Life After Theft

To Miss Snark, who loved it first;

to Kara, who bugged me for two years to finish,

and to Bill Bernhardt, who showed me how.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Acknowledgments

Also by Aprilynne Pike

Copyright

About the Publisher

I HATE THIS SCHOOL.

I tugged at the lame plaid tie that was about three milli-meters away from suffocating me, and revised. I hate this tie. The whole uniform get-up—tie, buttoned shirt, slacks, sweater-vest, I kid you not—was worlds away from the baggy cargoes and T-shirt I’d worn to my old high school just last week.

I caught sight of the name tag the chubby advisor with too much lipstick had slapped onto my chest—HI! MY NAME IS JEFF—and changed my mind again. I hate the name tag the most, the tie second, and I still hate this school.

What started out as an idea my dad had six months ago to move us all from Phoenix to Cali had morphed into an exciting but unlikely adventure three months later, and then a nightmare when I literally came home from school and the SOLD sign was up on our house. Yeah, I agreed to it in the beginning, but how many of Dad’s ideas ever came to fruition?

The big ones, I guess. Maybe I should have known better.

I tried to make the case that it was the middle of the school year and transferring credits was going to be a nightmare, but apparently private schools are more interested in bank-account numbers than GPAs.

I looked down at the piece of paper in my hand and then up at the rows of lockers. I was pretty sure my assigned locker was on this floor, but I must have taken a wrong turn out of the office. I backtracked, trying to stay out of the way of the stream of students, and finally found the right corner.

The first thing I saw was the pink bubble gum, four feet lower than it should have been, inches above the ground, framed by a set of perfectly painted lips.

It was one of those huge bubbles you just know is going to pop and cover the girl’s face, and she’ll shriek and yell and whine that her makeup is ruined, blah, blah, blah. But the bubble didn’t pop—she did that thing where you suck all the air back into your mouth, and the bubble deflated into a little pink heap.

The girl and her bubble were lying on the floor.

In the middle of the hallway.

I tilted my head to get a better look at her legs. Maybe this school wasn’t all bad.

A guy came tearing around the corner clutching a bright pink backpack that I had a sneaking suspicion was not his. He pushed a few people out of his way, veering to the side and clipping me with his shoulder before I could move away.

“Watch it, jerk!” I muttered, not quite loud enough for anyone to hear.

Then I realized he was running straight at the girl on the floor. He was looking back over his shoulder, so there was no chance he would see her before he ran right over the top of her.

“Hey!” I yelled, pushing past a guy in front of me. I had to warn her. Or stop him.

But she just rolled her eyes and pulled her arm out of the way an instant before his Eckos pounded down right beside her head. “Look out, asshole,” she said without flinching.

Jerk didn’t even glance back.

I rushed forward. “You okay?”

She looked up at me with wide, surprised eyes. “Are you talking to me?”

Right. Any girl who could look that hot in a black skirt and plaid vest and had the guts to lie in the middle of the hallway was not going to tolerate being talked to by some brand-new nobody like me. “Forget it,” I said, and turned to look for my assigned locker. Again.

“Wait!”

I stopped walking but didn’t turn around.

“Were you talking to me?”

I turned and gave her my best I-don’t-care-that-you’re-rich-popular-and-gorgeous look. I admit: I haven’t had much practice with it. “Yeah. And?”

She sat up. “You can see me?”

So that was a pretty weird conversation starter. Still, a hot girl was talking to me; I’m not one to question these things. “I sure can.”

“What color is my skirt?”

What? “Black,” I replied hesitantly, trying to figure out where she was going with this.

She sighed. “Stupid uniforms. What color are my eyes?”

I looked. She fluttered her lashes dramatically. Was this some kind of trick? “Blue?”

“Is that a question?”

“Your eyes are blue, okay?”

She stared at me for a long time in a way that made me want to look over my shoulder. She was . . . impressed. And that certainly didn’t make any sense. I had to be missing something. “You really can see me, can’t you?” she said, sounding—of all stupid things—awestruck.

