Dedication

To Smart Chicks everywhere,we’re grateful that the future is in the hands of so manystrong, clever, and wise girls and women.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction: by Melissa Marr & Kelley Armstrong

Giovanni’s Farewell: by Claudia Gray

Scenic Route: by Carrie Ryan

Red Run: by Kami Garcia

Things About Love: by Jackson Pearce

Niederwald: by Rachel Vincent

Merely Mortal: by Melissa Marr

Facing Facts: by Kelley Armstrong

Let’s Get this Undead Show on the Road: by Sarah Rees Brennan

Bridge: by Jeri Smith-Ready

Skin Contact: by Kimberly Derting

Leaving: by Ally Condie

At The Late Night, Double Feature, Picture Show: by Jessica Verday

IV League: by Margaret Stohl

Gargouille: by Mary E. Pearson

The Third Kind: by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Automatic: by Rachel Caine

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

ost anthologies start with a theme. This one was a little different: it began with a tour.

Having done a few joint events, we decided that it would be fun to set up a multiauthor, multicity, author-organized tour. Touring is great, but touring with others is even better, both for us and for the readers. So with that in mind, we started talking to authors whose books we liked—books we thought our readers would like too. The response was so overwhelmingly positive that we didn’t get very far down our wish list before the tour was full.

Nineteen authors visited twelve cities on the Smart Chicks Kick It tour. That sounds huge, but it still means we missed a lot of places and a lot of readers. We wondered how we could bring some of that tour experience to readers we couldn’t meet. The solution? An anthology. We’d invite the authors from the tour to contribute a story—schedules permitting. As the 2010 tour got under way and we began inviting authors for 2011, we added two of them to the collection, as a sneak peek at Smart Chicks 2011.

Like the tour itself, the anthology needed a focus. We decided on journeys, trips—including diversions—in keeping with the tour idea. In some stories, the characters embark on actual road trips, getting from point A to point B. But there are other kinds of journeys, and you’ll read those here too, as our characters find their paths and discover things about themselves and their places in the world. We hope you’ll enjoy taking these trips as much as we are enjoying being on the road together.

From somewhere out here,

Kelley & Melissa

Giovanni’s Farewell by Claudia Gray

efore I was awake or aware, before my heart began to beat, Cairo was there. We curled around each other in the womb, so much so that the doctors had to pry our limbs apart to deliver us. Until we were four years old, neither of us spoke; we each understood the other without words, and nobody else was as important. There were Mom and Dad, of course, but they always recognized our bond.

He served as my one constant in a life led on four different continents (to date), where instead of schools and suburbs (until a year ago), we’d been taught by various tutors, sometimes Mom’s grad students, the different cities and cultures we lived in, or occasionally just books and our own curiosity. Last year, Mom took a visiting professorship at Georgetown, and for the first time in our lives, we were plunged into a “normal American high school”—the biggest culture shock of all. I adapted well enough; Cairo found it harder. We weren’t like other kids, something he reveled in and I tried to hide. But even as I made new friends and Cairo withdrew into the background, the bond between us never wavered. We were two parts of one whole. Inseparable, forever.

Maybe that was why I tried too hard to hide from the fact that Cairo was . . . changing. Why I denied this new truth until it was beyond denying. Until our first trip to Rome.

“Okay, so, seriously, I don’t get it.” My friend Audrey painted her toenails baby-pink by the gleam of her iPod’s flashlight app, so the chaperones wouldn’t see we were violating the lights-out rule. “Toilets come with seats. Always. So why does every single freakin’ restaurant and museum in Italy have toilets without seats? Do they, like, remove them just to be evil?”

Although the no-toilet-seats thing in Italy was annoying, I’d seen worse. My brother would’ve told Audrey so, explaining that we’d been to archaeological digs in Egypt and Syria where the only bathroom facilities were holes in the ground, and how different cultures look on different things as necessities or luxuries. I just said, “I know. It’s disgusting.”

And the truth was, Rome was kind of a disappointment.

