Read Online His Everlasting Love: 50 Loving States, Virginia by Theodora Taylor - Free Book Online

let him change the subject back to a safer topic. At least safer for him.
    “The reason my sister decided to flirt with you all that day was because we were truly hungry,” she told him plainly. “The problem with my mom is she doesn’t just see ghosts. She also talks to them and sometimes she gets visits from what she calls “future ghosts”—kind of like ghosts who aren’t quite ghosts yet. Sometimes they just tell her things, sometimes they want help with something they want to correct. That’s what she’s referring to when she says, ‘The spirits told me this or that.’ She says she and Trevor’s dad divorced because we he was unfaithful, but I think the fact that she has literally thousands of spirit friends didn’t help matters either. It certainly didn’t help when it came to providing for the three of us.”
    Willa shook her head with real bitterness remembering every single time Thel, Trevor, and she had to go without because her mother had gotten a request she refused to deny from one of her spirits.
    “Anyway, about five months after the settlement check came, Marian went out and spent every single dime of it, plus an advance on her next three paychecks, to buy a first edition copy of The Wizard of Oz which she then immediately donated to the Smithsonian. Because some curator spirit she’d just met told her he’d always regretted not being able to acquire it for their collection. ”
    The memory rolled Willa’s stomach with disgust. “She was always doing stuff like that. And the money she got from the settlement only made it worse. She eats like a bird, so it didn’t matter for her. But Thel and I had to feed Trevor, and you remember how big he was. So we went to the mall after giving him the last can of soup we had in the pantry. Usually Serena could flirt a meal out of one of the clerks. But that night, there wasn’t anybody but older managers working. And there were some lines even Thel wouldn’t cross—at least back then. And there wasn’t any other high schoolers hanging out—I guess because it was a Wednesday. Then you walked into the food court with your friends.”
    The Sawyer she was talking to didn’t technically have a body, but she could have sworn she saw his stomach sink as he said, “Fuck, I’m sorry, Willa. If I’d known…”
    He trailed off then, because they both knew the answer to the rest of it. Sawyer truly was an asshole back then. He probably would have not only still not bought them a meal, but he would have rubbed their faces in the fact that their mother had squandered all that settlement money on a book.
    “No wonder you didn’t want to acknowledge me when you saw me here,” he said, quiet as the night.
    She stayed silent, because that was exactly why. They listened to the night air for a while after that, the cool breeze making Willa want to put on a jacket even though it was the middle of summer. German weather wasn’t anything like the weather in Greenlee, Virginia where the nights were so sticky and humid, you didn’t even think of breaking out a sweater until September came around. Standing next to Sawyer didn’t help either. It was like standing next to an old-fashioned ice box for way to long. Cold by association.
    “Maybe my coma is karma,” he said into all that quiet. “Retribution for what all I did to you. Maybe that’s why I’m stuck as a ghost now.”
    Even a week ago, she would have liked to think the same. But she shook her head. “No, karma doesn’t work like that. And even if it did, you would’ve woken up as soon as you realized the error of your ways.”
    She thought of what had happened after her brother died, then. His ghost looking down at his body…confused, only to become even more scared, when a portal suddenly opened up behind him. An oval in thin air with a tableau of two Asian-American women in a doctor’s office, one dressed in a hospital gown. They were holding hands and smiling as a doctor did some kind of