Our conversation had sailed straight past run-of-the-mill weird and docked in crazytown. Hot or not, I was ready to get away from this girl. “Yeeeeah, well,” I said, looking down at my schedule, “it’s been fun and all, but I have to—”

“Nobody else can see me,” she said. The seriousness in her voice was kind of freaking me out. “No one in this entire school, except you.”

“Sorry, I didn’t notice your invisibility cloak,” I said, edging away. Was everyone in California this nuts? I could feel the crowd around me staring as they walked by, and despite the crazy coming out of her mouth, I had a feeling they weren’t staring at Blond Girl. Fabulous. My chance to make a decent first impression in this school was swiftly and surely melting away.

“How many?” the girl said, holding up two fingers like rabbit ears, then changing her mind and switching to four.

“This is ridiculous.” I was still trying to look cool—or, barring that, casual—but I was on the verge of exploding at her.

“Answer the question, freak.”

Just my luck—it had taken a whole five minutes for the school nut job to latch on to me. Don’t judge a book by its cover, I guess. Or a girl by her hotness. “I’m a freak? You’re lying in the middle of the floor pretending to be invisible, and I’m a freak?”

She gasped. “It’s really true! You can see me. This is the best day of my . . . well, more than a year, anyway. I thought this would never happen. But now you’re here. You’re here . . . um . . .” She glanced at my loser label. “Jeff.” She scrunched up her nose. “Jeff? Ew.” When I rolled my eyes she raised her hands in surrender. “I take it back. Jeff’s fine. But can I call you Jeffrey at least? That is your whole name, right?”

“No.”

“Can I call you that anyway?”

“No.” I gotta get out of here. People were starting to seriously gawk.

“Fine, we’ll work on the name later. We have so much to do!” And then, I kid you not, she started bouncing up and down on her toes.

“Stop!” No, really, for the love of all that is holy, stop. I held up both hands. “Who are you?”

I’m not sure what made me ask—a name to put on the restraining order, maybe?—but she gestured to herself like she was a celebrity I should recognize instantly. Maybe she was—this was Santa Monica, after all. “Kimberlee Schaffer? The Kimberlee Schaffer?”

I shrugged.

She sighed dramatically. “Come with me.” I followed her down a hallway and into the main foyer, where she backed up against a wall and gave me a cheesy, toothy grimace—more sarcasm than smile. She gestured grandly to her left at an eleven-by-fourteen framed picture of herself.

“So . . . your parents paid for the school?” I asked. Maybe it was the only way they’d let this psycho in.

She rolled her eyes and pointed a long, fake fingernail at a small bronze plaque beneath the portrait.

IN MEMORY OF KIMBERLEE SCHAFFER

I glanced at her, then back at the photo. “That’s really funny.” I made myself look her in the eyes, my best fake smile plastered into place. “You almost had me. Ha-ha. Joke on the new guy. That’s really good. Now if you’re finished, I have to go to class.” Preferably before everyone starts staring again.

“Can I come?” she asked all chipper, like she hadn’t just pulled the world’s lamest joke on me. Pretending to be a dead girl—that was seriously messed up. And stupid.

I’m such a moron.

“No, it’s school. You go to your class; I’ll go to mine.” I knew I should feel flattered that a hot girl wanted anything to do with me, but there’s a saying about what you don’t do with crazy people.

Ever.

She jumped in front of me. “Listen, Jeff.” She said my name like it was a bad word. “You don’t get it. I’m dead. Ask anyone. I’ve been stuck for a year and a half and no one has been able to see or hear me except you.”

“Look, your little trick worked, Kim. Isn’t that—”

“Kimberlee.”

“What?”

“Kimberlee. With two e’s. No one calls me Kim.”

Unbelievable. “Forget it. Just leave me alone, okay?” I stepped around her and continued walking. Maybe I could blend in with the other sweater-vests all over the place and get away. Sadly, this wasn’t my old, overcrowded public high school, and disappearing would take more work than I was used to despite the matching uniforms.