Of all the places we’d lived and traveled, Cairo and I had never made it to Rome before. Strange, considering that Mom and Dad were archaeologists who specialized in the history of the ancient Roman Empire. But their work never took them, nor us, anywhere in Italy. Mom’s research concentrated on Roman settlements in the Middle East, and Dad long ago gave up digging in favor of writing books. He was as serious about history as Mom, but his books still became bestsellers thanks to their flashy titles (like his latest, Cleopatra: Eternal Temptress). So we grew up hearing about how glorious Rome was back in the day. When the school announced the summer trip for Rome, we both wanted to go, and our parents were thrilled we’d finally get to see the city.

But once we arrived, I realized that I knew too much to enjoy this the way my new friends did. The Forum would have been glorious 2,000 years ago; what I saw when we finally visited it was a ruin not unlike ones I’d seen my whole life. Tour guides acted like the Colosseum was just the world’s oldest sports stadium, instead of a place where thousands upon thousands of people and animals were slaughtered. Even the pizza wasn’t as good as it was at Vincenza’s in Falls Church. Instead of having some magnificent, enriching experience, I spent my days wondering which was hotter—Rome in July, or the surface of the sun.

A knock on the hotel room door startled us both. Audrey slid her iPod under the sheets. Mrs. Weaver called, “Ravenna? Are you awake?”

“Just a second.” I threw off the sheet to get out of bed while Audrey tucked herself in and tried to look like she was sleeping. Despite the darkness of the room, I could see her mouth the words What did you do?

Nothing, I mouthed back, as though I had no idea what was going on.

But I did. I knew. With my brother, I always knew.

I cracked open the door to find Mrs. Weaver standing there in a pink plaid bathrobe she couldn’t have wanted any of us to see. I said, “Is Cairo okay?”

She blinked, maybe in surprise that she didn’t have to tell me what was going on. But she didn’t ask any stupid questions. “He seems to have had . . . a nightmare or an upset of some sort. We’ve tried to calm him down, but—”

“He’ll be okay. Just let me talk to him.”

Mrs. Weaver led me down the long corridor of the hotel. Behind various doors, I could hear giggling or talking, everyone else breaking curfew to gossip or make out. As we reached the end of the hall, I saw Cairo’s roommate, Jon, a jock assigned to room with him at random. I used to think Jon was beautiful with his carved muscles and white-blond hair—until I got to know him.

As I reached the door, Jon muttered, “Shut that freak up, will you?”

“Go screw yourself.” Nobody got to call my brother a freak but me. Before Mrs. Weaver could scold us for that exchange, I went inside.

This hotel room looked just like mine, except that it had been trashed. The covers were crumpled in one corner, the sheets in another, and the mattress had been flung up against one wall. Curled next to it, shaking, hands over his ears, drenched in sweat, was Cairo.

“It never stops,” he whispered without looking up. My brother always knew it was me. “I can’t sleep and I can’t think. It never, ever stops.”

“Shhhhh.” I sat next to him, careful to keep us from touching. My presence soothed him, though, just as his presence did for me. Maybe it reminded us of the time before our memories began, when we knew nothing of the world but each other.

We looked like negatives of each other: both thin to the point of being bony, with big, dark eyes and too much blue-black hair to control, but me with Dad’s pasty Irish complexion and Cairo with Mom’s deep Indian skin tone. The two of us shared accents nobody could ever place, fluency in five languages, a sense of belonging everywhere and yet nowhere, and our ridiculous names (Cairo’s for the place Mom and Dad met, mine for the city where they spent their honeymoon).

I always thought we would share everything. Then, a few months ago, these . . . episodes . . . began.

The signs were subtle, at first: Cairo would go very still and quiet, and his normally deep concentration would shatter to distraction. Nobody besides me could even tell something was really wrong, and even I was unsure exactly how to react. But slowly the episodes became longer. More intense. He would bolt from wherever we were, whatever we were doing, to isolate himself. His skin became sweaty and cool. Despite the lack of any rational explanation for it, he acted like a guy in severe pain.

Between episodes, it was like nothing had ever happened. Which was maybe why he never talked about it, and why I never made him talk about it.

