I turned my head, pressing my cheek into the pillow. It smelled of wintermint. The backs of my eyes burned as I squeezed them shut.
There was still hope.
He was alive.
It wasn’t too late.
That’s what I kept telling myself until I began to drift off. It felt like minutes passed before I was jarred awake.
“Trinnie!” a voice shouted directly in my face.
I jerked upright, my heart launching itself somewhere into the vicinity of the ceiling as my eyes popped open. Hovering several feet off the floor was the ghostly form of Peanut.
“Jesus,” I rasped, blinking several times. Muted daylight streamed in front of the windows. “I think you gave me a heart attack.”
“You? I gave you a heart attack?” he screeched, and it was a good thing that 99.5 percent of the populace couldn’t hear him. “Where have you been all night? I came home, and you were gone. I kept coming back and then it happened.”
Shoving the hair out of my face, I waited until my vision cleared. Peanut’s dark hair was messy, like he’d been inside a wind tunnel. The Whitesnake concert shirt was as vintage as his red Chuck Taylors, but when I focused on his feet, I realized from the knees down he was completely transparent.
My brows rose. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m dead. Do I look like I have a watch or need one?”
“Well, you think you need your own bathroom so why wouldn’t you think you need a watch?” I muttered.
“That’s different,” he argued, lowering. It looked like the coffee table ate half his body. “Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I don’t need my privacy.”
“As if you respect anyone else’s privacy.” I reached for my phone on the end table. I hit the screen, seeing only a handful of hours had passed since I’d fallen asleep. Not nearly enough to get any true rest.
But long enough for Zayne to get into any amount of trouble.
“Who cares about privacy right now? You’ve been gone all night and something...something happened.” Not known for toning down the dramatics, he smacked his hands against his cheeks. “It happened.”
“What happened?” I asked as I shoved the blanket off and rose. Knowing Peanut, whatever he was freaking out about was probably something normal. Like “it happening” was him hearing the refrigerator running.
“Something superweird, dudette.”
Bones and muscles stiff, I shuffled toward the kitchen, feeling like a hundred years old. “What happened, Peanut?” I opened the fridge door and grabbed a Coke.
Peanut drifted out of the coffee table and turned toward the kitchen. His lower body became more solid. “I don’t know what it was,” he said as I snapped open the can and lifted it to my mouth. “But I was sucked into the nothing.”
The bubbly carbonated goodness hit my throat, burning in the best way just as he spoke. I almost choked as I swallowed hard. “What? The nothing?”
He drew close enough for me to see how big his eyes were. “Yes. That is exactly what I said. I was chilling with Gena down below,” he said, and I made a mental note that now I knew the girl lived on one of the lower floors—one of the many lower floors. For some concerning reason, Peanut was supervague when it came to this girl. “And then it felt like an invisible string had grabbed ahold of me and there was an intense flash of white light, but the light was, like, falling? I thought, no way, I’m going into the afterlife whether I want it or not.”
I stared at him, taking another drink while wondering if it was possible for ghosts to do drugs. And if so, was I going to have to have a talk with him.
“But it wasn’t the afterlife. No. I was suddenly in this place that was supergray and stagnant, with all these people that I’d never seen before. And I mean lots of people.” He came through the kitchen island and to my side, so that he was two inches from me. “You see how close we are?”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“This is how crowded the place was. We all were crammed into this nothing world, first to be all up in each other’s personal space. I was so confused and freaked—totes freaked. Wherever I was, it wasn’t dope or gnarly. Then a couple of moments later, I was thrust back to here. That place, though. It was...” He floated back, shaking out his shoulders. “It was empty, Trinnie. It was full of people but empty.”
The fog of sleep and exhaustion cleared as I stared at him. This wasn’t one of his normal overreactions to something extraordinarily common. He was being serious and—
I lowered the can of soda. “You said there was a pop of bright, falling light? Around what time?”
“I don’t know. A few hours after the sunset? I wasn’t really paying attention.” Peanut started to rise. “I was watching Poodle Exercise with Humans on YouTube.”