“Wait. Please?”

I didn’t.

She trotted alongside me. “What class do you have?”

“Like I’m going to tell you.”

“I’ll help you find it.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I stopped and turned to her. “Then you could get me totally lost and ditch me. A special welcome for the new guy. Just leave me alone!”

A tall brunette edged away from me like a first-grader who had just learned about boy cooties. “What a dork,” she said, loud enough for everyone within ten feet to hear her.

“Really, Jeff,” Kimberlee said, far too calmly. “You should stop yelling at me. People are going to think you’re schizo.”

I looked down at my schedule and pretended Kimberlee wasn’t there.

“You gotta go upstairs for Bleekman’s classroom.”

I gritted my teeth, and hurried up the stairs hoping I could lose her. In the hallway I slowed down and counted off room numbers.

204.

205.

206.

Damn. She was standing outside room 207.

“Clever boy. You found it all by yourself.”

There must be an elevator . . . somewhere. I let my eyes slide by her and walked into the half-full classroom, hurrying to plant myself in the last seat on the back row.

“I wouldn’t sit there if I were you. That’s Langdon’s spot,” Kimberlee said, sounding almost bored.

Ignore, ignore, ignore.

“Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I kept my head down and pulled out a notebook as more students filed in, quickly filling the remaining seats.

“Dude. If you’re not out of my desk by the time I count to two, I personally guarantee your life will end before lunch hour.”

I looked up at what appeared to be a non-green version of the Incredible Hulk.

“One. One and a half . . .”

I jumped up from the desk so fast I cracked my knee against one of the legs and had to bite off a yelp. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Didn’t know.”

“Liar!” Kimberlee yelled from across the room, where she was lounging on a windowsill.

Shut up! I glared at her and looked for another seat. The only one left that wasn’t in the front row was over by Kimberlee’s windowsill.

I sat in the front row.

The bell rang and Mr. Bleekman rose from his desk. He was a perfect caricature of every English teacher on TV: tall, painfully thin, with a comb-over sprayed crispy, and thick glasses. Finally, some normalcy. He stood in front of my desk and studied my name tag. “Mr. Clayson, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Bleekman and Kimberlee corrected in stereo.

I refused to even look at her. “Yes, sir,” I repeated.

“Take notes for now, but stay after and I’ll give you the material you’ll need to catch up.”

I nodded as Kimberlee walked over and plunked herself down on top of my notebook. “I’ve taken this class already. I’ll help you.”

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Mr. Clayson?”

“Could you please tell Kim to get off my desk, sir?”

“Excuse me?” Bleekman asked, looking right past Kimberlee and staring at me like I’d sprouted an extra head.

I glanced at Kimberlee for just a second. Something was seriously wrong. There was no way this teacher was part of the joke. “Oh, shit,” I said, the words slipping out before my brain caught up enough to stop me.

Bleekman’s eyes widened. “Mr. Clayson. I will let you off with a warning because this is your first day. But in the future, any use of profanity at Whitestone Academy will result in detention. Do you understand?”

I gaped at Kimberlee, unwilling to believe she could possibly be telling the truth.

“I told you,” she said, studying her fake nails. “No one can see or hear me but you.” Her eyes flicked to Mr. Bleekman. “You’d better say ‘yes, sir,’ before Bleeker has a coronary.”

“Yes, sir,” I said quickly, snapping my gaze back to the front of the room.

Bleekman stared at me for a few seconds as the rest of the class snickered. He finally looked away and started droning on about Victor Hugo.

I waited a few minutes for everyone to turn their attention away from me. “You’re not joking anymore, are you?” I hissed at Kimberlee through clenched teeth.

“Never was,” she said at full volume.

No one even glanced in our direction.

“What do I have to do to get you to stop acting like the freak you are?” She paused. “You want me to walk through a wall?”