We hid it from Mom and Dad, always tacitly, never admitting even to each other what was going on. The first time, at school, we claimed Cairo’s behavior was a reaction to some medication. The next few times at school he was able to cover by hiding in the guys’ bathroom and accepting the tardies. The only time it happened at home, Dad was at the store and Mom was puttering around in the yard—I got him calmed down before either of them came back inside.

I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t like the fact that there was anything about Cairo I couldn’t understand. Or anything that he didn’t want to share with me.

That night, as we huddled together in his wreck of a hotel room, I decided to finally press for answers.

“What’s going on with you?” No answer at first. “When you—when you get like this, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me what you do know. What you feel.”

He rocked back and forth, trying to calm himself. “I feel . . . what everyone else feels.”

“Huh?”

Cairo breathed out raggedly. “Audrey’s scared Michael has a crush on you. He doesn’t, but she ought to be worried, because Michael isn’t really into her. He’s just into her feet. Only the feet. He thinks about her doing things with her foot that I’m not sure are actually physically possible.”

I tried not to picture exactly what Michael would want Audrey to do with her feet. “How do you know this?”

“I just know. Just like I know Mrs. Weaver kind of has a thing for Jon—”

“Ew.” Mrs. Weaver was at least forty.

“She’d never do anything about it, but she fantasizes about Jon constantly. Tegan’s afraid her parents are splitting up. Marvin’s afraid he’s gay, which he is. Lindsey hates herself— everything about herself. She goes through her whole body over and over, hair to bones to skin, and hates each part of it in turn.”

I didn’t understand why he was inventing stories about all of our friends, which was weird enough without it having this strange effect on him. All I understood was that I wanted to shake him to snap him out of it. Yet I knew, without being told, that any contact would feel like broken glass to him now—nothing but pain. “You don’t know these things. You’re imagining this weird stuff about people, and it’s—messing with your mind. We’ve never spent a lot of time around kids our own age, and maybe it’s just getting to you. It gets to me sometimes.” Never like this, I thought but didn’t say. “After this trip, we’ll have some time to ourselves. We’ll go hiking. Make some music. You won’t be surrounded by people anymore.”

“It’s worse when I’m surrounded by them, but—it’s getting stronger. This new . . . ability.” His dark eyes found mine, and in the dim light from the city beyond our window, I could see the glimmer of unshed tears. “Ravenna, I know you don’t understand. I know because I know what you’re thinking. What everyone’s thinking. I can . . . I can read minds.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move.

He said, “You think I’m going insane, don’t you?”

I hadn’t—until he said that. His eyes were so intense, his belief in his . . . “psychic power” or whatever so absolute. I’d been worried before, but that worry kindled within me, blazing into fear.

Cairo had always been my other half. The second part of my soul.

If he was going crazy, I was being cut in two.

Terror made me angry, made me stupid. I pushed myself up to my feet, hands balled in fists by my side. “Stop it. Just stop it. You’re not even trying to get a handle on yourself. You’re making yourself crazy and you don’t care what it does to you or to me. So spare me the guilt trip, okay? Get the hell over it and start acting like my brother again.”

The look on Cairo’s face—the total sense of betrayal there—I couldn’t stand it. I ran out the door of his room and back toward my own. As I ran past, Jon whispered, “Freak,” again, but I pretended I didn’t hear.

“I wish your brother wasn’t such a weirdo,” Audrey said the next day. We stood, with the rest of our school group, in the gardens in front of the Catacombs of Saint Cecilia. Though it was still morning, the Italian sun beat down, sweat beading between my breasts so that I could feel my cotton sundress sticking to my skin. Tendrils of my hair that had escaped from their high, sloppy bun clung damply to my neck. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean, he’s different, right? But so hot.”

That was another of the ways in which my twin and I were not alike. No matter how much Cairo stood out from the crowd, girls always raved about how gorgeous he was. No matter how hard I tried to fit in, guys never seemed to agree with my mother that I was “growing into my looks.”

At that moment, I was doing my best to be just one of the twenty schoolkids from Virginia—standing around, giggling at Jon’s handstands on the grass, eating a lemon gelato from the stand across the road, and trying to catch the eye of one of the hot guys with the Italian school group also waiting for the tour.

