The Ghost and the Goth by Stacey Kade

Author:Stacey Kade
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Publication World Wide
Published: 2010-10-13T22:00:00+00:00

I’d never seen this side of Alona Dare, and to be honest, it was kind of freaking me out. She’d been silent—other than giving me directions on where to turn—and still, except for her foot jouncing against the floorboards, since we’d left the school parking lot. I’d never realized how much of her was movement, energy, and life—even after death—until seeing her this way.

I turned into a cul-de-sac lined with sprawling brick houses and huge yards. Ben Rogers lived somewhere over here. We weren’t far from where Lily had … had her accident. This was definitely not my side of town.

“Now what?” I asked. I let the car roll forward slowly, hoping it looked like we were lost and checking addresses.

Probably wouldn’t take much for people in this neighborhood to call the cops. One shabby-looking car doing an extended drive-by might be enough.

Alona’s foot increased its frantic rhythm and then stopped suddenly. “Nothing,” she said after a long moment. “Never mind.” But her gaze was fixed on one house in particular. It looked pretty much like all the others. Except all the curtains were pulled tight, a piece of weathered-looking plywood covered one of the upstairs windows, the bushes by the front door and under the huge picture windows were scraggly and overgrown, and the trash cans were tipped over at the foot of the driveway, spilling out little black microwave meal trays and lots of glass bottles. Looking closer, I could see two deep parallel lines, tread marks, in the front lawn, like someone had badly miscalculated the driveway’s location.

“This was a bad idea,” she said shortly. “Let’s just go back to school.”

I hit the brakes and stared at her. “You dragged me all the way over here, which is going to make me really late and only piss off Brewster even more, just to look at some random house—”

“Not some random house,” she snapped. “My house. Home sweet home.”

I froze. Her house? I’d had no clue where she was leading me when we’d started our little road trip, but this was the last thing I would have expected. The base of a broken vodka bottle rolled back and forth in the gutter, capturing my attention like a pocket watch in an old-fashioned hypnotist’s routine.

She couldn’t have lived here. I mean, yeah, I could picture it. Nice neighborhood, a clearly expensive house, but something was obviously wrong on the inside. This did not match the Alona Dare I knew. And that, I realized, had been her point.

“Nice, right?” she asked with no small amount of bitterness. “We’re aiming for the whole white-trash-meets-skid-row look. I mean, it could use some sprucing up. Clearly, we’re missing an opportunity with the car in the garage instead of on blocks in the yard.”

As if she’d commanded it, the dented-up garage door on the house rose. Alona stiffened.

A barefoot blond woman in a barely tied, pink silky robe stumbled out, one hand raised against the light, the other dragging a plastic garbage bag, its contents clanking.

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