I glared at her but refused to snap at the bait. This can’t be real.

She slid off my desk. “No, I mean it. If I walk through that wall, will you believe I’m dead?”

I rolled my eyes. But I nodded.

She stuck her nose in the air and lifted an eyebrow. Her eyes never left me as she walked to the wall and, without slowing, slid right through it.

“I’M HOME,” I YELLED. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been so happy to see my own house. After Bleekman’s class—and seeing Kimberlee walk through the wall—my head basically exploded. I still couldn’t digest what I’d seen, or figure out how it could be real. I didn’t believe in ghosts! Somehow, for some reason, I was hallucinating; Kimberlee was a figment of my imagination—and that meant ignoring her for the rest of the day.

Easier said than done. She followed me everywhere and got louder and louder. By the time I dropped my schedule card full of signatures in the basket at the front office I had a pounding headache and a ghostly companion.

“Jeff, there you are.” My mom sniffed as she came into the room. Her eyes were red and wet.

“What’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” She looked at me cluelessly. “Oh, the tears?” She laughed. “I’m just rehearsing, sweetie. I have a funeral scene tomorrow.”

My mom’s an actress. Always has been. Community theaters and stuff. But part of moving to California was so she could pursue an acting career for real, in Hollywood. And apparently she’s good because even without an agent or anything, she went out the first day and came home with a walk-on part in CBS’s latest cop thriller. Now she’s got a couple gigs lined up, dramedies or something. It’s all very surreal.

I reached into the fridge and pulled out a Coke. “That’s great, Mom,” I said absently. “What show’s it for?”

She shook her finger at me and clicked her tongue. “Ah, ah, ah. If I told you that you’d know someone was dying next season.” She reached her hand out and ruffled my hair. “Trade secret.”

My mom’s only thirty-three. I was thirteen when I first realized that I was born while she was in high school. She always wanted to be an actress; she’d been the lead in every high-school play and musical until the year she was pregnant with me. Somehow, her theater director just couldn’t handle an eight-months-pregnant Ado Annie belting “I Cain’t Say No.” Go figure.

The nice thing about having me when she was so young is that now she’s just the right age to start a new career in Hollywood as a “mature woman.” Which means she plays twenty-five-year-olds.

She’s married to my dad. Like, my biological dad. They got married the night they graduated high school; I was one. My dad is supersmart and he always told my mom he’d make up for getting her life off track. So when he was offered a small ownership stake in a startup venture—social networking on the internet; everyone said it would never last, right—he took it and ran with it. The company survived the “Dot Bomb,” but for a while there Dad was drawing stock more often than a paycheck. Fortunately, it was a risk that paid off. After twelve years of accumulating ownership, he cashed out, bought us three new BMWs for Christmas, sold our house in Phoenix, and moved us to Santa Monica so Mom could chase her dream.

And now, instead of an inner-city school with a 62 percent graduation rate, I get to go to a spoiled-brat private school that feeds more or less straight into Yale. Lucky me.

I really should be grateful—the lockers stay closed at Whitestone and I suspect their PE equipment is less than fifty years old, but despite the advantages, I missed my friends. Even after just a week, it was obvious I wasn’t cut out for the long-distance friendship thing. I figured I’d make new friends, but, well, these Whitestone kids weren’t really my type.

“So how was your first day?”

Ummmm. “It was fine.”

“Fine? Is that all?”

I took a breath and smiled. “I think it’s going to be a good school for me,” I lied. Well, sort of lied. It really was a great school, academics-wise. Apparently not so good if you want to keep your sanity intact.

“I hope so,” she said, putting on her special-moment face. “You deserve to go to a great college. You have so much potential.”

“Thanks, Mom.” I don’t know why she has to be so mushy about stuff sometimes. Maybe it’s an actress thing. Still, I wasn’t above taking advantage of her good mood.

I wasn’t sure quite how to start—maybe there wasn’t a good way—so I just dived right in. “Hey, I was thinking . . .” I paused. “Is there any history of . . . craziness in our family?”