Cairo, on the other hand, stood off to one side reading the 2,000-year-old Latin carvings in an ancient salvaged stone.

Of course, I could read Latin too—Mom and Dad made sure of that early on—but I had the sense not to flaunt it.

Cairo’s shoulders were hunched over. His oversized black T-shirt hung off his slim frame. Though he was steady again, himself again—at least for the moment—I could see how alone he felt.

If I went to stand with him, let him borrow some of my “normal” for a little while, it would help. That was what I usually did. But Cairo had become . . . unstable. I couldn’t say whether it frightened me more for his sake or for my own. I couldn’t deal with that. Couldn’t face it. Easier to remain there, to keep giggling even if I didn’t pay attention to the jokes, keep flirting with guys who didn’t notice me.

Except that one of them did.

“Where are you from?” The Italian guy closest to me gave me a bashful smile. He was probably the cutest boy there— curly hair, nice build, the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a guy. His clothes were unfortunate, a plaid shirt and stiff jeans that screamed 1970s, but maybe there was a retro craze in Italian high schools.

“DC.” I wasn’t sure that would translate. “America. Right outside Washington, DC.”

“You are enjoying your trip?”

“Uh-huh.” I wanted to ask him the same thing, but maybe he lived close by. So I kept it simple. “I’m Ravenna.”

“Like the city in Italy? Very beautiful.” This guy had an amazing grin. “I am Giovanni.”

His accent was so warm, so sexy. JhoVAHNny. The name seemed to melt in his mouth. I felt a smile spreading across my face. “What about you, Giovanni? Are you from Rome?”

“Not living here now—”

“Come on, you guys,” Michael interrupted, stepping between me and Giovanni. “Mrs. Weaver’s calling the group.” It was rude of him to do that, and I meant to apologize to Giovanni immediately, but something stopped me: I noticed that Michael was staring at Audrey’s feet, and her painted toenails.

Coincidence. Had to be. She had just changed the polish color, after all. What if Michael had noticed that? Didn’t we want guys to notice?

By the time I turned back to Giovanni, he was gone. His group must have been called too.

Scowling at Michael’s back, I followed him to the gathering spot. A weary tour guide, going through his spiel by rote, explained what the catacombs were, the theories about why they existed, the need to be careful because these were built before modern safety standards, and how if anybody was scared of enclosed spaces or graves, they should speak up immediately instead of having a panic attack underground.

Cairo and I had been visiting tombs with our parents since we were old enough to walk. If he were next to me, we’d share a look and a laugh at the thought of anybody panicking down there.

But we weren’t next to each other. The divide between us was still so new and so small, but if what I feared was true—if Cairo was losing his grip on sanity—it would only get wider. And it might last forever.

I couldn’t think about it.

The blazing summer heat evaporated as soon as our group had filed only a few feet down into the catacombs. The underground chill always turned the day to winter. My friends began shivering; I had known to bring my embroidered shawl in my bag. Several steps ahead, I saw Cairo shrug on a hoodie.

Crudely carved fish and lambs dotted the bleak stone walls as we went farther and farther down. Since the tour guide was rattling off a lot of history my parents had already taught me, I fell toward the back, making room for my friends to hear better.

And, as it turned out, for someone else to fall in beside me.

“Hey.” I felt that smile tugging at my lips again as I glanced over to see Giovanni walking downstairs by my side. “I thought you’d wait for the Italian-language tour.”

“I have been here before many times.” Giovanni’s hands were tucked into his jeans pockets so that his elbows splayed out a little, revealing what broad shoulders he had. “I do not need to hear the tour guide again.”

“Why come at all?”

“Have to.”

“School trips suck.” I sighed. Though this one was looking up all of a sudden. I wondered if Giovanni and I could meet up after—Mrs. Weaver would never have let me go on a date, but an espresso at the hotel café seemed possible.

“One thing is better this time.” Giovanni’s shy smile made this cold, dark, dead place feel warm and alive. “You are here.”

