Girl Haunts Boy by Cesar Vitale

Author:Cesar Vitale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amulet Books
Published: 2024-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

BEA

All lights went out the second Cole’s lips touched mine. The boos were silenced, the music abruptly cut. The room fell into a thick darkness, and the band packed its instruments and left the stage, and the top hat man and the barmen and everyone in the audience fizzled like dandelion seeds blown in the wind, and with them went the rest of the city outside the ballroom, and then the country, and then the world.

There was no more Spectral Valley. No more New York. No more house I was haunting, no more cursed ring haunting me, and no more murderous streetcars that kill distracted young ladies outside small-town museums.

There was no time. There was no space.

There was just Cole and I, floating in the dark, and we were the beginning and the end of all things, and nothing mattered other than his lips on my lips and the way his hand touched the side of my face and the way my arms intertwined behind his neck in a way that I could feel his hair brushing softly against my fingers, and in that moment, for those brief seconds out of time, if someone told me we could have stayed like that forever, I’d have taken that deal in a second.

But forever ended when a shoe hit Cole on the back and a woman’s voice called out, “Get a room!” and suddenly the band was back in place and the people were made whole again from their little dandelion seeds, and the lights flashed back on in Spectral Valley and New York and inside the ballroom, and everything hurried back to its normal place in the order of things as Cole’s lips parted from mine and we both smiled at each other as the boos from the audience reached our ears again.

“You guys suck so much!”

“That was the worst Charleston I’ve ever seen!”

“Get the hell off the stage!”

Cole suppressed a burst of laughter. “I think we should get out of here.”

He guided me down the steps and through the disapproving crowd in a hurry, both of us laughing ourselves out of breath.

He turned to face me near the back of the ballroom. “That was awesome!” he said, smiling. “I mean, the dance! But also the . . . huh . . .”

We held each other’s stare, out of breath and sweaty, as another couple took to the stage and the music resumed around us. Cole looked down at our hands—still intertwined, still holding on to each other. All of a sudden, he seemed shy, which I thought was just plain adorable.

“Bea, I—”

“Shut up and kiss me again, Heartbeat Boy,” I said. And then he did.

✵ ✵ ✵

We slow-danced—for hours, or maybe years or decades or centuries—who can tell?—spinning around the ballroom to the sound of jazz pianos and soft saxophones as the party died down and, drunk guest by drunk guest, the ballroom slowly emptied around us. By the end we were kicking deflated balloons and champagne flutes with

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