“I think he’s scared. Not
of
me. Maybe
for
me.”

“Huh. I wish I had the guts to be scared.”

I thought I knew what he meant, but asked him anyway. I wanted to hear him say it.

“When he gave me that trick question,” Logan said, “if I loved you enough to let you go, I wanted to say yes. I wanted it to be true. I know it’s what’s best for you.” He shook his head at the wall between himself and the dining room. “I thought tonight I could prove I was the better guy for you. I thought I’d prove I loved you more, and you would—” He set his elbow on the back of the couch and rubbed his mouth. “But a jerk like me can never compete with someone so fucking pure of heart.”

“You can’t help what you feel.”

“I can try harder to feel something different.” His fist tightened on his knee, then let go. “At least I’ve got the music now to distract me, and maybe help get these feelings out of my system.”

“The music?”

“I picked a band Sunday night. That’s what I was trying to tell you in the car, but you were too red.”

“Who’s in this band?”

“Three sixteen-year-olds—Josh, Heather, and Corey.” His gloom dissipated as he spoke. “They call themselves Tabloid Decoys.”

“Great name.”

“It’s from that song ‘Leech,’ by Eve 6.”

“I remember that band! We used to love them when we were kids.”

“Remember that talent show we did for our folks, where we sang ‘Inside Out’?”

I laughed at the memory of us screaming into fake microphones. “We must’ve been six years old.”

“I loved that line about the heart in a blender. I thought it was so funny.” He touched his chest, his smile diminishing. “I wonder if Mom still has the video.”

“I’ll ask Dylan. You could play it on a screen before one of your shows.”

Logan’s eyes lit up, glowing a brighter violet than the rest of him. “That’d be awesome! But
show
, not shows. We’re doing one big concert, on the solstice.”

“You mean, with—”

“My real hands, holding a real guitar.” He stretched his fingers. “If I turn human again.”

“You told your bandmates about being solid? You barely know them.”

“Calm down. No one knows about that except the four of us. It’ll be a surprise.”

“And then what’ll you do?”

“Play a few tunes, and probably turn back to ghost, like before. Then I’ll pass on if I can. I’ve got seventy-nine days to make myself worthy.”

“What if you stay alive?”

He tilted his head. “Then I guess I’ll play an encore.”

I tried to smile at his joke. “The DMP won’t know what to do with you—what to do with
us
—if you pull this off.”

“Kind of funny, since they’re sponsoring the whole thing.”

A sudden thought occurred to me. “Logan, if it gets out that ghosts can come back to life—even if it’s just you—it’ll blow people’s minds.”

“Cool, huh?”

“Not cool. Pre-Shifters have barely gotten used to the idea that ghosts exist. Now you’ve proven that shading can be reversed. If you show that death itself can be undone, there’ll be a massive, worldwide freak-out. It would be like aliens landing, maybe worse.”

“Huh,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“No, you only thought about how fun it would be for you. I can’t be part of this.”

“Wait. What if we came up with a way to let people believe it was some kind of illusion?”

“Like a magic trick?”

“Sure. Then they could choose to believe it or not.” He leaned forward. “It’d be worth it, don’t you think?”

I pictured him standing in the spotlight one last time, his hands bringing magic out of the shiny black Fender, his eyes gleaming with the energy of the crowd and the ecstasy of creation. After months in
the shadows, being less than nobody, he could let his light shine forth.

He could be a god again.

I’d have done almost anything to give him such a send-off. It wouldn’t erase the tragedy of his death—nothing ever could—but it would leave us both with a memory of glory.

I put my hand over Logan’s. “Totally worth it.”

S
o what are we looking for here?” Megan rifled through a rack of prom dresses at our favorite formal-wear shop in Mount Washington. “Sexy, sassy, funky, what?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.” I picked up a blue dress, then promptly put it back when I saw the skirt was slit up to the thigh. “Probably not sexy.”

“You don’t want to put Zachary in a world of hurt? I would.”

“He’ll be too busy drooling over Becca. She always looks amazing in formal wear.”

“True. But you’re the one he loves. He said so.”

“He didn’t say so.” I’d replayed his exact words in my head the last four nights, trying to decipher their meaning. “He said he couldn’t let me think that he didn’t … something.”

“Love you.”

“Nope. If he did, he would’ve come out and said it. Logan says it all the time.”

“Logan says everything that pops into his head. Zachary actually thinks first.”