I ducked my head, unable to meet his eyes any longer but unable to quit smiling. No guy had ever flirted with me before. Maybe it was something about Italian guys. Maybe it was something about Giovanni himself. But I felt totally sure he wasn’t just playing me—that he’d never done anything like this in his life.

That made two of us.

We reached the very bottom level of the catacombs, catching up with the rest of the group—my friends were silhouetted by the naked bulbs that served as lighting down here. They stood just through a stone archway. Carved-out graves surrounded us, and I saw Giovanni glancing their way.

“No need to be nervous.” I felt bold enough to tease him. “No dead bodies in there anymore.”

“Nothing but dust, now.” Giovanni’s mournful expression reminded me what this place used to be. Now it had become a stop on the standard tourist routes, with school bus trips tromping through every day and a souvenir shop nearby. Once, though, it was a secret cemetery where people came to hide their martyrs and hope for miracles. I looked up into the dark chambers above us and felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. What I felt was wonder—the emotion I’d been waiting to feel in Rome, but that had evaded me. Until Giovanni.

I smiled at him and whispered, “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “For finding me. I have waited so long.”

“Waited?”

“No one sees me. Only you see me.”

“Giovanni, we only just met—” I edged through the archway, with a glance over my shoulder. I expected him to follow me, and he did.

What I didn’t expect was for him to walk through the wall.

Straight through the stone wall.

I didn’t imagine it. It wasn’t a trick of the light. Giovanni really walked through the stone. “How did you do that?” My voice was too loud; I could hear the echoes in the stone chambers, and several people turned back toward me in irritation.

Audrey, in particular, looked put out. “Who are you talking to?” she muttered. “You’ve been ranting to yourself all morning. Did Cairo, like, infect you with weirdness?”

I pointed at Giovanni, who stood right in front of her, where she couldn’t possibly miss him. He had an apologetic look on his face. Then I realized that our shadows were all outlined sharply against the stone wall—everyone but Giovanni’s. The light shone right through him.

When our eyes met again, Giovanni nodded. “You are the only one who has seen me since I died.”

I screamed because I couldn’t do anything else, louder and louder, until someone turned out the lights.

What happened next—I couldn’t say. To me it was only confusion. I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on the sun-heated grass outside, Rome’s summer light nearly blinding me, Mrs. Weaver almost panicking, Marvin trying to get me to drink water out of his squeeze bottle. None of it made any sense until I saw my brother.

Cairo knelt by my side and took my hand. None of the instability I’d seen last night, or the insecurity I’d seen this morning, was visible now. Even when my brother had trouble being strong enough to take care of himself, he could be strong for me. “She needs to rest; that’s all. Just put us in a taxi back to the hotel,” he said. “I’ll see that she gets some sleep.”

Mrs. Weaver looked around, as if she wanted someone else to tell her what to do. But there weren’t enough adults on this trip, and she had about another twenty minutes to get the rest of the group back on the tour bus for the afternoon trip to the Castel Sant’Angelo. That, plus Cairo’s steadiness—his apparent recovery from last night’s upset—must have convinced her. “Don’t set one foot outside the hotel,” she said. “When we get back at six, I expect to see both of you waiting for us.”

“We will.” I would have said anything to get out of there.

Only when Cairo and I were truly alone—me flopped in exhaustion across my hotel bed, and him sitting yoga-style on Audrey’s—did we speak to each other. “What happened?” he said.

“I was talking to this guy, Giovanni, but . . . he wasn’t real.”

“What do you mean, not real?”

“He didn’t have a shadow. Nobody else could see him. And he said—he said I was the only person who’d seen him since he died.” I clutched the cover on my bed into a knot between my fingers. “That can’t be real, right?”

Only after I said the words did I realize—I didn’t have to tell Cairo the truth. I could’ve pled sunstroke or dizziness or something else and denied what had happened to me. But I never lied to him; it hadn’t occurred to me to start now.

Instead of calling the nearest psychiatrist, Cairo remained by my side. He even smiled. “It all makes sense now.”

“What makes sense?”

“Don’t you get it? I wondered about this before, but . . . when it was just me, I couldn’t be sure. Now I am. We’re psychic.”