She looked at me with one eyebrow cocked, a smirk ticking at the corner of her mouth. “You mean before you at this moment?”

“I’m serious,” I said. She had no idea just how serious I was. “Do I have any crazy old uncles or anything? Murderers, public nudity”—I hesitated—“schizos?”

Mom thought about it for a second. “Well, my granddad had dementia pretty bad for the last two years before he died. And I think your dad’s uncle Fred—you know, the one with the yogurt-carton collection?—I’m pretty sure he doesn’t play with a full deck. Why the sudden interest?”

“Uh . . . we had a discussion about mental health in . . .” Oh, great. I wasn’t in any classes that this particular subject fit into. “Lit-er-a-ture,” I finished, dragging the word out syllable by syllable.

“Literature?”

“Yeah, you know, Les Mis.” Whatever that meant. “I’m gonna go play some games,” I said, making my escape before Mom could ask any more probing questions.

I went upstairs to my sitting room—no lie, I have a sitting room—and turned on the TV, lying back on my humongous beanbag. This whole Kimberlee thing had to be my imagination. Stress of the first day in a new school and all that. Or maybe I’d wake up tomorrow and realize this was just a long, very vivid dream and that I was about to start my real first day of school.

“Okay, don’t freak, but we seriously need to talk.”

I sprang to my feet and spun to find Kimberlee standing right in the middle of my room.

“Listen, I know you’re wigging out, but the fact is, I have no one else to turn to, so I’m not going away.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten before opening them and turning my head. There she was, looking far too real to be a figment of my imagination.

“You’re not real and you need to leave me alone,” I said slowly, carefully.

She rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m trying to make nice here, and trust me, I understand where you’re coming from. You know how long it took me to convince myself I was real? Ages.”

You’d think that if my head was going to make someone up it would give me someone nice. I was feeling officially betrayed. “Not real, not real, not real,” I whispered under my breath.

“This’ll be a really long year if you’re going to walk around muttering that all the time. I am real; it’s just that no one else can see me.”

“How convenient!” I laughed. “Give me one logical reason for that.” Why am I still talking to it? Her. No, me. I’m talking to myself; it is not real.

She crossed her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow. “Beats the hell out of me. I’ve been screaming at every student in that school—new kids included—for ages. Apparently, you won the medium’s lottery. Wait,” she said, stepping forward. “Maybe that’s why. Do you see other ghosts?”

I backed away from her as though she had some kind of contagious disease. A not-real contagious disease. “No! I don’t see anything. Technically I don’t see you; you’re not real.”

“Oh,” she said, her mouth drooping. “Well, whatever. You can see me and that’s all that matters. I need your help.”

“No! No help. No nothing. Not for fake people.”

She shot me a nasty look and put her hands on her hips. “Fine, I’ll prove it. Get out your computer, now!”

There is something irrationally terrifying about being ordered around by a hallucination.

I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and set it on my messy desk. Couldn’t hurt. If nothing else, I could catch up on XKCD while she spouted her nonsense.

“Go to Google.”

At least my alter ego knew what Google was.

“Type in my name.”

I had gotten to the first of the double ee’s when I stopped. “Wait a second,” I said. “If I Google your name, all that proves is that there is some dead girl out there named Kimberlee Schaffer. You tell me about yourself first and then I’ll Google and see if you’re right.” Oh yes, outwitting my own brain. Sweet.

But Kimberlee shrugged nonchalantly. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“How’d you die?”

“Drowned.”

Drowned? That’s the best my subconscious could come up with? “You drowned? Like, you didn’t know how to swim?”

“Of course I know how to swim, moron; I live . . . lived on a private beach. The same one I drowned at, actually.” A touch of something resembling real emotion clouded Kimberlee’s eyes for an instant before she ran her fingers through her hair; whatever it was I’d seen was erased by that casual gesture. “I got caught in a riptide,” she said softly. “It happens.”