“He thinks too much.”

She snorted. “At least Zach half said he loved you. Have you even a quarter said it to him? No, you’re still at the admitting-it-to-yourself stage.”

I grumbled and held up a purple gown with straps crisscrossing the chest. “You think Dylan would like this?”

“If it comes with a Wonder Woman cape. Why do you care what Dylan would like?”

“He’s my date. More important, he’s not Logan or Zachary.”

“Points for him. Ooh, that style comes in red.”

“No red.” Was Megan still trying to wean me off Logan? “I hear a ton of ghosts show up outside Ridgewood on prom night. I’d hate to ruin their nostalgia-fest.”

“But you look so hot in red.” She turned me to the mirror and held the red dress in front of me. I had to admit, it was the perfect complement to my tan skin and dark eyes.

I brushed it aside. “I don’t want to look hot. It’ll give Dylan the wrong idea.”

“Good point. You need to look gorgeous, but not ho-baggy. Let’s try on the purple one.”

The dressing room was too small for two people, so Megan sat
outside the door, on the platform with the three-way mirror.

I undressed quickly, wanting to get this over with. I stepped into the gown, almost tripping on the straps.

She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Mickey and I stopped having sex.”

I had no clue how to respond to that announcement. “On purpose?”

“On purpose for him.”

“Why?”

“He said he couldn’t take the pressure anymore. We’ve only done it twice since Logan died. Twice in six months, Aura. Before that it was twice a day, practically. Not every day, but every day I saw him.”

“Wow.” My mind flashed to Zachary and his ex-girlfriend again. Maybe Suzanne wasn’t even his first. How experienced was he? “I never knew you guys were so bunnylike.”

“What was the point in telling you? You would’ve thought I was pressuring you to do it with Logan.”

“I wish I had.” I shimmied the dress up over my hips. “I wish a lot of things.”

“Me too.”

I frowned down at the dress’s crisscross straps, trying to figure out where my head went. “What’d Mickey mean, he can’t take the pressure?”

“The pressure to be happy, I guess. The pressure to climb out of his everlasting pain.” She sighed again. “He can’t see past it. It’s like trying to see around the sky, he says. It only goes away when he closes his eyes or turns to the ground. Meaning, when he just shuts off.”

I paused my struggle to put on the dress, contemplating the wreckage Logan had left behind. “I know.”

“Do you?” She was silent for a moment. “Logan’s my friend, too. Everyone forgets that. I’ve spent six months comforting you and Mickey and Siobhan, and not once has anyone ever said, ‘Wow, Megan, it sucks that your good friend died, that boy you’ve known since you were little kids. I bet you miss him. I bet you loved him.’”

I stared at my reflection. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s like we’re back in the neighborhood playing freeze tag, and Logan’s It. Everyone he touches has to stop living, until we’re all frozen.”

I rested my forehead against the mirror. I’d thawed for a while, with Zachary, but now I felt more cold and alone than ever. To top it off, I’d been a horrible friend, so wrapped up in my own pain that I’d ignored Megan’s.

“If Mickey and I break up,” she said, “I’ll be the last one Logan froze. I guess that makes me It.”

“No.” I hurried out of the dressing room, holding up the skirt so I wouldn’t trip. “Don’t be It. Don’t start a new misery game.”

She looked up at me, sniffling. “Then what can I do?”

I crouched down and took her hands. “Just because you can’t make Mickey happy doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.”

“If I can’t make him happy, then who can?”

“Maybe only Logan can. Or Prozac. Or nothing. But it’s not your fault.” I squeezed her wrists. “And Megan? I’m sorry you lost Logan.”

She burst into a fresh cascade of tears. I hugged her, my unzipped dress falling open in back.

“Seeing Logan at your house the other night,” she sobbed, “made me think of the times we all hung out. There were always cookies from
your grandmom’s bakery, and we’d get on a sugar high, crank up the music, and sing and dance until we puked.”

“I’m pretty sure you did all the puking,” I said, trying to cheer her up.

She let go of me and swiped under her eyes, smearing her brown mascara. “Maybe we should’ve stayed like that, just hanging out. Maybe we never should’ve kissed those Keeley boys.”

I tried not to think about that parallel fantasy universe. Maybe we’d all still be friends, even after the Keeleys left the neighborhood. Maybe Logan and I would bring our girlfriends and boyfriends in and out of the group, and maybe we’d always have a crush on each other, just a little.