“Psychic?”

“Or . . . talented, somehow. I don’t know the right word for it. But I have moments when I can hear people’s thoughts, and you can see the dead. We’re twins; I guess it makes sense that if it was happening to me, eventually it would happen to you too. Maybe it’s the . . . family inheritance. Something like that.”

I wanted to tell Cairo to stop talking about hearing people’s thoughts, just like I had the night before, but I couldn’t, and not just because I had begun experiencing something even stranger. I wanted to go back in time to the night before and not be such a bitch to Cairo, to come through for him the way he came through for me.

Most of all I wanted to go back to the life I’d had just this morning, where fitting in seemed possible. If Cairo was right, then I would never fit in. My brother and I really were freaks, and we’d be freaks forever.

But down deep I knew, for certain, that I’d seen Giovanni.

“How can we be sure?” I said. “It could have been heatstroke, or . . . déjà vu, or something.”

Cairo folded his arms. “Do you honestly believe that?”

“Can’t you tell?” I retorted. If he wanted me to take him seriously as Mr. Mind Reader, he was going to have to offer more proof.

“When I can hear thoughts, I can hear all of them. When I can’t, I can’t,” he said. He was bouncing on his heels, energized by the possibilities. “I can’t turn it on or off, but lately I’ve started thinking there might be a pattern—but I’m not sure yet. Enough of that. Back to you. Ravenna, do you really think what happened to you was as simple as heatstroke?”

“No,” I admitted. “But I need to understand what’s going on before we try to diagnose ourselves because of a vision I saw in the catacombs.”

He checked the time on his phone. “If we cab it out there, we can get to the catacombs and back before the others return to the hotel.”

Breaking Mrs. Weaver’s rules didn’t bother me nearly as much as seeing Giovanni again. When I looked into my brother’s eyes, I could see that he understood my fear.

I said, “I don’t know why he appeared to me. What Giovanni wants.”

“Neither do I. What was he saying to you?”

“Ordinary stuff.” I shrugged. “Actually, I thought he was flirting with me. But I guess he was just excited that someone could see him finally.” It had been nice, thinking some hot Italian guy was into me. I should’ve known something was up.

“Well, we’ll go back. I’ll be with you. I can’t see the dead— not yet, anyway—but you won’t be alone. And you can figure out for sure whether or not this is real.”

“Thanks.” It came out in a small voice.

Cairo gave me a look. “If this had happened to you first, instead of me? I wouldn’t have believed you either. So stop feeling guilty. We have bigger things to deal with.”

When we returned to the catacombs in the early afternoon, the summer sun had intensified until even the roads seemed to sizzle. Although trees grew on the grounds outside the tombs, shade didn’t help much. My skin felt grimy with sweat. For a while we stood around where I’d first seen Giovanni that morning, but nobody appeared except a gaggle of blue-habited nuns awaiting their own tour.

“Maybe it doesn’t happen every time,” I said. “Maybe I can’t predict when it happens.”

“Possibly.” Cairo wasn’t ready to give up. “We should go back to the last place you saw him.”

Nobody could walk down into the catacombs without being on a guided tour, so we had to buy more tickets. The seller said crisply, “The next English-language tour is in just over one hour.”

Too long, I thought, to give us time to explore the catacombs and yet get us back to the hotel on time. “What’s the very next tour?”

“French, in five minutes.”

“We speak French,” I said. “Deux billets, s’il vous plaît.”

As we walked toward the gathering spot for the tour, Cairo said, “You wouldn’t have admitted that yesterday.”

“I wouldn’t have admitted a lot of things yesterday.” My long-cherished desire to look and act normal had so obviously died that there was nothing to do but let it go. If I could see the dead, “normal” was never going to happen.

We arranged ourselves at the end of the French tour. For the first little while, nothing appeared out of the ordinary—but as we descended the uneven stone steps toward the chamber where Giovanni had walked through the wall, my heartbeat quickened. It wasn’t just nerves; it was like my body knew he was near.

When I walked back in, Giovanni stood there, as if he’d been waiting for me the whole time.

He looked so relieved to see me. Almost on the verge of tears. I thought I might cry too. Giovanni was more beautiful to me now than he was before—now, when I knew what he was, when he ought to have terrified me. But there was nothing scary about him. He was simply someone who had died—something that happened to everyone, eventually.

He was the proof that I was sane.

And he was the proof that Cairo and I really were twins of the soul and always would be.

“You have come back,” he said.

“Yeah. Sorry I panicked.”

“He’s here?” Cairo whispered to me, looking around wildly in pretty much every direction but the right one.

“You can’t see him?”

Cairo shook his head. Whatever powers he possessed, they weren’t like mine. Just as I had zero ability to read other people’s thoughts. Our gifts were unique. Our own.

Giovanni looked even sadder. “You have told someone about me? He is . . . boyfriend?”

“Cairo’s my brother. He’s just trying to help.” Glancing behind me to see if the French tourists were paying any attention to the muttering teenagers in the back—which, fortunately, they weren’t—I took a deep breath. “Giovanni, I’m not sure how to ask this, but . . . you’re definitely dead, right?”

He nodded, unconcerned; it was old news to him. “My school came here. I fell. My neck, it broke.”

Maybe his clothes came across so 1970s because that was when he died. “Do you think you were pushed? Did someone murder you?”

“What? No. Not possible.” Giovanni seemed utterly sure about this. “Rain was falling. The steps were wet all over. My feet went”—he made a hand motion that resembled the Nike swoosh.

“He says he wasn’t murdered,” I whispered to Cairo, who shrugged. The only other sounds were the increasingly distant patter of the tour guide and the shuffling feet of French tourists walking away. I turned back to Giovanni. “Then why are you still here? I always thought . . . if spirits stuck around on earth, it was because they had some kind of unfinished business here.” But what did I know? It had been only stupid TV shows and horror movies to me until a few hours earlier.

Yet Giovanni nodded. “One thing I never did on earth. One thing I always wanted to do.”

Maybe he needed me to find his mother and tell her he loved her. Maybe I had to search for some long-lost friend. Or get revenge. Was I willing to get revenge for Giovanni for something that happened decades before I’d been born? Carefully, I said, “What’s that?”

Bashfully, Giovanni said, “Never I kiss a beautiful girl. Never any girl, actually.”

For a long moment, I thought I must have gone crazy after all. He couldn’t have said that, could he? “You’ve hung around on earth for thirty years or so because you didn’t want to go to heaven without kissing a girl?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Cairo whispered. I elbowed him sharply in the side; mockery wasn’t going to help us.

Giovanni said, “I want this very badly. Please—maybe you would—maybe? You are most beautiful girl.”

I didn’t especially want my first kiss to be from a dead guy. If this was a sign of how my love life would go from then on, my already low expectations were going to have to drop even lower.

And yet . . . it was such a simple request. He wanted it so badly. He thought I was beautiful. He was so gorgeous; if I hadn’t realized he was dead, I would have kissed him for certain. And Giovanni would always be the first guy who had ever flirted with me.

The tour group had moved significantly ahead of us now, but we could still hear them—still catch up if we had to, without getting lost down here. I told Cairo, “Can you give us a second?”

“For what? So you can kiss him?” To my surprise, Cairo— who’d been so unflappable through all of this—looked disgusted. “You don’t know what that will do. He might, I don’t know . . . suck your soul out.”

“I don’t think it works that way.” How it worked, I wasn’t sure, but I felt convinced that Giovanni wasn’t trying to hurt me. “Remember how you know that Michael’s always interested in Audrey’s feet? That’s how I know Giovanni isn’t trying to hurt me.”

Cairo considered this. “You can read his mind?”

Giovanni said, “Tell him I will not hurt your soul.”

“It’s not mind reading. It’s just . . . if he were lying, I’d know. I feel sure of that.” And I did.

The French-speaking guide had taken our group almost out of earshot. With a sigh, Cairo said, “Okay, I’m going ahead. Catch up when you can. And if anything weird happens . . . scream even louder than you did last time.”

“All right.” We tangled pinky fingers for just a moment, a quick sign of solidarity we hadn’t shared since we were eight years old. Then Cairo walked off without a backward look. I knew it was his way of saying he trusted my judgment. The question was, did I trust my own?

I turned back to Giovanni, who still stood there, hopeful and sweet. He was so beautiful—big, dark eyes, long eyelashes, dimpled chin—that only one question came to mind: “How is it that you never kissed a girl?”

It turned out to be possible to blush after death. Giovanni flushed so that the catacomb around us seemed to turn a soft shade of pink. “Did not always look like this.”

“What do you mean?” I shouldered my cloth bag and tried to stay focused. I hadn’t brought my shawl this time, and I shivered slightly in the underground chill. “Did you . . . change or something? After you died?”

“After death, we look like we are meant to look. Not always in life.”

I began to understand. This wish of his wasn’t only about kissing a girl; this was about making up for the life he lost—not after he died, but before. “Show me.”

Giovanni didn’t want to, I could tell, but he obeyed. His beautiful face seemed to melt, the skin along the left side of his jaw crinkling and turning a vivid, meaty red. A burn scar, I realized. Giovanni’s fall on the catacomb steps wasn’t the first terrible accident he’d been in.

It wasn’t so horrible, really—just a line along one side of his face—but I could imagine what most girls would’ve said about it. What Audrey would have said. If Giovanni had lived to be a little older, he might have met a girl mature enough to look past his scar and see the gentle, beautiful guy beneath. But he didn’t make it.

“You see me now,” he said, ashamed.

“I see you now.” I stepped closer to Giovanni and put one hand to his face. I couldn’t actually touch him—or so it seemed to me—but when my fingers appeared to brush his face, his lips parted slightly as though he could feel it. “I see all of you.”

I lifted my face to his and closed my eyes. I felt his kiss not as a touch, but as a glow—warmth spreading through me, making me aware of my blood and my pulse, of everything that separated the living and the dead. For one moment, I knew more than ever before what it meant to be alive.

The kiss’s end was like the snuffing of a candle—a little less light and heat in the world.

When I opened my eyes, Giovanni was beaming at me, his face whole and perfect once more, and slightly transparent now. “Thank you,” he said.

“Is that enough?” I still couldn’t believe that he wanted nothing more than one kiss.

Giovanni shook his head as he faded even further. “Nothing is enough. Nothing makes up for it. But . . . is something. Something beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” I said, and he must have known that I meant it, because the last of him I could see was his smile.

I caught up to the French tour group, and Cairo and I managed to get a taxi to the hotel more than an hour before the others were due back from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. We ordered a couple of coffees from the café downstairs and drank them in his hotel room, which had a view of the street below—crowded with little cars and motor scooters, both more tourists and just Roman people trying to get on with their day.

“We have to tell Mom and Dad about this, don’t we?” I said.

Cairo sipped his cappuccino. “I think they already know.”

“How could they know?”

“Ever since this started happening to me—I know we tried to hide it from Mom and Dad, but I always suspected they knew. Almost like they were waiting to see what would happen, you know? To see what I’d make of it.”

“How would they guess you were hearing people’s thoughts?”

He gave me a look. “They got married three weeks after they met, Ravenna. I always wondered about that, and now I believe we see the reason. You don’t think they recognized something special in each other? Something unique? Just consider it. Everything they’ve discovered—stuff they found where nobody else even knew to look—and the way Dad’s books all seem to be written like he was really there?”

Cairo was making some wild leaps—but I wasn’t sure he was wrong about our parents. If they possessed these powers, did that mean Cairo and I had inherited them?

My mind was full of so many things, too many for me to discuss them with my brother before our friends returned and we were once again surrounded by other voices, other thoughts. So I said the most important thing first: “I shouldn’t have turned on you like that last night, Cairo. I’m really sorry.”

“Thanks for saying that. But I mean it, Ravenna. I get why you didn’t believe me. Why you were angry. You thought I was leaving you, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“No such luck.” My brother grinned at me over the rim of his paper coffee cup. “No matter how weird it gets from now on . . . we’re in it together.”

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